X-Nico

44 unusual facts about Royal Navy


Anti-discrimination law

The reason given varies; for example, the British Royal Navy cite the reason for not allowing women to serve aboard submarines as medical and related to the safety of an unborn fetus, rather than that of combat effectiveness.

Antoine de Sartine

Antoine de Sartine inherited a strong French Navy, resurrected by Choiseul after the disasters of the Seven Years' War (in which France had lost Canada, Louisiana, and India); a resurrected French Navy which would later defeat the British Navy in the War of American Independence.

Army Navy Match

Although a match was played between the officers of the British Army and the officers of the Royal Navy at Kennington Oval, London on 13 February 1878, it was not until 1909 that the Army Navy Match became an annual fixture, when it was jointly administered by the newly formed Royal Navy Rugby Union (RNRU - 1906) and the Army Rugby Union (ARU - 1906).

Arnaud de Borchgrave

He served in the British Royal Navy (1942–1946), from the age of 15, after running away from home and using falsified papers to enlist.

Barca-longa

They were used in Spain and Portugal for fishing but were employed by the British Royal Navy in Mediterranean waters, for shore raids or as dispatch boats.

Basset-class trawler

Orders were placed at shipyards in Britain, Canada and India for the Royal Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy and the Royal Indian Navy.

Battenberg Cup

In 1905, Prince Louis of Battenberg, commanding the five ships of the Royal Navy's 2nd Cruiser Squadron, visited the United States, making port visits in New York City, Annapolis and Washington, D.C. Shortly after his return to England, Battenberg sent the cup to Rear Admiral Robley Evans who at the time commanded the US North Atlantic Fleet.

Battle of Fort Charlotte

He learned in April that additional reinforcements, including British Royal Navy vessels, had arrived at Pensacola.

Bowman Flag

It commemorates (by the motto England expects that every man will do his duty) the Royal Navy’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar (21 October 1805) a landmark event for Britain’s Australasian colonies.

Christmas on a Rational Planet

It also contains the first casual reference to the Faction Paradox, which become an important element in the BBC books Eighth Doctor Adventures and subsequent spin-off series, and an explicit explanation that the mark carried by the Third Doctor during his exile on Earth was a branding used to distinguish criminals by the Time Lords (in reality, this mark was a tattoo of a cobra that Jon Pertwee picked up while serving in the Royal Navy).

Connell James Baldwin

When he was fourteen he joined the Royal Navy, and two years later, after being deemed medically unfit to serve in that branch, the British Army.

CSS Tallahassee

The iron Confederate cruiser Tallahassee was named after the Confederate state capital of Tallahassee in Florida and was built on the River Thames by J & W Dudgeon of Cubitt Town, London for London, Chatham & Dover Rly. Co. to the design of Capt. T. E. Symonds, Royal Navy, ostensibly for the Chinese opium trade.

Ethel Gee

She thus handled top secret documents on Britain's underwater warfare work and HMS Dreadnought, the Royal Navy's first nuclear submarine.

Ferranti Argus

The 350 was used in various military simulators, including the Royal Navy for frigate, submarine and helicopter based anti-submarine training, and the Royal Air Force for a Bloodhound Mk.II simulator and the Vickers VC10 flight simulator built at Redifon and delivered to RAF Brize Norton in 1967.

Galleass

The galleass was a popular type of vessel for England's Henry VIII, who had more than a dozen constructed for the English Navy during the 1530s and 1540s for his wars with the French.

Gunboat

With the introduction of steam power in the early 19th century, the Royal Navy and other navies built considerable numbers of small vessels propelled by side paddles and later by screws.

Habeas Corpus Parliament

I must needs put you in mind how necessary it will be to have a good Strength at Sea, next Summer, since our Neighbours are making naval Preparations...

History of the Halifax Regional Municipality

At the same time, the towns people and especially seafarers were constantly on-guard of the press gangs of the Royal Navy.

Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn was ordered to live in at the headquarters of the Royal Navy's, North American Station in Halifax (1794- 1800).

While it had quickly become the largest Royal Navy base on the Atlantic coast and had hosted large numbers of British army regulars, the complete destruction of Louisbourg in 1760 removed the threat of French attack.

HMAS Eduardo

She was the Royal Navy's MFV 2045, which was loaned to the RAN and commissioned on 8 March 1945.

HMS Reclaim

HMS Reclaim was a deep diving and submarine rescue vessel of the British Royal Navy.

Hornblower in the West Indies

Hornblower in the West Indies, or alternately Admiral Hornblower in the West Indies is one of the novels in the series CS Forester wrote about fictional Royal Navy officer Horatio Hornblower.

Marcos Christino Fioravanti

He graduated in Medicine and went to serve in the Napoleonic Wars as a doctor in the Royal British Navy.

Marlborough, New York

A land grant (patent) of this territory was made to Captain John Evans of the Royal Navy in 1694, and one of his first settlers arrived in 1697.

Mathew Macnider

The MacNiders quickly became one of the leading mercantile families there, selling Canadian timber and supplies to the Royal Navy and trading in wine and spices from Europe and the British West Indies to Quebec, London and Scotland.

Napier, Ontario

One early settler was Captain Christopher Beer who previously had spent 14 years in the Royal Navy.

Naval Service Act of 1910

Naval Service Act of 1910 was the federal act that gave rise to the Royal Canadian Navy to replace the role of Royal Navy in protecting the sovereignty of the Canadian waters.

Naval Service Bill

Prior to the bill's introduction Canada did not have a navy of its own, a state of affairs that left the Dominion dependent on the British Royal Navy for maritime defence.

Operation Hametz

Royal Navy destroyers cruised up and down the Palestinian coast, and Royal Air Force warplanes overflew southern Tel Aviv and Jaffa.

Patterson Park

The American defenses were far stronger than anticipated, and U.S. defenders at Fort McHenry successfully stopped British naval forces from advancing close enough to lend artillery support, and British attempts to flank the defense were countered.

Pegasus class

five British Royal Navy ships carrying a single fighter launched by catapult, known as Fighter catapult ships

Penelakut Island

British sailors surveying the area in 1851 cruised into a tiny group of five unnamed islands in the Strait of Georgia, naming the two largest Kuper and Thetis, after their Captain Augustus Leopold Kuper R.N. (1809–1885) and his frigate, HMS Thetis, a 36-gun Royal Navy frigate on the Pacific Station between 1851 and 1853.

Point Hope, Alaska

The cape at Point Hope was renamed by Captain Frederick William Beechey of the Royal Navy, who wrote on August 2, 1826: "I named it Point Hope in compliment to Sir William Johnstone Hope".

Sam Malcolmson

Malcolmson served in the Royal Navy and in 1969, whilst stationed at R.N.A.S. Culdrose in Cornwall, he played 14 games (5 goals) for Falmouth Town A.F.C..

Sharpe's Devil

Lord Cochrane, a former Royal Navy officer now in service to the Chilean rebels under Bernardo O'Higgins, ambushes the Espiritu Santo and, with the assistance of Sharpe and Harper, capture it, taking Captain Ardiles prisoner.

Stilo

At 10 km from the city is the promontory of Cape Stilo, where in 1940 the Battle of Punta Stilo was fought by the Italian and British Navies.

Sylvia Breamer

Her father was Sir James De Courcey Breamer, a commander in the Royal Navy.

The Great War of 1892

The Great War of 1892 was a story of the genre termed "Invasion Literature" written by Admiral Philip Howard Colomb in which he sought to alert Britain to what he saw as the weakness of the Royal Navy.

Torpedo gunboat

A number of torpedo gunboats, such as the Alarm class and the Dryad class, were built for the Royal Navy during the 1880s and the 1890s; similar vessels were also constructed or otherwise acquired by a number of European nations and Japan.

UKN

The British Royal Navy, occasionally known as the United Kingdom Navy (UKN)

We Didn't Mean to Go to Sea

These conditions are imposed because of the imminent arrival of their father, Ted Walker, who, after an overseas posting with the Navy, is expected to return by ferry at any time from Holland.

Whiggism

The opposing Tory position was held by the other great families, the Church of England, and most of the landed gentry and officers of the army and the navy.

Win, Lose or Die

M receives word that a terrorist organisation known as BAST (Brotherhood of Anarchy and Secret Terrorism) is planning to infiltrate and destroy a top-secret British Royal Navy aircraft carrier-based summit scheduled a year hence between American President George H. W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Russian Premier Mikhail Gorbachev.


Aubrey–Maturin series

The series focuses on two main characters, naval officer Jack Aubrey and physician, naturalist, and spy Stephen Maturin, and the ongoing plot is structured around Aubrey's ascent from Lieutenant to Rear Admiral in the Royal Navy during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars.

Carlyon Bellairs

In 1885 he entered the Royal Navy, receiving his education at Stubbington House School and HMS Britannia and the Royal Naval College, Greenwich.

Chyetverikov SPL

After successful trials by the Royal Navy, with submarine borne aircraft, using the Parnall Peto and the M-class submarines, the V-MF (Voenno-morskoj flot - Naval Fleet") wanted to deploy aircraft from cruiser submarines for open sea reconnaissance.

Daniel Oliver Guion

Daniel Oliver Guion (London, 20 April 1776 – Ringkøbing, 24 December 1811) was an officer of the Royal Navy.

Daniel Pring

Daniel Pring (c. 1788 – 29 November 1846) was an officer in the British Royal Navy.

Dawsonne Drake

During his administration in the Philippines, his term was scandalized by bitter quarrels with various military officers (General William Draper; Admiral Cornish; Major Felt; Captain Thomas Backhouse (command British forces in Manila); and Captain William Brereton, RN).

Defence College of Communications and Information Systems

The College consists of a headquarters based at Blandford Camp in Dorset, the Royal Navy CIS Training Unit at HMS Collingwood, Fareham, Hampshire, The Royal School of Signals at Blandford Camp and the Royal Air Force Number 1 Radio School, collocated with the headquarters of the Defence College of Aeronautical Engineering at Cosford, of which the Aerial Erector School at RAF Digby is a part.

Del Rio, Tennessee

According to family lore, Stokely was impressed into the British navy, but escaped and fought under American captain John Paul Jones.

Edward Keane

His father, also Edward Keane, was a captain in the Royal Navy, and was a relative of John Keane, 1st Baron Keane, who had been made a peer for his service in India.

First Battle of Algeciras

As a result, the British Royal Navy became dominant in the Mediterranean Sea and imposed blockades on French and Spanish ports in the region, including the important naval bases of Toulon and Cadiz.

Future of the Royal Navy

At the beginning of the 1990s the Royal Navy was a force designed for the Cold War: with its three small aircraft carriers and a force of anti-submarine frigates and destroyers, its main purpose was to search for – and in the event of an actual declaration of war, to destroy – Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic.

George Vallings

Educated at Belhaven Hill School in Dunbar and the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, Vallings joined the Royal Navy as a midshipman in 1950 and took part in the Korean War.

Georgiana Molloy

However in December 1836, she received a letter from Captain James Mangles, asking her to collect botanical specimens for him.

Greene Inlet

The name "Deep Inlet" was probably given by Lieutenant Commander J.M. Chaplin, Royal Navy, of the Discovery, during his survey of the Undine Harbour area in 1926 but it is not used locally.

Grog

The word originally referred to a drink made with water or "small beer" (a weak beer) and rum, which British Vice Admiral Edward Vernon introduced into the Royal Navy on 21 August 1740.

Her Majesty's Australian Ship

This prefix is derived from HMS (Her/His Majesty's Ship), the prefix used by the Royal Navy of the United Kingdom, and can be equally applied to warships and shore bases (as Australia follows the British tradition of referring to naval establishments as ships or stone frigates).

Hinstock

From 1941 to 1947 there was a co-located Royal Air Force and Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm training station called HMS Godwit, which specialised in instrument and blind landing technologies.

History of the Halifax Regional Municipality

He was instrumental in shaping that port's military defences for protecting the important Royal Navy base, as well as influencing the city's and colony's socio-political and economic institutions.

HMS Ivy

Three ships of the British Royal Navy have been named HMS Ivy named after the plant.

HMS Leven

Three ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Leven, probably after the River Leven, Fife in Scotland.

HMS Norfolk

Five ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Norfolk, after the Duke of Norfolk or the county of Norfolk.

HMS Queen Charlotte

Four ships of the Royal Navy have been named HMS Queen Charlotte after Charlotte, queen consort of King George III of the United Kingdom.

HMS Royal Charlotte

Six vessels of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS (or HMY) Royal Charlotte, for Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, consort of King George III.

HMS Vesuvius

Twelve ships of the Royal Navy have borne the name HMS Vesuvius or HMS Vesuve, after the volcano Mount Vesuvius.

Hubert Acland

Captain Sir Hubert Guy Dyke Acland, 4th Baronet Acland of St. Mary Magdalen, Oxford, DSO (8 June 1890 – 6 May 1976) was an officer in the British Royal Navy who served during both World Wars.

Irene Incident

In an attempt to surprise the pirates of Bias Bay, about sixty miles from Hong Kong, Royal Navy submarines attacked the merchant ship SS Irene, of the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company, which had been taken over by the pirates on the night of October 19.

Japanese cruiser Tsushima

From mid-1915 to 1918, Tsushima and her sister ship Niitaka were permanently based at the Cape Town, assisting the Royal Navy in patrolling the sea lanes linking Europe to the east.

Little Holm, Yell Sound

In 1983, the Royal Navy cleared ordnance from the area, and their bomb disposal team discovered an unrecorded shipwreck nearby.

LMS diesel shunter 7050

At some point it was rebuilt with a Gardner engine and was used at the Royal Navy base at Botley, Hampshire.

Naval Air Station Brunswick

Naval Air Station Brunswick, Maine, was originally constructed and occupied in March 1943, and was first commissioned on April 15, 1943, to train and form-up Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm pilots to fly squadrons of the Chance Vought F4U Corsair, and of the Grumman TBF Avenger and F6F Hellcat, for the British Naval Command.

Old Lyme, Connecticut

John McCurdy (b.1724), whose home was the resting place for George Washington on April 10, 1776 while traveling to New York City to take on the British Army and Navy (source: Papers of George Washington, Connecticut State Library); grandfather of Connecticut Supreme Court judge Charles McCurdy

Ray Michie, Baroness Michie of Gallanach

She supported the campaigns to end submarine operations of the Royal Navy and United States Navy in the Firth of Clyde, to hold another inquiry into the Chinook crash on the Mull of Kintyre in 1994, and the successful bid for the residents of Gigha to buy their own island.

Robert Patten Adams

Adams was married twice; his first wife, who died in 1867, being Harriett Matilda, daughter of the Captain George King, R.N. He then married Kate, daughter of the George Francis Huston, JP, of New Norfolk, Tasmania.

Royston Tickner

He served in the Royal Navy in World War II and from 1947 took a break from the theatre to work as a lighthouse keeper, miner, fireman and publican, before returning to acting in 1958.

Salford Quays lift bridge

Except for Royal Navy visits and dredging, most vessels entering the Salford Quays turning circle are pleasure craft, and are most commonly seen between April and October, when Mersey Ferries operate the Manchester Ship Canal Cruise service from Liverpool to Salford Quays.

Satsuma Domain

In 1862, in the Namamugi Incident an Englishman was killed by retainers of Satsuma, leading to the bombardment of Kagoshima by the Royal Navy the following year.

Service Prosecuting Authority

It was formed on 1 January 2009 by the merger of the separate prosecuting authorities of the British Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force and is headed by Andrew Cayley QC, a civil servant, as Director Service Prosecutions.

Society of United Irishmen

In October, Wolfe Tone himself was captured when a supporting French fleet of 3,000 troops was intercepted and defeated by the Royal Navy near Lough Swilly.

South Walls

South Walls has substantial remains from the WWII period, when Scapa Flow was used as a Royal Navy base.

Southgate River

Its namesake was Captain James Johnson Southgate, a retired ship-master, who came to Victoria in 1859 via San Francisco and launched a commission and general mercantile business, largely in connection with the Pacific Station of the Royal Navy at Esquimalt, operating as J.J. Southgate & Co.

Viscount Bridport

Viscount Bridport was Lieutenant-Commander in the Royal Navy and also held minor political office from 1939 to 1940 under Neville Chamberlain.

World of Warships

These ships can be either real ships or prototypes from a variety of forces such as the Imperial Japanese Navy, Kriegsmarine, US Navy, Royal Navy, and the Soviet Navy.