Themes
HMY Britannia
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Brief history
The John Brown Shipyard in Clydebank built HMY Britannia in 1953. The Queen launched Britannia on 16 April 1953. Britannia was the 83rd royal yacht in a long history of royal yachts. The first belonged to King Charles II in 1660. Britannia had a number of roles; official business, diplomatic work, recreation and rescue.
Designers developed Britannia with a dual purpose, as both a royal yacht and a hospital ship. The admiralty carried out tests in 1954 to prove they could successfully convert Britannia into a hospital ship. They developed a number of different schemes to convert Britannia. Each scheme took a different amount of time to complete. In 48 hours they could convert her to carry 180 patients with stores. A ten day conversion meant she could carry 255 patients, an x-ray room, dispensary and dental surgery. Listen to one of HMY Britannia's designers explain more:
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Transcript:
"And I was then appointed as the constructor in charge of the section, which meant moving the chair slightly sideways to do the design of the Royal Yacht so I then spent 18 months on designing the Royal Yacht Britannia. That was another interesting and fascinating thing and she still carries one or two of my original designs. For example all the superstructure and the funnel, I wouldn't say I actually designed it but that was largely my work in conjunction with MPL from wind tunnel testing because of such things as you had to make sure that as far as possible smoke didn't drift down onto the royal games deck which was by the funnels so we spent a lot of time playing around with the design of the funnels and of course despite what people said there were in fact 2 designs one for the Royal Yacht and one for the hospital ship. We had to have certain plans for the hospital ship so a lot of work with the medical director general whatever he was called to produce a set of plans for the Royal Yacht as a hospital ship."
The British government did not need to use Britannia in her hospital ship capacity. However in 1986 the British Government did use her in a similar way to evacuate British nationals from Yemen during the Aden Crisis. Civil war in South Yemen escalated into the Crisis. On 14 January 1986 the Yemeni government granted Britannia permission to rescue British nationals trapped by the fighting. They permitted Britannia to enter their waters because she was not a warship. The Navy chose Britannia because she had the equipment and staff skills to deal with the situation.
The Queen, The Duke of Edinburgh and 14 senior members of the Royal Family watched the decommissioning of Britannia on 11 December 1997 at Portsmouth Naval Base. Over 2000 Royal Yacht Officers and Yachtsmen, their families and the public witnessed the ceremony. She had travelled 1,087,623 nautical miles and visited 135 countries.
