Remembering The Battleship - Queen Elizabeth

As the new HMS Queen Elizabeth is being readied to enter service, Paul Brown recalls the previous warship of the name, a battleship which saw action in both world wars.

- Paul Brown

On 16 October 1913 the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth slid down the ways in Portsmouth Dockyard watched by 70,000 spectators and accompanied by all the ritual and panoply of a battleship launch in peacetime. Her keel had been laid just under a year earlier, on Trafalgar Day, 21 October. She was the first of a new class of five super-Dreadnoughts that would be bigger, faster, more powerfully armed and more heavily armoured than any of her predecessors. And, for the first time in a British battleship, she would be oil-rather than coal-fired.

While the Admiralty was nervous about being reliant on imported oil rather than home-mined coal, Winston Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, persuaded the government to invest in the Persian oilfields to secure supply. To achieve a speed of 24 knots, three knots faster than the preceding Iron Duke class, required doubling the power output of the steam turbines and employing 24 boilers, six more than in Iron Duke. The boilers were arranged in four adjacent compartments, aft of which were four engine rooms. The new ships would provide a fast wing for the Grand Fleet and, it was considered, obviate the need for more battle cruisers. 

Four Queen Elizabeths were ordered in 1912, and a fifth was added in 1913. The decision was taken to design and mount a new 15-inch gun in four twin turrets in order to outgun the 14-inch guns of new Japanese and American battleships, and in the knowledge that Germany was to increase the calibre of its battleships’ main armaments.

The main armament was complemented by 16 quick firing six-inch guns, mounted in case mates on either side of the hull. The four guns under the quarterdeck were found to flood in heavy weather or at high speed, so were soon removed and two single guns in shields were fitted amidships above the case mated guns there.