The British Battleship. Norman Friedman

shows a range indicator on the fore side of her foretop. All three ships were fitted with these indicators soon after completion, but by 1914 they were gone.

      It seems likely that Fisher initially envisaged construction of a fusion (battleship/cruiser) design, which was apparently pursued as Design X4 (presumably for four turrets). It is described in the first Folio in the Bellerophon Class Cover, the relevant legend being dated 2 December 1905, X4. Fusion meant battleship armour but battlecruiser speed (25 knots). To remain within acceptable dimensions, it adopted a new main battery layout: four rather than five turrets, the two waist turrets (en échelon) being triples. This was the origin of the design initially adopted for the 1907–8 programme. The 13.5in gun was apparently considered as an alternative weapon. X4 also had a mixed secondary battery of eight 4in QF and eighteen 12pdrs (the type in HMS Dreadnought). To achieve speed plus armour plus guns required, unsurprisingly, much greater power, nearly double that of HMS Dreadnought – 45,000 IHP equivalent, compared to 23,000 IHP in Dreadnought. The ship would have displaced 22,500 tons (580ft × 83ft × 27ft 6in, 623ft overall), which must have seemed a great deal in 1905, but was far surpassed within a few years. This design also featured improved torpedo protection in the form of a complete torpedo bulkhead 1½–2in thick. There were two tripod masts, boats being worked from the mainmast. Unit cost would have been four-thirds that of a repeat dreadnought.

      As of 26 December 1905 the projected 1906–7 programme was four dreadnoughts, two to be built by contract and one each by Royal Dockyards (one Devonport, one Portsmouth). By that time the Conservatives had lost the November 1905 election. The incoming Liberal Party had pressed for reductions in military spending to fund social programmes. Cawdor was replaced by Lord Tweedmouth. In the past, the naval members of the Board of Admiralty had been replaced when the government changed, but that practice had been abolished and Admiral Fisher and his colleagues remained. In retaining them the incoming administration was endorsing Fisher’s reforms, which many in the navy had hoped would be repudiated. For his part Fisher clearly considered the reforms, such as fleet redistribution and personnel policy (such as nucleus crews and issues of naval education), far too important for him to leave on a point of policy, such as the details of the building programme.

      This photograph of HMS Superb shows that there were no 4in guns atop ‘X’ turret. The superstructure had four 4in guns on each side in open embrasures, for a total of sixteen such guns. The ship is shown before her 1914 refit, when her topmasts were cut down. Note the original positions of the forward searchlights: one in the bridge wings and two on the shelter deck atop the fore part of the superstructure.

      Bellerophon shows experimental modifications made in 1914, mainly to improve searchlight performance. The lights were concentrated on her foremast and her mainmast and they were raised as high as possible to limit interference with gun crews. In addition to the four lights clearly visible on the foremast, two more were mounted on lattice platforms just abaft the bridge structure (abreast the forefunnel). The two searchlights on the after structure were moved forward to the mainmast. The two 4in guns atop ‘A’ turret were moved to the top of the forward deckhouse. The wing turrets were given glare screens, presumably because of the two lights now moved to the mainmast legs. Concentration amidships was intended to make it difficult for a night attacker to judge the ship’s course. The compass platform was extended forward, presumably to take it out from under the new searchlight platforms. In 1914 Superb was similarly modified, but work was incomplete on the outbreak of war. Thus new searchlight platforms were built abreast the forefunnel, but they were not occupied, the searchlights remaining on the bridge. Temeraire was also modified, but with a somewhat less extended compass platform. After Jutland all three ships had their searchlights relocated again and their funnels were given clinker screens.

      Fisher probably realised that the new Government would never buy four X4s. He appointed a committee to advise on what armoured ship he should build under the 1906–7 programme.² The committee advised in favour of a repeat dreadnought, on the grounds that in the face of the new German dreadnought programme it was vital to build up numbers. The committee seems to have been an exercise in Fisher’s deviousness, since one of its arguments (that if the British built a fusion ship, the Germans would simply outgun it later) could have been levelled against Dreadnought herself. The key argument was that, for the same amount, the Royal Navy could have four repeat Dreadnoughts but only three fusion ships. Presumably Fisher could have sold four ‘fusion’ ships to the previous Government but not to the new one. Fisher had presumably initiated the fusion project in the first place (the Cover gives a Legend but no explanation of the origin of the design). The same Fisher Papers document which includes both the committee report and a description of X4 includes a note from DNI offering evidence that the French thought fusion ships were inevitable. A printed marginal note, presumably Fisher’s, points out that armoured cruiser and battleship ‘are very nearly assimilated into each other now in the Dreadnought and Invincible types’, and directs the reader to the attached extract from French Navy Estimates at the end of the paper.

      Photographed from aft in 1915–16, Bellerophon shows the 4in guns retained atop ‘X’ turret (but not the others) and the 6pdr anti-aircraft gun mounted atop the former stub searchlight platform between ‘Q’ and ‘X’ turrets. Note the revised searchlight position first used in Bellerophon, but then in all three ships. Note also the absence of the lattice searchlight tower alongside the forefunnel. (© National Maritime Museum N.16812)

      Superb in 1915–16. Note the 4in director (the short squat cylinder on the after part of the compass platform) and the windscreen on the fore part of the compass platform. The main-battery director is the larger cylinder on the platform below the spotting top on the foremast. The top conceals a 9ft rangefinder. Another 9ft rangefinder has been installed in an armoured hood at the rear of ‘A’ turret, which is barely visible against the forward superstructure. (© National Maritime Museum N.16604)

      In proposing four repeat Dreadnoughts for the 1906–7 programme Controller (Captain H B Jackson) added that ‘in preparing the design of the large fast armoured vessel, Fusion type, for future adoption, the dimensions should be such that they can be readily transported and shifted in existing basins in our dockyards and for this reason are not to exceed 600ft in total length’. That suggests that Jackson thought the fusion design was being shifted to the 1907–8 programme, not abandoned.

      The 1905 election came so late in the programme cycle that the incoming Liberal Government felt unable to change the 1906–7 programme.³ The expensive fusion design seems to have been abandoned some time in the spring of 1906. That summer, the Cabinet cut the programme to three ships, based on the state of foreign shipbuilding and also on the apparent balance of naval power as measured in battleships, both pre-dreadnought and dreadnought.⁴ The tempo of new construction in future programmes would also be limited to three ships. The Liberal Government continued to use this balance (including pre-dreadnoughts) to justify its programmes up to 1908. They hoped for deeper cuts. A Peace Conference was about to convene at the Hague in 1907. In hopes that a general understanding might be arrived at among the sea powers, the Cabinet postponed the third ship of the 1907–8 programme until the conference had concluded.⁵ No understanding was reached; the British naval attaché in Germany reported particular hostility to what Germans described as an attempt to enforce permanent British superiority.⁶ Tirpitz seems to have seen it as an attempt to derail his carefully-crafted building programme. The British offer could be seen quite differently, as an attempt to preclude a building race in dreadnoughts, in which the Germans had started nearly even with the British. A further consideration in 1907–8 was a Cabinet decision to stop financing naval works by loan (to be repaid out of Navy Estimates over thirty years). That increased the