HMS Attentive (1904)

HMS Attentive was one of two Adventure-class scout cruisers built by Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick for the Royal Navy in the first decade of the twentieth century. She was laid down on 8 January 1904 as yard number 748, launched on 22 November and completed in October 1905, and then sat in reserve until she was commissioned in March 1907. Scout cruisers were meant to lead destroyer flotillas, and Attentive led several of them, although she was unlucky in collisions: she sank the destroyer Gala in April 1908 and damaged two others. She was 374 feet long, made 25.9 knots on trials from two triple-expansion engines and a dozen Yarrow boilers, and carried ten 12-pounder guns until about 1912, when nine 4-inch guns replaced them. In the First World War she served mostly with the Dover Patrol, was bombed off Ostend in 1915, screened the Zeebrugge Raid in April 1918, escorted convoys to Gibraltar and spent months off Murmansk. She was sold for scrap in April 1920.