HMS Queen Mary

The Vessel

HMS Queen Mary was a Lion-class battlecruiser of the Royal Navy, the third ship of her class (after Lion and Princess Royal), commissioned at Palmers Hebburn yard on 4 September 1913. She was 214 metres long, 27,200 tons, armed with eight 13.5-inch guns in four twin turrets, and designed for 28 knots. Her designer, Sir Philip Watts, had intended the Lion-class to be the answer to the German Moltke-class battlecruisers; at her commissioning, Queen Mary was the fastest and most heavily armed battlecruiser in the world.

She was the most modern of the Royal Navy's pre-war battlecruisers at the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. She was assigned to the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron under the command of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty at Rosyth. Beatty's battlecruiser force had been established under Admiral Fisher's late-Victorian doctrine as the "eyes of the fleet": fast ships intended to scout ahead of the main battle line, engage enemy scouting forces, and lead the fleet onto the enemy's main body.

The battlecruiser concept had several known weaknesses by 1914. The Lion-class ships had been built with main belt armour of 9 inches and deck armour of 1 inch, substantially thinner than contemporary battleships; the design philosophy traded armour for speed and firepower. Queen Mary's captain at Jutland, Captain Cecil Prowse, had expressed concern through 1915 about the inadequate deck armour against plunging fire at long range; Prowse's concerns had been formally logged with the Admiralty but no modification had been ordered.

The Voyage

At 14:28 on 31 May 1916, in the North Sea approximately 90 kilometres west of the Danish coast, the Grand Fleet's battlecruiser force under Vice-Admiral Beatty sighted the German High Seas Fleet's battlecruiser force under Vice-Admiral Franz Hipper. Beatty's six battlecruisers (Lion, Princess Royal, Queen Mary, Tiger, New Zealand, Indefatigable) were steaming south at 25 knots on a course intended to engage Hipper's five battlecruisers. Queen Mary was the third in Beatty's line.

The "Run to the South", the opening phase of the Battle of Jutland, began at 15:48 on 31 May 1916 when Beatty's squadron opened fire at 17,000 yards. The two battlecruiser forces exchanged fire for approximately 50 minutes. Queen Mary fired approximately 150 rounds of 13.5-inch ammunition, scored four confirmed hits on her opposite number SMS Seydlitz, and was hit by five German shells of varying calibres. None of the five hits had breached her main armour belt.

The Disaster

At 16:26, approximately 50 minutes into the battlecruiser action, the German battlecruiser SMS Derfflinger opened fire on Queen Mary from a range of 14,500 yards. Derfflinger's third salvo of 12-inch shells straddled Queen Mary. Her fourth salvo, fired at 16:26, landed two hits at the base of Queen Mary's Q turret.

The two shells penetrated the lightly-armoured turret roof and detonated in the 13.5-inch cordite handling room adjacent to the turret. The cordite ignited. The resulting flash explosion propagated downward through the loading trunk into the main magazine below. Queen Mary detonated in a single catastrophic explosion at approximately 16:27 on 31 May 1916.

The explosion vented upward through her boat deck and superstructure, producing a column of flame and smoke estimated by observers on nearby ships at 120 metres in height. Her hull broke at the point of Q turret; her bow and stern rose momentarily in the air and then sank in opposite directions. She was gone inside 90 seconds of the fatal salvo. 1,266 of her 1,275 crew died.

Beatty, on the bridge of HMS Lion 2,000 yards ahead, watched Queen Mary explode. His remark to his flag captain Alfred Chatfield, preserved in Chatfield's 1942 memoirs, was: "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today." The remark was understated even by the standards of the Royal Navy: in the same 40 minutes of Beatty's battlecruiser action, HMS Indefatigable had also been destroyed by an identical magazine explosion (1,019 dead, 2 survivors) and HMS Lion herself had been saved from magazine detonation only by the Q-turret magazine door being closed by the mortally wounded Royal Marine Major Francis Harvey (posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross).

The Legacy

The British loss of three battlecruisers (Queen Mary, Indefatigable, and Invincible the same afternoon) to magazine explosions was the central tactical puzzle of the Battle of Jutland from the British perspective. Beatty's remark had not been a grumble but a diagnosis. The battlecruiser concept, as the Royal Navy had been practising it, had proved fatally vulnerable to German plunging fire at long range.

The Admiralty's subsequent investigation identified two failure modes. The first was the inadequate Q-turret armour protection of the Lion-class; this could not be retrofitted on remaining battlecruisers. The second was a systemic Royal Navy practice of the 1914-1916 period: British battlecruisers had been handling cordite propellant with open turret doors to accelerate rates of fire, and the cordite handling spaces had been stacked with loaded cordite charges rather than feeding them singly from the magazines. The result had been that a German shell penetrating the turret had found a flash path all the way to the main magazine. The German Kriegsmarine, which had learned the same lesson at Dogger Bank in January 1915, had already tightened its own cordite-handling practices; the Royal Navy had not.

The post-Jutland reform of Royal Navy turret and magazine operation was the principal British tactical response to the battle. Flash-tight doors were retrofitted to all remaining battlecruisers; open-cordite-stack handling was prohibited by fleet order; cordite silk-bag packaging was standardised to reduce flash risk. These reforms, in place by the end of 1916, meant that no subsequent Royal Navy battlecruiser in the First World War was lost to magazine explosion. HMS Hood, built to a post-Jutland magazine standard but never fully retrofitted to the interwar improvements, would ultimately be lost to an effectively identical failure mode 25 years later at the Denmark Strait.

The wreck of HMS Queen Mary was located in 1991 by the Royal Navy's HMS Challenger survey ship at 56°20.4′N 5°28.2′E, approximately 60 metres deep on the Jutland Bank. She lies upside down, her two ends 400 metres apart, with a central debris field between them. The site is a protected war grave under the UK Protection of Military Remains Act 1986. The 1,266 dead are commemorated on the Portsmouth Naval Memorial, the Chatham Naval Memorial, and the Plymouth Naval Memorial, depending on the ratings' ports of service. She remains the second-largest single-ship loss in Royal Navy history, surpassed only by HMS Hood. The Royal Navy's annual Jutland commemoration on 31 May continues to read the names of her dead.