Never-Built British Warships We Nearly Got

Added: 2026-05-01

[00:00:00]In 1915, Admiral John Fisher proposed the largest warship the Royal Navy had ever seriously considered.

[00:00:08]Fisher described his sketch as "Good enough for sure-going people to give them the idea."

[00:00:14]It was never anything more than a sketch. No formal design was prepared.

[00:00:19]No contractor was approached. The guns required did not exist in a form that could be mounted. The armor Fisher proposed was too thin to protect the hull from the weapons that would have been sent against it.

[00:00:32]Incomparable was not a design for a ship.

[00:00:36]It was a design for an argument.

[00:00:39]Fisher's argument that speed and firepower made armor irrelevant produced at the moment that Jutland was about to prove the opposite.

[00:00:49]Before construction was complete, Fisher proposed replacing the forward turret with a flying off-deck for aircraft.

[00:00:56]The Admiralty accepted the modification.

[00:00:59]What they did not accept was a subsequent proposal to fit a second forward turret carrying the 20-in weapons that Incomparable had been built around.

[00:01:09]The 20-in gun, in Fisher's conception, was the logical conclusion of the trajectory that had begun with the 12-in weapons of Dreadnought.

[00:01:18]The Royal Navy's experience at Jutland, where Fisher's lightly armored battlecruisers had exploded under German gunfire, had made the Admiralty permanently unreceptive to conclusions drawn from that trajectory.

[00:01:31]Furious was completed as a hybrid and eventually converted to a conventional carrier.

[00:01:38]Three of the four Admiral class battlecruisers authorized in 1916 were suspended before their keels were laid.

[00:01:46]Three of them, HMS Rodney, HMS Howe, and [music] HMS Anson, were suspended before their keels were laid as the material and labor required were redirected to merchantmen and escort vessels.

[00:02:00]The fourth, HMS Hood, was sufficiently advanced that she was completed in 1920.

[00:02:07]Anson, Howe, and Rodney were canceled in 1919 in favor of clean sheet designs that would incorporate all the lessons the war had produced.

[00:02:17]The names were eventually reused. Rodney on one of the Nelson class, >> [music] >> Howe and Anson on two of the King George V.

[00:02:26]The canceled [music] ships became ghost namesakes of the vessels that replaced them.

[00:02:32]Four contracts were placed with British shipyards on the 24th of October, 1921, and work began immediately.

[00:02:40]John Brown received the detailed construction drawings on the 3rd of November and began preparing keel blocks and hull plates.

[00:02:47]Swan Hunter, Fairfield, and William Beardmore received their contracts simultaneously.

[00:02:53]The Washington Naval Conference had opened 12 days earlier. On the 18th of November, a cabinet order suspended all construction.

[00:03:02]The keel blocks were dismantled. The hull plates were returned to stock. The contracts were formally canceled in February 1922.

[00:03:10]The ships had existed as real metal and real labor for less than 3 weeks.

[00:03:17]The belt armor reached 15 in at maximum thickness.

[00:03:21]The design speed was 23 knots.

[00:03:23]Where the G3 was intended to hunt and destroy enemy capital ships, the N3 was built to stand and absorb punishment while delivering it.

[00:03:33]Neither class was ever ordered.

[00:03:36]The Washington Treaty, signed in January 1922, banned construction of any ship exceeding 35,000 tons.

[00:03:44]The design work that had produced the N3 was not wasted. [music] The two Nelson class battleships authorized under the treaty limits used the same all forward gun arrangement, the same armor principles, and the same 16-in guns that had been developed for the G3, cut down to fit within [music] treaty limits.

[00:04:05]The class specification called for nine 16-in guns, 30 knots, and armor capable of defeating the weapons of the era.

[00:04:13]Lion would have been the most powerful battleship the Royal Navy had ever operated.

[00:04:20]She was suspended in May 1940 as the war consumed the labor and steel her construction required.

[00:04:27]In 1942, her hull was broken up for material needed elsewhere.

[00:04:32]The design continued to be refined long after the hull ceased to exist.

[00:04:37]The Admiralty produced updated versions through 1944, each heavier and more demanding than the last.

[00:04:46]Lion was formally canceled in April 1943 with her 16-in guns and turret hardware reassigned to programs that were considered more urgent.

[00:04:57]Temeraire carried one of the most distinguished names in the Royal Navy.

[00:05:01]The original HMS Temeraire had fought alongside Nelson at Trafalgar, and the J. M. W. Turner painting of the ship's final voyage had become one of the most recognizable images in British cultural memory.

[00:05:14]The wartime Temeraire was formally canceled in April 1943, having never progressed beyond early hull work that was subsequently scrapped.

[00:05:23]Her guns, turrets, and machinery were allocated to other programs that were considered more urgent.

[00:05:30]The name was eventually assigned to a carrier that was itself canceled before completion.

[00:05:35]The name was not reused on a completed warship until 2014, when it was assigned to a Type 45 destroyer.

[00:05:44]HMS Conqueror was authorized in the 1940 program and suspended without being laid down as the war consumed the yards and labor she required.

[00:05:53]The War Cabinet authorized a new design for the Lion class in 1944, incorporating the full weight of wartime experience, improved anti-torpedo protection, heavier deck armor against the dive bombing and kamikaze threats the war had demonstrated, and a revised 16-in gun installation.

[00:06:13]The resulting preliminary sketch displaced 60,000 tons.

[00:06:17]The DNC concluded that the protection required against modern weapons had grown incompatible with the offensive power the ship could carry at that displacement.

[00:06:26]The Admiralty included revised Lion class ships in the 1945 program regardless.

[00:06:32]The program was rejected in October 1945.

[00:06:37]HMS Thunderer was the fourth and last of the Lion class, authorized in 1941 and never laid down.

[00:06:45]Development of the 16-in Mark IV gun intended for all four ships continued until 1948, 3 years after the last Lion class hull had been canceled, and 7 years after the first had been laid down.

[00:07:00]The guns that would have armed the most powerful battleships Britain ever designed outlasted the ships they were designed for by nearly a decade.

[00:07:09]The Lion class had died four times, once for each hull, and the weapons intended for it died separately in a different year for different reasons.

[00:07:21]Malta and her sisters would have been the largest aircraft carriers Britain had ever built, 897 ft overall, 46,900 tons standard displacement, capable of carrying 81 aircraft and operating at 33 knots.

[00:07:38]The design incorporated an open hangar and deck edge lifts drawn from American practice with armor concentrated below the hangar deck rather than on it.

[00:07:49]The board postponed further consideration of the design on the 31st of August, 1945, 15 days after the Japanese surrender.

[00:07:57][music] Formal cancellation came in December.

[00:08:02]Britain was bankrupt, demobilizing, and had no naval adversary that required four fleet carriers of that [music] size.

[00:08:11]None of the four had progressed to the point where material had been cut to hull dimensions.

[00:08:16]The Malta class would have given Britain a carrier force comparable to the American Midway class, ships that went on to operate for 40 years.

[00:08:24]The Royal Navy instead emerged from the war with a carrier fleet composed of vessels that had been designed before it started.

[00:08:32]Had the Maltas been completed, they would have defined British naval aviation for the 1950s and 1960s.

[00:08:39]The capability gap they would have filled was eventually addressed [music] by the CVA-01 program, planned 20 years later, which was itself canceled before a single ship was laid down.

[00:08:51]Originally ordered as an Audacious class ship, HMS Africa was redesignated as the fourth Malta class carrier in 1944.

[00:09:01]HMS Africa was the first of the four to be canceled in October 1945 before any construction had begun.

[00:09:10]Each revision added displacement and [music] complexity.

[00:09:14]By the time the design was finalized in April 1945, it had grown beyond what any existing British dockyard could efficiently accommodate.

[00:09:24]The four ships had been ordered before the design was finished and finished after the war had ended.

[00:09:31]Africa was canceled in the same month that the final design was formally submitted to the board for approval.

[00:09:38]The material, which Pyke called Pykrete, a mixture of 14% wood pulp and 86% water, was genuinely stronger than regular ice, slow to melt, and resistant to explosives.

[00:09:52]Churchill approved a prototype. A 60-ft scale model weighing 1,000 tons was built on Patricia Lake in Alberta in early 1943, kept frozen through a Canadian summer by a single 1-horsepower motor, and proven to float.

[00:10:08]By December 1943, the project was formally abandoned.

[00:10:12]The prototype at Patricia Lake took three hot Canadian summers to melt.

[00:10:16]Its metal components are still on the lake bottom.

[00:10:20]In February 1966, a name that had been approved 2 years earlier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, was left unassigned [music] for 50 years.

[00:10:31]The 1966 defense white paper concluded that land-based aircraft operating from island bases east of Suez could provide equivalent coverage at lower cost.

[00:10:42]The RAF's claim to cover 700 mi offshore >> [music] >> was contested by the Navy and unproven by any operational experience.

[00:10:51]Denis Healey, the Secretary of State for Defense, accepted it anyway.

[00:10:56]Within 2 years, Britain had announced its withdrawal from east of Suez, rendering the strategic argument for cancellation invalid, and the carriers it was used to cancel permanently absent from the fleet.

[00:11:10]The cancellation [music] of CVA01 in February 1966 ended both ships simultaneously, since the second carrier's entire strategic justification rested on the same operational requirement the defense white paper had dismissed.

[00:11:27]The Royal Navy's First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir David Luce, resigned over the decision.

[00:11:33]His successor resigned shortly afterward.

[00:11:37]The Director of Naval Intelligence wrote privately that the decision had ended Britain's capacity to operate as an independent naval power [music] outside European waters.

[00:11:49]The fleet of carriers [music] that had been promised in the defense estimates, CVA01, CVA02, and a modernized Hermes, was replaced by three Invincible-class ships of 20,000 tons, designed for anti-submarine work with no catapults and no arrester gear.

[00:12:11]Four Type 82 destroyers were planned as the escort group for the CVA01 carrier task force.

[00:12:18]When CVA01 was canceled, three of the four were canceled with it.

[00:12:23]Without a carrier to escort, the class had no operational purpose, and the defense review that killed the carrier eliminated the requirement the destroyer had been built to meet.

[00:12:34]Four [snorts] ships were designed for a fleet that was canceled before they were built.

[00:12:39]Three of those four ships were then canceled alongside it.

[00:12:43]The single ship that was completed had no fleet to join and no mission to perform.

[00:12:49]British warship procurement in the 1960s produced, with some regularity, ships without fleets and fleets without ships.

[00:12:57][music] The angled flight deck concept, developed by British engineers >> [music] >> and passed to the Americans who applied it before Britain did, was incorporated from the outset.

[00:13:09]Steam catapults [music] tested on HMS Perseus was specified.

[00:13:13]The design was sized for the [music] swept-wing jets the Fleet Air Arm could see entering service and would have produced a ship capable of operating Phantoms and Buccaneers when those aircraft became available.

[00:13:24]No construction order followed.

[00:13:27]The existing carriers, rebuilt and modified, were pressed further into service lives their designers had never intended.

[00:13:34]The 1952 design was technically more current than any carrier Britain subsequently operated until HMS Queen Elizabeth was commissioned 65 years later.

[00:13:46]Four Audacious-class fleet carriers were ordered during the war.

[00:13:51]HMS Eagle and HMS Ark Royal were completed, both substantially redesigned and delayed, entering service in 1952 and 1955, respectively.

[00:14:02]Two were canceled at the end of 1945.

[00:14:06]The original HMS Eagle, assigned to Harland and Wolff, and HMS Audacious, which became the name given to the class.

[00:14:14]Neither had progressed beyond early construction work before cancellation.

[00:14:19]The two ships that were completed served as the core of British carrier aviation for 20 years.

[00:14:25]The two that were canceled represented the reserve capacity that the fleet required to sustain operations, conduct refits, and absorb losses.

[00:14:35]When the carriers that were completed were finally retired, there was nothing to replace them.

[00:14:41]On the 8th of December 2017, HMS Queen Elizabeth entered Portsmouth Harbour for the first time under her own power.

[00:14:50]She displaced 65,000 tons, carried 65 aircraft, and bore a name that had been approved for a British aircraft carrier in 1964, assigned to a ship that was canceled in 1966, and unused for 51 years.

[00:15:07]The admiral who had resigned over CVA01's cancellation had predicted that Britain could not recover the carrier capability once it was lost.

[00:15:16]He was wrong about the recovery, and approximately correct about the timeline.

[00:15:22]The ship that finally arrived bore the same name, nearly the same displacement, and almost identical dimensions to the ship that should have arrived 51 years earlier.