Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt

Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt

Sir Eustace Henry William Tennyson-d'Eyncourt, 1st Baronet (1 April 1868 – 1 February 1951) was a British naval architect and engineer. As Director of Naval Construction for the Royal Navy, 1912-24, he was responsible for the design and construction of some of the most famous British warships.

Tennyson-d'Eyncourt was related to:
*The politician Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt (d. 1861), uncle of the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson, and also to
*Admiral Edwin Tennyson d'Eyncourt.

Life and Work

Tennyson-d'Eyncourt was a ship designer for Armstrongs. In 1910-11 he was their Special Envoy to South America negotiating contracts for battleships and as such was responsible for securing the contract for and the design of a battleship for the Brazilian Navy, the Rio de Janeiro - which later became HMS Agincourt on the outbreak of World War One - and two for the Chilean Navy, the Almirante Latorre class, of which the first was taken over as HMS Canada.

In 1912 he was asked by the Admiralty to become the Royal Navy's Director of Naval Construction (DNC) where he succeeded Phillip Watts. His predecessor had designed the Queen Elizabeth class battleships and Tennyson d'Eyncourt's first task was to design the next class of British 15-inch gun capital ships which became the Royal Sovereign or Revenge class battleships of 1913. The last two ships of this class were then redesigned as the battlecruisers Renown and Repulse. At the same time he designed the first class of light cruisers, the Arethusa class, and went on to design their successors in the 'C', 'D' and 'E' classes. Following Admiral Sir John Fisher's ideas of a "large light cruiser" armed with very heavy guns for use in the Baltic, he designed the Courageous, Glorious and Furious (the last-named briefly carried an 18-inch gun), all of which were subsequently converted to aircraft carriers. In 1917 he evolved the design allowing the ex-Chilean battleship Almirante Cochrane, which he had designed while still at Armstrongs, to be rebuilt as the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle.

After the Revenges Tennyson d'Eyncourt was asked to provide a "fast battleship", a brief that his designer E. L. Attwood turned into the Admiral class battlecruiser design, only one of which would be built - "the mighty Hood". He was also involved in the "Landships Committee" set up at the Admiralty which led to the development of the tank, and until 1917 was responsible for the construction of all rigid airships.

Because of a perceived need to track down German commerce raiders and counter large cruisers that the Germans were erroneously believed to be building, he designed the medium-sized cruisers of the so-called 'Improved Birmingham' class, later called the Cavendish class and finally the Hawkins class, armed with 7.5-inch guns. The existence of these comparatively large cruisers with long range capability was one of the factors that led to the setting of upper limits for heavy cruiser design in the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, and the three-funnelled ‘Kent' Class 8-inch cruisers which Tennyson d'Eyncourt next designed were the first British cruisers to have to conform to treaty limits. In fact the Washington Treaty, aimed as it was at preventing a new naval arms race on the part of Britain, Japan and the USA to produce a generation of ‘super battleships', curtailed what would have been Tennyson d'Eyncourt's most ambitious designs. The battleships Nelson and Rodney, his last capital ships, were essentially a truncated form of the pre-Washington 'St.George' project.

In World War Two he was one of "The Old Gang" (TOG), properly known as the Special Vehicle Development Committee, a group of British engineers and army officers who had been instrumental in bringing the first British tanks to the battlefield). Together they drew up two heavy tank designs, the TOG 1 and TOG 2 - these 80 ton prototypes were designed to cross battlefield conditions like the those of the First world War but never came to fruition.

He was created a baronet on 3 February 1930.

Design characteristics

In his battlecruisers, ‘large light cruisers' and the Hawkins class cruisers Tennyson d'Eyncourt evolved a novel hull form: in cross-section the hull was a rhomboid with the ship's sides sloping inboard at an angle of 10 degrees from the vertical, while outboard of this external bulges extended over the full length of the machinery spaces. This resulted in a hull structure of great strength, and the sloping sides increased the possible range of impact of shells and thus gave greater resistance to penetration. The aesthetic side of naval architecture has seldom been given much attention, though it is as much of an art as the architecture of buildings; but in general appearance (in terms of harmonious proportion as regards length, beam and freeboard, and the size of superstructures and funnels in relation to the hull), the opinion might be expressed that Tennyson d'Eyncourt created some of the most elegant and eye-pleasing warships ever designed, the prime example being the battle-cruiser Hood.

Ship designs

(Tennyson d'Eyncourt was not necessarily the principal designer of all these vessels but had ultimate responsibility for them)

Battleships and Battlecruisers

*Brazilian battleship, later HMS Agincourt
*Turkish battleship, later HMS Erin
*Chilean battleships Almirante Latorre, later HMS Canada and Almirante Cochrane, later HMS Eagle (aircraft Carrier)
*Royal Sovereign class battleship
*Renown class battlecruiser
*HMS Hood battlecruiser
*several very large capital ship designs, both battleships and battlecruisers, rendered inadmissable under the Washington Naval Treaty
*HMS Nelson battleship

Cruisers

*GRC Katsonis
**HMS Chester
*Arethusa class (1912)
*C class cruisers (1912-17)
**Caroline class
**Calliope class
**HMS Champion
**Cambrian class
**Centaur class
**Caledon class
**Ceres class
**Carlisle class
*Hawkins class large cruisers (1915)
*D class cruisers (1916-18)
**HMS Danae
**HMS Dragon
**HMS Diomede
*HMS Enterprise (Emerald class cruiser)) (1917-18)
*HMS Kent (County class cruiser) (1923-24)

"large light cruisers", later aircraft carriers

*HMS Courageous
*HMS Furious

Destroyers

*R and S class destroyers
*V and W class destroyers
*Scott class flotilla leaders

Submarines

*"J" class
*"K" class

Other types

Monitors, Patrol boats, Minesweepers, Sloops, Gunboats for China Station, Merchant ship conversions into seaplane carriers

Writings

Tennyson d'Eyncourt summarized his World War I work in an article 'Naval Construction During the War', published in Engineering, 11 April 1919, pp.482-490. He also published an autobiography entitled A Shipbuilder's Yarn (London: Hutchinson, c. 1940).