HMS ''President'' (formerly HMS ''Saxifrage'') is a retired Flower-class

Q-ship Q-ships, also known as Q-boats, decoy vessels, special service ships, or mystery ships, were heavily armed merchant ships with concealed weaponry, designed to lure submarines into making surface attacks. This gave Q-ships the chance to open f ...

that was launched in 1918. She was renamed HMS ''President'' in 1922 and moored permanently on the

Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

as a Royal Navy Reserve drill ship. In 1982 she was sold to private owners and, having changed hands twice, served as a venue for conferences and functions as well as the offices for a number of media companies. She has been moved to Chatham on the Medway in

Kent Kent is a county in South East England and one of the home counties. It borders Greater London to the north-west, Surrey to the west and East Sussex to the south-west, and Essex to the north across the estuary of the River Thames; it faces ...

since 2016, but is due to return to the capital. She had the suffix "(1918)" added to her name in order to distinguish her from HMS ''President'', the Royal Naval Reserve base in

St Katharine Docks St Katharine Docks is a former dock and now a mixed-used district in Central London, in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and within the East End. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames, immediately downstream of the Tower of London an ...

. She is one of the last three surviving

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against ...

warships of the First World War.The other two are in

Belfast Belfast ( , ; from ga, Béal Feirste , meaning 'mouth of the sand-bank ford') is the capital and largest city of Northern Ireland, standing on the banks of the River Lagan on the east coast. It is the 12th-largest city in the United Kingdom ...

, and the 1915

monitor Monitor or monitor may refer to: Places * Monitor, Alberta * Monitor, Indiana, town in the United States * Monitor, Kentucky * Monitor, Oregon, unincorporated community in the United States * Monitor, Washington * Monitor, Logan County, West ...

Portsmouth dockyard His Majesty's Naval Base, Portsmouth (HMNB Portsmouth) is one of three operating bases in the United Kingdom for the Royal Navy (the others being HMNB Clyde and HMNB Devonport). Portsmouth Naval Base is part of the city of Portsmouth; it is l ...

She is also the sole representative of the first type of purpose built anti-submarine vessels, and is the ancestor of World War II convoy escort sloops, which evolved into modern anti-submarine

frigates A frigate () is a type of warship. In different eras, the roles and capabilities of ships classified as frigates have varied somewhat. The name frigate in the 17th to early 18th centuries was given to any full-rigged ship built for speed and ...

Design and construction

HMS ''President'' was built as an ''Anchusa''-type . These were built between 1916 and 1918 as submarine hunters disguised to look like merchant ships, while carrying concealed 4-inch and 12-pounder naval guns.

U-boat U-boats were naval submarines operated by Germany, particularly in the First and Second World Wars. Although at times they were efficient fleet weapons against enemy naval warships, they were most effectively used in an economic warfare ro ...

s would dive at the sight of a naval warship, and the success of the

s, or 'mystery ships' - converted merchantmen with hidden guns - led to the building of these specialised naval vessels for the same purpose. It was intended that a U-boat captain, unwilling to expend a precious torpedo on a small coastal merchantman, would surface to sink it by gunfire. As the submarine closed for the kill, the Q-ship would reveal her hidden guns and counterattack while the U-boat was at its most vulnerable on the surface. By the time the "warship-Qs" were constructed, the Germans were well aware of this tactic, and with the introduction of

unrestricted submarine warfare Unrestricted submarine warfare is a type of naval warfare in which submarines sink merchant ships such as freighters and tankers without warning, as opposed to attacks per prize rules (also known as "cruiser rules") that call for warships to s ...

these sloops became active rather than passive submarine chasers. HMS Saxifrage WWI IWM SP 1650

In the case of the warship-Qs the individual builders were asked to use their existing designs for merchantmen, based on the standard Flower type warship hull. This included a dummy merchant ship sternpost rudder, mounted above the waterline over a much more manoeuvrable balanced rudder which allowed the ship to make a fast turn to bring her guns or depth charges to bear on a U-boat, or even to ram it before it could escape. The class were also given a wide variety of spectacular dazzle camouflage schemes to confuse the primitive range finders of World War I submarines. Altogether, 120 Flowers were built, of which eighteen were sunk in action during the war. ''Saxifrage'' was built at the shipyard of Lobnitz & Company, Renfrew, Scotland, as yard number 827 and launched on 29 January 1918. She was named ''Saxifrage'' after the flower also known as ''London Pride''.

Naval service

Active service

HMS ''Saxifrage'' escorted convoys in UK waters during 1918, and engaged nine U-boats, as recorded in her logbooks held in the National Archives at Kew. In 1922 she was permanently moored on the Thames, and renamed ''President''. Other members of the class served as patrol vessels throughout the world during the peacetime years between the wars, but almost all were disposed of by the Second World War. This allowed the majority of the class names to be revived for the new, smaller s, including both ''Saxifrage'' and ''Chrysanthemum''.This s, based on a 1936 deep-sea whaling boat design, carried the brunt of the anti-submarine war in 1940-42 before the larger frigates became available. These World War II Flowers were immortalised by

Nicholas Monsarrat Lieutenant Commander Nicholas John Turney Monsarrat FRSL RNVR (22 March 19108 August 1979) was a British novelist known for his sea stories, particularly '' The Cruel Sea'' (1951) and ''Three Corvettes'' (1942–45), but perhaps known best i ...

in his 1951 novel '' The Cruel Sea''

Reserve service

From 1922 she was employed as a

Royal Naval Reserve The Royal Naval Reserve (RNR) is one of the two volunteer reserve forces of the Royal Navy in the United Kingdom. Together with the Royal Marines Reserve, they form the Maritime Reserve. The present RNR was formed by merging the original Ro ...

drill ship, and as such was moored permanently on the Thames at Blackfriars. Her new name was inherited from the '' Old President'' of 1829, which had been based in

West India Docks The West India Docks are a series of three docks, quaysides and warehouses built to import goods from and export goods and occasionally passengers to the British West Indies on the Isle of Dogs in London the first of which opened in 1802. Follow ...

from 1862 to 1903 as the first London naval reserve drill ship. The name ''President'' (which might be thought an unusual choice in a constitutional monarchy such as the United Kingdom) celebrated the capture of both the French frigate ''Président'' in 1806, and the American 'super frigate' in 1815 The 1918 ''President'' remained in Royal Navy service for a total of seventy years, from 1918 to 1988. She was the last Royal Navy warship to wear Victorian battleship livery of black hull, white superstructure and buff yellow funnel and masts. All naval personnel working at the Admiralty and elsewhere in London were nominally appointed to service in ''President'', and they were paid and administered by her staff. MI6/SIS officers who had RN commissions were appointed to ''President'', but paid and administered by the SIS. During the Second World War ''President'' was converted to a gunnery training ship, fitted with a large overall "shed" superstructure. Her major role was the training of DEMS gunners for

defensively equipped merchant ship Defensively equipped merchant ship (DEMS) was an Admiralty Trade Division programme established in June 1939, to arm 5,500 British merchant ships with an adequate defence against enemy submarines and aircraft. The acronym DEMS was used to descri ...

s. Her sister Flower class Q-ship, , was moored ahead of her in 1938 to provide additional office and training space. After the war both ships were reconstructed by the

with large deckhouses fore and aft, giving an improved drill area and extra offices; they were also provided with tall wheelhouses and dummy funnels. These were dismountable, so they could pass under the London bridges to be periodically maintained in one of the Thames dockyards. In this form, they continued in use as Royal Naval Reserve training ships until 1988, each matching ''Old President''s total of more than seventy years in naval service. Since 1988 the name HMS ''President'' has been used for a

shore establishment A stone frigate is a naval establishment on land. "Stone frigate" is an informal term that has its origin in Britain's Royal Navy after its use of Diamond Rock, an island off Martinique, as a 'sloop of war' to harass the French in 1803–04. ...

of the

near

Tower Bridge Tower Bridge is a Grade I listed combined bascule and suspension bridge in London, built between 1886 and 1894, designed by Horace Jones and engineered by John Wolfe Barry with the help of Henry Marc Brunel. It crosses the River Thames clos ...

Civilian use

Charitable venue

In 1988 the ship was saved by the charity, Inter-Action Social Enterprise Trust, run by

ED Berman Edward David Berman (born 8 March 1941 in Lewiston, Maine) is an American-born British community educator, social activist, children's poet, playwright, director and producer. In 1979, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Berman an MBE for Services to Com ...

. In ''President'' social enterprises included: a base for start-up companies for young people; audio-visual studios; a publishing company; an NGO Advisory Service, and an 'event deck' to earn funding for the charity. This period saved her from scrap, and preserved her for future generations. She had become a London landmark, marked on street maps, so was permitted to retain her warship title and name "HMS ''President''" with the added suffix "(1918)" to distinguish her from the new

of the same name. (Her sister ship, ''Chrysanthemum'' was hired to Steven Spielberg for the boat chase sequences shot in 1988 in Tilbury Docks for the film '' Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade''; she was then laid up in the River Medway, where the

brackish water Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estuari ...

rusted her hull so badly that she was scrapped in 1995.)

Corporate venue

''President'' was resold in 2001 to David Harper and Cary Thornton, then purchased in April 2006 by the serviced office company, MLS Group Plc, to serve as a venue for conferences and functions and to house the offices of a number of media companies. Its owners planned to present her as an historical resource during the 2014-18 First World War centenary, as the U-Boat campaign of World War I was the greatest peril that Britain faced in 1917–18, and was the most critical naval conflict of that war. As part of the Imperial War Museum's 14-18 Now project, HMS ''President'' was selected to be a " dazzle ship"; she was given a new livery, entitled ''Dazzle Ship London'', by artist Tobias Rehberger, to commemorate the work of the artists who created the naval dazzle camouflage of World War I.

Uncertain future

''President'' had been permanently berthed in the

River Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

on the Victoria Embankment in the

City of London The City of London is a city, ceremonial county and local government district that contains the historic centre and constitutes, alongside Canary Wharf, the primary central business district (CBD) of London. It constituted most of London f ...

close to Blackfriars Millennium Pier since 1922. During 2016, however, she was moved to Chatham to make way for the construction of the new Thames Tideway Tunnel (one of the access tunnels will enter from Temple Avenue, next to where the ship had been moored). Ownership was transferred to a charitable trust which launched a crowdfunding appeal to seek to raise funds for restoration; however grant applications submitted to the

Heritage Lottery Fund The National Lottery Heritage Fund, formerly the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), distributes a share of National Lottery funding, supporting a wide range of heritage projects across the United Kingdom. History The fund's predecessor bodies were ...

, the

LIBOR The London Inter-Bank Offered Rate is an interest-rate average calculated from estimates submitted by the leading banks in London. Each bank estimates what it would be charged were it to borrow from other banks. The resulting average rate is u ...

fund and the

National Heritage Memorial Fund The National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) was set up in 1980 to save the most outstanding parts of the British national heritage, in memory of those who have given their lives for the UK. It replaced the National Land Fund which had fulfilled the ...

were all unsuccessful. In December 2018 HMS ''President'' (1918) was sold by the trust and bought by Lisa-Marie Turner. ''President'' turned 101 in 2019, and is currently in Chatham, Kent, where the ship awaits dry docking and a refurbishment in the coming years. She remains listed on the

National Register of Historic Vessels National Historic Ships UK is a government-funded independent organisation that advises UK governments and others on matters relating to historic ships.

as part of the

National Historic Fleet The National Historic Fleet is a list of historic ships and vessels located in the United Kingdom, under the National Historic Ships register. National Historic Ships UK is an advisory body which advises the Secretary of State for Culture, Media ...

Notes

References

Publications

External links

New ''Saxifrage'' Maritime Trust website

''HMS President'' at the National Historic Ships register

2014 Dazzle painting
{{DEFAULTSORT:President (1918) Anchusa-class sloops Museum ships in the United Kingdom Sloops of the Royal Navy Sloops of the United Kingdom Tourist attractions in London World War I naval ships of the United Kingdom City of London 1918 ships 1918 in Scotland Ships built on the River Clyde History of Renfrewshire Economy of Renfrewshire Ships and vessels of the National Historic Fleet