All who served in the Yacht would recall a sense of almost familial camaraderie, which came down from the very top. ‘If the Queen saw a yachtsman working over the side without a lifejacket on, I was the first to know,’ says Sir Robert Woodard. ‘Anything that risked life or limb would need immediate sorting out. She wouldn’t remonstrate. She’d just say: “Quick, quick, there’s someone without a lifejacket”. She got to know them extremely well.’
Stalwarts like ‘Dixie’ Deane and ‘Norrie’ Norrell are still invited to royal receptions, long into their retirement. At a recent one, Norrell needed no introduction. ‘The Queen said to me: “Hello, Norrie. Where’s Dixie?” I explained that he was actually on holiday and she said: “Oh good. I was worried he might be unwell”.’
It was a challenge for any outsider to drop into this well-oiled machine, with all its quirks and unusual rules, no matter how senior you might be. Sir Robert Woodard recalls taking command in 1990. By then he had flown both jets and helicopters from aircraft carriers, had commanded a frigate and a destroyer and had taught both the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York along the way. He was running the Royal Navy’s submarine base at Faslane when he received a call about the Britannia job (he was dressed as Father Christmas at the time). Even he had to adapt. ‘When you are in command of a warship, you fall in the ship’s company and you say: “This is the way this ship is going to run.” If you went on board the Royal Yacht, it really was their home. They’d train you in their ways pretty quickly.’
The officers were not averse to a few pranks, either. Sir Robert’s predecessor had left him strict instructions that the Queen insisted on her Flag Officer wearing his best uniform at all times on family cruises. ‘Complete rubbish,’ chuckles Sir Robert. ‘It was Hawaiian shirts and sandals!’ The Queen was greatly amused on the first occasion that Woodard appeared in full uniform. ‘Wool? . . .’ she ribbed him. ‘Over the eyes? . . . Being pulled? . . .’
There was much to learn. When members of the Royal Family were on board, for example, the crew were to stay forward of the mainmast after 8 a.m., unless requested otherwise. There was a clear dividing line between the Royal Household quarters and the rest of the Yacht. Like all ships, this one had a framework of steel ribs. The green baize door or ‘below stairs’ section began at ‘Rib Number 100’. Even at the royal end of the ship, there were further gradations. A cabin with a dark mahogany door was a royal cabin. A light-brown door denoted a Private Secretary, equerry or lady-in-waiting. But come the weekly ship’s quiz, conducted over the Yacht’s internal radio, there was no hierarchy. The team to beat was always the Chief Petty Officers’ Mess. If the Wardroom (the officers’ mess) ever managed it, there would be a ritual stamping of feet on the floor of the Wardroom, which sat immediately above the Chief Petty Officers’ Mess. The Queen could be very competitive, too, although the questions might be gently skewed when she was on board. ‘You might get a question about a steeplechase at Wetherby,’ laughs one former member of the Royal Household. He recalls seeing the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, accompanying a state visit, being ordered off the phone and out of his cabin to add some extra brainpower to the royal team.
Whenever the Queen was on board, so too were the Band of the Royal Marines. They might perform at a small dinner for six or a floodlit shore display for thousands. In 1971, Britannia stopped at tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific, with Prince Philip and his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, on board. The Yacht’s task was, in part, to conduct a Hydrographic Office survey of an area that had last been surveyed by Captain Cook. It was also to pay a royal visit to one of the Commonwealth’s loneliest communities, established by Fletcher Christian and his collaborators after the 1789 mutiny on HMS Bounty.§ Though the crew of Britannia outnumbered the entire population by more than two to one, the Band of the Royal Marines still insisted on going ashore in full uniform to perform their Beating Retreat ceremony on Pitcairn’s only patch of flat open ground.
Into this unusual world, albeit briefly, stepped a young Lieutenant, Jock Slater. Having watched the launch of the Yacht as a schoolboy, the future First Sea Lord found himself appointed as a young ‘season officer’ for a year in 1961. He looks back on it with great fondness as an excellent test of initiative. He might be making up the numbers during the Duke of Gloucester’s lunch for the King of Greece, at which he found himself seated next to Princess Sophia (the future Queen of Spain). Or he might be the duty officer as the Yacht arrived in Ghana for that famously challenging state visit to woo the temperamental father of Ghanaian independence, Kwame Nkrumah. Slater had a tricky task of his own. All the food for the Queen’s state banquet had been flown in from London and transferred to a lorry. However, the lorry was not refrigerated and had gone missing, along with the driver. Slater finally tracked the man down to his home, where he had decided to stop off for lunch. Against the odds, the banquet, like the visit itself, would be a great success. The tour moved on to Liberia, where Slater’s abiding memory is of the local military leaders stuffing their pockets with the Queen’s cigars.
On the voyage home, Slater found himself deputed to organise a music competition. A former flautist with the National Youth Orchestra, his talent had been unearthed earlier in the year by the Queen Mother during her Mediterranean cruise. After being invited to dine at the royal table one evening, the Queen Mother later asked him to join her on the sofa. ‘I gather that you were in the National Youth Orchestra,’ she told him, having somehow received word of his musical ability. ‘We thought it would be nice if you entertained us this evening.’ Slater’s polite protestation that he had no one to accompany him was instantly quashed when the Queen Mother pointed out that her lady-in-waiting, Lady Fermoy (grandmother of Lady Diana Spencer), had been a concert pianist. Young Slater went to retrieve his flute from his cabin and the pair then performed into the night as Britannia sailed for Tunis. Every Flag Officer was on the lookout for such hidden talents when recruiting. ‘I always had a qualified yachtsman as one of my officers in case the royal family wanted to go sailing,’ says Sir Robert Woodard. ‘In the same way, I might pick someone because he was a pianist. You needed to cover every eventuality.’
Entertainment was a key part of life in the Yacht, particularly when the Royal Family were on board. There might be deck tennis or ‘horse racing’, involving model horses progressing across the deck according to the roll of giant dice. Films were always popular, if a little stressful for the young officer appointed as ship’s projectionist. Anthony Morrow, who had three spells in Britannia, first arrived as a junior officer in 1965. He has vivid memories of screening the first James Bond film, Dr No, for the Queen and Duke, together with a cross-section of the ship’s company, drawn by ballot. Fortunately, film selection was not his task. That was a job for the Queen’s Equerry, with a proviso that there should not be ‘too many writhing sheets’.
Every voyage would include a concert party (or ‘sod’s opera’ as some called it) just like the one that Roger du Boulay had watched in the Pacific. The different sections of the ship would go to a great deal of trouble with their costumes and routines. ‘That was naval life at that time in every ship,’ says Anthony Morrow. ‘We didn’t have all the modern stuff like iPads. We had to ad-lib it and provide entertainment to keep the troops happy.’ All guests were expected to take part, including royal ones. During a visit to New Zealand, a bare-chested Earl Mountbatten of Burma performed his own version of the Maori haka. Britannia veterans can even recall one occasion when the Queen was reluctantly persuaded to appear in a sketch as herself, at the behest of the medical officer. As she remarked afterwards: ‘The Surgeon Commander got me to do that. If he does it again, he won’t be a Surgeon Commander much longer.’ One of the more memorable routines during Britannia’s later years was a clod-hopping display of Irish dancing, as the ship’s Petty Officers attempted a version of the musical, Riverdance, wearing gumboots.
Former MP Frank Judd (now Lord Judd) was surprised to end up as part of the entertainment duri
ng his time as the Foreign Office minister ‘in attendance’ for part of the Queen’s 1979 tour of the Persian Gulf. ‘There was a lot of fun,’ he recalls. ‘They said: “Frank, you are part of the Household now and it’s the custom on the ship to put on an entertainment and we’d rather like you to be part of it”. I have a treasured photograph of me leading the chorus with Prince Philip and the Queen there.’ He remembers leading his group, including the Queen’s press secretary, in a fancy-dress variation of an old Forces number, with a chorus of ‘Bum, titty, bum, titty, bum’. As far as he can remember, it went down well. ‘The message we got was that the Queen thoroughly enjoyed it.’
After his debut performance for the Queen Mother in 1961, Jock Slater was always in demand with his flute. Years later he found himself back in Britannia, this time as Equerry to the Queen, and ended up writing a comedy sketch called ‘The Musical Fairy Tale’ during which he had to play the flute (in a helmet) while the Prince of Wales hit him on the head with a mallet. While these happy, village-hall-style rituals continued all over the world, from one continent to the next, the Royal Yacht was about to embark on a new career – as a television star and trade envoy.
SALE POWER
No reigning British monarch had ever visited South America until the Queen’s dazzling arrival in Brazil in 1968. This was a very different affair from Britannia’s usual diet of long-distance Commonwealth tours and short hops around Europe. It is thought that half a million people turned out to watch the Queen join the Yacht, after she flew into the north-eastern city of Recife. More than 100,000 people came out to observe her three-hour stop in Salvador a few days later. Yet it was the royal arrival in Rio de Janeiro that showed how the Queen and her Yacht really could make a grand entrance. The marine cavalcade that greeted Britannia beneath Sugarloaf Mountain and the ticker-tape welcome for the Queen ashore offered high drama. And it was all captured by Richard Cawston’s crew making that first television documentary. Now, more than ever, the British public could see the Yacht earning its keep overseas. But they were also privy to life on board, to the sense of Britannia as a relatively unostentatious sanctuary for the Queen during the happy mayhem of a state visit.
There was another important innovation once the royal party had moved on, by air, to Chile. The Yacht was then handed over to British industry for a series of trade-promotion events known as ‘sea days’. The most senior figures in the Brazilian defence and industrial establishments were invited to lunch and to watch a display of seamanship and weaponry by the frigate HMS Naiad. The British Ambassador, Sir John Russell, reported back to his superiors on the ‘unique advertising value’ of the exercise: ‘This was a most welcome filip for us in our efforts to break into the field of Brazilian naval and mercantile procurement, and I am in good hopes of seeing immediate returns here in the shape of orders for submarines and frigates.’ The figures seem to support Sir John’s optimism. Over the next ten years, Brazil would buy more British military hardware than any other Latin American country, by a margin of three to one. The shopping list would include Oberon-class submarines, Niterói-and Broadsword-class frigates, several helicopters and 400 Sea Cat missiles. The most surprising result, perhaps, was that it would be several years before Britannia was called upon once again to act as a trade-promotion platform. When it did happen, it was a very similar sort of occasion during the Queen’s 1975 state visit to Mexico. On that occasion, a combination of Britannia’s hospitality and a display of British firepower and naval technology by HMS Tartar in the waters off Veracruz led directly to the purchase of a number of patrol boats from Vosper Thorneycroft.
The following year, during the Queen’s transatlantic tour to mark the bicentenary of American independence and open the 1976 Montreal Olympics, another sea day was sandwiched into the royal programme while the Yacht was in New York. The heads of thirty American corporations, with a combined value of $66 billion, trooped aboard to spend a day being wooed by the British Overseas Trade Board. The guests also included top financiers like Paul Volcker, future chairman of the Federal Reserve. Given that this was the mid-Seventies, a time when Britain’s moribund economy was an international laughing stock, it was some achievement. Anthony Morrow was Britannia’s Signal Officer at the time. ‘The Queen disappeared to go to Washington so we went to sea for a day from New York with a very strong crowd of business people,’ he says. ‘The main thing was just having them there. You would never refuse an invitation to go to the Royal Yacht. You might refuse some boring hotel or an embassy do but not a do in the Yacht. It was a particularly good event.’
It was only in the final quarter of Britannia’s operational life that the British government really woke up to the Yacht’s potential as a trade platform. That was ironic, given that this was the period when funding of the Yacht was more politically divisive than ever. By the Nineties, Britannia’s annual running costs were averaging £9 million a year, comparable to those of a mid-ranking British embassy. Gaye Murdoch of British Invisibles, then the promotional arm of the UK financial services industry, has always maintained that the Yacht ‘earned millions for Britain and was the envy of all our competitors’. It was hard to put a precise value on the ‘Britannia factor’, but its existence was never questioned. In 1986, during a sea day in Shanghai, one British executive seeking a slice of a £4 billion steel contract expressed his thanks to Britannia’s then captain, Rear Admiral John Garnier. He had met all the key Chinese state officials he needed to see at lunch in the royal dining room. Under any other circumstances, he explained, it would have taken him six months to make contact with exactly the same people.
In 1993, during one stopover in Bombay, the Yacht was offered as a venue to sign new UK–Indian contracts. Deals that had been mired in legal haggling for months, if not years, were suddenly – and miraculously – resolved. In just four days, contracts worth a total of £1.5 billion were signed. And so it continued to the very end. On Britannia’s final trip, to the Middle and Far East in 1997, Commodore Anthony Morrow staged no fewer than eighty-eight commercial events on board, more than the combined total for the previous decade. The Yacht that had been designed for service as a hospital ship had found a perfect métier as a national conference centre. ‘The crew were astonishingly helpful in every way and there weren’t that many of them to do all the things that they were expected to do,’ says the Princess Royal. ‘You had boats to go ashore, gangways up and down, dining room tables in, dining room tables out, receptions – all of that was largely done by the crew.’ Unfortunately it was just too late.
LOVE BOAT
One break in Britannia’s regular royal routine would occur after a royal wedding. There were four honeymoon cruises in the Yacht’s forty-four-year-history, the only occasions when a double bed was installed on board. The first newly-weds were Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon, who toured the West Indies in 1960. The Yacht was in the same location, bound for New Zealand, when Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips came aboard after their wedding in 1973. Though their Caribbean honeymoon coincided with stormy weather, they enjoyed more privacy than the Prince and Princess of Wales eight years later. Their honeymoon caused a diplomatic row before it had even started, when Spain objected to the couple sailing out of Gibraltar. The Spanish had always claimed the British overseas territory as their own and the Spanish King and Queen declined their wedding invitations as a result of the honeymoon plan. There were also a few less-than-romantic official engagements for the newly-weds, including that dinner for the President of Egypt. After their wedding in July 1986, the Duke and Duchess of York spent ten days sailing around the Azores.
By the time the Queen’s youngest child, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex was married to Sophie Rhys-Jones in 1999, the Yacht had been decommissioned. However, Britannia played an important role in the earlier years of their courtship. The Prince invited his future wife, to join him for the annual sailing regatta at Cowes on the Isle of Wight, much to the delight of the photographers covering the event. After a
few days, though, the media attention was starting to grate. Sir Robert Woodard, the Yacht’s captain, is still proud of his diversionary tactics. ‘The paparazzi were being appalling, so I dressed up one Yachtsman as Miss Rhys-Jones and another as Prince Edward and put them in the Royal Barge and sent them off to Osborne House,’ he chuckles. ‘All the paparazzi went off behind them in pursuit. When they’d gone, Prince Edward and his girlfriend went down the other side, got into my barge and went off to spend the day alone at Beaulieu. They were very appreciative of that – and they still are.’
The Yacht’s presence during Cowes Week was entirely down to the Duke of Edinburgh who greatly enjoyed taking part in the racing and the camaraderie at Britain’s busiest annual sailing regatta. The Queen, for whom competitive sailing held as much appeal as algebra, would stay away. When Cowes Week was over and the time came to set sail for the Western Isles, she would ask the Yacht to pick her up in Portsmouth or Southampton rather than travel across to the Isle of Wight. ‘She avoided Cowes like the plague,’ says one former Britannia officer. ‘It was Prince Philip’s time and she let him get on with it.’ For the Duke, Britannia represented an enduring connection with the Royal Navy career he had been forced to relinquish as a Commander when the Queen came to the Throne. Few dispute that he would have risen to the top of the Service, had he been given the chance.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 46