But you couldna spoil those lines. I was only an apprentice then.”

It was difficult to visualize him as a young man. The ship I was in was only an armed merchant ship. (I felt a little ashamed that I was not in a real warship.) And here was a man who had helped to build the Hood. I had seen her only once myself, sliding through a gray mist off the Pentland Firth, with her escorting destroyers looking like the flunkies and outriders of royalty.

"I remember weel the day that Lady Hood launched her. As she went doon the ways I was looking at my bit of plating, just on her starboard quarter—the plating I had worked on myser.”

Now I could see him as a young man—a handkerchief round his neck, and his eyes shining as he watched her smoke down into the sea.

"She’s oot there noo,” he said, with a twitch of his head toward the Firth. But she was not visible, and I knew that he meant she was somewhere out on the gray sea.

“TI’ gett’n on,” he said. "Its many years. She’s still working, though.”

He was old, and there was another war, and he was living on his pension, but something he had helped to build was still afloat and working. He had a small gleam of satisfaction on his face— like that old admiral, perhaps, who used to thrust acorns into the ground on his country walks and smile to know that one day they would make great oaks for the wooden wall of England.

It is a long time between the conception of a great ship and the moment when the workmen begin on her. After the requirements of a ship like the Hood are laid down by the naval staff, the Director of Naval Construction and his assistants must evolve the outlines or preliminary designs, balancing one requirement against another. A warship of her magnitude involves so many more factors than even the largest merchant vessel that there can be hardly any comparison between them.

There are gunnery, engineering, armor, communications, torpedo, and antitorpedo requirements—so many and so varied, in fact, that design must always remain to some extent a matter of compromise. The vessel is to be fast, but at the same time there is the gunnery school demanding the heaviest possible guns. When a solution between these two worlds has been worked out, there remains the demand that she must be able to receive an appreciable amount of underwater damage without losing her fighting efficiency. Yet this, which necessitates armor plating and “bulges” must still be achieved without detriment to her speed. Finally, something like fifteen hundred men have to be accommodated, given sleeping and eating facilities, and some space for recreation.

Unlike the ships of the German High Seas Fleet, the Hood had to be designed so that she could be lived in, and be battleworthy, in any part of the world. (It is not so difficult to build an almost unsinkable ship for engagements in the North Sea only—a ship which will have nothing but limited periods away from the comforts of barrack rooms and shore living quarters.) England with her world-wide sea communications had to produce ships that could fight from the Denmark Strait to the Pacific. In the twentieth century, the century of specialization, the warships of the Royal Navy had to be capable of specialist action and yet be Jacks-of-all-trades. Such a compromise was an uneasy one, and the Hood started with these disadvantages.

She cost £6,250,000 to build, and those were the days when the pound was truly a pound. Her contemporary, the battleship Queen Elizabeth, cost only £2,500,000. But, while the Queen Elizabeth had a displacement of 27,500 tons and a speed of 25 knots, the Hood displaced 41,200 tons and had a speed of 32.x knots. After Jutland the weight of her armor was increased, but she still remained a battle cruiser in conception, even though her armoring was now nearly as heavy as that of a contemporary battleship. A writer in the Naval Review was later to point out: “ . . the extra 7 knots speed of the Hood has been obtained at the cost of some 14,000 tons additional displacement and about £2,030,000, namely 14,000 tons at £145 per ton.”

So she rose up on the slipway, transverse and longitudinal watertight bulkheads; armor plate 12 inches thick on her sides; protective bulges against torpedoes, and the great keel lying rigid beneath her mounting weight; the great keel—her backbone. One hundred and five feet on the beam and 860 feet long, she was a giant among ships.

Thousands of men spent millions of hours on her construction —and most of them would never even see the finished ship. Electricians, ordnance workers, steel smelters, technicians of every sort, engineers, and torpedo artificers (for she carried six 21-inch torpedo tubes)—all over Britain men worked on their different contracts. For her, the ingots were slabbed down in the press and rolled, annealed, cooled, and straightened. For her, the steel plates were lifted into the carburizing furnaces and subjected to intense heat for two to three weeks. For her, oil and water tempered the plates—plates as large as twelve feet by ten, and weighing nearly 30 tons.

Armor plating was not new, but many technical improvements in its manufacture had occurred between 1900 and World War I.