Ports navals - Grande Bretagne : livres - histoire

Pembroke Dockyard and the Old Navy: A Bicentennial History

The Royal Dockyard at Pembroke Dock produced over 250 warships for the Royal Navy, including five royal yachts, between its founding in 1814 and its closure after the First World War.
Prior to this, no ocean-going ships had ever been built on the south shores of Milford Haven, where the most complex piece of machinery used was the horse-drawn plough.

Yet within twenty years Pembrokeshire men were building major British warships and they did so for the next hundred years. This long century, from the Napoleonic Wars until after the First World War, covered all the major changes in warship design and construction, from wood to iron and then steel, and from sail to steam, and paddle wheel to screw propulsion.

In this authoritative and splendidly illustrated work, naval historian Lawrie Phillips, who was born and bred just outside the dockyard walls, tells the story of this royal yard, its ships and the Pembroke men who built them.

Pembroke Dock 1814-2014 - A Bicentennial Look Back

In 2014 Pembroke Dock celebrates 200 years since its founding, when a Royal Dockyard - the only one ever to exist in Wales - was established here on the banks of Milford Haven. The dockyard was the reason for the rapid development of the town, with people from rural Pembrokeshire and from all around Britain moving to the area to work in the dockyard and the industries that serviced it. The closure of the dockyard in 1926 was a severe blow, and many families moved from the area to other dockyard towns.
A new use was found for the dockyard and in the 1930s the RAF took over much of the old yard. Pembroke Dock was above all a military town, since, in addition to the RAF base, there were Army garrisons at Llanion, Defensible and Pennar Barracks. Today there is no military presence and the dockyard now hosts a ferry to Ireland.

"Pembroke Dock, 1814-2014: A Bicentennial Look Back" presents readers with a series of photographs and old prints, illustrating the development of the town from the first half of the nineteenth century to the present day.

The Ships of Pembroke Dockyard

The year 2014 marks the bicentenary of Pembroke Dock.
This book looks at the ships created during the 112-year history of the dockyard, covering their construction, careers and, in many cases, their demise as well. During those years, nearly 300 ships were built at Pembroke Dock, the only Royal Naval dockyard ever to exist in Wales, but only two major conflicts took place, so most Pembroke ships served in the constant series of skirmishes that marked the growth of the British Empire.

These small colonial engagements helped give the Royal Navy a standing that has hardly ever been equalled, before or since, and provide fascinating stories for the reader. In this book, well known Welsh historian and broadcaster Phil Carradice tells these stories, focussing on the frigates, sloops, gunboats and, occasionally, battleships from Pembroke Dockyard and their crews who fought them.

Portsmouth Dockyard through Time

Portsmouth Dockyard has a long and distinguished history. Functioning in a naval capacity since 1495, although more active as a dockyard from the Victorian period, few other places have such a prominent place in Britain's naval history. The dockyard is the oldest that the Royal Navy has, and boasts one of the oldest dry docks in the world; today it features as a major tourist attraction.

In this book, Philip MacDougall uses his fascinating collection of images to display the incredible recent history of the dockyard. Starting with the Victorian dockyard, he looks at the mighty HMS Dreadnought, which was built at the dockyard, as well as taking the reader on a tour of the yard and its naval role. Moving forward through the decades, Philip considers the impact of the two world wars, as well as the Cold War, before finishing the story up to the present day.

Rosyth Dockyard and Naval Base Through Time

With the coming of the naval arms race with Germany, in 1903 the Admiralty decided to establish a naval base and dockyard at Rosyth, taking advantage of deep tidal water there.
Construction work started in 1909 and the dockyard was finished in 1916, when the pre-Dreadnought HMS Zealandia entered dry dock there. The yard closed in 1925, reopening in 1938 when relations with Germany began to deteriorate again and serving throughout the Second World War.

During the Cold War, Rosyth was used to refit conventional and Polaris nuclear-armed submarines as well as other warships. In 1997 Rosyth was acquired by Babcock International, becoming the first privatised naval dockyard in Britain, and is now the site where the Royal Navy's two new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers are being assembled.

In this book, published in the dockyard's centennial year, Walter Burt takes us through the history of Rosyth dockyard and naval base.

Scapa - Britain's Famous Wartime Naval Base

Scapa Flow, of the greatest naval bases in history, resonates through the annals of the Royal Navy during the two great wars of the twentieth century. It was from there that the Grand Fleet sailed to Jutland in 1916; from there that Russian convoys set off; and it was in that beautiful, bleak anchorage that the German High Seas fleet committed the greatest act of suicide ever seen at sea - 'The Grand Scuttle' - before being raised and scrapped in one of the most astonishing examples of maritime salvage. It was also in Scapa that we have our last photographs of Kitchener before he boarded the Hampshire, sunk by mine off Marwick Head.

But it was also in this great anchorage that many more human stories took place. Here lie the wrecks - now war graves - of the Vanguard, blown apart by an explosion in 1917 and the Royal Oak, sunk by Günther Prien of U-47 in a spectacular raid at the beginning of World War Two. Here too Italian prisoners of war built both the spectacular Churchill causeways and the exquisite Italian chapel at Lamb Holm crafted from Nissan huts.

The text weaves eyewitness accounts and personal experience into the larger narrative, and the photographs capture the spirit and activity of Scapa Flow when it was the home of thousands of service personnel.