HMS Warrior Extracts

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HMS WARRIOR

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Copyright Š Wyn Davies & Geoff Dennison 2011 First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Seaforth Publishing, Pen & Sword Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley S70 2AS www.seaforthpublishing.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 84832 095 6

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing of both the copyright owner and the above publisher.

The right of Wyn Davies and Geoff Dennison to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Art Direction and Design by Stephen Dent Deck layouts by Tony Garrett Printed and bound in China

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CONTENTS 6 Captain’s Welcome 8 Introduction 30 The Hull The Figurehead The Anchors 2004: In Drydock 48 The Upper Deck The Bow and Stern Chasers Ongoing Repairs 70 The Masts and Rigging 84 The Gun Deck The Muzzle Loading Rifle The Breech Loading Gun The Galley The Ship’s Wheel 110 The Lower Deck 116 The Hold 128 Further Reading

Half title: The port side looking aft, with a 32ft galley hung in its davits. Warrior carried ten boats of various sizes, the biggest being the two 42ft launches capable of taking the 20pdr normally stowed on the Upper Deck.

Title pages: Warrior lies afloat at Portsmouth all year round, the changing seasons reflected in the sky and water.

Above left: It is important to remember that the crew relied largely on candles and small oil lamps when Warrior was in service and the modern electric lighting gives a level of illumination that is far better than they ever experienced.

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HMS Warrior

The convergence of steam power and the wooden warship came about in 1843 with the conversion of HMS Penelope. Originally built in 1828, she was a traditional wooden frigate before she received paddle wheels and a steam plant. She was followed by some similar conversions and some new buildings using the same formula until the paddle wheel was overtaken by screw propulsion two years later.

The first screw battleship to complete was the Ajax in September 1846, one of a series of successful conversions known as blockships, designed to protect the main naval bases against sudden attacks by a steam-powered fleet. The first frigate screw conversion was the Horatio, ordered in September 1845 and completed in December 1849. She was followed by the first design for a screw battleship, ordered in April 1847, and although this was never built it was used as the basis for the first original design to be built, the Agamemnon, completed in 1852.

In the meantime the French had edged ahead with Dupuy de Lôme and his screw frigate, the Pomone, launched in 1845. Next, Dupuy de Lôme proposed a screw battleship which eventually appeared as the Napoleon in July 1852. It is interesting to note that

despite the public panics about the threat from the French, the engineers of the period were quite happy to exchange information. As we shall see later, Dupuy de Lôme visited Britain to learn about iron shipbuilding, whilst Isaac Watts and Thomas Lloyd went to France to view progress on the Napoleon, leading to the Agamemnon completing only a few months after her French opposite number. Indeed this free exchange of information lasted until after the First World War, encouraged no doubt by the formation of the Institution of Naval Architects (INA), later the Royal Institution, in 1860. In the pages of the nineteenthcentury Transactions of the INA it is not unusual to see papers on the latest Italian or American battleship published alongside papers by the naval architect Sir William White on his designs for the Royal Navy.

Between the launch of the Agamemnon to that of the Warrior, the steam fleet grew to a total of fifty-eight screw battleships, nine blockships and thirty-three screw frigates. This provided the Admiralty with a considerable source of operational experience, almost certainly without parallel elsewhere. We must now turn to the next element of Warrior’s construction, the use of iron in shipbuilding.

IRON SHIPBUILDING

A contemporary illustration of Warrior’s engine room showing the crankshaft and upper platform. From the presence of the crinolined lady it may be deduced that she was not actually underway at the time the sketch was made.

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It had long been recognised that iron was a suitable material for shipbuilding, its greater strength bringing the added bonus of much increased internal volume compared to a similar-sized wooden ship. The first ironbuilt ship to provide a regular passenger service was the Aaron Manby, built in 1821 for the London–Paris through service. As further confirmation of the strength of this material it is of interest to note that she is reputed to have survived until 1880 before being broken up.

The shipbuilder Lairds of Birkenhead were one of the earliest firms to seize upon the advantages of iron construction, starting in 1829 with iron lighters and then in 1833 the first of the paddle steamers. The most germane to this story is the Nemesis, an iron paddle steamer, the first to be built as a warship, ordered for the Honourable East India Company in 1835; amongst her other claims to fame she was also the first warship fitted with watertight bulkheads.

An early problem that had to be resolved before iron construction could be universally adopted was that of interference with the compass. As the amount of iron in wooden warships increased so too did the problems with the compass. The Admiralty instructed the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Airy, to investigate the problem, building on earlier work by Captain E J Johnson in 1835. Airy succeeded in working out the basic mechanism for correcting a compass with

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Introduction

A model of a section through the Warrior showing clearly the massive bottom structure and the teak backing to the armour plate. (© National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

magnets and soft iron masses suitably placed around the binnacle, still used today, but it was not until somewhat later that enough experience had been gained to be sure of satisfactory accuracy every time.

The first iron fighting ship for the Royal Navy, HMS Albert, was launched in 1840. Although she had a rela-

tively short career, being handed over to the colonial authorities in Gabon in 1843 or thereabouts, by 1842 such was Britain’s reputation for building iron ships that France sent Dupuy du Lôme to investigate iron shipbuilding, publishing his report in 1844. As we have 15

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APART FROM THE PROTECTION OF ARMOUR, Warrior also incorporated other measures to improve the utility of her guns and protection. Continuing a trend that had demonstrated by the large frigates Mersey and Orlando, the spacing between gun ports was set at 15 feet, by far the greatest distance between ports of any warship at the time. This greater spread allowed a much better working environment for the gun crews, and incidentally more space to live in. It was also responsible for the great length of the ship. A second innovation was intended to reduce the size of the gun ports. Obviously these broke the armoured protection, so it was logical to minimise their size. This was achieved by means of a modified gun carriage with a slide bar running through its centre, pivoting on

a pintle in the mouth of the gun port. This arrangement ensured that when the gun was trained fore or aft its muzzle was in exactly the same position relative to the port, thereby reducing the tolerance needed in sizing the port. The bar was long enough for the carriage to remain attached at the end of its recoil.

The Warrior also introduced a new system of handling the powder charges for the guns, using for the first time the French system of handing them up from deck to deck. This much reduced the number of exposed charges on deck at any one time. The mechanised equivalent of this system remained the standard for as long as the Royal Navy retained manned gun positions.

The ship’s armour forms what is known as a box

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citadel as it does not cover the whole of the gun deck, but is closed by armoured bulkheads at the extremities of the side armour belts. This had the disadvantage that the extreme ends of the ship were unprotected and to counter this Watts increased the subdivision of these compartments. However, it also resulted in a number of guns being outside the citadel. It is only on this deck that these bulkheads were later breached by armoured doors, allowing the flow of charges to the outer guns.

Heads were still provided in the traditional location at the ship’s head for the crew, although experience seems to have shown them to be wetter even than usual because further enclosed heads was provided on both sides soon in her career. Junior officers had two

WCs at the forward end of their accommodation and there was a single head in the stern galleries for the Captain’s exculsive use.

Above: A good view of the starboard side of the main gun deck. Note the rows of hammock hooks on the main deck beams over head.

Previous pages: A view along the starboard side of the main gun deck. While ventilation was much improved on previous designs, lighting was poor and remained the traditional oil lamp or candle. It is likely that Warrior would have had better lighting than her wooden counterparts, but even so it would have been gloomy below decks. Additional lighting came through the several skylights, but these would have been covered by gratings when working ship or at action stations.

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HMS Warrior

THE MUZZLE–LOADING The bulk of Warrior’s armament would have been recognised by the men who served on HMS Victory at Trafalgar. They were conventional muzzle–loading cannon, albeit considerably larger in the weight of shot they could fire. The significant difference introduced in the Warrior were the directing bars added to the basic gun carriage to ensure the muzzle was

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in the same place relative to the gun port, thus allowing the gun ports to be made smaller than heretofore and so minimising the size of the potentially dangerous cut-outs in the armour plate.

Warrior had twenty-six 68pdr muzzle–loaders; those now seen on display are all replicas cast from a surviving example found at Woolwich.

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The Gun Deck

GUNS Below: A 68pdr muzzle–loading smoothbore rigged for action. Note the display of the various shot and shell the cannon was capable of firing. The 68pdr was supplied with solid shot, cylindrical case shot, grape shot with fifteen large balls in three tiers, common shell with gunpowder filling, shrapnel shell containing 340 balls, and the Martin’s shell to be filled with molten iron.

Below: The rear sight of number 11 68pdr gun. Although the more traditional of the guns fitted to Warrior, the 68pdr was considered more reliable than the 110pdr. The latter had the edge in accuracy being rifled, but it was to be some time before the breech-loading mechanism became sufficiently reliable to become the standard. In her second commission Warrior herself had a complete complement of muzzle-loading rifled guns installed.

Above: The base of a slide carriage, in this case gun no 13, starboard side, showing the inner end of the directing bar beneath the carriage proper. Because few ironclads were fitted with these carriages none had survived, so producing replicas proved a considerable challenge to the restorers.

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