New Life For Victory

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30442, 16 May 1964, Page 5

New Life For Victory

[By

DAVID HUW JONES]

ILTORE than £300,000 has been spent in the last 10 years on 1 A restoring Britain’s most famous warship H.M.S. Victory to the condition in which she sailed into battle at Trafalgar in 1805. The first phase of an extensive programme of restoration work on the ship is now complete.

The Admiralty has had to make special purchases of timber. Huge pieces of oak and teak have been cut, fashioned and fitted by craftsmen with tools similar to those used in building the ship at Chatham Dockyard, Kent, in 1759. Research has been carried out to ensure that the cabins in the Victory are as nearly as possible in the same condition as they were at Trafalgar. Nelson’s great cabin has been repainted in a pastel shade with gold leaf on the beading and pilasters. The curtains are made of pure silk. The day cabin is furnished as it was at Trafalgar and the dining cabin, still not completely finished, will contain a table made from a model constructed at Devonport in 1800. Work on re-rigging the ship will start soon. For this, 34 miles of hemp will be required, together with three tons of spun yarn, 300 yards of canvas and 224 gallons of tar. Famous Captains An all-wood, three-decker, the Victory was launched in 1765, six years after the laying of her keel at Chatham. She carried 104 guns and two carronades, which gave her the then record broadside power of 11601 b of shot. Long before her association with Nelson she was commanded by many famous naval figures—Hood, Howe, Kempenfelt and St. Vincent. But by the year 1800 the Victory had been taken out of active service and lay rotting in the Royal Naval Dockyards on the River Medway, Kent. She had been stripped of her rigging and was used only as a prison hulk.

It was in this condition that she was first seen by Horatio Nelson. He looked at the hulk and immediately gave orders that she was to be refitted as his flagship.

Five years later, once more a towering ship of the line, the Victory carried Nelson into battle at Trafalgar. And it was on her bridge that he was shot down by a French sniper. Nelson was dead. But the Victory lived on. She remained on active service until 1812, when she was put on the retirement list and anchored in Portsmouth Harbour for use as a naval signal school and cadet training establishment.

Striking proof of her sound construction is provided by the fact that she remained afloat in the harbour for the next 100 years. Then, in 1922, the runaway ironclad Neptune smashed a great hole in her hull while being taken to the brokers. Oldest Dock For a time it looked as if the old flagship was doomed to be broken up herself. But she was eventually brought ashore, repaired and set up in concrete in Portsmouth Harbour in what happens to be the oldest graving dock in the world (it was built in 1656). Since then the Victory has been a national memorial to Lord Nelson and the Royal Navy of his day. She has been visited by nearly seven million people from all parts of the world. They have climbed her narrow gangway, trod her decks, inspected her cannon and rigging and paused, reverently, in the tiny cockpit where Nelson died after hearing the news that Napoleon’s navy had been defeated.

The Victory is still in service. Today she is used as the headquarters of the command-er-in-chief, Portsmouth Area, of the Royal Navy. As such, she is still part of the fabric of British sea power.