without an engine works, it was the shipyard’s responsibility to sub-contact this work to an engine works acceptable to the Admiralty. The Royal Dockyards relied on private firms for the manufacture of engines and boilers and, for example, when the contract to build the battlecruiser Indefatigable was given to Devonport Dockyard, the machinery contract was won by John Brown at Clydebank.
The Coventry Ordnance Works (Coventry Syndicate)
Armstrong Whitworth and Vickers Son & Maxim effectively cornered the market for the design and manufacture of heavy gun mountings, highly complex and time-consuming mechanisms to construct. This conferred a distinct advantage to these firms when tendering for warship contracts. In an attempt to break this monopoly, John Brown, Cammell Laird and Fairfield developed the Coventry Ordnance Works from 1905 with the capacity to design and construct guns and mountings. The Works comprised an ordnance factory at Coventry where mountings were designed and guns manufactured. A new ordnance works was built at Scotstoun, on the Clyde where mountings were assembled and tested in gun pits from where they would be taken by barge or ship to the shipyards.
Hundreds of other firms were involved in the supply or manufacture of materials and products for HM ships. Together, the industry that produced warships in Britain was a very large one that in the years before and during the First World War accounted for a significant portion of the public purse. The decade and a half prior to 1914 was dominated by intense naval rivalry between Britain and Germany, which had begun in 1897 when the German legislature passed the first of Admiral Tirpitz’s Naval Laws. These, in effect, committed Germany to building a fleet to rival the British. While this initially seemed an impossible target to meet, the British battlefleet was made obsolete by the British themselves with the introduction of the all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought in 1906. This ship outclassed all preceding classes of battleship, and, in effect, reduced the Royal Navy’s lead in modern battleships to just one. Germany, with a formidable industrial base of its own, thus had the opportunity to keep pace with British construction. Against this background, a ‘naval race’ ensued between Britain and Germany, a trial of industrial strength as much as political will in which British resolve, resources and shipbuilding capacity won the day.
PRINCIPAL ARMOUR AND ARMAMENT COMPANIES:
| Armstrong Ordnance: | Elswick Works, Newcastle |
| Armour and Forgings: | Openshaw Works, Manchester |
| Gun Mountings: | Elswick Works, Newcastle |
| Vickers Ordnance: | River Don Works, Sheffield |
| Armour and Forgings: | River Don Works, Sheffield |
| Gun Mountings: | Barrow |
| Beardmore Ordnance: | Parkhead Works, Glasgow |
| Armour and Forgings: | Parkhead Works, Glasgow |
| John Brown Armour and Forgings: | Atlas Works, Sheffield |
| Cammell Laird Armour and Forgings: | Grimethorp Works, and Cyclops Works, Sheffield |
The Photographs
Like many shipbuilding firms, John Brown & Co used photography to record the construction of vessels, usually starting with keel laying and ending with trials. The ship’s machinery, engines and boilers were also recorded. To do this, a photographic department was established at Clydebank employing up to five photographers and darkroom personnel. As this was an expensive overhead, many other shipbuilders opted to employ outside commercial firms to take progress shots as and when needed. The photographs tended to follow a similar pattern from ship to ship and established a clear record of progress at a given date. Although there was obvious interest in recording the construction of ships at Clydebank, many of which were large and prestigious, the exact purpose of the photographs is unclear. There is no evidence that they were routinely sent to ship owners and certainly no reference to them at all in correspondence with the Admiralty. Neither are they specified as a necessary part of the contract.
Presentation volumes showing the ship in various stages of construction were often given to owners on the completion of the ships, including the Admiralty. Beyond this thoughtful gesture, the photographs appear to have been for company purposes only and were often used by John Brown & Co in publicity materials and engineering articles.
That this photographic collection has survived at all the decimation that has taken place across British industry is remarkable in itself and has resulted in the preservation of one of the finest records of ship construction in modern industrial Britain. Throughout the period covered by this book, photographic exposures were made on glass plate negatives measuring 10 × 12in and occasionally on plates of 12 × 15in. The cameras used were necessarily large, and together with substantial tripods, made for a cumbersome and heavy load to be carried across the large area of a shipyard. Setting up to make an exposure was a time consuming event not to mention a hazardous and often high-wire activity given the need to climb cranes or scale hulls in various stages of completion in a dangerous working environment. Slow emulsions required time exposures which account for the sometimes blurred appearance of men working but compensated by allowing for images of exceptional detail. The growing use of photography at Clydebank can be seen in the number of exposures made for the five ships that make up this book: around sixty negatives were exposed covering the construction of Inflexible, rising to over 600 for Hood.
The first three ships, Inflexible, Australia and Tiger, were built under peacetime conditions where the due and lengthy process of tendering applied and no undue pressure was made on the shipbuilder during construction. This was in stark contrast to the urgency of wartime conditions where events moved much more quickly. So fast in fact, that in the case of Repulse, the shipbuilder was commanded to start work more or less right away with little by way of preparations, specifications or drawings to guide the way. On his retirement from John Brown’s in 1946, Sir Thomas Bell recalled the meeting that he and Alexander Gracie of Fairfield’s had with Lord Fisher at Christmas 1915 in order to impress on them the urgency of building Repulse and Renown rapidly and quoting him as saying ‘I am going to have these ships delivered on time and if you fail me your houses will be made a dunghill and you and your wives liquidated’, adding ‘I expect to hear tomorrow that you have started preparations for these ships.’ The environment in which Hood was constructed was completely different again, subject to delay through partial redesign in the wake of the battle of Jutland and then encountering an acute shortage of labour within a shipbuilding industry that was working to capacity.
The John Brown photographs of the five battlecruisers covered by this book offer an insight into this unparalleled period of industrial endeavour particularly when it is considered that a total of fifty-one capital ships were built in British yards from Dreadnought in 1906 to the completion of Hood in 1920.
Another feature of these photographs is the depiction of the ships ‘as built’, with the overall balance of the design as the naval architect or constructor originally intended, unadorned by service or wartime additions. The ‘as built’ ship provides an interesting alternative to popular images and models of warships that favour late configurations which often depict ships after years of modifications and additions with the invariable accumulation of often ungainly clutter.
Note that the NRS photo reference numbers, where applicable, are given at the end of the captions.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the following persons for help in the preparation of this work: Ian Buxton and Brian Newman for reading the manuscript and Ian Sturton for kindly allowing me to use some information he uncovered in researching
