HMS M33
1915 M29-class monitor
HMS M33 is an M29-class monitor of the Royal Navy. Built in 1915, she saw active service in the Mediterranean during the First World War and in Russia during the Allied Intervention in 1919. She was used subsequently as a mine-laying training ship, fuelling hulk, boom defence workshop and floating office, being renamed HMS Minerva and Hulk C23 during her long life. She passed to Hampshire County Council in the 1980s and was then handed over to the National Museum of the Royal Navy in 2014. A programme of conservation was undertaken to enable her to be opened to the public. HMS M33 is located within Portsmouth Historic Dockyard and opened to visitors on 7 August 2015 following a service of dedication. She is one of only three surviving Royal Navy warships of the First World War and the only surviving Allied ship that took part in the Gallipoli Campaign.
Construction
M33 was built as part of the rapid ship construction campaign following the outbreak of the First World War by Harland & Wolff, Belfast. The design of the M29-class monitors were provided by Assistant Constructor Charles Lillicrap for a simple plan for five monitors to carry two guns, as a modified design from the M15-class monitor.
This re-design was to accommodate the 6-inch Mk XII guns deemed surplus from the aft casemates of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleship, and oil tanks required for her boilers.
The public source identifies “HMS M33” as 1915 M29-class monitor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around M29-class and monitor.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3010574. Authority coordinates are 50.802, -1.111. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1915, 1919, 2014 and 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “HMS M33” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.