HMS King Alfred: The Swimming Baths That Trained 22,500 Naval Officers

A Very Modern Swimming Baths

Hove first talked about new swimming baths in April 1935, and being a careful sort of town it took until March 1938 to start building them. The site was three acres of former gravel pit known as the Beach Pit, on the seafront next to the drill hall of the Sussex Division of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve.

The Borough Surveyor, Tom Humble, designed a long brick building holding a large bath, a smaller one, a restaurant and dance hall, and beneath it all an underground car park for 480 cars, with indoor bowling greens in its western end. It was to be called Hove Marina and it cost £170,000.

The Munich crisis took some of the workmen away and slowed the job. By August 1939 the bowling greens were open and the council hoped to have the small bath ready for September. On 3 September war was declared.

On 11 September the Admiralty requisitioned the lot, and the building and the depot next door were commissioned together as HMS King Alfred, under the command of Captain John Noel Pelly, a retired officer recalled at the age of about fifty.

Parts of the Ship

The conversion had a certain logic to it. The large bath was given a removable floor and became the main instructional hall, with some 10,000 square feet of space. The restaurant and dance hall became the wardroom.

Dressing rooms beside the pools became classrooms, the small rooms intended as individual baths became offices, and the car park became living quarters, a mess and a ship handling simulator. The smaller cleansing pool went to the chaplain and was fitted out by 1940 as St Nicholas' Naval Chapel, one of the few places of worship ever to have been built as a place to rinse.

The reason for all this was simple arithmetic. The Royal Navy of 1939 had nothing like enough officers for the ships it was about to build, and its own college at Dartmouth took years to produce one. King Alfred would have to do it in about three months.

The first men arrived in late September, many of them yachtsmen from the Royal Naval Volunteer Supplementary Reserve who needed only ten days or so to learn the Navy's ways before being commissioned, and some 2,000 of them came through in all. Regular classes began in October, four classes of thirty, with those under nineteen and a half made midshipmen and those above it sub-lieutenants.

Direct entrants tended to be older. Many were, as one of them put it, "gentlemen over 30"; he had been running a soap factory in Lagos until he decided to come home and do his bit.

Captain Pelly saw every candidate, and some interviews were more personal than others. He told a young Ludovic Kennedy that he had known his father in the last war, and was glad he had been given the armed merchant cruiser Rawalpindi.

Not long afterwards, in November 1939, Rawalpindi was sunk fighting the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, with Captain Kennedy aboard.

Pigeons and Other Precautions

It was an inventive place. A man named Stegman asked Pelly what would happen if the enemy landed and no message could reach Whitehall, and suggested pigeons. Pelly told him to get some.

The birds went into an old lion's cage bought from a small zoo at Shoreham, which was hoisted on to the roof with such a clatter that the captain put his head out and asked, "What the hell goes on?" Stegman then took the pigeons up to London by train to accustom them to the journey and released them for a trial flight. They flew off and were never seen again. The cage was reportedly still on the roof in 1960.

The seafront was a more serious matter.

German radio is said by one family's recollection to have announced the sinking of HMS King Alfred twice, which would have been quite a feat for a building, and one cadet of 1943 wrote afterwards: "Looking back, I am surprised at the location as we were very vulnerable to air attack." One afternoon a group of men practising manoeuvres with flags on the nearby lawns heard a tremendous explosion.

A bomb had fallen by the Princes Hotel ten days earlier without going off, and it detonated as the disposal party tried to extract it, killing them and blowing out every window in the hotel.

Thirty-Two Volunteers for Dunkirk

In the last days of May 1940 a signal reached Hove asking for volunteers, and the request was put to the cadets between the turns at a Guest Night Concert, without the word Dunkirk being mentioned. Thirty-two went.

At Tilbury they were given steel helmets and put in charge of tows of small boats loaded with water, bully beef and biscuits, and then they crossed the Channel in company with destroyers and minesweepers, under air attack, with some of them very seasick and Dunkirk visibly on fire ahead.

Sub-Lieutenant Long took the converted river-boat Tigris One to the beaches and reckoned he and his crew brought off between 1,100 and 1,200 men. He was later sunk himself and spent a long time in the water. Another volunteer, David James, was reported missing and turned up at Portsmouth in a sailing barge.

Three of the thirty-two were killed and about six injured, one of whom, the King Alfred magazine reported that September, wanted to come back for a refresher course as soon as he had been fitted with a new leg.

A further group answered a different call that year. The Admiralty asked for twelve new sub-lieutenants to volunteer for what it sportingly called a secret mission, and they found themselves at HMS Vernon learning to take mines apart by hand.

Mowden, Lancing and the Ice Cream Tricycle

The war soon outgrew one building. Mowden School on the Droveway in Hove, whose pupils had been evacuated to Northamptonshire, was taken in early 1940 and became the first stage of the course.

Lancing College, evacuated to Shropshire that summer, followed at the end of the year, and its first division passed out on 27 February 1941. The three sites were known as King Alfred (M), (L) and (H), and the usual route, from about 1941, was two weeks at Mowden, six at Lancing and four at Hove.

By then most of the trainees were not yachtsmen but serving ratings, known as CW candidates, who had done at least three months at sea and been picked out as officer material, along with young men of the Y Scheme recruited straight from school. This was the part of the business that Admiral Stark of the United States Navy called "Britain's greatest experiment in democracy".

From July 1941 they reported to Mowden, where the Admiralty Selection Board sat in the school library, Vice-Admiral R. C. Davenport presiding from that October until 1946. One eighteen-year-old was asked if he knew the lower deck saying "one hand for yourself and one for the King".

He replied that he knew it as one hand for yourself and one for the Navy, but that if the weather was too rough it was both hands for yourself, and the Board laughed. Kenneth More, interviewed earlier at Portsmouth, where the actor Robert Newton had already made himself a nuisance, met an admiral who was less amused: "Oh God, not another bloody actor."

The candidates who passed swapped their cap tallies for white cap bands, which they could lose at any moment. The great fear was not of failing the examinations but of being found short of OLQ, officer-like qualities, or worse, of showing LDA, lower deck attitude.

Nobody could quite say what either of them was, which was what made them so alarming. One divisional officer was never seen without a notebook, and the belief was that each time your name went in it your commission grew more distant.

Lancing was bitterly cold, the chapel singing was tremendous, and the navigation was remarkable. Trainees learned to follow a course on the cricket pitch by pedalling a Wall's ice cream tricycle fitted with a compass on the front and a small mast for signal flags, a method borrowed from the Fleet Air Arm.

At one stage the syllabus allowed 52 hours for navigation, 38 for seamanship and 20 for pilotage, and there was real boatwork as well: whalers at Portslade, ship handling at Newhaven, and a small fleet of yachts and auxiliary boats in the Shoreham canal.

One seamanship instructor, a dour former Merchant Service man, opened his lectures in 1942 with the words, "Gentlemen, there are two ways of doing a job at sea, the correct way and the Royal Navy way. Unfortunately it is my duty to teach you the Royal Navy way."

The best remembered of the instructors was Chief Petty Officer Vass, who stayed throughout the war. His gas-mask drill consisted of shutting a class in a shed full of gas and remarking, "Gentlemen, we shall now see if these bloody gas-masks work properly," before leaving them to it.

A King, a Playwright and the Captain of the Endurance

King George VI came on 29 May 1941, in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet, and inspected both Lancing and Hove. The visit was supposedly secret, though a local newsagent mentioned it to one cadet the night before.

In a chart plotting class a man who had seen plenty of service at sea but struggled with the paperwork sat himself just inside the door, sure that the King would make for the bright sparks at the front. The King went straight to him, read the question, picked up the parallel rulers, drew half a dozen lines and said, "I think that is the course for your convoy."

Noel Coward came to dinner that August and went on stage afterwards, and Vera Lynn and Stanley Holloway were among the others who entertained the Thursday concerts, first organised by Peter Scott.

The cadets produced a song of their own, about the "Wavy Navy", named for the wavy gold stripes on an RNVR officer's cuff: "Our stripes may be crooked, but our characters straight." The staff included some remarkable people.

From April to June 1942 one of the officers doing a short stint on the staff was Commander Frank Worsley, who had commanded Shackleton's Endurance and navigated the open boat James Caird some 800 miles to South Georgia in 1916. Any cadet troubled by his sextant might have reflected on the conditions in which Worsley had last needed his.

The torpedo instructor in 1940, meanwhile, was a former circus clown who could also play the trombone.

In August 1942 Lancing took on an extra job when Les Fusiliers Mont-Royal of the Canadian Army used it as a staging point for the Dieppe raid. They mustered on the Tower Quad in the early hours of 19 August and embarked in landing craft from the beaches below.

Where They Went

The men who came out of Hove went everywhere. By the end of the war they were an overwhelming majority of the Navy's officers: over 80 per cent by one reckoning and 88 per cent by another. They served in corvettes, minesweeping trawlers and landing craft, and in time commanded submarines, as HMS Storm (P233) records.

Their luck varied. Sub-Lieutenant R. G. Robinson was taken off HMS Hood with a perforated ulcer just before she sailed for the last time.

The shore establishment also has one of the most entertaining lists of former pupils in the Navy: Alec Guinness, Michael Hordern, Donald Sinden and Donald Hewlett among the actors, along with Kenneth More, Jon Pertwee and Peter Bull, as well as the broadcaster Richard Baker and the twins Norris and Ross McWhirter, later of the Guinness Book of Records. Norris McWhirter's intake is a reminder that it was not a formality.

Of 140 carefully selected entrants who started together in 1943, he noted, only sixty passed out. By 1944 officers were needed in smaller numbers and the course had grown harder, and one division that year started with 110 men and finished with about 60.

Those who did pass out received their commissions at a parade in the main hall of the old swimming baths, usually before an admiral, and were then sent on to Greenwich as Acting Temporary Probationary Sub-Lieutenants, a title which left little room for conceit. About 2,300 of those trained at King Alfred were decorated, and about 600 were killed.

Back to the Swimming

Captain Pelly did not quite see the end of it. He died suddenly on 6 June 1945, on duty at Hove, aged 57, and his coffin was carried on a gun carriage along the Kingsway to the building he had run for nearly six years. The Times spoke of his "genial and strong personality".

Captain Cuthbert Coppinger took over for the winding down. On 5 September Admiral of the Fleet Sir Andrew Cunningham unveiled a plaque recording that 22,500 officers had trained there; the fuller count made it 22,508, from the whole Empire and from Allied nations besides. The last commissions at Hove were handed out in December.

In January 1946 the name moved to Exbury House near Southampton, and the Hove building was handed back to the council in time for Admiral Sir Geoffrey Layton to reopen it that August. The town had by then been calling it King Alfred for so long that the Admiralty gave permission to keep the name, and it carries it still as the King Alfred Leisure Centre.

A replica of the ship's bell reminds the swimmers of it. The Navy reused the name too. In 1994 a new Royal Naval Reserve training centre at Whale Island in Portsmouth became HMS King Alfred, a second ship of the name that would never go to sea, in succession to one that had been built to hold the water on the inside.