HMS Invincible as modified shortly after completion, with the foremast searchlight removed in favour of lights on the bridge wings. The guns atop ‘A’ and ‘X’ turrets have been given portable screens to protect their crews from the glare of these lights; note that there are no such screens for the wing guns.
Indomitable as built. The extensive boat stowage raises a question: boats were stowed around the after conning tower, leaving it almost no view unless they were landed. However, ships retained their boats in battle. The plan view shows a rectangular area just forward of the after funnel and slightly to port of centreline on the forecastle deck marked ‘hangar’. It is otherwise empty of fittings, hatches, ventilators, etc. Although it is on a plan dated 1908, it may have been added somewhat later (but the plan does not show the major changes made during the First World War). Some later ships had blast screens to protect their boats, but the Invincibles and the early dreadnought battleships did not. Note that much of the high superstructure was not roofed; they were labelled as blast screens on plans (many plans and models inaccurately show decks over these structures). This ship and other British battlecruisers had noticeable tumblehome to their hulls (the dreadnoughts did not). Photographs of these ships taken before the First World War show that from time to time their torpedo net booms (and netting) were apparently removed, only to be restored later. As the attachment points of the booms were very close to the water, the entire boom set could be hauled up and lashed atop the netting. Note the five torpedo tubes, including a stern tube. Torpedoes were stowed both inside the torpedo room and in a compartment above it. The circular cage structure on the port side of the after funnel surrounded the end of the vertical wireless antenna (which is not shown). This was a standard fitting on Royal Navy warships up to the end of the Second World War. It protected shipboard personnel from touching the antenna as it went through the deck to the wireless office below. (A D Baker III)
In the late autumn of 1904 work on the new battleship apparently had a higher priority. Fisher ordered a series of armoured cruiser designs armed with eight 12in guns and 4in anti-torpedo (boat) guns. The first two (Designs A and B) were described in a Legend given to DNC on 4 January 1905. They were different arrangements to meet alternative (2) of the previous year’s memo. Design A was the sketch requested the previous November. It economised on armour weight by enclosing the two pairs of turrets at either end of the ship in a single redoubt rather than using separate barbettes. On this basis Design A was expected to displace 17,000 tons.
In January 1905 Fisher told his Committee on Designs that he wanted ships armed with 12in guns (and nothing smaller except anti-torpedo guns), armoured like the most recent armoured cruisers (Minotaur class) and capable of 25 knots: ‘the Armoured Cruiser is the embodiment of armed speed’. The argument for the 12in gun was, he said, the same as that for the battleship, ‘but the overriding qualification is speed’. Since some new foreign armoured cruisers were credited with 24 knots, the new British ship must be capable of at least 25 knots (preferably 25.5). In order to fit into existing docks, she would have to sacrifice some guns and armour, compared to the battleship. The fast 12in armoured cruiser should render all existing cruisers obsolete, as she could overtake and annihilate anything at sea apart from the new all-big-gun battleship
The new armoured cruiser would also have a battle fleet function: to overtake and keep touch with a fleeing enemy fleet, ‘and possibly bring it to bay by the wounding which her 12in guns are capable of at a distance of 7 miles or more . . . The Japanese contention is that the Armoured Cruiser will be able if needs be to lie in the Line of Battle, because of her uniform armament of 12in guns, which is the armament of the Battleship. Indeed, these Armoured Cruisers are Battleships in disguise! for their armour, though thinner than that of the Battleship, practically offers infinitely more resistance than theory allows’. Fisher argued that such ships would almost never be hit at right angles. If hit at an angle of 30°, the belt would have considerably more resistance, more like battleship armour. ‘Their [Japanese] new Battleship is a glorified Armoured Cruiser, as they say they cannot at present afford to have both, nor can they afford to go to our displacements’.
A rigging plan of Indomitable, as built, shows rigging for her torpedo net booms, but the all-important wireless antenna is not depicted. Wireless range depended on the height of the antenna and also on the length of the horizontal element it joined; the Royal Navy eventually used cage-like horizontals to increase effective length. The battlecruisers were given especially tall topmasts specifically to increase the range at which they could receive signals from the Admiralty. The antenna terminated in a Faraday cage (vertical conducting elements) on deck before passing down to a radio room. (© National Maritime Museum)
HMS Inflexible as completed, with all her funnels of equal height and with a searchlight at her foretop.
The battlecruiser was an extrapolation of the earlier armoured cruiser. The question of why it was conceived would not even be asked had three battlecruisers not been destroyed at Jutland – not because of poor protection but because of suicidal magazine practices. The great question before 1914 was whether battlecruisers should be organised in squadrons, like armoured cruisers, or dispersed to back up the cruisers intended to maintain a light cover of the German coast. In 1914 the Royal Navy planned to break up its battlecruiser squadron so as to form combinations of battlecruisers and light cruisers – which would have been snapped up by the concentrated German battlecruiser force. Photographed before the war, the First Cruiser Squadron illustrates the evolution of the British battlecruiser from large armoured cruisers (at left) to 12in cruisers (middle) to the ‘Splendid Cats’ armed with 13.5in guns (at right), the line being led by HMS Lion. The formation of the squadron strongly suggests that the Royal Navy saw the battlecruiser and the big armoured cruiser as closely related, although the armoured cruisers were substantially slower. It might be added that the major navies all continued to build battlecruisers after Jutland, albeit with better protection. That is not obvious nearly a century later only because most of the ships involved were never completed, due either to the end of the First World War (the Germans and some of the British) or to the Washington Naval Conference (US Navy and Imperial Japanese Navy). Inter-war US wargaming showed just how great a disadvantage it was not to have such ships and the Naval War College successfully pressed for fast battleships (battlecruisers) in 1933. Similarly, the British post-treaty