Visitors can this week see the revamped National Museum of the Royal Navy and RN Submarine Museum, opening after £11.5m of investment.
More than £4m has been pumped into creating hi-tech galleries celebrating the deeds of the 20th and 21st Century Royal Navy in Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, while £7m has been spent across the water in Gosport restoring wartime-era submarine HMS Alliance.
The gun which fired Britain's first shots in the Great War – now on display in Portsmouth
MUSEUM chiefs in Portsmouth this week unveil £11.5m new and refurbished attractions celebrating the Royal Navy’s achievements from the turn of the 20th Century to the present day.
A series of hi-tech new galleries in the National Museum of the Royal Navy chart the story of the Senior Service from the Dreadnought to Afghanistan and current maritime security operations.
Meanwhile across the water in Gosport, the jewel in the crown of the Royal Navy Submarine Museum, HMS Alliance, has been restored to her 1950s glory through a £7m ‘refit’.
The hi-tech interactive timeline which uses tablet technology to bring a century of naval history to life
The massive investment in understanding the Royal Navy’s recent history is aimed at nearly doubling visitor numbers at the submarine museum, while more than 700,000 people are expected to pass through the gates of the historic dockyard this year.
The latter has invested £4.5m in its Hear My Story galleries, which draws on accounts, photographs, film and mementos from more than 1,000 sailors and Royal Marines to describe life and death in the Senior Service since 1900.
In addition, the museum is also opening the first of a series of temporary exhibitions marking the role of the Royal Navy in World War 1, with the naval gun which fired the first British shot of the conflict restored and on permanent display.
The 'artefact wall' for some of the museum's hidden treasures, including a canoe like those used in the 'Cockleshell heroes' raid
On August 5 1914 the 4in guns of destroyer HMS Lance opened fire on the German minelayer Königin Luise off the Dutch coast – less than a day after Britain declared war; the Germans promptly scuttled their ship.
The gun has been provided by the Imperial War Museum, but many of the items and artefacts on show in the new exhibition spaces are from the National Museum’s previously-unseen collections.
It has never before had the space to display objects such as the poignant personal chest – containing all his worldly and naval possessions – of a cadet who died of scarlet fever in Gibraltar in 1911 at the age of 17; the sword of Vere Harmsworth – son of Daily Mail owner Lord Harmsworth – who died fighting with the Royal Naval Division on the Somme; and a ‘Blair-Bush world domination tour 2003’ T-shirt as worn by Royal Marines in Iraq.
A 15-minute film, All of One Company, uses film, photographs, sound effects and personal testimony to give an insight into the Battle of Jutland, Battle of the Atlantic and the landings in the Falklands in 1982.
Many other testimonies and accounts have also been recorded, while a series of interviews with serving and veteran RN personnel from WW2 to the present day were interviewed on film by schoolchildren.
Most of the displays are accompanied by touch-screen interactive screens for the iPad/tablet generation.
The sword of Vere Harmsworth of the Royal Naval Division. The son of the Daily Mail owner was killed on the Somme in 1916.
The centrepiece of these hi-tech features is a huge display table – ‘the interactive timeline’ of Royal Navy ships from 1900 to today.
Touch the ships and you can move them about the virtual ocean, fire their guns, launch Swordfish from the deck of HMS Ark Royal, and fire a Polaris missile from a 1960s ballistic missile R-class submarine.
Aside from this fun elements, the interactive timeline also features 20,000 words, 850 photographs, and 20 videos describing key actions and moments over the past 115 years. Using your fingers you can spin these around, move them across the display screens, enlarge and reduce their size – rather like the Hollywood blockbuster Minority Report.
On test runs with invited members of the public, children have been using the board to learn about the RN’s rich recent history, say museum staff, while adults have been content merely crashing the ships into each other…
Whether it’s historic artefacts or playing out modern-day battleships, curator Matthew Sheldon hopes the new galleries will do justice to the men and women they depict.
“We’ve done a lot of work with both veterans and serving personnel to tell the story of the Royal Navy of the last 100 or so years. Many of these stories are undiscovered, from ordinary men and women, dealing with great changes in technology, in society, in the world,” he said.
“Through our state-of-the-art interactive displays and exhibitions, we hope it will bring our collections alive – and into the 21st Century – for everyone to discover.
As part of the opening of the new galleries – from Thursday April 3 – a new year-long pass for tourists is being introduced covering all the official Royal Naval museums in the Portsmouth area: HMS Victory, Warrior, Mary Rose, Action Stations and the new-look National Museum in the historic dockyard; the Royal Marines Museum at Eastney; and the RN Submarine Museum and Explosion across the harbour in Gosport – they are linked with the attractions in Portsmouth by water bus. Ticket holders will be able to visit the museums as many times as they like.
We’ll be featuring the new-look HMS Alliance later this week.
