HMS Powerful (1895): The Giant Cruiser Whose Guns Helped Save Ladysmith

Built to Catch One Russian Ship

HMS Powerful was, when she entered service, the largest cruiser in the world, and she owed her enormous size to a single, specific Russian threat.

The Admiralty had grown alarmed by the Russian armoured cruiser Rurik, a formidable commerce raider capable of devastating British merchant shipping across the globe, and Powerful, along with her sister ship Terrible, was designed with the range and speed to hunt such a raider down wherever she went.

Built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness, laid down in March 1894 and launched in July 1895 by the Duchess of Devonshire, she displaced a colossal 14,200 tons, stretched 538 feet in length, and could make nearly 22 knots on trial, armed with two 9.2-inch guns and a further twelve 6-inch guns. She commissioned on 8 June 1897, a genuine leviathan for her era.

A Cruiser That Never Fought a Naval Battle

For all her size and firepower, Powerful never actually fired a shot at the Russian raider she had been built to chase, nor indeed at any enemy warship at sea. Her moment of genuine fame came instead on land, in the most unlikely of circumstances for a first-class cruiser.

Guns Ashore at Ladysmith

When the Second Boer War broke out in 1899, Powerful was diverted to South Africa, arriving at Simon's Town on 13 October to help transport troops. As the British garrison at Ladysmith found itself besieged by Boer forces with artillery that badly outranged anything the defenders had on hand, the Royal Navy did something no one had quite planned for: it landed its guns.

Captain Hedworth Lambton led a naval brigade drawn from Powerful and her sister Terrible, while Terrible's own captain, the resourceful Percy Scott, improvised field carriages capable of hauling a pair of 4.7-inch naval guns and four 12-pounders overland to where they were needed. Scott reportedly sketched the wheel design straight onto a blacksmith's door in Simon's Town, working from four-inch square bar iron and a sheet of circular iron plate, and had a working carriage ready inside 48 hours.

The brigade, 283 officers and men strong, left Simon's Town on 26 October and reached Ladysmith just four days later, on the 30th, arriving in the thick of the very battle that would trigger the siege itself. Their two 4.7-inch guns, nicknamed Lady Anne and Bloody Mary, went into position on Junction Hill and Cove Redoubt respectively, though Rear Admiral Harris had restricted their ammunition to a mere 500 rounds against Scott's recommended 5,000, a shortage that would have emptied both guns in under half an hour at full rate of fire.

It was an engineering feat born of pure necessity, turning heavy naval ordnance never designed to move on land into mobile artillery that could finally answer the Boer guns on something like equal terms.

Her sister did the same thing and then kept going. HMS Terrible (1895) landed guns for Ladysmith and Colenso, and then took the same idea and the same captain on to China for the relief of the legations at Peking, which makes the pair of them the only cruisers ever built to chase one Russian ship that ended up providing the field artillery for two separate wars on two continents.

One of Powerful's own officers, Egerton, was killed by enemy fire on 2 November, reportedly remarking "my cricketing days are over" moments before he died. Of the 283 men who had marched in, 33 never made it home, and starkly, only six of those deaths came from enemy action; the rest were claimed by enteric fever and the general hardship of a siege that would run to 118 days. Bloody Mary, for her part, repeatedly found the range on a Boer gun position atop Mount Bulwana at close to nine thousand yards, helping silence one of the very Long Toms the whole expedition had been sent to answer.

The naval brigade's guns became a vital part of the besieged garrison's defence, and their presence is still remembered as one of the more improbable and celebrated episodes of the entire war.

When the siege finally broke on 28 February 1900, the war correspondent George W. Steevens put it plainly: this handful of sailors, he wrote, had been the saving of Ladysmith. Powerful herself sailed home to a hero's welcome at Portsmouth that April, her crew each presented with a silver watch by the city's mayor, and the improvised gun-carriage drill Scott had invented under such pressure went on to inspire the Royal Navy's own Field Gun Run, a fixture of the Royal Tournament from 1907 for the best part of a century.

Lambton's own reward arrived by a route nobody could have invented. Among the people reading about the naval guns at Ladysmith in the papers was Lady Valerie Meux, the widow of Sir Henry Meux, third baronet and brewer, of Theobalds Park. She was the daughter of a Devon butcher and had been an actress and a banjo-playing barmaid before she married him, which the aristocracy had never entirely forgiven her for. On learning what Powerful's people had done, she paid out of her own pocket for six 12-pounder naval guns on travelling carriages to be built at Elswick and shipped to Lord Roberts in South Africa.

When Lambton got home he went round to see her, described what his guns had done at Ladysmith and thanked her for sending hers. That was all. She had made and remade a great many wills in her time, and after that visit she made him her heir, on one condition: that he take her husband's name. On 2 September 1911 Captain Hedworth Lambton became, by royal licence, Sir Hedworth Meux, and in due course an Admiral of the Fleet and a Member of Parliament for Portsmouth. He got a brewing fortune and a country house for going round to say thank you, which is not a career path the Admiralty could reasonably have planned for.

The Field Gun Run itself outlived every ship and every man in this story, and then stopped rather abruptly. The inter-command competition ran at the Agricultural Hall in Islington and from 1950 at Earls Court, with crews from Portsmouth, Devonport, Chatham and the Fleet Air Arm; Chatham dropped out in 1960 and the other three carried on. On 20 July 1999 the Government confirmed that the competition would end, and the 109th and last Royal Tournament was held that August. Something like ninety years of sailors dismantling a gun, throwing it across a chasm and putting it back together again in under a minute and a half, because of four days of improvisation in a Simon's Town blacksmith's yard in 1899, finished in an afternoon at Earls Court.

It has not quite gone. The Brickwoods Trophy, first won in 1907 by the Royal Marines from Forton, is still competed for, and the full-size Command gun is still run in Portsmouth by crews of former field gunners and civilians who were not going to let it die. Powerful's guns are still being dragged about a hundred and twenty-odd years later, which is more than can be said for her 9.2-inch turrets.

Not every man from Powerful's brigade stayed at Ladysmith itself. A memorial that still stands in Portsmouth's Victoria Park lists brigade casualties from Graspan, Belmont, Modder River and Paardeberg too, a reminder that her sailors were fighting and dying across a good stretch of the wider South African campaign, not just behind the town's own defences.

Flagship of the Australia Station

After her South African service and a refit in 1902 and 1903, Powerful settled into a rather more conventional role, serving as flagship of the Australia Station from 1905 to 1912 under Rear Admiral Sir Arthur Fanshawe, leading a squadron that included the cruisers HMS Cambrian, HMS Encounter, HMS Pegasus and HMS Prometheus, showing the flag and representing British naval power across a vast stretch of the Pacific during the years before the First World War reshaped naval priorities entirely.

In August 1908 she sailed to New Zealand alongside Encounter and Pioneer to welcome the United States Navy's Great White Fleet on its own round-the-world cruise, a rare moment when the ship built to outrun a single Russian raider found herself instead playing genial host to sixteen American battleships on the other side of the planet.

That Pioneer is worth a nod, because she has an article of her own here and a rather odder career than Powerful's: HMS Pioneer (1899) was given away to Australia in 1912, spent the First World War blockading a German cruiser up an African river, and was scuttled off Sydney Heads in 1931, where her wreck was found again in 2014.

From Warship to Training Hulk

Powerful returned home in 1912 and, rather than being scrapped as an obsolete design, was given a long and useful third career.

From August 1912 she served as a training ship at Devonport, and in November 1919 was renamed Impregnable I, continuing to train generations of boy sailors in the basics of naval discipline and seamanship for another decade, her enormous hull well suited to housing the classrooms, messes and dormitories a training establishment required.

A Long Career, Quietly Ended

Powerful was finally paid off on 27 March 1929 and sold for breaking up that August, bringing to a close a career spanning more than three decades, in which the largest cruiser of her generation had gone from a purpose-built commerce-raider hunter to an improvised field artillery unit and finally to a floating training school.

Remembered for the Battle She Fought on Land

There is a pleasing irony in the fact that HMS Powerful, built at enormous expense and engineering effort to outrun and outgun a single enemy cruiser at sea, is remembered today not for any naval action at all, but for the moment her guns were dragged ashore and turned into artillery to help save a besieged town. It is a reminder that a warship's real legacy is not always the one her designers had in mind.