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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.