by Matthew Wright | Jan 30, 2020 | History Article
It’s not often that a city’s memorial to a warship is larger than the ship itself. Or that the ship’s bell continues to be rung in that city to this day, honouring the way the navy came to the rescue when tragedy unfolded. But that’s true in Napier, New Zealand, where...
by Matthew Wright | Dec 12, 2019 | History Article
The loss of the battleship HMS Victoria to a ramming accident in June 1893 sent shock waves across the British Empire. As we saw in the last article, she went down remarkably quickly after a collision with the battleship HMS Camperdown. There was very heavy loss of...
by Matthew Wright | Nov 18, 2019 | History Article
In many ways the 1890s were the high noontide of Britain’s globe-spanning Empire. It was also when they suffered their worst naval disaster of the late nineteenth century with the sinking of HMS Victoria – and it occurred not as a dramatic outcome of some storm or...
by Matthew Wright | Oct 16, 2019 | History Article
In the mid-1880s the British began building two new battleships as part of the so-called ‘Northbrook’ programme, a massive burst of naval expenditure to which government reluctantly agreed in early December 1884. What then emerged from the drawing boards of the...
by Matthew Wright | Aug 27, 2019 | History Article
In an earlier article we explored the story of HMS Collingwood, a British battleship that the Royal Navy’s Director of Naval Construction, Nathaniel Barbaby, sketched in 1880 and which was detailed by his assistant, William White.[1] Collingwood was soon followed by...
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