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 commissioned on 25 February 1955, in a ceremony held in the builder's own main hangar while she was still afloat in Cammell Laird's fitting-out basin at Birkenhead, very nearly thirteen years after her contract had first been signed.

Her first commanding officer, Captain Dennis Campbell DSC, was the naval aviator credited with inventing the angled flight deck concept she had been built around, and he held the post for eighteen months, later calling it the high point of his entire career in the Navy.

Three inventions made jet aircraft possible at sea, and all three of them were British. The angled deck came from Captain Dennis Campbell working with Lewis Boddington of the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and was first tried out in HMS Triumph in early 1952 with nothing more elaborate than a landing area painted at an angle across the existing deck. The steam catapult was the work of Commander C. C. Mitchell, whose prototype was built into HMS Perseus at Rosyth in 1951 and demonstrated to the Americans in their own waters the following March. The mirror landing sight came from Commander Nicholas Goodhart, and the story of it is told in the account of HMS Albion. The United States Navy adopted all three inside a few years, and every carrier in the world has used them ever since.

Which makes her first commanding officer a rather remarkable appointment. Dennis Campbell had conceived the angled deck; Ark Royal was the first ship in the world built with one from the keel up; and the Admiralty gave him her. It is very rare for an engineer or an inventor in any service to be handed the finished article and told to take it to sea, and he called it the high point of his career, which sounds like modesty and probably is not.

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 notably significant package of naval aviation innovation for a single vessel.

The reason the angled deck mattered is worth stating plainly, because it is not obvious from a diagram. On a straight deck, an aircraft that missed the wires ran into a barrier, and behind the barrier sat everything already recovered and parked. Every landing was therefore a one-attempt affair with a crash as the alternative, and the deck could not be used for anything else while recoveries were in progress. Angle the landing area a few degrees to port and a pilot who takes no wire flies off the far corner and comes round again, while the forward end of the deck can be parking aircraft or launching them at the same time. It doubled what a carrier could do and it stopped killing people. On Ark Royal it started at five and a half degrees and was rebuilt to eight and a half in the great refit.

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.

The following June she crossed the Atlantic for the International Naval Review off Virginia, marking the 350th anniversary of the Jamestown settlement, and called at Pier 88 in New York alongside a pair of Italian destroyers, a rare early transatlantic outing for a ship that would spend most of her working life much closer to home.

In 1963 she had rather more direct luck testing the future, conducting 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.

The Phantom detail deserves more attention than it usually gets, because Britain did not simply buy the American aeroplane. The Royal Navy's Phantom FG.1 was re-engined with Rolls-Royce Speys, which are fatter than the American engines and required the rear fuselage to be redesigned around them, and it was given a nose leg that extended to raise the aircraft's nose on the catapult. A British carrier is shorter than an American one, so the aircraft has to leave the deck at a steeper angle to survive the difference. It made the British Phantom slower at altitude than the American one and better at low level, and it made it, by some distance, the most expensive way anybody has ever bought a Phantom.

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.

Sailor is worth understanding as a piece of television history, not just as a footnote about a ship. In 1976 the idea of pointing cameras at ordinary people going about a job and simply broadcasting the result was very new, and doing it aboard a warship, with the mess decks, the arguments, the homesickness and the language left in, was newer still. Ten episodes went out and the country watched. Rod Stewart's Sailing had already been a hit the year before, and the series pushed it straight back into the charts. For a great many people who never went near the sea, that programme is the Royal Navy, and the ship in it is this one.

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.

The mechanical troubles are worth explaining rather than just noting, because they are the direct consequence of the way she was built. A ship laid down in 1943, suspended, redesigned and finished in 1955 ends up as a compromise between two different eras of engineering, and Ark Royal kept a direct current electrical system when the rest of the world had gone to alternating current. That made spares harder to get, machinery harder to replace and every modernisation more expensive than it should have been. Twelve years in commission out of twenty-four is a dreadful figure for a capital ship, and none of it was anybody's fault aboard. She was old before she was finished.

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.