HMS Warrior was the first armour-plated, iron-hulled warship, built for the Royal Navy in response to the first ironclad warship, the French Gloire, launched a year earlier. When completed in October 1861, Warrior was the largest, fastest, most heavily armed and most heavily armoured warship the world had seen. She was almost twice the size of Gloire and thoroughly outclassed the French ship in speed, armour, and gunnery. Warrior did not introduce any radical new technology, but for the first time combined steam engines, rifled breech-loading guns, iron construction, iron armour, and the propeller in one ship, and all built to an unprecedented scale.
Her construction started a competition between guns and armour that did not end until air power made battleships obsolete in the Second World War. Warrior became an early example of the trend towards rapid battleship obsolescence and was withdrawn as a fighting unit in May 1883. Listed as part of the National Historic Fleet, Core Collection, she is now a museum ship in Portsmouth.
Restoration of Warrior for use as a museum ship began in August 1979, when she began her 800-mile (1,287 km) journey to her temporary home in the Coal Dock at Hartlepool, where the £8 million restoration project would be carried out, largely funded by the Manifold Trust. Warrior arrived in Hartlepool on 3 September 1979. Restoration work started with the removal of 80 tons of rubbish, including a thick concrete layer poured onto her upper deck as part of the conversion to an oil jetty. Over the next eight years, Warrior’s decks, interior compartments, engines, woodwork and fittings were restored or recreated, her masts, rigging and funnels were recreated, and a new figurehead carved from photographs of the original (destroyed in the 1960s) as a guide. She arrived at her current berth in Portsmouth on 16 June 1987, almost fully restored. The restored ironclad was renamed Warrior (1860) to avoid confusion with the Northwood Headquarters, commissioned as HMS Warrior, which was at the time the operational headquarters of the Royal Navy.
