Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is famous for its mighty ships, but look a little closer and you’ll find the Dockyard itself has stories carved into every corner. From 19th-century graffiti etched into bricks to the scars left by bombs during the Second World War, the site is alive with overlooked details that whisper of centuries past.
Hidden Depths is your guide to these secret traces of history, the quirks, relics, and reminders that make the Dockyard far more than just a home to legendary vessels.
The afterlife of naval cannons
How long do you think it takes before you see your first cannon when you visit Portsmouth Historic Dockyard? When you reach HMS Victory? Or walking to HMS Warrior? How about right outside the front gates?
When the Royal Navy moved away from using wooden ships, they were left with a lot of surplus cannons. While a lot were melted down for scrap, many were repurposed, and converted into bollards, buried deep into the ground to provide a solid bollard that would survive a collision, especially once cars and lorries started travelling the streets of Portsmouth. The two at the front gates were there to protect the brickwork of Victory Gate from supply vehicles passing through.
Which ship these cannons came from is unknown, but despite what you may have heard from various online lists of facts, they’re unlikely to have come from French ships captured at Trafalgar – the only ships brought back to England from that battle were Spanish…
The writing’s on the wall…
Portsmouth is famous for its street artists, but they weren’t the first ones to leave their marks on the walls of the city.
Outside the main entrance to the National Museum of the Royal Navy’s galleries, you can see graffiti carved in the brickwork, where sailors and dockyard workers have scratched their initials into the bricks, possibly while waiting to pick up supplies back when the building was a storehouse. There are also a few names too, so if you know an E. Morgan, they were hanging around the dockyard over a century ago!
There are also a number of dates carved into the brickwork, the earliest we spotted was 1800, but there might be earlier – the building was first constructed in 1763. The earliest museum in the building, the McCarthy Museum, didn’t open until 1971, and we’ve yet to see any more recent!
The broad arrow also appears a lot; this symbol usually represents an item that has been issued by the government, but here it has probably just been appropriated by the artists.
One interesting symbol that shows up is a hexafoil, more commonly known as a daisywheel, a flower-like pattern often seen as a protection mark, or ‘witch mark’, drawn to protect a building from evil…
Oh, and this is a Grade 1 listed building, so no adding your own graffiti!
Blast from the past
Did you know some of the dry docks that house many of our historic ships came under attack during the Second World War? Take a closer look at No. 1 Dock, home to HMS M.33. No. 1 Dock is part of the complex of six docks surrounding the Great Ship Basin, one of the legacies from the golden age of sail. The Great Basin and the ‘Great Stone Dock’ (now No. 5 Dock) were begun in 1689 and then extended in the 1800s.
No. 1 Dock opened in 1801 and operated until 1984. It received a direct hit during the Portsmouth Blitz of 1941 when a huge crater was blasted out of the southern wall. The repair work can still be seen today where the original stonework was replaced with concrete.
The same air raid saw a further bomb falling into No. 2 Dock damaging HMS Victory’s keel, blowing a hole in the bottom of the ship, damaging the orlop and hold. German propagandists took this opportunity to try and crush British morale by reporting Victory’s demise. Rumours were promptly thwarted with Victory patched up in record time and photos of her swiftly released to the press.
If you look at HMS Victory today, you can still see the repaired section on her keel.
The hidden depths of the Mary Rose Museum
If you’ve visited the Mary Rose Museum, you may notice that the ship hall is a lot deeper than the ground surrounding the building. This is because, just like their neighbours HMS Victory and HMS M33, the Mary Rose is also in a dry dock, in this case, Dry Dock 3.
The Mary Rose was brought into Dry Dock 3 in 1982, less than two months after being raised on 11th October 1982. The previous ship hall, and the current museum, were both built over the top of this dry dock, and the original structure is still down there, from the dramatic steps at the end to the water depth gauges, carved into the stonework in Imperial measurements and on wooden boards in metric.
Sadly, because it’s a working area filled with environmental systems that keep the Mary Rose and her objects at a constant temperature and humidity, visitors aren’t allowed in this space, but if you walk around the end of the museum near the stern of HMS Victory, and look down the grating around the edge, you might be able to see into the dry dock and get a glimpse of members of the team at work…