Royal Navy Trivia
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48 free Royal Navy trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Royal Navy is older than the British Army, older than the United Kingdom itself, and it has left fingerprints all over everyday English. Phrases people use without a second thought started life as orders shouted across a wooden deck, and the daily tot of rum survived into the age of nuclear submarines. This quiz treats the navy as an institution rather than a list of battles. You will meet the Tudor king who gave it a bureaucracy, the admirals whose names ended up on pubs and streets, the ships preserved in dry dock and the toasts officers still raise at dinner, before moving on to the carriers, submarines, bases and Royal Marines of today. It suits pub-quiz regulars, naval families and anyone who has ever wondered why sailors drink the loyal toast sitting down. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches you something.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which admiral, known as 'Old Grog' for a grogram cloak, ordered the Royal Navy's rum ration watered down in 1740?
Edward Vernon
Edward Vernon's nickname is said to have named the drink, and grog in turn gave English the word groggy; the watering-down began in his own squadron in the West Indies.
Q 02What do sailors call 31 July 1970, when the Royal Navy issued its last rum ration?
Black Tot Day
Black Tot Day followed an Admiralty Board ruling that rum no longer suited crews working complex, delicate machinery; some sailors wore black armbands and one training base staged a mock funeral with a coffin.
Q 03Which nickname for Britons comes from what the Royal Navy issued to its sailors to ward off scurvy?
Limey
Limey began as the jeer 'lime-juicer', and it stuck even though the navy's switch from lemons to colonial limes, which hold much less vitamin C, let scurvy creep back.
Q 04Which future novelist, in turban and stage make-up, toured HMS Dreadnought in 1910 posing as Abyssinian royalty?
Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf, still Virginia Stephen, was one of six hoaxers led by Horace de Vere Cole who were shown round the fleet's flagship with full honours. The visitors reportedly greeted everything with cries of 'bunga bunga!'.
Q 05Legend says rum, but Nelson's body was actually carried home from Trafalgar preserved in a cask of what?
Brandy
Brandy, mixed with camphor and myrrh, did the pickling, and at Gibraltar the body was moved to a lead-lined coffin filled with spirits of wine; the rum tale survives in the nickname 'Nelson's blood'.
Q 06Simon, the ship's cat awarded the Dickin Medal, served on which Royal Navy ship held on the Yangtze in 1949?
HMS Amethyst
HMS Amethyst was held on the river by the People's Liberation Army from April until she slipped her chain and dashed downriver in the dark on 30 July 1949; Simon kept the rats off the dwindling food.
Q 07In the 'Cod Wars' that ended in 1976, Royal Navy warships shielded trawlers from which country's coastguard?
Iceland
Iceland won every round, and the 1976 settlement gave it a 200-mile fishery zone that foreign fleets could enter only with permission. Coastguard cutters used long hawsers to slice the nets off British boats.
Q 08Which phrase for shady money began as the cash raised aboard ship by selling fat scraped from the cooking pots?
Slush fund
Slush fund comes from 'slush', the refuse fat of a ship's galley, which was sold ashore; the takings were kept apart from the ship's accounts, and the phrase later passed into politics.
Q 09Which 'Sailor King', at sea from age thirteen, is credited with letting Royal Navy officers drink the loyal toast sitting down?
William IV
William IV is said to have learned about low deckheads the hard way as a young officer, so the seated toast spared his navy the same knocks, and the Royal Canadian Navy keeps the custom too.
Q 10At Trafalgar Night dinners each 21 October, Royal Navy officers raise which toast to Nelson?
The Immortal Memory
The Immortal Memory is proposed by the guest of honour at the end of a speech; in Washington in 2016 the First Sea Lord asked the diners to stand and drink it in silence, without response.
Q 11Which Tudor monarch's 1546 letters patent set up the Navy Board that ran dockyards and supplies until 1832?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII's board gave the navy a permanent administration to match the standing fleet he had built; before his reign a single Clerk of the King's Ships had looked after the royal vessels.
Q 12At which Thames royal dockyard, founded in 1513, was Francis Drake knighted aboard the Golden Hind in 1581?
Deptford
Deptford then kept the Golden Hind on public show by royal command until the ship's timbers rotted away in the following century.
Q 13Which Commonwealth 'General at Sea' was buried in Westminster Abbey, then dug up and put in a common grave in 1661?
Robert Blake
Q 21HMS Victory now rests in dry dock at Portsmouth, but at which royal dockyard was her keel laid in 1759?
Chatham
Chatham floated her out in 1765, six years after the keel went down, using timber from some 6,000 trees, about 90 per cent of it oak; since 2012 she has been flagship of the First Sea Lord.
Q 22The 1889 Naval Defence Act pegged the Royal Navy's battleship strength to which benchmark, aimed at France and Russia?
Next two navies combined
Next two navies combined was the two-power standard, and it bought ten battleships and dozens of cruisers for an extra £20 million, yet it probably spurred rivals to build rather than deterring them.
Q 23The 1909 cry "We want eight and we won't wait" demanded more battleships to stay ahead of which country?
Robert Blake, often called the father of the Royal Navy, was evicted from the Abbey on Charles II's orders along with other Cromwellians. His bones went into St Margaret's churchyard next door.
Q 14Which diarist, as Secretary to the Admiralty, introduced the 1677 exam that every would-be lieutenant had to pass?
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys came to the navy in 1660 as Clerk of the Acts with no maritime experience, yet his reforms began its professionalisation, and a lieutenant's seniority dated from the day he passed.
Q 15Which admiral's 1740–44 voyage round the world captured a Manila galleon carrying 1.3 million silver coins?
George Anson
George Anson came home rich for life, then at the Admiralty moved the Marines from Army to Navy control and put officers into uniform. Only three of his six ships survived rounding Cape Horn.
Q 16At which 1798 battle in Aboukir Bay did Nelson destroy the French fleet and strand Bonaparte's army in the East?
The Nile
The Battle of the Nile handed Britain the Mediterranean for years, and Nelson was made a baron for it, though privately he thought the reward too small.
Q 17Nelson's right arm was lost in a failed 1797 night assault on Santa Cruz, capital of which Canary island?
Tenerife
Tenerife's defenders shot Nelson as he stepped ashore, and the arm was amputated that night aboard ship. Three years earlier the siege of Calvi in Corsica had already cost him the sight of his right eye.
Q 18Nelson lies in the crypt of which London church, in a 16th-century sarcophagus first made for Cardinal Wolsey?
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral placed Nelson in a sarcophagus carved for Cardinal Wolsey, later taken over for a royal tomb that was never finished, so it stood empty for almost three centuries.
Q 19Which captain, dismissed after an 1814 stock-exchange fraud, went on to command the navies of Chile, Brazil and Greece?
Thomas Cochrane
Thomas Cochrane so harried the French coast that Napoleon called him 'the Sea Wolf', and his exploits fed both Hornblower and Jack Aubrey. Three Lord Chancellors later concluded he should have been acquitted.
Q 20Royal Navy press gangs stopping American ships to seize sailors helped push the United States into which war?
War of 1812
The War of 1812 grew partly from impressment, which turned American opinion against Britain, and the navy never pressed men again once Napoleon's 1814 surrender let it shrink. Britain claimed the men it took were deserters.
Germany
Germany's building caused the panic, and the slogan, coined by a Conservative MP, carried the day: Asquith agreed to start four ships at once and four more if they were needed.
Q 24What motto did Admiral 'Jacky' Fisher adopt when he was made a baron in 1909?
Fear God and dread nought
Fear God and dread nought punned on HMS Dreadnought, whose outline design came from the committee Fisher chaired. He ran the navy as First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910 and again briefly in the First World War.
Q 25Which Royal Navy captain reached the South Pole in January 1912, five weeks after Amundsen, and died on the way back?
Robert Falcon Scott
Robert Falcon Scott and four companions found Amundsen's tent already standing at the pole, then died about twelve miles short of their next supply depot. A search party recovered Scott's journals the following spring.
Q 26Which naval surgeon gave scurvy patients oranges and lemons aboard HMS Salisbury in 1747, an early controlled trial?
James Lind
James Lind split twelve patients into pairs on different remedies, and only the citrus pair recovered, yet the Admiralty waited until 1795 to issue lemon juice fleet-wide. The trial is remembered for its use of control groups.
Q 27Which Mediterranean Fleet admiral said a new tradition takes 300 years while evacuating the army from Crete in 1941?
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham, 'ABC' to the fleet, said in full that the navy takes three years to build a ship and three hundred to build a tradition, so the evacuation would go on despite the losses.
Q 28The 1937 "Inskip Award" took the Fleet Air Arm away from which service?
Royal Air Force
The Royal Air Force had formed the Fleet Air Arm within its own ranks in 1924 and ran it until the Admiralty took control in May 1939, only months before war broke out.
Q 29Which carrier feature from Lieutenant Commander Douglas Taylor's 1973 thesis let loaded Harriers take off from short decks?
Ski-jump
Ski-jump ramps fling a rolling Harrier upward so it can leave a short deck with a heavier load; HMS Invincible was the first major ship fitted with one, set at a cautious seven degrees.
Q 30Which carrier, flagship of the 1982 Falklands task force, served India as INS Viraat until 2017?
HMS Hermes
HMS Hermes sailed for the South Atlantic just three days after the Argentine invasion, and India bought her in 1986 for another three decades of service. Her final decommissioning came on 6 March 2017.