HMS Temeraire (1876): The First Royal Navy Ship to Carry a Barbette

The Build: Chatham

HMS Temeraire was built at Chatham Dockyard, her keel laid on 18 August 1873, launched on 9 May 1876 and completed the following year, an ironclad battleship whose design broke new ground in naval architecture.

The name she carried is one of the two or three most resonant in the Royal Navy. The Fighting Temeraire was the 98-gun second rate that came up on Victory's quarter at Trafalgar in 1805, took on two French ships at once and lashed one of them to her own side, and thirty-three years later she was painted by Turner being towed up the Thames by a steam tug to be broken up. The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to Her Last Berth to Be Broken Up is in the National Gallery, was voted the nation's favourite painting in a BBC poll in 2005, and is the single most famous image of the end of the age of sail. Giving that name to a ship in 1876 was not a neutral act, and the ship they gave it to was, as it happens, one of the last big warships in the world designed to sail.

A Genuine Technical Pioneer

Temeraire carried her main armament partly in the traditional broadside battery and partly in barbettes mounted on the upper deck, making her the first British ship to use barbettes of any kind.

Her four 11-inch muzzle-loading guns sat in innovative Moncrieff mounts with hydraulic systems, protected by distinctive oval barbettes surrounded by thirty-six-inch armour parapets, a notably forward-looking design that pointed the way towards the gun turret arrangements that would come to define battleships for the following century.

The Guns That Went Down to Reload

The Moncrieff mounting deserves describing, because it is the sort of idea that sounds like fiction. The problem it solved was this: a gun crew has to stand up to load a muzzle-loader, and standing up on an open deck in the middle of a battle is how gun crews die. Captain Alexander Moncrieff of the Edinburgh Militia Artillery worked out that the energy of the recoil, which is otherwise a nuisance to be absorbed, could be used to do the work instead.

On firing, the gun does not simply run back; it pivots downward on curved arms and drops below the top of the armoured parapet, lifting a counterweight as it goes. The crew, entirely under cover and invisible from outside, then load it. Releasing the counterweight raises the gun again, it appears above the parapet, and it fires. The whole cycle happens without anybody ever showing above the armour, and the gun is only visible to an enemy for the instant it takes to fire. Coast defence batteries used the principle for decades. HMS Temeraire is the only capital ship in the history of the Royal Navy to have gone to sea with disappearing guns, mounted inside oval barbettes with ten inches of armour and a parapet standing three feet above her deck.

The Last Ship to Sail Into Harbour

The other half of her is even harder to picture. This armoured, hydraulically operated, technically advanced warship was also a fully rigged sailing vessel, carrying something like twenty-five thousand square feet of canvas on two enormous masts, and she is usually described as the largest brig ever built anywhere. She was, unsurprisingly, slow under sail and rather a handful, but the reasoning behind it was sound at the time: coaling stations were few, coal was expensive, and a fleet that could not sail could not go anywhere the Empire did not already own a wharf.

Which produces her best claim on posterity, and it is rarely mentioned. On 3 October 1890, at Suda Bay in Crete, Temeraire came into harbour under sail alone, with no assistance from her engines. No Royal Navy warship has ever done it since. Fourteen months later she paid off for the last time. That single arrival is as clean a marker as exists for the end of four hundred years of sailing navy, and it was made by a ship named after the most famous painting of that ending, carrying guns that hid behind a wall to reload. Other ironclads of the same generation are here: HMS Iron Duke (1870) and HMS Edinburgh (1882).

Watching the Russo-Turkish War

Under Captain Michael Culme-Seymour, Temeraire served with the Mediterranean Fleet for fourteen years from 1877, including a deployment to the Dardanelles in 1878 and 1879 to observe the Russo-Turkish conflict and represent British interests during the Congress of Berlin negotiations that reshaped the map of the Balkans.

Bombarding Alexandria

In 1882, Temeraire was recommissioned for the Anglo-Egyptian War, taking part in the attack on the defensive positions along the coast at Alexandria, a significant action that helped secure British control over the Suez Canal and effectively began Britain's decades-long occupation of Egypt.

A Collision With HMS Orion

In 1890, Temeraire suffered a serious collision when HMS Orion's ram struck her directly beside the engine room, a particularly dangerous incident given how vulnerable that part of the ship was, though she survived the damage and continued in service for one further year.

Two More Names, and a Final Sale

Paid off at Plymouth in 1891, Temeraire entered reserve, with plans for modernisation eventually rejected as economically unviable. She was renamed Indus II in 1904 and again renamed Akbar in 1915, serving in these training roles under her new identities before finally being sold to the Netherlands for breaking in May 1921, nearly half a century after her pioneering barbette design had first gone to sea.

The two names she wore afterwards are worth explaining as well. Indus and Akbar were both training establishments rather than sea-going ships: hulks moored permanently in harbour, used to house and instruct boys, and the Navy habitually recycled old battleships into them because a redundant ironclad makes an excellent immovable dormitory. Akbar in particular was a reformatory ship on the Mersey, which is to say that a battleship that had bombarded Alexandria ended her days as accommodation for boys being taught a trade instead of going to prison. She was sold in 1921, forty-five years after her launch, having spent thirty of them tied up.