Edward Attwood and Stanley Goodall

Edward L Attwood was head of battleship design during the critical period up of the First World War, and beyond. He had a young, rising star under his supervision: Stanley Goodall, a future DNC. Stanley Goodall had first come to prominence with his design for the Arethusa class light cruisers. Edward Attwood lead the design of the 1915 battlecruisers, of which one, the Hood, was completed. D.K. Brown notes that by the time the Hood was completed, her designers had lost faith in her. To solve the problem, they had the design approach up their sleave that would have resulted in the 1921 battlecruisers. That was eventually adapted for the battleships Rodney and Nelson. Too often, during this period, requirements given to the design staff resulted in flawed ships being produced. In the flailing around after the Battle of Jutland, the Hood design was altered, in many ways, for the worse. One feature of the Hood and the 1921 ships was a huge conning tower. We know, from the work done examining the wreck of the Hood, that when she capsized, the conning tower fell out. An alternate view is that the conning tower was ejected by the force of the explosion. I am somewhat skeptical about that, given that the conning tower weighed over 200 tons. The Hood would have been a better ship if they had used a lighter conning tower. This was a problem of "design by committee" (or specifications by committee). In any case, I very much like the direction taken in the 1921 designs. There was a flush deck, with a bow that flared and rose to give a good freeboard forward. There was the small transom stern that saved weight and gave a small increase to the effective length, slightly lowering the propulsion cost. These ships also finally included triple turrets for the main armament and twin turrets for the secondary armament. They also employed the "all-or-nothing" armoring scheme. I think that placing the three turrets forward was overkill. They would have been better ships with a conventional layout. At this point, Stanley Goodall was into some of these radical features, so the designs had them.