How Ships Get Their Names

Fear Nothing, Since 1553

Dreadnought was chosen in the expectation that the ship would 'dread nought,' fear nothing, and English and Royal Navy ships have carried the name since 1553. A galleon of 1573 served until she was broken up in 1648. The battleship of 1906 was so far ahead of everything else afloat that the whole category reorganized around her, with every earlier battleship demoted to 'pre-dreadnought' and every later one called a 'dreadnought.' The UK's first nuclear submarine, launched in 1960, took the name next, and the planned Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines will carry it again.

A name that persists like this is not a label but a lineage. Each new Dreadnought inherits the record of the last, which is why the naming committee prefers names that already carry battle honours. The fourth ship to bear a name matters precisely because three others earned it or disgraced it, and the crew knows which.

Folk belief holds that renaming a ship invites bad luck. The Admiralty never let that stop a political correction. The Dreadnought of 1660 began life as the Commonwealth ship Torrington, launched in 1654, and was renamed at the Restoration, when a name honouring the old regime became a liability. She was lost in 1690. Score that against the taboo however you like.

A Committee, the Navy Board, and the Monarch's Signature

The modern process is on paper. A Ministry of Defence FOI response of 29 March 2021, reference FOI2021/03414, lays it out. New names are proposed by the Ships' Names and Badges Committee, chosen by the Navy Board, forwarded to the Secretary of State for Defence, and finally approved by the reigning monarch. Four layers of sign-off for a word painted on a stern.

The Ships' Names Committee dates to 1913, and its tastes are conservative in the literal sense. It favours names with historic significance and battle honours, and it avoids naming vessels after living people, with exceptions made for senior royals. The rule keeps the fleet's names pointed at the past, which is exactly where a navy wants its crews looking for reassurance.

Steal the bureaucracy along with the names. A fleet whose names need a sovereign's signature treats them as state property, and every christening becomes a small act of policy. A rebel navy naming ships by acclamation on the gun deck says the opposite just as loudly.

Destroyers by the Letter, Corvettes by the Garden

From the L class of the 1912-1913 programme, Royal Navy destroyers took the initial letter of their names from their class letter, so the class told you the name and the name told you the class. The Second World War's emergency programmes ran the alphabet dry after Z, and new classes restarted with two-letter prefixes, Ca-, Ch-, Co-, Cr-. In 1943 the letters gave way to themes, with classes named for Battles, Weapons, Counties, and Towns. Today's Type 45 destroyers have circled back to D names.

The corvettes that escorted Atlantic convoys got gentler treatment. Between 1939 and 1945, 294 Flower-class corvettes were built, 225 of the original design and 69 modified, and the Royal Navy named its ships of the class after flowers, so the class is also called the Gladiolus class after its lead ship. The Royal Canadian Navy took the same design and named its sisters after Canadian towns instead, Agassiz, Alberni, Chambly. One hull, two naming cultures, and the name alone told you whose ship it was.

That legibility is the point of any class system. For an invented fleet, pick one axis per class, letters or flowers or towns or battles, and hold it. Readers learn the code as fast as sailors did.

Mutiny Over a Pansy

Theme naming produced casualties. The Flower-class corvette ordered in 1939 as HMS Pansy was renamed HMS Heartsease before her launch, after the crew reportedly threatened mutiny at the prospect of wearing 'Pansy' on their cap tallies. Heartsease is another word for wild pansy, so the Admiralty changed the word without changing the flower, a neat piece of face-saving. The ship, built by Harland and Wolff and launched on 20 April 1940, later served the US Navy as USS Courage, hull number PG-70. The Americans took a wild pansy and called it Courage, which is its own commentary on naming cultures.

The First World War's Insect class had already run the experiment. Twelve shallow-draught gunboats went to war under names like HMS Cockchafer, Moth, Cricket, Gnat, Bee, Ladybird, and Tarantula. Cockchafer, named for the May bug, was the last survivor of the class, sold for scrap in 1949. Small ships get small names, and crews learn to wear them, or occasionally refuse.

A Gilded King, a Stock Lion, and a Witch with a Horse's Tail

Before a name could be read, it could be seen. William the Conqueror's flagship Mora carried a figurehead in 1066, and Charles I's Sovereign of the Seas of 1637 bore a gilded king on horseback. During the 17th and 18th centuries the lion was the standard figurehead for lower-ranking Royal Navy warships, a stock item rather than a portrait, and only two British examples survive, one of them a lion of about 1740 preserved at the Red Lion Inn at Martlesham in Suffolk.

Sailors believed a female figurehead with bared breasts could calm storms at sea, even though women aboard ship were considered unlucky, which is why so many figureheads depict semi-nude women. The contradiction bothered nobody. The Admiralty attempted to abolish figureheads on new ships in 1796, and the carvings outlasted the order by more than a century, until the last Royal Navy ship to carry one, HMS Espiegle, was broken up in 1923. What actually killed the figurehead was the straight-hulled ocean-going steamer, which left no place to mount one.

The best figureheads are footnotes to their names. Cutty Sark, launched in 1869, takes her name from Robert Burns's poem Tam o' Shanter, where the witch Nannie wears a 'cutty sark,' archaic Scots for a short nightdress, and tears the tail off Tam's horse Meg. The figurehead is Nannie, and she holds a horse's tail, the punchline of the poem carved onto the bow. The original was the work of Frederick Hellyer, and today's replacement was carved by Andy Peters from drawings by the ship's designer, Hercules Linton.

She Since 1375, It Since 2002

The earliest example the OED gives of an English ship as 'she' is John Barbour's The Bruce, from 1375, where a 'schip' becomes 'scho.' The habit can 'hardly be supposed,' the OED notes, to survive from Old English grammatical gender, since the Old English scip was neuter. The grammarian Otto Jespersen offered the more human explanation, that gendered pronouns personify objects because 'it' seems too inert.

Lloyd's List had called ships 'she' since its establishment in 1734. In March 2002 it announced a switch to 'it,' and an attempt four years earlier had already been reversed once. Six centuries of habit do not die on an editor's schedule. When you write a fleet, choose the pronoun deliberately, because it tells the reader how the crews feel about their hulls.

Names carry that same freight. A run on the ship namer hands you hulls without histories, and the history is your job. Give one name a lineage, give one a committee that vetoed the first choice, and give one a crew that grumbles about the cap tally. The fleet will feel crewed before a single sailor speaks.