HMS Ganges: The Boys' Training School Built Around a 143-Foot Mast

From Warship to Training Hulk

The establishment's name came from an 84-gun teak warship, built as a copy of HMS Canopus by the master shipbuilder Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia at Bombay Dockyard, launched in 1821 and commissioned at Portsmouth two years later.

She had a truly active career before her training days began, serving as flagship on the South America Station, taking part in the bombardment of Beirut, blockading Alexandria, and later serving as Pacific Station flagship, surveying waters off British Columbia so thoroughly that the town of Ganges on Salt Spring Island still carries her name today.

Built in Bombay, of Teak, by a Family Firm

The builder deserves more than a name in passing. Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia belonged to a Parsi shipbuilding dynasty that ran Bombay Dockyard for generations and built warships for the Royal Navy on the far side of the world, at a point when Britain was running short of the oak she needed and India was not.

What the Wadias used instead was Malabar teak, and it was not a compromise. Teak resists rot far better than oak, it does not corrode the iron fastenings driven through it in the way oak does, and it needs a fraction of the seasoning time. Ships built of it lasted. The Wadias launched HMS Minden in 1810, reckoned to be the first ship of the line built for the Royal Navy anywhere outside Britain, and Ganges herself followed in 1821.

And one of their ships is still there. Jamsetjee Bomanjee laid the keel of HMS Trincomalee in May 1816 by driving in an engraved silver nail, and she is afloat at Hartlepool today, the oldest British warship still floating. Anybody who wants to know what the ship that gave this establishment its name was actually like can go and walk round her near-contemporary, built by the same family, in the same yard, out of the same timber.

Converted to a boys' training ship, she took her first intake on 1 January 1866 and spent the next thirty-three years moored at Mylor Harbour near Falmouth in Cornwall, before being towed to Harwich in 1899 ahead of a permanent move ashore.

A School Built From a Battleship's Bones

Shore buildings at Shotley on the Stour estuary were built between 1902 and 1905, and the Royal Naval Training Establishment there was formally commissioned on 4 October 1905, though the base was not officially renamed simply HMS Ganges until 1927.

The old training ship herself left in 1906, was renamed twice more, and was eventually broken up at Plymouth in 1930, her timbers finding an unexpectedly dignified afterlife in panelling at Trafalgar Park, a stern cabin at the Burgh Island Hotel, and a cross presented to Guildford Cathedral in 1933.

The establishment's single most famous feature, though, was not the old ship at all but a mast, erected on the parade ground in 1907 and built from the salvaged iron foremast of the corvette HMS Cordelia topped with a wooden topmast reputedly taken from the battleship HMS Agincourt, standing somewhere around 142 to 143 feet tall depending on which source you consult.

Selected boys, known as button boys, climbed all the way to the twelve-inch disc at the very top during ceremonial mast-manning displays, a notably hair-raising tradition that claimed at least one recorded life, fifteen-year-old Alfred Hickman, who fell in 1928 when his hand slipped from a rope.

It is worth being precise about what the button boy actually did, because the phrase makes it sound like a climb. Having gone up the rigging, over the futtock shrouds, which means hanging backwards off the mast at about a hundred feet, and then up the topmast, the boy stood upright on the button: a wooden disc twelve inches across at the very top of a hundred-and-forty-foot mast, with nothing to hold and no line on him, and saluted.

They were chosen for being small and light and they were, by definition, children. Whatever else one thinks of it, the Royal Navy stopped doing it, and Alfred Hickman is the reason the record notes that it was not merely frightening.

Hard, By Design

Boys typically joined Ganges around the age of fifteen for an initial six-week induction of drill and discipline, followed by seamanship, gunnery, compulsory swimming, boxing, mast climbing and the more mundane business of hammock lashing and uniform care, alongside standard academic lessons. Numbers on site rose from around five hundred boys in the early years to a wartime peak of roughly two thousand.

It would be dishonest to describe this simply as a nostalgic chapter in naval history. Discipline was severe by any modern standard, with punishment runs up a flight of steps nicknamed Faith, Hope and Charity while carrying rifles, and caning was routine for much of the establishment's history.

At least one detailed first-hand account from a boy who entered in 1955 describes not just harsh discipline but sexual abuse by an instructor, a difficult and important part of the record that deserves to be acknowledged honestly rather than glossed over in favour of more comfortable memories.

Other former trainees describe their time there very differently, with some recalling it as hard but fair and crediting it with particularly changing the trajectory of their lives, and both sets of testimony sit, sometimes uncomfortably, side by side in the historical record.

The scale is worth putting on the record too, because it explains why the arguments about Ganges are as loud as they are. Between the opening at Shotley in 1905 and the closure in 1976, somewhere between 150,000 and 160,000 boys passed through, the figure varying with the source and with what is being counted. That is a substantial fraction of every man who served in the Royal Navy in the twentieth century, and it is why there are so many people with a firm opinion about the place.

It was not the only one, either. HMS St Vincent at Gosport did the same job for the same kind of boy, and there were others at Devonport and elsewhere. Boy entry was not an eccentric survival; it was how the Royal Navy manned itself, on the reasoning that seamanship had to be learned young and that a fifteen-year-old could be trained into habits an adult recruit would never acquire.

The End of Boy Entry

Standard boy training was suspended during the Second World War from May 1940, with the establishment switching to fast-track wartime training for new entrants, and some 60,968 ratings passed through Ganges by the war's end.

Postwar, changes to the school-leaving age gradually eroded the traditional model of enlisting boys as young as fifteen, and from 1973 the base shifted toward short courses for adult entrants instead.

HMS Ganges finally closed, most sources say in June 1976, with Prince Philip taking the final salute, though the establishment's own association gives a later date that October for when the ensign was actually lowered for the last time, a discrepancy worth noting rather than resolving arbitrarily. Training subsequently transferred to HMS Raleigh in Cornwall.

What killed boy entry was not a change of naval opinion but a change in the law. As the school leaving age rose, the supply of fifteen-year-olds available to be enlisted simply stopped, and an establishment built around six-week inductions for boys had nothing left to induct. HMS Raleigh at Torpoint took over, and it trains adults on ten-week courses, which is a different institution doing a different job under the same heading.

What Remains Today

The Shotley site went on to serve as RAF housing and later as a multi-force police training centre before falling largely dormant, and is now being redeveloped as a substantial waterside housing scheme.

The famous mast, which had deteriorated badly by 2013, was removed for an eighteen-month restoration in 2022 and now stands as the centrepiece of the new development, alongside a Grade II listed swimming pool, two Napoleonic-era Martello towers and Nelson's Hall, built in 1937 and now serving as a café and library.

A volunteer-run museum occupies the old sail loft on site, and the HMS Ganges Association continues to organise reunions and preserve the memories, both fond and difficult, of the tens of thousands of boys who passed through what was, for seventy years, one of the most formative and formidable places a fifteen-year-old in Britain could be sent.