HMS Lord Clive

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Career (United Kingdom) Royal Navy Ensign
Name: HMS Lord Clive
Builder: Harland and Wolff, Belfast
Laid down: January 9, 1915
Launched: June 10, 1915
Decommissioned: 1921
Fate: Sold for breaking up October 1927
General characteristics
Class and type: Lord Clive class
Displacement: 6,150 tons
Length: 335 feet (102.1 m)
Beam: 87 feet (26.5 m)
Draught: 9.7 feet (3.0 m)
Propulsion: 2 shafts, reciprocating steam engines, 2 boilers, 2,310 hp
Speed: 6.5 knots (12.0 km/h)
Complement: 187
Armament: 2×12-inch (305 mm) guns in a single turret, two 3-inch (76 mm) guns. A conversion to a single 18 inch /40 gun was made in the summer of 1918.

HMS Lord Clive was the nameship of the First World War Royal Navy Lord Clive-class monitors. HMS Lord Clive named for Clive of India, a British general of the Seven Years' War who won the battle of Plassey. Her original 12-inch main battery was stripped from an obsolete Majestic class battleship.

The Lord Clive class monitors were built in 1915 to engage German shore artillery in occupied Belgium during the First World War. Lord Clive, with her sisters was regulaly engaged in this service in the Dover Monitor Squadron and was present at the First Ostend Raid, providing cover for the Inshore Squadron.

In the summer of 1918, Lord Clive was taken in for a refit in which her two 12-inch guns were to be replaced by a single 18 inch gun; the spare for the intended two single gun turrets of HMS Furious which had been converted to an aircraft carrier. [1]. The refit was completed and Lord Clive subsequently used her single gun four times on bombardment operations on the Belgian coast before the armistice in November 1918, which saw Lord Clive and her sisters being put into reserve pending scrapping, as the reason for her existence ended with the liberation of Belgium. In 1921 Lord Clive was decommsiisioned and she was scrapped in 1927.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Navweapons.com accessed 12th October 2007
  • Dittmar, F. J. & Colledge, J. J., "British Warships 1914-1919", (Ian Allen, London, 1972), ISBN 0-7110-0380-7
  • Gray, Randal (ed), "Conway's All The Worlds Fighting Ships, 1906-1921", (Conway Maritime Press, London, 1985), ISBN 0-85177-245-5