HMS General Craufurd was the one of eight s built for the Royal Navy during World War I. Their primary armament was taken from obsolete pre-dreadnought battleships. The ship spent the war in the English Channel bombarding German positions along the Belgian coast as part of the Dover Patrol. She participated in the failed First and Second Ostend Raids in 1918, bombarding the defending coastal artillery as the British attempted to block the Bruges–Ostend Canal. Later that year General Craufurd supported the coastal battles during the Hundred Days Offensive until the Germans evacuated coastal Belgium in mid-October. The ship was decommissioned almost immediately after the war ended the following month, but she was reactivated in 1920 to serve as a gunnery training ship for a year. General Craufurd was sold for scrap in 1921.
Design
All of the British monitors built during the war were intended to bombard land targets. To this end the Lord Clive class were given a heavy armament modified to increase its range and a shallow draught to allow them to work inshore as necessary. As the Royal Navy did not expect the ships to engage in naval combat, speed was very much not a priority. General Craufurd had an overall length of , a beam of including the torpedo bulge, without, and a draught of at deep load. She displaced at deep load and her crew numbered 12 officers and 182 ratings. The ship was powered by a pair of four-cylinder Harland & Wolff triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller shaft using steam provided by two water-tube boilers. The engines were designed to produce a total of which was intended to give her a maximum speed of . On her sea trials General Craufurd only made because her designers were unfamiliar with the proper way to contour her hull to maximise her propeller efficiency; the ship reached in service as she was more heavily loaded. The monitor carried of coal which gave her a range of at .
Armament, fire control, and armour
The Lord Clives mounted two BL Mk VIII guns in a single hydraulically powered gun turret which came from the predreadnought battleships; General Craufurd received hers from . To suit their new role as long-range bombardment weapons, the turrets were modified to increase the maximum elevation of the guns from 13.5° to 30°. Their secondary armament consisted of a pair of quick-firing (QF) 12-pounder () guns on low-angle mounts. Anti-aircraft defence was provided by a single QF 3-inch 20-cwt gun and a QF 2-pounder () Mk I gun.
The spotting top on the tripod mast between the turret and the funnel housed a rangefinder that fed data to the director on the roof of the spotting top. The director's crew would calculate the amount of traverse and elevation needed to hit the target and transmit that information to the turret for the guns to follow.
The Lord Clive-class ships were protected against gunfire by a sloping waterline belt amidships of Krupp cemented armour (KCA) that was closed off at its ends by transverse bulkheads of equal thicknesses to form the ships' central armoured citadel. The upper deck of high-tensile steel served as the roof of the citadel and the forecastle deck above it consisted of plates of high-tensile steel. For protection against torpedoes, the ships were fitted with bulges deep.
The turret taken from Magnificent retained its original armour, viz. faces and sides with a 2-inch roof, all of Harvey armour. Its original circular barbettes was replaced by a new one formed from a dozen plates of KCA. The ships were also fitted with a cast-steel conning tower just forward of the barbette that had 6-inch sides and a roof thick.
Wartime modifications
Four QF 6-inch guns with 200 rounds per gun were added in early 1916 abreast the funnel when it was realized that the two 12-pounder guns were not powerful enough to defend the ship from German destroyers. Two coal bunkers were turned into magazines for them, reducing the range to approximately , and increasing the crew in size to 215, necessitating plating in the sides of much of the upper deck to provide quarters. These guns were later exchanged for longer-ranged 6-inch Mk VII guns. The 3-pounder gun was replaced by another QF 3-inch 20-cwt anti-aircraft gun late in the war.