HMS Britannia (formerly Prince of Wales): The Warship That Trained a Future King

The Last of the Wooden Giants

HMS Prince of Wales was laid down at Portsmouth on 10 June 1848 and launched on 25 January 1860, one of six 121-gun screw-propelled first-rate three-decker line-of-battle ships, the last and most powerful expression of the wooden warship before iron and steam rendered the type obsolete almost as soon as she entered service.

Displacing around 3,186 tons as designed, she carried a formidable mixed armament of 8-inch guns, 32-pounders and a single massive 68-pounder spread across her gun decks, and reached an average speed of 12.6 knots during sea trials off Stokes Bay on 31 October 1860, an impressive performance for a vessel of her enormous bulk and vintage design.

Stripped for Parts

HMS Prince of Wales never fired a shot in anger, and by most accounts never even put to sea as a commissioned warship at all.

She spent her first seven years laid up, a magnificent design already overtaken by ironclads before her paint had properly dried, and in 1867 her engines were quietly removed and installed instead in the ironclad HMS Repulse, a telling sign of how quickly the age of the wooden line-of-battle ship was giving way to iron and steel, and of how the Admiralty was already treating vessels like HMS Prince of Wales as sources of useful components rather than as ships with a future of their own.

Reborn as HMS Britannia

In July 1869, the engineless hulk was renamed HMS Britannia and converted for a very different purpose, retaining only her foremast and beginning what would become one of the most historically significant roles of any Royal Navy vessel of the era: cadet training ship at Dartmouth. She was, in fact, the fifth ship to carry the name, inheriting it from an older three-decker that had trained naval cadets since 1859, first at Portsmouth, then briefly and rather miserably at Portland, before the whole establishment settled on the more sheltered waters of the River Dart in 1863.

The two-decker HMS Hindostan was moored just ahead of the new Britannia and linked to her by an enclosed gangway, giving the cadets extra accommodation and classroom space that neither vessel could have provided alone. Boys joining the Royal Navy were grouped into two-year intakes known as terms, and across the Britannia name's forty-six years in the role, spanning 1859 to 1905, seamanship and mathematics remained the only two subjects that never left the syllabus.

From 1869 until 1905, HMS Britannia served as the floating schoolroom for generations of young officers entering the Royal Navy, moored in the River Dart and providing the practical grounding in seamanship and naval discipline that no classroom ashore could fully replicate.

Among her own cadets over the years was a young Rosslyn Wemyss, who would rise to become an admiral, and whose Britannia days would prove more relevant to the ship's story than anyone could have guessed at the time.

In January 1877, Britannia received her most famous pupils: Prince Albert Victor and Prince George, sons of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. The timing was no accident. The decision to send royal princes to train alongside ordinary cadets came in the wake of a bullying scandal involving a cadet named Lloyd, and was intended as a public show of confidence in the Britannia system. Queen Victoria gave her consent only on condition that the boys' tutor, the Reverend John Neale Dalton, accompanied them aboard, but beyond sleeping in a guest cabin on the poop deck, the two princes shared exactly the same food, lessons and discipline as everyone else.

Prince George, the future King George V, later admitted the arrangement did him few favours. "It never did me any good to be a Prince," he recalled. "The Britannia was a pretty tough place, and so far from our benefiting, the other cadets made a point of taking it out of us, on the grounds that they would never be able to do it later on... I was awfully small then, and I'd get a hiding time and again." It is not the sort of confession one expects from a future King, which is rather what makes it so believable.

The following year, 1878, Lieutenant Mainwaring left his own mark on Britannia tradition, introducing the custom of photographing each passing-out term and founding the Britannia Beagles, a pack kept aboard for the cadets' amusement ashore, proof that even a Royal Navy training ship found room for a hunt.

A New School Ashore

By 1895, the Board of Admiralty had begun seriously discussing what Britannia's own cadets could probably have told them years earlier: that a wooden hulk on the River Dart, however storied, was no longer adequate for training the officers of a modern steam navy. After lengthy wrangling over land purchases, tenders for a new shore-based college, designed by the architect Aston Webb, were issued in 1900 and construction began soon after.

In 1902, the Admiralty promulgated the so-called Selborne Scheme, instituting common training for all officer entrants regardless of which branch of the service they eventually intended to join; a cadet would not specialise into the Engineer Branch or the Royal Marines until reaching the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. Because the new college at Dartmouth would not be ready in time, an interim school was built in the grounds of Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, where cadets would spend their first two years before moving on to Dartmouth for a further two.

Command of the new Osborne college went to Captain Rosslyn Wemyss, the same officer who had once been a Britannia cadet himself, and he was determined that the new scheme would owe nothing to the old one. The Director of Naval Education, J. A. Ewing, put it bluntly: he was "very anxious to see that Dartmouth College develops on entirely new lines without Britannia interference or even influence." Construction at Osborne began in March 1903, and the first term under the new scheme was admitted that September.

Britannia herself was not simply left to fade quietly. In 1903, Second Sea Lord Sir John Fisher appointed Captain Charles Cross to give the old ship a shake-up before her closure, and by all accounts he did exactly that. "He was allowed a free hand to hire and fire," one witness recalled, "and within a fortnight there was heard the splash of bodies going overboard, chiefly officers, though the messman was the first to go, reputed to be making a thousand pounds a year out of the cadets' messing."

Cross was relieved in the spring of 1905 by Captain William Goodenough, brought in to oversee the final handover and to take command of the new Royal Naval College the moment it opened. On 14 September 1905, Britannia's last term, forty-two cadets known as Hawke term, marched ashore into the new college, senior by tradition to the first intake to arrive from Osborne, who were known as St Vincent term.

Retirement and a Lasting Name

HMS Britannia's training role finally came to an end in September 1905, when the newly built Royal Naval College at Dartmouth opened its doors ashore, rendering the old wooden hulk's floating classroom obsolete after thirty-six years of continuous service, a name so closely associated with naval cadet training that it was carried forward to the shore establishment itself, which remains known as Britannia Royal Naval College to this day.

HMS Britannia was formally hulked in September 1909 and sold for breaking up to J. B. Garnham on 13 November 1914, before being resold to Hughes Bolckow and towed away to Blyth for breaking up on 5 July 1916. That month's Britannia Magazine recorded the scene as she left: "The whole College was assembled to watch her passage, whilst her band paid her the last farewell, and a furtive expression was not infrequently heard of a feeling that an enemy torpedo would be a not unfitting end to her career of usefulness." Her ornate figurehead survives today at the Scottish Maritime Museum in Irvine, a tangible remnant of a ship that began life as one of the last great wooden battleships, never fired a shot, and still ended up personally training a future King of England.