HMNB Portsmouth: Where the Mary Rose Sank and the Industrial Revolution Quietly Began

Eight Centuries of Naval History, Give or Take

Portsmouth's naval story is generally dated to 1194, when Richard I granted the town its first Royal Charter, an act widely credited with founding what would become Britain's premier naval port, with protective walls added under King John in 1212.

The pivotal early development came under Henry VII, who in 1495 and 1496 ordered the construction of what is usually described as the world's first dry dock, though some sources more cautiously phrase this as the oldest surviving dry dock, a small but genuine distinction worth keeping in mind, since being first and being the oldest still standing are not quite the same claim.

The Mary Rose, and a Death Nobody Can Fully Explain

Henry VIII made Portsmouth home to a permanent standing navy, and it was here, on 19 July 1545, that his flagship the Mary Rose sank in the Solent during the Battle of the Solent against an invading French fleet, taking roughly five hundred of her seven hundred crew down with her.

Why she sank remains particularly disputed among historians even today, with the Mary Rose Trust itself declining to declare a single winner among the leading theories, which include an ill-timed turn that left her open lower gunports exposed to a sudden gust of wind, inexperienced command, simple overloading, and, less credibly, French cannon fire.

She was finally raised on 11 October 1982 after 437 years underwater, and following a thirty-year conservation effort the museum built to house her now displays more than nineteen thousand Tudor artefacts, billed as the largest collection of its kind anywhere in the world.

The Machines That Quietly Started the Industrial Revolution

Portsmouth's most historically significant achievement may not be a ship at all. From 1802, engineer Samuel Bentham commissioned a scheme designed by Marc Isambard Brunel and built by Henry Maudslay to mechanise the production of wooden pulley blocks, the simple but essential rigging components every warship needed by the thousand.

Installed in stages between 1803 and 1807, the resulting Portsmouth Block Mills used forty-five machines and largely unskilled labour to produce some 130,000 blocks a year by 1808, dramatically outstripping previous Navy demand of around 100,000 annually, and the achievement is widely regarded by historians of technology as one of the true starting points of mechanised mass production.

In a nice piece of local colour, Marc Brunel's own son, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was born just a few hundred yards away in Portsea in April 1806, while his father was still building the very machines that would help define the industrial age his son went on to shape. HMS Victory, completed in 1765 at a cost of some sixty-three thousand pounds, went on to become Nelson's flagship at Trafalgar in 1805, where she suffered fifty-one men killed in action and a further eleven who later died of their wounds, and Nelson himself reportedly toured the newly built Block Mills shortly before his final departure aboard her.

Blitz, and the Push Toward D-Day

The nineteenth century brought steam-age transformation and a vast programme of basin extensions, along with HMS Warrior, launched in 1860 and described by naval historians as the Royal Navy's first iron-hulled armoured warship and the most powerful warship of her day.

The Second World War hit Portsmouth hard, with the city enduring some sixty-seven separate air raids between 1940 and 1944, killing 930 people and injuring a further 2,837, destroying or severely damaging roughly a fifth of the city's housing stock.

The single worst night came on 10 and 11 January 1941, when around three hundred bombers dropped 140 tons of high explosive and some forty thousand incendiaries, killing 171 people and destroying both the Guildhall and the Royal Garrison Church, the latter deliberately left roofless ever since as a permanent memorial.

Just over three years later Portsmouth became a critical embarkation hub for D-Day, with more than 170,000 troops and around 43,000 tanks and vehicles departing through the city, while the dockyard itself helped build the vast concrete Phoenix caissons used in the Mulberry harbours off the Normandy beaches.

The Falklands, and the Fleet Today

Portsmouth's more recent history includes the departure of the Falklands Task Force, which began sailing from the city on 5 April 1982, just three days after the Argentine invasion, eventually growing into a force of 127 ships carrying around nine thousand personnel, led by the carrier HMS Hermes, which had ironically been due for decommissioning before the war intervened.

Today HMNB Portsmouth is home to almost two-thirds of the Royal Navy's surface fleet, including both Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth, which arrived in 2017, and HMS Prince of Wales, which followed in 2019, alongside the Type 45 destroyer and Type 23 frigate fleets.

While Portsmouth is unquestionably the Royal Navy's oldest and most historically significant base, it is worth noting that Devonport remains the physically larger of the two, a useful corrective for anyone tempted to assume Portsmouth's fame automatically makes it the biggest.

What notably sets Portsmouth apart is the unusual and rather wonderful arrangement by which a fully working, operational naval base sits immediately alongside Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, where visitors can walk past HMS Victory, HMS Warrior and the Mary Rose Museum within sight of the modern warships still doing the job those older vessels once did themselves.