HMS Good Hope (1901)

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Career

Ordered:
Laid down:	11 September 1899 at Fairfield Shipyard, Govan, Scotland
Launched:	21 February 1901
Commissioned:
Fate:	Sunk at the battle of Coronel 1 November 1914
Struck:
General characteristics
Displacement:	14,100 tons
Length:	529.5 ft (161.4 m) overall, 515 ft (157 m) at waterline
Beam:	71 ft (21.6 m)
Draught:	28 ft (8.5 m) maximum
Propulsion:	43 coal-fired Belleville boilers providing steam for two 4-cylinder triple expansion steam engines, twin screws. 30,000 ihp
Speed:	23 knots maximum
Range:	7,000 nautical miles at 14 knots
Complement:	900
Armament:	Two 9.2 inch guns in single turrets, Sixteen 6 inch guns in casemates along hull, Twelve 12 pounder guns, Three 3 pounder guns, Two 18 inch submerged torpedo tubes. Director fire control fitted in 1905-1906.
Armour:	11.5 ft wide 6 inch belt amidships thinning to 3 inches at bow, 6 inch barbettes, 6 inch turrets, 12 inch conning tower
Motto:

HMS Good Hope was a 14,100-ton Drake-class armoured cruiser of the Royal Navy; she was originally planned to be named Africa, but was renamed before she was launched. Laid down on 11 September 1899 and launched on 21 February 1901, with her heaviest gun being of 9.2 inch calibre, she became the flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron, Atlantic Fleet, in 1906, and in 1908 became the flagship of the 2nd Cruiser Squadron.

She went into the Reserve Fleet in 1913, but following the mobilisation just before the outbreak of the First World War, she joined the 6th Cruiser Squadron. The 6th Cruiser Squadron was initially allocated to the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow to replace the 4th Cruiser Squadron (of Monmouth class cruisers) which had previously been sent to Rear-Admiral Sir Christopher Craddock's North America and West Indies command to help protect British interests during the Mexican Revolution.

However, the Admiralty almost immediately (mistakenly) concluded that it was likely that German liners in New York and other ports on the United States Atlantic seaboard could convert themselves to armed merchant cruisers by installing guns which the Admiralty believed they carried in their holds. They therefore diverted Good Hope to further reinforce Craddock's force, and she left Portsmouth on 2 August 1914 under the command of Captain Philip Francklin. Craddock transferred his flag to her on her arrival at Halifax, Nova Scotia because, although 90% of her crew were reservists who had been given little opportunity to train together in the ship, she was faster than his current flagship HMS Suffolk.

For the next few weeks she was employed protecting British merchant shipping as far south as Pernambuco and later the Falkland Islands. She then embarked on the search for the German East Asiatic Squadron, leaving Stanley on 22 October for the west coast of South America via Cape Horn.

She was sunk along with HMS Monmouth by the German armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau under Admiral Graf Maximilian von Spee with the loss of her entire complement of 900 hands in the Battle of Coronel, on 1 November 1914, off the Chilean coast.

See HMS Good Hope for other ships of this name.

[edit] References

Geoffrey Bennet (2000). Coronel and the Falklands. Birlinn Limited. ISBN 1-84158-045-7.
(1990) Jane's Fighting Ships of World War I. Studio Editions. ISBN 1-85170-378-0.
The Coronel Memorial