The King George V Ships
Lunch 1200 - 1400 Monday to Saturday
Sunday roast 1300 - 1600
All-day 12" pizza to eat in or takaway
Live acoustic music on the last Sunday of each month
A dark mild always available
Free cheese board on Sunday evening
Big selection of rum
Four real ales on hand pump
Dinner 1830 - 2030 Tuesday to Saturday
More than 40 bottled Belgium beers
Four superb letting rooms
More than 30 single malts
Monthly special £5 hot dish and drink deal
Friendly atmosphere
There have been two battleships called HMS King George V and it’s the second one which is painted on the outside wall of the pub. The first was a King George V-class dreadnought with a displacement of 23,400 tonnes and a length of 597 feet.
She was built at Portsmouth Dockyard and launched in October 1911. She had ten 13 x five inch guns in twin gun turrets and a secondary armament of 16 x four inch guns with a crew of 870 men.
Before the war she was part of a squadron of British ships which attended the Kiel regatta in 1914
and Kaiser Wilhelm 11 visited the ship on an inspection tour. She took part in the Battle of Jutland and survived the First World War. She was decommissioned in 1919 and used as a training ship between 1923-26 before being scrapped.
The second HMS King George V was the lead ship of the King George V class of battleship of 1939 – the year she was launched. Following the tradition of naming the first battleship constructed in the reign of a new monarch after the current monarch, she was due to be named King George V1. However, the King instructed the Admiralty to name the ship in honour of his father. She was built in Newcastle upon Tyne and commissioned in December 1940. The following year she began convoy escort duties and took part in the unsuccessful search for the German warships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau during the Kriegsmarine Operation Berlin.
The ship was made the flagship of the Home Fleet after the destruction of HMS Hood and was involved in the chase and the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck. On 27 May 1941 she fired 339 x 14 inch and 660 x 5.25 inch shells at Bismarck which helped to damage her superstructure and disable her weapons. Later that morning Bismarck sank.
While on escort duty in May 1942, HMS King George V collided with the destroyer HMS Punjabi resulting in the sinking of the destroyer.
HMS King George V covered the Operation Husky landings in Sicily and later took the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, back to Britain from the Teheran Conference. From 1944 until the surrender of Japan, HMS King George V served with the British Pacific Fleet and was present during the official surrender ceremony off the coast of Japan. She was re-commissioned as Flagship of the Home Fleet in 1946 but three years later she was decommissioned into the Reserve Fleet. She was scrapped at Dalmuir in 1957.
