27 April 2018
Portsmouth Naval Memorial - the history, design and unveiling
Sunday marks 65 years since the unveiling of the CWGC Portsmouth Naval Memorial Extension by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, on 29 April 1953.
The naval memorials
For centuries, the Royal Navy was the foundation of the British Empire’s global power. During the World Wars, it was tested as never before.
Some 50,000 service personnel of the Royal Navy, Royal Marines, and other maritime forces died during the First World War. Most were lost at sea – killed in battle or sinking with their ships – or were ‘committed to the deep’ in a traditional maritime burial. After the end of the First World War, the British Admiralty and the Imperial War Graves Commission agreed to build three memorials at the Royal Navy’s manning ports to commemorate them.
The design
In 1921, Sir Robert Lorimer drew up designs for the memorials. Although each varied slightly, they were effectively the same: an obelisk surmounted by a copper globe. At the Admiralty’s request they were also intended to serve as a marker point for ships arriving home to the safety of port. Around the base the names of the missing are inscribed on bronze panels, while the memorial was completed with sculpture designed by Henry Poole.
Over the course of 1924 the three memorials were unveiled: at Hoe Park in Plymouth, Great Lines in Chatham, and on Clarence Esplanade in Portsmouth, where more than 10,000 people witnessed The Duke of York, the future King George VI, unveil the memorial.
The extensions
After the Second World War, the CWGC appointed the architect Sir Edward Maufe, who also worked on the Air Forces Memorial at Runnymede, to design extensions to each of the memorials. These would record the names of Royal Navy personnel who died in the conflict but had no known grave.
At Portsmouth, an enclosure was added to the north of the original memorial, with low walls inscribed with names, leading to a barrel-vaulted pavilion on each side.
Today, the Portsmouth Naval Memorial commemorates nearly 10,000 sailors of the First World War and almost 15,000 of the Second World War.
The Portsmouth Naval Memorial Extension includes the names of those who lost their lives in many significant episodes of the Second World War at sea. Just six weeks into the conflict, the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by a German submarine in Scapa Flow, Orkney. More than 830 sailors died, of whom 785 are commemorated here. One of the most famous naval battles of the conflict took place in May 1941, when the battlecruiser HMS Hood was sunk by the German warship Bismarck. Only three of Hood’s sailors survived, and nearly 1,400 of her crew are commemorated at Portsmouth.
The unveiling
The extension was unveiled on 29 April 1953 by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, whose late husband had inaugurated the original memorial and served on HMS Collingwood and in the Battle of Jutland.