This WSS warship monographs deals not with a single class or type of ship but with the products of a single shipbuilder, Armstrongs. In the Pre-Dreadnought and Dreadnought eras Armstrong’s were warship builders to the world supplying most smaller navies and some major ones with battleships and armoured cruisers, submarines as well as a few destroyers and torpedo craft. In many cases Armstrong’s designers were untrammelled by demands from naval staffs and showed what the naval architect could produce when allowed his head. The book contains design and in-service histories of each ship built, from the Rendel gunboats of the 1860s and 1870s to the armoured gunboat for Thailand and the submarine for Yugoslavia completed in the 1920s, besides details of the many unbuilt designs, particularly the Dreadnoughts offered to South American and smaller European navies in the years of the great arms race before the Kaiser War. There is also a history of the firm and biographical details of the Chief Designers. This is a softback, quarto-size book of 243 pages, it is fully illustrated with 160 photographs (some never published before) of every ship plus 93 line drawings, 73 of which were drawn by Ian Sturton. The latter include drawings of the unbuilt designs as well as a table of Armstrong guns and a full bibliography and index.
