Two ''Fervent''-class destroyers served with the
Royal Navy
The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...
.
Under the 1893–1894 Naval Estimates, the
British Admiralty
The Admiralty was a department of the Government of the United Kingdom responsible for the command of the Royal Navy until 1964, historically under its titular head, the Lord High Admiral – one of the Great Officers of State. For much of it ...
placed orders for 36
torpedo-boat destroyer
In naval terminology, a destroyer is a fast, manoeuvrable, long-endurance warship intended to escort
larger vessels in a fleet, convoy or battle group and defend them against powerful short range attackers. They were originally developed in 1 ...
s, all to be capable of , the "27-knotters", as a follow-on to the six prototype "26-knotters" ordered in the previous 1892–1893 Estimates. As was typical for torpedo craft at the time, the Admiralty left detailed design to the builders, laying down only broad requirements.
[Chesneau and Kolesnik 1979, p. 87.][Manning 1961, p. 39.]
and were designed and built by
Hanna Donald in 1895. The ships displaced 275 tons and were long. Their locomotive (later
Reed
Reed or Reeds may refer to:
Science, technology, biology, and medicine
* Reed bird (disambiguation)
* Reed pen, writing implement in use since ancient times
* Reed (plant), one of several tall, grass-like wetland plants of the order Poales
* Re ...
) boilers generated which produced a top speed of between 26 and 27 knots. As was usual with ships of their type, they carried one 12-pounder, two torpedo tubes and had a complement of 53 officers and men.
Both ships served in home waters. They originally were designed with one funnel but when they failed to reach their contract speed they were reboilered with four funnels. Due to these problems, the ships did not leave their builders until 1901.
In September 1913 the Admiralty re-classed all the surviving 27-knotter destroyers, including ''Fervent'' and ''Zephyr'' as
A Class destroyers.
See also
*
A-class destroyer (1913)
The A class as designated in 1913 was a heterogeneous group of torpedo boat destroyers (TBDs) built for the Royal Navy in the mid-1890s. Some 42 vessels were constructed to the individual designs of their builders to meet Admiralty specificati ...
Citations
References
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{{A class destroyer (1913)
Destroyer classes
Ship classes of the Royal Navy