The ships were developments of the Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, with reductions in size and speed to offset increases in armour protection whilst retaining the same main battery of eight 15-inch (381 mm) guns.

Revenge emerged from the battle unscathed, but she saw no further action during the war, as the British and German fleets turned to more cautious strategies owing to the risk of submarines and naval mines.

Whilst serving in the Mediterranean in the early 1920s, the ship went to Turkey twice in response to crises arising from the Greco-Turkish War, including the Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922.

With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Revenge was used to escort convoys and transport significant quantities of the country's gold reserves to Canada as part of Operation Fish; these activities continued into 1940.

In October 1940, she conducted Operation Medium, an attack on German transport ships that had been collected along the English Channel in preparation for the later-cancelled invasion of Britain.

Revenge thereafter resumed convoy escort duties until October 1941, when she was reassigned to the 3rd Battle Squadron and sent to the Far East as tensions with Japan began to rise.

The Revenge-class ships were designed as slightly smaller, slower, and more heavily protected versions of the preceding Queen Elizabeth-class battleships.

Still under construction, the ships were redesigned to employ oil-fired boilers that increased the power of the engines by 9,000 shaft horsepower (6,700 kW) over the original specification.

Two four-barrel "pom-poms" were added in late 1941 atop 'B' and 'X' turrets as well as ten 20 mm Oerlikon guns that replaced the quadruple .50-caliber mounts.

To save weight and make more room available for the additional crew required to man the new equipment like the radars and Oerlikons, four 6-inch guns were removed in 1943.

The fleet sailed in concert with Rear Admiral Franz von Hipper's five battlecruisers and supporting cruisers and torpedo boats.

[22] The initial action was fought primarily by the British and German battlecruiser formations in the afternoon,[23] but by 18:00,[c] the Grand Fleet approached the scene.

The transition from their cruising formation caused congestion with the rear divisions, forcing Revenge and many of the other ships to reduce speed to 8 knots (15 km/h; 9.2 mph) to avoid colliding with each other.

The British ships initially had poor visibility and Revenge waited several minutes before opening fire at 18:22; her target during this period is unclear, and she may have engaged the crippled cruiser SMS Wiesbaden, the German battle line, or both.

Revenge and the rest of the Grand Fleet sortied on 24 April once they intercepted wireless signals from the damaged Moltke, but the Germans were too far ahead of the British, and no shots were fired.

[35] On 19 July 1920, Revenge went to Panderma, where she encountered several vessels of the Greek Navy, including the armoured cruiser Georgios Averof, which had King Alexander of Greece aboard.

[35] Shortly after the outbreak of the war, the merchant ship SS Pakeha was disguised as HMS Revenge to deceive German aircraft.

148 boxes of gold bars, worth a total of £2 million, were loaded onto each battleship at Portland; they departed on 7 October and arrived in Halifax nine days later.

[41] On 12 May 1940, she accidentally rammed and sank the Canadian Battle-class trawler HMCS Ypres which was acting as a boom defence vessel at Halifax, although without loss of life.

[42] On 30 May, Revenge began to participate in Operation Fish, the removal of all of the United Kingdom's gold reserves to Canada, in case of invasion, leaving the River Clyde with £40 million worth of bullion on board, bound for Halifax.

On 3 July 1940, while at Plymouth, boarding parties from Revenge took control of the Paris and the large submarine-cruiser Surcouf, in case their crews decided to return them to Vichy France where they might fall into the hands of the Germans.

If the German amphibious landing, codenamed Operation Sealion, had gone ahead as planned, Revenge would have been the only British capital ship in the English Channel area.

The British force came under accurate fire from German heavy coastal artillery but were able to retire undamaged, Revenge managed to make 21.5 knots on the return journey.

Vice Admiral Chūichi Nagumo's powerful Kido Butai, composed of six carriers and four fast battleships, was significantly stronger than Somerville's Eastern Fleet.

[45][46] In late March, the code-breakers at the Far East Combined Bureau, a branch of Bletchley Park, informed Somerville that the Japanese were planning a raid into the Indian Ocean to attack Colombo and Trincomalee and destroy his fleet.

Following the first raid on 5 April, Somerville withdrew Revenge and her three sisters to Mombasa, where they could secure the shipping routes in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

[41] In February 1943, Revenge and Resolution escorted the Operation Pamphlet convoy that carried the 9th Australian Division from Egypt back to Australia.

During the period of inactivity, in May 1944, her main armament was removed to provide spare guns for the battleships Ramillies and Warspite, as well as monitors which were to be vital during the bombardment of the beaches of Normandy during Operation Overlord.

[49] In March 1948, she was placed on the disposal list, being sold for scrap in July to the British Iron & Steel Co.; she was then sent to ship breakers Thos.

[49] Some of Revenge's gun-turret rack and pinion gearing was reused in the 76-metre (250 ft) diameter Mark I radio telescope built at Jodrell Bank, Cheshire, in the mid-1950s, along with equipment from Royal Sovereign.