[5] In 1650 Captain William Penn, Commander-in-Chief, was charged with guarding the Channel from Beachy Head to Lands End with six ships.

[12] With the amelioration of Anglo-French relations, and the German challenge towards 1900, the need for a Channel Formation diminished and the main European naval arena shifted to the North Sea.

The novel Billy Budd by Herman Melville is set on board ships of the Channel Fleet, in the immediate aftermath of the Spithead and Nore mutinies of 1797.

In the novel The War of the Worlds, the Channel Fleet protects the huge mass of refugee ships escaping from the Essex coast in the face of the Martian onslaught.

The initial heroic fight of HMS Thunder Child and the subsequent general engagement, is detailed in the chapter entitled "The Thunderchild".