Turret versus Broadside

<p>On the 150th anniversary of the capsizing of Britain’s low-freeboard yet fully-masted ironclad, HMS <em>Captain</em>, this widely-researched, intensive analysis of the great ‘Turret versus Broadside’ debate sheds new light on how the most well-funded and professional navy in the world at the height of its power could nevertheless build an ‘inherently unstable’ capital ship.</p> <p>Utilising an impressive array of government reports, contemporary periodicals, and unpublished personal papers this definitive study crucially provides for the first time both a long-term and international context.  The 1860s was a pivotal decade in the evolution of British national identity as well as warship design. Nor were these two elements mutually exclusive.  1860 began gloriously with the launch of Britain’s first ocean-going ironclad, HMS <em>Warrior</em>, but 1870 ended badly with the <em>Captain</em>.  Along the way, British public and political faith in the supremacy of the Royal Navy was not reaffirmed as some histories suggest, but wavered.  The growing emphasis upon new technologies including ever heavier guns and thicker armour plating for men-of-war was not ‘decisive’ but divisive, as pressure mounted to somehow combine the range of <em>Warrior</em> with the unique protection and hitting power of American monitor-ironclads of the Civil War.  As the geopolitical debate over rival ironclad proposals intensified, aggressively-minded Prime Minister Lord Palmerston gradually adopted a non-interventionist foreign policy which surprised his contemporaries.  <em>Turret versus Broadside</em> traces the previously unexplored connection between an increasingly schizophrenic Admiralty for and against the <em>Captain</em>, for example, and sabre-rattling mid-Victorians sinking into an era of ‘Splendid Isolation’.</p>