HMS Tiger (1913)

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Career

Class and type:	Unique battlecruiser
Laid down:	20 June 1912
Launched:	15 December 1913
Commissioned:	October 1914
Decommissioned:	1931
Struck:	Sold for scrap February 1932
General Characteristics
Displacement:	28,800 tons normal 33,677 tons full load
Length:	704 ft (214.6 m)
Beam:	90.6 ft (27.6 m)
Draught:	28.5 ft (8.7 m)
Propulsion:	4 shaft Brown-Curtis turbines, 85,000 shp (63,400 kW)
Speed:	28 knots
Complement:	1,109
Armament:	8 × 13.5 inch guns 12 × 6 inch guns 2 × 3 inch guns 4 × 3 lb guns 4 × 21 inch torpedo tubes
Armour:	Belt: 9 in Bulkheads: 5 in Barbettes: 9 in Turrets: 9 in Decks: 3 in

The eleventh HMS Tiger was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, built by John Brown and Company, Clydebank, Scotland, and launched in 1913. Tiger was the most heavily armoured battlecruiser of the Royal Navy at the start of World War I. A sister ship, Leopard, was planned but never ordered.

1 Genesis
2 World War One
3 Postwar Service
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Genesis

Tiger was originally intended to be a sister ship of HMS Lion, along with Princess Royal and Queen Mary. However, in January 1911, the Vickers-Armstrong yard began building a battlecruiser for the Imperial Japanese Navy, the Kongō. Vickers' chief designer, Sir George Thurston, created what was immediately recognised as a fine and superbly-balanced design, mounting eight 14 inch guns and a well-balanced scheme of armoured protection. The key feature of the Kongō-class was that it had its main gun turrets all either aft or fore, eliminating the amidship turret which had a poor firing arc. Kongō was actually built to a more balanced design than the Lions, which caused some indignation within the Royal Navy. The upshot of this minor controversy was that the Royal Navy abandoned the original Lion design.

Although the first three Lions already under construction could not be altered, Tiger was still early enough along in construction that she could be significantly redesigned. Thus it was possible to create revised specifications for her. What emerged from the naval architects' drawing boards was a ship which incorporated elements of the Kongō's design, but also retained many features of the Lions, including their eight 13.5 inch main guns. Her secondary armament was increased from 4 inch guns to 6 inch guns, which matched the secondary batteries of the newest British battleships. A proposal to use the new lightweight small-tube Yarrow boilers was rejected, a decision later criticised by the Director of Naval Construction, Sir Eustace Tennyson, who claimed that the Brown & White boilers used in Tiger cost her several knots of speed due to their greater size and weight. However, the early small-tube boilers used by the Royal Navy were very unreliable indeed, and the decision to use traditional boilers in Tiger is therefore understandable.

The quantity of coal carried was substantially greater than that carried by Lion, but since Tiger's engines generated higher shaft horsepower and burned more coal than Lion's, there was no real increase in range over the older ship.

Tiger was the sole member of her class. Some sources state that a second ship, to be named HMS Leopard, was to have been authorized under the 1912 Naval Estimates and later under the 1914 Estimates, but in the end she was never ordered. Leopard was replaced in the 1914 Estimates by a battlecruiser variant of the Queen Elizabeth class of fast battleships. This new ship, which was to be named HMS Agincourt, was never built either, and the name was given instead to a battleship being built in Britain for the Ottoman Navy and seized in August 1914 after the outbreak of war with Germany.

[edit] World War One

Tiger was still under construction when the First World War broke out in August 1914. She was commissioned in October 1914 and after working up she was sent to join Rear-Admiral David Beatty's First Battlecruiser Squadron based at Rosyth. She was a welcome addition to the squadron, which was composed of her near sisters Lion, Princess Royal, and Queen Mary. Her Commanding Officer was Captain Henry B. Pelly, who was later described by Beatty as "a little bit of the nervous excited type." Her initial crew was mostly made up of poor deserters from other ships.

With her fellow "Big Cats" Lion and Princess Royal she was part of the British force that fought in the Battle of Dogger Bank on 24 January 1915. During the action Tiger was hit by several German shells, losing ten of her crew to enemy action. Like the rest of the battlecruisers, Tiger's own gunnery was rapid but appallingly inaccurate, and she achieved only one hit out of 255 shells fired, though this was partially the result of her less than first rate crew and the fact that she had only been in service for a few months at the time of the battle. In the aftermath of the battle, Tiger's Gunnery Officer was sacked.

At the Battle of Jutland, 31 May 1916, Tiger's performance was better. Even so she took some substantial blows from the German guns. During the battle she was hit by fifteen 11 inch shells from the battlecruisers of Vizeadmiral Franz von Hipper's First Scouting Group. Twenty-four of her crew were killed during the action, most of whom died when a hit badly damaged her midships "Q" Turret early in the battle. Despite the damage she had suffered, she was very lucky to have survived the battle. In one instance, an unexploded shell came to rest on the floor of a gun turret. In another, an 11 inch projectile impacted the 'A' turret barbette but damage was minimal since the shell had impacted a strong point in the armour. If it had hit a half-metre lower, the shell would have passed through thinner armour and would have destroyed the whole turret.

The damage Tiger suffered at Jutland was repaired by 2 July, and after leaving the repair yard she served as the temporary flagship of the First Battlecruiser Squadron while Lion was under repair. Tiger saw action again a year later when she fought at the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight, on 17 November 1917. The same year saw her undergo a minor refit during which a flying-off platform for aircraft was mounted on "Q" Turret and a searchlight platform was added to her third funnel. She underwent a more extensive refit in 1918 which saw her mainmast shifted to the top of the derrick-stump and a more substantial observation platform added to the foremast. The resulting change in appearance was decried by the editors of the 1919 edition of Jane's Fighting Ships, who wrote that Tiger had been "a remarkably handsome ship until the present hideous rig was adopted in 1918."[1]

[edit] Postwar Service

Tiger remained in service with the Royal Navy after the Armistice and survived the culling of older capital ships following the Washington Naval Treaty. In 1922 she became a sea-going training ship, a role she served in throughout the 1920s. Her last major period of activity came in 1929 when the Royal Navy's newest battlecruiser, the ill-fated HMS Hood, went into dockyard hands for a refit. While Hood was out of commission, Tiger returned to active service with the fleet to keep the Royal Navy's three-ship Battlecruiser Squadron (normally made up of Hood plus the smaller Renown and Repulse) up to strength. Although by the 1930s Tiger was still in fair condition and was not a terribly old ship, her death knell was sounded by the Second London Naval Conference of 1930, during which Tiger was sacrificed by the Admiralty as part of an overall reduction in world battleship fleets. She remained in service with the fleet until Hood came out of refit in early 1931, at which time she was taken out of commission in accordance with the terms of the Second London Naval Treaty.

On 30 March 1931 Tiger was paid off at Devonport, and after the better part of a year of lying idle and awaiting her fate she was sold in March 1932. Tiger's last voyage was made under tow and ended at Inverkeithing, where she was broken up.