Wisdom and War

The Royal Naval College Greenwich 1873–1998

Harry Dickinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134769049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Opened in 1873, in buildings constructed by Charles II to house retired sailors, the Royal Naval College was founded with the aim of providing officers with 'the highest possible scientific instruction in all branches of study bearing upon their profession'. For more than 125 years it taught officers ranging in rank from Sub Lieutenants to Vice Admiral, providing the technical instruction that equipped a corps of naval architects to build some of the most advanced warships in the world and in later years, trained the Royal Navy's nuclear engineers. Despite the College's undoubted contribution, towards both the education of Royal Navy personnel, and technical research more broadly, this is the first book to address the history of the institution from its Victorian roots to its closure in the aftermath of the Cold War. Taking a chronological approach, the book traces the history of the College from its establishment in 1873, a period during which technical training for a steam-powered navy was increasingly vital. It then shows how, during the First World War, academic staff at the College made a vital contribution to the development of naval weapons systems, and its medical school initiated a vaccine production programme that later produced major improvements in the public health of the nation. During the Second World War, damaged by enemy action that set London's docklands ablaze, the College provided the first taste of naval life for more than 27, 000 men and women called from civilian life to serve on shore and at sea. Later chapters conclude with an exploration of the College's post-war role, focusing particularly on the establishment in 1959 of the Department of Nuclear Science and Technology (DNST) which ran a nuclear reactor on site until the College was closed in 1998. Both as a history of the Royal Naval College itself, and as an exploration of the Navy's attitude toward research and education, this book provides a fascinating insight into what is arguably one of Britain's most significant educational establishments.

Chapter 1
Palace, Hospital, College

The buildings of what is now termed the Old Royal Naval College stand on the south bank of the River Thames in an area which, including outbuildings and foreshore to the low water mark, comprises some 20 acres of land.¹ The massive grey blocks are arguably the most impressive, compact and beautiful architectural group in the country, and they dominate the shoreline in a celebration of symmetry picked out in grey and white stone. Standing above the College on the heights of Blackheath, and looking north and west across the River Thames towards central London, it is easy to appreciate the ancient significance of the Greenwich site. Across the bleak scrub ran the old Roman road connecting London to the Kent coast and thence to Europe. The high ground of the heath tumbled down to a great loop in the river, and a road along its bank and communication from coast to capital, by land and water, was effectively controlled at this point. The advantages of the location were apparent from earliest times – traces of Roman civilisation, possibly military fortifications, have been found in the neighbourhood, and the name Greenwich may itself be derived from Old Norse. Danes were certainly a part of early Greenwich history, and their formidable fleets used the Thames and its settlements to mount attacks on the English coast over an extended period at the turn of the tenth century. In 1011, during the reign of Ethelred, often described in English history as the ‘unready’ but in fact a ruler who made diligent efforts to organise his defences and build sufficient ships, Danish longboats used Greenwich as a base for an attack on Canterbury, and some years later, on London itself.²

Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, Regent during the minority of his nephew Henry VI, recognised the strategic importance of these lands and consolidated the position of the Crown at the one point which commanded the eastern approaches to London. On the brow of Greenwich hill, approximately where the Observatory stands today, he constructed a small watchtower overlooking both the river and the Dover road, thus ensuring early warning of foreign invasion or rebellious activity by the independent-minded men of Kent. In 1427, under the gaze of the watchtower, on the banks of the river, in the ground that now forms Grand Square of the College, Humphrey also began construction of a small red brick palace named Bella Court. Six years later he was granted the right to enclose 200 acres of land around the watchtower and the palace, and this was confirmed in 1437. Humphrey lived at Bella Court for a further ten years, but having made an enemy of Margaret of Anjou, wife of Henry VI, he was accused of treason and died in prison in 1447. Duke Humphrey, ‘who excelled all other princes both in divinity and science’, has been rightly identified as a suitable historical patron for the later College.³ Certainly, the remains of his fifteenth-century palace are the earliest tangible link with the present buildings, and although a soldier rather than a sailor, he was a military man devoted to science and learning. Well travelled and happiest in the company of scholars, on his death the library he had assembled at Bella Court, ‘the first great library in England outside a university or monastery’,⁴ became, and remains today, an important part of the Bodleian collection at Oxford.

Bella Court became Margaret’s home, and she improved it by tiling floors, filling windows with glass and building a bridge or pier giving access to the river at all states of the tide, but it was the accession of Henry VII in 1485 that confirmed the centrality of Greenwich Palace, or the Placentia as it had become known, to royal affairs. From Greenwich, Henry’s queen, Elizabeth of York, proceeded upriver, ‘attended in barges adorned with banners and streamers of silk … and with the music of trumpets, clarions and other minstrelsy’ for her coronation.⁵ At the Placentia their two sons Arthur and Henry (later Henry VIII) were born, and later Katherine of Aragon, bride to both, spent her first unhappy weeks away from Spain in the damp and cold of the palace. Although Greenwich was suitably removed from the deadly diseases of London and offered good access to open country, its climate was often held to be unkind. It certainly did not agree with the Spanish princess, who ‘was taken ill soon after her arrival in England with ague and a stomach attack and went to Greenwich where she became worse … [but] on her departure she recovered’.⁶ The supposedly unhealthy climate of Greenwich, with its oozing mud flats, its winter mist and summer damp, was to become a recurring theme and complaint throughout its history as a royal palace, but also later as a naval hospital and college.

Yet for Henry VIII, born and bred in the Placentia, there was no place like it – a home within easy water distance of London where he could hawk and hunt, and where ‘from the windows and leaden roof of the palace he could watch the large vessels of London bringing in silk and gold and spices … and visit his ships of war anchored close to’.⁷ Henry was to make Greenwich a great centre of state – a suitable place for holding court, receiving dignitaries and ambassadors, planning foreign adventures and marrying and divorcing his several wives. The Placentia palace was extended accordingly, and drawings made by Flemish artist Anthony van Wyngaerde, about ten years after Henry’s death, show a building of rare beauty. Built mostly of red and white stone, it was entered from the river by a towered Watergate giving access to a number of courtyards. A Banqueting Hall and huge twin-towered armoury dominated the skyline, and on the upper terraces stood a tiltyard with chapels marking the boundaries of the royal property to the east and west.⁸ Each February and May the palace and the adjacent park were used for games and military tournaments in which the King was an enthusiastic performer – on 12 June 1510, with two others, he challenged all-comers to fight with spears and two-handed swords.

While it is tempting to explore further this world of feasting, jousting, revelry and intrigue, for the purposes of this work, and in particular in order to show the relevance of the site to later naval activity, it is Henry’s connections with Greenwich and his navy that must be examined. Henry VIII is frequently portrayed as having an instinctive understanding of the importance and potential of sea power, to the extent that he is often described as the ‘father’ or ‘architect’ of the Royal Navy, but his early years on the throne did not particularly distinguish him in this regard. He inherited a small fleet of five ships and what was probably the first dry dock in Europe, and between 1510 and 1512 brought to completion several vessels probably laid down by his father. Three years later he is thought to have had a fleet of perhaps 25 ships deployed on the Thames and at Portsmouth, although it is unclear whether these constituted a permanent force or whether, as was the custom, they might be leased or sold as the situation demanded. This fleet included the 600-ton Mary Rose, a favourite built at Portsmouth between 1509 and 1511, and the Henry Grace a Dieu or Great Harry, which displaced perhaps 1,500 tons and mounted heavy bronze cannon capable of being fired as a broadside. Built both as a symbol of prestige and a deterrent to Scottish maritime ambitions, she was the most powerful ship of her day.

There can be little doubt that warship design and naval gunnery genuinely fascinated Henry, yet what distinguished him from his predecessors was not the number or the grandeur of his ships, but the facilities he provided for their upkeep and support. It is thus in storehouses, mud docks and float pools as much as in ship design or naval weapons that the foundations of the later navy may be observed. While almost all studies of early Greenwich and its palace stress its proximity to dockyards established at Woolwich and Deptford, it seems that Erith, about eight miles to the east, may have at least a claim to be the earliest centre of naval activity. Storehouses were built here about 1513, and despite their exposure to north-westerly winds may, have been favoured over Deptford for their closer proximity to the sea. A rudimentary mud dock was also built at Erith, which one commentator suggests accepted a number of ships in the winter of 1513, and when the first ‘Keeper of Storehouses’ was appointed the following year, his responsibilities extended to both Deptford and Erith.⁹ At the former, in 1517, the facilities were enhanced by the building of a ‘good and able pond’ – evidently a large tidal basin protected from the river by a substantial shelf of earth in which ships could float at all states of the tide.¹⁰ Towards the end of Henry’s reign there were similar docks to the east of Greenwich at Woolwich and Erith, to the north at Limehouse and Barking, and to the west at Deptford, and by 1547, the year of his death, accounts showed a substantial labour force of shipwrights, anchor smiths, ship keepers and labourers in various locations – with Greenwich at the geographical heart of this activity.¹¹

Perhaps the other significant contribution made to the advancement of naval activity during the reign of Henry VIII was the establishment of the guild of Trinity House at nearby Deptford Strand. Trinity House, today the general authority for lighthouses and navigation aids around the United Kingdom, derived its powers and privileges over a very long period. Its earliest records are lost, but there seems to be general agreement that in 1514 a charter was granted to establish a brethren or fraternity to regulate marine activity on the Thames, and in particular to control the ‘young men who are unwilling to take the labour and adventure of learning in the shipman’s craft on the high seas’.¹² Henry’s charter allowed the guild to grant and make laws ‘for the relief, increase and augmentation of the shipping of the realm of England’ and ‘to punish and chastise at their discretion’ all those offending against them.¹³ In this charter lie the origins of what was to become not only an important navigation authority, but also an organisation with responsibilities for the education and examination of mariners, including some ranks within the Royal Navy, and a charity caring for seafarers and their families.¹⁴ A combination of these two themes – charitable endeavour and the education and improvement of the seaman’s art – became enduring characteristics of the Greenwich site.

Henry was succeeded by the young Edward VI, who spent most of his reign at Greenwich and was a visitor to the dockyards at Woolwich, and more frequently at Deptford, where he granted £88 to pave the high street as it was ‘so noiysome and full of fylth that the Kinges Majestie might not pass to and fro to see ye building of His shippes’.¹⁵ But it was the accession to the throne of Elizabeth I in 1558 that substantially enhanced Greenwich as a place of naval significance, with the river now a maze of shipping and the dockyards the principal employers in the country. From the Thames the great trading companies despatched voyagers to the deep oceans of the world, and the palace foreshore at Greenwich became the point where royal approval might be conferred on a particular endeavour. In June 1576 Martin Frobisher, with two barks and a 10-ton pinnace (a small craft capable of being rowed and sailed), departed Greenwich in search of the North West Passage, the legendary maritime short cut to India. Royal approval was given – the contemporary editor and collector of travel narratives Richard Hakluyt noting that ‘outside the palace at Greenwich they dressed ship and shot off their ordnance while the queen waved her hand to them from a window’.¹⁶ Those returning from the remorseless wastes were similarly feted – in 1581 Francis Drake anchored the Golden Hind off the palace foreshore after his three-year circumnavigation and was duly knighted.

Following the death of Elizabeth and the end of the Spanish war, both Greenwich palace and the navy more generally settled into a period of gentle decay. The new King, James I, relatively uninterested in naval matters, at least for the first decade of his reign, had some effects moved to the Tudor palace, but lived there less than his predecessors. Nevertheless, he made his mark in a dramatic and beautiful manner. The first of James’s architectural contributions is hidden deep beneath the present Queen Anne block, one of the four great hospital buildings originally designed by Christopher Wren but completed in fits and starts by others over almost fifty years. The foundations of the Queen Anne building were dug out between 1696 and 1699, but they incorporated some of the existing groundwork of the Tudor palace, in particular the supporting structur...