HMS Ocean (1898): Lost in the Dardanelles Trying to Rescue Another Sinking Battleship

The First Big Ship Built at Devonport

HMS Ocean was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 15 December 1897, the first large armoured warship ever built at that yard, launched on 5 July 1898 by Princess Louise, Marchioness of Lorne, and commissioned on 20 February 1900 under Captain Assheton Curzon-Howe, a Canopus-class battleship, one of six vessels built deliberately smaller, lighter and faster than earlier British battleships while retaining the same heavy main armament, a design specifically intended for service in East Asia.

China, Typhoons and a Changing Alliance

HMS Ocean served with the Mediterranean Fleet immediately after commissioning, departing Devonport on 13 March 1900 and reaching Gibraltar four days later, before transferring to the China Station in 1901 in response to the Boxer Uprising. She visited Port Lazaref on the Korean peninsula in October 1902, but suffered typhoon damage that required extensive repairs through 1903.

Her entire East Asian deployment was rendered largely redundant by the Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902, and she and three sister ships departed Hong Kong on 7 June 1905, arriving back at Plymouth that August.

That redundancy determined the rest of her life, and the rest of her class's. Six Canopus-class battleships had been built deliberately lighter and faster for a war in the Far East that the Anglo-Japanese Alliance made unnecessary, which left the Royal Navy in 1914 with six battleships too old and too thin-skinned for the North Sea and too useful to scrap. So they were sent to do the jobs where losing one would not matter very much.

It shows in what happened to them. Canopus herself was run aground in Port Stanley harbour and used as a fort. Ocean went to the Persian Gulf, then Suez, then the Dardanelles. HMS Goliath was torpedoed off Cape Helles two months after Ocean sank, with the loss of some five hundred and seventy men, and HMS Glory finished the war in the Arctic. A class designed for a war that never happened was spent on the wars that did.

A Long Peacetime Career

HMS Ocean spent the years before the First World War moving through a series of fairly routine assignments: reserve at Chatham from 1905 to 1906, service with the Channel Fleet from 1906 to 1908, a further Mediterranean Fleet commission with fire control upgrades from 1908 to 1910, the Home Fleet's 4th Division from 1910 to 1913, and finally the 3rd Fleet at Pembroke Dock in Wales from 1913 to 1914, a particularly long and unremarkable peacetime career for a battleship whose most consequential chapter still lay ahead.

Bombarding Al-Faw

HMS Ocean joined the 8th Battle Squadron on 14 August 1914, the same day Captain Arthur Hayes-Sadler took command, a post he would hold for the rest of her career, and was detached to Queenstown, Ireland, a week later, before deploying to the Persian Gulf that October to serve as flagship supporting operations against Basra.

On 6 November she began the bombardment of Al-Faw, with a subsequent landing party capturing the fortress there without meeting any resistance, and by December ground forces had reached Al-Qurnah, prompting her reassignment elsewhere.

Defending Suez

HMS Ocean arrived at Suez on 29 December 1914 to help defend the vital canal, and on 3 and 4 February 1915, alongside the armed merchant cruiser Himalaya, supported British troops against an Ottoman attack near El Kubri, a properly important defensive action protecting one of the empire's most strategically vital waterways.

The Dardanelles

HMS Ocean transferred to the Dardanelles Campaign in late February 1915, taking part in bombardments on 28 February, 4 March, and again on 6 and 7 March, ahead of the major Anglo-French naval assault planned for later that month.

That assault, launched on 18 March, turned into one of the costliest days in the whole naval campaign well before Ocean's own drama began. The French battleship Bouvet struck a mine in the same largely unswept field that afternoon and capsized in under two minutes, taking around 640 of her 710-strong crew down with her, a stark measure of just how narrow the line could be that day between a ship that sank with almost everyone saved and one that sank with almost everyone lost.

Lost Trying to Save Another Ship's Crew

HMS Ocean met her end on 18 March 1915, during the major Allied assault on the Dardanelles forts, when she moved to assist the disabled British battleship HMS Irresistible, which had already struck a mine and lay helpless under fire. While retrieving Irresistible's surviving crew, HMS Ocean herself was struck by an artillery shell, and at around 19:00 struck a drifting mine of her own.

Her starboard coal bunkers and passageways flooded, her steering jammed hard to port, and she developed a dangerous 15-degree list to starboard.

The destroyers Jed, Colne and Chelmer moved in around 19:30, on Captain Hayes-Sadler's own order, to evacuate her crew along with the survivors already rescued from HMS Irresistible, and HMS Ocean, still under fire, drifted into Morto Bay and sank there unobserved by Allied forces at around 22:30 that night, a remarkably striking end for a ship lost not in the act of attacking the enemy, but in the act of trying to save another crew's lives.

Remarkably, given everything that had gone wrong that afternoon, not a single member of Ocean's own crew was lost. Her survivors, along with those already taken off Irresistible, were carried to safety aboard HMS Swiftsure, a genuinely rare piece of good fortune to close out an otherwise thoroughly bad day for the Allied fleet.

The reason so many ships came to grief in a stretch of water that had been swept is worth knowing, and it is not complicated. Ten days earlier a small Turkish minelayer, the Nusret, had crept down and laid a line of mines in Erenkoy Bay, running parallel to the shore rather than across the strait, in exactly the patch of water the Allied battleships had been using to turn in after each bombardment. Nobody found them. The full account is in the article on HMS Inflexible (1907).

One minelayer, one night's work, one line of mines nobody was looking for. Between them they sank Bouvet, Irresistible and Ocean, damaged Inflexible and Suffren and put Gaulois on a beach at Tenedos, all in a single afternoon. Churchill, who had staked a great deal on the operation, is said to have written afterwards that the Nusret may have changed the world.

He was not exaggerating. The attempt to force the Dardanelles by sea was abandoned after 18 March, and the alternative was to put an army ashore instead. The Gallipoli landings went in on 25 April. Everything that followed on that peninsula, and the reputations made and destroyed by it, follows from a line of mines laid parallel to the shore by a ship most people have never heard of, and from an afternoon in which HMS Ocean went to help another ship and did not come back.