HMS Triumph (R16) - Remainder of Service

Remainder of Service

After her Korean service Triumph was selected as the replacement for HMS Devonshire as a Cadet Training Ship. She carried two terms each of 100 RN and Commonwealth cadets on three cruises each year, in the Spring to the West Indies, in the summer to Scandinavia and around the UK, and in the autumn to the Mediterranean. She carried three Sea Balliol aircraft with which to inculcate air-mindedness in the cadets.

In 1952, HMS Triumph was used for the first trials of an angled flight deck. Her original deck markings were obliterated and replaced with new ones at an angle to the long axis of the ship. The success of these trials led to the development of the now standard design, with additional areas of the flight deck added to the port side of the ship.

In 1954 she was diverted to ferry survivors of the troopship Empire Windrush from North Africa to Gibraltar for repatriation. In 1955 she replaced HMS Albion on a 'goodwill' visit to Leningrad. This terminated in her Captain, Varyl Begg, carrying out a sternboard down the Neva against a beam gale after her hastily Soviet-laid sternbuoy had dragged. Her cadet training duties ended with the autumn cruise of 1955, when changes in the system of training RN officers rendered her redundant. Shortly before arriving home to Devonport, HMS Triumph executed the last axial-deck landing in the RN.

Triumph was then converted, between 1956 and 1965, into a Heavy Repair Ship, emerging from the work with the pendant number A108. Triumph was based in Singapore after her conversion, being involved in a major exercise in 1968 in the Far East, with numerous capital ships from the United Kingdom and other nations taking part, as well as dozens of destroyers and frigates. Triumph was used as a heavy repair and transport ship for troops. In 1975 Triumph was placed in reserve at Chatham Dockyard where she was used as a backdrop for the annual Navy Days, and in 1981 she was struck and subsequently scrapped in Spain.