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In the late 1850s, Britain and its ancient enemy France were involved in an arms race. Both sides were using new technology like armor plating to try and create the ultimate battleship. Things reached a head in 1860 with the development of this. HMS Warrior. The most revolutionary ship ever built. A product of Britain's naval mastery in the 19th century, but also the industrial revolution that was changing everything. What I always think when I come aboard HMS Warrior for the first time is just how much space there is. It was the longest warship in the world when it was launched. Absolutely vast. And it is three times the length of HMS Victory,
which was Nelson's flagship at the Battle of Trafalgar fought around 50 years before. But I also think how traditional it looks. Even though it's all made out of iron, it was the most cutting edge ship ever built. Up here, it's still got its sails, its mast, its rigging. In fact, when it was fully rigged, when the sails were all hanging off these yard arms, there were 4 and 1/2 thousand square meters of canvas. So the crew on board had to be brilliant. They had to be proficient at all the old-fashioned sailing techniques of the sailing navy, whilst also working out all the new technologies that this ship embodied. So Andrew, you're the man in charge of HMS Warrior for the National Museum of
the Royal Navy. For my sins, yeah. I always think that there are some very famous ships in this dockyard, but Warrior is the hidden gem of the collection. She is I think she's probably by quite a margin the least well-known of our ships. Um we're not allowed to have favorites, but in many ways she's incredibly special for what she is and what she embodies. Victory, Mayoral's important for what they did. Warrior is inherently important for what she is and what she symbolizes, that real point of change. Just how big a transformation was it when Warrior was launched? Pretty much every warship that comes before Warrior is built of wood and uses sail.
Every ship that comes after her is iron built, armor plated, and powered by um steam power. So they are working out how successfully they've combined those characteristics um in one ship. And then, as the public at large start saying, "Hang on a minute, we're spending quite a lot of money on the navy." The navy finds itself um with a PR issue. And she's a fantastic PR tool. So whereas um our other ships, HMS Victory, HMS Caroline are very famous for the battles they fought in, um that absolute highlight of Warrior's um career is a 4-month period in the middle of 1863 where they send you off round the country and over 300,000 people get on board the ship. With 15,000 people a day as tourists wandering from the captain's
bathroom down through the stockholds and anywhere you can imagine in between. This is the heart of the ship. This is the gun deck. Ships like this, of course, are just big floating artillery platforms. They're a way of getting a huge amount of firepower as close as possible to enemy ships or enemy shore installations and battering them. So it really kind of looks quite similar to, say, HMS Victory which fought at the Battle of Trafalgar 50 years or so before this ship was built. But the key difference is that unlike HMS Victory, which was made of good old English oak, this is made of iron. Everything's made of iron. So it's like an iron version of an old wooden warship.
Just look at the size of this helm. There would be at least eight men straining away trying to steer the ship. And that was in good weather. In bad weather, it could be 16 men or here and dozens more at the stern helping that rudder. So it was a heavy ship. It was difficult to steer. These, of course, are very different. The guns on this ship are hugely more powerful. This fires like 68-lb projectile. And that's got something like five times the destructive power of the guns that were firing at the Battle of Trafalgar. But it doesn't stop there because Warrior was armed with the latest, the most unbelievably expensive, the most cutting edge artillery at the time. This was costing the British government millions of
pounds, tens of millions of pounds to develop. And this is just the next evolution of guns. It didn't actually work that well when the ship was launched in the 1860s. But it was the start of an extraordinary process of development, of innovation around firepower that would lead from these to the sort of giant guns that you see on the battleships of the First World War or behind the trench lines of the First World War capable of firing projectiles dozens of miles. Uh this is rifled. You put the round in from the breech here rather than stuffing it into the muzzle like those guns over there. Uh and this represented just a step change from anything that had gone before.
I mean, it's this is cutting edge. It must have been fantastically expensive. Hugely expensive. You know, she cost almost 400,000 pounds um when by the time she's commissioned in August 1861. That's about 1 and 1/2 billion quid at today's prices. And it she's handed to a 36-year-old captain whose job it is, along with the other 704 people on board, to work out how we're going to use this. Strategically, just having it is important. It sends a signal to the other countries of the world. But as soon as you've built a ship that has sides that no gun can penetrate, someone's going to design that new gun.
Once they have the gun, you need thicker sides on your ship. So she sparks this arms race and she's really um obsolete on paper at least almost by the time she's commissioned to the navy. She has a good three years where she is the pride of Queen Victoria's navy. But by 1864, the next model is coming online. And then almost every year after that, there's an update, there's a change, there's an improvement. So after 10 years, she is obsolete. And after 20 years, it's inconceivable that you would use a um in any type of conflict. Nowadays, you'd expect a couple of decades service out of much more than that out of a warship, wouldn't you? That's right. Uh at least, you know, the
new carriers, you're talking about 20 years just to get them from concept to commission. And then you expect to have a good 50-year lifespan um out of those ships. Um Warrior is concept to obsolete in 20 years. So Warrior was made of iron. She still had the sailing rig up on the deck, the mast, the sails. But down here in the heart of the ship, there was the biggest maritime engine ever installed on any ship up to that point in history. It could push Warrior through the water at an extraordinary 14 and 1/2 knots, making her the fastest ship on earth at the time of her launch. 4,000 horsepower in this gigantic iron beast.
Throughout the whole of human history, when you study maritime history, you're so struck by how vulnerable they were to the weather, to the wind being in the wrong direction, storms. You think of William the Conqueror cooped up on the French coast not able to invade Harold to the leaks on the 1066. But now, basically for the first time, Warrior is able to just not worry about the weather, to put the throttle down, and cover over a thousand miles without even needing to stop for coal. This was a revolution in war at sea. A massive ship like Warrior could bring its guns to bear on an enemy over a thousand miles away and know exactly the day on which it would arrive.
It's often said that Warrior never fired a shot in anger. So what was she doing for all those, well, the few years that she was in service? In many ways, it's just enough that she is. She's sat operating in European waters sending a very clear message. So when she's down in Lisbon or she's in Gibraltar, indeed, even when she's sat off at Portsmouth, we are getting as many people on board as possible. Yes, that's British tourists showing what their money's being spent on, but it's also members of the foreign press and it's also foreign dignitaries. So for example, the Italian General Garibaldi's on board in late 1863 to see this fantastic ship. Most of the ambassadors of Europe are brought on board um the ship and have demonstrated to them
what the Royal Navy is capable of. So it's really about deterrence. It's far cheaper to deter a war than it is to fight one. Who were the Brits trying to impress, trying to overawe particularly at this stage? So in particular, we've got the Americans and the French. The French who are big European um opponents, shall we describe them? Their activities in building ships are what drive us into constructing Warrior. And they're the ones we continue to monitor after Warrior's been built. We've been keeping the French under various levels of scrutiny uh through the late 1850s and through Warrior's period of construction, indeed after.
Sometimes that's fairly low-key and Admiral's holiday in France and he has a rowboat and goes out to go out and climbs up the side measuring how tall she is with his umbrella. Others other times it's much more clandestine and basically we're spying on them. The Admiral employs a man called Eugene Sweeney to go down to Toulon and sit in the hills overlooking the dockyard with a telescope and spy on what's happening on a daily basis and then once the sun has set he goes down onto the streets of Toulon into the bars around the dockyard and speaks to the shipwrights and the engineers and the men who work in that yard to understand
what they've been doing. He's doing that before Warrior built and indeed we keep doing it after. This is the space where you just feel that you've moved into a completely different vision of what a warship is. No more wooden battleships. This is a giant iron compartment. Up here the boilers for the water to make steam to drive that huge steam engine and down here the furnaces that provide the heat. And the heat the fuel is coal. The stokers are down here. There were then six stokers at any one time. They would have each had to feed four of these doors with coal keeping the fires nice and even. There was an art to it. It could take five, six, seven years before
stokers were at the top of their game. And he would work down here for four hours and he would shovel one ton of coal per hour. Incredible. So in there and then in that side as well. Then you'd have to rake the ash out using that pretty heavy rake. The ash goes up this chute up this vent here and then is dumped overboard. It was hot and tiring work. The temperature in this compartment here regularly hit 54° C. So after the first two and a half years which is this wonderful period for any member of the crew on board and the captain's fated and everybody is a special individual wherever they might go. The navy sees that the ship is beginning to need large-scale repairs and they also need the crew. There's a real
problem with naval recruitment and they can't find enough men to get all the ships to see they need to. So Warrior brought into Portsmouth and sits for the best part of three years doing nothing on a very slow repair. She's then recommissioned back into the channel squadron as more ships like her armor-plated steam-powered are brought into service and they have a very effective fighting unit that is now not just serving as a deterrent with Warrior or her sister ship the Black Prince but with many other ships. Once you get past that point however and that only lasts another four years or so she really is beginning to creak at the seams. The steam engines aren't terribly powerful and they're very inefficient indeed. They run out of coal at full
speed after 1200 miles. So they need repairs and she's not really a front-line ship any longer. So she's relegated to Coast Guard and reserve duties which means it's not worth the expense of keeping her at sea all the time. So she'll sit in a port around the UK and is a base for the Coast Guard and the naval reserve to attend on a weekly or monthly basis to exercise a couple of nights a week and then go off and do their day jobs as it were in a little um other activity. That is a role she fulfills from 1875 through to 18 83. And once a year the Coast Guard is taken to sea to do a proper fleet cruise for about eight weeks. Um Warrior enters Portsmouth Harbor for a refit at that point before they take on the cruise and it's found that the foremast and the mainmast
are rotten and need replacement. So in a position that this wonderful ship designed as a steamship, incredible powerful ship, is brought low by the fact that old technology of the sails, the masts have decayed and it's not really worth the expense of putting new masts in her. So that point all the crew is pulled off very quickly. They're put on a different ship and Warrior is sent to lie on what is known as Rotten Row. That's a set of anchors at the head of the harbor awaiting disposal. So this is the gunroom which oddly enough doesn't have anything really to do with guns. It is the living space, the learning space for the midshipmen, the most junior officers on board. It's a big common room for a bunch of teenage
lads. They're on board to learn how ships work. They've got to go aloft. They've got to do the sailing. They've got to learn how these defy the guns and steer the ship but they're also receiving a gentleman's education cuz they're expected to be officers and one day admirals. These were young men, well these were children, from fairly well-off backgrounds. So they had to be kept in the manner they were accustomed to. You can see it's slightly more lavish but there was nothing easy about their training. In the army you could buy a commission. You could buy your way into a position of command. But here on ships you had to have the technical knowledge to avoid disaster. So the young men would have come in
here. They would have had their lessons from salty old sea dogs. There's the blackboard teaching how to use a sextant here which allows them to identify their position, where they are in the world using the sun. They would have done their navigation, [clears throat] reading charts, but also languages, even diplomatic skills cuz at the end of the day these young men after a long career in the navy might rise up to command a ship like this or perhaps even a fleet and they could alter the course of history. After a point she's really not ever going to be converted for use at sea but they do decide actually she's a very big ship. We've got these huge open spaces which are really useful as classrooms
for the navy, as storerooms and as workshops. So they take the engine out of her and the boilers out of her and they convert it to a floating classroom and workshop and make it part of HMS Vernon, the navy's torpedo and telegraphy training school. And she does that uh job um from 1901 all the way through um until 1923 by which point Vernon has moved ashore to purpose-built buildings and Warrior is again obsolete. So they're going to scrap her. And yet again she's spared from the scrapyard because there is a need for a fueling pontoon at Pembroke Dock. At Pembroke Dock there's a very large tidal range. So if you need to refuel a ship by the time you've brought it alongside a jetty as we have here today
moored the ship up and connected all the fuel hoses the tide has either gone up or down to such an extent that the fuel hoses are going to snap and you can't refuel. So the idea of Warrior or oil fuel hulk C77 as she's renamed is that you can have all sorts of complex permanent self-tensioning hose arrangements on board this ship or what's left of her. She's just got her masts. And as she floats up and down on the tide they will sort themselves out and then you just have to run a line from Warrior to whichever ship needs refueling. And she does that job for 50 years until in 1979 the fueling depot is closing. Warrior is without role and at that point people begin to say hang on. This is an incredibly important ship. We
can't just let this be sent for razor blades. So there's a campaign to save her, to restore her and to redisplay her. So you come into this compartment and it is actually literally a breath of fresh air. It's light. It's airy. There's there's fresh air coming through this hatch but it's also heated and that's because this was the sick bay. Again just a reflection of how seriously the navy was now taking the health and welfare of its sailors. It's a feels like a long way from the stinking old up deck where Admiral Nelson was taken to die on HMS Victory below the waterline. There's an operating table, medicine chest with access to a range of medicines that were unimaginable a couple generations
before. Surgical implements can be washed, hands can be washed and to match these surroundings you're starting to see the professionalization of the people that worked here, the attendants, the orderlies. They're getting the training they needed to keep this ship's company healthy and on duty. So these beautiful interiors, how much of these survived the ship's history particularly the bit when it was just kind of floating fuel pontoon? Well the whole of the hull is original and here we are in the wardroom. This is where the commissioned officers, 16 of the 17 senior most people on board would have been based and the vast majority of what you're looking at here is original to when she's commissioned in August of
1861. How did it survive? Um purely luck. They used this as a officer accommodation for all those years when she's a torpedo training school and then when she's a floating oil hulk at Pembroke Dock there's a little house effectively built at the after end of the ship which keeps lots of the water out of the ship and these areas are used as storerooms. Indeed during the Second World War these cabins become cabins once again for crews of torpedo boats and small coastal craft as they're stationed on Warrior's base. And so the restoration project was about bringing everything up to the standard of this wardroom. Absolutely.
[clears throat] I mean that this was still a pretty grossy place by the time you got to 1979. The rest of the ship had effectively been gutted. So the guns, all of the fittings, the engines, the boilers, the masts all taken out. There's a couple of 1940s boilers in the boiler room, but that's about it. So they're really starting with an empty shell save for some little gems of areas like the wardroom that all had to be painstakingly researched to understand what it looked like and then reproduce. An incredibly complex, difficult, and expensive job. And presumably those plans still remained in the archives. Partly available in the archive, but because it's such a rapid period of change, you can't go to a gun
carriage design for 1859 and say it's correct for Warrior, nor could you find one for 1863 and say it's correct for Warrior. It had to be the 1861 design. So along with archive material and designs, we had to go and look at photographs and sketches and diary accounts and bring all that information together and then sift it and work out what it was saying and then find people who still have the skills around to produce those items. And this is the product. Warrior was obviously revolutionary in the way that she'd be able to engage an enemy, withstand enemy cannonballs and shells, and in the way she moved through the water. But just importantly, she was revolutionary how the navy treated its sailors.
This was the modern world now. You couldn't just impress, force men to go to sea, and force them to serve against their will. You needed technically able specialists to work on the ship, and you needed to retain them, and that meant treating them properly. For the first time ever washing machines were taken to sea. This allowed the stokers and other crewmen to get their clothes clean, and there was even a drying compartment just down there. And that's why for me this compartment is just as important as what you see on the gun deck or down in the engine room. Maybe it's not quite as dramatic, but these washing machines talk about a very modern attitude, not to fighting, killing the enemy, traversing the
oceans, but to looking after the men on board. These men were now being seen as assets, people that needed to be encouraged, kept healthy, and retained. So the area now that this wardroom where the officers ate, met, slept. I mean, it's painstaking restoration. You've got like, you know, the little pens and that sort of case over there. You've got everything. Absolutely. So one of the key things is understanding who each of these people were, what their interests were. So for example, the fourth lieutenant is a man called Jackie Fisher in 1863. Lord Fisher goes on to a glittering naval career. He's a gunnery expert. So if you look in his cabin, you'll see all the indications of what you would expect
if you had a gunnery officer occupying that cabin, very different to a navigator, for example, that you might get in George Parker, who's the third lieutenant at this time, who went off to map areas of Canada later on. So we've tried to detail it down to that level. So you just begin to get a hint, if you have a closer look at the personalities of these men, cuz yes, Warrior is a fantastic technological marvel, and it's really easy to talk about the guns and the engines and miss out the point that she's designed and built and crewed and restored by people, and their stories are just as interesting individually as the ship is as a whole. How long did that restoration take? That's an 8-year process, but really
caring for any historic ship, these are not like buildings. They're not expected to last centuries. The intention is you get a couple of decades out of a ship by this point, and then it goes to scrap heap. So it's a constant challenge for us keeping her afloat, keeping the rainwater out. So we're on our second deck at the moment. The mizzen mast, the aftermost mast on board, is stripped being fully refurbished and repaired. We've had to replace the bullworks. Those are the walls around the upper deck. We're on to round three now for our hatch combing. So the main restoration was completed when Warrior arrives in Portsmouth on June 16th, 1987. Fantastic scenes she comes in through the entrance to the
harbor the final time. But beyond that, we are constantly engaged in the ship's restoration and preservation. It's it's it's obviously a huge project, but it must bring you so much pride that you've you've restored this ship, one of the most important ships in history, from a kind of from dereliction to looking like this. Yeah, I mean, Warrior's restoration started 2 years before I was born. So I can't take all the credit, but it is it's a privilege to be involved in part of the ship's story. And I think if you asked anybody who'd been involved in that restoration, they'd tell you the same thing.
