HMS Excellent: The Mud Bank That Became the Terror of the Gunnery World

An Island Built From Other People's Digging

HMS Excellent began life in June 1830 as a floating gunnery school, when Commander George Smith was given an old warship, moored off the corner of Portsmouth Dockyard and deliberately angled so her broadside faced open water for safe live firing practice.

Whale Island itself did not exist in any meaningful sense at the time, being little more than a pair of mudbanks purchased from Portsmouth Corporation in the early 1850s, and its transformation into solid ground was a slow, almost accidental process, built up over decades using spoil dredged and excavated during construction of the naval dockyard's docks, work that in its early stages relied partly on convict labour brought in on a small purpose-built railway.

It is worth sitting with what that means. Whale Island is not an island the Navy found and built on. It is an island the Navy made, out of the mud and rock dug out of HMNB Portsmouth while the dockyard was being enlarged, tipped onto a sandbank over a period of decades by men serving sentences.

So the administrative headquarters of the Royal Navy today stands on ground that did not exist when Nelson sailed, made of the spoil from the docks that serviced his fleet, put there by convicts. There are few better illustrations of how a naval base grows.

By the time the gunnery school finally moved ashore onto the reclaimed island in the mid-1880s, its footprint had grown by more than double, and the old training ship was paid off for good in 1891, completing the transition from hulk to permanent island establishment.

A Reputation Built on Fear

For well over a century Excellent stood as the Royal Navy's foremost gunnery school, and Whale Island discipline became naval shorthand for a standard of parade ground perfectionism that bordered on the fearsome, producing generations of gunnery officers and ratings drilled to a standard few other establishments even attempted to match.

Much of that reputation for excellence, rather than mere harshness, can be traced to Percy Scott, an instructor from 1878 who went on to revolutionise Royal Navy marksmanship through what became known as continuous aim training, a technique so effective that gunners under his methods achieved fifty-six hits from seventy rounds fired in 1899, a standard of accuracy previously thought impossible at sea.

What Continuous Aim Actually Was

The result is remarkable and the method is more interesting, because it is a small mechanical change that produced an enormous tactical one.

Before Scott, a gunlayer at sea aimed his gun and then waited. The ship rolled, the sights came onto the target for a moment on the way past, and he fired at that moment. Hitting anything therefore depended on the roll cooperating with the loading, and at any range worth the name it very largely did not.

Scott's insight, reputedly from watching one gunlayer instinctively working his elevating wheel to compensate for the ship's motion, was that the gun could be kept on the target continuously if the elevating gear were geared low enough for a man to follow the roll by hand. He had the mechanisms regeared on his cruiser Scylla and later in Terrible, and fitted telescopic sights so the gunlayer could see what he was aiming at.

The effect is that the gun is laid all the time and fired the instant it is loaded, rather than fired at whatever instant the sea permits. That is the whole of it, and it turned naval gunnery from a matter of luck into a matter of skill.

It also travelled. An American officer, William Sims, learned the method from Scott while serving in the Far East and spent years forcing it on a reluctant United States Navy, with results on their gunnery every bit as dramatic. A technique worked out on a reclaimed mudbank in Portsmouth Harbour rewrote the gunnery of both English-speaking navies.

A Tradition Born From a Broken Harness

One of Whale Island's most enduring contributions to British national life traces back to a moment of pure improvisation.

At Queen Victoria's funeral in February 1901, the harness of the Royal Horse Artillery team pulling the gun carriage broke, and naval ratings from HMS Excellent stepped in and hauled the carriage themselves using drag ropes, a spontaneous solution that so impressed onlookers it became permanent Royal Navy tradition, repeated at every British state funeral since, including those of Edward VII, George V, George VI, Winston Churchill, Lord Mountbatten and, most recently, Queen Elizabeth II in 2022.

King George V later personally presented HMS Excellent with a purpose-built ceremonial gun carriage that remains at Whale Island to this day, a notably moving example of a naval accident becoming a piece of permanent national ceremony.

There is a practical reason it stuck, beyond sentiment. Sailors are trained to haul heavy objects in step, together, on ropes, in confined spaces, which is precisely what moving a gun carriage through crowded streets at a slow march requires. Horses are unpredictable in crowds, and in February 1901 they had just proved it.

The teams have come from Whale Island ever since, and the drag ropes are worked by ratings rehearsing for weeks beforehand, at a pace of about seventy-five paces to the minute, which is considerably harder than it looks when the load is a gun carriage carrying a coffin and the route is several miles of London.

Guns, Polar Bears, and a Pig Called Tirpitz

Whale Island's history has its lighter, stranger corners too. Between 1893 and 1940 the establishment maintained its own small zoo, complete with polar bears, sun bears and lionesses, along with a celebrated mascot pig named Tirpitz, rescued from the German cruiser SMS Dresden in 1915 and and finally sold at auction in 1919, raising one thousand seven hundred and eighty-five pounds for the British Red Cross, with the mounted head still held by the Imperial War Museum today.

The pig deserves the full story, because how she arrived is better than the fact that she did. SMS Dresden was the last survivor of the German East Asia Squadron, and she was cornered and scuttled off the island of Mas a Tierra in the Juan Fernandez group on 14 March 1915. As the ship went down, the ship's pig got up on deck and jumped into the Pacific.

About an hour later she was spotted from HMS Glasgow, and a petty officer went over the side after her. By the accounts of it he was very nearly drowned by a large, frightened and extremely determined animal, which is the sort of detail that has the ring of truth about it.

The name was a joke at the expense of Grand Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the man who had built the German fleet that Dresden belonged to. She was Glasgow's mascot for about a year before being sent to Whale Island for the rest of her career, and the Imperial War Museum and the newspapers of the day both describe her as a sow, although a few later retellings have her the other way about.

And the ending is bleaker than the usual telling. She was not auctioned and then died. She was auctioned for pork, which is to say she was sold to be eaten, and the money went to the Red Cross. One thousand seven hundred and eighty-five pounds in 1919 was an extraordinary sum for a pig, and it was raised because everybody in Britain knew who she was.

Rather more sombrely, every animal in the zoo was shot by armed sailors on 27 May 1940 as a precaution against air raids, a stark, sudden end to a decades-long piece of naval eccentricity that says a great deal about how quickly wartime pragmatism could override even the most beloved of institutional quirks.

The date is worth pausing on. 27 May 1940 is the week the British Expeditionary Force was being pushed back onto the beaches at Dunkirk, and the day before the evacuation formally began. Invasion was being treated as a live possibility within weeks.

The reasoning was the same as at London Zoo, which had destroyed its venomous animals at the outbreak of war: a bomb on the enclosures of a naval establishment in the most heavily bombed city in Britain would put polar bears and lionesses into the streets of Portsmouth in the middle of an air raid. There was no good answer and somebody had to give the order.

From Big Guns to Big Responsibilities

As naval gunnery gave way in importance to guided missiles through the mid-twentieth century, seagoing gunnery training on ships attached to Excellent continued until 1957, before the gunnery school itself finally closed in 1985 and the establishment was folded into HMS Nelson.

It was recommissioned in 1994 when HMS Phoenix closed, taking on fire-fighting and damage-control training in its place, and today Whale Island hosts elements of the Maritime Warfare School, the Defence Diving School, a dedicated Fire School, and, perhaps most significantly, Navy Command Headquarters itself, including the Fleet Commander's offices, meaning a patch of reclaimed harbour mud that began as a dumping ground for dredging spoil now sits at the administrative heart of the entire Royal Navy.

That transition is worth spelling out because it happened in stages and each one was a demotion at the time. Seagoing gunnery training ended in 1957. The gunnery school itself closed in 1985 and Whale Island was absorbed into HMS Nelson, which is to say it stopped being an establishment in its own right. It was only recommissioned in 1994 because HMS Phoenix closed and its firefighting and damage control training had to go somewhere.

So Excellent spent about a decade as an annexe of somewhere else before coming back, and then acquired, one function at a time, the Maritime Warfare School, the Defence Diving School, the Fire School and finally Navy Command Headquarters itself. HMS Dryad at Southwick was one of the establishments whose work eventually came here.

What that means in practice is that the Royal Navy is now run from a place with no deep water, no berths and no ships, which for a service that spent four hundred years being run from wooden buildings beside a dry dock is a considerable change. The parade ground is still there and so is the gun carriage.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.
Last checked for updates: 24 October 2026