HMS Renown

Renown began life as an improved Revenge-class battleship, suspended at the outbreak of war because she could not be ready in time. Admiral Lord Fisher, back as First Sea Lord, had her reborn as a battlecruiser: he set his requirements before the ships were even approved, and the Director of Naval Construction, Eustace Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, completed a preliminary design by 30 December 1914. Fairfield at Govan, Glasgow, laid her keel on 25 January 1915 — before the altered contracts were even signed.

Launched on 4 March 1916 and completed that September at a cost of £3,117,204, she carried six 15-inch guns in three twin turrets and made 32.58 knots on trials from turbines that delivered 126,000 shaft horsepower — she and her sister Repulse were the world's fastest capital ships on completion. The price was protection: a 6-inch belt, and decks thin enough that extra steel went over her magazines after Jutland, with 504 more tons of horizontal armour added at Rosyth in 1917.

Renown served the Grand Fleet's 1st Battlecruiser Squadron in the North Sea for the last two years of the First World War but never fired a shot in anger, her closest brush an unsuccessful December 1917 sortie after German destroyers that had destroyed a Scandinavian convoy. With Repulse she was present at the surrender of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow on 21 November 1918.

Peace made her a royal yacht in all but name: refitted with a squash court and cinema between her funnels, she carried the Prince of Wales to Canada and the United States in 1919, to Australia and New Zealand in 1920, and to India and Japan in 1921–22. Two reconstructions followed — a £979,927 rearmouring in 1923–26 that gave her a 9-inch belt, and a £3,088,008 rebuild from 1936 that razed her superstructure, replaced engines and boilers, and rearmed her with twenty dual-purpose 4.5-inch guns.

Recommissioned in August 1939, Renown hunted the Admiral Graf Spee with Force K in the South Atlantic, sinking the blockade runner Watussi on 2 December. Off Norway on 9 April 1940 she met the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau in heavy weather. She spotted them and fired first; two 28 cm shells hit her with only slight damage, and minutes later she struck Gneisenau with one 15-inch and two 4.5-inch shells, knocking out the German ship's main fire-control director. The faster Germans disengaged after about 90 minutes; Renown had fired 230 main-battery rounds.

From August 1940 she was flagship of Force H at Gibraltar: covering Hurricane deliveries to Malta, fighting the inconclusive Battle of Cape Spartivento in November, bombarding Genoa on 9 February 1941 with little effect, and joining the hunt for Bismarck, intercepting the German supply ship Gonzenheim on 4 June. In 1942 she covered Arctic convoys with the Home Fleet, then returned to Force H for Operation Torch, shielding the invasion convoys. Between conferences she doubled as Winston Churchill's transport, bringing him home from Quebec and carrying him to Cairo in 1943.

In January 1944 Renown became flagship of the 1st Battle Squadron of the Eastern Fleet at Colombo. She supported the April carrier strike on Sabang (Operation Cockpit) and the May attack on Surabaya (Operation Transom), and turned her own guns on Japanese-occupied facilities: bombarding Car Nicobar and Port Blair on 30 April – 1 May, Sabang itself on 25 July, and the Nicobars again from 17 to 19 October 1944.

Recalled in March 1945 against a feared last sortie by Germany's remaining heavy ships, she reached Rosyth on 15 April and went into reserve that May. On 3 August 1945 she hosted the meeting between King George VI and President Truman, the president homeward bound aboard USS Augusta. The disposal decision came on 21 January 1948, and she was towed to Faslane for scrapping that August — the last British battlecruiser to be broken up, outlasting Furious by a few days.