HMS Spider (1887): A Torpedo Gunboat at the Diamond Jubilee Review

One of the Navy's Torpedo-Hunters

HMS Spider was laid down at Devonport Dockyard on 9 June 1886 and launched on 17 October 1887, one of only three Grasshopper-class torpedo gunboats ever built for the Royal Navy, alongside her sisters HMS Grasshopper and HMS Sandfly, a design developed in response to the naval scares of the mid-1880s and intended specifically to hunt down and destroy the new generation of enemy torpedo boats.

At 525 tons and capable of 19 knots on her twin-screw machinery, she carried a single 4-inch gun, six 3-pounder guns and four torpedo tubes of her own, a formidable armament for so small a ship.

Only three of the class were built, and the reason is the same reason the whole torpedo gunboat idea lasted about a decade. A torpedo gunboat existed to catch torpedo boats, and to catch a thing you have to be faster than it, and she was not: nineteen knots against enemy boats that could already do twenty-two and would soon do twenty-five. Spider, Grasshopper and Sandfly were followed by three larger classes on the same principle, and every one of them ran into the same wall. The argument is set out in full in HMS Karrakatta (1889), and the answer, when it finally arrived in 1893, is in HMS Hornet (1893): stop building small gunboats and build something that was itself a torpedo boat, only bigger and faster, and call it a torpedo boat destroyer.

Training the Navy's Engineers

For much of the early 1890s Spider led a curiously stop-start existence, recommissioned each summer under a fresh young lieutenant-commander, among them the Hon. Patrick Hely-Hutchinson in 1890, purely to take part in that year's Fleet Annual Manoeuvres before paying off again once the exercises ended. It was only from 1895, under Commander Edward Chapman and then Lieutenant-Commander Alfred Whitehouse, that she settled into a steadier role as tender to HMS Vivid for the instruction of engineer students, putting her at the heart of training the technical officers who would keep the Royal Navy's increasingly complex steam machinery running, unglamorous work but truly essential to the fleet's readiness.

Teaching the Men the Navy Would Not Call Officers

That tender role deserves unpacking, because of what it was tender to and when. HMS Vivid was the Devonport shore establishment, and engineer students needed a real ship with real machinery to learn on, which is exactly what a small, expendable, technically modern gunboat was good for once she had proved useless at her intended job. So Spider spent her most useful years alongside at Devonport with young men crawling through her boiler rooms.

The timing is what makes it interesting. The 1890s were the years in which the Royal Navy was becoming, whether it liked it or not, an engineering organisation, and it was fighting bitterly about the consequences. Steam had replaced sail entirely, machinery had become the thing that decided whether a fleet could be where it needed to be, and yet the men who understood it occupied a separate and distinctly inferior branch, with their own titles, their own messes and no command authority over anybody. The seaman officers regarded engineering as a trade. It took until the Selborne reforms at the start of the next century for engineer officers to be brought into the same training and the same list as everybody else. Spider was teaching them in the middle of that argument, which is a rather better claim on posterity than nineteen knots.

The Diamond Jubilee Review

In June 1897, with Lieutenant-Commander Henry M. W. P. Johnson lent to her for the occasion, and kept on afterwards to run that year's Annual Manoeuvres too, Spider took her place among the 165 warships mustered at the Spithead Naval Review on 26 June, a display of naval power so vast it was said to outnumber the combined fleets of every other Great Power put together, staged to mark Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and to demonstrate to the world the sheer scale of Britain's maritime strength.

The review deserves its numbers, because they were the entire message. More than a hundred and sixty warships were anchored in lines running some twenty-five miles, and the point that was made repeatedly at the time, and made to foreign naval attachés in particular, was that not one ship had been recalled from a foreign station to be there. Every vessel present was a ship Britain could spare. Queen Victoria herself did not attend, the Prince of Wales taking the review in her place, and the fleet included ships from HMS Mars, barely a year old, down to small fry like Spider.

The real showstopper that day, though, had nothing to do with the assembled fleet at all. Charles Parsons's experimental turbine yacht Turbinia burst uninvited through the lines at a scarcely believable 34 knots, easily outrunning the picket boat sent to chase her off, a stunt that made Spider's own 19-knot torpedo-gunboat machinery look almost antique within a decade, once the Navy had switched wholesale to the very turbine technology Turbinia had just gate-crashed the parade to advertise.

The Turbinia story has one wrinkle worth flagging. She is usually described as gatecrashing, and that is certainly how the newspapers told it and how it has been told ever since; some accounts, though, hold that her runs between the lines were asked for by the authorities rather than sprung on them. Either way, the substance is the same. Charles Parsons had been trying for four years to interest the Admiralty in the steam turbine and had got precisely nowhere, so he built a boat around one and drove it through the largest gathering of warships in history at thirty-four knots, in front of every naval attaché in Europe, and let the ships do the arguing.

It worked immediately. Within two years the Admiralty had ordered two turbine destroyers, Viper and Cobra, and within nine the turbine was in HMS Dreadnought and every serious warship afloat was obsolete. There is a footnote to that too: both Viper and Cobra were lost in 1901, Viper wrecked on Alderney and Cobra breaking in two in the North Sea, so the first two turbine warships in the world were both on the bottom inside a year. The turbine won anyway, which tells you how completely it had settled the argument. Spider was disposed of two years later, at sixteen years old, made obsolete twice over by an afternoon she had been anchored for.

A Quiet End

HMS Spider was disposed of in 1903, her sixteen years of service having encompassed the brief, experimental era of the torpedo gunboat and its rapid supersession by the torpedo boat destroyer, a class of ship that would in time evolve into the modern destroyer. Her career, quiet as it was, offers a small window into how the Victorian navy trained its engineers and marked its great imperial occasions.