Royal Navy Historic Dockyard

The RN's Historic Dockyard at Portsmouth is where the famous HMS Victory and HMS Warrior are  on display and of course visiting this was a major part of my holiday in Portsmouth!

I was able to go aboard Victory (which personally i didn't like so much as everything was so low i had to stoop down everywhere!), Warrior and the WW1 monitor M33 which was my favourite. I was also able to see the current RN in the form of HMS Diamond which was easily visible from the dockyard. You can see my photos here, the dockyard is a great place to visit.

Westland Sea King (Haynes Manual)

To mark its final year of service in the forefront of UK Search & Rescue (SAR) Haynes bought out this manual on the Westland Sea King last year and its a very good edition in the Haynes line. The Sea King is iconic of course, originally a US designed and built helicopter, the UK version built by Westland has served in the Falklands, Gulf Wars, Afghanistan though this book concentrates on the HU5 version used for SAR duties.

The book starts with a short general history of the use of helicopters in rescue operations and then the development of the Westland Sea King. Much of the book is taken up with the Sea King's innards and how to maintain it (as you would expect from a Haynes manual!) What is most interesting here is the more specialised equipment unique to a SAR helicopter and role. The book ends with a few examples of the many rescues and recovery operations the Sea King was involved with during its career.

The end of the Sea King also means the end of Royal Navy involvement in SAR as the role passes to a civilian contractor working for the Maritime & Coastguard Agency, in a way the passing of the Sea King HU5 from service is sad but the new SAR fleet is much more up-to-date and modern which will be welcomed by anyone in trouble! One wonders though if the new service and it's equipment will get immortalised in a Haynes manual one day?

GWR Gunpowder Van

The Great Western Railway, like all of the major railway companies on the pre-nationalised British railway system, had a large fleet of freight wagons carrying a huge variety of loads. The bulk of the fleet (which numbered in the tens of thousands) carried standard loads like coal and other minerals, milk, food stuffs and finished goods.

The GWR also had a number of specialised wagons for special loads which could often be hazardous. These might have better suspension and shock-absorbers, or cooling/heating systems. Gunpowder vans traditionally had metal bodies with a wooden interior (to reduce the chance of sparks of course, potentially catastrophic on a train load of gunpowder!) Care was especially taken with the doors and no steel on steel contact was allowed. Brass was used for all hinges and fasteners and the wood interior was also lined with lead.

GWR 58725 is a surviving example of a gunpowder van which currently resides on the Severn Valley Railway. It was originally built as a standard iron Mink van at the end of the 19th century but later converted into a gunpowder van.

Monty's Humber Super Snipe

Seen in the Coventry Transport Museum this Humber Super Snipe was Montgomery's "victory car" which the Field Marshal used from D-Day onwards to the end of the war.

Royal Signals

A British Army Royal Signals vehicle on display in Coventry.

Ammersee

The German Naval warship A1425 Ammersee on a visit to London.

Big gun

An artillery gun at Shrewsbury Castle.

HMS Caroline

Missed this earlier in the month but HMS Caroline, the last survivor from the Battle of Jutland, has been given a grant of £1 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF) for urgent repairs. The cruiser was finally decommissioned in 2011 following decades as a  training ship in Belfast (the ship's home since 1924) and static drill ship but its condition has deteriorated and the future of the ship was in question.

The funds will make the ship water and air tight and will remove dangerous materials like asbestos. The next stage is to transform the Caroline into a floating museum, hopefully for the centenary of Jutland in 2016. The Telegraph have a nice photo gallery.

Supermarine PB 31E Night Hawk

Lets go back to the First World War and the first aircraft to bear the Supermarine name, the company changed it's name from Pemberton Billing in 1916 (after Mr Pemberton Billing sold his interests to the company's other directors). One of the last aircraft Pemberton Billing had been working on had been the PB 29E, a large quadruplane for anti-airship defence. Unfortunately the sole PB 29E crashed during flight testing but the Admiralty decided to continue pursuing Pemberton Billing's ideas for combating the zeppelin menace so sponsored a further aircraft (Bruce 1969).

Supermarine PB 31E

This was the PB 31E, like the 29E it was a large quadruplane 37ft (11.27m) long and with a wing span of 60ft (18.28m). It was made more sturdy than the 29E with a planned crew of 5 and heavily armed with a 1½-pdr recoiless gun and twin Lewis machine guns. It was intended to be able to stay aloft for up to 18 hours and carried a searchlight that was powered by a separate engine and thus was probably one of the first aircraft to carry an auxiliary power unit (Andrews & Morgan 1981). Because of the long planned duration it was fitted with some basic comforts for the crew including a heated cabin. The aircraft also carried armour in some key areas and the cockpit was bound with fabric to avoid wood splinters in the event of a crash to protect the crew.

The problem with all of these features was weight, the PB 31E weighed over 6100lb (2787kg) when loaded and there simply wasn't the engine technology of the time to properly handle such a plane. Two 100hp Anzani engines powered the PB 31E and was enough to get it airborne but not enough to give it sufficient performance to perform in the anti-zeppelin role. The PB 31E took an hour to climb to 10,000ft which meant that zeppelins could easily escape it by ditching ballast and climbing rapidly. The design speed had been 75mph (120kph) which was considered fast enough to catch zeppelins (though some zeppelins could go faster than that in favourable conditions) but it is reported the PB 31E struggled to pass 60mph (97kph) (Bruce 1969).

Front view showing the search light on the nose

The PB 31E first flew in February 1917 but by then it was apparent there were flaws in the concept, highlighted by the PB 31E's poor performance. Unable to pursue a zeppelin it's only chance of success would have been the sheer luck of being in the right place at the right time and firing on the zeppelin before it got out of range (Bruce 1969). It's main armament, a 1½ pounder Davis non-recoil gun, was also rather unwieldy.

The sole PB 31E was scrapped in the Summer of 1917, the second planned example never being built. The PB 31E, which was given the name Night Hawk, was technically innovative and it's concept could maybe have worked with a better performance. It was an early example of what we would call today a "weapons system" (Andrews & Morgan 1981). In the event the zeppelin was near the end of it's time as a military weapon anyway, Supermarine survived the war. You may have heard of one of their later products.

Further reading :

Supermarine Aircraft Since 1914 (Andrews & Morgan, Putnam, 1981)
Warplanes Of The First World War - Volume 3 (Bruce, Macdonald, 1969)