This is the bunk I slept in on HMS Belfast. It is a very cosy bunk bed. HMS Belfast is a light cruiser and it is said to be a very lucky ship by the sailors onboard.
It is moored in the River Thames beside The Shard, which is a skyscraper, in London.

HMS Belfast was built in Belfast, in Northern Ireland, on the same slipway as The Titanic at Harland and Wolff, the shipbuilders. That slipway was the only one big enough to build the ship.
It was moored on the Thames in 1971 after it had been used in the navy. It was used in the Cold War for arctic convoys, they also had a Supermarine Walrus aircraft on board. That was used for locating enemy ships and aircraft.

The ship’s bell is made of pure silver and is not very loud because every time the ball inside hits the bell it dents it because the silver is soft. The sound is absorbed into it. I love this fact!

These pictures show me at the stern and Tower Bridge is just behind me and about to open. The cannon in the third picture was an anti-aircraft gun, there were four of these on the boat. There was one at the front, one at the back and one on each side.
It was very exciting when we went outside after dark on the deck of the ship. You could imagine what it was like to be a sailor on that ship.

HMS Belfast was amazing! I cannot wait to do another trip to HMS Belfast! The best bit was the bunk.

Rowan, March 2024

We learned about Morse Code and how you wrote the letters in code so that you could contact other ships on your team without the enemy knowing what you were talking about.
The ship had a cat called Frankenstein, he had his own hammock lower to the ground so that he could get in it.
They also had a reindeer onboard that they ate for Christmas dinner. Olga the reindeer was a gift to HMS Belfast, but the ship made so much noise when it was firing cannons during the Battle of North Cape it terrified the reindeer which is why they put it to sleep.

There was a torpedo from one of the two torpedo tubes located in the centre of the ship. There was a room full of bombs and they had an escalator that took them up to the guns. I don’t think that this would be a good place to work because there was always the fear that it would blow up.
The ship had reinforced lower decks with a thick ‘box’ of cemented armour around the missile rooms.

I ate in The Mess, it is not messy at all, and I ate from a mess tin. They are pretty sharp and it was quite interesting.
Onboard was a huge big kitchen which is the size of a house. They were cooking all the time to feed all the sailors all round through the night.
There was a laundry, a pharmacy, a bakery, a newsagent for magazines and comics (who wouldn’t want to have a Beano at sea?).

In the front of the ship on the low decks there were two jail cells. They were tiny and there was a big long wooden bench inside.
There was a hospital located at the bottom middle of the ship and it has extra lead panelling in the x-ray block. Here there was a tiny room with a big box and that was the X-ray machine and it was controlled from the outside of the room. There was a tiny little screen under it for the doctors.
The most amazing thing on the ship was sleeping in the bunk and seeing that the sailors slept in hammocks from hooks in the corridors all through the ship.
Rowan said: “It was amazing. You should book tickets if you like the sound of this. I thought why didn’t they armour the whole ship instead of just doing the starboard side? I loved the whole thing!”

PLEASE NOTE: Photos taken by Rowan Taylor-Ramsay, except the ones taken by mum.