15/07/2026
Such a shame, this is the reason why facilities like Northfleet Harbour should be restored to give some historic ships a chance of survival.
https://www.facebook.com/share/1D7v2YYcS4/?mibextid=wwXIfr
Britain Is Scrapping One of Its Last Three First World War Warships
The campaign to save HMS President (1918) has run out of road. In July 2026 a survey found the First World War Q-ship to be in very poor condition, and site owners ArcelorMittal Kent Wire announced she would be scrapped at Erith in Kent by the end of the month. The company had been left paying her berthing fees at Chatham Docks after the ship's owner stopped responding, and with the business itself shutting down, no other option was left within their control. For Danny Broom, a postman from Lordswood who spent a decade campaigning and working aboard her, the announcement ended a ten-year fight. National Historic Ships UK is photographing the vessel and identifying fittings worth saving, so her record survives even if she does not.
What Britain is losing is not a minor relic. Launched as HMS Saxifrage in January 1918, she was a purpose-built submarine hunter disguised as a harmless merchantman, with 4-inch and 12-pounder guns hidden behind false plating. The trap was brutally simple: a U-boat captain unwilling to waste a torpedo on a small freighter would surface to sink her with gunfire, and the mystery ship would drop her screens and open up while the submarine was at its most vulnerable. Renamed President in 1922, she spent some 92 years moored on Victoria Embankment as a Royal Naval Reserve drill ship, served as an anti-aircraft battery guarding London in the Second World War, and was paid off in 1988 after 70 years with the Royal Navy. She is one of only three surviving Royal Navy warships of the First World War, alongside HMS Caroline in Belfast and the monitor HMS M33 in Portsmouth, and the sole survivor of the first purpose-built anti-submarine vessels.
