HMS Renown (1916): The Battlecruiser That Chased a Pocket Battleship, Traded Blows with Scharnhorst, and Carried Churchill to Cairo

From Cancelled Battleship to Rushed Battlecruiser

HMS Renown began life as an improved Revenge-class battleship, laid down at Fairfield's Govan yard in January 1915, only for her construction to be suspended at the outbreak of the First World War. When Admiral Lord Fisher became First Sea Lord, he had the unfinished hull redesigned as a fast battlecruiser instead, with Director of Naval Construction Eustace Tennyson-d'Eyncourt drawing up plans that the builders promised, and very nearly delivered, in just fifteen months. She was launched in March 1916 and completed that September at a cost of over three million pounds, a battlecruiser born from a battleship that never was.

A Quiet War, a Grand Surrender

Renown joined the Grand Fleet's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron in the North Sea, and despite extensive patrolling, never fired a shot in anger during the First World War. She did witness one of the war's great anticlimactic spectacles, the surrender of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow on 21 November 1918, a fleet that had spent the war largely avoiding exactly this kind of decisive confrontation.

A Royal Yacht in Everything but Name

The interwar years gave Renown an unusually glamorous secondary career, refitted with a squash court and cinema to carry the Prince of Wales on extended tours of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, the Philippines and Japan through the early 1920s, and later conveying the Duke and Duchess of York to Australia in 1927, a voyage marred by a boiler room fire on the return leg. Between these royal engagements she underwent two major reconstructions, a thorough modernisation completed in 1926 and an even more extensive rebuild finished in 1939, closely modelled on sister-ship-in-spirit HMS Warspite's own transformation, which rebuilt her superstructure, replaced her machinery and re-armed her secondary battery entirely.

Hunting the Graf Spee

Recommissioned just before the Second World War began, Renown joined Force H at the Cape of Good Hope in November 1939 with the specific job of preventing the German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee from breaking back into the South Atlantic after her depredations against British shipping. She sank the blockade runner SS Watussi that December, and remained on watch in the South Atlantic even after Graf Spee's scuttling off Montevideo, a reminder that hunting one raider still meant guarding against others.

Trading Fire With Scharnhorst and Gneisenau

Renown's most direct combat came during the Norwegian Campaign, when as flagship of the Battlecruiser Squadron she encountered the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau on 9 April 1940. She spotted the German ships and opened fire first, only to be struck first herself by two 28-centimetre shells that caused relatively minor damage. Renown gave better than she got, striking Gneisenau with one 15-inch and two secondary shells that knocked out the German ship's main fire-control director, before the two faster German ships used the heavy weather to break off the action after ninety minutes, a genuinely rare instance of a British capital ship trading direct broadsides with German heavy units early in the war.

Force H, Bismarck, and the Mediterranean

From August 1940, Renown served with Force H out of Gibraltar, taking part in the inconclusive Battle of Cape Spartivento, bombarding Genoa in February 1941, and covering carrier operations flying Hurricane fighters into besieged Malta. In May and June 1941 she joined the hunt for the German battleship Bismarck, and went on to escort Mediterranean convoys and support Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of North Africa, in October 1942, before transferring to the Home Fleet to help cover the perilous Arctic convoy routes to the Soviet Union.

Carrying Churchill Across the World

In 1943, freshly refitted, Renown took on transport duties of a very different kind, carrying Winston Churchill and his staff from the Quebec Conference in September and on to the Cairo Conference that November, adding wartime statesmen to a passenger list that already included two future kings. In 1944 she joined the Eastern Fleet as flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron, taking part in the carrier strike on Sabang and bombardments of Japanese-held positions on Car Nicobar and Port Blair, before a final Atlantic recall in early 1945 in case German heavy ships attempted one last desperate sortie.

A Meeting of Great Powers, and a Quiet End

Renown's war ended with one more historic moment, hosting a meeting between King George VI and President Harry Truman aboard on 3 August 1945, shortly after she had been placed in reserve. Her disposal was announced in January 1948 and she was towed to Faslane for scrapping that August, going down in the history books as the last British battlecruiser ever to be broken up, closing out the entire type she had represented since her hurried wartime construction three decades earlier.