The 19,700-ton St-Vincent-class dreadnought battleship HMS Vanguard.
The eighth Vanguard was launched on 22 February 1909, and after fitting out afloat she was commissioned on 1 March 1910. She displaced 19,700 long tons standard and 22,800 tons deep load, and was 536 feet long with a beam of 84 feet.
Vanguard was fitted with ten breech-loading (BL) 12-inch Vickers Mk XI guns set in five twin turrets: the foremost, A turret, on the centreline forward of the bridge on the fo’c’sle deck; then P and Q turrets set one either side of the bridge superstructure; and two more aft on the centre line, X and Y turrets. The port wing turret was called P turret whilst the starboard wing turret was Q turret. These turrets had 11-inch face and side armour with 3-inch armour roofs.
These main battery 12-inch guns had a range of some 12 miles but suffered from bore erosion, short barrel life and poor accuracy due to inconsistent performance of the cordite propellant. The subsequent Mark XII evolution of these guns also suffered the same problems, and this led to the development of the 13.5-inch Mk V gun, which had much better performance.
Her secondary battery comprised 18 single Mk III BL 4-inch guns that were introduced in 1908 to deal with the threat of fast-moving, small and agile German torpedo boats. She carried four 3-pounder saluting guns and was fitted with three submerged 18-inch torpedo tubes.
Vanguard’s main vertical waterline armour belt was 10-inch thick Krupp cemented armour – and above the main waterline belt was a strake of 8-inch armour. Her transverse bulkheads, linking the main waterline vertical armour belts on either side of the ship forward of A turret and aft of Y turret to form the citadel, were 5 and 8 inches thick. The P and Q 12-inch main battery wing turret barbettes abreast the bridge had 10-inch-thick outer face armour, whilst the three centreline barbettes, A, X and Y, had 9-inch armour above the main deck that reduced to 5-inch armour below decks. Her horizontal armoured decks varied from 1.5 to 3 inches thick.
Propulsion was delivered by 18 Babcock & Wilcox marine boilers that fed two sets of Parsons steam turbines and drove her four shafts to give her a speed of 21.7 knots. She carried a standard ship’s complement of 823 officers and men – although at the time of her loss there were 845 men aboard.
Vanguard was initially based at Scapa Flow as part of the 1st Battle Squadron and when war broke out she began conducting North Sea sweeps and patrols from there before being attached, in April 1916, to the 4th Division of the 4th Battle Squadron just months before the Battle of Jutland.
During the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916, no German capital ship came within range of her big guns – but she fired 42 rounds at the crippled light cruiser Wiesbaden, claiming several hits. She also engaged German destroyer flotillas with her main and secondary batteries. Although enemy shells landed near her she was not struck during the battle.
On the morning of 9 July 1917, Vanguard had moved from her anchorage, just north of the island of Flotta, north across the vast expanse of Scapa Flow towards the north shore of the Flow as her crew practised ‘abandon ship’ training exercises. These were completed without incident, and after remaining at anchor to the north of Scapa Flow for the rest of the day, she weighed anchor at 1700 and headed back south across the Flow at 12 knots to her overnight anchorage, north of Flotta. On the way south, she practised deploying her minesweeping paravanes before anchoring off Flotta at 1830.
The evening went uneventfully until around 2320 when, without any previous warning, flames were seen coming up from below, just abaft her foremast. This was followed after a short interval by a heavy explosion deep within her. The flames greatly increased in intensity and wreckage was thrown up abaft the foremast in the vicinity of P and Q wing turrets, either side of the ship abaft the bridge.
This first explosion was followed after a short interval by a second, heavier, explosion that considerably increased the volume of flame and smoke. The ship was by now totally obscured by smoke and the exact location of this second explosion could not be determined.
When the huge cloud of smoke that had obscured the battleship drifted away in the gentle evening breeze, Vanguard was gone; 845 men had been aboard her at the time of the explosion – but only one officer and two ratings survived, one of whom subsequently died of injuries received. The total death toll of 843 included Commander Ito, an observer from the Imperial Japanese Navy – then an ally of Britain. Two Australian sailors from HMAS Sydney were locked in her cells when she went up and were also killed.
The bodies of her crew that could be recovered now rest in the naval cemetery at Lyness, and a memorial stands at the end of the gravestones, overlooking Scapa Flow where their destroyed dreadnought lies in the depths.
The subsequent Court of Inquiry took place on 30 July 1917 aboard the battleship HMS Emperor of India three weeks after Vanguard blew up. The court found that the likely cause of the explosion in either P or Q magazine was either (i) the ignition of cordite due to an avoidable cause or (ii) abnormal deterioration of a cordite charge subjected to abnormal treatment during its life.
Cordite is a smokeless propellant developed in the late 19th century to replace gunpowder in large military weapons such as tank guns, artillery and naval guns. High explosive gunpowder, used since the days of sail, produced a powerful detonation in the barrel that initially accelerated the projectile – but by the time the projectile was leaving the barrel, with the force of the explosion spent, the projectile was already decelerating. Gunpowder was very destructive of the gun barrel itself and produced a large quantity of black smoke.
In 1889, a new propellant consisting of nitroglycerine, gun cotton and petroleum jelly, was developed and manufactured in thin spaghetti-like rods. It was known initially as ‘cord powder’ – a name quickly abbreviated to ‘cordite’. Cordite was not designed to be a high explosive such as gunpowder: it was developed to deflagrate – that is, to burn and produce high-temperature gases. It was the rapidly expanding gas inside the breech that accelerated the projectile up the barrel, to such an extent that the shell was still accelerating as it left the barrel, unlike gunpowder where the shell was decelerating from the moment of detonation. This expansion of cordite gas was much less destructive of the gun barrel than gunpowder.
Cordite was stored for protection in propellant magazines, deep in the ship below the waterline. The magazines for the big 12-inch guns were clustered around the barbettes and ammunition hoists.
During World War I, the British kept all their big gun cordite propellant in silk pouches stored in flashproof copper Clarkson cases in the magazines. These Clarkson cases were 5-foot-high flashproof brass or steel tubes (like large cigar cases) with a carrying handle on the side and a circular lid at one end. The top half of the cases opened longitudinally to receive and safely transport cordite in silk pouches from the magazine to the gunhouse above via the ammunition hoists. Cordite propellant charges for smaller calibre guns were housed in rectangular brass-ribbed flashproof cases with a removable lid.
The early versions of cordite required to be kept at a temperature of less than 50°F (or 10°C) by a cooling system lest it become unstable – so on all warships, the temperature of propellant magazines had to be monitored.
The Court of Inquiry on Emperor of India heard evidence that on Vanguard the temperatures of all 12-inch and 4-inch magazines were taken daily every morning by means of temperature tubes. Additionally, thermograph charts were inspected weekly by the gunnery officer.
There was however, at this time, no standardised Royal Navy procedure for taking magazine temperatures – and systems and procedures varied from ship to ship in the fleet. Some ships like Vanguard took the temperatures once a day – whilst others took the temperature three times a day.
In reaching its verdict,
