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.

Specifications and a Quiet Decade

Tartar was one of fourteen Archer-class torpedo cruisers, third-class vessels built rapidly during the 1880s to counter the emerging threat of fast torpedo boats. She displaced around 1,770 tons, could make roughly 17.5 knots under forced draught, and carried six 6-inch guns and six 3-pounder guns alongside her torpedo tubes, a light but versatile armament typical of the class.

The Archer class belongs to one of the great dead ends of Victorian naval architecture, and it is worth knowing why it died. Through the 1880s every navy in Europe was frightened of the torpedo boat: small, cheap, fast, and carrying a weapon that could sink a battleship costing a hundred times as much. The answer everybody reached for was a slightly larger ship to hunt them, variously called a torpedo cruiser or a torpedo gunboat, and it never worked, for the simple reason that the hunters were never fast enough to catch the hunted. Seventeen and a half knots under forced draught was respectable in 1886 and useless against boats already doing twenty-two. The argument is set out in HMS Karrakatta (1889) and HMS Spider (1887), and the answer, when it finally came in 1893, was to stop trying to catch torpedo boats with something else and build a bigger, faster torpedo boat instead: the destroyer.

Like many of her sister ships, she spent much of her career on the kind of routine peacetime service that rarely made it into the history books, which is presumably why so little survives of her movements between her 1886 launch and her brief moment of prominence during the Boer War in 1899.

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.

Why a Ship's Gun Ended Up in the Veld

The naval brigade was not a curiosity, it was a solution to a specific and urgent problem. When the Boer republics went to war in October 1899 they had something the British Army had not reckoned on: modern Creusot and Krupp artillery, bought from France and Germany, firing further than anything the field batteries had brought with them. British troops were being shelled from ranges at which they could not reply. There was, however, a good deal of long-range ordnance in South Africa already, sitting in the ships at Simon's Town, and Captain Percy Scott of HMS Terrible designed improvised field carriages for naval guns in a matter of days so that they could be sent up-country by rail and ox team.

What followed is one of the odder chapters of British military history: sailors, in naval uniform, manhandling ships' guns across the veld hundreds of miles from the sea, and firing them in support of infantry. The most famous instance is Ladysmith, where the guns of the naval brigade arrived by train hours before the town was surrounded and spent the four-month siege out-ranging the Boer heavy pieces, a story told in HMS Powerful (1895). Tartar's contribution was a smaller one, a 7-pounder and a party of her own men, but the principle was the same, and by the end of the war several hundred naval guns and several thousand sailors had served ashore.

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.

Sold in a Lot of Twelve

Being auctioned at Chatham on the same day as eleven other warships was not the routine business of naval modernisation. It was the visible end of one of the most ruthless reforms in the Royal Navy's history. In 1905 the new First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, struck 154 ships off the effective list at a stroke, and his description of them has outlived most of the ships: miserable little gunboats, sloops and third-class cruisers that could fight no modern warship larger than themselves, and whose speed was insufficient to enable them to run away.

It was not sentimentality he was short of, it was people. Every one of those ships had a crew, and Fisher needed those trained men to man the fleet he was building against Germany, of which the first ship, HMS Dreadnought, was laid down that same year. So the small ships went, in job lots, at auction, and Tartar fetched a share of five thousand four hundred and fifty pounds among twelve of them. Twenty years old, obsolete for at least ten of them, and worth rather less than the guns she had once lent to the Army.