HMS Hood

The Admiral class was drawn up as an answer to Germany's Mackensen-class battlecruisers, reported to be more heavily armed and armoured than Britain's Renown and Courageous ships. Construction of Hood began at the John Brown shipyard in Clydebank as yard number 460 on 1 September 1916. Three British battlecruisers had blown up at Jutland that summer, and her design was revised while the hull was already taking shape: some 5,000 tons of extra armour and bracing were worked in. All four Admirals were laid down; only Hood was ever completed.

The others were abandoned because the ships were very expensive and swallowed labour and material better spent on the merchant tonnage needed to replace what the U-boats were sinking. Hood was launched on 22 August 1918 by the widow of Rear-Admiral Sir Horace Hood, a great-great-grandson of Admiral Samuel Hood. Sir Horace had been killed at Jutland aboard Invincible, one of the three battlecruisers lost there. To free the Clyde berth for merchant work she sailed to Rosyth to complete fitting-out in January 1920, and commissioned on 15 May under Captain Wilfred Tompkinson. She had cost £6,025,000.

The armour added during building cost her about four feet of draught at deep load. Freeboard fell and she became notoriously wet: at full speed or in heavy seas water flowed over the quarterdeck and entered the messdecks and living quarters through ventilation shafts, earning her the nickname "the largest submarine in the Navy". The persistent dampness and poor ventilation were blamed for a high incidence of tuberculosis aboard. Against that, with her twin funnels and lean profile she was widely regarded as one of the finest-looking warships ever built.

Her main battery was eight BL 15-inch Mk I guns in hydraulically powered twin turrets, lettered 'A', 'B', 'X' and 'Y' from bow to stern, with 120 shells carried for each gun. Twelve BL 5.5-inch guns on shielded single-pivot mounts were set high on the upper and shelter decks, where waves and spray troubled them less than the casemate mounts of earlier British capital ships. Six fixed 21-inch torpedo tubes were fitted, three to each broadside, with about 28 torpedoes.

Four Brown-Curtis geared turbines each drove one shaft, with steam from 24 Yarrow boilers. The turbines were designed for 144,000 shaft horsepower and 31 knots; on trials in 1920 they gave 151,280 shp and 32.07 knots, with an estimated range of 7,500 nautical miles at 14 knots. That was the ship at her best. By early 1940 her machinery was in dire shape and held her to 26.5 knots, and her condensers were so poor that fresh water went to the boilers rather than to washing or heating the messdecks.

The waterline belt was 12 inches of Krupp cemented armour between 'A' and 'Y' barbettes, angled outwards 12 degrees to increase its relative thickness against flat-trajectory shells — a change that exposed more deck to plunging fire. Protection took 33 per cent of her displacement, high by British standards but under the 36 per cent of the German battlecruiser Hindenburg. Firing trials against a mock-up showed the new 15-inch capped shell could reach her vitals through the 7-inch middle belt and the 2-inch deck slope, and 3-inch plating was added over the slopes beside the magazines very late in construction.

A July 1919 proposal to thicken the magazine armour to five and six inches was never fitted, pending further trials. As completed, she remained susceptible to plunging shells and bombs. A major rebuild scheduled for 1941 would have given her new turbines and boilers, 5.25-inch secondaries and reinforced deck armour, but she was the Royal Navy's most battle-worthy fast capital ship and could not be spared. Her last refit, in early 1941, fitted Type 279 early-warning and Type 284 gunnery radar; she reported an accuracy of 3 degrees with the 279M set.

She was the largest warship afloat when she commissioned and kept that distinction for twenty years. Her size and armament earned her the nickname "Mighty Hood", and she came to symbolise the might of the British Empire itself. From May 1920 she was flagship of the Battlecruiser Squadron of the Atlantic Fleet under Rear-Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, showing the flag in Scandinavian waters, the Mediterranean, Brazil and the West Indies in her first years.

In November 1923 she set out on a world cruise from west to east via the Panama Canal, in company with the battlecruiser Repulse and Danae-class cruisers of the 1st Light Cruiser Squadron. The stated object was to remind the dominions of their dependence on British sea power and encourage them to support it with money, ships and facilities. They returned ten months later having visited South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Newfoundland and the United States. In Australia in April 1924 the squadron escorted HMAS Australia out to sea to be scuttled under the Washington Naval Treaty.

Her crew took part in the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931 over pay cuts; it ended peacefully and the ship returned to her home port. On 23 January 1935, en route to Gibraltar, she was rammed in the port quarterdeck by Renown, losing a propeller blade and taking an 18-inch dent. Both captains and the squadron commander were court-martialled. Attached to the Mediterranean Fleet after the Spanish Civil War began, on 23 April 1937 she escorted three British merchantmen into Bilbao despite the Nationalist cruiser Almirante Cervera's attempt to blockade the port.

When war was declared she was operating around Iceland, and spent months hunting German commerce raiders and blockade runners between Iceland, the Faroes and the Norwegian Sea. On 25 September 1939 the Home Fleet sortied into the central North Sea to cover the damaged submarine Spearfish and was attacked by aircraft of the KG 26 and KG 30 bomber wings; Hood took a 250 kg bomb from a Junkers Ju 88 that damaged her port torpedo bulge and her condensers.

Ordered to Gibraltar on 18 June 1940, she became flagship of Force H, and took part in the destruction of the French fleet at Mers-el-Kébir that July. The exact results of her fire are not known, but she damaged the battleship Dunkerque, which was hit by four fifteen-inch shells and forced to beach herself. Dunkerque straddled Hood in return and splinters wounded two men. Hood and several light cruisers chased Dunkerque's sister Strasbourg for two hours before giving up, dodging a salvo of torpedoes from a French sloop and damaging a turbine at 28 knots.

In May 1941 she sailed to intercept Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, flying the flag of Vice-Admiral Lancelot Holland and accompanied by the newly commissioned battleship Prince of Wales. The heavy cruisers Norfolk and Suffolk found the Germans on 23 May, and Holland's ships met them in the Denmark Strait on the 24th. The British sighted them at 05:37 and opened fire at 05:52, Hood engaging Prinz Eugen as the lead ship in the German line; the Germans replied at 05:55, both concentrating on Hood.

Prinz Eugen probably struck first, a shell on the boat deck starting a large fire among ready-use anti-aircraft ammunition and the rockets of the UP mounts. Just before 06:00, while Hood was turning 20 degrees to port to unmask her rear turrets, Bismarck's fifth salvo hit her from about 16,650 metres. A jet of flame burst out near the mainmast, followed by a magazine explosion that destroyed the after part of the ship and broke her back. She sank in three minutes. Of a crew of 1,418, only Ted Briggs, Robert Tilburn and William Dundas survived, picked up two hours later by the destroyer Electra.

Two boards of enquiry followed. The first, under Vice-Admiral Sir Geoffrey Blake, reported on 2 June that one or more 15-inch shells had penetrated her protection and exploded an aft magazine. Criticism that no verbatim record of testimony had been kept, and the Director of Naval Construction's rival theory that her own torpedoes had destroyed her, brought a second board under Rear-Admiral Harold Walker, which took evidence from 176 eyewitnesses and reached almost the same conclusion. Both exonerated Holland of blame.

The wreck was not looked for until 2001, when Channel 4 commissioned shipwreck hunter David Mearns and Blue Water Recoveries to find her. Side-scan sonar located the battlecruiser in the 39th hour of a search across a 600-square-nautical-mile box. She lies in pieces among two debris fields at about 2,800 metres, the amidships section inverted in an impact crater, the conning tower alone some distance away. The stern rises at an angle with its rudder still locked into a 20-degree port turn, confirming the order given as the magazines detonated. The site was designated a war grave in 2002.

In 2015, after a first attempt was abandoned in bad weather in 2012, the team recovered one of her bells — a bell originally carried by the pre-dreadnought Hood and inscribed in memory of Sir Horace Hood, killed at Jutland. Princess Anne unveiled it at the National Museum of the Royal Navy on 24 May 2016, the 75th anniversary of the Denmark Strait, and it was rung eight times before descendants of the lost crew. A builder's model of the ship is displayed in the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, where she was built.