Kent Past
The History of Kent
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Chatham Dockyard
Royal Dockyards provided the Royal Navy with the shore support facilities it required
to build, repair and maintain the fleet. Central to any Royal Dockyard were, as the
name suggests, their dry docks and it was the provision of these expensive structures
that set the Royal Yards apart from their civilian counterparts until well into the
19th century.
The first documentary evidence of the Royal Navy's use of the River
Medway can be found in 1547 with the rental of two storehouses on 'Gillingham Water'.
By the reign of Elizabeth I (1558 -
In 1588, the shipwrights of Chatham prepared the Queen's ships for their
ultimate test -
No buildings of the
Tudor dockyard survive today for in 1613, the dockyard moved to its present site
and the Tudor yard was redeveloped for the Ordnance Board's facilities at Chatham.
Royal
Dockyards provided the Royal Navy with the shore support facilities it required to
build, repair and maintain the fleet. Central to any Royal Dockyard were, as the
name suggests, their dry docks and it was the provision of these expensive structures
that set the Royal Yards apart from their civilian counterparts until well into the
19th century.
By the mid-
In 1613, the dockyard moved
downstream to the present location. By 1618, storehouses and a ropewalk had been
built, and by 1625, a dry dock and houses for senior officials were erected.
From
the mid-
Only largely archaeological evidence now remains of
the Stuart dockyard. Three sites are known to exist -
The reign of Queen Anne (1702-
Queen
Anne's reign, dominated by the War of the Spanish Succession, also saw a major shift
in English naval activity westwards, away from the North Sea and Channel to the Atlantic
and Mediterranean and beyond capturing Gibraltar (1704) and Port Royal (1710). By
the time of her death in 1713, the Royal Navy's supremacy at sea had been established
and the foundation for the use of sea power to develop Britain's global influence
laid.
Proximity to the North Sea, which had placed Chatham in a prime position during
the 17th century, was not such an advantage during the 18th, once attention had shifted
westwards towards the Mediterranean and the New World. Inevitably, the home dockyards
at Portsmouth and Plymouth were geographically better located to support the fleet,
whilst Chatham's position was further compromised by changes to the River Medway
which began to silt heavily during the century. The combination of both factors led
to a significant change of role for the dockyard at Chatham -
The order
for the Victory to be built at Chatham was signed by the Navy Board on the 7th July
1759. Work started almost immediately, and the first timbers, those for the keel
were brought together at the Old Single Dock on the 23rd July 1759 in a ceremony
that was attended by William Pitt the Elder, the then Prime Minister, and the future
Earl of Chatham.
Once her frame was complete she was left to 'season in frame', a
process that would normally take six to twelve months, but in the case of Victory
lasted for many years, until the Seven Years War had ended, before work restarted
on her. Launched on 7th May 1765 she was completed and fitted out, not for war but
for the reserve fleet.
It was not until 1778 that she left Chatham for sea service,
as Augustus Keppel's flagship. Following the Battle of Cape St Vincent (1797) she
returned to Chatham where she underwent a Great Repair, before returning to sea as
Nelson's flagship, and the battle of Trafalgar
The need for greater speed and efficiency
in the Royal Dockyards to meet the ever increasing demands of keeping the fleet at
sea led to many of the great engineers of the day becoming involved in the mechanisation
of many of the yard's industrial processes, from sawing timber to the manufacture
of rope and paint.
Such engineers included Marc Brunel, Henry Maudslay, John Rennie,
Samuel Bentham, Simon Goodrich and Edward Holl and again serves to demonstrate the
national importance of the dockyard at that time.
The southern end of the site was
completely modernised with the construction of a new Double Ropehouse, the great
Anchor Wharf Storehouses and Edward Holl's Lead and Paint Mill of 1817. Towards the
centre of the yard Holl, the Navy Board's architect, built the Royal Dockyard Church,
the Officers' Offices (now Admiral's Offices) and No 1 Smithery; whilst on land acquired
to the rear of the Dockyard wall, Brunel, Bentham and Holl erected a steam powered
Saw Mill, one of Britain's earliest mechanical saw mills and the first use of steam
at Chatham. In 1820, Rennie constructed Chatham's first stone dry dock (No 3 Dry
Dock) and engine house for a steam powered dock pump, the South Dock Pumping Station.
From 1832 the Navy entered into a period of great technological change with the introduction
of both steam and iron to shipbuilding. The first steam vessel built at Chatham was
the paddle sloop Phoenix, launched in September 1832. From 1840, numerous trials
were carried out with screw propellers, including the construction at Chatham in
1842 of the Bee, a curious small craft built with both paddle wheels and screw propeller.
In 1849, the Admiralty suspended construction of all remaining sailing ships and
Chatham's first screw frigate, Horatio, was launched a year later.
The last major
period of construction of dockyard buildings and structures on the site took place
at this time. A new range of covered building slips were constructed between 1838
and 1855, most on land largely reclaimed from the River Medway and at around the
same time the yard's two remaining timber dry docks were rebuilt in granite.
The
end of battleship construction marked the dawn of a new era for Chatham as the Royal
Navy began to embrace the submarine as a new weapon of war. In 1906, the Admiralty,
having had two small classes of submarines built by Vickers of Barrow-
The construction of C17 heralded the start of a new shipbuilding era for the
dockyard with specialist submarine construction, which would span two World Wars,
enter the nuclear age, and provide continued work for at least two of the Historic
Dockyard's Covered Slips (No�s 6 & 7) until the mid-
In all, 57 submarines
were built at Chatham between 1908 and 1960. Significant vessels included the giant
'X' and 'M' class boats of the inter-
HMS Pembroke, the Royal Naval Barracks
at Chatham, was built between the Steam Yard and Brompton barracks in the early years
of the century. By the outbreak of the First World War Chatham had become one of
the Royal Navy's three 'manning ports', with over a third of the navy, 205 ships,
manned by men allocated to the Chatham Division -
Thereafter Chatham became home to the reserve,
or standby fleet, although a number of operational ships were also based at the Dockyard
including the Antarctic patrol vessel HMS Endurance.
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