HMS Revenge (06): The Battleship That Carried Britain's Gold Reserves and Ended Up at Jodrell Bank

Built at Barrow for a Coming Storm

HMS Revenge was laid down at Vickers's Barrow-in-Furness yard in December 1913, launched in May 1915 and commissioned into the Grand Fleet in February 1916, just in time to take part in the war's greatest naval clash only three months later.

Landing Blows on Derfflinger at Jutland

At the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, Revenge served with the 6th Division of the 1st Battle Squadron and acquitted herself impressively, firing 102 rounds from her main battery and scoring five hits on the German battlecruiser Derfflinger, disabling both of her aft turrets, along with a further hit on SMS Von der Tann. Remarkably, Revenge came through the entire battle without being hit once herself, a genuinely strong showing for a ship that saw no further major action for the rest of the war as both fleets grew increasingly cautious of mines and submarines.

Smuggling Britain's Gold Across the Atlantic

Revenge's most extraordinary role came at the start of the Second World War, when she was selected to carry out Operation Fish, the closely guarded transport of Britain's gold reserves and securities to Canada for safekeeping against the very real possibility of invasion. Between October 1939 and August 1940, Revenge carried an astonishing series of shipments: 148 boxes of gold bars worth £2 million in October 1939, £10 million that January, £40 million on 30 May 1940 at the very height of the Dunkirk crisis, a further £47 million on 4 July, and £14.5 million on 11 August, transporting sums that today would represent a genuinely staggering proportion of the national wealth, all under strict wartime secrecy aboard a battleship built for entirely different work.

Seizing a French Battleship at Plymouth

With France's collapse in 1940 raising urgent fears about the fate of the French fleet, boarding parties from Revenge seized the French battleship Paris and the submarine-cruiser Surcouf at Plymouth in July that year, preventing them from returning to Vichy French control and potentially falling into German hands, part of the same tense, fast-moving effort that led to the much bloodier confrontation with the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir around the same time.

Shelling Invasion Barges at Cherbourg

That October, Revenge led Operation Medium, an attack on German invasion barges massing at Cherbourg during the height of invasion fears, firing 120 main-gun shells into the harbour during an eighteen-minute bombardment while her escorts added a further 801 rounds, a direct strike against the very forces that might otherwise have been used against Britain's shores.

Convoy Duty in the Indian Ocean

From October 1941, Revenge served with the 3rd Battle Squadron based at Colombo, and after Japan entered the war she was, like her sister ships, judged too old to risk against the modern Japanese fleet, settling instead into convoy escort duties across the Indian Ocean, including covering the Operation Pamphlet convoy carrying the 9th Australian Division home in February 1943.

A Final Voyage With Churchill, Then Retirement

By mid-1943 Revenge's poor material condition prompted her recall to Britain, but not before one last notable duty, carrying Prime Minister Winston Churchill partway to the Tehran Conference in late 1943. Her main guns were removed in May 1944 to provide spares for other battleships and monitors supporting the Normandy landings, and she spent her final months as a training ship for boiler room personnel before being placed on the disposal list in March 1948 and broken up at Inverkeithing that September.

From Battleship Guns to Radio Telescope

In one of the more unexpected afterlives of any Royal Navy warship, mechanisms from Revenge's gun turrets were repurposed in the mid-1950s for the construction of the Jodrell Bank radio telescope, one of the great instruments of British scientific achievement, a genuinely fitting final chapter for a ship that had already smuggled a nation's gold reserves across an ocean and traded shots with the Imperial German Navy at Jutland.