In 1919 the embittered Admiral Sir John Fisher, former First Sea Lord and the long-standing champion of naval technology, summed up his recent thinking about heavy warships in three words: ‘speed is armour’.[1] The phrase has since been inextricably associated with...
At the end of 1904 Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir John Fisher, set up a committee that met over a period of several months into early 1905 and produced two new types of vessel: an all big-gun battleship and its armoured cruiser homologue. The latter...
In March 1909 there was a good deal of around Australia’s major cities about responding to the latest Imperial naval crisis by giving Britain a battleship. At a time when social militarism was a major feature of society the call resonated. It also came on the eve of a...
In November 1923 a British squadron led by HMS Hood embarked on a world tour that took in key elements of Britain’s far-flung Empire and a range of Britain’s main trading partners. It was in many respects a repeat of the 1913 world tour by HMS New Zealand,[1]...
A range of pictures of British battlecruisers in New Zealand waters during the inter-war period have been doing the rounds on social media. Most were taken by professional or semi-pro photographers using high-end equipment of the day. However, the identity of the...
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