Royal yachts
She ruled the waves of the greatest empire the world had ever seen, launched more warships than any other nation and indulged a son’s love of ‘big class’ yacht racing, yet Queen Victoria hated sailing, a new book reveals. The Empress of India suffered from seasickness and during a passage from the Thames to Edinburgh’s port of Leith, in the full-rigged ship, Royal George, she lay on a sofa brought up on deck as she succumbed to mal-de-mer.
Victoria was also disappointed at the unreliability of wind power and noted in her diary how ‘annoying’ it was that the ship had made only 58 miles up the North Sea overnight.
According to author Mike Keulemans in his book, Never To Sail In Her, Victoria’s loathing of sail was confirmed on the passage home as she watched several paddle-steamers overtake the square-rigger. From then on, her royal yachts would all be steam-powered.
However, Victoria was a sensible monarch and eschewed an ostentatious royal yacht to save on the public purse, but appearances would later dictate otherwise.
At the 1897 Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Review at Spithead, when the Royal Navy showed off 170 warships in trots five miles long from Southsea to Victoria’s holiday home at Osborne House, the only vessel letting the side down was her paddle-yacht, Victoria & Albert II. Against Tsar Nicholas of Russia’s 420ft Standart and, more ominously, the German Kaiser’s 390ft ram-bowed Hohenzollern, both screw-driven ships, the 42-year-old, 300ft Victoria & Albert II looked like what she was: a clapped-out paddler.
Yet she was used for little more than Channel crossings, or as a platform to view her eldest son’s racing prowess at Cowes Week aboard the giant cutter Britannia.
If Victoria was happy enough to make do with her ‘ancient paddler,’ her subjects at both Windsor and Westminster were not, and following the perceived disgrace of the Spithead Review, urged her to accept a replacement that was fitting for a waveruling Briton. So, much against her wishes, by December of that year the keel of Victoria & Albert III was laid down. Size then mattered and at 430ft LOA the new yacht of the British sovereign was now longer than the Tsar’s or the Kaiser’s.
Speed also mattered, but until the launch Victoria was content to watch the Cowes Week jousting between Meteor – her grandson Wilhelm II, the German Kaiser’s yacht – and Britannia sailed by her eldest son, Edward VII.
Shortly before he died, Maldwin Drummond, former commodore of the Royal Yacht Squadron, told me that after losing a bet to be the fastest ashore, the Kaiser picked a fist-fight with his uncle! Such a fracas can only have reinforced Victoria’s disenchantment with sailing.
Speed, as well as size, was an important factor for the royal yacht too, and during her sea trials Victoria & Albert III achieved a maximum speed of 20.53 knots after an incredible 140 stokers shovelled coal into her boilers!
Victoria did not live to see the more sinister race of who could have the biggest, fastest boat when Britain and Germany started building Dreadnought battleships, the first of which was launched by the then King Edward VII in 1906.
Indeed, she died without ever stepping aboard her third royal yacht which steamed on for another 44 years before being scrapped and replaced by our current monarch’s HMY Britannia, which now exists as a museum.
As for the sailing yacht Britannia, she was taken out in the English Channel and scuttled in 1936, as King George V had willed. Many in the yachting fraternity were outraged. Perhaps one comment, made to me by the late author and yachtsman, Hervey Benham, summed it all up: ‘It was an act of vandalism… paid for by the taxpayer, it wasn’t his to sink!’
Despite her seasickness I doubt Victoria would have approved, either. Never To Sail
In Her by Mike Keulemans, is published by Chaffcutter.
Queen Victoria was disappointed at the unreliability of wind power