Name HMS Brilliant Laid down 1890 Class and type Apollo-class cruiser Launched 24 June 1891 Draft 5.33 m | Builder Sheerness Dockyard Commissioned 1893 Construction started 1890 Length 96 m | |
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Fate Scuttled as blockship, 23 April 1918 | ||
HMS Brilliant was an Apollo-class cruiser of the British Royal Navy which served from 1893 to 1918 in various colonial posts and off the British Isles as a hastily converted minelayer during the First World War.
Contents
Operational History
Brilliant was commissioned at Portsmouth on 1 October 1901 by Captain Hugh Pigot Williams, for service with the Cruiser Squadron. In May 1902 she was taken into Portsmouth for a refit, and later that year she served in the 1902 Coronation review.
Wreck
In April 1918, Brilliant was deliberately scuttled in the mouth of Ostend harbour in Belgium during the failed First Ostend Raid. This operation was intended to block the harbour mouth and prevent the transit of German U-boats and other raiding craft from Bruges to the North Sea. German countermeasures were however too effective, and Brilliant and fellow blockship HMS Sirius were eventually destroyed by their crews outside the harbour mouth after running aground on a sandbank. The wrecks were broken up postwar.