HMS Terrible (1895): Naval Guns on Wheels, From Ladysmith to Beijing

Built on the Clyde

HMS Terrible was built by J. and G. Thomson at Clydebank, laid down on 21 February 1894 and launched on 27 May 1895, one of the Powerful-class armoured cruisers. She made a temporary appearance at Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee fleet review in July 1897 before entering full active service in March 1898.

The class is worth explaining, because it is one of the great expensive mistakes of Victorian naval policy. There were only two Powerfuls, Terrible and HMS Powerful herself, and they were built in a straightforward panic. Russia had laid down two very large, very fast armoured cruisers designed to prey on British trade across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and the Admiralty's answer was to build something bigger that could catch them: fourteen thousand tons, five hundred feet long, twenty-two knots, with enough coal to cross an ocean and back. They were the largest cruisers in the world when they appeared and among the most expensive ships ever ordered.

They were also, in the judgement of almost everybody, poor value. Two ships that size absorbed the cost of several smaller ones, they were too valuable to risk in a fleet action and too few to police a trade route, and the Russian threat they had been built against never materialised. What they turned out to be extremely good for was something nobody had planned: they were enormous, they carried a great many guns and a great many men, and they could be sent anywhere in the empire at short notice and land both. Which is precisely what happened to this one, twice, inside a year.

Captain Scott's Ingenious Wheeled Guns

With Captain Percy Scott taking command in September 1899, and war clouds gathering over South Africa, Scott persuaded the Admiralty to route Terrible via the Cape of Good Hope rather than the Suez Canal, arriving at Simonstown that October just as the Boer War broke out.

Recognising the British Army's severe shortage of heavy artillery, Scott devised a way to mount naval guns on improvised wheeled carriages so they could be hauled inland and used in support of ground troops, a remarkably inventive solution to a pressing wartime problem.

The Man Who Taught the Navy to Shoot

Percy Scott deserves considerably more than the word ingenious. He was, by common consent, the most important gunnery officer the Royal Navy ever had, and also one of the most disliked: abrasive, contemptuous of anybody slower than himself, and utterly indifferent to whose feelings he trampled. The wheeled carriages he knocked up at Simon's Town in a fortnight are the sort of thing he did before breakfast. What he actually changed was how warships hit things.

Before Scott, naval gunnery was largely a matter of firing on the roll and hoping: the gunlayer waited for the ship to come up, fired, and the shot went where it went. Hit rates in fleet practice were dismal and everybody accepted it. Scott pushed a technique called continuous aim, in which the layer works the elevating gear continuously to keep the sights on the target through the roll and fires when he is ready rather than when the ship happens to be level, and he backed it with training devices he invented himself: the dotter, the deflection teacher, the loading tray, all of which let a gun crew practise properly alongside instead of once a quarter with live ammunition. Ships under his command produced hit rates several times the fleet average, which is the kind of result that cannot be argued with even by people who dislike you.

It was taken up, taught at HMS Excellent, and it is a large part of why the Grand Fleet could shoot at all at Jutland. Scott ended up a baronet and an admiral, spent years in a spectacular public feud with Lord Charles Beresford, and then, after the First World War, announced in the newspapers that the battleship was finished because of the submarine and the aeroplane, which made him even more unpopular and turned out to be entirely correct.

Relieving the Siege of Ladysmith

Terrible's naval brigade, equipped with two 4.7-inch guns and eighteen 12-pounders mounted on Scott's wheeled carriages, took part in the operations to relieve the besieged town of Ladysmith between December 1899 and February 1900, including the battles of Colenso and Spion Kop, two of the hardest-fought and most costly engagements of the entire Boer War.

Doing It Again in China

Remarkably, Terrible was called upon to repeat the trick within the year.

Reaching Hong Kong in May 1900 as the Boxer Rebellion erupted in China, Scott again mounted field guns and transported three companies of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers to Taku, with the ship's personnel and guns supporting the relief of Tientsin and the second expedition to Beijing that August, an extraordinary repeat performance for a single ship's company within the space of just a few months.

The China expedition deserves a sentence more, because it is one of the odder things a ship's company has ever been asked to do. The Boxer Rebellion in the summer of 1900 trapped the foreign legations in Peking, and the relief force assembled to reach them was an eight-nation improvisation of British, Russian, Japanese, French, American, German, Italian and Austro-Hungarian troops, thrown together with no common language and very little common purpose beyond getting up the road from the coast. Terrible's contribution was the same trick again: naval guns on improvised carriages, hauled inland from Taku with her own sailors working them, in support of the fighting at Tientsin and the advance on Peking.

So within twelve months the same ship's company put naval artillery ashore on two continents, against two entirely unrelated enemies, in campaigns that had nothing whatever to do with each other, and in both cases the guns arrived because a cruiser captain had decided not to wait for the Army to sort itself out. HMS Endymion (1891) was in the same operation.

From Accommodation Ship to Training Hulk

After 1902, Terrible settled into quieter duties, ferrying replacement crews, escorting royal tours, and serving as an accommodation ship between 1909 and 1913. Offered for sale in July 1914, the outbreak of the First World War cancelled that plan, and she instead became a troop transport in 1915 and later a depot ship.

Renamed Fisgard III and converted into a training vessel in 1920, she was finally purchased by John Cashmore Ltd in July 1932 and broken up at Newport, closing out a career that had once seen her guns fire in two entirely different corners of the British Empire within the space of a single year.