HMS Warrior & HMS Vanguard print by John Wigston
The World’s First Battleship & Britain’s Last Battleship
Before the HMS Warrior was restored to her full glory and installed as one of the great attractions of Portsmouth Historic Dockyard on the south coast, she was sent to Hartlepool for complete renovation. While there, local artist John Wigston virtually had her to himself as an artist.
John is a maritime artist of some distinction. A dozen of his paintings were hung in the Queen Elizabeth 2 ocean liner. He painted a series of fine pictures of HMS Warrior and the men who served in her working below decks.
HMS Warrior is a naval icon - the first ironclad, propeller-and-sail driven warship. When she was built she was the greatest warship in the world, impervious to the firepower of all other warships. She revolutionised naval warfare, was the ultimate weapon of the mid-19th Century and formed the blueprint for the great dreadnoughts that followed and whose great grey steel successors dominated war at sea throughout the 20th century.
HMS Vanguard was Britain’s last and biggest battleship. It was commissionned in 1946 and is famous for being the only British battleship “never to fire her guns in anger”.
For more artworks by John Wigston, go to his page in our webshop.
June 11th, 2008 at 2:02 am
It was certainly a sad day for Hartlepool to see the Warrior leave. We restored the ship from a wreck. To her most glorious splender for the South again to enjoy.
Will have to wait for 2010 and the finnish of the Tall Ships race.
Cheers from Mel
September 8th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Sad for you to lose it yes, but its back in Portsmouth where it belongs and to be honest, with the naval history of Portsmouth it is the most suitable place to put her. She sure looks good, saw her twice this week and she’s an amazing ship.
September 8th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
The amazing thing about HMS Warrior was how fast after she was launched the entire world of warships changed from wood and sail to the grey battleships of today.
Wooden-sided Warrior, with both steam and sail, was the first step but after thousands of years of sail the entire transition to no-sail basically took less than 30 years… within 46 years of her launch you had the massive fleets of Dreadnought-type battleships and cruisers ranged against each other en masse in the First World War.
There was an excellent small exhibition on this topic in the RN Museum (150 yards from HMS Warrior) about two years ago. In 20 minutes you could see and learn all about the entire chain of warship design transition. The RN Museum shop probably has good books on the subject.
Louise is right too about Warrior and Portsmouth. Warrior was pivotal to the continuing development of a Royal Navy that really did rule the waves, and Portsmouth was its home.
Strangely, though, the change to industrialised warfare at sea that Warrior ushered in (at the same moment as industrial land warfare was developed in the American Civil War) also swept away the global British imperial power it was designed to uphold. Imperial power become untenable within just 50 years for all but the mightiest of the new world powers.
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