First conceived in pre-war Britain under the government of Neville Chamberlain, Britannia would still be showing the world how to make an entrance – and exit – up to the threshold of the twenty-first century. The arrival of the Queen in Cape Town harbour in 1995, with Table Mountain in the distance and Nelson Mandela on the quayside, will be in school history books many generations from now. The sight of the Royal Yacht sailing serenely out of Hong Kong a little after midnight on 1st July 1997, carrying the Prince of Wales and the colony’s last Governor, Lord Patten, was the ultimate in dignified departures. And when Britannia was in town, everybody knew it. Commodore Anthony Morrow, Britannia’s last captain, was serving as Signal Officer in 1977 when the Yacht berthed in Melbourne and he was able to acquire a ticket for the Centenary Test match at the mighty Melbourne Cricket Ground. An important message was received from London requiring his attention, and Britannia’s wireless operator contacted the stadium. To Morrow’s horror, he suddenly heard the public address system announce: ‘Would Lieutenant Commander Morrow please contact the Royal Yacht.’ He will never forget what happened next: ‘As I got up to leave, the entire stadium stood up and clapped!’
Just as it has often been said that the Commonwealth would not have lasted all these years without the support of the Queen, it might also be argued that the Queen would not have managed all that she has without Britannia. On one level, there was a practical point. For it was only thanks to the Yacht, particularly in the early part of the reign, that the Queen or a member of the Royal Family could actually visit parts of the Commonwealth that had seldom (if ever) seen a royal visitor. Then there was the diplomatic dimension. On occasions fraught with sensitivity and security issues, the Yacht could provide a detached platform for more restrained and harmonious discussions. Those present at fractious Commonwealth meetings like the 1985 Nassau summit, where the issue of South Africa was threatening an irreparable split within the organisation, recall that it was not just the Queen who held things together. So did Britannia. With both Greek and Turkish elements protesting against the Crown at the 1993 summit in Limassol, Cyprus, Britannia provided a dignified base in which the Head of the Commonwealth could meet every leader individually and hold her banquet.
Above all, whatever the destination or event, the Yacht would simply make it so much easier for the Queen to get on with being Queen. Ask those close to the monarch for the secret of her indefatigability and they will usually cite the winning combination of good health, a strong faith and Prince Philip. Her former Private Secretary, Lord Charteris, was once asked the same question and memorably replied: ‘The Queen is as strong as a yak.’ He went on: ‘She sleeps well, she’s got very good legs and she can stand for a long time.’ He might also have added that, for most of her reign, she also had her Yacht.
Rear Admiral Sir Robert Woodard well remembers the day in 1990 when he went to see the Queen on being appointed Flag Officer Royal Yachts, as Britannia’s captain was known. Would it be helpful, she asked him, if she were to offer her own thoughts on the role of the Yacht? He said it would. ‘People who know us at all know that Buckingham Palace is the office,’ she began, ‘Windsor Castle is for weekends and the occasional state thing and Sandringham and Balmoral are for holidays. Well, they aren’t what I would call holidays. For example, there are ninety people coming to stay with us at Balmoral this summer. The only holiday I get every year is from Portsmouth the long way round to Aberdeen on the Royal Yacht when I can get up when I like and wear what I like and be completely free. And if you, as Flag Officer Royal Yachts, can produce the Royal Yacht for my summer holidays, that’s all I ask.’
For the person with surely the most abnormal position in British national life, the Yacht offered the one thing the Queen craved – a spot of normality. Britannia would be a place for fun, for mischief and – in a world governed by ritual and tradition – for the spur-of-the-moment.
Commander John Prichard would recall a Western Isles cruise during the Eighties when Britannia found itself on the same course as the square-rigged sailing giants of the Tall Ships Race. The Queen was listening to a jazz recital by her Band of the Royal Marines when she spotted the Soviet ship Kruzenshtern. ‘Shall we give them some music? What can you play?’ she asked the bandmaster. Moments later, a crew of weather-beaten Soviet seamen suddenly found themselves being slowly overtaken by the Royal Yacht with the band playing ‘Tiger Rag’ and the Queen of the United Kingdom waving at them. As Prichard recalled: ‘The Russians looked absolutely astounded with what was going on.’
The diplomat, Roger du Boulay, and his wife joined the Yacht for a week in 1974 during his years as Resident Commissioner of the New Hebrides in the Pacific. Like those Russian sailors aboard the Kruzenshtern, the du Boulays were similarly astounded one night when dinner was followed by the ship’s entertainment – ‘an elaborate pantomime’ – in front of the Royal Family and the crew, with the Queen acting as wardrobe assistant. ‘It involved the equerry taking the part of a Polynesian beauty,’ says du Boulay. ‘I remember him sitting on the floor and I remember seeing the Queen kneeling on the floor. He was stripped to the waist and she was fitting a brassiere on to him. It was an extraordinary sight!’ On board, informality would go a long way – but it had its limits. John Gorton, former Prime Minister of Australia, later recalled one beach barbecue with the family during a 1970 tour of Australia, when the royal party decided it was time for a swim. ‘Princess Anne was thrown in and then Prince Philip,’ he said. ‘I was sitting next to Her Majesty and I was just about to throw her in but I looked at her and something about the way she looked at me told me that perhaps I shouldn’t. In the end, the Queen was the only one who stayed dry.’
SHIP NUMBER 691
As both a ship and a royal residence, Britannia was unique. There was no other palace in which the Royal Family would seat their guests on cheap wicker chairs (purchased by Prince Philip during a Hong Kong stopover in 1959), just as there was no other Royal Navy ship in which orders were delivered in complete silence and by hand. The Yacht was certainly not a new idea (nor would it even be a new design). There was an unbroken line of 83 Royal Yachts dating back to the reign of King Charles II. Some were built as a statement of authority, others for recreation or racing. Britannia’s immediate predecessor was the Victoria and Albert, launched in 1899. Queen Victoria never set foot on board, having learned of early stability problems before it had even gone to sea. It spent its years in northern Europe, seldom venturing out of British waters. Perhaps the V&A’s most famous voyage was one of its last, taking King George VI and his family on a visit to the Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth in 1939. It was there that Princess Elizabeth had her first proper introduction to a promising young naval cadet, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. By now, the King had already discussed the idea of a new Yacht with the Prime Minister of the day, Neville Chamberlain, and the Admiralty had settled on a budget of £900,000. Dockyards were invited to submit preliminary suggestions by 12th September 1939. Nine days before that deadline, Britain declared war on Germany. It would be many years before anyone gave the idea of a Yacht much thought again.
After the war, a suitably regal vessel was required to carry the King and his family to the Cape for their 1947 tour of southern Africa. The choice of the Royal Navy’s new battleship, HMS Vanguard, helped to focus minds on the need for a new Yacht. There was not only the need to ferry members of the Royal Family to more exotic destinations than the old V&A (which had spent the war as an accommodation unit in Portsmouth and would soon be heading for the scrapyard). If there was to be a new Royal Yacht, it would be a good idea to get on with it, while there were still a few old salts who remembered how things were done in the old one. What’s more, with the King’s health in decline, many felt that a spell at sea might have a restorative effect. It was a Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who announced plans for a new Royal Yacht in October 1951, just before the general election. Wisely and very correctly, he had cleared the announcemen
t with the leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill. There was not the faintest chance that Churchill would have any problem with the idea. However, it was important to ensure that the new ship did not become an issue during the election campaign, a precaution ignored by John Major’s government many years later, with disastrous results.
From the outset, the Admiralty announced that a medium-sized hospital ship would be included in the nation’s rearmament programme, with a dual role as a Royal Yacht in peacetime. The Glasgow shipbuilders, John Brown & Co., were selected, on the understanding that they would move quickly, in light of the King’s health. The contract was signed at the start of February 1952. As with those original bids back in 1939, weightier matters intervened. By the morning of 6th February, the King had died in his sleep at Sandringham. There would, though, be no delay in getting this ship afloat. One of the Queen’s very first audiences in the same month she succeeded to the Throne was with the Controller of Navy Construction, in order to discuss the new Yacht. By June, the keel was laid, with an absolute minimum of fuss or fanfare. For now, this new vessel was simply Ship Number 691. With an eye on both time and price, it was decided to base the new vessel on an existing design, a pair of North Sea ferries already serving the route between Harwich and the Hook of Holland. There would be a few modifications to the new model – a sleeker bow and stern, to make the hull look more royal, and a reduced draught (the amount of ship below the waterline). If the Yacht was going to enter some of the shallower harbours and rivers of the Commonwealth, then it would need to clear the bottom. Nor was the Yacht’s alter ego as a hospital ship a fabrication. The Royal Navy’s medical Director-General drew up detailed plans for medical use – including 200 beds in the royal apartments and an open-air ward for tuberculosis sufferers on the Verandah Deck (which would also be strengthened to accommodate helicopter landings). A full operating theatre and X-ray facility were incorporated and a clear deadline was established. The new ship would be able to switch from a royal role to a medical one in twenty-four hours.
Senior figures at the Admiralty were not the only ones keeping a close eye on developments. So was the Duke of Edinburgh. He was still creating a new role for himself, in the face of a Palace establishment resolutely determined to keep him away from affairs of state. The new Yacht would be a perfect distraction, when he wasn’t busy chairing the committee in charge of the Coronation or taking charge of the royal estates. ‘You had to be on your toes when Prince Philip was on board,’ explained Dr John Brown, chief architect and later managing director of the shipyard. On one occasion, the Duke was on board when a new winch mechanism was being tested. The Duke was unimpressed. ‘He promptly ordered it out,’ Brown told the authors of a private anthology of Britannia memories compiled by ex-Yachtsmen. ‘That was typical of him.’
It was also the Duke who chose Britannia’s famous colour scheme, based on the livery of his own Dragon-class sailing boat, Bluebottle. ‘She was dark blue with a red boot topping which I thought looked rather smart,’ the Duke told Richard Johnstone-Bryden. It was decided to complement the blue hull with a thin gold band around the top, for an extra £90. While the use of gold leaf would be more expensive than gold paint, it would need replacing less often and thus save money on the long-term maintenance bill. Everyone was acutely aware of likely public attitudes to the costs, although parliamentary questions on the subject never escalated into the media storm that some had anticipated. The original estimate of £1.6 million would finally reach £2.1 million, but, as with plans for the Coronation, the public consensus was that the new Queen should have something to be proud of, not something done on the cheap. Even so, she took issue with the extravagant designs for the interior. John Brown & Co. had built the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth and the original proposals for the new Yacht involved the sort of grandeur to be found in the smartest sections of an ocean liner. The Queen wanted none of it, and commissioned Sir Hugh Casson to come up with something more homely. ‘The Queen is a meticulous observer with very strong views; there was no question of showing her a drawing room and her saying “All right, that will do”,’ he wrote later. ‘She had definite views on everything from the door handles to the shape of the lampshades.’
On 8th April 1953, two months before her Coronation, the Queen was in Scotland to launch ‘Ship 691’. The name would remain a closely guarded secret up to the very moment the Queen announced it. A crowd of 30,000 – including 7,000 children and 300 striking steel-platers, who had voted to abandon their three-week strike for an hour to see the Queen launch their handiwork – had assembled inside the John Brown shipyard. Its owner, Lord Aberconway, welcomed her by recalling her first visit, aged twelve, to the launch of the liner Queen Elizabeth in 1938 and her return, as an eighteen-year-old Princess, to launch HMS Vanguard. The new ship, he assured her, would bring happiness to the ‘far portions of the Empire’, but was also equipped to do a fine job as a hospital ship. ‘If such a time does arise, she will be well fitted for it, and the occupants will rejoice that it is your ship,’ he told her.
Dressed in black, for the court was still mourning the recent death of Queen Mary, the Queen departed from the usual ship-launching script. ‘I name this ship Britannia. I wish success to her and to all who sail in her.’ No one is entirely sure why she did not invoke the Almighty with the customary words ‘May God bless all who sail in her’. Perhaps the Queen felt it was inappropriate to exhort God to bless herself. Another break with tradition was the smashing of a bottle of Empire wine, rather than champagne, over Britannia’s bows. Though the Admiralty had been unenthusiastic about a name that, in their view, was too Anglocentric and not worldly enough, Britannia was the favoured choice of the Queen and the Duke. It was also hugely popular with the public.
Among those in the crowd that day was Jock Slater, a teenage schoolboy who would one day serve in the Yacht, would later become the Queen’s Equerry and finally end up as First Sea Lord in charge of the entire Royal Navy. He had been taken along to watch by a family friend who lived nearby. ‘The cheering was so loud that we couldn’t hear what the Queen said and had no idea what the Yacht was called until we got home and heard it on the news,’ he laughs.
One person who saw and heard everything very clearly was the eight-year-old girl chosen to present the flowers to the Queen. Robin Bullard was the step-granddaughter of the shipyard’s chairman, Lord Aberconway. Now Robin, Countess of Onslow, she remembers having lessons in how to curtsey, and the roar of the crowd as the name was announced. She also remembers the family presenting the Queen with a set of ‘absolutely beautiful’ glass goblets engraved by Laurence Whistler, brother of Rex Whistler (the artist and ‘Bright Young Thing’ who had been killed in action in Normandy). The Queen made a short speech in which she paid a warm tribute to her late father. The King, she said, had been the guiding hand behind this great new royal undertaking: ‘He felt most strongly, as I do, that a Yacht was a necessity not a luxury for the Head of our great British Commonwealth, between whose countries the sea is no barrier but the natural and indestructible highway.’
Like the Coronation, the Yacht would help make the country feel a little prouder of itself once more. Prince Philip touched on that in his foreword to the anthology of Britannia’s years at sea. ‘During the almost fifty years of her service, she played a very special part in Britain’s recovery after the war,’ he wrote. ‘She managed to project all that was best in British life.’
To emphasise that recovery, and to revitalise the new-look Commonwealth still taking shape after the London Declaration of 1949, the Queen and the Duke were already preparing for what remains the most ambitious royal tour in history. Britannia would not be ready in time for the start of that great Coronation tour of 1953–4 in which the royal couple circumnavigated the world via the South Seas, New Zealand and Australia. Most of that journey would be spent in the converted cargo-liner, the SS Gothic, which had been specially chartered and repainted for the trip. Since the charter fee for this one trip
would equate to 10 per cent of the entire cost of building Britannia, the Yacht was already proving its worth. However, by the time the royal couple were on the latter stages of their tour, Britannia was ready to meet them en route. The Yacht had done well in all its sea trials, including a testing encounter with a 97mph wind off Scotland, and an entire ship’s company had been recruited and trained up. The Royal Yacht Service – an entirely separate arm of the Royal Navy – was up and running once again.
On 14th April 1954, the Queen Mother travelled to Portsmouth to entrust the Yacht’s first two royal passengers to the crew. Prince Charles, aged five, and Princess Anne, aged three, were welcomed aboard, along with Miss Lightbody and Miss Peebles, their nannies. Two Yachtsmen were given additional duties as lifeguards, a role that would come to be known by a new name throughout Britannia’s years of service – ‘Sea Daddy’. Leading Stoker Mechanics Rutter and McKeown were among the first in a job with one overarching rule: never, ever let your charge out of your sight.
The Yacht set sail, via Malta, to the Libyan port of Tobruk to meet the Queen. Such were the formalities of international diplomacy that the Queen and the Duke were expected to visit the main Commonwealth cemetery and to have tea with King Idris of Libya before being reunited with the children they had not seen for five months. Not that the young passengers were unduly troubled. Both had been given plenty of duties on board and were having the time of their lives. ‘We were kept very busy,’ the Princess recalls. There were lots of things to do, all sorts of places to go and things to keep clean, scrubbing and polishing.’
The Princess can remember enjoying a pedal car in the shape of the Yacht and a rubber swimming pool, while, even now, the Prince of Wales can still recollect the smell as the rum ration* was issued. He was also mesmerised by the sight of all the rusting wrecks still littering the port of Tobruk, after some of the worst fighting of the North African campaign. War still loomed fresh in so many minds. Finally, at 11.46 on 1st May 1954, the Queen was piped aboard for the first time. For her, as for the officers and crew, it was a rather nerve-racking moment. After all, the story of Queen Victoria and her new yacht had not been a happy one. From the outset, however, it was clear that Britannia would have a very special atmosphere. The following day, a Sunday morning service was held in the Royal Dining Room. With no ship’s chaplain – the Queen had decided that would be an unnecessary luxury - the service was taken by the Flag Officer Royal Yachts, Britannia’s captain, Vice Admiral Conolly Abel Smith. He duly recited the traditional prayer for the Queen, the Queen Mother, the Duke, Prince Charles and ‘all the Royal Family’ – at the end of which, a small voice broke the silence. ‘He hasn’t prayed for me, Mummy,’ said Princess Anne, at which point the entire congregation burst out laughing. Here was a moment that would set the tone for Britannia’s next one million miles.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 44