HMS Vanguard (23): Britain's Last Battleship Ran Aground on Her Way to the Scrapyard

Launched by a Princess

HMS Vanguard was built by John Brown and Company at Clydebank, with construction beginning on 2 October 1941, though wartime design revisions meant a long gestation. Princess Elizabeth presided over the launch on 30 November 1944, the first ship she ever launched, and Vanguard finally commissioned on 12 May 1946, after the war had already ended, making her the last battleship ever built for any navy.

The Guns Had Already Fought a War

First World War-era battlecruisers is accurate and much too vague, because the story of those turrets is the best thing about this ship. They came out of HMS Courageous and HMS Glorious, two extremely odd vessels built in 1916 as large light cruisers: enormous, very fast, almost unarmoured, and armed with four fifteen-inch guns apiece, designed for a Baltic scheme of Admiral Fisher's that never happened. They were known in the fleet as Outrageous and Uproarious, and their sister Furious was known as Spurious.

They did fire those guns in earnest. On 17 November 1917 both ships were in action at the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight, chasing German minesweepers and light cruisers through the fog and their own smoke. Eight years later the Admiralty decided the pair were more useful as aircraft carriers, took the turrets out, and put them in store. There they sat, greased and covered, through the 1930s.

When Britain wanted a fast battleship in a hurry in 1940 and the sixteen-inch guns for the planned Lion class did not exist and were not going to for years, somebody remembered the four turrets in the shed. That is why the last battleship ever built carried mountings designed before Jutland. What became of the two carriers is a bleaker story, told in HMS Glorious (77).

One refinement, because it is often got wrong. The turrets came from Courageous and Glorious. The guns inside them mostly did not. When the mountings were refurbished at Scotstoun, the barrels fitted came from wherever spares existed: two from HMS Queen Elizabeth, two from HMS Ramillies, one from Royal Sovereign, one from Resolution and one from the monitor Erebus. Only a single barrel of the eight can be traced back to the two carriers, and that by way of a spell in HMS Warspite. Vanguard's main armament was, in the most literal sense, assembled from the leftovers of the Grand Fleet.

Old Guns, New Ship

Rather than wait for entirely new 16-inch turrets to be developed for the planned Lion-class battleships, designers equipped Vanguard with four existing 15-inch gun turrets originally built for First World War-era battlecruisers, a pragmatic compromise that let Britain complete a properly fast and powerful battleship, displacing 44,500 long tons and reaching over 31 knots on trials.

She cost over eleven and a half million pounds, which made her the most expensive warship Britain had ever built, and she was obsolete before she was finished. That is not hindsight: the design was revised repeatedly during construction precisely because everybody involved could see what carrier aircraft had done to capital ships between 1940 and 1945. What Britain got for the money was a superb sea boat, the best-riding battleship anyone ever built, with a flared bow that kept her forward turrets dry in weather that had made her predecessors nearly useless, and a hull that could hold thirty knots across the Atlantic. It was a magnificent answer to a question nobody was asking any more.

Carrying the Royal Family to South Africa

Following sea trials, Vanguard was modified to serve as a royal yacht, and in early 1947 carried King George VI and his family on the first Royal Tour of South Africa by a reigning monarch, departing on 1 February and arriving in Cape Town on 17 February, a role that suited her scale and prestige rather better than any battle she would ever fight.

The Voyage That Made a Famous Promise

The South African tour is remembered for something that happened three thousand miles from the ship, and it is worth joining up. Vanguard sailed from Portsmouth on 1 February 1947 with the King, the Queen and both Princesses aboard, into one of the worst British winters on record; the country they left behind was rationed, frozen and running out of coal, which did not go unremarked at the time. She reached Cape Town on 17 February.

On 21 April, her twenty-first birthday, Princess Elizabeth broadcast from Cape Town to the whole Commonwealth and made the promise that has been quoted at every stage of her life since: that her whole life, whether it be long or short, would be devoted to the service of the peoples she belonged to. She was twenty-one, she was five years from the throne, and she had got there in this ship. It was also the first time she had left Britain.

They came home in May. It was the last great imperial progress of its kind, and the last time a British monarch went anywhere in a battleship.

Flagship Duties and the Coronation Review

Through the 1950s, Vanguard served as flagship for various Royal Navy commands, taking part in exercises and ceremonial duties, including Queen Elizabeth II's Coronation Fleet Review at Spithead on 15 June 1953, a fitting moment of pageantry for the navy's newest and largest capital ship.

It is worth stating plainly what her fourteen years amounted to. HMS Vanguard never fired a shot in anger. She never met an enemy ship, never bombarded a coast, and never had a weapon fired at her. She exercised, she flew flags, she carried royalty, she took part in fleet reviews and NATO exercises in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and from 1956 she lay at Portsmouth in reserve as a headquarters ship. Her contemporary HMS Anson (79) at least had a war to be present at.

Aground on the Way to the Breakers

Declared obsolete by October 1959 and decommissioned on 7 June 1960, Vanguard drew enormous crowds along the Southsea seafront during her final tow to the breakers on 4 August 1960.

In a moment of high drama, the great ship slewed across the harbour and ran aground near the Still and West pub, before tugs managed to refloat her and send her on to Faslane, where she was completely broken up by the middle of 1962, a memorably undignified send-off for the last of the Royal Navy's battleships.

The grounding on 4 August 1960 has passed into Portsmouth folklore and the details are worth having. She was under tow by tugs down the narrow entrance to the harbour, with the seafront and the Point black with people, when she took a sheer to starboard and drove her bow into the mud right off the Still and West, a pub on the corner of the entrance where the drinkers are close enough to the fairway to read a ship's name without moving. The story told ever afterwards in the city is that somebody in the crowd said she did not want to go.

It took several hours and a good deal of pulling to get her off. She was gone by the evening, and with her the Royal Navy's battleship era ended: not in a battle, or a scuttling, or even a decent gale, but stuck on a mudbank outside a public house in front of half of Portsmouth.