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• Dreadnoughts and battlecruisers

• Majestic class battleships 1894 – 1896

• HMS Dreadnought, battleship 1906

• Orion class battleships 1910 – 1911

• Queen Elizabeth class battleships 1913 – 1915

• HMS Invincible, battlecruiser 1907

• HMS Tiger, battlecruiser 1913

Majestic class 1894 – 1896

Ships of the class were HM Ships Majestic, Caesar, Hannibal, Illustrious, Jupiter, Magnificent, Mars, Prince George and Victorious. The ships were 14 890 tons with a complement of 672 men and could reach a top speed of around 16 knots.

Majestic-class battleship HMS Jupiter (1895) coaling at Alexandria c.1900. (RNM)

With nine ships, this was the largest class of battleships ever built anywhere in the world. Experts considered the ships a great success and the design formed the basis of many classes that followed.

HMS Dreadnought revolutionised battleship design making all pre-Dreadnought ships obsolete. If taken as a typical pre-dreadnought class used at the turn of the 20th century, the Majestics can chart the difference between the pre-dreadnoughts and subsequent dreadnought designs.

As with all battleships of the time, the Majestics were powered by coal-fired triple expansion steam engines. They had a thick belt of armour round their vital parts, four long-barrelled guns in even more heavily armoured turrets with magazines directly below, about 12 lesser cannons in casemates along the sides and smaller rapid firing guns to deal with torpedo boats.

HMS Jupiter (1895) hoisting in torpedo netting. Ships used the netting as a defensive device against torpedoes from around 1890, when torpedoes were becoming a more advanced threat within naval combat. The Navy would suspend the nets consisting of rings of galvanised iron around the sides of the ship below the waterline in order to protect the ship's hull. Torpedo nets were used until the after the Battle of Jutland in 1916 when nets damaged by naval gunfire got tangled in the propellers of ships. (RNM)

The Royal Navy fitted the Majestic class with a new main armament of 12-inch guns, considered superior to the 13.5-inch guns they replaced. There were also improvements in the way the guns were mounted.

The high velocity 12-inch guns were also possible by the introduction of “cordite� as a smokeless propellant. In order to gain the maximum benefit from the use of cordite the guns had to have longer barrels in order that the shell could reach a higher velocity before leaving the muzzle.

The introduction of this technology and type of gun resulted in weight and space saving. This allowed for a larger provision of secondary armament and more ammunition for the quick firing smaller guns, which was important in tackling the fast torpedo boats being introduced to the fleets in the late 19th century.

Another example of weight saving then being applied elsewhere was the use of Harvey armour which because it gave the equivalent protection with much reduced thickness more areas of the ships could be so protected. The Majestics had 9-inches of armour around their middle with 14-inches on their barbettes.

Since the Royal Navy had moved from the age of sail to the age of steam, British battleships had been fitted with expansion engines.

The Majestic battleships were powered by coal-fired triple expansion engines that would reuse the steam they made, making them more economical than the original single expansion engines as they used less coal and manpower.

Triple Expansion Engine of an ironclad. The steam would start off in the smallest engine when the pressure was at its highest and then progress through the other two chambers. The cylinders have to be increasingly bigger in order to extract the same amount of pressure and power as the steam continually expands. (RNM)

Another feature of naval life on battleships that did not begin to alter until the introduction of the Queen Elizabeth class dreadnoughts of 1914-15 was the job of coaling the ship.

The Navy needed massive amounts of coal in order to power the ships. Coaling ship was a dirty job which the majority of the ship’s crew would have to help out with.

Stokehold, HMS Majestic (1895). Photograph of two stokers at work in pre-Dreadnought battleship HMS Majestic. The stokehold was a hot and dangerous place to work in and their jobs also held little chance of promotion, hence stokers were paid more money than other naval ratings. (RNM)

The Royal Navy also used the class for experiments in new technology. The Royal Navy used HMS Victorious to carry out experiments in “methods of controlling, directing and ranging gun fire in action�. This included testing out internal communications on board including early versions of electrical equipment.

The Royal Navy also fitted these ships with early and experimental wireless telegraphy (W/T) apparatus in 1902.