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.

The Airport Plymouth Never Got

Midway through that building programme the range came within one planning inquiry of being moved off Wembury Point altogether, and the reason was not the Navy. Plymouth wanted a civil airport, the preferred site was at Collaton Cross, and Collaton Cross sat underneath the seaward firing arc. Aircraft on approach and 4.5 inch shells in flight are not compatible neighbours, so one of the two had to give way.

The argument was settled in the Commons on 22 December 1965. Sir Henry Studholme asked what the site had cost and what moving it would cost, and Christopher Mayhew, the Minister of Defence for the Royal Navy, gave the numbers: well over £2 million spent on the establishment since 1950, and probably over £3 million to put it somewhere else. On those figures the Government concluded that a new airport for Plymouth at Collaton Cross could not be justified, and the planning inquiry due the following February was dropped.

Plymouth was not left without an airfield: the existing municipal airport at Roborough carried on, and Collaton Cross would have been the larger replacement for it. But the replacement never came, Roborough was always limited by its short runway, and when commercial flights there stopped in 2011 the city was left with nothing. The gunnery range won that argument in 1965, and thirty-four years later the same sort of arithmetic was run against the range itself, with the opposite result.

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.

The Rock Had People Living On It

It is worth knowing what the War Office was actually restricting, because the Great Mewstone is not simply a lump of rock. People lived on it, in a house, for the better part of a century.

In 1744 a local man convicted of a minor offence was sentenced to seven years on the island, which was evidently thought a punishment. He took his family out there, served his time, and then declined to come back, staying for the rest of his life. His daughter, known locally as Black Joan, stayed on after him, married, and brought up three children on a rock a mile off the Devon coast.

In the early 1800s Samuel Wakeham and his wife Ann moved in, enlarged the house, put in a garden, and ran boat trips out from Wembury beach, advertising the service in the South Devon Monthly Museum in 1834. Wakeham was also, less publicly, a smuggler, which is very nearly obligatory for a man with his own island in that part of Devon, and it ended the way these things generally do: an excise officer caught him, and he left. Nobody has lived there since.

The rock then went through the property market with unusual briskness. It was sold in the 1927 Langdon Estate sale for £500, resold inside a year for £575, and promptly given away by the new owner as a wedding present to her brother. Whatever he expected to do with it, the War Office settled the matter in 1940 by claiming it on the grounds that it lay directly in the firing line, and it stayed in military hands for the next sixty years. Few small islands anywhere can have served in turn as a place of punishment, a smuggler's address, a wedding present and a naval aiming mark.

The point was not empty either. When the Royal Navy took over the holiday camp in 1940 it installed a radar station, observation posts and anti-aircraft guns, so the live-fire range of 1943 arrived on ground that was already defended.

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.

Cambridge is easiest to understand as one half of a pair. HMS Excellent at Whale Island in Portsmouth Harbour was the gunnery school proper, the place that set the doctrine, wrote the drill books and terrorised generations of gunnery officers into precision. What Whale Island did not have was anywhere to point a gun. It sits in the middle of a crowded harbour with a city on every side, which is fine for teaching theory and impossible for firing shells.

Wembury Point had the opposite problem and the opposite virtue: not much else there, and a clear arc of open water running south. Between them the two establishments covered the whole job, one supplying the instruction and the other the ammunition, with HMS Dryad at Southwick handling the fire control and direction side as weapons became less a matter of laying a barrel and more a matter of running a system.

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.

That dispersal is telling in itself. The gunnery work went to HMS Collingwood, which by then was the Navy's weapon engineering school and had the simulators to do without a live range; the Board and Search and military training went to HMS Raleigh at Torpoint, a few miles round the coast; and the direction and control element went to Dryad. Nothing that Cambridge taught was abandoned. What was abandoned was the idea that any of it required putting real shells into the sea, which is a fair summary of what happened to naval gunnery between 1956 and 2001.

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.