Loss Of The Ship 14^th April 1953

At 8.15am on Wed 14th April 1953 HMS Conway slipped her mooring off Plas Newydd in the Menai Strait and was taken under tow on the first stage of her return to Birkenhead for a refit. A little over two hours later, under the fearful gaze of the thousands who waited to cheer her through Menai Suspension Bridge, she would be driven ashore by an unexpectedly powerful tide, and as that tide fell it would reduce Britain’s last commissioned, massively built floating wooden walled Ship-of-the-Line to a total constructive loss within a matter of hours. For over three years her flooded, broken hull would haunt the banks of the Strait until, in a last fitting blaze of glory, she caught fire in unexplained circumstances and burned to the waterline.

This is the story of those events.

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