On 16 October 1913 the battleship HMS Queen Elizabeth slid down the ways in Portsmouth Dockyard watched by 70,000 spectators and accompanied by all the ritual and panoply of a battleship launch in peacetime. Her keel had been laid just under a year earlier, on Trafalgar Day, 21 October. She was the first of a new class of five super-Dreadnoughts that would be bigger, faster, more powerfully armed and more heavily armoured than any of her predecessors. And, for the first time in a British battleship, she would be oil-rather than coal-fired.
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