HMS Warrior (1860): The Ship So Powerful She Never Had to Fire a Shot in Anger

Britain's Answer to the Gloire

HMS Warrior was built by the Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding Company at Blackwall in London, ordered on 11 May 1859 and launched on 29 December 1860 during a winter so cold that hydraulic rams were needed to free her from her frozen slipway.

Designed by Isaac Watts and Thomas Lloyd and completed in October 1861 at a cost of around £377,000, she was built as a direct response to France's launch of the wooden-hulled Gloire in 1859, and Britain was determined not to be outmatched.

The First of a New Kind of Warship

Warrior was the first ocean-going warship to combine an iron hull with armour plating, carrying four and a half inches of wrought iron backed by eighteen inches of teak that made her, by contemporary accounts, practically invulnerable to the ordnance of the day.

At 9,137 long tons and 420 feet in length, armed with a formidable mixed battery of smoothbore and rifled Armstrong guns, and capable of over 14 knots under steam alone, she rendered every other warship afloat instantly obsolete.

A Deterrent Too Powerful to Fight

Warrior served with the Channel Squadron under Captain Arthur Cochrane, escorting Princess Alexandra of Denmark in 1863 and drawing some 300,000 visitors during a twelve-week publicity tour. In one of naval history's more satisfying ironies, she proved so overwhelmingly powerful that no enemy ever risked engaging her, and she never fired a shot in anger throughout her entire active career.

Overtaken by Her Own Revolution

The very pace of naval innovation Warrior had helped unleash soon caught up with her. By 1871, mastless designs like HMS Devastation offered superior gun arcs and firepower, and Warrior was placed in reserve in 1875, finally decommissioned in 1883 after her masts rotted beyond repair, a strikingly fast fall for a ship that had briefly been the most powerful vessel afloat.

From Depot Ship to Oil Fuel Hulk

Rather than being scrapped, Warrior was repurposed repeatedly: as a storage hulk and destroyer depot ship from 1901, as support vessel for the Portsmouth torpedo school under the name Vernon III from 1904, and finally, after 1927, as a static mooring jetty and oil fuel terminal at Pembroke Dock in Wales.

Renamed Oil Fuel Hulk C77 in 1942, she quietly refuelled some 5,000 ships during the Second World War, an unglamorous but truly vital role for a ship once built to be the most feared vessel in the world.

A Nine Million Pound Restoration

The Duke of Edinburgh championed Warrior's preservation from 1968, and after the Royal Navy donated her to the Manifold Trust in 1979, an eight-year restoration costing £9 million painstakingly returned her to her 1862 appearance using original documents and crew sketches.

She reopened as a museum ship at Portsmouth on 27 July 1987, drawing over 280,000 visitors a year by the mid-1990s, and today sits alongside HMS Victory and the Mary Rose as part of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard's National Historic Fleet, still very much a living monument to the ship that changed naval warfare forever.