HMS London - Paul Wright RSMA

H.M.S London. Pre-Dreadnought battleship. Built 1902. 15,000 tons.

London represented one of the last pre-Dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy before the huge reforms in the Royal Navy instituted by Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher, which swept away whole classes of warships and instituted the era of the all big gun battleship as represented by the first, H.M.S Dreadnought.

From then on, London and her sisters were relegated to supporting roles within the fleet. In WW1, London supported the Italian Navy in it's containment of the Austrian fleet in the Adriatic. After a busy though hardly very active service, H.M.S London was scrapped in 1920.

Acrylic on paper

18 x 24 inches (46cm x 61cm)