HMS Drake: The Barracks That Waited 45 Years to Get Its Famous Name
Getting Sailors Off the Old Hulks
Before HMS Drake existed, sailors based at Devonport were housed the old-fashioned way, aboard obsolete ships moored in the Hamoaze, a system that was as uncomfortable as it sounds. The purpose-built Royal Naval Barracks at Keyham, Devonport, changed that, completed in 1889 and able to house around 2,500 officers and men, with the first 500 transferring ashore from the receiving hulk HMS Royal Adelaide on 4 June that year.
It is worth being clear about the timeline here, since the barracks are sometimes assumed to be an early twentieth century creation, when in fact they opened well before the century turned, initially commissioned under the far less celebrated name HMS Vivid, inherited from the commander-in-chief's own yacht.
Forty-Five Years Before Drake Got His Name on the Door
It was not until 1 January 1934, some forty-five years after the barracks first opened, that the establishment was finally renamed HMS Drake, honouring Sir Francis Drake, the Elizabethan navigator and privateer whose connections to the area run deep. Drake was born near Tavistock in Devon around 1540, served as Mayor of Plymouth in 1581 and later as the area's Member of Parliament, and is the subject of the famous, probably apocryphal story that he insisted on finishing his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe before setting off to fight the Spanish Armada in 1588, a legend that has stuck to Plymouth's naval identity ever since.
A Night Churchill Came to See for Himself
The barracks, still known as HMS Vivid through the First World War, served throughout as the principal manning depot for the Devonport Division of the fleet, with five of the fourteen British ships lost at Jutland in 1916 crewed at least in part by Devonport-manned personnel. Its darkest hour came during the Plymouth Blitz, when HMS Drake suffered a direct hit, with the heaviest recorded losses on or around 21 April 1941, sources vary slightly on the exact date and final casualty count, though well over a hundred men are recorded as killed in bombing-related deaths that week according to official Royal Navy casualty rolls.
The scale of the tragedy brought Winston Churchill to the barracks in person on 2 May 1941, where he was shown, in the words of one account, a gruesome sight in the gymnasium, beds holding some forty injured men separated only by a low curtain from coffins being nailed shut nearby, a stark image of just how close the war had come to Devonport's own front door.
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Built to Impress, Even in Wartime
HMS Drake's buildings are architecturally significant in their own right, with fourteen listed structures, mostly built from Plymouth limestone in a confident neoclassical style, including a clock tower and guardhouse from 1896 that Historic England describes as an unusual and particularly fine component of what it calls one of the finest and most complete barracks in England, alongside a main gateway from 1906 and a wardroom from 1902 facing out over the River Hamoaze.
Even amid coastal defence duties and the threat of invasion, wartime photographs show sailors at HMS Drake rehearsing Christmas concerts and decorating their mess decks in December 1940, a small but telling reminder that ordinary life carried on wherever it could.
Still at Work Today
HMS Drake today functions as the Fleet Accommodation Centre for HMNB Devonport, housing around three thousand personnel and effectively administering the wider naval base, and since 2009 it has also hosted the Hasler Naval Service Recovery Centre, providing rehabilitation and support for injured service personnel. Three ceremonial QF three-pounder Hotchkiss guns, brought back from Hong Kong after the 1997 handover, are still used today to fire royal salutes, a small ceremonial flourish for a barracks that spent its first forty-five years without even the name most people now associate with it.
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