HMS Raleigh: The Front Door to a Career in the Royal Navy

Built in a Hurry, Days Before War

Construction began on the Trevol site near Torpoint, Cornwall, part of the historic Antony Estate overlooking the River Lynher, on 24 August 1939, mere days before Britain declared war on Germany.

The new establishment was commissioned as HMS Raleigh on 9 January 1940 under the authority of the recently passed Military Training Act, Britain's first peacetime conscription law, and its original purpose was to train new entrants, initially drawing heavily on merchant navy volunteers, in basic seamanship, gunnery and signals.

Conditions in these earliest months were suitably austere, wooden single-storey huts, drill sheds and a bare parade ground, processing around three hundred new recruits every week.

Three hundred a week is the figure that explains the huts. Britain had passed the Military Training Act in May 1939 and was about to need sailors in numbers the peacetime Navy had no way of producing, so the requirement was not a handsome establishment but a very large through-put of men, starting immediately. Wooden huts go up in days. Anything better does not.

The site itself was chosen for the same practical reason. Torpoint sits directly across the Tamar from HMNB Devonport, which meant recruits could be walked off the ferry and into the dockyard, and the ships they were going to needed no more than an afternoon to reach.

Like most Royal Navy shore establishments, Raleigh took its name from an earlier commissioned warship, in this case a Hawkins-class cruiser wrecked off Labrador in 1922, which itself honoured the Elizabethan explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, a West Country figure whose seafaring and privateering reputation made him a fitting namesake for a training base so close to Plymouth.

There is a small awkwardness in the choice which nobody in the Navy seems ever to have minded. Sir Walter Raleigh was a soldier, courtier, coloniser, poet and privateer who spent thirteen years in the Tower under a death sentence and was finally beheaded at Whitehall in 1618 on the old treason conviction, essentially to placate the Spanish. Naming the place where every British sailor learns to obey orders after a man executed by his own sovereign is a choice with a certain amount of character in it.

Two ships carried the name before the establishment did. HMS Raleigh (1873) was a Victorian frigate built for showing the flag rather than fighting in the line, and HMS Raleigh (96) was the Hawkins-class cruiser that ran ashore in fog off Labrador in 1922 and stayed there. The shore establishment has now held the name for longer than either of them.

A Bombing That Cost Sixty-Five Lives

HMS Raleigh's darkest day came on 28 April 1941, during the Plymouth Blitz, when a German bomb struck an air raid shelter on the base, killing forty-four sailors and twenty-one Royal Engineers who were reportedly there preparing assault boats for the North Africa campaign, sixty-five deaths in total on a single night that also saw roughly a hundred and twenty-three tonnes of explosives fall on Plymouth.

The dead are buried at Horson Cemetery in Torpoint, and the tragedy is still formally commemorated by the base every year, a sober counterweight to the more cheerful passing-out parades the establishment is generally associated with today.

The particulars are worth setting down because the figures are exact and they are all confirmed. A single bomb hit an air raid shelter. Forty-four Royal Navy ratings and twenty-one Royal Engineers were inside it. Around a hundred and twenty-three aircraft dropped roughly the same number of tonnes of explosive on Plymouth that night.

An air raid shelter is the one place on a base where everybody is by definition packed together and cannot move, which is why a direct hit on one produces casualty figures a scattered raid never would. The men in it had done exactly what they had been told to do.

Most of the ratings were recruits. They had joined a matter of weeks earlier, had not yet been to sea, and in a good many cases had never seen a warship. Horson Cemetery in Torpoint holds seventy-four service personnel in all, and the majority of them died on that one night.

In 1944 the entire base was handed over to the United States Navy as a marshalling and embarkation centre for troops bound for the Normandy landings, before being returned to Royal Navy control that July.

That handover is easy to read past and it was a considerable thing. For several months in 1944 a Royal Navy training establishment in Cornwall was an American camp, because the south-west of England had effectively become a marshalling yard for the invasion of France and every hard standing, hut and slipway between Falmouth and Portland was in use.

The men who went through Raleigh that spring were American soldiers waiting for a landing craft, and a fair number of them did not come back from Normandy. The base was handed back in July, by which time the beachhead was secure and the war had moved on.

Absorbing Other Schools, One by One

HMS Raleigh's postwar role expanded steadily, taking on stoker mechanic training around 1950, Women's Royal Naval Service recruit training and artificer apprentice training through the early 1980s, before male and female basic training were finally merged in 1990.

The base has since absorbed training functions from several other establishments as the Navy rationalised its shore estate, and when HMS Dolphin at Gosport closed as an active submarine base in September 1998, the Royal Navy Submarine School itself followed in December 1999, with staff completing their move to HMS Raleigh at the end of January 2000, giving Cornwall a stake in submariner training that Hampshire had held for nearly a century.

That move mattered a great deal to the people it happened to. HMS Dolphin at Gosport had been the home of the submarine service since 1904, and the escape training tank there was the thing every submariner remembered for the rest of his life. Moving the school to Cornwall ended a ninety-five year association and was not popular.

It was, however, logical. By 2000 the submarine flotilla was concentrated on the Clyde and the surface fleet was split between Portsmouth and Devonport, and keeping a separate submarine school at Gosport meant maintaining an entire establishment for one course. Consolidating it at Raleigh put submariner training alongside everything else.

The Sole Front Door

Since 2007 initial recruit training at HMS Raleigh has run to ten weeks, covering weapons handling, seamanship, firefighting and damage control, first aid and basic navigation, much of it delivered aboard a permanently moored former warship, HMS Brecon, kept specifically for hands-on instruction.

What Ten Weeks Actually Consists Of

The syllabus is worth looking at, because most of it is not what people expect. Weapons handling is on the list and it is a small part of it. The bulk of basic naval training is firefighting, damage control, sea survival and first aid.

The reason is simple and slightly grim. A soldier under fire can lie down, take cover or move. A sailor cannot leave the ship. If something goes wrong at sea, every person aboard is part of the response whatever their trade, so a cook, a writer and a marine engineer all have to be able to fight a fire in a compartment full of smoke, shore up a bulkhead, and get somebody out of the water. That is why recruits spend so much of ten weeks wet, or in smoke, or both.

The ship they learn a good deal of it on is HMS Brecon, a Hunt-class minehunter now moored permanently at Torpoint as a training hull. She has her own place in the record: she was the first Royal Navy warship to be commanded by a woman.

The base is officially described as the largest Royal Navy training establishment in the South West, and in a remarkably significant and very recent development, a training reorganisation completed in June 2026 made HMS Raleigh the single starting point for every recruit joining the Royal Navy, officers included, with future officer cadets now completing their ten-week initial training here before moving on to Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth for their commissioning course, rather than starting their careers at Dartmouth alone as had long been traditional.

It is a striking piece of levelling, in career terms at least, for an establishment thrown up in a matter of weeks back in 1939, that it should end up, eighty-odd years later, as the one place every single sailor and officer in the modern Royal Navy has in common.

It is worth being clear about how large a break with practice that is. For essentially the whole of the Royal Navy's modern history, an officer and a rating did not share a single day of training. Officers went to Dartmouth and ratings went somewhere else, and the two systems were deliberately separate from the first morning to the last.

Under the arrangement completed in June 2026, an officer cadet now does the same ten weeks at Torpoint as the rating who will one day work for them, and only then goes on to Britannia Royal Naval College for the commissioning course. Whatever else it achieves, it means that every person in the Royal Navy has stood on the same parade ground, been shouted at by the same instructors and fought the same fires in the same smoke-filled compartment.

For an establishment thrown up in wooden huts in a fortnight in August 1939, ending up as the single front door to the entire service is a long way to have come.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.