HMS Sirius (1892)

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Career (United Kingdom) Royal Navy Ensign
Name: HMS Sirius
Builder: Armstrong, Elswick
Laid down: September 1889
Launched: 27 October 1890
Commissioned: 1892
Fate: Scuttled as blockship, 23 April 1918
General characteristics
Displacement: 3,600 tons
Length: 314 feet (95.7 m)
Beam: 43.5 feet (13.3 m)
Draught: 17.5 feet (5.3 m)
Speed: 19.75 knots
Complement: 273 to 300 (Officers and Men)
Armament:

2 × QF 6-inch (152.4 mm) guns
6 × QF 4.7-inch (120 mm) guns[1]
8 × 6 pounders
2 to 4 × 14 inch Torpedo Tubes

Converted in 1914 to a lightly armed minelayer.

HMS Sirius was an Apollo-class cruiser of the British Royal Navy which served from 1892 to 1918 in various colonial posts such as the South and West African coastlines and off the British Isles as a hastily converted minelayer during the First World War. In April 1918, Sirius was deliberately scuttled in the mouth of Ostend harbour in Belgium during the failed First Ostend Raid. This operation was intended to block the harbour mouth and prevent the transit of German U-boats and other raiding craft from Bruges to the North Sea. German countermeasures were however too effective, and Sirius and its fellow blockship HMS Brilliant were eventually destroyed by their crews outside the harbour mouth after running aground on a sandbank. The wrecks were broken up after the war.

Notes

  1. Admiral Percy Scott quotes 6 x 4.7 inch guns on sister ship HMS Scylla in 1899. "Fifty Years in the Royal Navy" published 1919, page 88