HMS Africa (1905)
HMS Africa
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| History | |
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 United Kingdom
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| Name: | HMS Africa |
| Namesake: | Africa |
| Ordered: | 1903/04 Estimates |
| Builder: | Chatham Dockyard |
| Cost: | £1,420,040 |
| Laid down: | 27 January 1904 |
| Launched: | 20 May 1905 |
| Completed: | November 1906 |
| Commissioned: | 6 November 1906 |
| Decommissioned: | November 1918 |
| Nickname(s): | The King Edward VII-class battleships were known as "The Wobbly Eight" |
| Fate: | Sold for scrapping, 30 June 1920 |
| Notes: | The first British launch of an airplane from a ship took place aboard Africa in 1912 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | King Edward VII-class pre-dreadnought battleship |
| Displacement: |
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| Length: | 453 ft 6 in (138.23 m) |
| Beam: | 78 ft (24 m) |
| Draught: | 26 ft 9 in (8.15 m) |
| Installed power: | 18,000 ihp (13 MW) |
| Propulsion: | 15 coal-fired (with oil sprayers) boilers (12 Babcock & Wilcox water-tube boilers and 3 cylindrical boilers), two 4-cylinder vertical compound expansion steam engines, two screws |
| Speed: |
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| Range: | 2,000 nautical miles (3,700 kilometres) at 18.5 kn (34.3 km/h); 5,270 nautical miles (9,760 kilometres) at 10 kn (19 km/h) |
| Complement: | 777 |
| Armament: |
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| Armour: |
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| Notes: | 2,164–2,238 tons coal maximum; 380 tons oil |
HMS Africa was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy. She was the penultimate ship of the King Edward VII class. Laid down on 27 January 1904, she launched 20 May 1905 and was completed November 1906. Like all ships of the class (apart from HMS King Edward VII), she was named after an important part of the British Empire, namely Africa.
Africa was a powerful ship when she was designed but during her constructions revolutionary advances in naval design occurred and she joined the fleet in November 1906 but was made obsolete the next month by the commissioning of the first of the Dreadnought class ships.
Decommissioned in 1918, Africa was placed on the sale list in March 1920, was sold for scrapping on 30 June 1920 and scrapped at Newcastle.
HMS Africa was laid down at Chatham Dockyard on 27 January 1904, launched on 20 May 1905, and completed in November 1906. She was the last battleship constructed at Chatham, later classes of battleships being too large for the yard.
Although Africa and her seven sister ships of the King Edward VII class were a direct descendant of the Majestic class, they were also the first class to make a significant departure from the Majestic design, displacing about 1,000 tons more and mounting for the first time an intermediate battery of four 9.2-inch (234 mm) guns in addition to the standard outfit of 6-inch (152 mm) guns. The 9.2-inch was a quick-firing gun like the 6-inch, and its heavier shell made it a formidable weapon by the standards of the day when Africa and her sisters were designed; it was adopted out of concerns that British battleships were undergunned for their displacement and were becoming outgunned by foreign battleships that had begun to mount 8-inch (203 mm) intermediate batteries. The four 9.2-inch were mounted in single turrets abreast the foremast and mainmast, and Africa thus could bring two of them to bear on either broadside. Even then, Africa and her sisters were criticised for not having a uniform secondary battery of 9.2-inch guns, something considered but rejected because of the length of time it would have taken to design the ships with such a radical revision of the secondary armament layout. In the end, it proved impossible to distinguish 12-inch and 9.2-inch shell splashes from one another, making fire control impractical for ships mounting both calibres, although Africa had fire-control platforms on her fore- and mainmasts rather than the fighting tops of earlier classes.
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Wikipedia