Royal Navy History: Trafalgar to the Arctic Convoys

For most of the last five hundred years the Royal Navy was the largest or second-largest fleet in the world, and Britain’s position depended on it. Its history covers the Tudor warship, the line of battle at Trafalgar, the dreadnought race, two world wars and the Falklands. The stories here pick out moments when its ships did something daring, or something went badly wrong.

From the Mary Rose to Trafalgar

The Tudor navy built its ships around heavy guns firing through ports near the waterline. On 19 July 1545, with a French fleet off the Isle of Wight, the Mary Rose heeled, flooded through her open gunports and sank in the Solent while Henry VIII watched from shore. Fewer than 35 of roughly 400 men got out.

By 1805 the sailing navy was at its peak. At Trafalgar a French marksman shot Nelson on HMS Victory’s quarterdeck. Sailors still call navy rum “Nelson’s Blood”, but the surgeon who brought the body home in a cask wrote that he filled it with brandy.

Dreadnoughts and the First World War

In 1906 HMS Dreadnought made every battleship afloat obsolete. Four years later Virginia Woolf and her friends got aboard disguised as Abyssinian princes. Her only kill came in 1915, when she rammed a U-boat.

The navy tried hard to keep its submarines up with the fleet. The steam-driven K-class boats needed five minutes to dive, and six of them sank without the enemy’s help. At Jutland on 31 May 1916, three British battlecruisers blew up and more than 3,300 men died, while Beatty’s flagship Lion survived a similar hit because the magazine rules were kept. HMS Warspite’s helm jammed and she circled twice under German fire. In the Channel, two broken destroyers were welded into a single ship, HMS Zubian, which went back to the Dover Patrol. After the war the interned German fleet scuttled itself at Scapa Flow, the Royal Navy’s main base.

The Second World War

The navy’s first big success came in December 1939, when three cruisers caught the pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee off the River Plate and a deception campaign convinced her captain to scuttle her. In June 1940 the carrier HMS Glorious was caught with no aircraft in the air and 1,519 men died.

In May 1941 Bismarck sank HMS Hood in about three minutes. Three of Hood’s 1,418 men survived. Two days later a Swordfish biplane jammed Bismarck’s rudder and the Home Fleet sank her. Her sister Tirpitz stayed in Norway and tied down British heavy ships until RAF Lancasters sank her with Tallboy bombs in November 1944. To keep Tirpitz out of the Atlantic, the navy rammed HMS Campbeltown, packed with explosives, into the St Nazaire drydock in 1942.

Force H, based at Gibraltar, shelled Genoa in February 1941, and a shell from HMS Malaya went through the cathedral roof without exploding. In the Arctic, HMS Edinburgh went down with 465 gold bars meant for the United States, most of them recovered by divers decades later. On New Year’s Eve 1942, Captain Sherbrooke and six destroyers held off Lutzow and Admiral Hipper in the Barents Sea, and every merchant ship reached Murmansk.

Warspite outlived almost all of it. She fought at Calabria and Salerno and was finally lost on the rocks of Prussia Cove in Cornwall in 1947, when her tow to the breakers parted.