Portsmouth

My Dad wanted to see HMS Warrior, the largest, fastest and most heavily armed and armoured the world had seen at that time now stationed at Portsmouth harbour, apparently he'd wanted to see this for while. It was part of Portsmouth historic dockyard which encompassed a number of other attractions, this was a good thing as the recommended viewing time to allow for The Warrior was 1 hour, but Dad managed to spend about 3.5 hours on it.

Deck of The Warrior

The Warrior was build in 1860 and has been restored now to it's original splendor, it had originally been built as a deterrent to ward off the French and must have been so frightful to behold at the time as it never needed to fire a shot in anger. It had a whole deck of guns including 36 cannons, a room full of riffles and hand guns, and close actions weapons like swords and dirks (I don't know what they were exactly, I'm just trying to sound learned). Each cannon required 18 men in areas called Messes where they ate, slept and relaxed, the Mess seemed to be a big bench table between each cannon, Mesa is Spanish for table but in old French it meant 'portion of food', anyway it probably ended up a mess with  that many people. In contrast the officers had their own cabins with writing table, for updating their blogs, raised beds with storage cupboards underneath all in one nice piece of furniture. The officers had a dinner hall with decorations that really shouldn't be in a boat, as all the port and sherry would most likely crash onto the floor, the captain has the whole rear end of the boat surrounded by windows and seats far away from the 10 boilers, 40 furnaces and massive 5468 horsepower engine room.
Warrior underwent a number of name changes and uses ending up as Oil Storage Hulk C77, how dull, the Navy decided to sell her off, but due to a downturn in demand for scrap iron no one wanted to buy her, poor old thing.
50 years went by and having refueled about 5000 ships, she was saved from scraping by The Maritime Trust who restored her to her initial glory as The Warrior.

HMS Victory

Also at the dockyard was HMS Victory, another wonderful old battleship launched in 1765 for the Royal Navy, the ceilings were much lower on the Victory and seemed like a tardis inside, interestingly the top rear deck that go up some steps on old ships was called a Poop deck, it forms the roof of the captains cabin, again it comes from the French word for stern - La Poupe.

Officers quarters on HMS Warrior