Inside Britain’s biggest warship
Chris Terrill witnessed the challenges faced by Britain’s largest warship – including a Second World War bomb
January 2016, Portsmouth Harbour. “Looks pretty murky down there, Dave.” “Visibility just about zero,” comes the disembodied reply. “OK. Proceed by touch.” Beneath us, a diver feels his way hesitantly over the seabed. On a CCTV screen, we can see exactly what he can see. Or rather can’t see. Just the swirling, shapes of sand and sediment illuminated by the beam of his head torch. I am with a specialist team searching for “objects of concern” submerged in Portsmouth harbour where, in 18 months’ time, HMS Queen Elizabeth, the largest warship ever built for the Royal Navy, will make its first entry. Portsmouth, a naval dockyard for at least 500 years, will be her home port but right now it’s not deep enough.
Boskalis, the Dutch dredging experts, is working round the clock to create a safe channel for the £3.1billion supercarrier when it arrives. I am here to film the story for the BBC, which will follow the progress of Queen Elizabeth. The whole story of our journey together is captured in a major three-part series Britain’s Biggest Warship to be aired on BBC Two starting tomorrow.
Amid the accumulated sludge Boskalis has identified 4,000 unidentified objects that could either harm Queen Elizabeth’s hull or damage the dredgers. So far they have raised everything from 19th-century cannons, rusting anchors and steel cables to old torpedo engines and empty Georgian beer bottles. Right now we are exploring what’s called the “berth pocket” of Queen Elizabeth – the area where the supercarrier will eventually be moored. A large “object of concern” has been identified and Dave has been sent down to find out what it is.
Five hundred miles away in Rosyth dockyard in Scotland, HMS Queen Elizabeth is nearing completion. Recently floated from dry dock to an inner basin, the carrier sits tethered to the sea walls and stands higher than Niagara Falls.
It will be another 18 months before she starts make-or-break sea trials in the North Sea followed by a muchanticipated entry in to Portsmouth. From a film perspective, my main interest is how the crew is going to breathe life into this gargantuan prototype warship. Unproven, untested, untried, there is no driver’s manual. The sailors will be learning everything from scratch.
The ship’s company numbers 683 and their commanding officer is 49-year-old Jerry Kyd. He was in charge of Britain’s last carriers, HMS Illustrious and Ark Royal, and is the man chosen to take HMS Queen Elizabeth to sea for the first time.
Kyd, an affable man with an air of natural authority, is fully aware of the challenges. “Guys,” he says to his amassed ranks. “I don’t think there’s been a Royal
Navy crew with as much responsibility on their shoulders for the past 200 years. The world’s a frisky place at the moment. There’s lots of insecurity and threat so we need to get HMS Queen Elizabeth on the front line as soon as possible.”
I follow the sailors as they learn their way around passages and compartments that spread across 17 decks. Over many months, tens of thousands of items are loaded on to the ship – from weapons, computers and galley utensils to soft furnishings, gym apparatus and lavatory rolls. “They’re the most important thing to go on the ship,” explains Fiona Percival, the logistics officer. “Run out of those at sea and it’s mutiny.”
Fire and flood training proceed with a vengeance. The standard time to put out a fire on a warship is 90 seconds. On a ship this size, Usain Bolt would have a problem getting from one end to the other in 90 seconds – especially in firefighting gear.
The flight deck is out of bounds to the aviation team, so they have to resort to tabletop training using cardboard cutouts of jets and little yellow Lego men as themselves. It’s been eight years since the Royal Navy last had a carrier-strike capability, so many of the aviation team are rookies. There are to be many landmark moments over the next 12 months and controversies, too. While the head of the Royal Navy describes the nation’s first supercarrier as the “embodiment of Britain in steel and spirit” others are less generous: a “totemic symbol” that will be left behind by emerging technology; a “massive military distraction”; “a floating white elephant” and then, of course, there is the Russian Defence Ministry. In June last year they mocked HMS Queen Elizabeth as “merely a large convenient naval target”, warning the Royal Navy not to show off her “beauty” too close to Moscow’s assets. I am there when the ship has to fight off claims that it is “beset with problems”. One is that she could be sunk by Chinese sea skimming missiles. Another is that she is prone to cyber attacks because, as one critic wrongly speculated, the computer system was based on Windows XP – the same as the National Health Service, which had been hacked.
But I am also on board for some truly remarkable moments, too – all captured on camera: the moment we leave the dockyard to sail under the Forth Bridge and out to sea; the excitement of pushing the warship to her limits to see what she is capable of; an extraordinary rendezvous with the American aircraft carrier USS George Bush; the first landing of an aircraft on the flight deck and an emotional visit to Scapa Flow in the Orkneys to mark a special centenary.
And then, of course, there is the day, after six gruelling weeks at sea, we head south for the muchanticipated entrance in to Portsmouth, where they started preparing for Queen Elizabeth’s arrival over two years ago.
“Dave – I know you can’t see it, mate. Describe it by feel.”
“OK. About two metres long… flat at one end and at the other… kind of pointy.”
“Pointy?”
“Yup.”
“Better come up, Dave.” Within two hours Royal Navy clearance divers confirm suspicions. Right in the middle of HMS Queen Elizabeth’s proposed berth pocket, sitting just on the surface of the sea bed, Dave has found a 1.5ton German bomb from the Second World War.
A 3,200ft exclusion zone is established and nearby houses are evacuated as the Navy bomb disposal team tow the bomb into the Solent for detonation. The enormous explosion rattles windows on the Isle of Wight and throws up a vast plume of water and silt high into the sky.
Nobody assumed that constructing HMS Queen Elizabeth and preparing for sea was ever going to be straightforward or without complications.
Few could have guessed, however, that even as she was being designed and built, one of Hitler’s bombs had been lying in wait for nearly 80 years.
Thank God for Dave.
Part two: ‘In at the Deep End’ in The Sunday Telegraph
Britain’s Biggest Warship is on BBC Two, tomorrow at 8pm