HMS Warrior (1860)

HMS ''Warrior'' is a 40-gun steam-powered armoured frigate"Ironclad" is the general term for armoured warships of this period. Armoured frigates were initially designed for the same role as traditional wooden frigates; this later changed as the size and expense of these ships forced them to be used in the line of battle. built for the Royal Navy in 1859–1861. She was the name ship of the ''Warrior''-class ironclads. ''Warrior'' and her sister ship were the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warships, and were built in response to France's launching in 1859 of the first ocean-going ironclad warship, the wooden-hulled ''Gloire''. ''Warrior'' conducted a publicity tour of Great Britain in 1863 and spent her active career with the Channel Squadron. Obsolescent following the 1873 commissioning of the mastless and more capable HMS ''Devastation'', she was placed in reserve in 1875, and was "paid off" – decommissioned – in 1883.

She subsequently served as a storeship and depot ship, and in 1904 was assigned to the Royal Navy's torpedo training school. The ship was converted into an oil jetty in 1927 and remained in that role until 1979, at which point she was donated by the Navy to The Maritime Trust for restoration. The restoration process took eight years, during which many of her features and fittings were either restored or recreated. When this was finished she returned to Portsmouth as a museum ship. Listed as part of the National Historic Fleet, ''Warrior'' has been based in Portsmouth since 1987.

Background

The launching of the steam-powered ship of the line ''Napoléon'' by France in 1850 began an arms race between France and Britain that lasted for a decade. The destruction of a wooden Ottoman fleet by a Russian fleet firing explosive shells in the Battle of Sinop, early in the Crimean War, followed by the destruction of Russian coastal fortifications during the Battle of Kinburn in the Crimean War by French armoured floating batteries, and tests against armour plates, showed the superiority of ironclads over unarmoured ships. France's launching in 1859 of the first ocean-going ironclad warship, the wooden-hulled , upset the balance of power by neutralising the British investment in wooden ships of the line and started an invasion scare in Britain, as the Royal Navy lacked any ships that could counter ''Gloire'' and her two sisters. The situation was perceived to be so serious that Queen Victoria asked the Admiralty if the navy was adequate for the tasks that it would have to perform in wartime. ''Warrior'' and her sister were ordered in response.

The Admiralty initially specified that the ship should be capable of , and have a full set of sails for worldwide cruising range. Iron construction was chosen as it gave the best trade-off between speed and protection; an iron hull was lighter than a wooden one of the same size and shape, giving more capacity for guns, armour and engines.

Design and description

Overview

The Chief Constructor of the Navy Isaac Watts and the Chief Engineer Thomas Lloyd designed the ship. To minimise risk they copied the hull design of the large wooden frigate , modifying it for iron construction and to accommodate an armoured box, or citadel, amidships along the single gun deck, which protected most of the ship's guns. Ships with this configuration of guns and armour are classified as broadside ironclads.

The ''Warrior''-class design used many well-proven technologies that had been used in ocean-going ships for years, including her iron hull, marine steam engine, and screw propeller; only her wrought-iron armour was a major technological advance. Naval architect and historian David K. Brown wrote, "What made 'Warrior''truly novel was the way in which these individual aspects were blended together, making her the biggest and most powerful warship in the world." Faster, better armoured and harder to hit than her rivals, she was superior to any existing naval ship. The Admiralty stopped construction of all wooden ships of the line, and ordered another 11 ironclads over the next few years. Jacky Fisher, who was the ship's gunnery lieutenant in 1863–1864, later wrote that most people did not realise at the time what a significant change it would bring about: "It certainly was not appreciated that this, our first armourclad ship of war, would cause a fundamental change in what had been in vogue for something like a thousand years."

Although built in response to ''Gloire'', the ''Warrior'' had a very different operational concept from the French ship, which was meant to replace wooden ships of the line. The ''Warriors'' were designed by Watts as 40-gun armoured frigates, not intended to stand in the line of battle, as the Admiralty was uncertain about their ability to withstand concentrated fire from wooden two- and three-deck ships of the line. Unlike ''Gloire'', they were planned to be fast enough to force battle on a fleeing enemy and to control to their own advantage the range at which a battle was fought. In contrast to ''Gloire''s square profile, ''Warrior'' has a clipper bow, but she is twice as long as a typical clipper ship.

HMS ''Warrior'' is long between perpendiculars and long overall. She has a beam of and a draught of . The ship displaces and has a tonnage of 6,109 tons burthen. The ship's length made her relatively unmanoeuvrable, making it harder for her to use her strengthened stem for ramming, an ancient tactic that was coming back into use at the time. The ends of the hull are subdivided by watertight transverse bulkheads and decks into 92 compartments, and the hull has a double bottom underneath the engine and boiler rooms.

Armament

The armament of the ''Warrior''-class ships was originally intended to be 40 smoothbore, muzzle-loading 68-pounder guns, 19 on each side on the main deck and one each fore and aft as chase guns on the upper deck. The 68-pounder had a range of with (solid) round shot. During construction the armament was changed to include 10 Armstrong 110-pounder guns, an early rifled breech loader (RBL) design, along with 26 68-pounders, and four RBL Armstrong 40-pounder guns with a calibre of and a maximum range of . It had been planned to replace all the 68-pounders with the innovative 110-pounder, whose shell could reach , but poor results in armour-penetration tests halted this. During the first use in action of a 110-pounder aboard HMS ''Euryalus'' in 1863, the gun was incorrectly loaded and the vent piece was blown out of the breech when fired. They were labour-intensive to load and fire, and were henceforth only used with a reduced propellant charge, which left them ineffective against ironclad ships.

All the guns could fire either solid shot or explosive shells. The 68-pounders could also fire molten iron shells, filled with iron melted in a furnace between the two forward boilers. The 40-pounder Armstrong guns were replaced with a better design of the same calibre in 1863. ''Warrior''s original armament was replaced during her 1864–1867 refit with 24 7-inch and four rifled muzzle-loading (RML) guns. The ship also received four RBL Armstrong 20-pounders for use as saluting guns. The RML 8-inch gun could penetrate of wrought iron armour at the muzzle, and the RML 7-inch gun could pierce .

Armour

''Warrior''s armour consisted of of wrought iron backed by of teak. The iron armour was made up of plates that interlocked by the tongue and groove method. It was bolted through the teak to the iron hull. The teak consisted of two layers laid at right angles to each other; they strengthened the armour by damping the shock waves caused by the impact of shells that would otherwise break the bolts connecting the armour to the hull. Unlike most later ship armour, ''Warrior''s armour was made by a process of hammering rather than rolling. Based on tests at Shoeburyness in October 1861 when the ''Warrior'' was launched, it "was practically invulnerable to the ordnance at the time in use".

The armour covered the middle of the ship and extended above the waterline and below it. The guns on the main deck were protected from raking fire by 4.5-inch transverse bulkheads. The ends of the ship were unprotected, but were subdivided into watertight compartments to minimise flooding. The lack of armour at the stern rendered the steering gear and rudder vulnerable.

Crew

The ship's crew comprised 50 officers and 656 ratings in 1863. The majority of the crew had to do physically demanding tasks; one such duty was the raising of the heaviest manually hauled anchors in maritime history. The day-to-day life of her crew differed little from those on the navy's traditional wooden-hulled vessels.

The majority of the crew lived on the single gun deck of the ''Warrior''; these crewmen slept in hammocks slung from the sides and deck beams, with up to 18 men between each pair of guns. The officers berthed in the rear of the ship in small individual cabins; the wardroom was also the officers' mess. The captain had two spacious, well-furnished cabins.

Of the ratings, 122 were Royal Marines. As an experiment during the ship's first commission, all of ''Warrior'''s marines were from Royal Marine Artillery; subsequently some marine infantrymen were assigned as was the usual naval practice. The marines manned the aft section of guns and slung their hammocks between the crew's accommodation and the officers' cabins.

Propulsion

''Warrior'' had a two-cylinder trunk steam engine, made by John Penn and Sons, driving a single propeller using steam provided by 10 rectangular boilers. The engine produced a total of during ''Warrior''s sea trials on 1 April 1868 giving a speed of under steam alone. The ship carried of coal, enough to steam at .

The ironclad was ship rigged and had a sail area of . ''Warrior'' reached under sail alone, faster than her sister ship . She had the largest hoisting propeller ever made; it weighed , and 600 men could raise it into the ship to reduce drag while under sail. To further reduce drag, both her funnels were telescopic and could be lowered. Under sail and steam together, the ship once reached against the tide while running from Portsmouth to Plymouth.

Construction and service

''Warrior'' was ordered on 11 May 1859 from Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company in Blackwall, London. The ship was laid down some time after 6 June 1859 on the West Ham side of Bow Creek when the P&O ocean liner ''Seine'' was launched, and the slipway was reinforced to support ''Warrior''s weight. Full-scale production of the ship's iron began in August, and the construction probably began in mid-August. Indecision by the Admiralty and frequent design changes caused many delays and nearly drove her builders bankrupt before a grant of £50,000 was awarded to keep them solvent. Her launching on 29 December 1860 was during the coldest winter for 50 years. She was frozen to her slipway and required the use of hydraulic rams, additional tugs, and dockworkers running from side to side on the upper deck to rock her free. ''Warrior'' was commissioned in August 1861 to conduct her sea trials; she was completed on 24 October for £377,292, almost twice the cost of a contemporary wooden ship of the line. Between March and June 1862, defects exposed during her trials were rectified, and damage repaired. Changes included the fitting of a lighter bowsprit and a shorter jib boom, along with the provision of extra heads amidships.

The ship was initially assigned to the Channel Squadron under the command of Captain Arthur Cochrane. In March 1863, ''Warrior'' escorted the royal yacht that brought Princess Alexandra of Denmark to Britain to marry the Prince of Wales. The princess appreciated the conduct of the ship's crew, and requested Admiral Sir Michael Seymour to convey to the ship that "she was much pleased". Cochrane had the message engraved on a brass plate and fitted to the ship's wheel. Her descendant, Princess Alexandra of Kent, is now patron of the HMS ''Warrior'' 1860 Trust.

In mid-1863 the Channel Fleet toured British ports for 12 weeks; the ship received 300,000 visitors, including as many as 13,000 a day in port. On 19 September, she rescued the survivors of the Mersey Flat ''Mary Agnes'', which had sunk in a collision with the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company's ship at Liverpool, Lancashire.

''Warrior'' began a refit in November 1864 during which the Armstrong guns, which had not proved successful in use, were removed and her armament was upgraded to the latest rifled muzzle-loading guns. She was recommissioned in 1867, under the command of Captain John Corbett, to relieve her sister as the guardship at Queenstown in Ireland, but instead both ships participated in the Fleet Review held on 17 July in honour of the visits made by the Khedive of Egypt and the Sultan of Turkey to Britain. After the review, the Admiralty paid off the ship on 24 July; the following day ''Warrior'' was recommissioned with Captain Henry Boys in command. After working up at Spithead, she sailed to join the Channel Squadron on 24 September. At the end of the year she was deployed to Osborne Bay to guard Queen Victoria at Osborne House. The Fenian Rising was under way, and there was intelligence suggesting that the Queen might be in danger from Irish nationalists. While ''Warrior'' was performing this duty, she received an informal visit from the Queen. The ship was part of a squadron that escorted the royal yacht to Dublin in April 1868 for an official visit by the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. In August, while cruising to Scotland, ''Warrior'' collided with , losing her figurehead and jib boom and smashing ''Royal Oak''s cutter. Boys was court-martialled and acquitted over the incident.

From 4 to 28 July 1868, ''Warrior'', with ''Black Prince'' and the wooden paddle frigate , towed a specially built floating drydock, large enough to accommodate ironclads, across the Atlantic from Madeira to Bermuda. Upon her return to England in late August 1869, Boys was relieved by Captain Frederick Stirling. After a refit to clean her hull and replace the figurehead lost in the collision, ''Warrior'' rejoined the Channel Squadron. On 2 March 1870, Captain Henry Glyn assumed command of the ship. While returning from a joint cruise with the Mediterranean Fleet, the ship was present when was lost during a severe storm on 7 September. Further cruises followed, including trips to Madeira and Gibraltar. ''Warrior'' narrowly missed colliding with when she was following her out of Gibraltar and ''Agincourt'' grounded on Pearl Rock.

The rapid evolution of warship design, for which ''Warrior'' was partly responsible, meant that she started to become obsolete only ten years after she had been launched. In 1871 the Royal Navy commissioned its first mastless capital ship, . In the absence of masts, the main armament could move from the broadside and traverse more freely from a higher position. In the same year, ''Warrior'' began a refit that lasted until 1875; it added a poop deck and steam capstan, a shorter bowsprit, and replacement boilers. In April 1875, the ship was recommissioned, and assigned to the First Reserve, where she served as a guardship at Portland. In this role, she went on annual summer cruises to various ports. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878, she was mobilised due to concerns that the victorious Russians might be about to attack Constantinople, forcing Great Britain to intervene, but nothing transpired and ''Warrior'' cruised to Bantry Bay instead. In April 1881 she was transferred to the Clyde District, where she served as guardship until 31 May 1883. Two of her masts were discovered to be rotten that month and with no replacements available, the ship was decommissioned and the masts removed.

''Warrior'' was reclassified as a "screw battle ship, third class, armoured" in 1887 and again in May 1892 as a first-class armoured cruiser, although no changes were made to her. She was considered for modernization as late as 1894, but this was rejected as uneconomical after at least one new boiler was installed. She was struck off the effective list at Portsmouth and classified as hulk in March 1900. The ship was used as a storage hulk from May 1901 to July 1902. In preparation for her service as a depot ship for a flotilla of destroyers, the ship had her engines and boilers removed and part of her upper deck roofed over. ''Warrior'' served in this role from July 1902, under the command of Captain John de Robeck. In March 1904, she was assigned to the Portsmouth-based , the Royal Navy's torpedo-training school. Her name was changed to ''Vernon III'' that month in order to release her name for a new armoured cruiser , and six new Belleville boilers and four electric generators were installed so that she could supply steam and electricity to the neighbouring hulks that made up ''Vernon''. Most of the upper deck was roofed over to form classrooms for radio training, and her fore and mizzen masts were reinstalled. In October 1923, the school was transferred to a newly built shore installation, rendering ''Warrior'' and her companion hulks redundant; ''Warrior'' resumed her name on 1 October and the Royal Navy declared her redundant six months later.

The mass scrapping of obsolete ships after World War I had caused a downturn in demand for scrap iron by the time the Navy decided to sell off ''Warrior'' on 2 April 1925. There was no commercial interest in scrapping the old ship, and she remained at Portsmouth for another four years. She was modified into a mooring jetty beginning on 22 October 1927. This entailed the removal of all of her equipment and masts other than her boilers and generators, and the installation of two diesel-driven emergency pumps. The space under the poop was converted into accommodation for a shipkeeper and his family. The hulk was towed to her new home, Pembroke Dock in Wales, on 13 March 1929 where she served as a floating oil jetty. For the next fifty years, the ship lay just offshore from an oil depot at Llanion Cove. The Navy covered the ship's upper deck with a thick layer of concrete during one of her maintenance dockings before World War II. In the war, she served as a base ship for coastal minesweepers and, on 27 August 1942, was once again renamed as ''Oil Fuel Hulk C77'' to release her name for use by a light aircraft carrier, , then under construction. She refuelled 5,000 ships during her service at Llanion Cove.

Preservation

Restoring ''Warrior'' was discussed in the early 1960s, but did not develop into a serious project. In 1967, the Greater London Council proposed to restore the ship as an attraction in London, but ''Warrior'' was still required in Pembroke by the Royal Navy and the scheme went no further. In 1968 the Duke of Edinburgh chaired a meeting that discussed preserving and restoring ''Warrior'' and other historic vessels, and a year later The Maritime Trust was established to save the decrepit ironclad and other historic ships. The Maritime Trust and a major supporter, the Manifold Trust led by the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) John Smith, maintained an interest in ''Warrior''. In 1976 the Royal Navy announced that the Llanion Oil Depot would close in 1978, and the Manifold Trust began to seek funds to restore her. With the promise of financial support for restoration, the Royal Navy donated the ship to the trust in 1979., The Ship's Preservation Trust acquired ownership of the ship in 1983; it became the Warrior Preservation Trust in 1985.

Restoration

In August 1979 ''Warrior'' began her journey to her temporary home in the Coal Dock at Hartlepool for restoration as a museum ship. She arrived on 2 September 1979 and began the £9 million restoration project, largely funded by the Manifold Trust. The Maritime Trust decided to restore ''Warrior'' to her 1862 condition with the aim that no further major work would be necessary for the next 20 years. The first two years of the restoration were generally devoted to safely removing material added after her first commission, like the poop deck and the of concrete decking. Intensive research was done to find detailed descriptions of the ship and her equipment as of 1862 to make the restoration as accurate as economically feasible. Sources included surviving official records, and the papers of those who had served on the ship during her active service. Bolt-holes and ridges in the paint gave clues to the location of some fittings and fixtures, and the sketch plans of Midshipman Henry Murray, found in Captain Cochrane's Letter Book, showed the locations of the armament, moveable fittings and stores.

Work on carving a replacement for ''Warrior''s figurehead, which was destroyed in the 1960s, began in 1981 using photographs of the original as a guide. The work-in-progress was displayed at the 1982 London International Boat Show with the carvers, Jack Whitehead and Norman Gaches from the Isle of Wight, still at work; it dominated coverage of the show. Before it was finished in mid-1983, the figurehead appeared on the BBC
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