HMS Tartar (1886): A Torpedo Cruiser's Gun Goes to War in South Africa

Built on the Clyde

HMS Tartar was built by J. and G. Thompson at Glasgow and launched on 28 October 1886, an Archer-class torpedo cruiser, part of the generation of small, fast Victorian warships developed to counter the emerging threat of enemy torpedo boats.

A Naval Brigade Goes Ashore

In 1899, as the Second Boer War broke out in South Africa, a small naval brigade drawn from Tartar's crew, together with one of the ship's own 7-pounder guns, went ashore to serve alongside British land forces, a practice common across the Royal Navy of the period, in which sailors and their ships' guns were pressed into service on land when the situation demanded it, often to devastating effect against an enemy unused to facing naval ordnance.

Sold at Auction

Tartar's career, like so many of her Victorian torpedo cruiser contemporaries, ended not in battle but in the routine business of naval modernisation. She was one of twelve vessels sold at auction at Chatham Dockyard on 3 April 1906, fetching £5,450, a quiet close to the career of a ship whose most notable contribution had come not at sea but on land, in the dust and heat of the South African veld.