Her sister ship, Princess Royal, also played a role in the Battle of Heligoland Bight, and was then sent south to the Caribbean to intercept the German East Asia Squadron in case they used the Panama Canal.

During the Battle of Dogger Bank, she scored only a few hits, but one crippled the German armoured cruiser Blücher, which allowed the enemy vessel to be caught and sunk by the concentrated fire of the British battlecruisers.

The sisters spent the rest of the war on uneventful patrols in the North Sea; they provided distant cover during the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight in 1917.

This pressure also allowed the Admiralty to gain approval to improve the size and power of its new ships so as to maintain qualitative superiority over the new German dreadnoughts then under construction.

The design of the Lions remedied some of the shortcomings of the preceding battlecruisers, which suffered from an inability of the en echelon amidships turrets to safely fire across the deck, limiting them to a three-turret broadside.

[7] The Lion-class ships were equipped with two sets of Parsons direct-drive steam turbines, each of which drove two propeller shafts.

The turbines, rated at 70,000 shaft horsepower (52,199 kW), used steam provided by forty-two Yarrow boilers that operated at a pressure of 235 psi (1,620 kPa; 17 kgf/cm2).

Nickel-steel torpedo bulkheads 2.5 inches (64 mm) thick were fitted abreast the magazines and shell rooms.

After the Battle of Jutland revealed their vulnerability to plunging shellfire, 1 inch of additional armour, weighing approximately 130 long tons (132 t),[19] was added to the magazine crowns and turret roofs.

This meant that hot clinkers and flue gases from the boilers made the spotting top on the foremast completely unworkable when the ships were steaming at high speed, that the upper bridge could easily be rendered uninhabitable, depending on the wind, and that the signal flags and halyards were at risk of burning.

[21] Both ships were altered to correct this problem, Lion before being commissioned, and Princess Royal as she was fitting out, at a total cost of £68,170.

These included the quick-firing (QF) 6-pounder (57 mm) Hotchkiss gun on a High Angle (HA) Mk Ic mounting that had a maximum elevation of 60°.

[24] QF 3-inch (76 mm) 20 cwt[Note 1] AA guns on high-angle Mk II mounts were also used that had an elevation range between -10° and +90°.

They turned south at full speed at 11:35[Note 2] when the British light forces failed to disengage on schedule and the rising tide meant that German capital ships would be able to clear the sand bar at the mouth of the Jade Estuary.

Beatty was distracted from the task of finishing her off by the sudden appearance of the elderly light cruiser Ariadne directly to his front.

An earlier raid on Yarmouth on 3 November 1914 had been partially successful, but a larger-scale operation was devised by Admiral Franz von Hipper afterwards.

The fast battlecruisers would conduct the bombardment while the entire High Seas Fleet was to station itself east of Dogger Bank to provide cover for their return and to destroy any elements of the Royal Navy that responded to the raid.

Admiral Beatty's 1st BCS, now reduced to four ships, including Lion, as well as the 2nd Battle Squadron with six dreadnoughts, was detached from the Grand Fleet in an attempt to intercept the Germans near Dogger Bank.

Communications failures meant that Beatty was not notified of this encounter for several hours afterwards, but he turned in pursuit of the German ships once he learned of their presence.

Hipper's battlecruisers spotted the British ships to their west by mid-afternoon and turned about to fall back on the German battleships, then about 60 miles (97 km) behind him.

[41] It blew the front roof and the centre face plates off the turret, killed or wounded everyone inside, and started a fire that continued to smoulder despite efforts to put it out.

They burnt violently, with the flames reaching as high as the masthead, and killed most of the magazine and shell room crews still in the lower part of the mounting.

[42] At 16:30 the light cruiser Southampton, scouting in front of Beatty's ships, spotted the lead elements of the High Seas Fleet charging north at top speed.

Beatty gradually turned more towards the east to allow him to cover the deployment of the Grand Fleet into its battle formation and to move ahead of it, but he mistimed his manoeuvre.

[46] Scheer finally disengaged around 19:15 and the British lost sight of the Germans until 20:05 when the light cruiser Castor spotted smoke bearing west-northwest.

[47] Shortly after 20:30 the pre-dreadnought battleships of Rear Admiral Mauve's II Battle Squadron were spotted and fire switched to them.

The remains of 'Q' turret were removed during this period and not replaced until a visit to Armstrong Whitworth at Elswick that lasted from 6 to 23 September.

She sailed later that day for Devonport Royal Dockyard where more permanent repairs were made and was back at Rosyth by 21 July.

The German objective was to bombard Sunderland the following day, with extensive reconnaissance provided by airships and submarines.

Scheer steered south-eastward pursuing a lone British battle squadron reported by an airship, which was in fact the Harwich Force under Commodore Tyrwhitt.