I was probably too charitable in my earlier post. Take this:
Quote:
A custom adhered to by navies in naming their ships is that a name is only repeated in a later vessel if the predecessor went out of service honourably -- through being sold to another owner, scrapped, or lost by enemy action. The name of a ship destroyed by fire or lost in collision or grounding is not repeated. It would perhaps be more appropriate to decide each case on its merits, but the custom seems quite inflexible. The Richmond name lives today as a modern active duty frigate in the R.N.
That simply flies in the face of the evidence, as everyone here knows. And it is not evidence that has only emerged in the last 50 years research - You only need to look as far as the naming of
HMS Victory. It seems to me that in fact the Admiralty stubbornly refused to bow to superstition. Three RN ships named
Stirling Castle were wrecked in the 18th century, and they still continued to use the name. The predecessors of
HMS Invincible, scrapped this year, fared equally badly.
Are there other ship's names with equally bad - or worse - histories?