HMS Sutlej's escort, training, and convoy career

Sutlej's name leads into a brief account of the hard-fought First Anglo-Sikh War between the Sikh state and the East India Company in Punjab. Her hull was begun by a Clydebank predecessor that John Brown and Company later absorbed as the armour, railway, and heavy-engineering firm entered shipbuilding. Commissioned in 1902, Sutlej attended Edward VII's coronation fleet review, exercised in the Aegean, and escorted the damaged battleship HMS Hood from Gibraltar to Chatham after Aboukir covered the earlier leg from Malta. She then served on the China Station and became a boys' training ship on the North America and West Indies Station, where sailors could gain real overseas experience at comparatively low risk of war. A boiler explosion killed four men during 1910 manoeuvres, but the cruiser returned for First World War convoy duties off Liberia, Ireland, and the Azores. She finished as an accommodation and depot ship before being sold in 1921, a career far broader than the class's most famous disaster.