HMS Monarch (1911): She Survived Jutland, Then Took Nine Hours of Naval and Air Bombardment to Sink

A Note on Her Class

HMS Monarch is sometimes loosely described as a pre-dreadnought, but she was in fact quite the opposite: an Orion-class dreadnought battleship, the second of four built for the Royal Navy and often referred to at the time as a super-dreadnought, thanks to a considerable leap in gun calibre and armour protection over the ships that had come before her. She was laid down at Armstrong Whitworth's Elswick shipyard on 1 April 1910, launched on 30 March 1911 and fully commissioned on 27 April 1912, at a cost of nearly £1.9 million, armed with ten 13.5-inch guns in five twin turrets, a considerable step up from the 12-inch guns of the original dreadnought generation just a few years earlier.

Rammed by Her Own Sister in a Storm

HMS Monarch joined the 2nd Battle Squadron and took part in the Parliamentary Naval Review of July 1912, before mobilising for war in July 1914 and proceeding to Scapa Flow for fleet concentration. In December 1914 she took part in the failed attempt to intercept German ships that had bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby, and during the return to Scapa Flow on 27 December, in severe weather, she was accidentally rammed by her own sister ship HMS Conqueror, sustaining stern damage that required temporary repairs before she could make her way to Devonport for a proper fix, a frustrating and entirely avoidable mishap for a ship not yet even a year into full commission.

Scoring a Hit on the König at Jutland

HMS Monarch fought at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, positioned as the sixth ship in the British battle line, and engaged a group of five German battleships at 18:32, firing three salvoes of armour-piercing shells and scoring a hit on the dreadnought SMS König that disabled one of her 15-centimetre guns and temporarily knocked out three of her boilers, a genuinely significant piece of gunnery against a first-line enemy battleship. HMS Monarch went on to engage the German battlecruiser SMS Lützow with a further five salvoes, contributing to the combined damage that ultimately helped doom that ship, expending 53 main battery shells over the course of the battle. She later took part in the inconclusive Action of 19 August 1916, one of several further attempts to draw out and destroy the German High Seas Fleet.

Present at the Surrender

HMS Monarch spent much of the remaining war years engaged in routine North Sea patrols, gunnery exercises and fleet manoeuvres, and was present at Rosyth on 21 November 1918 to witness the historic surrender of the German High Seas Fleet, a genuinely fitting culmination to a wartime career that had included real, if not decisive, combat action against some of Germany's most powerful warships.

From Troopship to Training Hulk

HMS Monarch transferred to the 3rd Battle Squadron of the Home Fleet by May 1919, and moved to the Reserve Fleet at Portland that November, though she was briefly recommissioned during the summers of 1920 and 1921 to carry troops to the Mediterranean. She was finally paid off on 5 May 1922 and placed on the disposal list under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty, which sharply limited the number of capital ships the world's major navies were permitted to retain. She was initially hulked as a training ship at the HMS Vernon gunnery school, before being converted into a target ship at Portsmouth Dockyard in October 1923.

Nine Hours to Sink a Dreadnought

HMS Monarch met a genuinely remarkable end. On 20 January 1925 she was towed out from Plymouth into Hurd's Deep in the English Channel, roughly 50 nautical miles south of the Isles of Scilly, and subjected to a sustained bombardment by RAF bombers, C-class light cruisers, the destroyer HMS Vectis, and the battleships HMS Hood, HMS Repulse and five Revenge-class battleships firing their own 15-inch guns. Despite this extraordinary weight of ordnance thrown against her, HMS Monarch stubbornly refused to sink for nine full hours, finally going down at 22:00 that evening following a last, decisive hit from HMS Revenge, a genuinely startling final testament to just how well-built and well-armoured a Royal Navy dreadnought of her generation truly was.