Charity’s plea to save WWI Navy ship from the scrapyard

IT SURVIVED torpedoes from German U-boats and bombs dropped from the air, but one of Britain’s last remaining Royal Navy ships from the First World War fleet faces being scrapped in a row over where it should be kept.

HMS President, an anti-submarine Q-ship launched in 1918, will be broken up unless the charity that owns it can raise enough money to move it to a new home in Portsmouth.

The vessel had been moored on the Thames for 90 years, serving as a training ship and later as a privately owned function and office space, but it had to be moved to Chatham Historic Dockyard, Kent, two years ago due to building work on the Thames “super sewer”.

Now Chatham has told the HMS President 1918 Preservation Trust that she must leave, and has threatened legal action if the ship is not removed.

The trust is now appealing for funds to tow it to a berth at the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, alongside HMS Victory and HMS Warrior, where vital repairs can be carried out.

Only three of the Royal Navy’s First World War fleet remain and Dan Snow, the historian and television presenter, said it would be a travesty if HMS President was lost to the nation.

He said: “HMS President is the last of her kind. I am astonished that a resolution has not been found to protect this important piece of naval heritage.

“It is sadly poignant that in the year that we mark the centenary of the end of the Great War we may also say goodbye to this great ship. I can only hope a solution is found urgently.”

Paul Williams, of the trust, said: “I am heartbroken that, 100 years on from her launch, she could be holed below the waterline. We really are about to lose a piece of history.”