HMS Argus (I49): The Converted Italian Liner That Invented the Modern Aircraft Carrier

From Italian Liner to British Innovation

HMS Argus began life not as a warship at all, but as the Italian ocean liner Conte Rosso, laid down in 1914 by William Beardmore and Company at their Dalmuir shipyard. With the liner still incomplete, the Admiralty purchased the hull on 20 September 1916 and set about converting it into something genuinely new: an aircraft carrier with a full-length flush flight deck, unobstructed by the funnels and superstructure that had caused dangerous turbulence problems on earlier carrier conversions such as HMS Furious. She was renamed Argus, after the hundred-eyed watchman of Greek mythology, launched on 2 December 1917, and finally commissioned on 16 September 1918, her construction slowed considerably by wartime labour shortages.

That delay meant Argus arrived just two months before the Armistice, too late to see any active service in the war she had been built for. What she had achieved, however, was to become the first aircraft carrier in the world with a full-length flight deck capable of both launching and recovering wheeled aircraft, a genuinely foundational moment in naval aviation, with her first deck landings carried out on 24 September 1918 using Sopwith aircraft.

Two Decades of Trial and Error

The interwar years saw Argus used extensively for deck-landing trials and the development of arresting gear, essentially working out, through trial and error, many of the techniques that would become standard practice for naval aviation worldwide. She suffered from stability problems owing to a low metacentric height, requiring a girdling modification in the mid-1920s to widen her hull and improve her seaworthiness, and typically operated around 15 aircraft through that decade in a mix of fighter, spotter and reconnaissance roles. She deployed briefly to the China Station between September 1927 and March 1928, before budgetary pressures saw her placed in reserve. In 1938, with war looming again, she was refitted as a target aeroplane carrier and recommissioned on 11 August that year.

The Fleet's Delivery Van

Argus began the Second World War as a training carrier, running deck-landing practice until June 1940, but soon took on a role that would define the rest of her war: aircraft ferrying. Ageing and limited though she was, she proved invaluable for delivering desperately needed fighters to distant and hard-pressed theatres. She carried Hurricanes and Skuas to Malta during Operation Hurry in August 1940, made repeated runs to Gibraltar with Spitfires and Swordfish, transported 24 Hurricanes all the way to Murmansk in Russia in late August and early September 1941, delivered aircraft to the West African staging post at Takoradi, and ferried Supermarine Walrus amphibians to Reykjavik.

By 1942, with British aircraft carriers in genuinely short supply, even a ship as elderly and limited as Argus found herself pressed into front-line service, providing air cover for the Malta-bound convoy during Operation Harpoon in June that year. During Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa, she was hit by a bomb on 10 November 1942 that killed four of her crew, a sobering reminder that ferrying and covering duties carried real danger even for a ship long past her prime.

A Long Farewell

After repairs between February and May 1943, Argus was reclassified as an escort carrier and relegated once again to deck-landing training, the role she had pioneered a quarter of a century earlier. Her final aircraft operation came on 27 September 1944, when a Fairey Swordfish made the last ever take-off from her deck, and by December that year she had become an accommodation ship at Chatham. She was approved for scrapping on 6 May 1946 and sold to Thos. W. Ward that December, arriving at Inverkeithing for breaking up shortly after. Her ship's bell survives today in Bristol Cathedral, a memorial to her last chaplain, Canon Percival Gay, a quiet, dignified relic of a ship that had, in a genuinely unglamorous and roundabout way, invented the modern aircraft carrier.