Royal Oak was
laid down at
Devonport Royal Dockyard on 15 January 1914. She was
launched on 17 November, and after fitting-out was commissioned on 1 May 1916 at a final cost of
£2,468,269. Named after the
Royal Oak in which
Charles II hid following his defeat at the 1651
Battle of Worcester, she was the eighth vessel to bear the name
Royal Oak, replacing a
pre-dreadnought scrapped in 1914. Upon completion
Royal Oak was assigned to the Third Division of the
Fourth Battle Squadron of the
Grand Fleet, under the command of
Captain Crawford Maclachlan.
First World War Battle of Jutland |alt=Watercolour painting of Royal Oak under war conditions. Smoke issues from her barrels and water spouts from a near miss from an enemy shell. In an attempt to lure out and destroy a portion of the Grand Fleet, the German High Seas Fleet, composed of 16 dreadnoughts, 6 pre-dreadnoughts, 6 light cruisers, and 31 torpedo boats, departed
the Jade early on the morning of 31 May. The fleet sailed in concert with Rear-Admiral
Franz von Hipper's five battlecruisers and supporting cruisers and torpedo boats. The Royal Navy's
Room 40 had intercepted and decrypted German radio traffic containing plans of the operation. The Admiralty ordered
Admiral John Jellicoe, commander of the Grand Fleettotalling 28 dreadnoughts and 9 battlecruisersto sortie the night before to cut off and destroy the High Seas Fleet. The initial action was fought primarily by the British and German battlecruiser formations in the afternoon, but by 18:00 the Grand Fleet approached the scene. Fifteen minutes later, Jellicoe gave the order to turn and deploy the fleet for action. The German cruiser had become disabled by British shellfire, and both sides concentrated in the area, the Germans trying to protect their cruiser and the British attempting to sink her. At 18:29,
Royal Oak opened fire on the German cruiser, firing four
salvoes from her main guns in quick succession, along with her secondary battery. She scored a hit on
Wiesbaden aft with her third salvo. In return,
Royal Oak was straddled by a German salvo at 18:33 but was undamaged. German
torpedo boats attempted to reach
Wiesbaden shortly after 19:00, and at 19:07,
Royal Oaks secondary guns opened fire on them, believing they were instead trying to launch a torpedo attack. By 19:15,
Royal Oaks gunners had observed the German battlecruiser squadron and opened fire at the leading vessel, . The gunners overestimated the range initially, but by 19:20 had found the correct distance and scored a pair of hits aft, which did not inflict serious damage.
Derfflinger then disappeared in the haze, so
Royal Oak shifted fire to the next battlecruiser, . She scored a hit at 19:27 before
Seydlitz too was lost in the mist. While
Royal Oak was attacking the battlecruisers, a German torpedo boat flotilla launched an attack on the British battleline.
Royal Oaks secondary guns were the first to open fire, at 19:16, followed quickly by the rest of the British ships. Following the German destroyer attack, the High Seas Fleet disengaged, and
Royal Oak and the rest of the Grand Fleet saw no further action in the battle. This was, in part, due to confusion aboard the fleet flagship over the exact location and course of the German fleet; without this information, Jellicoe could not bring his fleet to action. At 21:30, the Grand Fleet began to reorganise into its night-time cruising formation. Early on the morning of 1 June, the Grand Fleet combed the area, looking for damaged German ships, but after spending several hours searching, they found none. In the course of the battle,
Royal Oak had fired 38 rounds from her main battery and 84 rounds from her secondary guns.
Later actions Following the battle,
Royal Oak was reassigned to the
First Battle Squadron. On 18 August, the Germans again sortied, this time to bombard
Sunderland;
Vice-Admiral Reinhard Scheer, the German fleet commander, hoped to draw out the British battlecruisers and destroy them. British signals intelligence decrypted German wireless transmissions, allowing Jellicoe enough time to deploy the Grand Fleet in an attempt to engage in a decisive battle. Both sides withdrew after their opponents'
submarines inflicted losses in the
action of 19 August 1916: the British cruisers and were both torpedoed and sunk by German
U-boats, and the German battleship was damaged by the British submarine . After returning to port, Jellicoe issued an order that prohibited risking the fleet in the southern half of the North Sea due to the overwhelming risk from mines and U-boats. In late 1917, the Germans began using destroyers and light cruisers to raid the British convoys to Norway; this forced the British to deploy capital ships to protect the convoys. In April 1918, the German fleet sortied in an attempt to catch one of the isolated British squadrons, though the convoy had already passed safely. The Grand Fleet sortied too late to catch the retreating Germans, although the battlecruiser was torpedoed and badly damaged by the submarine . On 5 November 1918, in the final week of the First World War,
Royal Oak was anchored off
Burntisland in the
Firth of Forth accompanied by the
seaplane tender and the light
battlecruiser . A sudden
Force 10 squall caused
Campania to drag her
anchor, collide with
Royal Oak and then with
Glorious. Both
capital ships suffered only minor damage, but
Campania was holed by her initial collision with
Royal Oak. The ship's engine rooms flooded, and she settled by the stern and sank five hours later, without loss of life. Following the capitulation of Germany in November 1918, the Allies interned most of the High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow. The fleet rendezvoused with the British
light cruiser , which led the ships to the Allied fleet that was to escort the Germans to Scapa Flow. The fleet consisted of 370 British, American, and French warships. The High Seas Fleet remained in captivity during the negotiations that ultimately produced the
Treaty of Versailles.
Konteradmiral Ludwig von Reuter believed the British intended to seize the German ships on 21 June 1919, which was the deadline for Germany to have signed the peace treaty. That morning, the Grand Fleet left Scapa Flow to conduct training manoeuvres, and while they were away von Reuter issued the order to
scuttle the High Seas Fleet.
1920s The peacetime reorganisation of the Royal Navy assigned
Royal Oak to the
Second Battle Squadron of the
Atlantic Fleet. Modernised by a 1922–24 refit, she was transferred in 1926 to the
Mediterranean Fleet, based in
Grand Harbour, Malta. In early 1928, this duty saw a notorious incident which the contemporary press dubbed the "Royal Oak Mutiny". What began as a simple dispute between Rear-Admiral Bernard Collard and
Royal Oak's two senior officers, Captain
Kenneth Dewar and Commander , over the band at the ship's
wardroom dance, descended into a bitter personal feud that spanned several months. Dewar and Daniel accused Collard of "vindictive fault-finding" and openly humiliating and insulting them before their crew; in return, Collard countercharged the two with failing to follow orders and treating him "worse than a midshipman". When Dewar and Daniel wrote letters of complaint to Collard's superior,
Vice-Admiral John Kelly, he immediately passed them on to the Commander-in-Chief
Admiral Sir Roger Keyes. On realising that the relationship between the two and their flag admiral had irretrievably broken down, Keyes hurriedly convened a Board of Enquiry, the outcome of which was to remove all three men from their posts and send them back to England. The Board sat on the eve of a major naval exercise, which Keyes was obliged to postpone, causing rumours to fly around the fleet that the
Royal Oak had experienced a
mutiny. The story was picked up by the press worldwide, which described with some hyperbole what became known as "'
the Royal Oak
affair'". Public attention reached such proportions as to raise the concerns of
the King, who summoned
First Lord of the Admiralty William Bridgeman for an explanation. In a pair of highly publicised
courts-martial held aboard
HMS Eagle at Gibraltar, both were found guilty and severely reprimanded, leading Daniel to resign from the Navy. Collard himself was criticised for the excesses of his conduct by the press and in Parliament, and on being denounced by Bridgeman as "unfitted to hold further high command", was forcibly retired from service. He retreated to private life and never spoke publicly of the incident again. On the retired list, he was promoted from Rear- to Vice-Admiral on 1 April 1931. Daniel attempted a career in journalism – notably a prominent anti-noise campaign, conducted through the
Daily Mail, for whom he worked as correspondent – but this was unsuccessful and, after a number of other jobs, his health deteriorated and he died in South Africa in 1955. Of the three, only Dewar escaped with his career, albeit a damaged one: he remained in the Royal Navy, but in a series of more minor commands. His promotion to rear-admiral took place in the year following the court martial, after which he was forcibly retired. The scandal proved an embarrassment to the reputation of the Royal Navy, then the world's largest, and it was satirised at home and abroad through editorials, cartoons, and even a comic jazz oratorio composed by
Erwin Schulhoff. One consequence of the damaging affair was an undertaking from the Admiralty to review the means by which naval officers might bring complaints against the conduct of their superiors. The British
chargé d'affaires protested about the incident to the Republican Government, which admitted its error and apologised for the attack. Later that same month, while stationed off
Valencia on 23 February 1937 during an aerial bombardment by the
Nationalists, she was accidentally struck by an anti-aircraft shell fired from a Republican position. On this occasion the British did not protest to the Republicans, deeming the incident "an
act of God". at half-mast, about 24 November 1938 In May 1937, she and escorted SS
Habana, an
ocean liner carrying
thousands of Basque child refugees, to the
Southampton Docks. In July, as the war in northern Spain flared up,
Royal Oak, along with her sister rescued the steamer
Gordonia when Spanish Nationalist warships attempted to capture her off
Santander. She was unable on 14 July to prevent the seizure of the British freighter
Molton by the Nationalist cruiser while trying to enter Santander. The merchantmen had been engaged in the evacuation of refugees. This same period saw
Royal Oak star alongside fourteen other Royal Navy vessels in the 1937 British film
melodrama Our Fighting Navy, the plot of which centres around a coup in the fictional South American republic of Bianco. The Royal Navy saw the film as a recruitment opportunity and provided warships and extras.
Royal Oak portrays a rebel battleship
El Mirante, whose commander forces a British captain (played by
Robert Douglas) into choosing between his lover and his duty. The film was poorly received by critics, but gained some redemption through its dramatic scenes of naval action. In 1938,
Royal Oak returned to the
Home Fleet and was made
flagship of the Second Battle Squadron based in
Portsmouth. On 24 November 1938, she returned the body of the British-born
Queen Maud of Norway, who had died in London, to Oslo for a state funeral, accompanied by her husband
King Haakon VII.
Paying off in December 1938,
Royal Oak was recommissioned the following June, and in 1939 embarked on a short training cruise in the
English Channel in preparation for another 30-month tour of the Mediterranean, for which her crew were issued tropical uniforms. As hostilities loomed, the battleship was instead dispatched north to
Scapa Flow, and was at anchor there when war was declared on 3 September. The search was ultimately fruitless, particularly for
Royal Oak, whose top speed, by then less than , was inadequate to keep up with the rest of the fleet. The mission had underlined the obsolescence of the 25-year-old warship. Concerned that a recent overflight by German reconnaissance aircraft heralded an imminent air attack upon Scapa Flow, Admiral of the Home Fleet
Charles Forbes ordered most of the fleet to disperse to safer ports.
Royal Oak remained behind, her
anti-aircraft guns still deemed a useful addition to Scapa's otherwise scanty air defences. == Sinking ==