>Standing taller than Niagara Falls and weighing in at 65,000 tonnes, HMS Queen Elizabeth is Britain’s biggest ever warship.
>Its maiden operational mission to the Far East in 2021, carried out to demonstrate Britain’s naval strength, saw it harried by missile-armed Russian aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean, stalked by Chinese submarines in the South China Sea and battered by a Covid outbreak forcing a third of its 1,600-strong crew into isolation.
>On board were ten US F-35 stealth jets and eight British ones, along with 300 US marines, the first time the US had put a squadron on another nation’s vessel since the Second World War.
>As well as British pilots and sailors there were also recruits from 23 different Commonwealth nations and some 13 per cent of the ship’s crew were women.
The ship was recently the subject of a six-part BBC documentary The Warship: Tour of Duty.
>Here, we retrace a gruelling seven-month 49,000-nautical-mile voyage to the Pacific Ocean and back, and find out what life was really like on board.
>With around 100 people operating the flight deck at any time, the vast majority of the ship’s company were sleeping and working in the nine decks below it — some of them going days and even weeks without seeing daylight.
>“It’s a floating Little Britain comprising a cross section of our own society,” says anthropologist filmmaker Chris Terrill, who worked alone on the ship filming the BBC documentary. He describes the subterranean environment below deck as a “netherworld of troglodytes”.
>“People call it the biggest submarine in the navy,” Terrill says. “Everybody on that ship from the chefs in the galley, the medics, the writers, the stokers, is there for one thing — to get fighter jets and helicopters off as quickly as possible and everyone plays their part.”
>The £3.5bn ship’s 2021 voyage reintroduced carrier strike capability to the Royal Navy, which it hadn’t had for seven years since the last of the Invincible Class carriers HMS Illustrious was retired from duty in 2014.
>As well as strengthening bonds with allies across the world, it was a power projection, exhibiting interoperability with the US Navy and Nato members to adversaries. A key part of this was exercising freedom of navigation in disputed waters such as the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean and South China Sea.
>The 239ft-tall carrier has five gyms, a post office, a bank with a currency exchange, a “corner shop” — where the most popular items were spicy pot noodles and hobnob biscuits — and even its own chapel. Post takes about five weeks to get home or arrive.
>There are 470 cabins and 1,630 bunks on board with most junior sailors sleeping eight to a room.
>Ronnie Lambert, 31, one of those who featured in the documentary, is a former drum and bass MC who joined the navy as a chef to turn his life around because of a drug problem.
>“Physically the work is obviously hard, but it’s more mentally hard . . . I think it’s four or five weeks I didn’t see daylight for (at one stage of the journey), that is hard, especially as I love a sunbed”, he told The Sunday Times this week.
>Describing how he coped, the father of two added: “There were eight people in my cabin, all chefs and stewards. It was on deck seven. You’ve really got to get along with people, you haven’t really got a choice. We’d go up to the gym to do boxing. You were allowed to vape in vaping areas. We’d play Fifa, I downloaded Netflix shows and watched them on my phone.
>“My biggest escape was to go on the boat bay on four deck . . . where you can go outside and look at the water and stare into nothing. At night you’d never believe how beautiful the sky is, pitch black but just lit up (with stars).”
>Terrill, a Brighton-based veteran documentary maker who specialises in films about the military, was on call 24/7 trying to capture life on the ship.
>To relax, he would take 10km sunrise runs on the flight deck when he could, including running up and down the “ski jump” slope where the aircrafts launched from.
>Many sailors would spend their free time playing musical instruments or using the ship’s education centre to study for GCSEs, A-levels and even degrees, he said.
>His documentary shows the crew coming together for different events on board, including a gay pride day celebration and a “Crossing the Line” ceremony. This bizarre naval tradition sees senior sailors dress up as “bears” and “police” to initiate junior sailors who are crossing the equator for the first time so they can pay their respects to sea god Neptune.
>Terrill, 71, has also written a book called How to Build an Aircraft Carrier and made five navy documentaries, including two about the Queen Elizabeth through its construction and sea trials.
>He said: “I did all my anthropological field work in Africa but there’s nowhere more tribal than a warship. It was a very cosmopolitan community, very diverse. And actually there’s a lot to be learned from the way the ship’s company behave and get on together, it’s very inclusive indeed.
>“When I first started working with the navy back in 1994 if you were gay you couldn’t serve, or if you were found out to be gay you were thrown out, now some of the biggest recruiting pool is the LGBT community.”
>Commander Chris Ansell, second in command, who was responsible for the day to day running of the ship, found a different way to unwind.
>“I took three or four remote-control car kits to build with me while I was away, and ran them on the flight deck every now and again. That very much kept me sane, a couple of hours a night tinkering. In the course of seven months I built three of them, that was my little head space.”
>A favourite place to socialise was the ship’s coffee shop The Haven, where everything shakes when the jets take off above.
>There are four galleys on board and three dining rooms catering for all diets, including vegans. About 500 loaves of bread are baked each day in the ship’s bakery.
>During more than seven months away, sailors consumed 25.5 tonnes of sausages, 2.1 million eggs, 190,000 potatoes (equivalent weight of 15 London buses), 22,700kg of Angel Delight, 1.2 million rashers of bacon and 355,200 pints of milk. Via the Post Office, 40 tonnes of mail was delivered to those on board.
>At the height of the Covid outbreak 104 crew members were positive and 500 were forced to isolate in their cabins for ten days at a time, putting about 60 per cent of the pilots and 30 of the ship’s 42 chefs out of action.
>Lambert was one of the few kitchen staff who avoided it and worked through. Working in the kitchens wearing a mask “all day long next to a big pan and big ovens and all generating so much heat” as the ship sailed through sweltering 40c temperatures across the Indian Ocean was often “horrendous”, he says.
>“During Covid everyone was getting ten days off. I think someone in our mess got 32 days off, it’s mental. And everybody that was isolating wasn’t even ill, every time you’d go to work they’d just stick their fingers up at you and laugh,” Lambert said.
>Given life on the boat is subject to British law, Covid rules “were carried out to the letter”, Ansell, 46, recalled.
If one sailor in a cabin of eight tested positive on day nine of a ten-day isolation they all had to start again from day one.
>One tragic episode of the BBC programme shows the impact of a sailor’s suicide. Daniel Harrison, 23, a leading engineering technician, was on HMS Kent, one of Queen Elizabeth’s task group of eight supporting ships. Harrison was flown over to the aircraft carrier where surgeons were unable to save him.
>Terrill said: “He was repatriated from HMS Queen Elizabeth the next day in one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever witnessed on a warship.
>“I’m not saying this (his suicide) was because of Covid, I can’t say that, I think it probably was a contributory factor. People sometimes forget that sailors are human beings and everybody is impacted emotionally by quite an extreme experience and Covid was an extreme experience, because of a necessity to isolate for long periods of time. The mental health impact is pretty considerable.”
>Ansell had to isolate for a total of 24 days himself, occupying himself by doing press-ups and yoga planking as well as watching The West Wing.
>“I tried to stay in a routine because that’s where your own mental health starts to slip if you’re not,” he said. “I was still trying to run the ship and make decisions. I still spoke to the ship’s company every night from my cabin — that was important to show empathy for what other people were going through.”
>Now a captain and in charge of navy planning at maritime headquarters in Northwood, Ansell says the mission was “the most challenging but most rewarding thing I’ve ever done”.
>Lambert, the chef, left the navy 14 months ago after failing a drugs test. He now works as a postman and printer and is happy to have finished his four-year stint: “That trip from start to finish was pretty much a nightmare . . . I think that’s gone on through history, chef’s never get a good time at sea.”
>He adds: “(But) I really did run with it and a lot of people can’t say they did what I did and I’m pretty proud of that to be fair.”
Such a fucking waste of money. This thing costs £5billion, not even counting maintenance costs. For that money we could have built 5000 cruise missiles instead, which we would have actually used by giving half of them to Ukraine to help Europe’s defense.
Instead we just have a big fat target that we cant do anything with.
If you disagree, tell me why submarines or cruise missiles would not have been better for defense?
2 comments
>Standing taller than Niagara Falls and weighing in at 65,000 tonnes, HMS Queen Elizabeth is Britain’s biggest ever warship.
>Its maiden operational mission to the Far East in 2021, carried out to demonstrate Britain’s naval strength, saw it harried by missile-armed Russian aircraft in the eastern Mediterranean, stalked by Chinese submarines in the South China Sea and battered by a Covid outbreak forcing a third of its 1,600-strong crew into isolation.
>On board were ten US F-35 stealth jets and eight British ones, along with 300 US marines, the first time the US had put a squadron on another nation’s vessel since the Second World War.
>As well as British pilots and sailors there were also recruits from 23 different Commonwealth nations and some 13 per cent of the ship’s crew were women.
The ship was recently the subject of a six-part BBC documentary The Warship: Tour of Duty.
>Here, we retrace a gruelling seven-month 49,000-nautical-mile voyage to the Pacific Ocean and back, and find out what life was really like on board.
>With around 100 people operating the flight deck at any time, the vast majority of the ship’s company were sleeping and working in the nine decks below it — some of them going days and even weeks without seeing daylight.
>“It’s a floating Little Britain comprising a cross section of our own society,” says anthropologist filmmaker Chris Terrill, who worked alone on the ship filming the BBC documentary. He describes the subterranean environment below deck as a “netherworld of troglodytes”.
>“People call it the biggest submarine in the navy,” Terrill says. “Everybody on that ship from the chefs in the galley, the medics, the writers, the stokers, is there for one thing — to get fighter jets and helicopters off as quickly as possible and everyone plays their part.”
>The £3.5bn ship’s 2021 voyage reintroduced carrier strike capability to the Royal Navy, which it hadn’t had for seven years since the last of the Invincible Class carriers HMS Illustrious was retired from duty in 2014.
>As well as strengthening bonds with allies across the world, it was a power projection, exhibiting interoperability with the US Navy and Nato members to adversaries. A key part of this was exercising freedom of navigation in disputed waters such as the Black Sea, the eastern Mediterranean and South China Sea.
>The 239ft-tall carrier has five gyms, a post office, a bank with a currency exchange, a “corner shop” — where the most popular items were spicy pot noodles and hobnob biscuits — and even its own chapel. Post takes about five weeks to get home or arrive.
>There are 470 cabins and 1,630 bunks on board with most junior sailors sleeping eight to a room.
>Ronnie Lambert, 31, one of those who featured in the documentary, is a former drum and bass MC who joined the navy as a chef to turn his life around because of a drug problem.
>“Physically the work is obviously hard, but it’s more mentally hard . . . I think it’s four or five weeks I didn’t see daylight for (at one stage of the journey), that is hard, especially as I love a sunbed”, he told The Sunday Times this week.
>Describing how he coped, the father of two added: “There were eight people in my cabin, all chefs and stewards. It was on deck seven. You’ve really got to get along with people, you haven’t really got a choice. We’d go up to the gym to do boxing. You were allowed to vape in vaping areas. We’d play Fifa, I downloaded Netflix shows and watched them on my phone.
>“My biggest escape was to go on the boat bay on four deck . . . where you can go outside and look at the water and stare into nothing. At night you’d never believe how beautiful the sky is, pitch black but just lit up (with stars).”
>Terrill, a Brighton-based veteran documentary maker who specialises in films about the military, was on call 24/7 trying to capture life on the ship.
>To relax, he would take 10km sunrise runs on the flight deck when he could, including running up and down the “ski jump” slope where the aircrafts launched from.
>Many sailors would spend their free time playing musical instruments or using the ship’s education centre to study for GCSEs, A-levels and even degrees, he said.
>His documentary shows the crew coming together for different events on board, including a gay pride day celebration and a “Crossing the Line” ceremony. This bizarre naval tradition sees senior sailors dress up as “bears” and “police” to initiate junior sailors who are crossing the equator for the first time so they can pay their respects to sea god Neptune.
>Terrill, 71, has also written a book called How to Build an Aircraft Carrier and made five navy documentaries, including two about the Queen Elizabeth through its construction and sea trials.
>He said: “I did all my anthropological field work in Africa but there’s nowhere more tribal than a warship. It was a very cosmopolitan community, very diverse. And actually there’s a lot to be learned from the way the ship’s company behave and get on together, it’s very inclusive indeed.
>“When I first started working with the navy back in 1994 if you were gay you couldn’t serve, or if you were found out to be gay you were thrown out, now some of the biggest recruiting pool is the LGBT community.”
>Commander Chris Ansell, second in command, who was responsible for the day to day running of the ship, found a different way to unwind.
>“I took three or four remote-control car kits to build with me while I was away, and ran them on the flight deck every now and again. That very much kept me sane, a couple of hours a night tinkering. In the course of seven months I built three of them, that was my little head space.”
>A favourite place to socialise was the ship’s coffee shop The Haven, where everything shakes when the jets take off above.
>There are four galleys on board and three dining rooms catering for all diets, including vegans. About 500 loaves of bread are baked each day in the ship’s bakery.
>During more than seven months away, sailors consumed 25.5 tonnes of sausages, 2.1 million eggs, 190,000 potatoes (equivalent weight of 15 London buses), 22,700kg of Angel Delight, 1.2 million rashers of bacon and 355,200 pints of milk. Via the Post Office, 40 tonnes of mail was delivered to those on board.
>At the height of the Covid outbreak 104 crew members were positive and 500 were forced to isolate in their cabins for ten days at a time, putting about 60 per cent of the pilots and 30 of the ship’s 42 chefs out of action.
>Lambert was one of the few kitchen staff who avoided it and worked through. Working in the kitchens wearing a mask “all day long next to a big pan and big ovens and all generating so much heat” as the ship sailed through sweltering 40c temperatures across the Indian Ocean was often “horrendous”, he says.
>“During Covid everyone was getting ten days off. I think someone in our mess got 32 days off, it’s mental. And everybody that was isolating wasn’t even ill, every time you’d go to work they’d just stick their fingers up at you and laugh,” Lambert said.
>Given life on the boat is subject to British law, Covid rules “were carried out to the letter”, Ansell, 46, recalled.
If one sailor in a cabin of eight tested positive on day nine of a ten-day isolation they all had to start again from day one.
>One tragic episode of the BBC programme shows the impact of a sailor’s suicide. Daniel Harrison, 23, a leading engineering technician, was on HMS Kent, one of Queen Elizabeth’s task group of eight supporting ships. Harrison was flown over to the aircraft carrier where surgeons were unable to save him.
>Terrill said: “He was repatriated from HMS Queen Elizabeth the next day in one of the most emotional scenes I’ve ever witnessed on a warship.
>“I’m not saying this (his suicide) was because of Covid, I can’t say that, I think it probably was a contributory factor. People sometimes forget that sailors are human beings and everybody is impacted emotionally by quite an extreme experience and Covid was an extreme experience, because of a necessity to isolate for long periods of time. The mental health impact is pretty considerable.”
>Ansell had to isolate for a total of 24 days himself, occupying himself by doing press-ups and yoga planking as well as watching The West Wing.
>“I tried to stay in a routine because that’s where your own mental health starts to slip if you’re not,” he said. “I was still trying to run the ship and make decisions. I still spoke to the ship’s company every night from my cabin — that was important to show empathy for what other people were going through.”
>Now a captain and in charge of navy planning at maritime headquarters in Northwood, Ansell says the mission was “the most challenging but most rewarding thing I’ve ever done”.
>Lambert, the chef, left the navy 14 months ago after failing a drugs test. He now works as a postman and printer and is happy to have finished his four-year stint: “That trip from start to finish was pretty much a nightmare . . . I think that’s gone on through history, chef’s never get a good time at sea.”
>He adds: “(But) I really did run with it and a lot of people can’t say they did what I did and I’m pretty proud of that to be fair.”
Such a fucking waste of money. This thing costs £5billion, not even counting maintenance costs. For that money we could have built 5000 cruise missiles instead, which we would have actually used by giving half of them to Ukraine to help Europe’s defense.
Instead we just have a big fat target that we cant do anything with.
If you disagree, tell me why submarines or cruise missiles would not have been better for defense?