HMS Hood Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth

The River Clyde - Scotland's most iconic waterway.

Today it's a bustling commercial hub, but 150 years ago,

this was the beating heart of an industrial revolution.

And fuelling it were its shipyards.

I'm David Hayman

and I grew up surrounded by those yards

and the magnificent ships that they produced.

But it's where they went, and what they did

and the lives they touched, that's always fascinated me.

In this series I'm going to uncover the secrets of the great ships

that laid the foundations of today's Commonwealth of Nations.

It's a journey that's going to take me around the world to tell

incredible stories and unearth extraordinary characters.

If you want to know why Britannia ruled the waves

and where the Commonwealth was born, look no further than here.

The River Clyde is a place changed beyond all

recognition from its heyday in the early 20th century,

when over 40 shipyards were crowded along its river bank,

and Glasgow was known as the "Second City of the Empire".

Of all the ships that have been born on the slipways here and launched

into the Clyde, one of the greatest and most iconic was a warship.

HMS Hood.

For more than 20 years, the largest warship in the Royal Navy.

A source of great pride for her country, with a colossal

firepower that could blow anything else out of the water.

If ever there was a symbol of Britain's determination to

maintain the Empire, it was the "Mighty Hood".

But just like the Empire she came to represent,

Hood's days were numbered.

She was a flawed ship.

Even before she entered the water, her fate was sealed.

Hood was the most elegant warship ever conceived...

but contained within her design were the seeds for her downfall.

The fascinating story of HMS Hood

began during World War I, on the 7th of April 1916, when the Admiralty in

London, in charge of the Royal Navy, approved plans for four new ships.

They had been designed by the Director

of Naval Construction, Sir Eustace Tennyson D'Eyncourt.

But D'Eyncourt's ships would not be known as battleships,

but as battle cruisers. And with a top speed of 32 knots,

they combined the firepower of a battleship with speed.

Hood was to be one of those battle cruisers. She would be

armed with eight colossal 15-inch naval guns - each capable of

firing shells weighing almost a tonne over a distance of 17 miles.

And her speed would derive from 24 boilers

and geared turbines, generating an incredible 144,000 horsepower.

The job of turning D'Eyncourt's design into cold, hard steel was

given to Glasgow's world-famous John Brown's shipyard on the River Clyde.

Building large warships was a particular

speciality of the men of John Brown's.

And Hood, or ship number 460

as she was known in the yard, would be the largest they'd ever built.

For every one of their ships,

John Brown's kept a detailed record of the process of construction.

And here at the National Records of Scotland,

precious images of Hood being built have been preserved.

I'm with archivist Eva Moya, who looks after the collection.

Eva, that's beautiful.

Now, I've been following and reading about this ship for a long time.

This is the first time I've seen

a photograph of her under construction.

This is a glass-plate negative

and it shows the ship just before launch.

I mean, the sheer scale is awesome.

I mean, look at the way it dwarfs that three-storey building.

-Any more?

-Yes. These are the albums.

So we'll start with the keel laying.

And it was done on the 1st of September, 1916.

The detail is extraordinary, isn't it?

The construction of Hood began with the laying of the keel,

the great backbone of the ship.

And from this moment onwards,

the photographers returned every few weeks to slipway number three,

to capture the Hood slowly beginning to take shape.

At any one time,

between 1,000 to 3,000 men were at work on Hood,

from riveters and sheet-metal workers

to boilermakers and drillers.

Hood would weigh in at over 42,000 tonnes.

She would take 3½ years to build.

Slowly, on slipway number three, Hood began to resemble the warship

she would become.

As a boy, you would see these

ships growing up from behind the buildings.

It was like this great beast would grow up

and dominate the whole town, would dominate the town hall

and dominate the swimming baths, the whole commercial centre

of Clydebank dominated by these great shapes of mighty ships.

This must have been awesome in its day.

Awesome, it seems surreal.

Then one day you would come along...

-And it's gone.

-..And it wasn't there any more,

and suddenly you could see the sky.

I guess what strikes me,

looking at these extraordinary photographs, is of course,

the sheer scale of building the biggest warship of its day.

But for me what touches me most are these tiny, blurred, almost

insignificant human figures within this great mountain of steel.

These were the men that cut and shaped

and riveted this ship together.

And the hardship must have been extraordinary.

I mean, the West of Scotland climate is not the best in the world

and these men were dealing with cold, hard steel in sometimes

extremely icy, sub-zero temperatures.

But I guess, apart from a wage packet,

what made it all worthwhile was seeing

the product of your labours take shape before your very eyes.

Of all the different jobs in the shipyard,

one of the most iconic was that of the riveter.

For, like all ships of her day,

Hood was not welded together, but riveted.

Piece-by-piece.

Using several million rivets.

To find out how rivets, these chunky metal pins, were

the secret to stitching together the many

thousands of tonnes of steel that made Hood, I'm meeting former

John Brown's shipyard worker, Tom McKendrick.

Tom, what have we got here?

Well, this is a mock-up of this section here,

which relates to this wee rectangle on the end of the Hood,

on the aft end, just above the rudder.

And what it is, is a butt strap,

and a butt strap was where two plates were laid edge-to-edge

and a strap was placed over the top

and they're riveted together like this.

Now, this gives this whole area enormous strength, because really,

when you think about it, you've got four rivets in that wee area

there, pulling together all these sides, and that joining to that.

Now, the interesting thing about riveting

and riveting ships is that people,

particularly people who sailed in them, actually preferred a riveted ship,

because if this thing, you think of this thing crashing through

waves, going through heavy seas, they actually called it breathing.

When a boat was allowed to expand and contract that wee bit

with the rivets, and you've probably maybe seen in old films and stuff

like that, when you hear the creaks of decks and things, and riveting

was an immensely strong and powerful way of joining sections together.

-Right, so we're about to have a go at riveting, are we?

-We are indeed.

THEY LAUGH

You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din. Right, let's go.

When I was a teenage boy,

I worked in a steelyard as an apprentice template maker.

But I never got to do any riveting,

so this is my first time.

To start with, the rivet is heated to a temperature

of around 1,000 degrees Celsius, causing the rivet to expand.

Thanks, Andrew.

-Ready?

-Go!

Using a pneumatic rivet gun,

the end of the rivet is then flattened into shape.

As the rivet cools, it shrinks,

making the two ends of the rivet pull together,

fastening the plates and creating a watertight seal.

-Great, absolutely!

-We must be born-again riveters.

And this is how Hood was assembled.

Thousands upon thousands of metal sections, riveted together.

It was a job with little care for health and safety.

Rivets, glowing red-hot, would be thrown through the air.

The riveters working on Hood would have got through many

hundreds of rivets every day.

And at the end of the working day, men called timekeepers inspected

the new rivets and totted up how much the riveters were to be paid.

When you look at pictures of the Hood, what in actual fact

you're looking at is black and white photographs, but it was actually

an array of rainbow colours because every timekeeper had a pot of

marking paint, and to identify their own work, they had their own colour.

So you had from light blue through to deep orange,

you had purples, red and greens.

Every man had his mark.

And if you look very closely at pictures of the Hood,

you'll find it's absolutely festooned by symbols and markings.

Fascinating!

So you see a black and white photograph,

but every rivet was counted.

So they would come along and say, "How many rivets did you

"put in the day, John?

"The boys and I put in 142." And he would - one, two, three, four, five - count the rivets.

-And every man had their own symbol?

-That's it.

It was marked off and then your pay was calculated using this,

the Every Farthing Ready Reckoner.

So you could say, "OK we put in.. let me see... 1¾ pence.

"We put in 200 rivets.

"That means, as pay, we're due £1.9.2 in old money."

Good Lord. I remember my first wages were seven shillings and ninepence.

TOM LAUGHS

As an apprentice.

What's that? It's less than 50p, 35p, probably.

John Brown's had expected Hood to take just over two years to build.

But behind the scenes,

Hood's construction had been beset by problems...

and through no fault of the workers.

All along, the Admiralty in London had been having second thoughts

about D'Eyncourt's design for Hood.

And it's not hard to see why.

Since the Admiralty had approved his designs, something had happened

that had severe implications for HMS Hood - the Battle of Jutland.

On 31st May, 1916, in rough seas off the coast of Denmark, the Royal Navy

had engaged the German High Seas Fleet in one almighty battle.

With more than 200 combat ships involved,

the Battle of Jutland remains one of the largest ever

battles in the history of naval warfare.

Both sides claimed victory.

But what was worrying for Hood was the loss of three

battle cruisers, the Queen Mary, Indefatigable and Invincible.

All three of the battle cruisers had been destroyed by shells

plunging through their decks, causing their magazines to explode.

Could the same happen to Hood?

The battle cruiser combined the size

and fighting-power of a battleship with speed.

But its speed came at a cost.

To save on weight,

the protective armour on the decks,

and also the sides of the ship, was significantly reduced,

making them vulnerable.

It had been thought that speed alone would allow the battle cruiser

to escape danger and avoid heavy enemy fire.

Jutland had shown the whole concept of the battle cruiser to be flawed.

And so it was that in the months after Jutland, as work on Hood

began at John Brown's, D'Eyncourt set about the urgent task

of revising Hood's design to improve her armour protection.

Of the 700 or so ships built by John Brown's,

many of the plans have survived the passage of time

and are today preserved in the archives of Glasgow University,

including some of the precious plans for Hood.

I've come here with maritime historian Ian Johnston to look

at a particular plan which shows just some of the changes

that D'Eyncourt had to make to Hood's design.

This is a steelwork drawing, David, which is intended to identify

every individual plate that made up the hull of HMS Hood.

But what's really interesting about this drawing

is the fact that in red there's been quite a lot of over-working on it

and recalculation.

What D'Eyncourt did was to thicken the armour in all

the vital and crucial places for that ship,

to try and ensure her survivability in action.

So what he did was look at the ship again and add another 5,000 tonnes

of weight of armour onto the existing design of the ship.

And this drawing here is interesting because this looks like

it's a drawing that's part way through that process,

because it shows the structure of the ship, the frames and the plating

of the shell being stiffened to support this additional 5,000 tonnes of weight.

The thickest armour on the sides of Hood

was increased from nine inches to 12.

And crucially, the protective plating on Hood's decks was

also increased, particularly around the ship's magazines.

To retrofit 5,000 tonnes of extra armour to the existing

design of Hood was an almost impossible task.

D'Eyncourt was doing everything he could to improve the ship's protection.

Did D'Eyncourt achieve his aim of strengthening Hood?

I think part of the answer to that, David,

lies in the drawings we're looking at here.

And these are for battle cruisers that D'Eyncourt designed

immediately after Hood was completed.

And in this particular scenario, he had a completely clean sheet.

And he designed ships which were completely different from Hood.

They didn't look like Hood,

but most importantly, they were armoured quite differently.

In what way? Can you explain the differences to me?

Well, for the first time, an armoured deck appears

as one concentrated thickness of armour. In this case, nine inches

and eight inches over the vitals of this ship.

Unlike Hood, which had protective plating on various decks,

this ship had one thickness of very heavy armour over the vitals.

So this is probably what D'Eyncourt

would have wished to have done with Hood.

But he couldn't because the design was in existence

and she was already under construction.

Hood would be far better protected that the battle cruisers

that had been sunk at the Battle of Jutland.

Her side armour was now up to the standards of a battleship.

But the protection on her decks remained weak.

Unlike the warships of the future,

Hood would not be fitted with an armoured deck.

It had been intended that three other battle cruisers,

identical to Hood, would also be built.

But these plans were now quietly shelved. Hood would be unique.

She would come to be admired as one of the most elegant warships ever designed.

It would be many years before Hood's vulnerabilities would be exposed.

On the 22nd of August 1918, Hood was ready to be launched.

And D'Eyncourt was there to witness the momentous occasion.

Picture it, if you will.

The largest and most powerful warship the world had ever seen,

sitting on one of these slipways here in John Brown's.

The champagne bottle would smash against the side.

And then slowly, this mountain of steel would slide down the slipway,

picking up speed as her stern hit the water.

But at the same time, held back by hundreds of tonnes

of huge drag chains to control her speed.

Now, for those who witnessed it,

it must have been a truly awe-inspiring,

if not even terrifying sight.

The final stages of Hood's construction at John Brown's

took place in the fitting-out basin.

This is where Hood's colossal naval guns, each weighing 100 tonnes,

were installed.

And then, in the early afternoon of the 9th of January, 1920,

six tugs pulled Hood out of John Brown's

and she began her maiden voyage down the River Clyde, out to sea.

Hood had cost over £6 million to build,

the equivalent of almost £2 billion at today's prices.

She was the most expensive warship in the world.

As Hood sailed into her home port here in Plymouth,

her sheer size and elegance must have been truly impressive.

Her colossal 15-inch naval guns gave her phenomenal firepower

for a ship of war.

But like the Spitfire that was to come after her,

she was certainly a thing of beauty.

D'Eyncourt had delivered what he'd promised.

Here was a ship capable of a top speed of 32 knots.

A giant among ships. A potent weapon of war.

Revered around the world as the largest

and most powerful warship afloat.

Men signed up just for the chance to serve on Hood.

She was a big draw for recruitment for the Royal Navy.

I've come to London to meet two men

who served on Hood in the late 1930s.

We're on board HMS Belfast, one of the best preserved warships

from the Second World War,

to take them back to their time on the mighty Hood,

when they part of Hood's crew of around 1,300 men.

Alec Kellaway worked as a stoker in Hood's engine rooms.

And Keith Evans was a junior officer.

Can you express your feelings of being posted

onto such a beautiful, iconic and important ship as HMS Hood?

It must have been thrilling for a young man.

Oh, it definitely was. Especially for me, my first ship.

It was great.

When I walked up the gangway and I thought...marvel!

Like all other boys of my age,

we were drafted to mainly big ships.

And I came out to the Mediterranean to join the Hood

and I saw this enormous vessel there and I thought, "Good God.

"I'm going to be lost. I shall never find my way around."

And when I got on board, I was made extremely welcome by the lieutenant,

who was what's known as a snotty's nurse,

usually a lieutenant commander who was responsible for

the behaviour and general wellbeing of midshipmen under training.

I think actually I was very proud to join the Hood.

A lot of people said,

"Oh, you lucky so-and-so, you're going on the Hood."

Hood was renowned as one of the lovely ships to serve.

I suppose one didn't realise...

I thoroughly enjoyed myself, I will say, most of the time!

There was plenty of work to keep all the sailors on Hood occupied.

At six o'clock every morning,

the massive quarterdeck had to be scrubbed clean.

And several times a year, the crew had to repaint Hood.

A job that required a colossal four tonnes of paint.

But it wasn't all work and no play.

Under the great guns of Hood, boxing matches were just one of many

regular sporting events to keep the men entertained.

And of course, there was the daily issue of grog.

An eighth of a pint of rum mixed with two parts of water.

One of the many traditions in the King's Navy.

I slept in a hammock, which is the most comfortable way of sleeping.

When the ship rolls, you roll with it.

When the ship's pitching, it's not so nice.

Which Hood did quite a lot of that, pitching.

And sometimes you would find that the quarterdeck was underwater

and wonder whether it was going to come up again.

This is part of a rough sea, coming in onto the quarterdeck.

She'd hit water, right in the bows, and it would run right down

through the side of the ship then come straight in on the quarterdeck.

When she was going in seas,

she would lift like that, you were walking up hill.

And then the next she's going down. You're running downhill.

You didn't get much of side movements.

More that type of movement.

You were walking along the passage and all of a sudden...

Hood would be nicknamed "Britain's Biggest Submarine,"

a result of the 5,000 tonnes of extra armour

weighing her down in the water.

But inside it was another story.

For the officers, there were luxuries unmatched

by any other warship in the Royal Navy.

And living quarters for the men were spacious, compared to other ships.

Hood had everything you might find in a small village.

Just producing enough food to feed the crew was an immense task.

One of the most impressive sights was Hood's enormous engine rooms.

And this is where Alec worked.

Now, Alec, describe to me what your job would be,

when you were down here in the engine room,

what would you actually be doing?

My job down here if we were at sea, I would be checking these gauges

to make certain everything was all right, and if anything

went wrong, I would report to the artificer,

who was in charge of the engine room,

and he would then come down and see what the problem was.

But that was the main thing.

Running at her maximum speed, Hood consumed a colossal amount of fuel.

Over 70 tonnes of oil per hour.

In fact, for every gallon of oil consumed,

the ship moved forward just nine feet!

Despite this, Hood would become one of the most well-travelled

warships in the world.

Following the end of the First World War,

the British Empire covered almost a quarter of land around the globe.

And on the 27th of November, 1923,

HMS Hood set out from Plymouth on an epic voyage.

It would become known as the "Empire Cruise".

A journey of over 38,000 miles around the world,

visiting almost all parts of the Empire.

And it would make Hood famous.

In this round-the-world trip, Hood was joined by six other warships.

Together they were known as the "Special Service Squadron".

And their mission was to "show the flag".

Literally, sailing to all the major ports of the Empire,

from Cape Town to Zanzibar, to fly the flag of Britain

and show Britain's power to the world.

It was a job that Hood and her crew excelled at.

As the largest, most elegant warship in the world, she stole the show.

But the greatest reception awaited Hood in Australia.

These were the extraordinary scenes in Melbourne.

It was the first time that Australians had had a chance

to see the Mighty Hood, about which they had heard so much.

And when Hood arrived in Sydney,

she was besieged by crowds just as large.

To find out more about the Hood's historic visit,

I've come to Sydney Harbour

to meet Commander Shane Moore of the Royal Australian Navy.

The ships were in harbour for about ten days

and they created such a huge stir.

400,000 Sydney-siders either watched them

come into the harbour or visited Hood alone during ten days.

And at that time, roughly, what was the population of Sydney?

Nearly 900,000 or a million, something around there.

So about 40% of the population of Sydney saw Hood.

It must have been an extraordinary spectacle.

Oh, it certainly was. The crews of the Special Service Squadron

to Australia, and in fact around the world, was a very high profile

public relations event where showing the flag of the Royal Navy,

once more using the Hood as the epitome of sea power.

After her visit to Australia, Hood next hit the headlines

when she reached the famous Panama Canal.

No ship of Hood's size had ever attempted to pass through the canal.

And thousands turned out to see if she would make it.

"The little man of unassuming airs in a grey suit just

"waved a hand to one of the mules and whispered down a voice pipe,

"'Half ahead starboard.' The lookout hovers with the flag,

"ready to drop it if we touch. There is barely an inch."

The Empire Cruise had been an epic journey and it had not come cheap.

The fuel bill alone had cost over £330,000,

the equivalent of £17 million today.

And yet, the Admiralty judged it a success.

Over three quarters of a million people

had visited Hood during her trip.

She had done the Empire proud.

But the Empire Cruise was more than just an expensive flag-waving exercise.

There was menace in the message.

Hood was telling the Empire and the rest of the world

that Britain was still Great.

And if you wanted to pick a fight, that's what you were up against.

Hood would spend the remainder of the 1920s

and early '30s on peacetime duties,

but Hood had been built for a purpose - as a ship of war.

The days of "showing the flag" would soon be over.

Don't be alarmed if you hear of men being called up

to man anti-aircraft defences or ships.

These are only precautionary measures

such as a Government must take in times like this.

In August 1939, Hood was sent North to Orkney

to the expanse of sea known as Scapa Flow.

It's hard to imagine now, but when Hood sailed here in 1939

into her new home, this, Scapa Flow,

was Britain's biggest naval base.

She would have been surrounded by the Home Fleet,

over 40 ships in all, which would have entailed a complement

of thousands and thousands of men.

And then, onshore around these islands,

there would have been the supply mechanisms, the supply routes,

telecommunications, your food, your water, your oil, your armaments.

Everything that was needed to feed this massive fleet.

This was a place that was preparing for war.

Located off the North Coast of Scotland, Scapa Flow offered

easy access to the North Sea and Atlantic Ocean.

This was the reason it had been chosen by the Admiralty

as the main naval base for all the warships of the Home Fleet

from which to patrol the seas and keep the German Navy at bay.

For me, Scapa Flow has a special connection.

This is where my father served

when he was a gunner instructor in the Fleet Air Arm.

And Scapa Flow was now Hood's new home.

To learn about Hood's time here,

I'm meeting local historian Jude Callister.

So when Hood arrived, where would she be berthed?

She was anchored off to the north here,

and where you can see the two buoys out there,

the one on the left there, she would have been anchored

in that approximate position, and we've been able to deduce that

from photographs and from the defence map of the time.

So how did they get the supplies out to Hood,

how did they refuel her?

Refuelling was done by a fleet oiler that would come in.

Tankers would bring oil in which would be pumped

into the storage tanks and then there were a number of oilers

that would then load up from these tanks and go out to the big ships.

Likewise, they'd get their supplies of food, drinking water,

from small ships, and the big capital ships like Hood

would have one or two drifters attached to them

that would be ferrying supplies backwards and forwards,

and indeed would bring the men ashore for rest and recreation.

And what kind of recreation was available to them

in this small township?

Well, they had everything here to keep them entertained,

and I mean, entertaining the fleet was very important, because boredom

was a big enemy, so the rusting red building that you can see

down on the shoreline there, that was the World War I torpedo store,

but in World War II, they turned it into a cinema and a recreation centre

and that showed all the latest films.

It could seat about 1,800 men at a time.

Wow. That's some size of cinema.

But there were thousands of people here, 12,000 based at Lyness,

plus the crews of the ships coming ashore. Local people talk about

the road between the wharf and the cinema being a complete sea

of blue uniforms, no space to walk or drive.

That was when a crew came ashore.

With Hood now at Scapa Flow, the Home Fleet was assembled.

The sailors anxiously waited for the expected announcement,

the outbreak of war.

And on Sunday the 3rd of September, 1939, this is exactly what happened.

A few weeks after she arrived in Scapa, Hood received the news.

Britain was now at war with Germany.

So after almost 20 years of peaceful service,

Hood would finally get the chance to engage an enemy in battle.

For the second time in the lives of most of us,

we are at war.

With war declared, Hood now spent most of her time on patrol in

the seas around Iceland and Norway, on the lookout for German warships.

Returning to Scapa Flow every few days to refuel.

But Hood had little sight of the enemy.

At this time,

the German warships were keeping their distance from the Home Fleet.

Whilst on land, their armies were advancing.

I speak to you for the first time as Prime Minister

in a solemn hour for the life of our country,

of our Empire, of our allies, and, above all, of the cause of freedom.

A tremendous battle is raging in France and Flanders.

The Germans, by a remarkable combination of air bombing

and heavily armoured tanks,

have broken through the French defences north of the Maginot Line,

and strong columns of their armoured vehicles are ravaging the open

country, which for the first day or two was without defenders.

For days and nights, ships of all kinds have plied to and fro

across the Channel under the fierce onslaught of the enemy's bombers.

Utterly regardless of the perils to bring out

as many as possible of the trapped BEF.

The tide of the war had turned against Britain.

Dunkirk had been evacuated

and most of Europe was overrun by Hitler's army.

Only a narrow stretch of water separated Britain from France

and the rapidly approaching German forces.

France had agreed an armistice with Germany

and its forces were no longer engaged in hostilities.

Churchill was worried that if the powerful French fleet

fell into the hands of Hitler,

this could alter the whole course of the war.

So, in June 1940, Hood was reassigned from the Home Fleet

at Scapa Flow to be the flagship of Force H

on a secret mission to prevent this from happening.

The action would unfold off the North coast of Algeria

at the French naval port of Mers-el-Kebir.

It was here that many of the ships of the French fleet were anchored,

including six destroyers and four battleships.

As part of Force H, Hood was under the command

of Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville.

His mission was to put the French warships beyond the reach

of the enemy, if necessary by force.

When Somerville's Force H arrived, on the 3rd of July 1940,

they began by presenting the French with an ultimatum.

I'm meeting historical researcher Jean Cevaer.

He tells me that in their ultimatum the British offered

the French four choices.

So, there were four options, one of them

was to scuttle the fleet in Mers-el-Kebir.

The other one was to go to

the West Indies, where already part of the French fleet was located.

The third one was, of course, to join the British fleet,

the British Navy, and the fourth one was to keep the boats

in Mers-el-Kebir but decommission them completely.

What happened next would prove to be one of the most controversial

episodes in the history of the Royal Navy.

Britain and France were allies.

They had fought side by side in the First World War.

Yet, Churchill had given Somerville explicit instructions that

if negotiations failed, as a last resort,

he was to sink the French fleet.

With none of the four options accepted by the French,

at precisely 5:54pm,

more than three hours after the expiry of his original ultimatum,

Somerville gave the order for Hood and Force H to open fire.

The onslaught lasted just nine minutes.

It was Hood's first major battle.

But the tragedy was that she was firing her guns on ships and crews

that just weeks before had been friends and allies.

Somerville himself did not really want

to shoot on their friends from the French Navy.

Of course, I assume that most of the sailors on board the Hood

were also struck by a feeling of guilt,

firing on people who were friends a couple of weeks before.

And of course, this is where the question that we ask ourselves,

what is the weight of duty in a situation like that?

So obviously, for military people, the weight of duty

exceeds every other feeling you might have.

"We all feel thoroughly dirty and ashamed that the first time

"we should have been in action was an affair like this."

Admiral Sir James Somerville.

1,297 French sailors had been killed.

The extraordinary events that took place at Mers-el-Kebir

clearly showed the powerful destructive firepower of HMS Hood.

And also made a statement that the flag-waving days

of the Empire Cruise were long gone.

Hood now had blood on her hands.

In January 1941, whilst the war continued,

Hood returned to Scotland,

to the Rosyth dockyard on the Firth of Forth.

It was a place Hood had been before, 21 years earlier,

after leaving the shipbuilders, John Brown's.

Hood was still Britain's largest warship,

but she was now showing her age.

Her engines had been damaged during the action at Mers-el-Kebir

and needed to be repaired.

Maritime historian Ian Johnston is with me again

to explain the work that was carried out.

First of all, David, this is a huge dry dock,

but it's fair to say it would have been almost filled

from end to end with Hood.

She was so big, she was such a large ship.

So part of the reason for her coming here was to open up the turbines

and have a look at them and see what repair work could be done.

And was it fairly extensive?

I think one of the turbines had been stripped.

In fact, men from John Brown's came across

and they re-bladed the turbine and closed it back up again.

But there would be other things that would be done.

There'd be a whole series of running repairs would be required,

because the ship had seem some heavy action and very heavy service.

But around this time, the Admiralty in London received reports

of a German battleship undergoing trials in the Baltic.

The Bismarck.

Launched at the Blohm und Voss shipyard in Hamburg,

she was the largest and most powerful warship in Hitler's navy.

Here was a warship to rival Hood.

Did she have equivalent firepower?

She did. I mean, on paper, she's very similar.

I mean, she had eight 15-inch guns in her main armament.

That's what Hood had. She had a similar speed to Hood.

But, yes, altogether, a pretty formidable ship.

And a very formidable opponent for HMS Hood.

The Hood and the Bismarck may have been equally matched

when it came to their firepower.

But unlike the Bismarck, Hood still had no armoured deck.

She had been built over 21 years earlier.

The Bismarck was a state-of-the-art modern battleship.

When the Mighty Hood left Rosyth naval dockyard after her final refit

and sailed under the magnificent Forth Railway Bridge,

I guess the men and women who waved her goodbye

had no idea at all that it would be the last time

they would ever see Britain's great battle cruiser.

But sure enough, within a matter of weeks, two of the biggest

warships in the world, Hood and Bismarck,

would be locked in battle.

As the flagship of the Home Fleet's battle cruiser squadron,

Hood was charged with defending the shipping convoys which carried vital

supplies from North America across the Atlantic Ocean to Britain.

Without this crucial lifeline, Britain could not continue the war.

And it was through defending these convoys that Hood would meet

her nemesis, the Bismarck.

The battle between these two giant warships would unfold

in the Denmark Strait,

the stretch of sea between Greenland and Iceland.

And just a few hundred miles from the shipping convoys in the North Atlantic.

On the 21st of May 1941,

an RAF reconnaissance plane spotted the Bismarck in a fjord

on the Norwegian coast,

apparently on her way out to sea on her first mission.

Hood and the ships of the Home Fleet were dispatched to intercept

the Bismarck before she could attack the shipping convoys.

For only the second time,

the Hood and her crew would be engaged in a major battle.

Defending Britain and the Empire that she had come to symbolise.

Few images survive to tell the tale of what would be an epic battle.

This photo taken from the British warship Prince of Wales

shows Hood on her way to the Denmark Strait.

It is the last known photo of Hood before she engaged the enemy.

The only images of the battle that survive

were taken by a German war reporter.

They show the Bismarck firing her guns at Hood

and the Prince of Wales.

And shells from the Hood falling nearby.

The British and German warships were separated by around ten miles of sea

but the Bismarck soon found her target.

This footage shows the final moments of Hood,

after taking a direct hit from the Bismarck, appearing to explode.

A grey cloud of dark, dense smoke

reaching more than 300m into the air.

At 06:37, the wireless station at Scapa Flow received the message:

"HMS Hood sunk. Proceed to survivors."

A British officer on a nearby warship

later made these sketches of the terrible scene he'd witnessed.

Hood had sustained several direct hits.

But the colossal explosion which sunk her had been caused

by a shell from the Bismarck plunging through

her thinly protected decks, detonating her magazines.

Just as D'Eyncourt had feared.

"I can almost picture the terrible scene between decks

"when that fatal shell struck.

"The gigantic sheets of golden cordite flame sweeping through

"the narrow corridors and passages, incinerating everything in its path.

"The terrific hot blast, the bursting open of the armoured hull

"under the colossal pressure, and, finally,

"the merciful avalanche of the cold sea, cleansing the charred

"and riven wreck. On more than one occasion I have dreamed this scene."

The Mighty Hood. She took three and a half years to build,

served her country for 20 years, and had been sunk in minutes.

And with her, the lives of 1,415 officers and men.

They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them.

Every year, a service is held at this small church

in Boldre in Hampshire

to commemorate the men who lost their lives when Hood was sunk.

Reading the Act of Remembrance was Rear Admiral Philip Wilcocks,

President of the HMS Hood Association.

The loss of that ship had

a tremendous impact upon the nation.

She was the iconic figure for the Royal Navy, for our country,

for the Empire.

Is it true she was, that there was nothing left

on the surface within two or three minutes?

Did she literally sink that fast?

She sank within five minutes of the explosion.

And there were only three survivors. It was intense.

And when you go, when I went and sat above the sea bed,

two miles above the wreckage last year,

we saw on the ROV the scale of the devastation.

You can understand why she went down so quickly.

And it was the back end of the ship from the after turret

through to the boiler rooms went up in one huge, cataclysmic explosion.

And one can only imagine,

here we are at a service, remembering those who died,

but you have to put your mind in their position,

sailors buried deep inside armour, can't get out,

as that ship plunges to the sea bed.

What must have been going through their minds when that happened?

-And it's not just Hood, it's just every ship.

-Every ship.

When we were going through the decision or not to recover

her bell last year, I came across a phrase.

There are no gravestones on which there are flowers for those

who perish at sea.

Their memorial are the waters which wash our shores.

The loss of Hood was a devastating blow to Britain and her navy.

But it would also mark something else.

The passing of an era.

The end of an empire.

And the dawn of a new world.

Following the end of the Second World War,

the shape of the British Empire began changing drastically.

India gained independence in 1947.

I have a message from His Majesty the King to deliver to you today.

On this historic day, when India takes her place

as a free and independent dominion

in the British Commonwealth of Nations,

I send you all my greetings and heartfelt wishes.

The new state of Pakistan was created and a wave of decolonisation

followed, which saw colonies become independent and sovereign states.

The old world of Empire around which Hood had once made her epic voyage

was being left behind.

The Commonwealth of Nations as we know it today was born.

An association of countries spanning six continents

and oceans of the world.

For the shipyards on the Clyde, the end of war brought many

orders to replenish the world's merchant fleets.

Ships that rose like mountains of steel on the slipways of the Clyde.

Shipbuilding's greatest workshop.

And John Brown's would go on to build some of its finest creations,

culminating in the magnificent passenger liner, the QE2.

For me, the greatest tragedy is not the loss of a warship

and certainly not the loss of Empire that Hood came to symbolise,

but the fact that the great River Clyde, which once had 40 shipyards

lining its banks, employing 100,000 men, which at their peak

produced 20% of the world's shipping,

is sadly reduced to only one major shipbuilding yard,

and that only builds warships.

So we're left with the echoes and the ghosts

and the rubble of those heady days.

But the legacy of those extraordinary men and their skill

and determination and sheer hard graft

must surely live on in the memory

of some of the greatest ships the world has ever seen.

May God bless her and all who sail in her.