HMS Royal Arthur (1891): The Cruiser That Escorted a Future King to Open Parliament

A Modified Edgar Constructed at Portsmouth

HMS Royal Arthur was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 20 January 1890 under the name Centaur, renamed before she ever touched water, and launched as Royal Arthur on 26 February 1891, a first-class protected cruiser of the Edgar class, though she and her sister ship HMS Crescent were built to a slightly modified design distinctive enough that naval historians sometimes treat the pair as a separate class in their own right.

At 7,700 tons and 387 feet long, she was a substantial ship for her day, armed with a single 9.2-inch gun, twelve 6-inch guns and a dozen 6-pounders. She did not commission for sea service until 2 March 1893, more than two years after launch, under her first captain, Frederick P. Trench.

The modification is worth explaining, because it is the reason she spent her career as a flagship. The seven standard Edgars carried two 9.2-inch guns, one forward and one aft, and the forward one sat low in a hull that was already wet. Royal Arthur and Crescent gave that gun up. In its place they got a raised forecastle running further forward and additional 6-inch guns, which made them drier at the bow and, more to the point, gave them the internal volume for an admiral and his staff. Firepower was traded for accommodation and freeboard, and the two ships that got the deal spent the next decade flying flags on foreign stations while their sisters did not. One of those sisters is here: HMS Endymion (1891), who went to the Boxer Rebellion and was eventually torpedoed in the Aegean.

Flagship of the Pacific

Royal Arthur spent much of the 1890s and early 1900s as a flagship on distant stations, a role reflecting both her size and prestige as a substantial modern cruiser. She served as flagship of the Pacific Station from 1893 to 1896, one of the Royal Navy's furthest-flung commands, responsible for protecting British interests across a vast expanse of ocean with only a handful of ships available to cover it. Command changed hands partway through that first commission under sombre circumstances: Captain Trench died while still in post on 10 May 1895, and was succeeded first by an acting captain and then by Captain Frank Finnis, who saw the ship through to the end of her Pacific commission the following year.

Escorting a Future King to Australia

From 1897 to 1904, Royal Arthur served as flagship of the Australia Station under Rear Admiral Sir Lewis Beaumont, and she was on hand for the very birth of the nation she served: on New Year's Day 1901 she lay dressed overall in Sydney's Farm Cove to mark the proclamation of Australian Federation, months before playing her best-remembered role.

Federation is worth stating plainly, because the word does a lot of quiet work. It turned six self-governing colonies into one country. Before that morning there was no Australia in the legal sense; after it there was. Royal Arthur lay in Farm Cove dressed overall while it happened. For a cruiser whose career is otherwise a list of stations, being in Sydney on the morning a country came into existence is a considerable thing to have on the log.

That role came in May 1901, when she escorted the royal yacht Ophir, carrying the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall and York, the future King George V and Queen Mary, to Australia for the opening of the country's first Federal Parliament. On 9 May, the Duke, dressed for the occasion in the uniform of a Royal Navy Rear Admiral, opened proceedings before some 12,000 guests packed into Melbourne's Exhibition Building, a ceremonial duty of real constitutional significance marking the birth of the modern Australian nation. Beaumont himself was made a Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George for his part in hosting the royal visit.

The Ophir voyage is usually described as a trip to Australia and it was nothing of the sort. The Duke and Duchess left England in March 1901 and did not get home until November: Gibraltar, Malta, Aden, Ceylon, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Mauritius, South Africa and Canada, something in the order of forty-five thousand miles in eight months. It was mounted deliberately, in the year Queen Victoria died, to show the Empire a living heir at a moment when a good deal of it was wondering what came next, and Royal Arthur was the escort for the Australian leg of the largest exercise in imperial public relations anybody had yet attempted.

From Refit to Home Waters

After further service with the North America and West Indies Station, Royal Arthur returned home for a refit and recommissioned in 1905, subsequently joining the Home Fleet from 1906 onward as her career settled into the quieter routine typical of an older cruiser whose most demanding overseas duties now lay behind her. By 1913 she had settled into the reserve fleet, recommissioning at Portsmouth that June for duty with the Third Fleet and again at Sheerness that August, exactly the kind of unglamorous, skeleton-crewed reserve service that occupied most ageing cruisers in their final peacetime years.

A Wartime Collision at Scapa Flow

With the outbreak of the First World War, Royal Arthur found herself once again in active service with the Tenth Cruiser Squadron, helping patrol the waters north of Scotland as part of the Northern Patrol's blockade of German shipping, though not without incident. On 9 September 1914, under the command of Captain Adolphus H. Williamson, she collided with the Swedish steamer Tua at Scapa Flow, an accident that cost the life of one of her crew, a sober reminder that even routine wartime operations in home waters carried genuine risk.

The Northern Patrol needs a sentence of honesty, because it did not work. The Tenth Cruiser Squadron at the outbreak of war was made up of Edgars, ships designed in 1889 for the Mediterranean and the China Station, and they were sent to blockade the gap between Scotland, the Faroes and Iceland through a North Atlantic autumn. They could not do it. They were slow, they were old, their coal consumption in a head sea was ruinous, and they rolled and worked in a way that opened seams. One severe autumn gale settled the argument.

On 20 November 1914 the Admiralty ordered all seven Edgars home to pay off, barely three months into the war, and replaced them with something nobody had thought of using: about twenty armed merchant cruisers, requisitioned liners with a few guns bolted on, which had the freeboard, the range and the sheer size to stay out in that weather for weeks. It was an improvisation and it was the making of the blockade. The Northern Patrol went on to become one of the most effective in naval history. It simply could not be done in Royal Arthur.

She spent the rest of the war based at Scapa Flow, latterly as a guardship, before being converted in May 1918 into a depot ship for the Twelfth Submarine Flotilla, supplying and servicing submarines attached to the Grand Fleet, a far cry from the ceremonial duties of her Australian years but useful work all the same.

A Long Career, Quietly Closed

Royal Arthur was paid off in 1920 and sold for breaking up in Germany on 22 September 1921, closing out nearly three decades of service that had carried her across the Pacific, Australia, the West Indies and home waters, and had, for one memorable spring in 1901, placed her at the centre of a particularly significant piece of imperial and constitutional history.

The name had one more life, and it is the strangest thing attached to her. In 1939 the Royal Navy needed somewhere to put thousands of new entries at very short notice, and it requisitioned Billy Butlin's holiday camp at Ingoldmells outside Skegness, complete with chalets, dining hall and swimming pool, and commissioned the whole thing as HMS Royal Arthur. Tens of thousands of ratings did their basic training in a Lincolnshire holiday camp under the name of a Victorian cruiser that had escorted a king to Melbourne. The name moved on to Corsham after the war and stayed in use for decades. Royal Arthur herself had been broken up in Germany twenty years before any of it happened, which is a fate she shares with a great many ships and a name she has not.