HMS Warrior (1860) - Decrepitude

Decrepitude

Fortunately for Warrior, a downturn in demand for scrap iron had occurred when the Navy decided to sell her off. There was no commercial interest in the old ship, and she remained at Portsmouth for another five years. Finally, in March 1929, efforts aimed towards selling Warrior for scrap were abandoned, and she was taken in tow for her new home: Pembroke Dock, Wales. Upon arrival, she was transformed into a shipkeeper's home and floating oil jetty known from 1942 as Oil Fuel Hulk C77. A similar fate had already overtaken several of her successors by this time; in 1926 HMS Valiant became a floating oil tank at Hamoaze, while HMS Agincourt and HMS Northumberland were both stripped down in 1909 and subsequently used as coal hulks.

For the next fifty years, Warrior lay just offshore from an oil depot at Llanion Cove, occasionally being towed to a nearby dry dock for maintenance work and additionally serving as a base ship for coastal forces craft in World War II. She refuelled something close to 5,000 ships between 1929 and 1979. During that time, Britain's surviving ironclads and their later equivalents, the battleships, were all sold for scrap. Warrior's last surviving contemporary, Agincourt, was scrapped in 1960 after fifty years' service as a coal hulk at Harwich.