HMS Russell (1901): The Last Battleship Out of Cape Helles, Lost to a Minefield Off Malta

A Pre-Dreadnought for the Mediterranean

HMS Russell was laid down by Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company at Jarrow in March 1899, launched in February 1901 and commissioned at Chatham Dockyard in February 1903 under Captain Alfred Winsloe, joining the Mediterranean Fleet as one of the Duncan-class pre-dreadnought battleships, a design already growing dated by the time she entered service but still a substantial and capable warship.

That "already growing dated" quality was really a deliberate trade-off rather than a flaw. The Duncan class was designed specifically for speed, built to counter Russia's fast new Peresvet-class battleships under the Two-Power Standard, Britain's 1889 policy of keeping a navy as strong as its next two rivals combined. The sacrifice was armour, and Russell and her sisters ended up the fastest battleships in the world at launch, capable of 19 knots, though that edge inevitably faded as newer designs caught up. Oddly, for a class named after a different ship in the group, it was Russell herself who beat her own sisters into service, becoming the first of the six Duncan-class battleships to commission.

One of her five sisters has an account here, and it comes with a coincidence worth following. HMS Albemarle (1901) was commanded for a spell by Captain Robert Falcon Scott, between his Discovery expedition and the one he did not come back from. And Scott had gone to sea as a midshipman in a training corvette that is also here, HMS Rover (1874), where a cutter race in the West Indies in 1887 put his name in front of the man who would later send him to the Antarctic.

Bombarding Zeebrugge

When war broke out in August 1914, Russell initially joined the Grand Fleet, working alongside cruisers on the Northern Patrol before being made flagship of the newly reconstituted 6th Battle Squadron that November, tasked with bombarding German-held positions on the Belgian coast that Germany was using as a base for its U-boat campaign.

On 23 November, she and HMS Exmouth opened fire on Zeebrugge from 12,500 yards, closing to 6,000 yards after fifteen minutes, and between them put around 400 shells into the port's lock, harbour installations and shore batteries. Dutch newspapers at the time called it a great success. The Admiralty's own private verdict was rather less flattering: it had achieved little beyond a few fires ashore, and discouraged further bombardments of the kind.

The Last Ship Out of Cape Helles

By November 1915, Russell had been sent to the Mediterranean to support the faltering Dardanelles campaign, and she earned a notably distinctive place in that campaign's difficult final chapter, serving as the last British battleship to depart Cape Helles during the evacuation carried out between 7 and 9 January 1916, covering the withdrawal of the remaining troops from a campaign that had cost so much for so little strategic gain. She was made Divisional Flagship that same January.

Getting Thirty-Five Thousand Men Off a Beach

Being the last battleship out of Cape Helles is worth more than the phrase suggests, because of what the evacuation actually was. By January 1916 the Gallipoli campaign had failed at a cost of about a quarter of a million Allied casualties, and the last problem left was how to take an army off a strip of beach with a Turkish army dug in above it, at close range, in winter, without it turning into a massacre. Everyone involved expected to lose thousands of men doing it.

They lost almost nobody. Over the nights of 7, 8 and 9 January something over thirty-five thousand men came off Helles, along with their guns and their animals, and the Turks did not realise it was happening until it had happened. It was done by degrees, with the garrison thinned night after night while the same volume of noise was maintained; by long deliberate silences in the trenches, days at a time, so that quiet stopped meaning anything; and, most famously, by rifles rigged to fire themselves, triggered by water dripping from one tin into another until the weight pulled the trigger, so that the last men out left a line that was still shooting behind them.

It is one of the great small operations of the war and the bitterest possible commentary on the campaign, because the only part of Gallipoli that went entirely to plan was leaving it. Russell was the last British battleship on that coast, sitting off the beaches with her guns ready in case it went wrong, and then following the last boat out.

Mined Off Malta

Russell's own end came just months later, under the command of Captain William Bowden-Smith, who had led her since December 1913. The German submarine U-73 had slipped close to Malta on 25 April and spent the small hours laying twenty-two mines across the approach to Grand Harbour before withdrawing undetected. Returning from the eastern Mediterranean for resupply and minor repairs, Russell struck two of them on 27 April. A fire broke out in the after part of the ship, followed by an explosion near one of her turrets, and the order was given to abandon ship as she took on a dangerous list.

Russell floated for around twenty minutes before finally capsizing, long enough that most of her crew were able to escape, a mercy that undoubtedly saved many lives, but the disaster still claimed 125 men, twenty-seven officers and ninety-eight ratings, a heavy loss that deserves to be remembered alongside the more famous naval tragedies of the Gallipoli campaign she had so recently helped bring to its close. The same minefield claimed two more victims before the day was out, the sweeping sloop HMS Nasturtium and the hired yacht Aegusa, a grim reminder of just how much damage twenty-two mines, laid in a single night, could go on to do.

U-73 was not finished either, and what she did next connects to a story told elsewhere in these pages. She was commanded throughout by Kapitanleutnant Gustav Siess, and mine-laying was her trade: she carried the mines, put them where the traffic was, and went home. Seven months after Malta, in November 1916, she laid twelve mines in the Kea Channel off the Greek coast. A week later a ship came through it.

That ship was HMHS Britannic, the third and largest of the Olympic-class liners, sister to the Titanic and the Olympic, requisitioned as a hospital ship and on her way to collect wounded. She struck one of Siess's mines on 21 November 1916 and sank in under an hour, the largest ship lost in the whole war. She never carried a fare-paying passenger in her life. And because she was the biggest single item on the list of tonnage the White Star Line had lost, the Germans were required after the war to hand over their own largest liner in her place: the Bismarck, which became the Majestic, which was eventually traded to a shipbreaker for twenty-four obsolete destroyers, one of which has her own article here in HMS Restless (H82). All of it starts with one small submarine laying mines in the eastern Mediterranean in 1916.

A Wreck Rediscovered

Russell's wreck lay undisturbed for the better part of a century until Maltese wreck researcher Emi Farrugia located her, and a British technical diving team, working with Alex Vassello of Starfish Enterprise, carried out the first survey in July 2003, finding her lying capsized and upside down at around 115 metres depth roughly 3.2 nautical miles from Malta's Delimara peninsula, her stern torn away by the force of the mine explosions that sank her.

She is today an officially designated war grave, her resting place protected accordingly, and remains a poignant reminder of how great a toll the largely unseen war of mines and submarines exacted on the Mediterranean fleet, even away from the more famous battles fought elsewhere.

A last word about where she is. A hundred and fifteen metres is well beyond ordinary sport diving, which is why she lay unfound for eighty-seven years and why the 2003 survey needed technical divers on mixed gas with decompression measured in hours. She is upside down with her stern torn off, three miles from Delimara Point, and 125 men are still aboard her. The protection she has as a designated war grave is not ceremonial: at that depth, the only people who can reach her are precisely the people equipped to take things off her.