Did people at the time think that WWI era ships looked good? I know for hundreds of years sailing ships had a romantic quality to them and tons of paintings were made of their full sails and pretty lines splashing merrily along in the waves. I ready the two Robert K. Massie books about the subject and I think I remember him discussing the romantic element of the cruisers, and how the ships in general were used in peace time as public relations tools. To me that generation of ship is really ugly, somehow much less interesting than even the later WWII generation of ships. Were contemporaries fond of them?
Bonus question, what are those bars along the side of the ship at a 45 degree angle backwards? They seem to have disappeared from later ships.
Although beauty is somewhat in the eye of the beholder, one of the salient features of the early twentieth century culture was that images of dreadnoughts and various other modern warships were prominently featured in the mass press and popular literature of the day. Naval reviews of warships drew massive crowds and often local businesses would have produce special dreadnought-themed products to tap into consumer interests in naval matters. The October 1905 return of Togo's fleet to Yokohama in the aftermath of Japan's victory over Russia was a major media spectacle inside Japan. In Germany and Britain, naval reviews became a staple of imperial pageantry and the warships often engaged in complex maneuvers that resembled a naval ballet. The dubious military value of this naval theatre, something that several military professionals grumbled about, was for for public consumption and exposed the public to the navy. Nor was such spectacle limited to the ocean. Naval revues with paper mache battleships in large enclosed pools became a genre of their own. The theatre critic Alfred Kerr recorded his observations of one such ersatz review at Berlin in 1898:
Reproductions of German warships, three meters long, move on the water steered by a man, hidden inside. And they shoot, electrically propelled, with truly lightning-like speed over the surface of the water. In this fashion, the biggest victories are won and at the end the wonderfully white Hohenzollern sweeps through the waves, salutes are shot, the air is full with the smoke of gunpowder. The illusion is truly great while you can sit at the side and have a beer. These victorious battles are fought five to six times a day, intervals of two hours. To watch them costs only fifty pffenigs.
This era also saw naval wargames emerge as a new past time for some as exemplified by Frederick Jane whose Jane Naval Wargame went through three editions between 1898 and 1912 and Jane was able to parlay this enthusiasm for his wargames into the repeated updated editions of of All the World’s Fighting Ships. The German game Der Seestern came with its own cast metal flotilla and its makers advertised that its game was educational and suitable for young and old alike. Publications aimed at children often reproduced images of the latest naval armaments and emphasized that these ships were the acme of modern technology. The popular weekly, Boy's Own Paper published numerous articles about HMS Dreadnought when she was in the process of being launched. In the case of Britain, these youth publications presented the Dreadnought and other ships as part of a larger process of British naval history, often placing pictures of the current ships and their historical namesakes from the age of sail.
Whether or not contemporaries perceived this ships as beautiful or popular consumption of naval-related ephemera reflected a larger popular navalism is more difficult to ascertain. While there certainly was a popular affinity for naval merchandise, much of this boosterism enjoyed lavish support from navies. As the cost of navies grew exponentially in the twentieth century, service professionals recognized that they needed to engage in public relations to encourage politicians to open up the purse strings and finance the fleet. For example, the post-Tsushima IJN realized that it needed to cultivate Seiyukai support to justify the 8-8 fleet and ship launchings and naval reviews became an opportunity to invite select members of the Diet to encourage them to vote for naval armaments. The IJN also published a large number of books and treatises demanding that Japan keep up to date in naval armaments which were aimed at both elite and popular audiences. This type of boosterism, which was pervasive among navies in this period, compounds efforts to determine whether or not navalism was truly popular among the public. While there was a certain subset of the public that found dreadnoughts and other warships a paragon of modernity, such sentiments had the direct encouragement of military organizations.
Sources
Lambert, Andrew D., Jan Rüger, and Robert J. Blyth. The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age. Farnham, Surrey, England: Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2011.
Rüger, Jan. The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Schencking, J. Charles. Making Waves Politics, Propaganda, and the Emergence of the Imperial Japanese Navy, 1868-1922. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2005.
Wilson, Sandra. Nation and Nationalism in Japan. London: Routledge Curzon, 2002.
For the most part, the romance that ships from the period had came not from their aesthetics, but from their direct representation of the nation's power. A dreadnought was a prestige item for a nation, an indicator of its wealth and ability to project power. Their use as public relations tool, through cruises like the Great White Fleet, or the later British Empire Cruise, were to demonstrate these roles - showing off the ability of a fleet to carry out a long-distance cruise, the strength of the ships on the cruise, and the ability of a nation to support such a strong fleet. They did not need to be beautiful aesthetic objects, because that would have hindered their military role.
Another contribution to their romance was that these ships were seen as being at the cutting edge of technology. In the 1900s and 1910s, the Naval Race was very much the equivalent of the Space Race. The launch of Dreadnought was a massive media and public event, marking as it did the end of an era, and the beginning of a new one. Each new class of dreadnoughts would continue this sense of advancement, of pushing the edge of technology.
Contemporaries were less fond of the dreadnoughts, but more proud of them. It wasn't about admiring their aesthetic refinement, but more about their military power and strength.
Sailing ships definitely had a romantic quality to them (it's part of the reason why I got interested in my area of study). I'm not qualified to answer the question of how people in general thought about them, but perhaps /u/nmw or /u/thefourthmaninaboat could help?
I can answer this question, at least:
Bonus question, what are those bars along the side of the ship at a 45 degree angle backwards? They seem to have disappeared from later ships.
Those are rigging for torpedo nets, which would only be deployed when the ship was moored or at anchor. They were largely ineffective on ships, and were replaced by other types of torpedo protection by WWII (particularly underwater torpedo bulges and better underwater armoring schemes.) You can read up more on torpedo defense schemes here: http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-047.htm
So, I think a the reason that you don't like the looks of the ships from this time period is in part due to their bow shapes. Typically, military vessels of the dreadnought-era have either a plumb bow, or a bow that arcs forward from the fo'c'sle (an inverted bow). For watercraft that have displacement hulls (in contrast to planing hulls), top speed is limited by waterline length. Thus, by extending the water line as far as possible you can increase the speed of the vessel. WW2 ships on the other hand often have what has been referred to as a "destroyer bow." This style, which has a large amount of overhang, was meant to increase the amount of deck area on smaller vessels. I may be wrong, but I imagine that this is likely due to post-WW1 restrictions (e.g., the Washington Naval Treaty) that limited naval tonnage -- basically you can make the boat's deck bigger without massively increasing tonnage.
As for the 45 degree angle bars, these are likely supports for torpedo nets. Torpedo nets were exactly what they sound like they would be -- a means of physically blocking contact of a torpedo with the ship. These were held out from the ship some distance using metal poles, and were generally replaced with alternative anti-torpedo strategies as time progressed (e.g., anti-torpedo belts, torpedo bulges, etc.) Here is a wiki article on torpedo nets...are these the poles you are referring to?
