Work on the ship continued during the first months of the war until more concerns were expressed at the Admiralty; and on 12 March 1915 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, cancelled the order for the ship.
The Vickers-designed 23 class rigid airships, which were basically "stretched" and modified versions of the No. 9 design, were never used in combat; however, the four ships in the class provided many hours of valuable training for British airship crews and experimental data for designers and engineers, and some radical changes and refinements were consequently incorporated into the design of the R23X class.