HMS WARRIOR (1860)

'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'' . When completed in October 1861, ''Warrior'' was the largest, fastest, most heavily-armed and most heavily-armoured warship in the world. 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 This race caused her to quickly become obsolete, and she was withdrawn as a fighting unit in May of 1883.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.

Contents

Service career

Decrepitude

Salvation

Notes

Gallery

External links

Service career

The brainchild of Admiral Sir Baldwin Wake-Walker, and designed by Isaac Watts, chief constructor to the Royal Navy, Warrior was constructed by Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding company at Blackwall, London. She froze to the slipway when she was launched on December 29, 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.
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 On 1 April 1875 she was relegated to the Fleet Reserve and on 31 May 1883, withdrawn from sea service as being obsolete.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.

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. ^[1].

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 800 mile 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 Manifold Trust. ''Warrior'' arrived in Hartlepool on September 3 1979. Restoration work started with the removal of 80 tons 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.
See HMS ''Warrior'' for other ships of this name.

Notes

1. DK Brown "From Warrior to Dreadnought"

Gallery

External links

★ HMSWarrior.org

★ StVincent.ac.uk

★ Photos of HMS ''Warrior'' in Portsmouth