PAST                  PRESENT               FUTURE 

Built by W. White & Sons of Cowes, Isle of Wight during the early months of World War I, the naval pinnace MB 278 was delivered to Harland & Wolff, Belfast, to join her first mother ship, HMS Sir John Moore, in 1915. Sir John Moore was a Lord Clive-class monitor, built to engage German shore artillery in occupied Belgium during the First World War.

​

Her next ship, HMS Raglan, was an Abercrombie-class monitor. (monitors were relatively small warships, neither fast nor strongly armoured, which carried disproportionately large guns). HMS Raglan’s displacement was 6250t, and her main armament was two 14” guns. She was sunk in 1918 following an attack by Turkish naval forces off Imbros in the Aegean Sea, but MB278 survived, and after 5 years in Malta, she joined the battleship Iron Duke in the Mediterranean, then went to HMS Barham, and later to HMS Resolution in the Atlantic. 

​

Her first major refit was carried out in Malta in 1929, and she received a new 22hp Ferry engine before joining HMS Queen Elizabeth in 1930, the first of the ‘fast battleships’. Just before World War II, she was assigned to HMS Erebus (another monitor) and she

nearly missed Dunkirk when, in March 1940, she was crushed in an accident in Portsmouth dockyard and sank. When hauled to the surface, her hull was badly

damaged but she was quickly repaired and received a new engine. When the Admiralty disposed of MB 278 in 1948, their description of her hardly did her justice; 'round bilge ex-Naval hull of double-skin mahogany with mahogany shelter aft. Fair condition. No engine.’ In fact, she is of double-skin teak on rock elm and oak

frames, with a third skin fitted internally athwartships. This partial third skin possibly represents the repair carried out in 1940.