HMS New Zealand fights in the Battle of Jutland

In the misty North Sea on the last day of May 1916, 250 warships from Britain’s Royal Navy and Germany’s High Seas Fleet clashed in the First World War's greatest and bloodiest sea battle. Among them was HMS New Zealand, a battlecruiser New Zealand had given the Royal Navy in 1909.

Outgunned and outnumbered, the Germans inflicted more damage on their opponent but returned to port, leaving Britain in command of the high seas. HMS New Zealand survived with only light damage.

By building up its fleet from the late 1890s Germany, a land power, provoked Britain, whose empire rested on maritime supremacy. The tempo of this naval race accelerated in 1906 when Britain launched HMS Dreadnought, a completely new type of battleship that outclassed everything afloat. Three years later New Zealand paid for the construction of a dreadnought, the battlecruiser HMS New Zealand. 

At first the sea war was mainly confined to actions between cruisers and battlecruisers. The High Seas Fleet was too weak to confront the Royal Navy head-on, but hoped to wear it down by attrition. On 31 May 1916 German battlecruisers confronted British ones and then drew them towards the guns of their main battle fleet. Little went according to plan that afternoon and night. A series of often confused actions cost Britain three battlecruisers and Germany one; both fleets lost smaller cruisers and destroyers. Six thousand British and 2500 German sailors died.

Among them was one of the few New Zealanders serving with the fleet – 21-year-old Leslie Follett of Marton, a stoker on the battlecruiser HMS Queen Mary. Follett was killed in action alongside more than 1200 fellow crewmen when the Queen Mary exploded after it was struck by German shells.

The survival of the dominion’s gift battlecruiser was credited by some to the presence on board of a lucky piupiu and hei tiki. Its captain, John Green, inherited the taonga from his predecessor, Lionel Halsey, who had been given them during the ship's visit to New Zealand in 1913.

Who won? Controversy about Jutland rumbled on while the admirals lived and the battle is still debated by historians. Winston Churchill said that Admiral John Jellicoe (New Zealand’s governor-general from 1920 to 1924) was the only man who could have lost the war in an afternoon. New Zealanders, dependent on sea trade, were lucky that he did not.

New Zealanders found a tangible way to express their gratitude to the British sailors who had lost their lives by responding to the Navy League’s appeal for assistance for their widows and orphans. The impression Jutland made on New Zealand can still be seen in the landscape. Its name is included on several war memorials and the battle was also commemorated by the planting of an oak in the grounds of St Luke’s Church at Waerenga-a-Hika, near Gisborne.

During events to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Jutland in 2016, the National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy loaned the lucky piupiu to the National Museum of the Royal Navy for a major exhibition.

Image: Painting of HMS New Zealand by Gerald Maurice Burn, 1915.