Initially Armstrong’s great competitor was Thomson (Clydebank) of Glasgow. The company built the Spanish Reina Regente, seen here at the Columbian Naval Review (May 1893). Thomson became the John Brown shipyard, but the company’s independent design capacity was abandoned. Thomson’s last export success was the Japanese armoured cruiser Chiyoda, and the only other cruisers it built for export were the Confederate screw corvette Canton (which became the Spanish Pampero), the Chilean screw corvette Abtao, and the Spanish torpedo gunboat Destructor. The Armstrong (Elswick) design which lost out to Thomson was reportedly sold to the United States, to become the basis for the US cruisers Baltimore and Philadelphia (purchased through Humphreys, Tennant). Unfortunately, Armstrong records for the period before about 1910 have been lost, and it is impossible to say which foreign-built cruisers the company designed. For example, it is impossible to say whether ships built by the company’s Italian subsidiary owed anything to the British home office. Later Armstrong records suggest that the company often acted as design agent for other yards. There was apparently a boom in British-built paddle warships through the early 1850s, after which most British warship exports were either ironclads or small gunboats. That would be consistent with the relative status of capital ships and steam frigates, the latter important mainly to attack or defend seaborne trade. Some British yards exported small numbers of cruisers after 1860; the list which follows is probably incomplete. R & H Green of Blackwall built the composite corvettes O’Higgins and Chacabuco (launched 1865-66) and Magallanes (1874) for Chile, and Rainha de Portugal and Mindello (1875) for Portugal. Thames Iron Works built the Spanish unprotected cruisers Gravina and Velasco (1881).
(Courtesy Ted Stone via NHHC)
Thus scouting was recognized as more and more important, and cruiser scouts would be opposed by the enemy’s cruisers. They were unlikely to succeed unless they were backed by powerful armoured cruisers. Quite aside from any argument for trade protection against cruiser raiders, the 1901 manoeuvres showed that the main British fleet absolutely had to include a powerful fast armoured cruiser force of ships at least equal to any foreign counterparts.
Programs and Shipbuilders
Until 1889, the Royal Navy relied primarily on the Royal Dockyards for major warships such as cruisers: Chatham, Deptford, Devonport, Pembroke, Portsmouth, and Sheerness (Woolwich was closed as a dockyard, being confined to gun and boiler production, and in the 1880s Sheerness was closed altogether). The large commercial British shipbuilding industry, which often built warships for foreign governments, was considered a mobilization resource. For example, large numbers of gunboats were built under contract under emergency programs during the Crimean War. That mobilization bankrupted at least two builders, because it caused great wage and price inflation. Private builders were also brought in to introduce commercial technology not previously mastered by the Royal Dockyards, the most striking example being iron hull construction in the 1840s and 1850s. The effect of the 1889 Naval Defence Act was to stabilize warship construction programs and thus to attract private builders.
The British fiscal year began on 6 April. Through the 1860s the programs at the Royal Dockyards were generally described by a Program of Works (PW) dated by the fiscal year, e.g. PW 1860. PW 1860 was financed by the 1860-61 Estimates, which in this book is referred to as the 1860-61 program. Ships were typically ordered as early as possible in the fiscal year, although in some cases they were inserted later. In at least two important cases the planned programs were increased by Supplementals: 1884 (Northbrook Program) and 1898-99 (due to the Fashoda war scare). The 1885 crisis also brought forth a supplemental program, but it did not include new cruisers.
Changing Technology
During the period covered by this book ship design gradually changed from art towards science, one indication being the formation of the Institution of Naval Architects (later the Royal Institution) in 1860. The Royal Navy formed a series of professional schools for naval constructors, ultimately creating a course at Greenwich which educated not only important British constructors, but also many foreign ones. In 1883 it formed the Royal Corps of Naval Constructors, which was intended to design all British warships. All Directors of Naval Construction from 1923 on were products of the Greenwich course. Probably the most important development of this period was the work on resistance (to motion through the water) carried out by William Froude, who later ran the Royal Navy’s experimental testing tank. Froude’s work made it possible for the first time to predict (albeit not always precisely) how fast a ship of given dimensions, with a given hull form and with a given power plant, would be. The insights he gained made it possible to compare British ships with foreign ships which ran their trials under very different conditions conducive to much higher trial speeds. Without that insight, the Royal Navy would have found itself much more frequently pursuing higher speeds.
There were several waves of technology, beginning with steam power in its initial inefficient form (which greatly limited endurance under steam, and demanded that ships be powered by a combination of sail – for long endurance – and steam power). The next and roughly simultaneous waves were the telegraph and iron, rather than wood, hulls. The telegraph offered a new kind of naval strategy based on rapid reaction to events half a world away, and also (as indicated by the manoeuvre notes) to intelligence-based operations.
The next series of radical changes were the advent of efficient steam engines (compound engines), the appearance of breech-loading guns, the introduction of self-propelled torpedoes, and the advent of steel hulls, all about 1875-85. After that came a revolution in the rate at which guns could fire and shortly afterwards the appearance of lightweight (Harvey and Krupp) armour, in the 1890s. Although many of the cruisers in this book benefited from it, radio (introduced from about 1900 on) had little impact on their designs. The revolutionary impact of radio on the shape of the fleet, and on its tactics, came during the Fisher era, from 1904 on.
The most dramatic consequence of changing technology was that the effective life of a ship shrank, while the cost and complexity of individual ships increased. Although design and construction practices certainly evolved during the sailing ship era, they did so relatively slowly. HMS Victory could serve as Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar in 1805 although she had been launched in 1765. In 1900 it would have been inconceivable that a 40-year-old capital ship would have any first- or even third-line role; indeed, any 20-year-old capital ship was profoundly obsolete by that time.
These realities condemned the late nineteenth-century Royal Navy to a continuing financial crisis in which cruisers generally figured. Had technology not been changing, the size of the British cruiser force would have been the number bought each year multiplied by the lifetime of the ships. British naval administrators often grossly overestimated the important factor of lifetime, because they thought in terms of the durability of the ships, their hulls and their machinery. Unfortunately, in a time of rapid technological change the important issue was how quickly a ship became obsolete.
Guns
The Royal Navy designated its guns in three quite different ways: by nominal weight of projectile (e.g., 25pdr or 68pdr); by weight of gun (e.g., 95cwt, one cwt [abbreviation of hundredweight] being 112lbs, 20 of which made a standard [long] ton); or, as is now common, by calibre in inches. The latter seems to have become standard only after breech-loaders were re-introduced from 1881 on. One reason was that such guns could easily fire projectiles of different lengths, hence weights. In the 1830s, when the first ships in this book were begun, the usual designation was by nominal weight of projectile, based on round solid iron shot (guns did, however, differ in length). Projectile weight (hence gun calibre) was ultimately limited by what a gunner could lift. Much larger and more powerful guns were needed to penetrate armour, and they in turn required power loading or lifting. Guns were increasingly designated by their weight, so that in 1866 plans called for arming the new cruiser Inconstant with 12½-ton guns – at that time the