A life in letters, Vanguard, The

‘We’re going to see the Vanguard!’ my parents announced one morning in August 1960. I was puzzled. My mother’s parents had a Vanguard, one of the range produced at Coventry by the Standard Motor Company from 1947 to 1953. But seeing this familiar car was nothing to make special announcements about. Later that day, somewhere on the shoreline of the Firth of Clyde we saw a rather larger Vanguard – HMS Vanguard, the battleship built during the Second World War and commissioned following the War’s end. In 1947, the vessel took King George VI and his family on the first Royal Tour of South Africa by a reigning monarch. In 1959 it was decided to decommission HMS Vanguard as the costs of maintaining her were too high, and she was towed ignominiously to the breakers’ yard at Faslane on the Firth of Clyde. My parents and I were among those who watched the arrival of the long grey hull, the last of the dreadnoughts.