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.

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.

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.

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 later auctioned off for naval charity before his death in 1919, his mounted head still held by the Imperial War Museum today.

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.

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.