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.

On 18 October 1949, while three tugs, Beamish, Hendon and George V, were towing her from her builder's yard at Jarrow to Rosyth to be finished, she collided with the merchant ship SS Maystone some four miles off Longstone Lighthouse.

Maystone sank in the collision, and Albion herself was left with a 225-square-foot hole torn in her stern and began taking on water fast enough that the tugs tried to beach her near St Abbs Head.

One of them, Hector, was disabled when a tow rope fouled her propeller, and it took the destroyer HMS St James and the tug HMS Restive, sent out from Rosyth, to get her under control again; Albion was eventually brought in and berthed with five feet of water sitting in her own engine room.

The resulting repairs pushed her completion back all the way to 1954, a full decade after her keel had first gone down. Fully worked out, the Centaur class displaced around 22,500 tons standard, rising to over 27,000 tons deep loaded, ran to 736 feet in length, and could make 28.5 knots, with room for around 50 aircraft and a wartime complement of some 1,800 officers and men.

There were four of them in the end, and they are worth naming: Albion, Centaur, Bulwark and Hermes. The Centaur class was ordered during the war as an enlarged light fleet design, all four were still on the stocks when it ended, and all finished at a leisurely pace into ships the Navy was no longer entirely sure what to do with. Two of the four would end up as commando carriers and one would end up commanding a task force in the South Atlantic thirty-five years later. Not a bad return on four hulls nobody had a settled use for in 1946.

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 carrying Sea Hawk fighters of 800 and 802 Squadrons, Sea Venoms of 809 Squadron and Skyraider airborne early warning aircraft from 849 Squadron's C Flight, and her air group struck key Egyptian airfields while also providing cover for the paratroopers landing at Port Said, flying more than 1,100 armed sorties across the commission, putting her squarely at the centre of one of the most politically fraught British military operations of the postwar era.

It was a fitting stage for a ship that had already quietly made history of a gentler kind: Albion was the first British carrier fitted with both an interim angled flight deck and a mirror landing sight, two innovations that between them made recovering fast jets at sea considerably less hair-raising, for everyone involved.

Both deserve unpacking, because they are the two ideas that made jet aviation at sea survivable, and both were British. The interim angled deck was 5.5 degrees of it, the landing area painted and marked askew to port rather than running straight up the middle. That sounds like a decorator's decision until you consider what a straight deck meant. An aircraft that missed the arrester wires hit a wire barrier, and behind the barrier sat every aircraft already recovered, fuelled and parked. Angle the landing run a few degrees off the axis and a pilot who takes no wire simply flies off the far corner, opens the throttle and comes round again. Albion had it, and so did Centaur, and the whole world's carriers have had it ever since.

The mirror landing sight was the other half of the answer, and it belongs to one man. Commander Nicholas Goodhart worked the problem out in 1951, when the accident rate among the fast, heavy new jets was becoming impossible to defend. The old method was a batsman standing on the deck edge signalling with paddles, which asks a pilot doing 120 knots to interpret another man's arm movements. Goodhart's idea was to let the pilot see his own glidepath: a concave mirror at the deck edge reflecting a light source, so a ball of light appears to sit high or low against a row of datum lights depending on exactly where the aircraft is. Fly the ball, hit the wire. A prototype went to sea in the old wartime carrier HMS Illustrious in 1953, the Royal Navy adopted it in 1954, and the United States Navy took it up the year after. Every carrier landing since has been flown on some descendant of it.

The numbers behind that are worth having, because they are the reason the idea spread as fast as it did. In 1954, the year the mirror sight came into service, the Fleet Air Arm was losing or damaging aircraft in deck landings at a rate of about thirty-five for every ten thousand landings. By 1957 the figure was seven. One optical device, no moving parts to speak of, and four-fifths of the accidents simply stopped happening. That is a very large number of aeroplanes and a certain number of pilots.

Goodhart himself is worth following. He came out of the war and through the Empire Test Pilots School, flew something like thirty different types, went on exchange to the American naval flight test establishment, and was lent to Westland to test-fly the Wyvern, which was a large, powerful and notably unforgiving turboprop strike aircraft and exactly the sort of thing that had made deck landing so lethal in the first place. He knew the problem from the cockpit before he solved it from the deck.

He also had a second career that most people would consider a whole life on its own. Nick Goodhart was one of the outstanding glider pilots of his generation, British single-seat champion three times over, in 1962, 1967 and 1971, all of it done while holding down a full-time job in the Royal Navy. He finished as a rear-admiral, Director of Defence Operational Requirements and then military deputy to the Head of Defence Sales, was made CB in 1972 and retired the following year. He died in 2011, aged ninety-one. Every pilot who has ever called the ball on the way down to a carrier deck, in any navy, has been using his invention.

The Old Grey Ghost of the Borneo Coast

The reason she was converted at all can be traced back to the operation she had just flown strikes for. On 6 November 1956, while Albion's Sea Hawks were working over Egyptian airfields, something happened a few miles away that had never happened before anywhere: 650 men of 45 Commando and twenty-three tons of their equipment were flown ashore into Port Said by helicopter, ten Whirlwinds of 845 Naval Air Squadron from HMS Theseus and a mixed handful of Whirlwinds and Sycamores from HMS Ocean. It was the first helicopter assault in the history of warfare, improvised with two elderly light fleet carriers and borrowed aircraft, and it worked. The Admiralty drew the obvious conclusion. Bulwark went in for conversion in 1958 and Albion followed in 1961, and the Royal Navy spent the next twenty years as the world's most practised exponent of a technique it had invented on the hoof in an afternoon.

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 and working up with the helicopters of 845 and 846 Naval Air Squadrons alongside 40 Commando Royal Marines before joining the Far East Fleet, built around helicopters and Royal Marines rather than jet aircraft.

The dates give a sense of the tempo. She sailed east in her new role on 3 November 1962, and on 14 December, barely six weeks later, put 40 Commando ashore at Kuching in western Sarawak as the Brunei revolt spread into what became the Confrontation with Indonesia. She was off Borneo again in April 1963, back in September, and working off Tawau and up the Rajang River in January 1964. Bulwark took the coast when Albion was elsewhere and Albion took it when Bulwark was, so that for the best part of four years there was always a commando carrier somewhere off that shoreline. On a coast of mangrove and river mouths with almost no roads behind it, a ship that carries its own helicopters, its own Royal Marines and its own fuel and stores is not so much a warship as a piece of movable geography.

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 particularly 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 strip out her angled flight deck and fit heavy-lift cranes in its place, converting her into a crane ship for North Sea oil exploration, an unusual but not unheard-of fate for a decommissioned carrier hull.

Those plans ultimately fell through on cost and complexity, and ownership passed to Shipbreaking Industries on 12 November 1973; Albion was towed to Faslane, with breaking up getting under way on 20 November that year, 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.