In 1978, following growing interest in safeguarding Britain's maritime heritage, HMS Warrior was rescued from obscurity as a naval refuelling platform in Pembroke, Wales. Her near-derelict hull was towed to Hartlepool, where a nine-year restoration programme began.
She was eventually returned to her original home port of Portsmouth in June 1987, where she remains moored on a permanent, purpose-built pontoon by the entrance to the Portsmouth Historic Naval Dockyard.
Sowing the Seeds of Change
In 1861, HMS Warrior represented the very latest thinking in ship design and construction. She employed the ideas of Robert Seppings, the Navy’s chief surveyor from 1813 to 1832. Seppings introduced the use of diagonal iron bracing to strengthen the decks and hulls of the Navy’s latest ships. His innovations gave Britain a lasting lead in the maritime arms race that dawned with the advent of steam power.
Seppings’ Iron-braced hulls were stronger, stiffer and lighter than their traditionally-built wooden counterparts. They resisted “hogging” and “sagging”, the flexing up and down of a ship’s hull as it rides the crests and troughs of passing waves. In wooden hulls, the flexing motion weakens the joints between structural timbers and causes planking on the hull and outer decks to “spring” leaks. Its effects not only called for constant repair and maintenance but also set limits, especially in terms of length, for the overall size of hull built with wood alone.
Iron-framed hulls had few such issues. They could be bigger, creating the room to incorporate steam power, at first to drive paddle wheels, then propellers. They could better bear the weight of bigger, more powerful guns, as well as absorb the physical forces of firing them.
Iron-framed construction was also more economical, as good-quality timber was becoming harder to source and more costly to buy. There were weight savings, too. These gave ship designers scope to incorporate armour, to protect vulnerable areas such as boiler and engine rooms, shot and powder magazines, and the main gun decks.
“A Formidable Ship of Novel Character”
The impetus for building HMS Warrior followed reports in 1857 that France had begun construction of Gloire, an armoured wooden “ironclad” powered by steam and sail and armed with the very latest weaponry. The government demanded an effective response and the Admiralty ordered the building of two new ships, both specified to surpass the Gloire’s “ironclad” design by having the main part of their hulls built from iron throughout. Construction began at Blackwall on the Thames in the late summer of 1859.
Launched just two days before the 1861 New Year and assigned following completion and sea trials to the Navy’s Channel Squadron in early 1863, HMS Warrior was indeed the “formidable ship of novel character” called for in the official design brief of four years earlier.
At 128 m length overall, with a beam of nearly 18 m and a draught of 8.2 m, she was second in size only to the original “Leviathan”, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s 1858 passenger and cargo steamship, SS Great Eastern.
Her central section is an armoured box or “citadel”, protected on each side by 115 mm of interlocking wrought iron plates bolted to her iron hull through two 229 mm layers of teak. The wooden core was designed to dissipate the shock from a direct hit and her armour proved able in tests to withstand the impact, even at short range, from any gun then in general use. Her unarmoured bow and stern sections are joined to the citadel section by watertight bulkheads and are themselves sub-divided by further bulkheads and decking to contain flooding. Her hull under the engine and boiler rooms is double-skinned to provide similar protection.
Warrior could employ sail or engine power, or a combination of the two. With three masts and a total available sail area of 4,500 sq m, she could reach 13 knots (24 kph; 15 mph) under sail alone. Under power, Warrior could achieve just over 14 knots. Using both together, she once recorded 17.5 knots (42.4 kph; 20.1 mph), against the tide, on a passage from Portsmouth to Plymouth.
Her armament consisted of 26 smooth bore muzzle-loading 68-pounder guns, 10 rifled breech-loading 110-pounder guns, and 4 rifled breach-loading 40-pounder guns. Among further refinements to her overall firepower was a steam-driven fan system help clear her gun deck of smoke. She was also equipped with a small blast-furnace to prepare molten iron to fill a hollow, spherical shot known as a ‘Martin’s’ shell. Fired from a smooth bore muzzle-loading gun, these remained red-hot for up to one hour and are widely credited as sounding the final death-knell for wooden fighting ships.
Among the many other innovations on board were a laundry and a successful prototype for water distillation equipment to convert seawater to drinking water.
Decline — and Rescue
Warrior’s reign as the world’s most powerful warship was short-lived. Continued advances in all her technologies quickly overtook her. She was first relegated to the reserve fleet, then withdrawn from sea service. Later, she became a depot ship, then part of HMS Vernon, the Navy's torpedo training school, She was offered for sale in 1924 but found no buyers. Five years later, she was rechristened Fuel Oil Hulk C77 and began a new life as a ship keeper's home and floating refuelling platform, servicing the Navy's needs in its then base at Pembroke Dock in Wales.
Her lowly status secured her survival. For the next 50 years, the Navy kept her hull in serviceable condition, even taking her into dry dock from time to time to carry out essential repairs. She was nevertheless in a sorry state when rescued at the end of the 1970s. Her restoration in the North East of England is a separate story in itself, and the result a tribute to the craftspeople and workers who laboured to restore her to her former glory.
Did You Know?
- HMS Warrior’s masts and rigging stopped the guns on her upper deck from having as free an arc of fire as the Navy wanted. This put a premium on developing steam power as a sole means of propulsion. Less than 8 years after Warrior’s service debut, the Navy had already commissioned its first mastless warship, HMS Devastation.
- HMS Warrior’s length made her difficult to manouevre. Her turning circle was over a kilometre across and up to 40 men were needed to turn her rudder.
- Despite being by far the world’s largest iron-hulled warship, as well as its most powerfully-armed, HMS Warrior was classified from the outset as a frigate. This was due to the Navy classifying a ship by the number of guns it carried, and how many gun decks it had, rather than by its overall firepower.
- The career of HMS Warrior’s sister ship, HMS Black Prince, followed a similar pattern. Unlike Warrior, she was successfully disposed of by the Navy in 1924 to be broken up for scrap.