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Lot Essay
The second Royal steam yacht to be named Victoria & Albert was built at Pembroke Dock and launched on 16th January 1855. Displacing 2,470 tons and measuring 300 feet in length with a 40 foot beam, she was the largest Royal Yacht of the Victorian era and remained in service until the very end of the Queen's long life. So successful was the yacht that, almost immediately, she became a much-loved floating home to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert with the result that, after the Prince Consort's untimely death in 1861, the Queen would neither allow anything on board to be changed nor even contemplate the idea of a modern screw-powered replacement until compelled to do so by the yacht's increasing obsolescence in the mid-1890s. The old paddle yacht's last official voyage was to carry the Queen to and from her visit to Ireland in April 1900, by which time a new yacht was fitting out to replace her. In the event, Queen Victoria died before the third Victoria & Albert could be commissioned and the Queen was spared the sadness of watching her favourite yacht going to the breakers in 1904.