HMS Prince Rupert (1915)
HMS Prince Rupert was a First World War Royal Navy Lord Clive-class monitor named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, an important Royalist commander of the English Civil War and key figure in the Restoration navy. Although she is the only ship of the Royal Navy to have ever had this precise name, other ships have been named after Prince Rupert as HMS Rupert. Her 12" main battery was stripped from the obsolete Majestic-class battleships.
| History | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Name: | HMS Prince Rupert |
| Builder: | William Hamilton & Co, Glasgow |
| Laid down: | 12 January 1915 |
| Launched: | 20 May 1915 |
| Decommissioned: | 1923 |
| Fate: | Scrapped 1923 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Lord Clive-class monitor |
| Displacement: | 6,150 tons |
| Length: | 335 ft (102.1 m) |
| Beam: | 87 ft (26.5 m) |
| Draught: | 9.7 ft (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 (304.8 mm) Mk VIII 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. |
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 regularly 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 sister ships by two years as she had been briefly attached to the stone frigate HMS Pembroke at Chatham Dockyard.
References
Bibliography
- Buxton, Ian (2008) [1978]. Big Gun Monitors. Seaforth Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84415-719-8.
- Dittmar, F. J.; Colledge, J. J. (1972). British Warships 1914–1919. London, UK: Ian Allan. ISBN 978-0-7110-0380-4.
- Gardiner, Robert; Gray, Randal, eds. (1985). Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships, 1906–1921. London, UK: Conway Maritime Press. ISBN 978-0-85177-245-5. OCLC 12227060.