HMS Queen Mary
HMS Queen Mary was the last battlecruiser built by the Royal Navy before the First World War. She participated in the Battle of Heligoland Bight as part of the Grand Fleet in 1914. The ship never left the North Sea during the war and her wreck was discovered in 1991. Queen Mary is designated as a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.
About HMS Queen Mary in brief
HMS Queen Mary was the last battlecruiser built by the Royal Navy before the First World War. She was completed in 1913 and participated in the Battle of Heligoland Bight as part of the Grand Fleet in 1914. The ship never left the North Sea during the war and her wreck was discovered in 1991. Queen Mary is designated as a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 as it is the grave of 1,266 officers and ratings. Her wreck rests in pieces, some of which are upside down, on the floor of the North sea. She is named for Mary of Teck, the wife of King George V, who was the Queen’s representative at the ship’s christening on 20 March 1912. Her secondary armament consisted of sixteen BL 4-inch Mk VII guns, which were mounted in casemates on the deck, unlike the Lion-class arrangement in which they were mounted on the forecastle. Her range was 5,610 nautical miles at a speed of 10 knots. Queen Mary mounted eight BL 13. 5- inch Mk V guns in four twin hydraulically powered turrets, designated ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘Q’ and ‘X’ from bow to stern. They fired 1,250-pound projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 2,550 ft per minute. The guns could also be depressed to 20° and elevated to 15°, although the director controlling the prisms was 21′ until before the battle of Jutland in May 1916 to allow full elevation, this provided a maximum range of 23,820 yds. She had two paired sets of Parsons direct-drive steam turbines housed in separate engine rooms.
The steam plant consisted of 42 Yarrow boilers arranged in seven boiler rooms. Maximum bunkerage was 3,600 long tons of coal and 1,170 long tons of fuel oil to be sprayed on the coal to increase its burn rate. In peacetime, the crew numbered 997 officers and. ratings, but this increased to 1,275 during wartime. The ship normally displaced 26,770 long tons and 31,650 long tons at deep load, over 1,000 longtons more than the earlier ships. She carried a total of 880 rounds for wartime for 110 shells per round. Her magazines exploded shortly afterwards, sinking the ship in mid-1916 after being hit twice by the German battlecruisers Derfflinger during the early part of. the battle and her magazines exploded after she was hit by another German ship during the battle. The Queen Mary, the only ship of her name ever to serve in the Navy, was the first battlecruizer to mount a sternwalk. She differed from her predecessors of the Lion class in the distribution of her secondary armaments and armour and in the location of the officers’ quarters. Every capital ship since the design of the battleship Dreadnought in 1905 had placed the Officers’ quarters closer to their action stations amidships; after complaints from the Fleet, Queen Mary restored the quarters to their traditional place in the stern.
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This page is based on the article HMS Queen Mary published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
