HMS Royal Oak

The Revenge class was designed as slightly smaller, slower and more heavily protected versions of the preceding Queen Elizabeths. As an economy they were meant to burn coal as well as oil, but First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher rescinded that in October 1914 and the ships were redesigned around oil-fired boilers, which added 9,000 shaft horsepower over the original specification. Royal Oak was laid down at Devonport Royal Dockyard on 15 January 1914, launched on 17 November, and commissioned on 1 May 1916 at a final cost of £2,468,269.

She was the eighth ship of the name, taken from the Royal Oak in which Charles II hid after his defeat at Worcester in 1651. Her armament was eight BL 15-inch Mk I guns in two superfiring pairs fore and aft, with fourteen BL 6-inch guns, twelve of them in casemates along the broadside. Two sets of Parsons turbines driving four shafts, fed by 18 Yarrow boilers, were rated at 40,000 shaft horsepower for a designed 23 knots; on trials on 22 May 1916 she made only 22 knots. That shortfall never left her.

Her waterline belt was 13 inches of Krupp cemented armour between 'A' and 'Y' barbettes, with turrets protected by 11 to 13 inches. After Jutland an inch of high-tensile steel was added to the main deck over the magazines and extra anti-flash equipment fitted. Her 1922–24 refit added anti-torpedo bulges that widened her beam by over 13 feet, and her final refit of 1934–36 thickened deck armour to five inches over the magazines and 3.5 inches over the engine rooms — but nothing could be done about her speed.

She joined the Third Division of the Fourth Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet under Captain Crawford Maclachlan, and was with Jellicoe's fleet when it deployed for action late on 31 May 1916. The German cruiser SMS Wiesbaden had been disabled by British shellfire and both fleets converged on the area. Royal Oak opened fire on her at 18:29, firing four salvoes from her main guns in quick succession along with her secondary battery, and hit Wiesbaden aft with her third salvo. A German salvo straddled her at 18:33 without damage.

At 19:07 her secondary guns engaged German torpedo boats trying to reach Wiesbaden. By 19:15 her gunners had the German battlecruiser squadron in sight and opened on the leading ship, SMS Derfflinger. They overestimated the range at first, but by 19:20 had it right and scored a pair of hits aft that did no serious damage. Derfflinger vanished into the haze and fire shifted to the next in line, SMS Seydlitz, which was hit at 19:27 before she too was lost in the mist.

A German torpedo boat flotilla then attacked the British line, and Royal Oak's secondary guns were the first to reply, at 19:16. After that attack the High Seas Fleet disengaged and she saw no further action. Over the battle she fired 38 rounds from her main battery and 84 from her secondaries. She was reassigned to the First Battle Squadron afterwards and was with the Grand Fleet for the rest of the war, including the fruitless sortie of 19 August 1916 and the April 1918 chase after the German fleet's last attempt on the Norway convoys.

Transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet at Malta in 1926, she gave the world's press a scandal in early 1928. A dispute between Rear-Admiral Bernard Collard and the ship's two senior officers, Captain Kenneth Dewar and Commander Henry Daniel, over the band at a wardroom dance turned into a bitter feud running months. Dewar and Daniel accused Collard of vindictive fault-finding and of humiliating them before their crew; Collard countered that they had failed to follow orders and treated him worse than a midshipman.

Their letters of complaint reached Commander-in-Chief Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, who convened a Board of Enquiry that removed all three men and sent them home. It sat on the eve of a major fleet exercise, which Keyes had to postpone, and rumour flew around the fleet that Royal Oak had mutinied. Dewar and Daniel were charged with writing subversive documents and tried aboard HMS Eagle at Gibraltar; both were found guilty and severely reprimanded, and Daniel resigned. Collard, denounced in Parliament as unfitted to hold further high command, was forcibly retired.

The affair embarrassed what was then the world's largest navy, and was satirised in editorials, cartoons and a comic jazz oratorio by Erwin Schulhoff. One result was an Admiralty undertaking to review how naval officers might complain about their superiors. The 1930s brought quieter but more dangerous work: non-intervention patrols off Spain, where she was bombed in error by Republican aircraft on 2 February 1937 and hit by a Republican anti-aircraft shell off Valencia three weeks later, and the escort of the liner Habana carrying Basque child refugees to Southampton in May 1937.

In October 1939 she joined the search for Gneisenau, but her top speed was by then under 20 knots and she could not keep up with the fleet. She returned to Scapa Flow on 12 October battered by North Atlantic storms, many Carley floats smashed and several smaller guns flooded. When Admiral Charles Forbes dispersed most of the Home Fleet to safer ports against an expected air attack, Royal Oak was left behind, her anti-aircraft guns judged a useful addition to Scapa's scanty air defences.

Dönitz had planned a submarine raid on Scapa within days of the war's outbreak, and hand-picked Kapitänleutnant Günther Prien for a night of high tides and no moon. U-47 entered from the east via Kirk Sound, on the surface and lit by the aurora borealis, threading between the sunken blockships Seriano and Numidian and grounding briefly on a cable. Briefly caught in a taxi's headlights ashore, she was not reported. At 00:27 Prien wrote "Wir sind in Scapa Flow!!!" in his log, and found the anchorage almost empty.

At 00:58 he fired three torpedoes; one struck Royal Oak's bow at 01:04, severing the starboard anchor chain. Many aboard assumed an internal explosion and went back to their hammocks. Prien reloaded, doubled back, and fired three more. At 01:16 all three hit amidships, blowing a hole in the armoured deck, destroying the Stokers', Boys' and Marines' messes and killing the electrical power. Cordite ignited and a fireball tore through the ship's internal spaces. She listed to 15 degrees, rolled to 45, and went under at 01:29.

Of a complement of 1,234, 835 men and boys died that night or later of their wounds, among them Rear-Admiral Henry Blagrove. One hundred and thirty-four of the dead were boy seamen not yet eighteen, the largest such loss in a single Royal Navy action. The tender Daisy 2, tied up alongside for the night, was cut loose as the battleship rolled and was briefly lifted from the sea on the rising anti-torpedo bulge. Her skipper John Gatt turned on his lights and pulled 386 men from the oil-covered water, work for which he received the Distinguished Service Cross.

Churchill announced the loss to the Commons on 17 October, conceding the raid had been "a remarkable exploit of professional skill and daring" while insisting it would not materially affect the naval balance. In Germany the Propaganda Ministry made Prien a celebrity: Hitler sent his personal plane for the crew and invested Prien with the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, the first German submarine officer to receive it. Prien was nicknamed "The Bull of Scapa Flow", and his crew painted a snorting bull on U-47's conning tower.

The Admiralty board of inquiry condemned the defences at Scapa Flow and censured Sir Wilfred French, who had warned of their deficiency the previous year and offered to prove his point by bringing a small ship past the blockships himself. On Churchill's orders the eastern approaches were sealed with concrete causeways linking Lamb Holm, Glimps Holm, Burray and South Ronaldsay to Mainland. Built largely by Italian prisoners of war, the Churchill Barriers were essentially complete by September 1944 and carry roads between the islands to this day.

The wreck lies almost upside down in 100 feet of water with her hull 16 feet beneath the surface, a designated war grave under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. She sank fully fuelled with some 3,000 long tons of furnace oil, and leakage from the corroding hull through the 1990s led the Ministry of Defence to begin pumping it off; by 2010 some 1,600 tons had been removed and the wreck was declared no longer actively releasing oil into Scapa Flow.

A memorial in St Magnus Cathedral at Kirkwall carries a plaque and a book of remembrance whose pages are turned weekly; the list of names was not released by the Government until forty years after the sinking, and the ship's bell, recovered in the 1970s, was restored and added to it. Twenty-six bodies, eight unidentified, lie in the naval cemetery at Lyness. Each year Royal Navy divers place a White Ensign underwater at her stern. The last survivor, Arthur Smith, who had been on watch on the bridge as a boy of 17, died on 11 December 2016.