Boiler Feed Pump

This pump was made by J&G Weir of Cathcart, Glasgow for the Dreadnought battleship HMS Agincourt (1913).

The battleship was originally ordered by Brazil as the Rio de Janeiro before Brazil suffered a recession and had to sell her to Turkey who renamed her Sultan Osman I.

At the outbreak of the First World War Winston Churchill who was then First Sea Lord ordered that the ship be seized by the Royal Navy and renamed Agincourt, a favourite name of his. Because the ship had been partly paid for by public subscription this action caused widespread anger in Turkey and may have contributed to the country’s entry into the war.

The pump would have stood vertically inside the ship. At the top was a cylinder containing a piston powered by steam taken directly from the boilers. The pump below fed water into the boilers that powered the ships steam turbines.

The boilers turned water to steam so they had to be regularly topped-up with water recycled from the engines.

The Dreadnought Battleship

The years running up to the First World War saw an unprecedented naval arms race between the world’s major powers.

The arms race was fuelled by the development of a new type of battleship that was faster and more heavily armed than all before. This new type of ship was named after the first of its type, HMS Dreadnought (1906). Dreadnoughts had bigger guns and were powered by steam turbines instead of the old reciprocating steam engines.

Agincourt took the Dreadnought concept even further, cramming in 14 12-inch guns (Dreadnought had 10). She was known as the ‘Gin Palace’ by her crew, who had to get used to the fact that most of the signs in the ship were still written in Portuguese.

In the 1920s an international treaty was introduced to limit the number of battleships that nations could have and many ships were sold for scrap. Agincourt was broken-up at Inverkeithing in 1924 but this pump was re-used in a nearby paper mill.

Today the only surviving Dreadnought battleship is the American USS Texas which is preserved as a US National Monument near Houston, Texas.