HMS Ark Royal (R09): The Carrier That Launched Pianos, Phantoms and a Future King

A Ship That Took Longer to Build Than the War Itself

HMS Ark Royal's contract was placed with Cammell Laird on the Mersey on 19 March 1942, originally under the name Irresistible, before being renamed Ark Royal in tribute to the earlier carrier lost to a single torpedo in 1941. She was laid down at Birkenhead on 3 May 1943, but construction proceeded so slowly, and was then suspended altogether once the war ended so her design could be updated for modern jet aircraft operations, that she was not launched, by Queen Elizabeth, wife of King George VI, until 3 May 1950, seven years after her keel had been laid. She was finally completed on 25 February 1952 and commissioned the following day at Devonport, a full decade after her contract was first signed.

That delay, however painful at the time, had one significant upside: Ark Royal became the first ship ever constructed from the outset with an angled flight deck and steam catapults, rather than having them retrofitted after launch as her contemporaries required. She displaced 36,800 tons, generated 152,000 horsepower from eight Admiralty boilers, and was fitted with a partially angled 5.5-degree flight deck, twin steam catapults, a deck-edge lift on her port side (the first fitted to any British ship), and a mirror landing system, a genuinely significant package of naval aviation innovation for a single vessel.

Missing Suez, Testing the Future

Despite her advanced design, Ark Royal missed one of the defining British naval operations of the decade: en route to the 1956 Suez Crisis, she suffered a propeller shaft bearing failure and had to return home for repairs, with her sister ship HMS Eagle taking her place. She had better luck in 1963, when she conducted vertical and short take-off trials with the Hawker P.1127, the experimental aircraft that would eventually evolve into the Harrier jump jet, a quietly significant contribution to naval aviation's future even as her own career continued along more conventional lines. In 1965 she served on the Beira Patrol, helping enforce the naval blockade against Rhodesia.

A £30 Million Rebuild for the Jet Age

Between 1967 and 1970, Ark Royal underwent a massive reconstruction costing around £30 million, intended to let her operate the Royal Navy's new Phantom and Buccaneer strike aircraft. The work gave her a full 8.5-degree angled deck, more powerful steam catapults, heavy-grade jet-blast deflectors, 1,200 miles of new cabling, an enhanced electronic suite, and the American AN/SPN-35 carrier approach radar, making her the first and only Royal Navy carrier ever fitted with a US Navy-style approach system. Her post-refit air wing, though reduced to around 40 aircraft to accommodate the larger jets, included twelve Phantom FG.1 fighters, fourteen Buccaneer strike aircraft, four Gannet airborne early warning aircraft, and a mix of Sea King and Wessex helicopters. The refit made her, remarkably, the only non-American carrier in the world ever to operate the McDonnell Douglas Phantom at sea.

Collisions, Deterrence, and a Future King on the Catapult

Ark Royal's later career mixed genuine incident with genuine ceremony. On 9 November 1970 she collided with the Soviet Kotlin-class destroyer Bravyy during a NATO exercise in the Mediterranean, sustaining only minor damage herself while the Soviet ship lost two crew members; her captain, Raymond Lygo, was cleared of blame at the subsequent court martial. In 1972 her Buccaneer aircraft flew a long-range strike demonstration mission over British Honduras in Central America, a show of force intended to deter a feared Guatemalan invasion of the colony, a rare example of a single carrier sortie doing real diplomatic work without a shot being fired.

She represented Britain at the United States Bicentennial celebrations in Fort Lauderdale in 1976, and on 21 September 1977 Prince Charles, the future King Charles III, was launched from her catapult in a Buccaneer, before she led the Royal Navy's tribute to Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee at Spithead that same year.

A Genuine Television Star

Ark Royal achieved a rather unusual kind of fame in British popular culture. She had already featured in the 1960s comedy series Not Only... But Also, starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, before becoming the subject of the BBC's Sailor, a Western Atlantic deployment documentary broadcast between February and July 1976 that is now considered one of the earliest fly-on-the-wall documentary series, complete with a theme tune, Rod Stewart's Sailing, that became a genuine chart hit in its own right off the back of the show's popularity. When she was finally decommissioned, her crew marked the occasion by firing various items off her catapult into the sea, including at least one piano and, memorably, a toilet complete with its own paying-off pennant.

A Reluctant Retirement

Chronic mechanical and electrical problems, a legacy of her decade-long, interrupted construction and outdated DC electrical systems, meant Ark Royal required near-constant maintenance to stay operational, and she spent considerably less time at sea across her career than her more reliable sister ship Eagle. She entered Devonport for the final time on 4 December 1978 and was decommissioned on 14 February 1979, having spent only 12 of her 24 nominal years of service actually in commission, the rest lost to refit, repair and reserve. Her departure left the Royal Navy with no fixed-wing carrier aircraft at sea at all, a gap that would not be filled until HMS Invincible entered service in March 1980 and HMS Hermes completed her own conversion to operate Harriers in mid-1981.

Despite some private fundraising efforts to preserve her as a museum ship, the Ministry of Defence announced on 29 March 1980 that she would instead be sold for scrap. She departed Devonport under tow on 22 September 1980, arriving at Cairnryan near Stranraer on 28 September, where she was broken up alongside her sister Eagle, with the work continuing until 1983. Various pieces of her survive today as memorials, including anchors at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at RNAS Yeovilton and on Armada Way in Plymouth, and the museum later built an Aircraft Carrier Experience exhibition modelled on her island and flight deck, ensuring that a ship who had spent a decade just being built continued, in her own way, to be remembered for a good deal longer still.