Hold onto your hats, because I’m about to use the word ‘iconic’.
I think there’s justification though, because we’re going to look at the two huge battleship guns that stand outside the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, and if the picture of those guns with the classical portico and cupola above the entrance to the museum isn’t an iconic image, I don’t know what is.
They come from the WW1 dreadnoughts HMS Resolution and HMs Ramillies, two of the five wonderfully-named ‘Revenge’ class ships built between 1913 and 1919. These are 15” guns (38cm) that could fire a 1,900lb (875kg) shell 33,000 yards (about 19 miles, or 30km. We’re very much dealing with’imperial’ measurements here.) You can see examples of those shells next to the guns at the museum.
Neither ship saw combat in WW1 because by the time they were completed, (Resolution in 1916 and Ramillies the following year) we are post the Battle of Jutland and the German High Seas fleet was keeping pretty much to home waters, and the British Grand Fleet was wary of German submarines and mines.
Both ships were in service in the Mediterranean during the interwar period, but their paths diverged at the outbreak of WW2. Ramillies took convoy escort duties in the Atlantic and then the Indian ocean (where one of its crew was the young Philip Mountbatten), bombarded ports in the Med, was involved in the hunt for the Bismarck, before being badly damaged by a Japanese midget submarine during the 1942 British invasion of Madagascar. It was then repaired and updated (even at the start of the war these ships were not modern enough for the most important naval tasks) so that it could act as a bombardment vessel during the Allied invasions of Normandy and southern France.
Resolution’s WW2 saw attacking the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir, and being torpedoed by a French submarine at the Battle of Dakar, actions taken against the Vichy French navy to stop that fleet being of use to the Nazis. It was also an escort vessel for the Arctic convoys that resupplied the Soviet Union, in conditions so brutally cold that the ice had to be hacked of the ships’ decks each day to stop the prevent the vessels from becoming top heavy and unstable, and where an ungloved hand would immediately freeze onto the metal of the superstructure.
However, ‘our’ gun wasn’t on the Resolution by this point, as it had been taken off and fitted to HMS Roberts, a ‘monitor’ (described as a relatively small ship with relatively big guns – essentially a bombardment platform) where it had a full career supporting various Allied invasions – Operation Torch (North Africa), Husky (Sicily), Avalanche (Salerno) – and for British troops coming ashore on Sword Beach during D Day and Overlord.
Ramillies and Resolution were both scrapped in 1948 and Roberts in 1965. The guns were in storage until 1968 when they were installed in front of the museum. The 1960s date probably explains the rather stark, brutalist concrete plinth on which they now stand.
Walk up to them from the main gate, up the path fringed with lavender and contemplate what fearsome weapons they were, the realisation of the death and destruction they wrought contrasting with the smell of the flowers within which you stand.
And for further contrast: a few years ago a starling made its nest in the Ramillies gun, the chamber that fired those 1,900lb shells echoing to the cheeping of the chicks.
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