HMS Mars (1896): From Reviewing the Fleet for Queen Victoria to Evacuating the Dardanelles

The Seventh of Nine

HMS Mars was laid down at the Laird Brothers shipyard in Birkenhead on 2 June 1894, launched on 30 March 1896 and commissioned on 8 June 1897, the seventh of nine Majestic-class battleships, a class that in its day represented the very cutting edge of pre-dreadnought design, displacing 16,060 tons and carrying four 12-inch guns in twin turrets protected by 14-inch pear-shaped barbette armour, backed up by a substantial secondary battery of twelve 6-inch guns. Her pear-shaped barbettes, shared with six of her eight sisters, could manage a salvo roughly every 90 seconds; only the last two ships of the class, Caesar and Illustrious, got the improved circular barbette that let their gun crews reload from any position and cut that time down to around 72 seconds.

Parading for a Queen and a King

HMS Mars served with the Channel Fleet from the moment she commissioned, and took part in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee Fleet Review in June 1897, a properly spectacular occasion at which Britain's naval power was put proudly, and very publicly, on display.

A Turret Torn Apart

The peacetime routine turned suddenly and horribly real in April 1902, during Channel Squadron target practice, when Mars's forward 12-inch turret had already finished its own shoot but kept misfiring as the crew tried to switch the gun's electric firing circuit over to the spare. Four minutes after the order to switch circuits the port gun let go, blowing its breech-block clean to the rear with the shell still sitting in the barrel. The blast wrecked the forward turret outright and killed two officers and nine ratings, with a further seven injured, one of the worst peacetime gunnery accidents suffered by any Royal Navy battleship of the era.

The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is the opposite of what people assume. The half-charge of cordite had been rammed too far into the chamber, perhaps a foot or more clear of the breech-block and away from the ignition tube, so when the tube fired its flash never properly lit it. In a sealed chamber with very little air, the charge did not burn. It smouldered. Then the drill called for the standard pause, the breech was unlocked, the outside air got in, and the whole thing went up in the faces of the men standing round it.

Parliament wanted to know. On 15 April Mr Edmund Robertson, the member for Dundee, asked the Secretary to the Admiralty what had happened, and Mr Arnold-Forster gave the House the sequence: the misfires in both forward guns, the order to use the auxiliary firing circuit, the explosion four minutes later, the breech-block blown to the rear with the shell still in the barrel. Eleven dead. Seven more in hospital at Queenstown, a midshipman and six petty officers and seamen. And then the sentence that says everything about the state of the art in 1902: "No explanation of the explosion can at present be given, but an inquiry has been ordered and will take place immediately."

Remarkably, she was back in full ceremonial trim just four months later for King Edward VII's Coronation Fleet Review in August 1902, a properly jarring turnaround from disaster to pageantry even by the standards of a navy well practised at getting on with things.

She underwent a series of refits between 1905 and 1912, and during one of them, in 1905 to 1906, became the first Royal Navy battleship successfully converted to burn oil fuel rather than coal, a genuinely significant piece of naval engineering history that the rest of her Majestic-class sisters would not catch up with until 1907 and 1908. She transferred to the Home Fleet's Devonport Division in 1907, settling into the sort of steady peacetime routine that so many pre-dreadnoughts experienced in the years before the First World War rendered their whole design obsolete.

That oil conversion deserves more than a clause, because everything that came afterwards runs through it. Coal had to be shovelled, by men, into furnaces, for hours; a battleship coaling ship was a filthy all-hands evolution that could take the better part of a day and left the ship unfit for anything else. Oil could be pumped. It raised steam faster, it gave more heat for the same weight, it needed a fraction of the stokers, and, crucially, it could in principle be taken in at sea rather than alongside a wharf, which the Navy began trying out with the battleship Victorious in February 1906, while Mars was still working up her new boilers.

The catch was equally obvious and it has shaped British foreign policy ever since. Britain had coal. Britain had no oil. Every step down the road Mars was opening led towards a fleet that could not move without imports from other people's countries, which is why the Admiralty ended up buying a controlling stake in an oil company in Persia in 1914. Her sisters, meanwhile, followed her over to oil in 1907 and 1908, and one of them, HMS Hannibal, went on to a second life that says a good deal about what the Navy thought these ships were still worth.

Guard Ship, Then Disarmed

HMS Mars joined the 9th Battle Squadron as a guard ship in the Humber upon the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914, before transferring to the Dover Patrol that December.

By 15 February 1915 she had moved on to Belfast, where she paid off and was disarmed entirely, her 12-inch guns removed and passed on to serve aboard monitor vessels, a fate common enough among the older pre-dreadnoughts by that stage of the war, as the Royal Navy increasingly judged their big guns more valuable elsewhere than their increasingly vulnerable hulls.

Evacuating Gallipoli

HMS Mars, stripped of her main armament, took on an entirely different role as a troopship during the Dardanelles Campaign, recommissioning for the task in September 1915 alongside two similarly disarmed sisters, HMS Hannibal and HMS Magnificent, and reaching Mudros on 5 October 1915. Over the weeks that followed she took part in the grim, carefully managed evacuations of exhausted Allied troops from Anzac Cove on 8 and 9 December 1915, and from West Beach at Cape Helles on 8 and 9 January 1916, as the doomed Gallipoli campaign was finally, quietly wound down. She sailed home to Devonport that February.

It was unglamorous, thankless work, ferrying home the survivors of a campaign that had cost so many lives for so little strategic gain, but it was work that mattered enormously to the men she carried.

It was also, in the end, the one part of the campaign that worked. Something like 90,000 men came off Suvla and Anzac between 8 and 20 December, and the British left Helles on the night of 8 January, and out of a quarter of a million men in the peninsula the whole withdrawal cost only a handful of casualties. The plan was largely the work of an Australian staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Charles Brudenell White, and it worked by making the trenches sound occupied after they were empty: drip rifles rigged from two kerosene tins, water running slowly from the top one into the bottom until the weight pulled the trigger string, went on firing at intervals for up to twenty minutes after the last man had gone down to the beach.

Mars was one of the ships waiting at the other end of that walk. There is something bleakly appropriate about it: a battleship whose guns had been taken away to be used somewhere more useful, carrying home an army from a campaign that had been argued for on the grounds of what battleships could do.

A Quiet End at Invergordon

HMS Mars was converted to a harbour depot ship at Chatham and recommissioned in that role on 1 September 1916, serving at Invergordon until July 1920, a fittingly steady final posting for a ship whose fighting days were now well behind her.

She was sold for scrapping on 9 May 1921 and left Invergordon that November bound for the breakers at Briton Ferry, closing out the career of a battleship that had begun in the pageantry of a Diamond Jubilee review and ended in the far less glamorous, but remarkably essential, work of getting weary soldiers home from one of the First World War's most costly campaigns.