HMS Warrior (1860)
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HMS Warrior was the first iron-hulled, armour-plated warship, built for the Royal Navy in response to the first ironclad warship, the French La Gloire, launched a year earlier.
When completed in October 1861, Warrior was by far the largest, fastest, most heavily-armed and most heavily-armoured warship the world had ever seen. She was almost twice the size of La Gloire and thoroughly outclassed the French ship in speed, armour, and gunnery.
Warrior did not introduce any radical new technology, but for the first time combined steam engines, massive rifle-bored breech-loading guns, iron construction, iron armour, and propeller drive all in one ship, and built to unprecedented scale.
Her construction sparked off the intense competition between guns and armour that was to last for the next 85 years. This race caused her to quickly become obsolete, and she was withdrawn as a fighting unit in May of 1883. She is now a museum ship, open to the public in Portsmouth, England.
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[edit] Design and Construction
News of the highly-secretive designs for La Gloire reached the British Admiralty in May of 1858. The close co-operation that had existed between France and Britain during the Crimean War had disappeared quickly, and all details of La Gloire and her sister-ships were treated with great secrecy in France. The new Derby administration did not begin to take the threat of a new-building programme within France seriously until August of 1858, when it became apparent that France would soon gain parity with the Royal Navy in terms of steam-powered ships, and utterly outclass the RN in terms of ironclads.
After strong representations by Admiral Sir Baldwin Wake-Walker, the Surveyor of the Navy, and Henry Corry, the Parliamentary under-secretary to the Admiralty, the Board of Admiralty was moved on 22 November 1858 to call for designs for a wooden-hulled, armour-plated warship, whose dimensions were approximately equal to those of La Gloire.
It does not appear that Wake-Walker or his chief constructor – Isaac Watts – ever seriously considered wood as a building material. Wooden ships had reached their maximum size, and some of the largest were beginning to show signs of fatigue. When coupled with the tremendous problems of timber-supply, and the need for the ship to be built quickly – iron ships were far quicker to build than wooden – the only choice was for an iron-hulled ship. Given that armour plating precluded a design with several gun-decks, a broadside of 17 guns with 15-feet between guns on a single deck gave a central battery of great length. With an appropriate bow, and the creation of a stern, the design called for a ship some Template:Convert long, or Template:Convert longer than any warship built prior to this point.
The Admiralty design was approved at the end of December 1858, but having no experience with iron-hulls, the Board of Admiralty called for designs from the most prominent iron shipbuilders of the country. Received in April of 1859, Isaac Watts felt that none of these designs met the various criteria as well as his own had, and so the tender to build the new iron-cased frigate to the Admiralty design was awarded to the the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company in London. The contract called for a launch date 11 months after the date of the contract - an enormously optimistic timescale that was not met.
She froze to the slipway when she was launched on 29 December 1860, during the coldest winter for 50 years, and six tugs were required to haul her into the river. She was completed on 24 October 1861 at a cost of £357,291, or the equivalent of £22,985,295.00 as of 2006.[1] From November of 1858 and the need for the ship being established, until October of 1861 and the frigate entering service, a mere 35 months had elapsed.
[edit] Service Career
The rapid march of naval technology meant that she and her sister Black Prince fell from the front line within ten years. On 1 April 1875 she was relegated to the Fleet Reserve and on 31 May 1883, withdrawn from sea service as being obsolete. Her guns and upper masts were removed around this time.
She was used as a storage hulk, and from 1902–1904 as a depot ship for a flotilla of destroyers. Her name was changed to Vernon III in 1904, when she joined Portsmouth-based Vernon, the Royal Navy's torpedo training school. Her role was supplying steam and electricity to the neighbouring hulks that made up Vernon. In October 1923, Vernon was transferred to a newly-built shore installation, rendering Warrior and her companion hulks redundant. With no further use for the old ironclad, the Royal Navy put her up for sale in 1924.
[edit] Decrepitude
Fortunately for Warrior, a downturn in demand for scrap iron was occurring when the Navy decided to sell her off. There was no commercial interest in the old ship, and she remained at Portsmouth for another five years. Finally, in March 1929, efforts aimed towards selling Warrior for scrap were abandoned, and she was taken in tow for her new home: Pembroke Dock in Milford Haven, Wales. Upon arrival she was transformed into a shipkeeper's home and floating oil jetty known only as Oil Fuel Hulk C77. A similar fate had already overtaken several of her successors by this time; in 1926 HMS Valiant became a floating oil tank at Hamoaze, while HMS Agincourt and HMS Northumberland were both stripped down in 1909 and subsequently used as coal hulks.
For the next fifty years, Warrior lay just offshore from an oil depot at Llanion Cove, occasionally being towed to a nearby dry dock for maintenance work. She refuelled something close to 5,000 ships between 1929 and 1979. During that time Britain's surviving ironclads and their later equivalents, the battleships, were all sold for scrap. Warrior's last surviving contemporary, Agincourt, was scrapped in 1960 after fifty years' service as a coal hulk at Harwich.
Warrior never saw battle in her time in active service although, when launched, she and her sister ship HMS Black Prince were the biggest and most powerful naval ships in the world. [2].
[edit] Salvation
Warrior was saved from being scrapped by the efforts of the Maritime Trust. As the world's first iron-hulled battleship, she was recognised as one of the Royal Navy's most historically important warships. In 1968 the Duke of Edinburgh chaired a meeting regarding the possibility of rescuing and restoring Warrior, and a year later the Maritime Trust was established with a view towards saving the decrepit ironclad as well as other historic ships. Throughout the 1970s the Maritime Trust carried out negotiations and feasibility studies regarding Warrior, and finally obtained control of the ship in August 1979.
Restoration of Warrior for use as a museum ship began in August 1979, when she began her Template:Convert journey to her temporary home in the Coal Dock at Hartlepool, where the £8 million restoration project would be carried out, largely funded by the Maritime Trust. Warrior arrived in Hartlepool on September 3 1979. Restoration work started with the removal of Template:Convert of rubbish, including a thick concrete layer poured onto her upper deck as part of the conversion to an oil jetty. Over the next eight years, Warrior's decks, interior compartments, engines, woodwork and fittings were restored or recreated, her masts, rigging and funnels were recreated, and a new figurehead carved using photographs of the original (destroyed in the 1960s) as a guide. She arrived, almost fully restored, at her current berth in Portsmouth on June 16 1987.
The rejuvenated ironclad was renamed Warrior (1860) to avoid confusion with the present HMS Warrior, which is the operational headquarters of the Royal Navy at Northwood.
[edit] Gallery
HMS Warrior 110lb BL.png
One of Warrior's 110-pdr breech-loaders |
HMS Warrior Gun Deck 68pdrs.png
Gun deck showing 68-pdr guns |
HMS Warrior Annunciator.png
Annunciator dial in Warrior's engine-room |
HMS Warrior Engines.png
Replica engine |
HMS Warrior Armour.png
Cross section of Warrior's bulkhead armour |
[edit] See also
There have been three other ships and the naval base named HMS Warrior:
[edit] References
- ^ http://measuringworth.com/calculators/ppoweruk/ Inflation calculator at measuringworth.com
- ^ DK Brown "From Warrior to Dreadnought"
[edit] External links
- HMSWarrior.org
- StVincent.ac.uk
- Photos of HMS Warrior in Portsmouth
- HNSA Ship Page: HMS Warrior
- Pictures of HMS Warrior
Template:Coordde:HMS Warrior (1860) es:HMS Warrior fr:HMS Warrior simple:HMS Warrior
