From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Career (United Kingdom) |
 |
| Name: |
HMS Prince Rupert |
| Builder: |
William Hamilton & Co, Glasgow |
| Laid down: |
January 12, 1915 |
| Launched: |
May 20, 1915 |
| Decommissioned: |
1923 |
| Fate: |
Scrapped 1923 |
| 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 (457 mm) gun was incomplete by the armistice of November 1918. |
HMS Prince Rupert was a First World War Royal Navy Lord Clive-class monitor named for Prince Rupert of the Rhine, an important Royalist cavalry commander of the English Civil War. Although she is the only ship of the Royal Navy to have ever had this precise name, other ships have been named for Prince Rupert as HMS Rupert. Her 12" main battery was stripped from the obsolete Majestic-class battleships.
The Lord Clive class monitors were built in 1915 to engage German shore artillery in occupied Belgium during the First World War. Prince Rupert, with her sisters was regulaly engaged in this service in the Dover Monitor Squadron, bombarding German positions along the coast and someway inland with their heavy guns.
Following the armistice in November 1918, Prince Rupert and all her sisters were put into reserve pending scrapping, as the reason for their existence had ended with the liberation of Belgium. In 1923 Prince Rupert was scrapped, outliving all her sisterships by two years as she had been briefly attached to the stone frigate HMS Pembroke at Chatham Dockyard.
[edit] References
- 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
