The Stuart Yard :: The Pett family - England’s shipbuilding dynasty

Peter Pett, Resident Commissioner at the time of the Dutch raid,  was one of a long line of Pett family master shipwrights for at this time ship design was in the hands of a few gifted master shipwrights whose skills and knowledge passed from father to son. The picture to the right depicts Peter Pett, Resident Commissioner 1647-1667 with the Sovereign of the Seas, by Sir Peter Lely.

The first, Phineas Pett, Commissioner at Chatham, 1630-47, is credited with founding the Commissioner's House garden, with visits to it also recorded in the diaries of both Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn. Phineas was followed as Resident Commissioner at Chatham by his son, Peter Pett, builder of the Royal Sovereign at Woolwich in 1637 and one of Britain's leading ship builders.

Notable ships built by later Pett's include the Prince (1670), the yard's first 100 gun ship, and the first replacement for ships lost in the Battle of Chatham and  the Britannia, the only First Rate of Pepys' 1677 thirty ship programme and the largest English ship to be built in the 17th Century.