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50 free Royal Navy trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 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.
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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 gave the drink its name, and the drink gave English the word groggy. The mix of half a pint of rum to a quart of water began on his West Indies station to curb drunkenness.
Q 02Black Tot Day, when Royal Navy sailors wore armbands to mourn the last daily rum ration, fell in which year?
1970
The last tot was poured on 31 July 1970, and one training base staged a mock funeral with a black coffin, drummers and a piper. The Admiralty Board ruled that rum no longer suited sailors running delicate machinery.
Q 03Which nickname for Britons comes from the citrus juice the Royal Navy added to sailors' grog against scurvy?
Limey
Limey stuck even though switching from lemons to colonial limes roughly halved the vitamin C and let scurvy creep back. Lemons came first; limes replaced them because they grew in British colonies.
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 05After Trafalgar, Nelson's body was carried home to England preserved in a cask of what?
Brandy
Brandy did the pickling, which is why rum's nickname 'Nelson's blood' rests on a legend that sailors drank from the cask on the voyage. At Gibraltar the body was moved to a lead-lined coffin filled with spirits of wine for the final leg.
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 by the People's Liberation Army for ten weeks before slipping her chain and dashing downriver in the dark on 30 July 1949. Simon kept rats off the dwindling food and died soon after reaching Britain.
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 cash a Royal Navy crew raised by selling fat scraped from cooking pots?
Slush fund
Slush fund was the sailors' name for that money, kept apart from the ship's accounts and spent on small comforts for the crew. The fat went to tallow makers for candles and soap.
Q 09Which 'Sailor King', at sea from age thirteen, allowed Royal Navy officers to drink the loyal toast sitting down?
William IV
William IV had banged his head standing up too fast below decks, so the seated toast spared every officer the same low beams. The Royal Canadian Navy keeps the custom as well.
Q 10At Trafalgar Night dinners each 21 October, Royal Navy officers close the evening with which toast to Nelson?
The Immortal Memory
The Immortal Memory is proposed by the guest of honour at the end of a speech, and in 2005 the monarch gave it as 'the Immortal Memory of Lord Nelson and those who fell with him'. The dinners are held in the wardroom.
Q 11Which Tudor monarch's 1546 letters patent set up the Navy Board that ran dockyards and supplies until 1832?
Henry VIII
Henry VIII is often called the father of the standing Royal Navy because of it, and the board's separate Sick and Hurt, Transport and Victualling offices were swept away with it in 1832.
Q 12At which Thames royal dockyard, founded in 1513, was Francis Drake knighted aboard the Golden Hind in 1581?
Deptford
Deptford was the most significant royal dockyard of the Tudor period, and the knighting came at the end of Drake's circumnavigation of the world. The yard went on building for the navy for three more centuries.
Q 13Which Commonwealth 'General at Sea' was buried in Westminster Abbey, then dug up and put in a common grave in 1661?
Q 21HMS Victory, built from the timber of some 6,000 trees, had her keel laid in 1759 at which royal dockyard?
Chatham
Chatham floated her out in 1765, six years after the keel went down, and about 90 per cent of that timber was oak. Today she serves as flagship of the First Sea Lord while sitting in dry dock.
Q 22The 1889 Naval Defence Act pegged the Royal Navy's battleship strength to which benchmark, aimed at France and Russia?
Next two largest navies combined
Next two largest navies combined was the rule, and it bought ten battleships and dozens of cruisers for an extra £20 million over four years. The spending set off a building race that Germany soon joined.
Q 23The 1909 cry 'We want ___ and we won't wait' demanded how many new dreadnoughts be laid down in a single year?
Robert Blake
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 never served at sea, yet his reforms are credited with the early professionalisation of the navy, and a lieutenant's seniority was dated from the day he passed. Pepys had started in 1660 as Clerk of the Acts.
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 that had carried Bonaparte's army to Egypt?
The Nile
The Battle of the Nile stranded Bonaparte's army and handed Britain the Mediterranean for years, and Nelson was made a baron for it, though privately he thought the reward too small. Nine French ships of the line were captured.
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 beneath the dome of which London church, in a 16th-century sarcophagus first made for Cardinal Wolsey?
St Paul's Cathedral
St Paul's Cathedral put Nelson directly under the middle of the dome, the body sealed in two more coffins once the pickled remains reached England. The crypt places him at the exact centre of the building.
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.
Eight
Eight was the number a Conservative MP put into the slogan as panic grew over German building, and Asquith compromised on four at once with four more by 1910 if needed. The phrase caught on with the press and public.
Q 24What motto did Admiral 'Jacky' Fisher, First Sea Lord from 1904 to 1910, 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 admiral, 'ABC' to the lower deck, said a new tradition takes 300 years while evacuating Crete in 1941?
Andrew Cunningham
Andrew Cunningham's full line was 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. Two months earlier he beat the Italians off Cape Matapan by night.
Q 28In which year was the Fleet Air Arm formally handed back to Admiralty control under the 1937 'Inskip Award'?
1939
1939 saw the handover on 24 May, months before war broke out, and the force was renamed the Air Branch of the Royal Navy. It had been created as a part of the RAF in April 1924.
Q 29Which curved bow ramp from Lieutenant Commander Douglas Taylor's 1973 thesis helped Harriers take off from short decks?
Ski-jump
Ski-jump ramps were met with scepticism until trials, and HMS Invincible became the first major ship fitted with one, set at a cautious seven degrees. The first launch off it at sea came on 30 October 1980.
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.