Warspite

by Iain Ballantyne

  On 12 March 1947 the Warspite was towed again to Spithead and the following month the tugs Mytinda III and Bustler arrived. Their job was to tow her to the Gareloch, in the mouth of the Clyde, where Metal Industries would cut her up.

  However, a storm hit the Channel on 20 April when she was off Land’s End. With the full fury of the Atlantic rolling in, she bucked and struggled so violently the tow line to Bustler parted. Digging her bows stubbornly into the sea she began to take on water and became even more unruly. It was clear by the following morning she would get no further while the storm lasted and continuing would put the lives of eight caretaker personnel aboard at risk.

  The famous battleship’s final journey, and her bid for freedom on the way to the breaker’s yard, were reported in all the leading national newspapers.

  The Daily Telegraph’s man-on-the-spot wrote:

  I flew over the Warspite and her escort last night as they crept slowly along the Channel through heavy weather within sight of the shore twenty miles west of the Lizard. The tugs were straining at the tow ropes fore and aft, pulling almost at right angles to starboard, with the ship’s bows to the coast. Their position hardly changed as we circled, and the tugs appeared to be doing little more than hold the great battleship in the heavy seas. Both tugs were pitching so steeply that at times their screws were out of the water.

  The News Chronicle’s reporter also conveyed the same high drama:

  Experts who, from the shore, watched her lurching and pounding heavily among the distant breakers said that the bottom must by then have been torn out of her.

  After a fresh line was put across by Bustler, the battleship was pulled into Mount’s Bay, near Penzance, where she dropped anchor. On 23 April the violence of the continuing storm saw her breaking free of her anchor and she was carried across the bay to run aground in Prussia Cove. Her bows were ripped open, compartments flooded and she sank down by her bows – it was time to get the eight caretakers off. In a savagely undulating sea the Penlee lifeboat went out for them.

  In those treacherous conditions the small vessel could easily have been smashed to pieces but somehow she managed to get the men off without coming to grief.

  After this daring deed the News Chronicle’s man buttonholed Mr E.F. Madron, Cox of the Penlee Lifeboat. He said:

  We managed to get the lifeboat between the rocks and the ship, but could not get a line to her. Every time the lifeboat was level with the decks one of the crew jumped to safety. That was the only way we could get them off.

  Another newspaper sagely observed:

  Her oldest loves, the wind and the sea, have helped the Old Lady of the Fleet to cheat the executioner. She is ashore, apparently for good... .

  One of those who made his way to Prussia Cove was Gordon Ellis, who thirty-one years earlier as a young Surgeon Lieutenant had experienced a roller-coaster ride through Jutland aboard her. Having eventually reached the rank of Surgeon Captain before leaving the Royal Navy, his family home was in Cornwall, so he was close at hand. Taking his camera with him, Gordon Ellis stood on the storm-lashed shore not far from where the Warspite had run aground and captured her glorious end on film. ‘He always loved the ship,’ his daughter-in-law Judith recalled decades later. ‘My father-in-law said that, as she was a West Country ship, it would be appropriate if she ended her days there as well.’

  It was true. The Warspite had made her last voyage and typically did what she wanted, refusing to leave her native south-west of England. Where she was born she would die. There is no doubt all those who knew Warspite would have read the reports of her final stubborn gesture with a wry smile, not least Admiral Cunningham and Winston Churchill, two leading figures of the twentieth century whom she helped elevate to everlasting fame.

  Warspite hits the rocks after breaking free from the tugs taking her to the scrapyard. Gordon Ellis.

  Savage Atlantic rollers pound the old battleship’s hull as she finds her final resting place on the rocks of Cornwall. Gordon Ellis.

  It took several more years for the Warspite to disappear from her last resting place, cut up and blown apart.

  In the summer of 1950 what was left of the Warspite was refloated and towed over to Marazion beach by St Michael’s Mount. The job of blasting and cutting her apart continued over the next seven years, the seaplane crane which recovered Petty Officer Rice’s Swordfish at Narvik and Matapan was used to lift scrap sections over the side until it too was taken away. The scrap sections were loaded onto trains at a local siding and transported to Wales to be melted down. In the end they couldn’t remove her oil-burning boilers which are still deeply embedded in the beach after being blown to bits.

  It is said some members of her crew made a last pilgrimage to say a final farewell to the Warspite before she was completely gone, walking as close as they safely could to her remains on Marazion beach.

  Frank Page, who had sailed back to Britain aboard HMS Warspite as an eight-year-old boy in 1929, found his emotions stirred up reading about Warspite running aground. Even after taking part in bombing raids on Germany in RAF Lancaster bombers during the Second World War, he found room for sentiment in his soul.

  I always remembered HMS Warspite with affection, and was very sad when she went aground near Penzance.

  H. Banks, who last saw Warspite in dry dock at Gibraltar in October 1943 and had been demobbed as a Lieutenant two years later, keenly followed the story of her final days.

  I nearly wept with joy when I learned no further effort would be made to get her off. The Warspite’s epitaph was surely ‘she died as she lived – fighting!’.

  For most though, including former Petty Officer Charlie Pearson, her end provoked no great overwhelming reaction.

  At Salerno when she was hurt badly we all suddenly realized we might lose our home so we wanted the old girl to pull through with a passion. But when it came time to get rid of her, I can’t say any of us was out there waving banners. We were glad the war was over and wanted to get on with our lives. Had she been an American ship I have no doubt they would have preserved her as a museum and made a movie about her, the whole works. But not the British. Everybody loves our naval history except us. We truly are an unsentimental bunch. Sometimes it’s a pity, for some things, like the Warspite, are actually worth preserving.

  An aerial photograph of Warspite aground at Prussia Cove. Goodman Collection.

  Flying high over the battleship’s disappearing hulk during the 1950s was former Warspite junior officer John Corbett who had said goodbye to her at Malta in autumn 1943. He served in the Fleet Air Arm post-war and often piloted student navigators on training flights from the nearby naval air station at Culdrose.

  At the controls of his Firefly he stared down at his old battleship and felt little emotion. ‘We used her as a navigation point to mark the departure point of training exercises,’ he recalled half a century later. ‘She was a hulk, hardly recognizable. I felt no desire to go along to Marazion and actually see her.’ Then, one day, the Warspite was no longer there and the Culdrose pilots had to use something else as a navigation point.

  Surviving veterans of the Warspite Association make an annual journey to Cornwall to pay homage to their old ship, at a memorial to her on the shore at Marazion, which they commissioned to be built in the 1990s. After their annual service they stop off at a pub decorated with wood panelling salvaged from her and drink a toast to their old ship, to the immortal memory of the Warspite’s fighting life.

  Warspite drew many visitors after going aground at Prussia Cove in 1947. Goodman Collection.

  The wreckers get to work. Topham Picturepoint.

  Epilogue

  COLD WAR WARRIOR

  As battleship Warspite was being broken up on the rocks in Cornwall, a new global confrontation was evolving.

  In the opening phase of the Cold War, Russia was investing heavily in submarine construction, transforming its fleet from an ineffectual coastal force to a formidable, if crude, blue water navy. The
West tried to match Soviet naval expansion and the eighth HMS Warspite was born during a construction competition similar to the one which created her immediate predecessor.

  By the early 1960s, Britain’s ability to sustain any kind of mass warship building programme was largely gone, along with her battleships. In 1960 the Royal Navy’s last battleship, HMS Vanguard, had been sent to the scrapyard. Launched on 30 November 1944, the last, and largest, battleship built for the British fleet wasn’t completed until the summer of 1946. She had a displacement of 44,500 tons and carried belt armour fourteen inches thick. Aside from eight 15-inch guns - one of them previously mounted in Warspite and two from HMS Queen Elizabeth - she also possessed sixteen 5.25-inch guns and mounted more than seventy 40mm Bofors anti-aircraft guns. Her top speed was an impressive thirty knots. Vanguard never saw action. By the time she went to the breakers in 1960 it was becoming clear that for the UK to continue ‘dining at the top table’ of international affairs, and play an effective part in the Cold War, new super dreadnoughts called nuclear-powered submarines would have to be built.

  Britain’s biggest and last battleship, HMS Vanguard going into dock at Devonport. Goodman Collection.

  HMS Vanguard at sea in the late 1940s, carrying 15-inch guns taken from the Warspite and Queen Elizabeth among others. Goodman Collection.

  The eighth Warspite being launched. Goodman Collection.

  Despite entering the nuclear submarine construction race late, and in very small numbers compared with the Russians and Americans, the quality of British boats was very high, including the new HMS Warspite.

  Like the Queen Elizabeth Class battleships, submarine Warspite and her sisters - including a new HMS Valiant – were examples of cutting edge British naval architecture. The first British nuclear hunter-killer boat was HMS Dreadnought, completed in April 1963, around eight months before Warspite was laid down and the new Valiant launched. Launched on 25 September 1965, at Barrow-in-Furness, by Vickers, Warspite was commissioned into the fleet on 18 April 1967. With a displacement of 4,500 tons and length of 285 feet, the eighth Warspite had six 21-inch torpedo tubes and was powered by a British-made pressurized water-cooled nuclear reactor.

  An illustrated booklet printed for the occasion of her commissioning included an introduction by her Commanding Officer, Commander R. R. Squires, who made a direct connection between the first Warspite and the nuclear attack submarine of the 1960s.

  With her high speed, long endurance and sophisticated weapons system, she is a ship thoroughly worthy of an illustrious name in this modern age.

  Like the battleship of 1913, submarine Warspite contained many innovations including being the first British naval vessel to rely entirely on gyroscopes rather than a magnetic compass. Because of her nuclear power, submarine Warspite could stay submerged for months without coming up for air, a feat made possible by air conditioning, purification systems and electrolytic gills.

  The Warspite’s first deployment took her to the Far East on a voyage which included the longest submerged run achieved by a British submarine to date, from Gibraltar to Singapore. Submarine Warspite returned to her home base at Faslane on the Clyde in March 1968 and that September visited Plymouth for the first time. There was great interest not only from the local press but also from the families of her crew. They were all keen to get an insight into the secret world of the Cold War British submarine force.

  Warspite’s Executive Officer, Lieutenant Commander Tim Hale, welcomed aboard his mother and discovered a connection with the seventh Warspite he had not previously suspected. Mrs Hale explained how, as a girl, she had visited battleship Warspite in Plymouth during the First World War. The invitation had come about because ‘Uncle Monty was the Captain’.

  ‘I must confess I hadn’t been aware of it at all ,’ Mr Hale recalled more than thirty years later. ‘Naturally I knew about Jutland and Warspite’s part in it, but I had no idea there was a family connection until my mother came aboard the submarine.’

  The dimensions of the eighth Warspite and the veteran of two world wars were of course vastly different but the two vessels had much in common.

  ‘The sea-faring tradition of the first Warspite under Raleigh, and the fighting spirit of the seventh definitely carried on into the nuclear submarine,’ said Mr Hale. ‘In my experience the eighth Warspite was also a “happy ship” and lucky.’

  But good luck is earned with hard work, not given away.

  Nuclear submarines travel under water, at speeds of more than thirty knots and, because there is no room for error, the Warspite was always run at war pitch, with procedures for every eventuality imaginable rehearsed endlessly. Mr Hale recalled:

  You are always envisaging situations that might arise where things go wrong. When they do, you will survive if the reaction in the first ninety seconds is a conditioned one, created by endless practice. There is only one way to operate an SSN – in absolute safety. If it isn’t operated safely you are dead.

  A shot of submarine Warspite’s fin (conning tower), taken in October 1970. Topham/UPP

  Commander Jonathan Cooke pictured in the early 1980s after Warspite’s record-breaking long patrol. J. Cooke Collection.

  Fire, flooding, loss of reactor and/or hydroplanes were the chief disasters the crew of submarine Warspite hoped never to encounter. Added to them were the stresses and strains of jousting with the Russians.

  At the end of 1969 submarine Warspite received a new commanding officer – Commander John Woodward. He would later find fame as Admiral Sir Sandy Woodward, commander of the British task force which liberated the Falklands after the Argentinean invasion of 1982. But back in 1969 nobody would ever have imagined the Royal Navy would go to war in the South Atlantic. The focus was much closer to home.

  With the Russian presence in the Mediterranean growing in the late 1960s, it was inevitable submarine Warspite would sail the same waters her battleship forebear had mastered as Admiral Cunningham’s flagship. By the summer of 1971, after deployments to the Mediterranean, Warspite was back at Chatham for a refit which included refuelling her reactor. Recommissioned more than two years later, she subsequently deployed to the Far East in September 1975, returning home the following June. The submarine suffered a serious diesel generator fire while alongside at Liverpool and was out of action for more than a year. After extensive repairs she went back to the Cold War frontline in 1978 and then entered a major refit at Chatham in 1979.

  Three years later, as the Falklands War blew up, Warspite was finally coming to the end of that refit.

  It made her a virtually new submarine and was therefore the equivalent of battleship Warspite’s 1934-37 rebuild. The old reactor core was replaced as were weapons systems and sensors. The refit included installation of Sub Harpoon, a lethal anti-shipping missile. Warspite was one of the first British boats to receive it. It was a handy weapon to use against the Argentinean navy so Warspite’s captain, Commander Jonathan Cooke, was told to get his boat out of refit and into action as soon as possible. ‘We got the red alert to go to war,’ he recalled. ‘Rather than have six months post-refit work up, we compressed everything into four weeks.’

  Once Warspite arrived in the South Atlantic she secured an uneasy peace in the wake of the British victory by patrolling waters around the Falklands and lurking off the coast of Argentina.

  Warspite’s deployment ended up being a remarkable record-breaking patrol of 112 days, eighty-eight of them submerged. At the time it was a fortnight longer than any other British submarine had achieved. When she returned to Faslane in mid-March 1983, Warspite sported model penguins on her outer casing (to signify the South Atlantic aspect of her patrol) and it was disclosed her food had almost run out. Her Commanding Officer revealed nearly twenty years later:

  All we had left in our deep freeze was a trio of lonely herrings and a couple of lemons. We were eating tinned tomatoes and steak and kidney pudding.

  Commander Cooke was late for his wedding by four days.

&
nbsp; Warspite’s cooks made the wedding cake and if we had stayed at sea any longer I believe we would have been forced to eat it.

  The following year Warspite became a TV star when the BBC sent a camera crew aboard her as part of a series looking at the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine force. During the time she had the BBC aboard Warspite took part in a large NATO exercise and, after some initial difficulty avoiding the attentions of Maritime Patrol Aircraft, managed to sneak right into the middle of a ‘convoy’. Television viewers saw the Warspite picking off the escorting warships first and then sinking the ‘merchant ships’ one-by-one. The submarine’s score for the exercise was a dozen warships, four fleet auxiliaries and thirteen merchant ships. However, Warspite was also ‘sunk’ twice.

  Commander Cooke left the Warspite in 1984 but she was to soldier on without him for another seven years. For during the 1980s the Cold War continued unabated. Commander Cooke was promoted to Captain and found himself over-seeing Warspite’s frontline operations as the Commanding Officer of Faslane’s 3rd Submarine Squadron between 1986 and 1989.

  Following the beginning of the Soviet Union’s fragmentation in 1990, it was clear the Cold War had ended in victory for the West. Yet, more than a decade on, the war beneath the waves which the eighth Warspite played an important role in winning is still shrouded in secrecy.