HMS Warrior: Ironclad Frigate 1860

By Wyn Davies and Geoff Dennison

“A well-illustrated tour of the ship as she is today, deck by deck . . . includes a historical introduction looking at the ship and her significance.”—Ships Monthly
 
HMS Warrior, launched in 1860, was the first iron-hulled, sea-going armored ship, and for many years was the most powerful warship in the world. Rescued a century later from her role as a refueling hulk, she became the object of the most ambitious ship restoration project ever mounted and is now afloat and open to visitors at Portsmouth.
 
As is the case for many historic ships, however, there is a surprising shortage of informative and well-illustrated guides, for reference during a visit or for research by enthusiasts, ship modelers, naval buffs, technical historians or students. This book—second in the Seaforth Historic Ship Series—redresses the gap.
 
Written by experts and containing more than 200 specially commissioned photographs, each title in the series takes the reader on a superbly illustrated tour of the ship, deck by deck. Significant parts of the vessel for example, the steering gear, armament and armor, engine-room and gundeck are given detailed coverage so that the reader has at hand the most complete visual record and explanation of the ship that is at present available.
 
In addition, the importance of the ship, both in her own time and now as a museum vessel, is explained, while her design and build, her service career and her life prior to restoration and exhibition are all described.
 
The Seaforth Historic Ship Series is a truly groundbreaking concept, bringing the ships of our past vividly to life.
 
“A beautiful publication.”—Ships in Scale

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781848322837

Book preview

1 HMS WARRIOR

TODAY HMS WARRIOR, BEAUTIFULLY RESTORED and the epitome of Victorian elegance, is a star attraction at Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Larger than HMS Victory, she was the ultimate naval deterrent of her age and the quiet waters of Portsmouth Harbour where she lies afloat belie her origins. The youthful delight she inspires today has its source in a darker, less sure past, when Britain’s nearest neighbours were a genuine threat.

A maritime rivalry that was thought, by the public at least, to have been settled by Nelson’s crushing victory at the battle of Trafalgar in fact continued, with the continental navies and the Royal Navy regularly eyeing each other across the Channel. The French in particular, admitting the RN’s numerical superiority, were always looking for a technological edge to better their chances should war come again. In their design and construction of La Gloire in 1858 they thought they had found it. La Gloire was indeed the first fully armoured ship of the line, but despite the advance of armour plate, underneath she was only a wooden warship simply modernised by the addition of a steam engine as was already common practice.

It took the Victorian naval establishment little time to counter this new challenge with the design and construction of Warrior. Superficially similar in appearance to her wooden predecessors she was in reality a radical departure that in one stroke rendered all other fighting vessels obsolete and marked the start of a new generation of warships.

To a first-time visitor to Warrior today, she is something of a surprise. Where did this, the first successful iron warship, spring from so fully formed? The fine details of her construction repay the visitor’s attention, for Isaac Watts, her designer, devised so many features that were exactly right first time.

This book will show how important Warrior was, and take the reader around her decks and demonstrate that she was a ship that truly changed her world.

Commander Ken Jones

Royal Navy

CEO, Warrior Preservation Trust.

The magnificent sight of HMS Warrior, pictured alongside her jetty at Portsmouth’s Historic Dockyard.

2 THE VICTORIAN NAVY

ALTHOUGH THE MODERN PERCEPTION OF THE Victorian era is one of peace and tranquillity, the truth was that British armies were almost continuously engaged in a series of small wars across the Empire. Britain’s ability to rush troops to these trouble spots was only made possible by the Royal Navy’s dominance of the seaways, the arteries of commerce and trade that in their day afforded the quickest routes to any area of conflict.

For many years the Royal Navy had relied on its traditionally-built wooden line of battle ships of which they had many more than any other navy. Although most were laid up – partly or fully decommissioned and in ‘mothballs’ – to save costs, the Navy were confident that they could still mobilise enough ships in time to counter any threat from the Britain’s neighbours in any perceived combination.

Simple technical evolution had ensured that these battleships were always ahead of the competition. Greater use of iron fittings made construction cheaper, diagonal bracing (internal lattice-work iron framing for greater strength) allowed them to increase in length and thus carry more guns, and the use of suitable steam engines were all combined in the very latest ships, many of which were so well constructed that they lasted in some form or another well into the second half of the twentieth century. Clearly Victorian Britain’s competitors were keenly aware of the Royal Navy’s overwhelming firepower and many were investing resources to find a technological edge that might reverse this situation.

Despite quite frequent joint actions and a varying degree of exchange of information, France was always regarded as the most likely threat to Britain. A more cynical age might regard this mutual distrust as a ploy by the politicians to distract the populace from their domestic problems, but the fear was real enough none the less. In 1859 for example, Lord Palmerston, the then Prime Minister, set up a Royal Commission on the Defence of the United Kingdom and its subsequent report published a year later lead to the building of a series of great forts, such as those that surround Portsmouth, nearly all still in existence today. Twenty years in the building, they rapidly became known as ‘Palmerston’s Follies’ as they had been made obsolete by technological advances by the time they were completed.

It was the building of La Gloire by the French that caused this time of tension. Drawing on the experience of the Crimean War, the naval architect Stanislas-Charles-Henri Dupuy de Lôme took a traditional wooden battleship, cut her down a deck (in effect razeed her, in naval parlance) and fixed iron armour plate to the wooden hull. This produced the first armoured warship, against which traditional roundshot would have little or no effect. Built in great secrecy and presented to the world as a fait-accompli it seemed as if the French had found the edge they were looking for.

A rather splendid painting of La Gloire at sea under power by P Joubert. (© Les Amis des Musée de Marine)

Britain’s technical support to her Royal Navy has long been the subject of much criticism; from Pepys’ Diaries to the Victorian editions of The Times, from serving officers of the Napoleonic Wars to modern writers of historical fiction. However, much of this is ill informed. True, the naval establishment could be accused of being reactive rather than proactive, but with good reason, to quote Sir Baldwin Wake-Walker, Surveyor of the Navy, writing in 1858:

Although I have frequently stated that it is not to the interest of Great Britain – possessing as she does so large a navy – to adopt any important change in the construction of ships of war which might have the effect of rendering necessary the introduction of a new class of very costly vessels, until such a course is forced on us by the adoption by foreign powers of formidable ships of a novel character requiring similar ships to cope with them…

In reality, the result of experience built up over years of careful experiment, allied to a well-developed industrial base, allowed Sir Baldwin and his Chief Constructor, Isaac Watts, to produce a devastating response to La Gloire: HMS Warrior.

In many respects La Gloire was probably the last gasp of the old technology, built around a wooden hull as she was, whereas