HMS Temeraire (1907): Seventy-Two Shells at Jutland, and a Sail Into Constantinople

Built at Devonport

HMS Temeraire was ordered on 30 October 1906 and laid down at HM Dockyard Devonport on New Year's Day 1907, launched that August and completed in May 1909 at a cost of around £1.7 million. A Bellerophon-class dreadnought battleship, she carried ten 12-inch guns in five twin turrets and could make just over 21 knots on trials, a formidable fighting ship for her era.

Firing on a Crippled Cruiser at Jutland

Temeraire spent the First World War with the Grand Fleet on North Sea operations, and saw her most significant action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916, when she fired five salvos at the crippled German light cruiser SMS Wiesbaden from 18:34 onwards, claiming multiple hits. Across the whole battle she fired around seventy-two 12-inch shells and, remarkably, came through entirely without damage, a genuinely fortunate outcome given the ferocity of the fighting that day.

Into Constantinople

Following the armistice, Temeraire transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in October 1918 to support Allied operations in the region, and that November took part in the entry into Constantinople as the defeated Ottoman Empire's involvement in the war drew to its close, a historic moment for a ship that had spent most of the war on the comparatively unglamorous business of North Sea patrol duty.

Training Cadets, Then Scrapped

Returning home in April 1919, Temeraire was reduced to reserve as thoroughly obsolete, the fate of so many dreadnoughts once the war that had made them essential was over. She served for a period as a cadet training ship before being sold to the Stanlee Shipbreaking and Salvage Company for scrap in late 1921, towed to Dover for demolition in February 1922, closing out a career whose brief moment of real combat at Jutland had passed without a single hit being scored against her.