Fort Cunningham and Alexandra Battery are works of military engineering of the 1860s in Bermuda’s UNESCO World Heritage Site. They were built during Palmerston’s modernisation of Britain’s imperial defences to protect critical naval infrastructure. What may be news, is that these fortifications represent unique milestones in the development of modern armour.
When the War Office set about its modernisation initiative, it did so with only a vague notion of how iron armour could work beyond that it must be impregnable to Russian, French and American naval ordnance. But it would take almost a decade of experimentation before suitable armour could be deployed. In the meantime, the government insisted that forts in the most vulnerable outstations of empire were armoured before the experiments were complete.
Thus in1869, Alexandra Battery was strengthened with heavy iron Gibraltar Shields installed as an emergency measure and whereas similar shields at Gibraltar, Malta and London were later strengthened with additional armour, this was not the case at Bermuda.
Only months later, Fort Cunningham received powerful continuous iron fronts employing Warrior Armour as used on Britain’s first ironclad HMS Warrior. Cunningham’s sister work, Breakwater Fort in Devon, England, was subsequently strengthened, but like Alexandra Battery, Cunningham received no further iron.
These highly significant sites today provide a unique glimpse of the state of the art of British military engineering six months before the War Office developed a broad armour plate that transformed the completion of all remaining works globally and whose echoes we see today in modern battleship and tank armour.
Richard Linzey, Royal Institute of British Architects (retired), Royal Architectural Institute of Canada member.
