HMS Hood (1859): The Warship That Never Really Went to War

A Sailing Ship Reborn as a Steamer

HMS Hood began life as something quite different from what she eventually became: she was laid down on 13 August 1849 as a conventional 80-gun second-rate sailing ship, named, like the rest of her naval lineage, in honour of the 18th-century admiral Samuel Hood, 1st Viscount Hood, at a time when steam propulsion was still a remarkably new and unproven technology for a warship of her size.

The admiral is worth a paragraph, because he is one of the most consequential officers the Royal Navy has ever had and almost nobody outside the service could tell you a thing about him. Samuel Hood was born in Somerset in 1724, went to sea at seventeen, and fought his way up through the American War, where he commanded under Rodney at the Chesapeake and at the Saintes. What he is really remembered for is what he did to somebody else's career: he had been a friend of Maurice Suckling, and when Suckling's nephew turned up in the West Indies as a very young frigate captain, Hood took him in hand. The nephew was Horatio Nelson, who afterwards described Hood as the greatest sea officer he ever knew and, on another occasion, as the best officer, take him altogether, that England has to boast of, which from Nelson is not a sentence anybody else earned. In February 1793 Hood was made commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean at sixty-eight and took Toulon that August at the invitation of the French royalists in it. He held the place for four months and then had to get out, largely because the republican artillery on the heights above the harbour was being handled with unusual competence by a twenty-four-year-old Corsican major named Bonaparte. Hood went on to take Corsica, and finished as Governor of Greenwich Hospital and a viscount. It is a career of extraordinary consequence, and the ship named after it never left her moorings.

Her construction was substantially modified partway through the building process to incorporate steam machinery, a fairly common fate for warships caught mid-construction during the rapid technological transition of the mid-nineteenth century, when a ship laid down under one set of assumptions could easily be launched under an entirely different one.

She was not an isolated piece of muddle either; she was part of a national panic. In December 1851 the Admiralty announced a crash programme to give Britain a steam-driven battlefleet, mostly because the French were building one and there was a lively public conviction that Napoleon III intended to use his. The new Surveyor of the Navy, Captain Baldwin Walker, set about redesigning ships already on the stocks to take engines, and where the hull would not accommodate machinery it was simply cut in half and lengthened where it lay. Hood was one of these. So was the enormous three-decker HMS Victoria, completed in 1860 and not commissioned for another four years, and so was her sister Howe, launched in March 1860 and never completed as a fighting ship at all: she eventually went to sea in 1885 as a boys' training ship, under three different names in succession, and lasted until 1921 without ever having carried a gun in anger. The Royal Navy built a whole battlefleet in the 1850s and got remarkably little out of it, for reasons set out in the article on HMS Hero (1858).

She was launched as HMS Edgar on 4 May 1859, and renamed HMS Hood the following January, emerging as a screw line-of-battle ship displacing 3,308 tons, measuring 198 feet in length and 56 feet in the beam with an 18-foot draught, and carrying an impressive 91 guns with a crew of 720, powered by a modest 600 horsepower steam engine.

The name change is the sort of administrative comedy that only a very large organisation can produce. Chatham launched her as HMS Edgar on 4 May 1859. Woolwich had launched a different HMS Edgar, also a 91-gun screw two-decker, on 23 October 1858, which is to say six months earlier and forty miles up the same river. That Edgar went on to a perfectly respectable career as flagship to a succession of rear-admirals in the Channel Squadron. This one sat in the Medway being confused with her, until in January 1860 somebody in Whitehall settled the matter by renaming the Chatham ship Hood. She had therefore been afloat for eight months under a name that already belonged to somebody else, which is not the most auspicious start a warship has ever had.

A Ship That Never Quite Served

HMS Hood's active service record is a properly curious one, in that she appears to have suffered from serious design deficiencies significant enough that she may never have been fully commissioned for active fleet service at all, a rather deflating outcome for a ship carrying such an impressive gun armament on paper.

It is worth being precise about what actually happened to her, because never commissioned is a slippery phrase. She was launched, she floated, and she was towed away and moored, and then nothing else was done. The Admiralty records have her as never fitted for sea: no engines properly installed, no masts, no guns, no ship's company. She went into what the Navy called the Second Reserve at Sheerness, which in practice meant a hull lying to a buoy with a caretaking party aboard, whitewashed inside against the damp, opened up occasionally to be aired, and steadily quietly rotting. A wooden ship needs to be used. Timber that is never worked, never wetted and dried in a proper cycle, sitting in a river with a roof over it, develops dry rot with remarkable enthusiasm, and by the time anybody might have wanted her she would have needed most of her upper works replaced to be worth anything. Thirteen years passed like that. The Navy had spent a great deal of public money building a first-class fighting ship and then paid for another decade of watchmen to look after something it had already decided not to use.

Instead of active duty, she spent time in the Second Reserve at Sheerness, and from 1872 to 1883 served the rather more mundane role of barracks accommodation for the Royal Engineers at Chatham, a particularly unglamorous but not entirely wasted use for a hull whose fighting career had failed to materialise, specifically housing the harbour defence miners, the Royal Engineers unit responsible for underwater minefields protecting the dockyard.

The tenants she eventually got are considerably more interesting than she was. The Submarine Mining Service was set up at Chatham in 1871, and Hood became its barracks the following year, which makes her the accommodation block of the entire British controlled-minefield establishment at the moment of its invention. Submarine mining, in the language of the day, meant defending a dockyard port by laying fields of mines in its approaches and wiring them back to a shore station, where an observer with a pair of cross-bearings could watch a ship steam over a particular mine and fire that one, and only that one, by pressing a key. Other patterns went off on contact, or on contact plus an electrical permission granted from the beach. It was delicate, dangerous, deeply unfashionable work, done by Royal Engineers rather than sailors, and it spread across the Empire: detachments went out to Hong Kong, Ceylon and Singapore in 1878. The Navy never entirely forgave the Army for owning it, and in 1906 the Committee of Imperial Defence handed harbour defence back to the fleet and the service was disbanded. For eleven years, though, the men who worked out how Britain would mine her own harbours slept aboard a battleship that had never been to sea, moored at the dockyard she had been built in.

A Quiet, Uncertain End

HMS Hood was sold out of the Royal Navy in 1888, and her subsequent fate afterward is not reliably recorded in the sources available, a fittingly understated conclusion for a ship whose entire career had been defined more by what she did not do than by any notable action or achievement.

That her fate after 1888 is not recorded is entirely normal and slightly sad. A wooden ship sold out of the service went to a breaker, and a nineteenth-century breaker was not a scrap merchant so much as a timber dealer. Good seasoned oak that had been sitting quietly in a river for thirty years was a valuable commodity, and it went into houses, furniture, farm buildings, garden gates and church roofs all over north Kent; copper sheathing and bolts went for melting, the fastenings went for reuse, and the rest was firewood. Ships of the line have ended up as barn beams, staircases and, in more than one case, as panelling in the very dockyard offices that ordered them built. Nobody wrote any of it down, because there was nothing remarkable about it. So Hood almost certainly still exists, in a hundred pieces, holding up roofs within a few miles of the slipway she came off.

Her name, however, would go on to be carried by two far more famous successors, both of whom managed rather more eventful careers. The 1891 Royal Sovereign-class pre-dreadnought Hood saw action off Crete in 1896, survived a serious grounding in 1902, and ended her days deliberately scuttled as a blockship at Portland Harbour in 1914, her hull plugging a gap in the breakwater against German U-boats and remaining there to this day, upside down, on a wreck the Portland Harbour Authority has since closed to divers, a purposeful final act the 1859 Hood never got the chance to perform. And above all there was the legendary battlecruiser HMS Hood of 1918, whose own storied and ultimately tragic career would make the name synonymous with the Royal Navy itself for a generation.

The name went on to do rather better without her. The battleship of 1891 is a genuine curiosity, a Royal Sovereign built with low freeboard turrets that made her wet and unhappy, and she is still there, upside down in the entrance to Portland Harbour where she was sunk as a blockship in 1914; her story is in the article on HMS Hood (1891). And then there is the battlecruiser, the largest warship in the world for two decades, the ship every schoolboy between the wars could draw from memory, and the ship that blew up in the Denmark Strait in May 1941 with more than fourteen hundred men aboard and three survivors; that is the article on HMS Hood (51). Between a hired 14-gun vessel of 1797, a hull that never sailed, a blockship and a catastrophe, the name has had an oddly luckless run for one honouring the officer Nelson rated above everybody else. Of the four, the 1859 ship is the only one that came to no harm whatever, which she managed by the simple expedient of never going anywhere.