HMS New Zealand (1911): The Battlecruiser That Fought Through Jutland Wearing a Maori Warrior's Skirt

A Dominion's Gift to the Empire

HMS New Zealand was laid down at Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering in Govan on 20 June 1910, launched on 1 July 1911 by Lady Theresa Ward, wife of the New Zealand Prime Minister Joseph Ward, and commissioned on 19 November 1912, an Indefatigable-class battlecruiser displacing 18,500 tons and armed with eight 12-inch guns.

She was funded entirely by the New Zealand government as a gift to Britain, following proposals at the 1909 Imperial Conference for the Dominions to contribute directly to imperial naval defence, a properly generous piece of colonial patriotism from a country whose entire population at the time numbered barely a million people. New Zealand taxpayers were still repaying the loan that had funded her construction as late as 1944, more than two decades after the ship herself had been broken up for scrap, a generosity that clearly outlasted the gift itself.

The proportions are worth pausing on, because they are hard to credit now. She cost about £1.7 million, from a country of roughly a million people. When she came out in 1913 it was as part of a nine-and-a-half-month world tour taking in forty-seven ports, ten weeks of which were spent in New Zealand waters visiting eighteen of them. An estimated five hundred thousand people came aboard or came down to the wharf to look at her.

That is not a figure to skim past. Half the population of the country went to see their ship. There is no modern equivalent, in Britain or anywhere else, of half a nation queueing to inspect a single object it had bought together, and it puts the piupiu and the hei-tiki in their proper light: these were not curios pressed on a passing captain, they were a country handing something over.

A Warrior's Skirt and a Greenstone Pendant

HMS New Zealand's identity became bound up with two remarkable Maori cultural gifts during a 1913 tour of the Dominion.

A piupiu, a traditional warrior's skirt, was presented personally to Captain Lionel Halsey, with the chief who gave it instructing him to wear it during battle to protect the ship and her crew, reportedly prophesying three sea battles in which the ship would take only a single hit and suffer no casualties at all.

Two greenstone hei-tiki pendants followed that same year, one from the Wellington Boy Scouts on 13 April and another from the Christchurch businessman C. J. Sloman that May.

When Halsey was promoted and left the ship in June 1915, he passed the piupiu on to his successor, Captain John Green, who wore it just as faithfully. The crew came to credit the items, only half-jokingly, with the ship's particularly remarkable run of good fortune.

Heligoland Bight and Dogger Bank

HMS New Zealand took part in the Battle of Heligoland Bight on 28 August 1914, the first major North Sea engagement of the war, falling somewhat behind the faster British battlecruisers but still contributing to the German losses of the day.

She engaged the German armoured cruiser SMS Blücher at the Battle of Dogger Bank on 24 January 1915, firing somewhere between 147 and 151 shells to help sink her, and once again emerged from the action essentially unscathed, a pattern her crew increasingly attributed to their carefully worn talismans.

A rather more mundane accident struck her that April, when her sister ship HMAS Australia collided with her in heavy fog on the 22nd, causing significant damage to both vessels; HMS New Zealand returned to the fleet by 30 May after replacing her own damaged propeller with a spare taken from HMAS Australia.

More Shells Than Any Ship at Jutland, and Barely a Scratch

HMS New Zealand's finest hour came at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, where she fired an extraordinary 430 twelve-inch shells, more than any other ship on either side of the entire battle, scoring four confirmed hits, three on the German battlecruiser SMS Seydlitz and one on SMS Schleswig-Holstein, a hit rate of under one percent that nonetheless reflected the sheer volume and persistence of her fire. She sailed that day as flagship of Rear Admiral William Pakenham's 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron, now under the command of Captain Green rather than Halsey. Lieutenant Alexander Boyle, aboard for the action, likened the tense wait before contact to "the sort of feeling one gets when one goes to the dentist," a very British way of describing the calm before one of the largest naval battles in history.

She sustained only a single hit in return, a 28-centimetre shell from SMS Von der Tann that struck her X turret barbette but caused minimal damage. Her crew's faith in their Maori talismans reached its absolute peak during the battle; one seaman later recalled the shout "he's got them on" rippling through the ship, the reassurance that Captain Green was wearing the piupiu and tiki as the guns roared around them. The ship carried a second good-luck charm besides: a Maori face painted on her foretop, which Boyle recorded her sailors crediting with having "saved the ship" just as readily as anything worn by her captain.

The contrast with her sister ship could not have been starker: HMS Indefatigable, lead ship of the class, was destroyed at Jutland when her magazines exploded, killing all but two of her crew, while HMS New Zealand sailed through the same battle essentially untouched, cementing her reputation throughout the fleet as a notably lucky ship. Jutland was, by most reckonings, the third of the three great sea battles the old chief had prophesied back in 1913, and true to his word the ship had taken exactly one hit and lost not a single man across all three.

There was more than luck involved, and it is worth saying so even though it slightly spoils the story. Indefatigable was the prototype of the class; New Zealand was laid down two years later, and better armour plate had become available in the interval, so she went to sea with materially better protection than the sister who blew up. Not a great deal better. Better.

And what actually destroyed the British battlecruisers at Jutland was, in Jellicoe's own judgement and in most accounts since, not the thickness of anybody's belt armour but what was going on inside the turrets: safety doors held open and charges stacked in the handling rooms to keep the rate of fire up, so that a single hit on a turret had a clear run down to the magazine. The propellant those charges were made of has its own unhappy history, set out in the article on HMS Natal (1904).

So New Zealand's charmed run had three things going for it: rather better plating than her sister, whatever her own turret crews were or were not doing with the ammunition, and a warrior's skirt. Her ship's company were entirely clear about which of the three was doing the work, and since they were the men standing in the turrets at the time, they are entitled to the last word on it.

84,458 Miles by War's End

HMS New Zealand went on to take part in all three of the war's major North Sea battles, contributing to the destruction of two enemy cruisers and taking part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight on 17 November 1917, serving repeatedly as squadron flagship along the way.

By the time of the Armistice she had sailed 84,458 nautical miles, consumed 97,034 tons of coal and fired a total of 664 twelve-inch shells in action, an extraordinary record of sustained wartime service.

Carrying Jellicoe Around the Empire

HMS New Zealand undertook a remarkable postwar mission, carrying Admiral John Jellicoe on a world tour to review the naval defences of the Dominions, sailing via the Suez Canal to India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States and covering some 33,514 nautical miles before returning to Portsmouth on 3 February 1920.

Her visit to New Zealand itself proved especially significant, drawing an estimated 50,000 people to see her in Wellington alone.

Jellicoe himself went on to serve as Governor-General of New Zealand from 1920 to 1924, a fitting continuation of the deep bond between the admiral and the country whose gift had carried him around the world.

Scrapped Under Treaty Terms

HMS New Zealand was paid off into reserve on 15 March 1920, briefly recommissioned as flagship at Rosyth between July and September 1921, and was ultimately sold for scrap on 19 December 1922 to comply with the tonnage restrictions of the Washington Naval Treaty, a fate shared by many capital ships of her generation regardless of their wartime record.

Breaking up began under the Rosyth Shipbreaking Company from 25 January 1923 and continued through September 1924, yielding some 40,000 tons of steel and roughly 10,000 tons of armour plate; the New Zealand government received £20,000 from the sale.

A Legacy Kept Close to Home

HMS New Zealand's famous piupiu remained with Captain Halsey until his death in 1949, passing afterward to his daughter Ruth, who bequeathed it back to New Zealand in 2002; since 2005 it has been displayed at the Torpedo Bay Navy Museum in Auckland alongside the ship's bell and other artefacts, while the hei-tiki donated by Sloman has resided in Canterbury Museum since 1932, ensuring that the objects credited with protecting a battlecruiser through the deadliest naval battle of the First World War remain on display in the country that gave the ship her name. Other pieces of the ship found their own way home too: a section of armour plate dented at Jutland was fashioned into a wardroom dinner gong, and a pair of her 4-inch guns were later installed as coastal defence emplacements at Lyttelton's Battery Point during the Second World War, quietly guarding the very harbour the ship had once visited to say thank you.