Short film showing the scuttling of the 18th century wooden-wall 74-gun ship HMS Implacable by the Royal Navy in 1949, after she was towed from Portsmouth out to Saint Catherine’s Deep, a spot east of the Isle of Wight on December 2.
Charges were placed in her bilges and in the film she sinks quickly going straight down. There were protests against her sinking, but with the restoration of her hull estimated at £150,000 the costs were deemed too much in a postwar Britain where rationing was still in place and times were austere. It would have been very difficult to find the wood for the job. 
She had survived the second world war on a mooring in the harbour and was renamed Foudroyant in 1943. By then she’d served as an accommodation ship, a training ship, a holiday ship and a coal hulk. She’d come out of active service in 1842. Some believe she’d served at Trafalgar… and she did, but on the French side. She was built in France as Duguay Trouin and launched at Rochefort in 1800. Three weeks after Trafalgar she was sailing with what remained of the Franco-Spanish fleet when she was captured and taken as a British prize.
Today her figurehead and stern gallery (above) are on display at the National Maritime museum in Greenwich while her capstan is at the maritime museum at Rochefort (she’d been offered to the French, for restoration in 1947). It is said that public indignation about her scuttling led to the preservation of the Cutty Sark, taken into dry dock in Greenwich in 1953 to be preserved as part of the UK’s maritime heritage.
Elsewhere, in Sweden, it was just 12 years after this, in April 1961 that the Swedes brought up their 64-gun sunken flagship Vasa and (in 1990) created a museum around her in Stockholm which is a beacon to all maritime heritage and preservation projects across the world.