in May 1790. Along with
Woolwich,
Deptford,
Chatham and
Plymouth, Portsmouth has been one of the main
Royal Navy Dockyards or Bases throughout its history.
Medieval period Richard I ordered construction of the first dock on the site in 1194, while his successor
John added walls around the area in 1212. The docks were used by various kings when embarking on invasions of France through the 13th and 14th centuries, including the
Saintonge War in 1242.
Edward II ordered all ports on the south coast to assemble their largest vessels at Portsmouth to carry soldiers and horses to the
Duchy of Aquitaine in 1324 to strengthen defences.
Tudors . The first recorded dry dock in the world was built in Portsmouth by
Henry VII in 1495. The first warship built here was the
Sweepstake of 1497; of more significance were the carracks
Mary Rose of 1509 and
Peter Pomegranate of 1510—both were rebuilt here in 1536. The wreck of the
Mary Rose (which capsized in 1545, but was raised in 1982) is on display in a purpose-built museum. A fourth Tudor warship was the
galleass Jennett, built in 1539 and enlarged as a galleon in 1559. The appointment of one Thomas Jermyn as Keeper of the Dock at Portsmouth is recorded in 1526, with a Clerk of the Stores being appointed from 1542. Contemporary records suggest that the dry dock was enlarged and rebuilt in 1523 in order to accommodate the
Henry Grace à Dieu (the largest ship of the fleet at that time); but a hundred years later it is described as being filled with rubble. Following the establishment of Chatham Dockyard in the mid-1500s, no new naval vessels were built here until 1648, but ships from Portsmouth were a key part of the fleet that drove off the
Spanish Armada in 1588.
Seventeenth century Naval shipbuilding at Portsmouth recommenced under the
English Commonwealth, the first ship being the eponymous
fourth-rate frigate
Portsmouth launched in 1650. (Portsmouth had been a
parliamentarian town during the
civil war.) A resident
Commissioner was first appointed in 1649; fifteen years later the Commissioner was provided with a house, and extensive gardens, at the centre of the yard. Between 1665 and 1668
Bernard de Gomme fortified the dockyard with an earthen
rampart (complete with one
bastion and two
demi-bastions), as part of his wider
fortification of Portsmouth and Gosport.
Dummer's pioneering engineering works As France began to pose more of a military threat to England, the strategic importance of Portsmouth grew. In 1689, Parliament ordered a new dry dock to be built there, large enough to accommodate the latest
first-rate and
second-rate ships of the line (which were too big for the existing docks). Work began in 1691; as with all subsequent extensions to the dockyard, the new works were built on
reclaimed land (on what had been mud flats, to north of the old double dock) and the civil engineering involved was on an unprecedented scale. The work was entrusted to
Edmund Dummer, naval engineer and
surveyor to the Navy Board. His new dry dock (the "Great Stone Dock" as it was called) was built to a pioneering new design, using brick and stone rather than wood and with an increased number of 'altars' or steps (the stepped sides allowed shorter timbers to be used for shoring and made it much easier for shipwrights to reach the underside of vessels needing repair). Extensively rebuilt in 1769, the Great Stone Dock is now known as No.5 dock.
Eighteenth century , 1754. Between 1704 and 1712 a brick wall was built around the Dockyard, following the line of the town's 17th-century fortifications; together with a contemporary (though altered) gate and lodge, much of the wall still stands, serving its original purpose. A terrace of houses for the senior officers of the yard was built at around this time (Long Row, 1715–19); later in the century it was joined by a further terrace (Short Row, 1787). In 1733 a
Royal Naval Academy for officer cadets was established within the Dockyard, the Navy's first shore-based training facility and a forerunner of
Britannia Royal Naval College in
Dartmouth.
The 'Great Rebuilding' The second half of the eighteenth century was a key period in the development of Portsmouth (and indeed of the other Royal Dockyards). A substantial planned programme of expansion and modernisation was undertaken from 1761 onwards, driven (as would be future periods of expansion) by increases both in the size of individual ships and in the overall size of the fleet. In the 1760s the Lower Wet Dock (by then known as the Great Basin) was deepened, the Great Stone Dock was rebuilt and a new dry dock (known today as No 4 dock) was built alongside it over a five-year period from 1767. During 1771–76 the former Upper Wet Dock was reconfigured to serve as a reservoir into which water from the dry docks could be drained by way of culverts (enabling ships to be dry docked much more speedily). From 1789 work was begun on replacing the old wooden South Dock with a modern stone dry dock (known today as No 1 dock, it currently accommodates the museum ship HMS
M33). North of the reservoir a channel was dug leading to a new boat basin, beyond which several
shipbuilding slips were constructed on reclaimed land at what became known as the North Corner of the dockyard. Several of Portsmouth Dockyard's most notable historic buildings date from this period, with several older wooden structures being replaced in brick on a larger scale. The three great storehouses (Nos 9, 10 & 11) were built between 1764 and 1785 on a wharf, alongside a deep canal (or
camber) which allowed transport and merchant vessels to moor and load or unload goods; the camber was rebuilt in
Portland stone between 1773 and 1785. It was called a 'double' ropery because the spinning and laying stages took place in the same building (on different floors) rather than on two separate sites. Other buildings associated with ropemaking (including
hemp houses, a
hatchelling house,
tarring house and storehouses) were laid out alongside and parallel to the ropehouse; they largely date from the same period. Unusually for the time it was designed by a civilian architect (
Samuel Wyatt, with
Thomas Telford as clerk-of-works); most other dockyard buildings were designed in-house. The dockyard
chapel, built eighty years earlier, was demolished to make way for the new Commissioner's house and a new chapel (
St Ann's Church) was built nearby. At the same time a set of offices for the senior officers of the yard was built (in place of an earlier office block), overlooking the docks and basin; it continues to provide office space to this day. After the old Commissioner's House had been demolished, four identical quadrangular buildings were built, flanking the timber ground east of the Basin; as well as providing storage space, they accommodated workshops for a variety of trades, including joiners, wheelwrights, wood-carvers, capstan-makers and various other craftsmen. A new
smithery was also built nearby, immediately to the north (the latest in a succession of smiths' shops to have been built on the site); dating from 1791, it was mainly occupied with anchor making. Ten years later this process was vividly described: "The immense masses of the anchors, the ponderous hammers, the vast size of the bellows, the roaring of the flaming furnaces, the reverberations of the falling cumbrous hammers, and the fiery pieces of metal flying in all directions, are truly awful, grand and picturesque".
Samuel Bentham and industrial revolution In 1796
Samuel Bentham was appointed Inspector General of Naval Works by
the Admiralty with the brief of modernising the Royal Dockyards. As such, he took on responsibility for overseeing the continued rebuilding at Portsmouth and initiated further key engineering works. A prolific inventor and precision engineer, Bentham's initiatives at Portsmouth ranged from instituting new management principles in the manufacturing departments to developing the first successful steam-powered
bucket dredger, which began work in the harbour in 1802. While constructing a new entrance to the Basin, Bentham introduced the innovation of an inverted masonry arch to tie together the walls on either side. He went on to use the same principle in constructing the new dry docks attached to the basin; it soon became standard for dock construction around the world. In constructing the docks and basin he made pioneering use of
Smeaton's waterproof
cement. He also designed a "
ship caisson" to close off the entrance to the basin (another innovation which soon became a standard design). To deal with the increasing number of docks, Bentham in 1797 proposed replacing one of the horse pumps above the reservoir with a steam engine. His plan was that the engine should be used not only to drain the reservoir (by night) but also to drive a sawmill and woodworking machinery (during the day); he also envisaged linking it to a freshwater well, to enable water to be pumped through a network of pipes to various parts of the dockyard. A
table engine, designed by Bentham's staff chemist
James Sadler, was installed in 1799; it represented the first use of steam power in a Royal Naval Yard. By 1800 a second steam engine (a
Boulton & Watt beam engine) was being installed alongside the first. Meanwhile, Bentham designed and built a series of subterranean vaulted chambers over the reservoir, upon which he erected a pair of parallel three-storey workshops to contain reciprocating and circular saws, planning machines and morticing machines, built to his own designs, to be driven by the two engines (which were accommodated together with their boilers in the south workshop). Tanks installed on the upper floor provided a
head of water for Bentham's aforementioned dockyard-wide pipe network, providing both salt water for firefighting and fresh water for various uses (including, for the first time, provision of drinking water to ships on the wharves) sourced from a newly sunk 274 ft well.
Marc Brunel, father of
Isambard Kingdom Brunel, famously designed the machines, which manufactured ships'
pulley blocks through a total of fifteen separate stages of production. Having been presented with Brunel's designs, which would be built by
Henry Maudslay, Bentham incorporated them into his woodworking complex and linked them to the engines by way of
line shafts. At the same time as building his Wood Mills, Bentham, with his deputy
Simon Goodrich, was constructing a Metal Mills complex a little to the north-east. Alongside a smithery were a
copper-smelting furnace and
refinery, and a steam engine which drove a
rolling mill and
tilt hammers. Begun in 1801, these facilities were for recycling the
copper sheathing of ships' hulls. In 1804 the works were extended to accommodate machinery for the rolling of iron to make bars and bolts. A
millwrights' shop was also established nearby. The Wood Mills, Block Mills, Metal Mills and Millwrights' department were all placed under Goodrich's supervision as Mechanist to the Royal Navy.
Nineteenth century In 1800, the Royal Navy had 684 ships and the Dockyard was the largest industrial complex in the world. In 1805 Horatio
Nelson toured the newly opened block mills before embarking from Portsmouth on HMS
Victory, leaving Britain for the last time before his death at the Battle of Trafalgar. Taking on students from the age of 14, this was the forerunner of Portsmouth Dockyard School (later Technical College) which continued to provide specialist training until 1970.
Victorian dockyard expansion The adoption of
steam propulsion for warships led to large-scale changes in the Royal Dockyards, which had been built in the
age of sail. The Navy's first 'steam factory' was built at Woolwich in 1839; but it soon became clear that the site was far too small to cope with this revolutionary change in ship building and maintenance. Therefore, in 1843, work began in Portsmouth on further reclamation of land to the north of the then Dockyard to create a new 7-acre
basin (known today as No 2 Basin) with a sizeable factory alongside for manufacturing
marine steam engines. The Steam Factory, on the western edge of the basin, housed a series of workshops: for construction and repair of boilers, for
punching and
shearing and for heavy
turning; there was also an erecting shop for assembling the finished engines. The upper floor housed
pattern shops, fitting shops and other light engineering workshops. Line shafts throughout were powered by an 80
hp steam engine accommodated to the rear. A new Brass and Iron Foundry was also built soon afterwards, on the southern edge of the basin, and in 1852 the Great Steam Smithery was opened alongside the Steam Factory (where Bentham's Metal Mills had formerly stood), containing a pair of
steam hammers designed by
James Nasmyth. The infrastructure and buildings were designed by a group of
Royal Engineer officers, overseen by Captains Sir
William Denison and
Henry James. A much larger Iron Foundry was opened in 1861, immediately to the east of its predecessor; it was further expanded in the following decade. In 1867 a very large Armour Plate Workshop was opened, filling the space between the new North and South dry docks on the eastern side of the basin.
The 'Great Extension' Technological change affected not only ships' means of propulsion, but the materials from which they were built. By 1860 wooden warships, vulnerable as they were to modern armaments, had been rendered largely obsolescent. The changeover to metal hulls not only required new building techniques, but also heralded a dramatic and ongoing increase in the potential size of new vessels. The Dockyards found themselves having to expand in kind. At Portsmouth, plans were drawn up in the late 1850s for further land reclamation north and east of the new Steam Basin, and from 1867 work was begun on a complex of three new interconnected basins, each of 14–22 acres. Each basin served a different purpose: ships would proceed from the repairing basin, to the rigging basin, to the fitting-out basin, and exit from there into a new tidal basin, ready to take on fuel alongside the sizeable
coaling wharf there. Three dry docks were also constructed as part of the plan, as well as parallel pair of sizeable
locks for entry into the basin complex; the contemporary
pumping station which stands nearby not only served to drain these docks and locks, but also delivered compressed air to power equipment around the edges of the basins: five cranes, seven caissons and forty capstans were run on compressed air from the pump house.
The dockyard railway , Quayside crane, former
QHM offices and flagstaff (1850), former Railway station (1878), No 1 Store (1905). In 1843 construction began on a railway system within the dockyard. In 1846 this was connected to
Portsmouth Town railway station via what became known as the Admiralty Line. By 1952 there was over 27 miles of track within the dockyard. Its use declined in the 1970s: the link to the mainline was closed in 1977 and locomotives ceased operating within the yard the following year. A small railway station and ornamental cast-iron shelter served in particular the needs of
Queen Victoria and her family, who would often transfer from yacht to train at this location; this line soon became the main arrival/departure route for personnel. The swing bridge and viaduct were damaged in the wartime blitz and subsequently dismantled in 1946. The Royal Naval Railway Shelter has recently been moved to the other side of the island and restored. In 1900 the Third class cruiser
HMS Pandora was launched, followed by the armoured cruisers
Kent in 1901 and
Suffolk in 1903. Two battleships of the pre-Dreadnought
King Edward VII Class were launched in 1904—
Britannia and
New Zealand.
Dreadnoughts The first modern battleship,
Dreadnought, was built in 1905–06, taking one day more than a year. Further
dreadnoughts followed—
Bellerophon in 1907,
St. Vincent in 1908,
Orion in 1910,
King George V in 1911,
Iron Duke in 1912 and
Queen Elizabeth in 1913.
Electrification came to the Yard with the opening of a 9,800 kW power station in 1906. At this time the 1846 Steam Factory still served as the dockyard's main heavy engineering complex, but the following year a very large New Steam Factory (to the east of No 12 dock) was opened. Equipped for the repair and maintenance of
steam turbine propulsion units, it was soon put to the task of
fitting out dreadnoughts. Nearby a new boiler shop had recently been built (south of No 13 dock), together with a new sawmill. Dry-docking provision was further increased in 1912 through the addition of an
Admiralty Floating Dock, large enough to accommodate a dreadnought, which was moored just off Fountain Lake Jetty. In one of the more serious
suffragette attacks that happened before the First World War, a fire was purposely started at the dockyard on 20 December 1913, in which two men were killed after it spread through the industrial area. In the midst of the firestorm, the battlecruiser
Queen Mary, had to be towed to safety to avoid the flames.
First World War The largest vessel launched at Portsmouth during World War I was the 27,500-ton battleship
Royal Sovereign in 1915. The only other launchings during the war were the submarines
J1 and
J2 in 1915, and
K1,
K2 and
K5 in 1916. Some 1,200 vessels, however, underwent a refit at Portsmouth during the course of the War, and over the same period 1,658 ships were either hauled up the slipways or placed in dry-dock for repairs. For the duration of the war significant numbers of women were employed in the yard, including in the erstwhile male domains of the Engineering Department, the Electrical Department and the Constructive Department. By the end of the war a total of 2,122 women were employed; 280 worked as clerks, the rest were manual workers. The period after the war was inevitably a time of contraction at the Dockyard, and there were many redundancies. In accordance with the Government's
Ten Year Rule the Dockyard worked over the next decade and a half with a presumption of enduring peace rather than future conflict. The majority of warships launched at Portsmouth following the end of the War were cruisers—
Effingham in 1921,
Suffolk in 1926,
London in 1927,
Dorsetshire in 1929,
Neptune in 1933, and
Amphion and
Aurora in 1934. There were also four destroyers—
Comet and her sister
Crusader in 1931, and the
flotilla leaders
Duncan in 1932 and
Exmouth in 1934. The only other vessels launched between the wars were the mining tenders
Nightingale in 1931 and
Skylark in 1932. In 1922 HMS
Victory was brought into No 2 Dry Dock (where she remains to this day). She was opened to the public on 17 July 1928, and ten years later a museum building (the
Victory Gallery) was opened nearby to house works of art and other items related to the ship (including
W L Wyllie's
Panorama of the Battle of Trafalgar). New Dockyard facilities in this period included a Steel Foundry, built in 1926, and the Central
Metallurgical Laboratory, established ten years later. The "Semaphore Tower" was opened in 1930, a facsimile of its namesake (dating from 1810–24) which had been destroyed in a fire in 1913. The arch beneath incorporates the Lion Gate, once part of the 18th-century
fortifications. The original Semaphore Tower had been erected between a sizeable pair of buildings: the Rigging Store and Sail Loft (both of 1784), which perished in the same fire; in the end only one of the pair was rebuilt, as a five-storey office block. Portsmouth and the Naval Base itself were the headquarters and main departure point for the military and naval units destined for
Sword Beach on the
Normandy coast as a part of
Operation Overlord and the
D-Day landings on 6 June 1944. Troops destined for each of the landing beaches left from Portsmouth aboard vessels such as the armed merchant cruisers HMCS
Prince Henry and HMCS
Prince David, escorted by the Canadian destroyers HMCS
Algonquin and
Sioux. The majority of the naval support for the operation left from Portsmouth, including the
Mulberry Harbours. Boathouse 4 (built around the start of hostilities) contributed to the construction of landing craft and support vessels as well as more specialised craft such as midget submarines. There was much rebuilding, demolition and consolidation of bomb-damaged buildings in the aftermath of the Second World War. At the same time, a number of returning ships were refitted in the yard (while others were de-equipped, ready for scrapping). In the decade that followed No 5 shipbuilding slip was taken out of commission; it was infilled (along with the other remaining slips at the north corner) and the adjacent buildings were demolished. Nevertheless, elsewhere in the yard a number of new workshops and other facilities were built in the 1970s, especially around Nos 12–15 docks (including a large Heavy Plate Shop, now the Steel Production Hall, built on the site of the Edwardian Boiler Shop).
Falklands Task Force In 1982
Argentina invaded the
Falkland Islands. In response a
task force of British military and merchant ships was dispatched from Portsmouth Naval Base to the islands in the South Atlantic to reclaim them for the United Kingdom. arriving back at HMNB Portsmouth from the Falklands. • Two aircraft carriers • Two landing ship docks • Eight destroyers • Fifteen frigates • Three patrol ships • Five submarines • Three survey vessels • Five minesweepers • Ten fleet tankers • Six logistic landing ships • Five supply ships • One helicopter supply ship • Eighteen merchant ships including troop/cruise ships such as
Queen Elizabeth 2 and
SS Canberra Following some losses, the majority of these ships returned to Portsmouth later that year.
Rundown of the Dockyard 250-ton electric hammerhead crane (demolished 1984). Thereafter, some of the cuts that had been proposed in the
1981 Defence White Paper were reversed. The retention of a larger fleet meant that a larger workforce was retained at Portsmouth than had been envisaged (around 2,800); however the run-down of the old Dockyard went ahead, with dry docks 1–7 being closed, just under half the dockside cranes demolished and ten out of the nineteen major workshops on the site taken out of service. The dockyard's 'Edwardian
piece de résistance', the Great Factory of 1905, ceased manufacturing in 1986 and was converted to serve as a warehouse (at the end of the century it was linked by monorail to other nearby buildings to create a large Central Storage and Distribution Facility). In 1998 the work of the FMRO was contracted out to the
private sector in the shape of
Fleet Support Limited. In 2007 it was reckoned that the Royal Navy/MOD directly employed 9,774 people at Portsmouth, of whom 5,680 were ships' crew and the rest either service personnel or civilian employees working in the naval base. In addition, there were 3,834 private-sector employees on the base, including defence contractors, sub-contractors and heritage-related workers.
Shipbuilding, maintenance and repair Shipbuilding recommenced on the site in 2003 following the construction of a facility by
VT Group on the site of No. 13 dry dock (having relocated there from the old
Thornycroft Yard in
Woolston, Southampton).
Modular construction of warships took place in an interlinked complex of large buildings: the Steelwork Production Hall, the Unit Construction Hall and the Ship Assembly Hall. Construction of modules for the
Type 45 destroyers and Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers took place here, latterly under
BAE Systems Maritime – Naval Ships. The project was intended to secure the base's future for the next forty years and revitalise shipbuilding in the city; but in 2013 it was announced that, due to budget cuts, the shipbuilding facility in Portsmouth would close in favour of BAE keeping its yards in Glasgow open.
BAE Systems, having subsumed Fleet Support Ltd, continues to manage ship repair and maintenance facilities around No. 3 Basin at Portsmouth. As of 2016 the former shipbuilding complex was being used for repairing
minehunters and other small craft.
New aircraft carriers In 2013 a £100 million upgrade of the naval base facilities and harbour was begun, in preparation for the arrival of the two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers (Portsmouth having been chosen to serve as their home base). Victory Jetty and the Middle Slip Jetty were strengthened and upgraded (the latter being renamed Princess Royal Jetty on completion of the works), so as to enable both carriers to lay alongside at the same time. HMS
Queen Elizabeth arrived in Portsmouth in 2017, and HMS
Prince of Wales followed two years later. ==Civil and military administration of the Dockyard==