Ian obliged by taking me on a tour of his workplace, explaining to me the purpose and history of all the different rooms and features of the ship. I was agog.
I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the royal connections — rather, I was entranced by the ship’s gorgeous interior: the plush carpets, polished oak flooring, shining brass, frilly bedspreads, framed prints. It was a place I wanted to inhabit.
I could easily imagine myself comfortably ensconced in the royal bedroom, ringing a small bell for tea and toast as the ship carried me off to new and interesting places.
Britannia is the former royal yacht of the British monarchy, in their service from 1954-97. Part of a long lineage stretching back to the Restoration, Britannia was the 83rd royal yacht to serve the monarchy since the reign of Charles II and the second vessel to carry the name, following a racing cutter built for the Prince of Wales in 1893.
Built in just over a year at Scotland’s John Brown shipyard, Britannia was launched in April 1953, shortly before the Queen’s coronation.
In those austere post-war years, Champagne was considered an indulgence too far, so instead Her Majesty christened Britannia with a bottle of wine, declaring, "I wish success to her and all who sail in her".
Her wish was fulfilled. Over four decades, Britannia traversed more than a million nautical miles, crisscrossing the globe and calling at more than 600 ports across 135 countries. Its decks were trod by an impressive variety of high-flying guests, from Winston Churchill and Boris Yeltsin to Nelson Mandela, all entertained with elaborate banquets in the opulent State Dining Room.
Britannia was decommissioned in 1997 and has since spent its time moored at Ocean Terminal in Leith, just down the road from me. Today, it has found a second life as a museum ship, welcoming well over 300,000 visitors each year.
Walking around Britannia is an unexpectedly intimate experience. While the phrase "royal yacht" conjures up images of grandeur and importance, the ship itself feels less like a floating palace than a carefully managed family home at sea.
Uneasy with extravagance in a Britain still recovering from a brutal world war, Elizabeth and Philip toned down the original designs for Britannia’s interior.
The resulting spaces are still opulent — don’t get me wrong — but they’re more modest, furnished with florals or dark timber according to personal preference.
You get the sense that this ship was truly lived in; traces of ordinary family life are everywhere. There’s the sun lounge, where the Queen took breakfast and afternoon tea, and the veranda deck, where Prince Philip liked to paint at his easel.
Children played games on deck, corgis trotted about underfoot, barbecues were held on Scottish islands, and the stairway off of the veranda was even repurposed as a waterslide on summer holidays.
Britannia was also famously the preferred choice for royal honeymoons. Princess Margaret set the tone in 1960, choosing Britannia for her Caribbean honeymoon with Anthony Armstrong-Jones. This trip was a studiously formal affair in which dinner was taken in full evening dress every night, regardless of heat, humidity or good sense.
Princess Anne’s 1973 honeymoon with Mark Phillips was less a sedate affair and more a disaster; Caribbean sunshine gave way to storms and 6m waves, and the couple reportedly spent the first week of their romantic cruise incapacitated by seasickness. How romantic.
Charles and Diana’s Mediterranean honeymoon on the yacht in 1981 proved so elusive at dodging the press that Britannia earned the nickname "ghost ship".
The final royal honeymoon on Britannia was taken by now-no-longer-a-prince Andrew and his equally scoundrelly wife Sarah Ferguson in 1986, when the couple travelled around the Azores.
But all this talk of floral curtains, honeymoons and domesticity upon the rolling seas should not distract from Britannia’s true function as a carefully engineered instrument of post-imperial power: a floating office from which Britain continued to conduct diplomacy, trade and symbolic authority long after the formal empire had begun to fade.
The yacht hosted myriad heads of state, Commonwealth tours and high-level trade missions, projecting an image of Britain as an omnipresent state, arriving everywhere at once, ceremonially and by sea.
Its authority was enacted through a clever choreography of informality and hierarchy; receptions staged to appear relaxed yet underpinned by rigid protocol, routes through the yacht that subtly enforced status and interiors deliberately restrained rather than ostentatious.
Britannia also functioned as a roving trade envoy, promoting British industry through overseas missions known as "sea days", where an invitation aboard proved irresistible to political and business elites. Between 1991 and 1995 alone, for example, the Overseas Trade Board estimated these events generated some £3 billion for the Exchequer.
Britannia is now permanently berthed, curated and sanitised, its five public decks navigated by tourists armed with audio guides and polite reverence.
I enjoyed my tour around Britannia, especially because it ended with another slice of that heavenly carrot cake. As I munched away, I found myself musing on how the ship is a curious mix of contradictions — both a domestic haven and a mobile diplomatic tool; a vessel once designed for travel but now fixed in place, moored in a devolved Scotland; visited by millions of tourists who hail from all corners of the former British Empire.
Maybe this is how empire ends: not with a bang or even a whimper, but with museum-like stillness; preserved, interpreted and held at a stately distance behind red velvet ropes.
— Jean Balchin is an ODT columnist who has started a new life in Edinburgh.
