The Queen Elizabeth sits in the dry dock at Rosyth naval dockyard, being prepared for her graduation. Cables hang from her deck, workmen dangle in baskets carrying out last- minute cleaning and painting.
On Friday, Queen Elizabeth will come to the dockyard, situated across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, to christen the aircraft carrier named after her. Instead of champagne, a bottle of Bowmore whiskey from Islay will be used – both to emphasise Scotland’s connections with the Royal Navy and the queen’s connections with it, since Bowmore was the first distillery she visited in the early years of her reign.
The 65,000-tonne ship is the first of two carriers to be built for the navy – the second will be named after the Prince of Wales. By the end of the decade, both will carry Lighting II jets, along with Merlin and Apache helicopters.
Gargantuan
Everything about the carriers is gargantuan: the flight deck covers an area equivalent to
four football fields; lifts to the hangars below can bring up two jets in a minute for take-off during emergencies.
By contrast, however, the ship’s wheel is the size of a small dinner side-plate.
“You don’t need anything bigger than that. Everything is computerised,” says Tom Gifford, who has led the efforts to bring together at Rosyth the work of 10,000 people spread throughout the United Kingdom.
Below deck, plans have been made to ensure the carriers can stay in service until 2060, says David Atkinson of BAE Systems.
“I’m pretty tall, and this is the first ship I’ve been in where I don’t have to bend my head,” he says. Touching the still unfinished ceiling, he adds: “They worked out how tall people are going to be in 50 years’ time and worked out the head height accordingly.”
Once in service, each carrier will be home to 700 sailors and more than 900 flight and ground crew, with male and female ratings segregated. “The ships have been designed to make that easy to do,” says Atkinson.
Forty chefs will keep the crew fed, backed by stores that can hold 12,000 tins of beans, enough to fill 38 bath tubs; 64,800 eggs, enough to make 21,600 three-egg omelettes; and 28,800 rashers and 66,000 sausages.
The dockyard, employing 2,800 people, is the biggest private employer in West Fife – even if it is a pale shadow of its former self – but most of the workers are engaged on the carriers contract.
Not yet in the water, the Queen Elizabeth has already become a weapon in the increasingly rancorous debate about Scottish independence, which will be decided by referendum on September 18th.
For unionists, the carriers represent a £5 billion investment, but one crucially delivered by shipbuilders in Devon, Merseyside, the Govan dockyard in Glasgow, Rosyth, along with yards in Portsmouth and on the Tyne.
Equally, they are proof of what Scotland will lose if it goes it alone, since the Scottish defence forces to be set up if voters say Yes will have need for fishery protection vessels, or other small craft, but none for aircraft carriers.
In reply, pro-independence campaigners insist Royal Navy contracts would not be lost, even though the British government has never bought foreign-built warships outside of wartime.
“An independent Scotland will need to build naval ships of its own,” says the Yes, Scotland campaign, pointing to the 47 shipyards that survive in Norway and to Scotland’s burgeoning offshore wind and wave industries, which will need to be serviced with equipment.
Though Rosyth has enough work on its hands for the next few years, its future rests on the decision to be made in London about the 13 Type 26 frigates the navy wants to replace its existing destroyers.
So far, no decision has come on where and when the frigates will be built, raising concerns among many workers in the Govan dockyard and in Rosyth – but by no means all of them – that they could face a bleak future if Scotland votes Yes.
Politics has played its part before in deciding the future of shipbuilders. Last November, BAE Systems decided to end shipbuilding altogether later this year in Portsmouth, with the loss of nearly 1,000 jobs in a city where shipbuilding stretched back 500 years.
Message to Scotland
That decision, though it cost 800 jobs
on the Clyde too, was seen partly as a message to Scotland – that military shipbuilding could stay on the Clyde in the UK, if on a smaller scale; but it could just as easily disappear.
For Gifford the Queen Elizabeth represents 12 years of work, nursing its construction though the many yards needed.
“There was no yard big enough in the UK to build this on its own. We can be very proud of what we have done here, and elsewhere,” he says, pointing to the 25mm-thick steel plates that form the decks – ones that will have to withstand 600-degree temperatures from the Lighting jets as they take off and land.
Standing on deck, Gifford explains the ramp at the aft end: “Carriers travel in figures of eight when jets are taking off. The jet goes one way and the carrier goes the other.” For some, the image has relevance, too in the Scottish independence debate.
Tomorrow: people of Dunfermline on their voting intentions
