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.

The gun calibre was only half of it, and arguably the less important half. The real change was where the guns were put. All five of Monarch's turrets sat on the centreline, and she and her sisters were the first Royal Navy dreadnoughts built that way. Every previous British dreadnought had carried part of its main armament in wing turrets, which meant that on any given broadside a proportion of the ship's guns were pointing at empty sea on the wrong side. Put them all down the middle and every gun can fire either way. That, more than the extra inch and a half of bore, is what the word super-dreadnought was doing.

They were not perfect, and two of the faults are worth knowing. The mast was stepped behind the fore-funnel, which put the spotting top, the one position in the ship whose entire purpose is to see where the shells are falling, directly in the funnel smoke. And the sighting hoods left on the turret roofs meant the superfiring turrets could not safely fire over the turrets below them, because the blast would have injured the men underneath. A ship designed around firing everything on one broadside, with a gunnery control position full of smoke and two turrets that could not shoot across the others.

The third fault is the one that matters two paragraphs down. The Orions carried their weight high and rolled heavily in a seaway. Bear that in mind when a squadron of them is trying to keep station in severe weather off the north of Scotland in December, and one puts her bow into another's stern.

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.

Repairs were completed swiftly enough that she rejoined the Grand Fleet by 20 January 1915, barely a month after the accident, evidence that even an embarrassing own-goal collision needn't keep a dreadnought out of the fight for long.

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 truly 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 notably 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.

Which left the question of what to do with the hulls. Scrapping was the usual answer and it paid something, and most of them went that way. A handful were held back instead to be shot at, on the entirely sound principle that a ship you have already agreed to get rid of is the only honest way to find out what modern weapons actually do to a ship you are keeping.

So the nine hours in the Channel were not a spectacle or a firework display. They were an experiment, run methodically from the lightest weapons upwards, to establish what it took to kill a capital ship, and the answer, on that particular January day, was very considerably more than anybody had budgeted for.

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.

She was formally assigned her final role as the Navy's live gunnery and bombing target ship on 14 June 1924, a rather unglamorous demotion for a vessel that had once traded broadsides with the Kaiser's fleet at Jutland.

Nine Hours to Sink a Dreadnought

HMS Monarch met a 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 one of the most methodical demolitions any Royal Navy ship has ever endured. RAF bombers went in first, scoring several hits without managing to finish the job. Four C-class light cruisers, HMS Caledon, HMS Calliope, HMS Carysfort and HMS Curacoa, followed up with their 6-inch guns, then the destroyer HMS Vectis added her own 4-inch fire. Only once all of that had been thrown at her did the big ships arrive: the battlecruisers HMS Hood and HMS Repulse, then five Revenge-class battleships, HMS Ramillies, HMS Resolution, HMS Revenge, HMS Royal Oak and HMS Royal Sovereign, opening up with their 15-inch main armament.

It is hard not to compare her end with that of the German battleship Ostfriesland, sunk by American bombers off Virginia in 1921 in barely twenty minutes using six 2,000-pound bombs, a demonstration that had sent shockwaves through naval establishments on both sides of the Atlantic about just how vulnerable battleships might be from the air. Monarch, by contrast, absorbed everything the RAF could throw at her and simply kept floating; it took cruisers, a destroyer, two battlecruisers and five more battleships on top of the bombing before she finally went down at 22:00 that evening, following a last, decisive hit from HMS Revenge. Whatever conclusions the Admiralty drew from that about the relative merits of bombs and big guns, they can't have been entirely comfortable reading for the fledgling Royal Air Force.