Only one ship by the name HMS Queen Elizabeth has served with the Royal Navy, although there have been more than twenty ships named Elizabeth in the Royal service, from the Hansa-built ship Elizabeth of 1514, to a 156 ton schooner hired for use as a Q -ship in 1918, and which used the name Elizabeth as one of her ‘aliases’. In the four intervening centuries the name was also used for more conventional warships, including five line-of-battle ships. The list of Battle Honours for ships named Elizabeth is long: Armada 1588; Cadiz 1596; Montecristo 1652; Orfordness 1666; Barfleur 1692; Sadras 1758; Negapatam 1758; Porto Novo 1759 and Guadeloupe 1810.
HMS Queen Elizabeth was lead ship of an important and innovative class of battleships, and both she and her sisterships served with great distinction in both World Wars.
In just a few years the gun-power of British Dreadnoughts had increased from 12-in., firing a 850 lb. shell, to 13.5 in. firing 1,400 lb. shells in 1909; by 1911 foreign navies were developing battleships with 14-in. guns and the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, took the decision to raise the stakes by the introduction of the 15-in. gun, capable of firing a 1,950 lb. projectile 35,000 yards. For secrecy’s sake, the new gun was known throughout its hurried development as the ‘14-in. experimental’.
Bigger guns needed bigger ships to carry them, and the tactical need for speed – War College studies had recommended fast battleships capable of 25 knots, 4 to 5 knots faster than existing ships – led to the decision to adopt for the first time oil-fired furnaces in British battleships. Aside from increased speed, oil-burning gave ships greater range, they were quicker to raise steam, and their crews were spared the oft-repeated labour and filth of ‘coaling ship’. However, the move away from British-produced steaming coal to foreign-sourced oil fuel was a giant step, and shifted one of the bases of Britain’s naval supremacy. The Government’s acquisition of a controlling interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. in August 1914 was just one consequence of the decision.
The Queen Elizabeth, first and name ship of the new class of ‘super-Dreadnoughts’ was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 21st October – Trafalgar Day – 1912, and launched just under a year later on 16th October 1913. She was commissioned on 22nd December 1914 but only officially completed at the end of January 1915; on the 29th January she sailed from Portsmouth to join the Mediterranean Fleet off the Dardanelles, carrying out full power and gunnery trials on the way.
As completed HMS Queen Elizabeth was 639 ft. 9 in. length overall, 90 ft. 6 in. breadth, 29 ft. 6 in. mean draught, on a load displacement of 32,950 tons. Her main armament of eight 15-in. was mounted in four twin turrets (which would become the ‘classic’ battleship layout), and she had a secondary battery of sixteen 6-in. guns (quite soon reduced to fourteen), with four submerged 21-in. torpedo tubes and a rudimentary anti-aircraft outfit of two 3-in. and some machineguns. Her main armour protection was up to 13 in. thick.
Her advanced propulsion machinery developed twice as much horse power (57,000 SHP) as the preceding ‘Iron Duke’ class’s, giving a 4 knot increase in speed to just over 24 knots.
HMS Queen Elizabeth’s first action was the bombardment of the Seddul Bahr fort guarding the Gallipoli side of the entrance to the Dardanelles on 25th February 1915, and for the next three months she provided gunfire support to operations in that area, including the attempt by the Franco-British fleet to force the passage on 18th March, the landings on the Gallipoli peninsula on 25th April and, throughout, bombardments of Turkish positions and shipping. Nevertheless, shore bombardment was not the most appropriate use for the Royal Navy’s most modern battleship, and her vulnerability to mines and torpedoes while in such confined waters – German U-Boats were known to be en route for the Eastern Mediterranean – led to the decision to withdraw her from the area, and she sailed for Gibraltar on 14th May. On 15th May the pre-Dreadnought HMS Goliath was torpedoed and sunk by a Turkish torpedo boat, and on the 27th the Majestic was sunk by U-21.
Arriving at Scapa at the end of May, the Queen Elizabeth joined the Grand Fleet, and with the other ‘Queen Elizabeths’ formed the 5th Battleship Squadron in November 1915; the 5th BS was the ‘fast battleship wing’ of the Grand Fleet, and the most powerful battleship squadron the world had seen. HMS Queen Elizabeth was refitting at Rosyth from May 1916 and did not take part in the battle of Jutland, where her sister ships Malaya, Warspite, Valiant and Barham were attached to the Battlecruiser Squadron and in the thick of the early fighting.
In November 1916 the Queen Elizabeth became Flagship of the Grand Fleet, and though she saw no further action in the Great War, it was in her Admiral’s Cabin that Admiral Sir David Beatty dictated the terms of the naval armistice to the German naval plenipotentiary in November 1918.
HMS Queen Elizabeth was Flagship of the Atlantic Fleet from 1919 to 1924, when, with the rest of her class, she transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet, again as Flagship. She underwent a thorough refit and modernisation at Portsmouth from May 1926 to the end of 1927 before rejoining the Mediterranean Fleet in early 1928, and resuming her place as Flagship of the Royal Navy’s most important overseas station. By the time she entered Portsmouth Dockyard for a prolonged refit in August 1937 HMS Queen Elizabeth had been the peacetime flagship of no fewer than eight Commanders-in-Chief of either the Grand Fleet, the Atlantic Fleet or the Mediterranean Fleet. She had been senior flagship at King George V’s Jubilee Review at Spithead in July 1935 and was also present at the Coronation Review in May 1937.
The refit amounted more or less to a total reconstruction, involving 90 per cent of the ship’s structure, with modifications made to her hull form and armour protection, a completely new outfit of boilers and machinery, modified and improved main armament and twenty 4.5 in. guns in twin turrets as secondary armament replacing her original 6 in. gun positions. Her light anti-aircraft armament consisted of four eight-barrelled 2 pdr. pom-poms (to be later augmented by no fewer than fifty-four 20 mm Oerlikons). Tonnage increased to over 36,000 tons.
She was still in dockyard hands when war broke out in 1939, and owing to the threat of air attack was removed to Rosyth, where her reconstruction was completed in February 1941.
After working up with the Home Fleet, she escorted an important Malta convoy through the Straits of Gibraltar in May, before joining the Mediterranean Fleet engaged in operations off Crete and in the evacuation of the island. From May until August she took part in operations and diversions of the Mediterranean Fleet and on 1st September she hoisted the Flag of Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean.
On 19th December 1941 the Queen Elizabeth was severely damaged by an Italian ‘human torpedo’ while at anchor in the harbour at Alexandria; the battleship Valiant was also successfully attacked in this very daring and skilful raid. Temporary repairs at Alexandria, which took until May 1942, were necessary to make her seaworthy enough for the passage to Norfolk, Virginia where she remained under repair until mid-1943.
HMS Queen Elizabeth returned to home waters in July 1943 to work up, and in December 1943 she left Scapa in company with HM Ships Renown and Valiant for the Eastern Fleet, arriving at Trincomalee at the end of January 1944. In May 1944 she became Flagship of Admiral Sir James Somerville, C-in-C Eastern Fleet, and took part in carrier air strikes on Sabang and Sourabaya; in July she returned to bombard Sabang once more.
In January 1945 she covered the landing on Ramree Island, bombarded Sabang yet again and covered anti-shipping air strikes off Sumatra. In April and May she bombarded positions in the Andaman Islands, intercepted Japanese shipping in the Malacca Strait and participated in the operations that led to the sinking of the Japanese cruiser Haguro. In July she began the voyage home, and arrived at Rosyth on 10th August.
In March 1946 she reduced to Category B Reserve at Portsmouth, and on 21st January 1948 the decision to scrap her was announced in the House of Commons. In July 1948 she was taken to the Clyde for demolition.
| Dardanelles 1915 | Crete 1941 | ||
| Sabang 1944 | Burma 1944-45 | ||
| East Indies 1945 | |||