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On This Day: Queen launches Royal Yacht Britannia

APRIL 16, 1953: The Queen launched the Royal Yacht Britannia amid the deafening cheers of a 30,000-strong crowd, braving heavy rain in Clydeside, on this day in 1953.

Her Majesty, filmed in a British Pathé newsreel, named the vessel, which served the Royal Family for 44 years, at a naming event at the John Brown shipyard.

‘I name this ship Britannia,’ she said before smashing a bottle of Empire wine – as Champagne was seen as too extravagant in the rationing era – across her bow.

The new royal yacht, which was the 83rd such boat after Charles II introduced the first in 1660, then rolled into the River Clyde.

Britannia, the second vessel to bear that name following the racing cutter built for the Prince of Wales in 1893, was designed to be converted into a hospital ship in wartime.

However, her main purpose was to be used as a family holiday retreat as well as for official state visits and to host receptions for foreign leaders.

Prince Charles, then five, and Princess Anne, three, were the first members of the Royal Family to travel on the 412ft yacht when she made her maiden voyage on April 14, 1954.


They spent eight days sailing to Malta before meeting the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh in Tobruk, Libya at the end of the couple's Commonwealth Tour.

There, the sovereign and her consort sailed on steam-powered Britannia for the first time.

During the ship’s service, she carried out 968 official voyages all over the globe and steamed 1,087,623 nautical miles.

 

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Notably, in 1959, she sailed the newly opened Saint Lawrence Seaway from the Canadian east coast to Chicago, the first Royal visit to the U.S. city.

And Charles and Diana, the new Prince and Princess of Wales, took their honeymoon cruise aboard HMY Britannia in 1981.

The ship, which carried a platoon of Marines when members of the Royal Family were aboard, also evacuated over 1,000 refugees from the civil war in Aden in 1986.


There were even secret plans for the Queen to use the Royal Yacht in the event of nuclear war.

Historian Peter Hennessy wrote: ‘It was her floating nuclear bunker... it would lurk in the sea lochs on the north-west coast of Scotland; the mountains would shield it from the Soviet radar and at night it would go quietly from one sea loch to another.’

Yet as the 1990s approached, the ageing vessel’s future was uncertain.

 

[On This Day: The Queen launches the QE2 cruise liner]

 

Ahead of the 1997 General Election, the Tories promised in their manifesto to replace her using funds from the defence budget if re-elected.

But Labour didn’t disclose any plans and the party later decided to scrap the yacht and not replace it after being elected in a landslide vote following 18 years out of office.

Two months after the change of government, Britannia set sail on her final voyage from Hong Kong following the official handover to China on July 1, 1997.


Chris Patten, the last governor of the former British territory, was joined by Prince Charles on the vessel as it returned to Portsmouth.

 

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In April 1998, the city of Edinburgh won a nationwide competition to be Britannia's new home and she is now permanently moored at the port of Leith.

The vessel, which is owned by The Royal Yacht Britannia Trust, is now visited by 250,000 people a year and is a major tourist attraction.