The Monmouths were intended to protect British merchant shipping from fast cruisers like the French Guichen, Châteaurenault or the Dupleix class.

The engines produced a total of 22,000 indicated horsepower (16,000 kW) which was designed to give the ships a maximum speed of 23 knots (43 km/h; 26 mph).

[2] The Monmouth-class ships' main armament consisted of fourteen breech-loading (BL) 6-inch (152 mm) Mk VII guns.

[5] Bedford, named after the English county,[6] was laid down on 19 February 1900 by Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering at their Govan shipyard.

[10] On 20 August 1910, four armoured cruisers of the China Station, under the command of Vice-Admiral Alfred Winsloe aboard HMS Minotaur, departed Wei-Hai-Wei, bound for Nagasaki, Japan.

[11] Bedford got a partial star observation at 04:15, but the bridge crew was distracted by spotting land off the port side just seven minutes later and did not make the calculations until later.

The navigator was called to the bridge and he assumed that it was Loney Bluff on the southwest side of Quelpart Island in the East China Sea.

Winsloe ordered Kent to continue on to Nagasaki to act as a radio relay as he requested assistance from the Japanese Ministry of the Navy under the terms of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Minotaur and the cruiser Monmouth put men aboard on the morning of the 22nd to see what could be salvaged, but they were withdrawn by noon as the weather continued to worsen and Kent radioed news of a typhoon en route.

As the weather began to improve he ordered that her upper deck guns and their equipment be salvaged, despite the waist-deep water.

By this time the British and Japanese had salvaged 14 six-inch guns, 13 torpedoes, and much gunnery and fire-control equipment in addition to the items removed earlier.