Royal Navy Dockyard

[1] From the reign of Henry VII up until the 1990s, the Royal Navy had a policy of establishing and maintaining its own dockyard facilities (although at the same time, as continues to be the case, it made extensive use of private shipyards, both at home and abroad).

By the 18th century, Britain had a string of these state-owned naval dockyards, located not just around the country but across the world; each was sited close to a safe harbour or anchorage used by the fleet.

In the age of sail, wharves and capstan-houses were often built for the purpose of careening at yards with no dock: a system of pulleys and ropes, attached to the masthead, would be used to heel the ship over giving access to the hull.

At the same time, large factory complexes, machine-shops and foundries sprung up alongside for the manufacture of engines and other components (including the metal hulls of the ships themselves).

[6] The origins of the Royal Dockyards are closely linked with the permanent establishment of a standing Navy in the early sixteenth century.

The beginnings of a yard had already been established at Portsmouth with the building of a dry dock in 1496; but it was on the Thames in the reign of Henry VIII that the Royal Dockyards really began to flourish.

Apart from Harwich (which closed in 1713), all the yards remained busy into the eighteenth century – including Portsmouth (which, after a period of dormancy, had now begun to grow again).

In 1690, Portsmouth had been joined on the south coast by a new Royal Dockyard at Plymouth; a hundred years later, as Britain renewed its enmity with France, these two yards gained new prominence and pre-eminence.

Being more defensible than Halifax, Nova Scotia, and in a position to command the American seaboard (the nearest landfall being Cape Hatteras at 640 miles), the Admiralty began buying land at Bermuda's West End in 1795 for the development of what would become the main base, dockyard and headquarters for the North America and West Indies Station until United States Navy control of the region under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization led to HMD Bermuda being reduced to a naval base from 1951 until its final closure (as HMNB Bermuda) in 1995 (and to the abolishment of the America and West Indies Station in 1956).

In the wake of the Seven Years' War a large-scale programme of expansion and rebuilding was undertaken at the three largest home yards (Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth).

These highly significant works (involving land reclamation and excavation, as well as new docks and slips and buildings of every kind) lasted from 1765 to 1808, and were followed by a comprehensive rebuilding of the Yard at Sheerness (1815–23).

A series of closures followed the war: Pembroke in 1947, Portland and Sheerness in 1959/60,[8] then Chatham and Gibraltar (the last remaining overseas yard) in 1984.

[11] As of 2019, all three (along with other privately owned shipyards) continue in operation, to varying degrees, as locations for building (Rosyth) and maintaining ships and submarines of the Royal Navy.

[13] The principal officers varied over time, but generally included: (In practice there was a deliberate overlap of responsibilities among the last three officials listed above, as a precaution against embezzlement).

[7] Ships in commission (and along with them the majority of Naval personnel) were not under the authority of the Navy Board but rather of the Admiralty, which meant that they did not answer to any of the above officers, but rather to the Port Admiral.

In addition to naval personnel and civilian workers, there were substantial numbers of military quartered in the vicinity of the Royal Dockyards.

Gunboats were small, shallow-draft vessels, developed after the Crimean War, which benefitted from being stored ashore rather than left afloat, to help preserve their light wooden hulls.

The Royal Navy had established itself at St. George's Town at Bermuda's East End in 1795, after a dozen years spent charting the surrounding reef line to find a channel suitable for ships of the line, but following the American War of 1812 it began relocating entirely to the West End with the dockyard and Admiralty House, Bermuda moved to sites on opposite sides of the entrance to the Great Sound).

[30][31] It gives access not only to Murray's Anchorage (named for Commander-in-Chief Vice-Admiral Sir George Murray, who led the fleet of the North American Station through the channel to anchor there for the first time in 1794) but to the entire northern lagoon, the Great Sound and Hamilton Harbour, making the channel vital to the success of the Town of Hamilton, which had been established in 1790, and the economic development of the central and western parishes of Bermuda.

Ships of the fleet (which went from being a mix of cruisers and smaller vessels to a handful of station frigates before being removed and replaced in the 1980s with a single frigate designated West Indies Guardship, which only stopped at Bermuda on its way to take up station in the West Indies and again on its departure) based there after 1951 were required to cross the Atlantic to Portsmouth for repairs.

The Great Lakes, as largely self-contained bodies of water, required their own dockyards to service the Provincial Marine.

Trincomalee was threatened with closure in 1905 as the Admiralty's focus was on Germany, but it remained in service, and was headquarters of the Eastern Fleet for a time during World War II.

The Naval Base and Dockyard fell into Japanese hands during World War II, and became the target of Allied bombing raids.

The yard was expanded, and served as a regular summer anchorage up until the Second World War (though the territory, and with it control of the base, was returned to China in 1930).

It was the Royal Navy's principal Mediterranean base for much of the eighteenth century; however the territory changed hands more than once in that time, before being finally ceded to Spain in 1802.

Gibraltar (1704)[7] (Imperial fortress) A small base served the Royal Navy in this strategically important location throughout the 18th and 19th centuries.

At the start of the 20th, HM Dockyard, Gibraltar was dramatically expanded and modernised, with the addition of three dry docks (one an unprecedented 852 ft (260 m) in length).

New South Wales, Australia (1859) In 1858 the Admiralty acquired land on Garden Island in Sydney Harbour, and established a small naval base there.

In the 1880s it was substantially expanded (though no dry docks were built, as the Navy had use of the facilities at nearby Cockatoo Island Dockyard operated by the Government of New South Wales).

Ascension Island A dockyard and naval base was established in 1816 Georgetown following Napoleon's imprisonment on Saint Helena; it went on to serve as a victualling, repair and supply station for the West Africa Squadron.