HMS Albion (R07): The Carrier That Nearly Sank Before She Ever Sailed

A Rocky Start, Almost Literally

HMS Albion, built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson, had her keel laid down on 23 March 1944 and was launched on 6 May 1947 by Violet Attlee, wife of the then Prime Minister. Her path to completion was anything but smooth. While under tow to Rosyth in 1949, still years from being finished, she collided with the merchant ship SS Maystone, which tore a 225-square-foot hole in her stern and very nearly sank her before she had ever sailed under her own power for real. The resulting repairs pushed her completion back all the way to 1954, a full decade after her keel had first gone down.

Into Service, and Into a Crisis

Once finally commissioned, Albion wasted little time earning her keep. In June 1954, helicopters from her air group assisted in the search for survivors after a Swissair aircraft ditched in the English Channel, and that September she joined the Mediterranean Fleet, becoming flagship of the Flag Officer Aircraft Carriers.

Her most significant early action came during the Suez Crisis, after Britain, France and Israel moved against Egypt in 1956 over control of the canal. Following a refit at Portsmouth, Albion returned to the Mediterranean and her air group struck key Egyptian airfields while also providing cover for the paratroopers landing at Port Said, putting her squarely at the centre of one of the most politically fraught British military operations of the postwar era.

The Old Grey Ghost of the Borneo Coast

As fixed-wing carrier aviation moved on and the Navy's needs shifted, Albion began conversion into a commando carrier in January 1961, recommissioning in her new role in 1962, built around helicopters and Royal Marines rather than jet aircraft. It was in this guise that she earned one of the more evocative nicknames in Royal Navy history, the Old Grey Ghost of the Borneo Coast, picked up during operations off Borneo in support of British and Commonwealth forces during the Indonesian Confrontation, moving troops and equipment along a coastline where her presence, and often her camouflage, made her a genuinely elusive and effective asset.

A Long Working Life, Then a Quiet End

Albion's final overseas deployment took her to Canada in October 1972, and she sailed into Portsmouth Harbour for the last time on 24 November that year, flying her paying-off pennant. There was a brief hope that she might find a second life: in 1973 she was sold with plans to convert her into a heavy lift vessel, an unusual but not unheard-of fate for a decommissioned carrier hull. Those plans ultimately fell through, and Albion was instead broken up for scrap at Faslane, closing out a career that had begun with a near-catastrophic collision before she had even properly gone to sea, and ended two decades later having flown air strikes over Egypt and earned a nickname worthy of a much longer legend.