RN ship names

Natalie Solent has some thoughts on the historical naming practices of the Royal Navy:

My husband points out that after the development of iron hulls, rifled guns and explosive shells ships usually were sunk rather than boarded. However, he says, if the chivalrous customs of Napoleon's time had continued, an HMS Bismark, HMS Graf Spee or HMS Emden would still have been possible even though these ships were sunk. Both sides in the Napoleonic wars sometimes named new ships after a worthy adversary that had been sent to the bottom of the sea, as well as merely keeping the names of prizes.

In case anyone is worried, even in that alternative world there would have been no danger of the Royal Navy ever getting itself landed with a ship called the HMS Adolf Hitler. Hitler was happy have SS Divisions named after him but he was aware enough of the all-or-nothing nature of modern naval warfare to refrain from extending any such practice to ships. After the loss of the Graf Spee, Hitler ordered the Deutschland to be renamed the Lützow. If the ship went down he did not want to see headlines saying "Germany sunk."

It always struck me as a charming notion that sailing navy ships would acquire non-native names . . . usually as a result of capture at the end of a sea battle. I would imagine, in a less sensitive age, it would have been quite the political message for the Royal Navy to send a squadron of ships, all bearing the former names of enemy vessels.

I was a big fan of "age of fighting sail" books as a boy, with Hornblower and co. and the imitations (Bolitho, Ramage, etc.), so I was quite aware that historically RN ships might carry foreign names. So ingrained was this knowledge of how some British ships were named, that when I first saw the "Airfix" ship model of the Rommel, back in the early 1970's, I assumed that it was a very odd-looking RN ship!