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

Built at 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 genuinely new ground in naval architecture.

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 genuinely forward-looking design that pointed the way towards the gun turret arrangements that would come to define battleships for the following century.

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 genuinely 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.