Mediterranean Fleet - Pre-Second World War

Pre-Second World War

The Royal Navy gained a foothold in the Mediterranean Sea when Gibraltar was taken by the British in 1704 during the War of Spanish Succession, and formally allocated to Britain in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. Though the British had maintained a naval presence in the Mediterranean before, the capture of Gibraltar allowed the British to establish their first naval base there. The British also used Port Mahon, on the island of Minorca, as a naval base. However, British control there was only temporary; Minorca changed hands numerous times, and was permanently ceded to Spain in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens. In 1800, the British took Malta, which was to be handed over to the Knights of Malta under the Treaty of Amiens. When the Napoleonic Wars resumed in 1803, the British kept Malta for use as a naval base. Following Napoleon's defeat, the British continued their presence in Malta, and turned it into the main base for the Mediterranean Fleet. Between the 1860s and 1900s, the British undertook a number of projects to improve the harbours and dockyard facilities, and Malta's harbours were sufficient enough to allow the entire fleet to be safely moored there.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Mediterranean Fleet was the largest single squadron of the Royal Navy, with ten first-class battleships - double the number in the Channel Fleet - and a large number of smaller warships. The Mediterranean was considered a vital trade route between Britain and India. The shortest route to and from India for British merchant ships was to pass through the Suez Canal, which required access to the Mediterranean. Malta also served as an important stop-off for ships on the way to India. Britain saw this sea link as under constant threat from the navies of France and Italy, and thus concentrated a large force in it, turning the Mediterranean Fleet into one of the largest fleets in the world.

On 22 June 1893, the bulk of the fleet, eight battleships and three large cruisers, were conducting their annual summer exercises off Tripoli, Lebanon, when the fleet's flagship, the battleship HMS Victoria, collided with the battleship HMS Camperdown. Victoria sank within fifteen minutes, taking 358 crew with her. Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet, was among the dead.

Of the three original Invincible-class battlecruiser which entered service in the first half of 1908, two (HMS Inflexible and Indomitable) joined the Mediterranean Fleet in 1914. They and HMS Indefatigable formed the nucleus of the fleet at the start of the First World War when British forces pursued the German ships Goeben and Breslau.

A recently-modernised HMS Warspite became the flagship of the Commander-in-Chief and Second-in-Command, Mediterranean Fleet in 1926.

The Mediterranean Fleet achieved an especially high degree of professional excellence under the leadership of Admiral Roger Keyes from 1926 to 1929. He had under his command such strong figures as Dudley Pound as Chief of Staff, Ginger Boyle, commanding a cruiser squadron and Augustus Agar, V.C. commanding a destroyer flotilla.