Saying Farewell to a Giant - HMS HERMES Final Voyage.

 

The long story of the aircraft carrier known as HMS HERMES / INS VIRAAT appears to be drawing to a close. On the 30^th of September, baring a miracle last minute intervention, she will be intentionally beached and the scrapping process will begin.

This marks the end of a saga which began in 1944 when she was laid down as HMS ELEPHANT, and then commissioned some 15 years later as HMS HERMES. Her life in the Royal Navy was, apart from 1982 relatively uneventful.

Indeed she spent much of her career as a carrier that felt distinctly unwanted, having been cited for decommissioning in 1966 as surplus to requirements, she somehow soldiered on as both a strike carrier (carrying about 19 jets) and latterly as an ASW/amphibious carrier with a limited harrier capability.

It was really only the Falklands war that preserved her for posterity in the eyes of the public, when as the flagship of the Task Force, she led the successful liberation of the islands. Thereafter she remained in limited Royal Navy service for another year, before entering reserve and decommissioning in 198 prior to sale to India.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

She served a further roughly 30 years with the Indian Navy as the INS VIRAAT, being deployed on a variety of missions and roles throughout this time. She was finally decommissioned in 2017 after 58 years of service.

The ship was originally slated for transfer as a museum ship, but all bids from a variety of sources fell through. The key reason for this was reportedly a lack of financially viable bids that could ensure that the ship would survive as a going concern.

There has been some suggestion in the UK that she should have been brought ‘home’ to the UK as a museum for the Falklands and other operations, and been the centrepiece of a maritime museum. Various campaigns were run, without success to bring her back.

That they did not succeed is perhaps a blessing in disguise. While it is easy to call for a ship to be preserved as a museum, it is rarely a happy experience for the ship, her owners and the visitors.

Fundamentally warships do not make great museums – they are not designed or intended for large numbers of causal visitors. They are intended as fighting vessels and laid out inside in a maze of honeycomb like compartments designed to protect the integrity of the vessel from attack and damage.

This can make it an expensive proposition to open the ship for visitors, with extensive conversion work required to make it accessible to all. It can also be challenging to work out a safe and effective tour route that really shows off the ship and its intended function.

The challenge is that when visiting an aircraft carrier, once you’ve seen the hangar, flight deck and bridge, its actually difficult to work out what else is worth seeing. Most US museums with aircraft carriers seem to focus on a random tour involving an ops room, catering, laundry and accommodation facilities, and perhaps random parts of the ship.

Health and safety legislation makes it difficult to gain access to many of the more challenging spaces without extensive conversions internally, while areas like magazines and machinery areas are rarely a good place to visit.

When brought together this makes for a challenging museum to preserve – the maintenance requirements on a ship, even when in full commission, are significant. They require daily preventative maintenance to stay afloat and functional and a relentless commitment to painting and upkeep.

Having visited many US museum ships, one of the shared things they have in common is that no matter how hard their hard stretched volunteers try, many of the ships are in extremely poor material condition. These conditions will only get worse over time without extensive maintenance and support.

Indeed the battleship USS TEXAS, the last surviving dreadnought has reached a parlous state of affairs where it is possible that she may not survive the planned tow to repairs elsewhere due to her hull being so porous. One only has to look at images of the ship, whose very elderly steel is now failing to realise that a museum ship cannot continue indefinitely.

Were HERMES/VIRAAT to have come ‘home’ then no matter how well intentioned the museum, the chances would be that over time the economics of supporting the ship as a going concern would have made it unviable to continue.

The combination of keeping visitor numbers up, the costs of keeping the ship permanently berthed and supplied somewhere with life support and hotel services, and the regular cost of maintenance and the odd dry docking would have made it a non viable proposition.

It is worth noting that not a single credible proposition could have been found for HMS ILLUSTRIOUS, despite being offered for preservation as once the misty eyed romanticism is stripped away, the numbers make clear that its almost impossible to run a ship as a long term museum without losing a lot of money.

The wider question too is ‘what version of HERMES would be displayed’. The fact is she spent far longer in Indian service than Royal Navy service, and her interior is likely to be next to no resemblance to her time as a Royal Navy warship. The cost required to bring her into a state where she resembled her time as a carrier would be astronomical, and arguably be ‘fake history’ as the ship was turned into something she is not.

It is far better to recognise her passing with sadness and reflect instead on her achievements through other means. For example anyone interested in the general story of naval aviation in the UK can go to the Fleet Air Museum and see the excellent ‘carrier’ exhibition which focuses at length on the development of British carrier aviation over the last century.

It is, dare one say, a far more pleasant experience to visit than an old museum ship that is rusting away and smells of decay and maintenance backlogs. There is something inherently sad about visiting a warship now preserved as a museum ship – like seeing a killer whale in a theme park, you feel that they instinctively do not belong in this awful half life state.

We also have to, bluntly, take an objective view on the relevance of HMS HERMES to the modern UK. The Falklands War was almost 40 years ago and the youngest people to have formed part of her ships company will now be approaching 60 and likely retired from the RN.

Within 10-20 years there will be relatively few people left who served on HERMES, or who see the value in the link and her place in our history. Is it better to let it end on a far off beach, or rotting in a UK port in the manner of HMS PLYMOUTH, merely deferring an inevitable end?

Perhaps better to watch video footage and read articles of what was, than be depressed by seeing what remains. For those who want a good account of the ship in her finest hour of UK use, then the new book by Rowland White (Harrier 809) is well worth a read. It captures the story of HMS HERMES as part of the wider account of the Falklands and is a fantastic read.

 Humphrey hopes to reflect more on this story in due course when considering the forthcoming Exercise Joint Warrior and the role played by HMS QUEEN ELIZABETH, and comparing it to HMS HERMES in the Falklands – there is a great deal to consider here and the very positive modern story that can be told.

As this blog is being written, some news reports suggest that the VIRAAT has been saved and will not be beached on 30 September, but instead be passed to a consortium to turn her into a museum in India. It remains to be seen if this will happen, or if it succeeds, or if instead we will merely see this whole saga repeated in a couple of years time.

Instead, while we wait to see if this really is the end of the ship, or if a further extension is granted, let us focus on a story that perhaps fuses the best of Royal and Indian Navy traditions, values and people.

The account below was on an internet forum many years ago – and the ‘dit’ is emphatically not Humphreys, but someone elses. It is shared here in the hopes that the original author of the piece who shared it with the forum won’t mind if it is shared again on this site with a new audience, and that it puts a smile on your face. It covers the period of the sale of HMS HERMES to the Indians and her handover as the INS VIRAAT…

For my sins, I was appointed to MOD Sales for the handover of HERMES to the Indian Navy as Oi/c Air Department. We were based in Plymouth and were in barracks for the beginning of the project. We were a small band of merry men soon to be bludgeoned to death with copies of, "THE CONTRACT" a document that every Indian Officer on the project slept with and carried around all day. We were first to arrive and saw "H" into dry dock for exterior hull work and painting. Soon after we were docked down, the Indian crew started to arrive in dribs and drabs until a few months later they outnumbered us. As all you salty sailors will know, when a ship is docked down, she rests on huge oak blocks and in order to complete the hull work on the areas resting on oak, the ship has to be floated, moved forward or aft and re-sat.

The Brit Commander was one of the most inspirational Officers I ever met in my Naval career, his name was Roger Lockyer and without his man management skills the whole project would have folded. Roger sadly died of cancer some years later but will always be remembered with great fondness by this sailor, he was a gentleman in every truest sense of the word. Roger and the Seamanship Department had put together the Temp Memo for floating the ship, as the initiated will know, this is a Whole Ship activity and a very intricate evolution so we were all required onboard. As a WAFU, I had very little input to this evolution so I was sat in my cabin catching up on Divisional paperwork whilst my boys were scattered around the ship on flood watch. About half an hour after the brow had been slung by a dockyard crane, my telephone rang and I was requested in Roger's cabin. When I got there he was with the Indian Commander, Rambir Talwir who was in a bit of a lather leaping up and down blathering on about something. He explained to us that as this was the first time the Indian crew would be afloat in the ship so they were holding a launching ceremony on the Forecastle and that we were cordially invited. Roger grabbed his cap and said, "Eric, this I have got to see!"

When we arrived on the fo'c's'le the Indian Ship's Company were already mustered and sat cross legged on the deck, in the eyes of the ship their senior Warrant Officer had an alter set up with burning joss stick and other paraphernalia. At this point Talwir began to explain the ceremony and said that at the moment the ship floated, they would be informed by stornophone and at this point the launching ceremony would begin. Roger, jokingly, asked where the bottle of Champagne was and was told by Talwir that in Indian custom a coconut is used because it is considered to be the fruit of all knowledge. After a silent pause for thought, Roger then asked where the coconut was only to be told that they did not have one. Roger looked at me inquisitively and I thought that our duty driver was on the jetty with the ship's Landrover and as we had about 40 minutes to go to lift off, we could despatch him down to the market to get a coconut. I offered this to Talwir as a solution only to be told, "No no Eric, this is not necessary, we have the next best thing; we have been to the NAAFI and bought a Bounty Bar!" Sure enough, they launched INS VIRAAT (still HERMES at that time) with a Bounty Bar broken across the forward hawser…