HMS Centaur: From Filming Sink the Bismarck! to Rescuing Survivors of a Burning Liner

Nearly a Decade in the Making

HMS Centaur was built by Harland and Wolff at Belfast, her keel laid in 1944, launched on 22 April 1947, but not commissioned until 1 September 1953, a construction span of nearly a decade reflecting the postwar slowdown that affected several of her Centaur-class sister ships. She entered service with a straight flight deck, the only one of her class completed that way, but between 1956 and 1958 became the very first Royal Navy carrier fitted with an angled flight deck, along with steam catapults and improved arrestor gear, technology that transformed how safely jet aircraft could land and take off at sea.

It is worth explaining what that refit actually solved, because it is the single most important change in the history of the aircraft carrier. On a straight-deck carrier, aircraft that have already landed are parked forward, and a crash barrier is rigged across the deck to stop anything that misses the arrestor wires from ploughing into them. A pilot coming in therefore has one attempt. If he misses the wires he hits the barrier, and if the barrier fails he hits the parked aircraft, which by the jet age meant a fully fuelled row of them. The angled deck moves the landing run out to one side, pointing off into open sea, so a pilot who misses simply opens the throttle and goes round again. It is an idea so obvious in hindsight that the only surprise is that it took until 1951 for anybody to have it.

The man who did was Captain Dennis Cambell of the Royal Navy, and his was one of three British inventions of that decade that between them made jet aviation at sea possible: the angled deck, the steam catapult worked out by Commander C. C. Mitchell of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, and the mirror landing sight devised by Lieutenant Commander Nick Goodhart, which let a pilot see his own position on the glide path instead of relying on a man with bats. By 1955 all three were in service, and every aircraft carrier afloat anywhere in the world today, American, French, Chinese or otherwise, uses all three. Centaur was one of the first ships to carry the lot.

A light fleet aircraft carrier, she went on to serve with the Mediterranean Fleet between 1954 and 1955, before a substantial Far East deployment in 1956 during which she steamed 80,916 nautical miles and conducted 7,805 catapult launches, a particularly demanding operational tempo for a carrier still relatively early in her career.

A Star Turn in Sink the Bismarck!

In the summer of 1959, HMS Centaur landed a starring role of sorts: standing in on screen for both HMS Ark Royal and HMS Victorious in the film Sink the Bismarck!, a dramatisation of the Royal Navy's pursuit and destruction of the German battleship Bismarck in 1941. Three surviving Fairey Swordfish biplanes were restored to flying condition and launched from her deck for the cameras, with further scenes shot on her bridge and in the aircrew briefing room; the level of Admiralty cooperation owed something to the producer, John Brabourne, whose father-in-law happened to be Earl Mountbatten of Burma, a man with a knack for opening doors at the Admiralty whenever the Royal Navy's own history needed retelling.

She went on to an extended Far East deployment between 1959 and 1960, visiting Kuwait, Aden, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia.

Crisis in Kuwait and Mutiny in Tanganyika

HMS Centaur relieved HMS Victorious in the Persian Gulf during Operation Vantage in July 1961, the rapid British military response to Iraqi threats against the newly independent state of Kuwait, one of the more significant Cold War flashpoints in the Gulf region, and went on to Indian Ocean operations during the Indonesian Confrontation between 1963 and 1964.

Landing the Marines in Tanganyika

In the early hours of 20 January 1964, mutinous soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Tanganyika Rifles broke into the armoury at Colito Barracks outside Dar es Salaam and arrested their own, mostly British, officers. Within days HMS Centaur, carrying 45 Commando Royal Marines under Lieutenant Colonel Paddy Stevens, had sailed from Aden with the destroyer HMS Cambrian in company; at dawn on the 25th, Cambrian bombarded the barracks while helicopters lifted the Marines ashore, taking the guardroom out with an anti-tank missile and restoring order with minimal bloodshed. Centaur's own flight deck did double duty as an emergency hospital, wounded Tanganyikan soldiers stretchered off the helicopters straight into her sick bay.

The destroyer that fired that bombardment has her own account of the operation, and of the wider wave of East African mutinies that January, in the article on HMS Cambrian. Between them, a carrier and a twenty-year-old destroyer covered 2,500 miles from Aden and put a commando ashore by helicopter inside three days, which is precisely the capability the Royal Navy spent the following sixty years arguing about whether it could still afford.

Later that same year, her Sea Vixens struck rebel tribesmen in the mountains of the Radfan during Operation Damon, a demanding counter-insurgency conflict fought in difficult mountainous terrain.

Tragedy, Collision and a Dramatic Rescue

HMS Centaur's service was marked by a series of serious incidents. At 5.30 in the morning of 19 November 1962, a high-pressure steam pipe burst in one of her boiler rooms, killing the officer and four ratings on watch there; among the dead, named in Parliament, were Chief Mechanician Tom H. Cartwright and Sub Lieutenant Leslie T. Jennings. In the House of Lords the following day, Lord Carrington called it "a very unusual accident," one no serving engineer officer could recall the like of, while Viscount Alexander pressed, unsuccessfully, on whether sabotage might have been to blame.

On the night of 28 January 1963, flying off Lizard Point, she lost a Sea Vixen with both crew killed: Lieutenant Commander Derek "Mick" Fieldhouse, her senior pilot, who left behind three daughters all under ten, and Lieutenant Stacy Swift, her senior observer, a Plymouth man. Shipmates several decks below the flight deck later recalled feeling the shockwave of the crash through the hull. That October, on the 18th, she collided with the submarine HMS Porpoise while both ships were leaving Portsmouth Harbour, Porpoise caught by the ebb tide; Centaur needed bow repairs, Porpoise escaped with superficial damage.

That December, HMS Centaur was diverted to the burning Greek cruise liner TSMS Lakonia, some 200 miles north of Madeira, fire having broken out among her Christmas cruise passengers on 22 December. Centaur closed at dead slow to keep her bow steady into the swell, and launched a cutter crewed by a junior officer, a stoker and, doubling as medics, two Royal Marine bandsmen, Musician Richard "Bagsy" Baker and Bandsman "Willi" Watson, who spent hours searching the heavy Atlantic swell for survivors. The next day, once the fires had died down enough to board her, Centaur's men climbed onto the gutted hulk itself and recovered 22 bodies; of the 128 people who ultimately died in the disaster, 95 were passengers and 33 crew, killed by fire, drowning or injuries sustained jumping for their lives.

The Lakonia did not sink that night, and what came out of it afterwards matters more than the fire. A Norwegian tug got a line aboard her on the evening of the 24th and started for Gibraltar; her list worsened day by day, and she finally went over and sank on 29 December, still two hundred and fifty miles short. She had left Southampton ten days earlier with 646 passengers and 376 crew for an eleven-day Christmas cruise of the Canaries.

The Greek board of inquiry traced the fire to faulty electrical wiring, and then took the ship's own organisation apart. It found that the order to abandon ship had been given far too late, that the evacuation on deck had not been properly supervised by responsible officers, and that in most cases the crew had failed to get sleeping passengers out of the cabins below. Barely half the lifeboats were launched properly: some were swamped by people rushing them, some were caught by the fire before they could be got away, and some simply would not move because the davits were corroded and the chains had broken. Eight officers were charged with negligence and the captain, the first officer and the security officer with gross negligence.

The consequence was regulatory and it is still with everybody who sails on a passenger ship. The Lakonia is one of the disasters that forced the strengthening of the Safety of Life at Sea convention, revised in 1974 and phased in by 1980, and among the changes were requirements for fire-retardant materials in place of the varnished wood and lacquer that had let the fire run through her. So the sailors and Royal Marine bandsmen from Centaur who spent 23 December pulling people out of an Atlantic swell, and then climbed aboard a gutted hulk the next day to bring back twenty-two bodies, were at the beginning of a chain that ends in the fire doors and the muster drill on every cruise ship afloat.

The End of Service

HMS Centaur was decommissioned on 27 September 1965, her decade of eventful and varied service complete, and was eventually sold to the Queenborough Shipbreaking Company on 11 August 1972, broken up at Cairnryan.

Her three sisters are worth a closing paragraph, because between them they cover the entire arc of the postwar Royal Navy. HMS Albion and HMS Bulwark were both at Suez in 1956 and were then converted into commando carriers, giving up their fast jets for helicopters and Royal Marines, which turned out to be the most useful thing any British carrier did for the next twenty years. Albion paid off in 1973 and Bulwark in 1981, and both were scrapped.

And the fourth outlived the lot of them by a margin nobody could have predicted. Hermes was completed years later than the rest and to a much altered design, took the task force south in 1982 as the flagship of the Falklands campaign, left the Royal Navy in 1984, was sold to India in 1986 and served on as INS Viraat until 2017. Four ships laid down in the same programme: one broken up at Cairnryan in 1972 having never fired a shot in anger, and one still steaming as somebody else's flagship forty-five years after that. Centaur was the first of them and the shortest lived, and she is the one who taught the Royal Navy how to land a jet on a moving ship.

Her career, marked by tragedy, genuine crisis response and a memorable brush with the film industry, stands as a striking illustration of just how varied and unpredictable service aboard a Cold War-era aircraft carrier could be.