HMS Warrior history: the Victorian ironclad in Portsmouth

HMS Warrior history: the ship that made warships obsolete

HMS Warrior was built between 1859 and 1861 as Britain's answer to a French surprise. In 1859 France launched Gloire, the first ocean-going ironclad warship, and overnight the Royal Navy's great fleet of wooden ships of the line looked vulnerable. The reply was Warrior and her sister HMS Black Prince: the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warships in the world. Warrior was a 40-gun steam-powered armoured frigate, 128 metres long overall, with a full set of sails for long passages and a steam engine by John Penn and Sons that gave her a speed of just over fourteen knots.

She was so far ahead of everything afloat that she never fired a shot in anger. Warrior made a publicity tour of Great Britain in 1863 and spent her active career with the Channel Squadron, but the pace of change she had started soon overtook her. When the mastless HMS Devastation was commissioned in 1873, Warrior became obsolescent; she went into reserve in 1875 and was paid off in 1883.

Fifty years as an oil jetty

The strangest chapter of HMS Warrior history is the longest. For most of the twentieth century Warrior was barely recognisable. She served as a storeship and depot ship, and in 1904 joined the Royal Navy's torpedo training school. Offered for sale in 1925, she found no buyer, and in 1929 she was towed to Pembroke Dock in Wales to become a floating oil jetty off the depot at Llanion Cove. Her equipment and masts were stripped, her upper deck was covered with a thick layer of concrete, and she stayed there for fifty years while tankers moored alongside.

Hartlepool and the restoration

Saving Warrior was discussed through the 1960s, and in 1969 the Maritime Trust was set up partly to rescue her. When the Navy announced that the Llanion depot would close, the trust and the Manifold Trust raised the money, and in August 1979 the hulk began an 800-mile tow to the Coal Dock at Hartlepool. The £9 million restoration that followed aimed to return her to her 1862 condition. The first two years went on removing later additions, including some 200 tons of concrete decking. Researchers worked from official records and from the papers of men who had served aboard, and missing guns were recast in fibreglass from originals lent by museums.

Her figurehead had been destroyed in the 1960s after decades of weather at the dockyard gate. A replacement was carved on the Isle of Wight between 1981 and 1983 by Jack Whitehead and Norman Gaches; the half-finished carving was the star of the 1982 London International Boat Show and appeared on Blue Peter before it was mounted on the bow on 6 February 1985.

Home to Portsmouth

Warrior left Hartlepool on 12 June 1987 and was towed 390 miles to the Solent in four days. Thousands of people lined the walls and the shore as she entered Portsmouth Harbour, escorted by more than ninety boats, and she opened as a museum on 27 July. She lies beside Portsmouth Harbour railway station, part of the Historic Dockyard alongside HMS Victory, the Mary Rose and the First World War monitor HMS M33. The Warrior Preservation Trust managed her until 2017, when she passed to the National Museum of the Royal Navy.

Weddings and naval evenings aboard HMS Warrior

Warrior still earns her keep. The ship is used as a venue for weddings and functions, and the income helps pay for her maintenance. That has made her gun deck one of the most unusual party venues in the country: candlelight between the cannon, a Victorian ironclad's timber deck underfoot and the harbour lights outside the gunports. Couples searching for an HMS Warrior wedding are usually drawn by exactly that.

For years one of the entertainers most closely tied to those evenings was Portsmouth's Shep Woolley. His programme for a full ship's event read like a naval pageant: military marching and musket displays on the upper deck as guests arrived, traditional music during the reception, shanties, jigs and reels around the tables from the 'Ansom Cabin Buoys, table visits from a close-up magician and a trio of chatty musical "Dockyard Floosies", and a genuine Royal Navy rum bosun serving the tots. After dinner came a brass band with "Land of Hope and Glory", "A Life on the Ocean Wave" and "Jerusalem". The director of an international yacht-regatta series wrote afterwards that of twenty regattas she had organised in the UK, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, the evening aboard Warrior had been voted the best.

Visiting the ship in Portsmouth is the easiest way to see why, and the best way to take in her history. Walk the upper deck, go below to the gun deck and the engine room, and the scale of what the Victorian Navy built in answer to Gloire is obvious. Then picture it lit for an evening, with a shanty band starting up between the guns.