32 I HMS Queen Elizabeth
NAMESAKES The Earlier Queen Elizabeths Story by Charles Oldham
The first HMS Queen Elizabeth was the name-ship of a class of five superdreadnought battleships. Launched in 1913, she entered service in January 1915. Other ships of the class were HMS Warspite, HMS Barham, HMS Malaya, and HMS Valiant. They were armed with eight 15-inch guns, then the largest naval guns in existence, each weighing over 100 tonnes and able to fire a 1,938-pound shell nearly 20 miles. Secondary armament included 16 6-inch guns as built. These were later deleted during subsequent refits in favour of 4.5-inch dual-purpose guns. Queen Elizabeth was also a pioneer in being the first Royal Navy battleship to burn oil exclusively rather than coal. This innovation decreased the thick black smoke from the ship’s stacks that was a hallmark of coal firing, and made the ships more difficult for the enemy to spot. The reduction in smoke also aided in aiming the ship’s own guns. Because oil has a much greater energy density than coal, it also gave the ships longer range, and in addition cut down on manning requirements, as stokers were not required to continuously shovel coal into the boilers. Further, refuelling became a much less burdensome activity. HMS Queen Elizabeth served in both world wars. She participated in the ill-fated Dardanelles campaign, firing her 15-inch guns in anger for the
first time during the Gallipoli landings. She was undergoing maintenance at the time of the Battle of Jutland, however, and missed that action in which her sisters so distinguished themselves. However, in November 1918, as flagship of the Grand Fleet, it was from Queen Elizabeth’s deck that Admiral of the Fleet Sir David Beatty dictated armistice terms to the German High Seas Fleet. Modernised and reconstructed twice between the wars, the battleship didn’t come out of her second reconstruction until 1941. Joining the Mediterranean Fleet, she escorted convoys to Malta and covered the evacuation of British troops from Crete in June 1941. In December, she was damaged badly enough by an Italian human torpedo attack
in Alexandria Harbour so that she was out of action for 18 months. Returning to action in July 1943, she joined the Home Fleet. In December, she left to join the Eastern Fleet, supporting operations off Burma and the Malay Peninsula. She was placed in reserve in August 1945, and scrapped in 1948. The other namesake of today’s HMS Queen Elizabeth was actually never built, but was, interestingly, also an aircraft carrier. HMS Queen Elizabeth (CVA-01) was the product of a 1960 study that found that a large aircraft carrier of approximately 53,000 tonnes represented the best option for the nation’s needs. Originally, four were planned, but the entire class was cancelled in February 1966, in the wake of the 1966 Defence White Paper.