The battlecruiser, brainchild of colourful First Sea Lord Sir Jackie Fisher, has long been a matter of controversy. Contemporaries argued over the use and value of these warships; the loss by catastrophic magazine explosion of three of these vessels at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916 further polarised this debate; and modern-day historians have, for various reasons, spilt a great deal of ink over their genesis and purpose. In the current historiography there are two rival explanations for their origins. On the one hand there are revisionist historians such as Jon Sumida, who argue that the battlecruiser was conceived as an imperial power-projection vessel, whose roots lay in the need to find an antidote to Franco-Russian plans to wage a guerre de courseagainst British shipping with a fleet of commerce-raiding armoured cruisers. On the other side of the debate are historians, such as the present author, who argue that the origins of the battlecruiser are grounded in the Anglo-German antagonism of the early twentieth century. In this formulation, this warship type was specifically devised as a counter to German plans to convert fast transatlantic liners into auxiliary cruisers and deploy them as raiders on the Atlantic trade routes. An exceptionally fast surface warship able to cut through the heavy Atlantic swells that could swallow smaller vessels and so overtake the fast German liners that ploughed this route with ease led first to subsidised British liners and then to the battlecruiser. This essay will contribute to this debate by demonstrating that the former argument is based upon an inaccurate depiction of relative naval strength and illustrate the limitations inherent on focusing purely upon the originsof the battlecruiser, without paying sufficient attention to how the craft were actually employed.

The first of these interpretations assumes that a global Franco-Russian armoured cruiser threat was foremost in the Admiralty's thinking when the battlecruiser was conceived. However, a careful examination of the available documentary evidence reveals this premise to be unsustainable. The first battlecruiser to be laid down was HMS Inflexible, the keel plate of which was placed in position on the slipway on 5 February 1906.