The Lion class were a pair of battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I. Nicknamed the "Splendid Cats", the ships were a significant improvement over their predecessors of the in speed, armament and armour. These improvements were in response to the German battlecruisers of the , which were in turn larger and more powerful than the first British battlecruisers of the .
served as the flagship of the Grand Fleet's battlecruisers throughout World War I. She sank the German light cruiser during the Battle of Heligoland Bight in August 1914 and participated in the battles of Dogger Bank in 1915 and Jutland the following year. She was so badly damaged at the Battle of Dogger Bank that she had to be towed back to port. During the Battle of Jutland, Lion suffered a serious cordite fire that could have destroyed the ship.
Her sister ship, , also played a role in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, and was then sent south to the Caribbean to intercept the German East Asia Squadron in case they used the Panama Canal. After the squadron was sunk at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, Princess Royal rejoined the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron (BCS). During the Battle of Dogger Bank, she scored only a few hits, but one crippled the German armoured cruiser , which allowed the enemy vessel to be caught and sunk by the concentrated fire of the British battlecruisers. Shortly afterwards, Princess Royal became the flagship of the 1st BCS and participated in the Battle of Jutland. Both ships were present during the inconclusive Action of 19 August 1916.
The sisters spent the rest of the war on uneventful patrols in the North Sea; they provided distant cover during the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917. In 1920, they were put into reserve and were then sold for scrap a few years later in accordance with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922.
Design and description
The acceleration of the German naval building programme in 1907–1908 forced H. H. Asquith's Liberal Government to yield to public pressure and authorise more ships for the 1909–1910 Construction Programme. Only a single battleship and a battlecruiser had been authorised in 1908–1909, but three battleships and a battlecruiser were authorised in 1909–1910 with another three battleships and a battlecruiser planned as contingency ships to placate the public and the Admiralty. Continuing pressure forced the government to announce in July 1909 that the contingency ships would also be built. This pressure also allowed the Admiralty to gain approval to improve the size and power of its new ships so as to maintain qualitative superiority over the new German dreadnoughts then under construction.
The Lion-class battlecruisers were designed to be as superior to the new German battlecruisers of the Moltke class as the German ships were to the Invincible class. The increase in speed, armour and gun size forced a 40% increase in size over the Indefatigable class and made them the largest warships in the world. Their layout was adapted from the design of the first "super-dreadnought" class, the s of 1910, with 13.5-inch (343 mm) guns. The ships were the first battlecruisers to be armed with the new 13.5-inch Mk V gun. The design of the Lions remedied some of the shortcomings of the preceding battlecruisers, which suffered from an inability of the en echelon amidships turrets to safely fire across the deck, limiting them to a three-turret broadside. This was done because the greater size and weight of the new guns rendered wing turrets impracticable. As such, all four turrets in the Lions were arranged on the centreline; 'Q' turret was located amidships and could only fire on the broadside. The Director of Naval Construction, Sir Philip Watts, suggested that a fifth turret, superfiring over the rear turret, could be added if the ship was lengthened by three frames, in total, and that this would add very little cost other than the £175,000 for the additional turret but add 25% more firepower to the ship. This was not approved, possibly because of doubts about its feasibility.
General characteristics
The Lions were significantly larger than their predecessors of the . They had an overall length of , a beam of , and a draught of at deep load. They displaced at normal load and at deep load, over more than the earlier ships. They had a metacentric height of at deep load.