Two ''Ferret''-class destroyers served with the

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. and were built by

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, displaced 280 tons and were in overall length.

Armament

They were armed with one 12-pounder and three 6-pounder guns, and three torpedo tubes (two on deck mounts and one fixed bow tube). The bow tube was soon removed, and provision was made for removing the deck tubes and substituting two extra 6-pounder guns. They carried a complement of 42 (later raised to 53).

Background

The invention of the

self-propelled torpedo A modern torpedo is an underwater ranged weapon launched above or below the water surface, self-propelled towards a target, with an explosive warhead designed to detonate either on contact with or in proximity to the target. Historically, such ...

in the 1860s, combined with the introduction of small fast

torpedo boat A torpedo boat is a relatively small and fast naval ship designed to carry torpedoes into battle. The first designs were steam-powered craft dedicated to ramming enemy ships with explosive spar torpedoes. Later evolutions launched variants of ...

s posed a threat to

battleship A battleship is a large, heavily naval armour, armored warship with a main battery consisting of large naval gun, guns, designed to serve as a capital ship. From their advent in the late 1880s, battleships were among the largest and most form ...

s: large numbers of torpedo boats could overwhelm a battleship's defences and sink it, or distract the battleship and make it vulnerable to opposing capital ships. Torpedo boats proved devastatingly effective in the

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. The defence against torpedo boats was clear: small warships accompanying the fleet that could screen and protect it from attack by torpedo boats. Several European navies developed vessels variously known as torpedo boat "catchers", "hunters" and "destroyers", while the Royal Navy itself operated

torpedo gunboat In the late 19th century, torpedo gunboats were a form of gunboat armed with torpedoes and designed for hunting and destroying smaller torpedo boats. By the end of the 1890s torpedo gunboats were superseded by their more successful contemporaries, ...

s. However, the early designs lacked the range and speed to keep up with the fleet they were supposed to protect. In 1892, the

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Jackie Fisher ordered the development of a new type of ships equipped with the then novel

water-tube boiler A high pressure watertube boiler (also spelled water-tube and water tube) is a type of boiler in which water circulates in tubes heated externally by fire. Fuel is burned inside the furnace, creating hot gas which boils water in the steam-generat ...

s and quick-firing small calibre guns.

Orders

Six ships to the specifications circulated by the Admiralty were ordered initially, comprising three different designs each produced by a different shipbuilder: * and from Yarrow (the ). * and from John I. Thornycroft & Company (the ''Daring'' class) * and from Laird, Son & Company .

Design

These boats all featured a turtleback (i.e. rounded)

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that was characteristic of early British TBDs. All six of them were removed from service and disposed of by the end of 1912, and thus were not affected by the Admiralty decision in 1913 to group all the surviving 27-knot and 30-knot destroyers (which had followed on these six 26-knot vessels) into four heterogeneous classes, labelled "A", "B", "C" and "D" classes. The ''Ferret''-class destroyers were followed by the larger which were built by Lairds less than a year later.

Bibliography

* * * * * * * {{A class destroyer (1913) Destroyer classes Ship classes of the Royal Navy