Dreadnought: A History of the Modern Battleship

“I christen you Dreadnought!”

The bottle of Australian wine failed to break against the battleship’s mighty stem — that in later years was to slice in two one of Germany’s most destructive U-boats — and King Edward VII had to swing the bottle with its garland of flowers a second time. The glass scattered, the wine streamed down the steel plates, and the King, in bicorne hat and full-dress uniform of Admiral of the Fleet, took up the chisel and mallet made from a fragment of timber from Nelson’s Victory, and severed the last securing cord with one strike. The dogshores were released, and at once, with mighty and steadily increasing momentum, the battleship slipped toward the water that was to embrace its hull for the next sixteen years.

Among the distinguished gathering in the enclosed red-and-white-draped platform was Rear-Admiral Carl Coerper, representing the King’s brother-in-law, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Details of this epochal and revolutionary vessel were already known to his Admiralty, and work on existing German battleships had been halted as a result. The vast crowds outside the Royal Box, who had streamed in from Portsmouth or had arrived from London that morning in special trains, witnessed the event from the dockyard quays and from a multitude of vessels offshore. There was everywhere a consciousness of the importance of the occasion, which had in no way been diminished by Court mourning for the late King of Denmark, which forbade the use of all but the most important flags and bunting and restricted the ceremonials; nor by the overcast, dour weather that hung like some chill threat over the sky all day.

The Dreadnought’s period of freedom was brief. One moment she lay helpless in Portsmouth harbour waters, a 520-foot empty hulk of steel with her cradleways like scattered afterbirth about her; the next she was being hustled by little paddle tugs toward her fitting-out basin, accompanied by packed light craft of all