Home Fleet

• 1. Introduction

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  The Home Fleet lost one of its own battleships at Scapa Flow, a base the Royal Navy considered safe. A German submarine had slipped in and sunk it. The ship was the Royal Oak, and Admiral Blagrove, who commanded the 2nd Battle Squadron, died when it sank.

  That loss raises a question this documentary will answer. How did a fleet built to guard Britain's home waters lose a ship inside its own harbor? And why did the Royal Navy keep renaming that same fleet, again and again, across the decades?

  This story does not begin with a battle. It begins with a handful of guard ships, tied up and scattered in ports around Britain, waiting to be organized into something bigger.

• 2. A Fleet Renamed

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  In 1902, the Royal Navy kept four Port Guard ships standing watch at the Nore, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Queenstown, now called Cobh. On the 1st of October that year, Vice-Admiral Gerard Noel, already serving as Admiral Superintendent of Naval Reserves, was also made Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet. A rear-admiral served under him, commanding a new sea-going force called the Home Squadron. Historian Matthew Seligmann later summarized its core, in his words, as 'the four Port Guard ships, which would be withdrawn from their various scattered dockyards.' Rear-Admiral George Atkinson-Willes served as second-in-command, flying his flag in the battleship HMS Empress of India. Vice-Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson succeeded Noel as Commander-in-Chief in May 1903.

  On the 14th of December 1904, the Admiralty restyled the Channel Fleet as the Atlantic Fleet. The Home Fleet, in turn, took on the Channel Fleet's old name. In 1907, the Home Fleet was reformed under Vice-Admiral Francis Bridgeman. Admiral Sir William May succeeded him in 1909, and Bridgeman returned to command in 1911 before Admiral Sir George Callaghan took over that same year. On the 29th of March 1912, the Admiralty announced a new structure, effective from the 1st of May. It divided the fleet into a First, Second and Third Fleet, together known as the Home Fleets. These Home Fleets served as the Navy's unified home command from 1912 until 1914.

  On the 4th of August 1914, as war broke out, John Jellicoe was ordered to take command. His appointment renamed the force the Grand Fleet. On the 8th of August, an Admiralty Fleet Order scattered the old Home Fleets' ships across new commands. Among them were the Channel Fleet, the Dover Patrol and the Harwich Flotillas, along with flotillas of destroyers and submarines. The Grand Fleet these ships had joined would not survive the peace that followed.

• 3. Between the Wars

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  In April 1919, the Admiralty disbanded the Grand Fleet and split its ships in two. The more powerful vessels became the Atlantic Fleet, while the older ships kept the name Home Fleet, at least for a few months. By late 1919, those Home Fleet ships had been folded into a new Reserve Fleet, and the name disappeared again.

  The name returned in March 1932, revived as the new title for the Atlantic Fleet in the aftermath of the Invergordon Mutiny of 1931. By 1933, Admiral Sir John Kelly commanded this reborn Home Fleet. His flagship led a force built around a 2nd Battle Squadron of five more battleships and a Battlecruiser Squadron. A 2nd Cruiser Squadron of three cruisers, under Vice-Admiral Edward Astley-Rushton, completed the cruiser strength. Three destroyer flotillas totaling twenty-seven ships, a submarine flotilla of six boats, and two aircraft carriers rounded out the fleet.

  Scapa Flow had anchored the Grand Fleet during the First World War. That base would soon be reactivated, well placed to intercept ships running a new blockade.

• 4. War in the North Sea

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  On the 3rd of September 1939, Admiral Forbes flew his flag at Scapa Flow, commanding the Home Fleet. The force was built around the 2nd Battle Squadron, the Battle Cruiser Squadron and the 18th Cruiser Squadron. Submarines answered to a Rear-Admiral, Submarines, whose flotillas were based at Dundee and at Blyth in Northumberland. Vice-Admiral L. V. Wells commanded the fleet's aircraft carriers, among them Pegasus, while an Orkney and Shetlands force rounded out the command. Its central task was to keep the German Kriegsmarine from breaking out into the North Sea.

  A German battleship sank one of the fleet's own battlecruisers early in the war, a ship the Navy regarded as the pride of the fleet. The 2nd Battle Squadron did not survive as a unit; it was effectively disestablished soon afterward.

  Convoys code-named PQ, QP, JW and RA carried the Home Fleet's protection between the United Kingdom, Iceland and Russia. They sailed in both directions throughout the war. Its biggest success along these Arctic convoys came with the sinking of the German battleship Scharnhorst, while it was protecting convoy JW55B. Sir Bruce Fraser commanded that operation from HMS Duke of York. As the Battle of the Atlantic grew more intense, the Navy created a separate Western Approaches Command to handle it. Only in 1944, after Allied forces destroyed another German battleship, did the Home Fleet's role finally shrink. Most of its heavy ships were freed to sail for the Far East.

  Admiral Sir Henry Moore took command that June, the last Commander-in-Chief to lead the Home Fleet through a world war.

• 5. Cold War Command

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  In June and July 1949, Admiral Sir Rhoderick McGrigor led combined Western Union exercises pairing British, French and Dutch warships. He flew his flag from an aircraft carrier. That combined force paid a visit to Mount's Bay in Cornwall from the 30th of June to the 4th of July 1949. Admiral Sir Philip Vian commanded the Home Fleet from 1950 to 1952. In late 1951, a carrier joined the fleet as flagship of the new 3rd Aircraft Carrier Squadron.

  From 1947 to 1957, retired battleships and carriers were reassigned to a Training Squadron headquartered at Portland, teaching basic seamanship. Some of those same carriers were converted into helicopter carriers for the Suez operation of 1956. In December 1951, the Admiralty created a new Heavy Squadron built around the battleship Vanguard, more carriers and cruisers. An officer titled Flag Officer, Aircraft Carriers commanded it, until the squadron was disbanded in October 1954. That disbandment was part of a wider effort, running from 1954 to 1971, to merge the Navy's scattered geographic commands into fewer, larger ones. After 1951, the word 'flotilla' came to describe entire squadron groupings rather than single ships. The Flag Officer, Flotillas, Home Fleet became its senior seagoing officer. A parallel post did the same job for the Mediterranean Fleet. In the Far East, a former cruiser-squadron flag officer took on equivalent second-in-command duties.

  When NATO's military command structure took shape in 1953, the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet gained a second title: Commander-in-Chief, Eastern Atlantic, answering to Allied Command Atlantic. That NATO post, known as CINCEASTLANT, was based at Northwood in northwest London, even though the Commander-in-Chief still flew his flag at Portsmouth. During Exercise Mainbrace in 1952, NATO naval forces gathered for the first time to rehearse the defense of northern Europe, Denmark and Norway. Disputes under the United States' McMahon Act, over British control of nuclear-armed American attack carriers, caused friction. By the end of 1952, Washington set up a separate Striking Fleet Atlantic. It answered only to the U.S. Navy's own Atlantic Fleet commander, acting in his NATO role as SACLANT.

  A submarine tender served as the Home Fleet's flagship in 1956, a sign of how far the force had shifted since its battleship-led days.

• 6. The Final Years

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  In the spring of 1960, the Commander-in-Chief, Home Fleet moved permanently ashore to Northwood. The Flag Officer, Flotillas, Home stayed in day-to-day command at sea as his deputy. Historian Cecil Hampshire recorded the fleet that year: the flagship Tyne, a destroyer depot ship already more than twenty years old, and the carrier Victorious. Also on the list were the fast minelayer Apollo, seventeen destroyers and frigates, and sixteen submarines. Under construction were another carrier, the cruisers Lion and Blake, and the first four guided missile destroyers.

  In February 1963, the Navy merged all remaining frigate and destroyer squadrons across the Home, Mediterranean and Far East Fleets into new Escort Squadrons. That April, a naval unit at the Northwood Headquarters was commissioned under the officer then serving as Captain of the Fleet. From 1966 to 1967, Rear-Admiral Sir Michael Pollock held the post of Flag Officer Second in Command, Home Fleet. In December 1966, the Navy disbanded every squadron still remaining under the Home Fleet's name.

  In 1967, the Home Fleet merged with the Mediterranean Fleet and was redesignated the Western Fleet. Admiral Sir John Frewen had held the Home Fleet command since July 1965. He carried that title into October 1967, the month the name Home Fleet finally left the Navy List.