Transporting splendour

Royal Yacht Britannia, Leith, Edinburgh A property of the Royal Yacht Britannia Trust | The Queen is the best-travelled monarch in British history. John Goodall looks at the story of the yacht she helped furnish, both as her floating home and as a theatre of state

- John Goodall

INAME this ship Britannia. I wish success to her and to all who sail in her.' With these words, on April 16, 1953, The Queen released a bottle of 'Empire wine'-a post-war economy in place of Champagne-to launch the Royal Yacht Britannia. The name of the ship had been kept secret and, hearing it declared, the assembled crowd gave a huge roar of approval. To the sound of more cheers, and as a band played Rule Britannia, the 4,000-ton hull, No 691, slid slowly down the slipway from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown & Co, into the river, and was towed by tugs to the fitting-out basin upstream.

From as early as 1939, bids had been invited to construct a new Royal Yacht capable of long-distance travel. War and austerity put paid to the initiative, but a visit by George VI to South Africa in 1947 on board the battleship HMS Vanguard revived it. As The Queen commented at Britannia's launch, George VI 'felt most strongly, as I do, that a yacht was a necessity and not a luxury for the Head of our great British Commonwealth, between whose countries the sea is no barrier, but the natural and indestructible highway'.

In October 1951, therefore, the Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee announced the government's intention to build a yacht capable of conversion into a hospital ship in time of war. A General Election, however, almost immediately passed responsibility for realising the £2.1 million project to a Conservative government under Sir Winston Churchill and the King authorised the commission in writing on February 5, 1952, the day before he died. Britannia claims to be the 83rd Royal Yacht in succession to Mary, which was presented to Charles II by the people of Amsterdam at the Restoration in 1660. The first steam-powered Royal Yacht was launched in 1843.