HMS Thunderer

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Six ships and one shore establishment of the British Royal Navy have been called HMS Thunderer:

• The first HMS Thunderer was a 74-gun third-rate launched in 1760. She was involved in a single-ship action with the French Achille in the following year, but foundered in the great hurricane in the West Indies in 1780.

• The second Thunderer was an enormous 14-gun radeau built on Lake Champlain in 1776. She sank off Windmill Point on the lake in 1777 while carrying sick and wounded British from the Battle of Saratoga. In her glory in 1776 she was armed with six 24-pounders, six 12-pounders, and two howitzers making her the most heavily armed ship on the lake and easily outgunning anything in the American fleet.

• The third HMS Thunderer was a 74-gun third-rate launched in 1783. She was a classic Nelsonian 74-gun two-decker Line-of-Battle ship, and she fought right through the French wars, from the Glorious First of June in 1797 to Trafalgar in 1805 and beyond. She participated in the twenty-year close blockade of Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, which is one of the Royal Navy's greatest achievements. In her construction, her rig and her guns, she represented the highest technology of her era, and she served right through the Napoleonic War until 1814, when she was finally broken up.

• A new Thunderer was laid down at Woolwich in 1817, but renamed Talavera to commemorate the Duke of Wellington's Peninsular War action before she was launched in 1818.

• The fourth HMS Thunderer was an 84-gun second-rate "Symonite" ship, launched in 1831, and constucted with diagonal framing and improved underwater lines on the principles of Sir William Symonds, Surveyor (Chief Constructor) of the Navy. In 1840, HMS Thunderer fought in the Syria campaign, taking part in the battle of Sidon, which was the last fleet action conducted purely by wooden battle-liners under sail. In the same year she acted as flagship at the bombardment and capture of the fortress at St. Jean d'Acre, which was the first action at which steam vessels were present, albeit as support vessels rather than fighting ships. She was fitted with iron-clad plate in 1863 for trials of new armour-piercing guns, renamed Comet and then Nettle, and finally sold in 1901.

• The fifth HMS Thunderer was an ironclad turretship designed by Edward James Reed with revolving turrets, launched in 1872. The Royal Navy introduced, with the sister-ships HMS Devastation and Thunderer, the world's first mastless battleships, with a modern central superstructure layout which has lasted to this day. Armed with four 12 inch guns in rotating turrets, these ships represent the greatest single step forward ever taken in Naval design; they are really the prototypes of all subsequent warships, and are of far greater significance than the much-vaunted Dreadnought of thirty years later. With 12 inches of ironclad armour from end to end, they weighed over 6,000 tons despite a length of only 285 feet. Their hydraulic turret machinery and twin screw propulsion put them in the forefront of mechanical design, and with sufficient coal to provide a range of 4,700 miles, they were "veritable fighting coal-mines".
  At a time when the bulk of the fleet consisted of wooden square-riggers, they were regarded with some suspicion, and this was partly justified when two unfortunate incidents clouded the success of Thunderer's design: in 1876 she suffered a boiler explosion which killed 36 crew members, and in 1879 one of her 50-ton muzzle-loading turret guns was double-charged, and burst killing 11 gun crew. Both disasters had important repercussions: the boiler explosion signalled the end of box-boilers in favour of the modern cylindrical type, and it led directly to the writing of the first official Steam Manual in 1879, as it was poor operating procedures which had caused the problem; the safety valves had been screwed down for a pressure test, and then left in this condition. The gun explosion was equally significant, as it led to improved loading and handling procedures, and ultimately to the demise of the muzzle-loading gun. Thunderer herself was re-equipped with long-calibre 10" breech-loaders, and settled down in her old age to become a favourite of the Fleet: King George V served in her for a while as Lieutenant Prince George of Wales. With her broad beam she was a fine gun-platform, and the phrase "As steady as the old Thunderer" was high praise for any newcomer to the Navy.

• The sixth HMS Thunderer was an Orion-class battleship launched in 1911, the last major warship built by the Thames Ironworks.^[1] Thunderer and her sisters were huge ships of 22,000 tons, with ten 13.5 inch guns in super-firing turrets, all mounted on the centreline. Her machinery consisted of new steam turbines, and her electrics were provided by four 200 KW generators, installed in separate compartments, and capable of isolation if damaged, an important innovation in this design. The following year, she was the flagship of Vice-Admiral Jellicoe, and in 1916 she fought at Jutland with the Second Battle Squadron, under the command of Captain Sir James Ferguson, (whose wife was coincidentally staying at Manadon House during May 1916 the month of the battle, over 30 years before Manadon College became HMS Thunderer itself). After the war she was the only member of her class to survive scrapping, becoming a cadet training ship until she was finally paid off in 1926.

• The seventh Thunderer would have been one of the four 42,500-ton Lion class battleships planned in 1938. She was ordered from Fairfields in Govan in 1939 as a "third-generation" battleship, with nine sixteen-inch guns in triple turrets, but construction of the first two was suspended in October of that year and cancelled in 1944 when it was realised that she and her sisters would not be completed before the end of the Second War. Had they been built, they would have been the British equivalents of the long-lasting Iowa class, including USS New Jersey, Wisconsin and "Mighty Mo" (Missouri) which have survived for sixty years to represent the ultimate in traditional seapower.

• The Thunderer name was next awarded to the Royal Naval Engineering College in 1947. The college had been founded at Keyham, Devonport in 1880, but during the Second World War the move to Manadon, at Crownhill north of Plymouth, had begun with the building of the hangars and instructional block, and the use of Manadon House as the initial Wardroom. The college was developed on its hilltop site for the next fifty years, but finally closed in 1993. (Rupert Nichol)

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