Everyone knows the 1941 film of HMS Barham rolling over and exploding. Almost nobody has seen how she was built: designed in 1912 around a 15-inch gun nobody had fired yet, and laid down at John Brown's Clydebank yard in February 1913.

This documentary follows the build machine by machine. We look at the Admiralty's 1912 decision to order the 15-inch gun straight from the drawing board and to burn oil only, and at the Brown-Curtis turbine that won Clydebank the contract, scaled up from HMS Bristol and HMS Tiger to 75,000 shaft horsepower. We cover the first 15-inch turret test on 6 May 1914, more than 14 months into the build, the New Year's Eve launch in 1914, and the Titan hammerhead crane lowering 100-ton guns into her turrets in the fitting-out basin.

We cover the roughly 10,000 people who worked the yard, what the record says and doesn't say about the cost in lives, and the verdict on the gamble: 337 shells fired at Jutland, 23.9 knots against a promised 25, and the Board of Enquiry's finding on the magazines that exploded in 1941.

#HMSBarham #Battleship #Shipbuilding #Clydebank #RoyalNavy #NavalHistory #ww1

Sources: Wikipedia articles on HMS Barham (04), the Queen Elizabeth-class battleship, the BL 15-inch Mk I naval gun, John Brown & Company, Titan Clydebank, HMS Tiger (1913), HMS Bristol (1910), HMS Valiant (1914), RMS Aquitania and HMS Duchess (H64); NavWeaps, British 15"/42 Mark I; ASCE, Titan Crane landmark; National Records of Scotland, John Brown & Co. photograph collection (ScotlandsPeople image library); British Pathé, HMS Barham newsreel.

This video is for educational and historical documentation purposes.

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