A campaign has been launched to save one of the world’s last surviving Royal Navy warships from the First World War after the vessel was told it must leave its berth at Chatham Docks, raising fears that it could be removed from the River Medway altogether.
HMS Saxifragelater known as HMS Presidentis currently moored within the commercial docks at Chatham, where she has remained largely hidden from public view since being relocated from London in 2016. The ship was previously a familiar landmark on the River Thames for more than nine decades before being moved to Kent to make way for the Thames Tideway Tunnel project.
Now, with changes at the dockyard forcing the vessel to vacate its current berth, campaigners fear the historic warship’s future is once again in jeopardy. The Q-Ship Society, which has been leading efforts to preserve the vessel, is calling for urgent action to secure a permanent home for the ship on the Medway.
Launched in 1918, HMS Saxifrage was built as an Anchusa or Flower class sloop and served as a so-called ‘Q-ship’, a heavily armed vessel disguised as an ordinary merchant ship in an attempt to lure German U-boats into attacking before revealing its hidden weapons. Campaigners describe the vessel as an exceptionally rare survivor of a conflict that transformed naval warfare.
Of the thousands of ships that once formed Britain’s wartime fleet, only three Royal Navy warships built during the First World War survive today. Alongside HMS Caroline in Belfast and HMS M33 in Portsmouth, HMS Saxifrage remains one of the last tangible links to the Royal Navy of 1914-18.
The Q-Ship Society is proposing that the vessel be relocated to Collier Dock in Gillingham, where it hopes to create a permanent heritage attraction and museum focused on the often-overlooked story of Q-ships, convoy escorts and the anti-submarine campaign of the First World War. The group argues that the site would not only save the ship but also preserve an important piece of Medway’s own maritime history.
Campaigners say the dock retains significant historic features linked to the area’s naval past, and they believe it could form the centrepiece of a wider heritage-led regeneration project.
The society is now appealing to Medway Council, Peel Land and Property, Peel Ports, heritage organisations and members of the public to support plans for a permanent home for the vessel before any relocation takes place.
For campaigners, the race is now against time. After years spent in what supporters describe as legal and physical limbo, they believe the coming months could determine whether one of Britain’s rarest surviving warships remains in Kent as a future museum ship or disappears from the Medway for good.
