HMS Cambridge: The Gunnery School That Fired at a Rock for Fifty Years

A Name That Began Afloat

The name HMS Cambridge has a truly long pedigree in Royal Navy gunnery training, one that began not on land at all but afloat. The West Country's gunnery school traced its origins back to 1838, training aboard the wooden ship San Joseph at Plymouth, before shifting in 1856 to the 80-gun second-rate HMS Cambridge, moored off Devonport as a dedicated gunnery training ship.

That vessel was broken up in 1869 and replaced by the former first-rate HMS Windsor Castle, renamed Cambridge in turn and recommissioned as the Devonport gunnery ship in 1876, complete with a small flotilla of tender vessels supporting live-fire and torpedo practice and the use of rifle ranges on the Cornish shore of the Hamoaze.

Even then the work was not without its dangers, an inquiry into unsafe range conditions forcing a temporary closure in January 1892 following concerns raised by the local fishing industry.

That old floating gunnery ship was finally sold out of service in 1908, and for roughly three decades afterwards, gunnery training moved ashore to the Royal Naval Barracks at Devonport, with no vessel or establishment carrying the Cambridge name at all.

From Holiday Camp to Live-Fire Range

The site that would eventually inherit the Cambridge name had its own separate, and rather more unlikely, origin. Wembury Point, on the Devon coast near Plymouth, saw continuing military use from 1911, with the Army establishing an infantry camp and a Royal Artillery position finding station there through the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1940 the Royal Navy requisitioned a pre-war holiday camp on the same stretch of coast, reportedly a site that had earlier provided a backdrop for scenes in the Forsyte Saga, and by 1943 it was operating as a live-fire gunnery range used jointly by the Army and Navy.

The Admiralty purchased the land outright in 1948, permanent accommodation was approved in 1950, and on 9 August 1956 the site was formally commissioned as HMS Cambridge, inheriting a name with well over a century of gunnery tradition behind it, reportedly the seventh vessel or establishment to carry it.

Major building programmes continued for two further decades, with the final phase of permanent structures completed as late as April 1977.

Why Wembury

The clifftop position at Wembury was chosen for a very practical reason: it offered a clear seaward arc of fire out towards the Great Mewstone, a striking offshore rock stack that sat directly in the line of fire and effectively served as a natural backstop and aiming reference for live gunnery practice, with public and civilian access to the surrounding waters restricted by the War Office as a result.

From Big Guns to Guided Weapons

HMS Cambridge's core mission, in the establishment's own words, was to provide live firing practice with conventional weapons for officers and ratings qualifying in gunnery and for ships' gunnery teams, and veterans who trained there recall working on 4.5 inch Mark 6 and Mark 8 guns, firing live out to sea with the Great Mewstone as their marker.

As naval technology moved on, so did the syllabus, with training expanding to cover the evolving generations of fire control systems, from early visual and mechanical gunlaying methods through to radar-directed systems, and eventually to guided weapons training on the Seacat surface to air missile system, sometimes in conjunction with related instruction at HMS Dryad near Portsmouth.

From 1985 the establishment was refurbished and broadened into a Naval and Military Training School, adding Board and Search training and internal security instruction alongside its traditional gunnery role, a clear reflection of how naval warfare itself was changing around it.

A Site That Shook the Villages Around It

Local community accounts describe the shockwaves from live firing rattling windows in villages along the nearby Yealm estuary for decades, and some local sources have suggested that accidents over the site's roughly fifty years of live gunnery cost lives as well as shaping them, though it should be said plainly that no dated, named incident or official accident record could be traced to corroborate this specific claim, and it is best treated as an unverified community recollection rather than an established historical fact.

What can be said with more confidence is that the range's final act of gunnery, a last live 4.5 inch shoot fired in 2001 to coincide with the establishment's closure, was well enough remembered by veterans to be photographed and shared years later.

Closed on the Numbers

HMS Cambridge's end came down, in the end, to straightforward defence economics. Live firing at the range ceased in October 1999, and a government minister confirmed in Parliament in June 2000 that the remaining training work, including non-firing gunnery instruction, Board and Search training and Naval and Military training, could be delivered more efficiently elsewhere.

The relocation was costed at £7.8 million against projected savings of £112 million over a twenty five year appraisal period, a case strong enough that training was duly transferred to HMS Raleigh, HMS Collingwood and HMS Dryad.

The establishment was decommissioned in the spring of 2001, generally dated to 30 March, closing the book on 45 years as an independent commission, though this precise closing date rests on a single source and should be treated as likely rather than fully verified.

Returned to the Wild

Large scale demolition of the site followed in 2002, with the last disused structures cleared by around 2008, though one building, the Leach Building, the former Gunnery Range Control Building completed in 1985, was deliberately retained and given a form of heritage protection as a physical record of the site's purpose.

In 2006 the National Trust acquired Wembury Point and the offshore Great Mewstone, reportedly funded by around thirty thousand individual public donations, and set about removing roads and fencing to let the site return to a natural coastal and heathland state, now part of a Site of Special Scientific Interest.

Visitors walking the coastal path between Wembury Beach and Heybrook Bay today can still make out the former gun mount bases sunk into the turf, and the remains of a nine hole golf course laid out for service personnel in the establishment's later years, quiet physical traces of a site that spent half a century firing live shells out towards a rock in the sea.