HMS Prince Rupert

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A painting of Prince Rupert
History
United Kingdom
Name	Prince Rupert
Builder	William Hamilton & Co, Port Glasgow
Laid down	12 January 1915
Launched	20 May 1915
Decommissioned	1923
Fate	Scrapped, 1923
General characteristics
Class and type	Lord Clive-class monitor
Displacement	6,150 tons
Length	335 ft (102.1 m)
Beam	87 ft (26.5 m)
Draught	9.7 ft (3.0 m)
Propulsion	2 shafts, reciprocating steam engines, 2 boilers, 2,310 hp
Speed	6.5 knots (12.0 km/h; 7.5 mph)
Complement	187
Armament	2 × 12 in (305 mm) guns 2 × 3 in (76 mm) guns

HMS Prince Rupert was a First World War Royal Navy Lord Clive-class monitor named after Prince Rupert of the Rhine, an important Royalist commander of the English Civil War and key figure in the Restoration navy. Although she is the only ship of the Royal Navy to have ever had this precise name, other ships have been named after Prince Rupert as HMS Rupert. Her 12" main battery was stripped from the obsolete Majestic-class battleships.

The Lord Clive-class monitors were built in 1915 to engage German shore artillery in occupied Belgium during the First World War. Prince Rupert, with her sisters was regularly engaged in this service in the Dover Monitor Squadron, bombarding German positions along the coast and someway inland with their heavy guns.

Following the armistice in November 1918, Prince Rupert and all her sisters were put into reserve pending scrapping, as the reason for their existence had ended with the liberation of Belgium. In 1923 Prince Rupert was scrapped, outliving all her sister ships by two years as she had been briefly attached to the stone frigate HMS Pembroke at Chatham Dockyard.

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