HMS Royal Sovereign (05): The Battleship Britain Lent to Stalin

The Tiddley Quid

HMS Royal Sovereign was ordered from Portsmouth Dockyard under the 1913 programme, laid down on 15 January 1914, launched on 29 April 1915 and completed in May 1916.

She was the fifth and last of the Revenge class, sometimes called the Royal Sovereign class after her, five ships of just under 30,000 tons carrying eight 15-inch guns in four twin turrets: shorter, slower and better protected than the Queen Elizabeths that came before them, and built on the assumption that a battleship's job was to stand in the line and take punishment rather than run about the ocean.

She was the eighth ship of the name, which the Royal Navy had been using since 1509, when it was given to the Grace Dieu.

Her battle honours board therefore reaches back further than almost anything else afloat in 1916: Kentish Knock and Solebay, Texel, Beachy Head, Barfleur, the Glorious First of June, and Trafalgar, where the previous Royal Sovereign carried Collingwood into the enemy line ahead of everybody else and earned Nelson's admiring remark about how that noble fellow was carrying his ship.

Collingwood himself is the subject of our article on the shore establishment named after him. Her motto, Ducere Classem Regem Sequi, means "to lead the Fleet, to follow the King".

The lower deck was less reverent. They called her the Tiddley Quid, tiddley being naval slang for smart or spruce and a quid being a sovereign, which is the kind of joke a ship's company makes about a ship they are quietly fond of.

Completed in Time, Not Ready in Time

She commissioned in April 1916 and was completed in May, and she was still working up when the Grand Fleet sailed for Jutland at the end of that month. There is no more comprehensive way to miss the point of your own existence.

She had been designed, argued over, funded and built for a fleet action against the German battle fleet, and the one fleet action of the war happened without her while she was learning how to work her guns.

She joined the 1st Battle Squadron at Scapa Flow and spent the remaining two and a half years of the war there, waiting for a second Jutland that the Germans had no intention of providing. She fired her main armament a great deal and never at an enemy, which is what the photograph in this article records: eight 15-inch guns going off on a gunnery exercise, a great deal of noise, and nothing at the other end of it.

She stayed in full commission after the war, manned from the Chatham depot, and served through the 1920s and 1930s in the way that unmodernised battleships did: Atlantic Fleet, Mediterranean Fleet, showing the flag and burning coal-era ideas in an oil-fired hull. The Navy knew perfectly well she needed rebuilding.

In 1939 she was scheduled for the full modernisation that Royal Oak had already received. The war broke out, the modernisation was postponed indefinitely, and she got a short refit that dealt only with what was urgent.

That decision, made in a hurry in September 1939, quietly determined everything that happened to her afterwards.

Five Million Pounds in Gold

On 18 December 1939 she was visited by King George VI. Three weeks later she was at the Pitch House Jetty in Portsmouth loading five million pounds of gold bullion, and on 14 January 1940 she sailed for Halifax with three destroyers, HMS Achates among them, who saw her clear of home waters and turned back.

From 16 January she crossed the Atlantic entirely alone, which tells you something about how the Admiralty rated the odds of a raider finding one battleship in a big ocean, and how badly the gold needed to arrive.

It was the beginning of the long, dull, essential work that filled her war. Britain was paying cash for American weapons, and Britain's cash was in Canada.

She ran the bullion out and then joined the Halifax Escort Force, riding shotgun on the HX convoys: HX 18, HX 22, HX 28, HX 34 and more, out into the Atlantic and back, a big slow ship put in the middle of a convoy so that any German raider looking at it through a periscope or a rangefinder would count the 15-inch guns and go and look somewhere else.

The bullion side of that story belongs to her sister HMS Revenge, and is told at length in her own article.

In 1940 she went to the Mediterranean and was present off Calabria on 9 July, one of the rare occasions when both fleets brought their heavy ships out, described from a submarine's deck in the article on HMS Phoenix and fought alongside HMS Warspite and HMS Malaya.

In 1942 she went east to the Indian Ocean, where the four surviving R-class ships were formed into Force B, the squadron Admiral Somerville privately regarded as a liability rather than an asset, being slow enough to be caught and old enough to be sunk. Resolution, Ramillies and Revenge were the others, and two of them have accounts worth reading alongside this one: Resolution, torpedoed by the French navy she had just been fighting, and Ramillies, who survived a Japanese midget submarine.

A Year in Philadelphia, and the One Job They Would Not Do

In October 1942 she sailed from Freetown under sealed orders, which turned out to say Philadelphia. She arrived at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 21 October and stayed for over a year.

The Americans did a great deal of work.

They laid two inches of non-cemented armour over her magazines against bombs and plunging fire, took out her two forward 6-inch guns and her after conning tower, improved her watertight subdivision, rebuilt her damage control and firefighting systems, fitted new water distilling plant, swapped her auxiliary diesels for General Motors units, put in fourteen single and sixteen twin 20mm Oerlikons, and chipped off all her lead paint and repainted her in zinc oxide.

Two thirds of her crew went home and she was reduced to care and maintenance. For a while a battleship of the Royal Navy was commanded by a commander, because there was not enough left aboard to justify a captain.

There was one thing they did not do. Her shell and cordite handling gear, the machinery that moves ammunition from the magazines up to the 15-inch turrets, was found to be badly worn and in need of replacement. The Americans declined to carry out that work.

Hold on to that, because it is the hinge on which the rest of her life turns.

She came home at the end of 1943 carrying a cargo that could only have been assembled in that war: a load of mines and torpedoes, a party of American news reporters, and a party of British children being repatriated after being evacuated to the United States earlier in the war. She put the children ashore at Greenock and took the mines round to Rosyth.

Not Wanted for Normandy

In January 1944 the Admiralty had her surveyed, to see whether she was fit to join the bombardment force for the Normandy landings, then being planned. The survey found major defects in the shell and cordite handling gear for her main armament.

It was the same fault the Philadelphia Navy Yard had identified and left alone a year earlier, and it meant that her eight 15-inch guns could not be relied on to be fed.

The Admiralty decided not to repair it. She was left out of the invasion plan and reduced to care and maintenance at Rosyth in February 1944, which in any ordinary year would have been the last sentence of her story: a twenty-eight-year-old battleship, unmodernised because of one war and unrepaired because of another, tied up in Scotland with nothing to do.

What saved her was that she had become, precisely because of all that, the most expendable capital ship in the Royal Navy. And in the winter of 1943 somebody had asked Britain for a battleship.

What Stalin Actually Asked For

At Tehran, between 28 November and 1 December 1943, Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill agreed that the Soviet Union should receive a share of the surrendered Italian fleet. Stalin wanted the ships by the end of January 1944.

The trouble was that handing Italian warships to the Soviet Union while Italy had just changed sides and while those ships had Italian crews aboard was diplomatically and practically impossible on that timetable, and through December and January Stalin kept asking.

Under pressure Churchill offered a British battleship on loan instead, until the Italian battleship Giulio Cesare could be made available. Stalin asked for a King George V class, which is to say one of the five newest and best battleships Britain had. He was offered Royal Sovereign, laid down in 1914.

His reply, which Churchill preserved, has a particular flavour: he wrote that after the favourable answer he had been given at Tehran he had considered the matter settled, that it had never occurred to him that a decision taken by the three of them could be revised, and that nonetheless, in order not to delay a matter so vital to the common fight against Germany, the Soviet Union was willing to accept the proposal of Royal Sovereign and one cruiser.

It is possible to read that as gracious. It is easier to read it as a man noting, for the record, exactly what he had been promised and exactly what he was being given.

Arkhangelsk

She went into Rosyth in March 1944 for a refit to prepare her for transfer. The Soviet crews for her and for the smaller ships in the package arrived in Britain aboard convoy RA 59 on 6 June 1944, and were billeted in the liner Empress of Russia, moored at Rosyth as an accommodation ship.

Their admiral, Gordey Levchenko, had come out separately, and the passage that brought him is remembered in the article on HMS Ulysses.

At the end of May 1944, on the 30th, she was transferred to the Soviet Navy at Rosyth and renamed Arkhangelsk. She was not alone: destroyers and submarines went with her, including a batch of elderly ex-American Town-class destroyers whose own strange careers are followed in the article on HMS Churchill.

Her new ship's company spent June learning her, July working up in the Firth of Forth, and August working up at Scapa Flow, and on 17 August 1944 she sailed north with convoy JW 59, reaching Murmansk on 25 August to join the Soviet Northern Fleet. That convoy was a bad one, and the sloop HMS Kite was lost on it.

On the way, U 711 fired at her. Her captain, Hans-Günther Lange, reported hits on the battleship and on a destroyer. His torpedoes had in fact detonated prematurely and he had hit nothing at all, which did not stop the claim being made.

The Second Attempt on a Royal Sovereign

The Germans took the transfer personally, and what they decided to do about it is the strangest compliment the ship was ever paid. In October 1939 Günther Prien had taken U 47 into Scapa Flow and sunk her sister Royal Oak at her moorings, the most spectacular U-boat operation of the war and a propaganda triumph that Germany had been living off ever since.

With the same ship class now flying the Soviet ensign in a northern anchorage, somebody in Berlin saw the chance to do it twice.

U 315, commanded by Herbert Zoller and fitted with a schnorchel, was ordered into the Kola Inlet to torpedo Arkhangelsk at her moorings. On the dark night of 19 September 1944 she went in and discovered what the Royal Navy had failed to have at Scapa five years earlier: an anti-submarine net, strung right across the entrance. U 315 went into it and stuck fast.

They spent the whole night trying to get out. A submarine tangled in a net at the mouth of an enemy naval base has until dawn, when somebody ashore notices the floats moving. She finally tore free in the small hours and Zoller took her home, having concluded that the Kola Inlet could not be entered.

The difference between Royal Oak and Arkhangelsk, in the end, was a length of steel netting and five years of learning.

The Loan Comes Back

She served with the Soviet Northern Fleet through the rest of the war and for four years after it, which was rather longer than anybody in London had envisaged when the word loan was used. Giulio Cesare, the ship she was standing in for, was eventually handed over in 1949 and became Novorossiysk, and only then did the Soviet Navy give Royal Sovereign back.

She was returned at Rosyth in February 1949 and took her own name again. She had been away four years and eight months. There was nothing left to do with her: she was thirty-three years old, had never been modernised, and still had the worn ammunition hoists that had kept her out of Normandy.

She went straight onto the disposal list, was sold to the British Iron and Steel Corporation and was broken up by Thomas W. Ward at Inverkeithing.

One piece of her outlived the rest by a long way. Between 1955 and 1957, when Bernard Lovell's enormous radio telescope was being built at Jodrell Bank, the engineers needed gearing strong enough to elevate a 250-foot steel bowl and precise enough to hold it steady.

They found it in the elevation racks of 15-inch battleship turrets, and took one rack and pinion from Royal Sovereign and another from Revenge. The machinery built to point eight 15-inch guns at the German battle fleet spent the second half of the twentieth century pointing a dish at quasars, and it is still there.

The Only One of Her Kind

No other British battleship has ever served under the Soviet flag. That fact usually gets told as a curiosity, which undersells it, because the reason she was available is the whole point. She was completed in the month of Jutland and was still learning her own guns when it was fought.

She missed her modernisation because war broke out a few months too early. She missed Normandy because an American dockyard would not renew a set of worn ammunition hoists and the Admiralty would not pay to do it afterwards.

Each of those was a small administrative decision, and between them they turned the eighth HMS Royal Sovereign into the one capital ship Britain could hand over without missing her.

She is also, on any reasonable measure, the least distinguished of the five Revenge-class ships, which is a hard field. Royal Oak was sunk at anchor at Scapa. Resolution was torpedoed by the French navy she had just been fighting. Ramillies survived a Japanese midget submarine at Madagascar.

Revenge carried the nation's gold. Royal Sovereign, the Tiddley Quid, missed the battle, missed the invasion, changed navies, came back and was cut up, and left behind a gearbox that is still working.

It is not a bad epitaph for a ship that spent thirty-three years waiting for a battle that never quite came to her.