HMS Collingwood: The Cornfield That Became the Royal Navy's Biggest Classroom

Built on the Finest Corn Land in the South of England

HMS Collingwood was commissioned as a new-entry training establishment on 10 January 1940, built on farmland between Fareham and Gosport that had been requisitioned the previous year and described at the time, with a note of genuine local regret, as the finest bit of corn land in the south of England.

Sources differ slightly on the exact acreage and price paid, somewhere around 197 to 200 acres for a little over seven thousand pounds, a minor discrepancy that hardly matters next to what was built there.

The establishment was named after Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, Nelson's close friend and second-in-command at Trafalgar in 1805, who took over command of the fleet after Nelson was mortally wounded, leading Nelson to remark admiringly, see how that noble fellow Collingwood carries his ship, as Collingwood pressed HMS Royal Sovereign into the enemy line.

What happened to him afterwards is less well known and rather harder to read. Collingwood took command of the fleet when Nelson was killed, brought it through the storm that followed Trafalgar, and was then kept on as commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean because nobody could be found who was trusted to replace him. He asked to be relieved repeatedly, over years, and was refused every time. He died at sea on 7 March 1810, aboard ship, having never set foot in England again after Trafalgar. He had been away from his family for the better part of five years.

There is a gentler thing about him worth knowing too. When he was at home in Northumberland he carried acorns in his pocket and planted them wherever he saw ground that would suit an oak, on the reasoning that it took something like three thousand mature oaks to build a ship the size of HMS Victory and that somebody ought to be thinking about where the next lot would come from. It is not a bad emblem for a training establishment: a man planting trees he would never see grown, for ships that would be built long after he was dead.

This shore establishment was actually the fourth Royal Navy unit to carry the name, following an 1841 wooden man-of-war and two later battleships.

Ten Thousand Recruits at a Time

Collingwood was purpose-built to train the wartime hostilities-only ratings flooding into the Seaman Branch, deliberately split into four self-contained sections, Forecastle, Foretop, Maintop and Quarterdeck, each designed to house 2,500 men, giving the base a wartime capacity of some ten thousand trainees cycling through in batches of around a thousand new entrants every three weeks on ten-week courses.

Conditions were basic by any standard, with barracks costing roughly six hundred pounds each and built on raised plinths to cope with marshy ground, and for a time the entire establishment shared precisely one typewriter between them, a detail that says a great deal about wartime priorities.

King George VI visited in July 1940 and had to take shelter during an air raid while there, a small foretaste of what was to come.

That visit has a connection the record usually misses. One of the two battleships that carried the name before this establishment was the dreadnought HMS Collingwood of 1908, and at Jutland on 31 May 1916 the King himself was serving in her. Prince Albert, as he then was, was a sub-lieutenant in her forward 12-inch turret, and he wrote his own account of the action afterwards. He remains the only British sovereign to have been under fire in battle since William IV.

So the man who had to take cover from a German bomber at Fareham in July 1940 had fought a fleet action in a ship of the same name twenty-four years earlier. Three years after his visit, a German bomber came back and did what the raid he sheltered from did not.

A Tragedy the Admiralty Kept Quiet

In the early hours of 18 June 1943, a lone German bomber trailing a returning Allied squadron dropped two bombs on the base.

One landed harmlessly on the playing fields, but the other struck an accommodation hut full of sleeping recruits, killing somewhere between thirty-one and thirty-three young sailors, most of them only seventeen or eighteen years old and many barely two weeks into their naval careers, with a further thirty-eight wounded.

At the time, families were reportedly told their sons had died in an ammunition accident rather than an air raid, the truth deliberately suppressed to deny German propaganda any hint of the raid's success, a properly difficult piece of wartime history that deserves to be remembered honestly rather than smoothed over for the sake of a tidier story.

From Wartime Camp to Electrical Branch Headquarters

Following the postwar Middleton Report, HMS Collingwood became, from 1 January 1946, home to the newly formed Electrical Branch, training officers and ratings in the maintenance of electrical and radio equipment across the fleet, and the old wartime parade divisions were renamed Howe, Anson, Fisher and Rodney, with all thirty-one internal roads renamed after ships Collingwood himself had commanded.

Why the Navy Had to Invent an Electrical Branch

That sounds like an administrative detail and it is one of the more consequential changes the Royal Navy made in the twentieth century. Before 1946 there was no electrical branch. Electricity in a British warship belonged to the Torpedo Branch, for the entirely logical historical reason that torpedoes and mines had been the first electrical things anybody put aboard a ship, and so the torpedo officer had inherited the wiring along with them.

By 1945 that arrangement had become absurd. A destroyer was full of radar, radio, gyroscopes, fire control computers, sonar and electrical power distribution, none of which had existed when the convention was set and none of which had anything to do with torpedoes. The Middleton Report recommended splitting electrics out into a branch of its own, and Collingwood, a purpose-built wartime camp with room to expand and no other function once the hostilities-only ratings stopped coming, is where it was put.

Royal visits marked the base's steady peacetime growth, with Princess Margaret opening new accommodation in 1966, Prince Philip opening the wardroom in 1975, and the Princess Royal opening a new administration building in 1979.

Absorbing Its Sister Establishments

Collingwood's modern role owes a great deal to the closure of other Royal Navy training establishments around it. When HMS Mercury at Leydene House closed in 1993 after fifty-two years, its communications training function transferred to Collingwood that same year, and the Maritime Warfare School was formally established there in January 2002.

Both of those establishments have accounts here, and both are worth reading alongside this one, because between them they explain what Collingwood now is. HMS Mercury was the signal school, which spent the war at Leydene House on the Hampshire downs and moved there in a single day. HMS Dryad was the navigation school, and in 1944 the building it occupied at Southwick housed the meeting at which the weather forecast for D-Day was argued out.

Neither closed because it had failed. Both closed because a Royal Navy with a quarter of the ships it once had could no longer justify running separate schools for signals, navigation, gunnery and electrics on separate sites within twenty miles of one another. Collingwood is what you get when four schools are pushed into one, and it is the reason a wartime hutted camp on requisitioned farmland is now the largest training establishment in the Royal Navy.

When HMS Dryad at Southwick subsequently closed in the mid-2000s, its warfare-training functions and Maritime Warfare Centre relocated to Collingwood as well, completing the process by which this one site in Fareham absorbed the training role of several once-separate establishments, and it is now consistently described by the Royal Navy as the largest training establishment in the entire Royal Navy, with its Maritime Warfare School billed as the largest naval training organisation in Western Europe.

Still Growing Today

Around 1,700 military personnel and over 1,100 civilian staff work at Collingwood on any given day, training roughly 33,000 sailors and Royal Marines every year across facilities that now include the Defence Diving School, the Royal Navy Physical Training School, the Royal Navy Leadership Academy and the Fleet Intelligence Centre.

In January 2021, amid a Covid-era recruitment drive, Collingwood began training raw recruits directly for the first time in over fifty years, a modest first cohort of twenty-two personnel that nonetheless marked a genuine shift in the base's role.

The original 1940 chapel of St George with St Gabriel still stands today, a small, unassuming survivor from the cornfield the Admiralty requisitioned in such a hurry over eighty years ago, quietly watching over what has become one of the busiest training grounds in British defence.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.