HMS St Vincent: Gosport's Other Boys' Training School

Named for a Victory Off Portugal

HMS St Vincent takes its name from Admiral John Jervis, who became the first Earl St Vincent after leading the Royal Navy to a decisive victory over a much larger Spanish fleet off Cape St Vincent, Portugal, in 1797, a battle that also made a name for a young Horatio Nelson serving under him.

It is worth knowing what Nelson actually did on 14 February 1797, because it is the single most insubordinate act in his career and it worked. Jervis had fifteen ships of the line against something close to twice that number, and as the Spanish fleet split he ordered his line to tack in succession, which is the correct and orderly manoeuvre and would have been too slow to stop the two halves rejoining.

Nelson, in Captain and near the rear, pulled out of the line without orders, turned across the front of the Spanish, and blocked them on his own. He then boarded one Spanish ship and, from her deck, boarded a second alongside her, a manoeuvre the fleet cheerfully christened Nelson's Patent Bridge for Boarding First Rates.

Jervis, who was not a sentimental man, could have had him court-martialled for leaving the line and instead backed him publicly. He was made Earl St Vincent for the victory, and his own name went on to a destroyer of the Second World War: HMS Jervis fought through the Mediterranean and came out the other side without losing a man to enemy action.

The name had already been attached to a genuine warship long before it reached Gosport, an imposing 120-gun first-rate ship of the line launched in 1815, which was placed on harbour service in 1841 and repurposed as a training ship for boy sailors from 1862, continuing in that role until she was finally sold in 1906.

It Was a Marines Barracks First

The Gosport site had a life of more than a century before the Navy put this name on it. Forton Barracks was built in 1807, at the height of the war with France, and it belonged to the Royal Marines. Generations of Marines were quartered, trained and paraded there while Nelson was still alive and for a hundred and sixteen years afterwards.

They left on 1 August 1923, moving across the harbour to Eastney, and the barracks stood empty for four years. It reopened after essential repairs and was commissioned as HMS St Vincent on 1 June 1927.

That is why the place looks the way it does, and it is worth knowing when looking at photographs of it. The handsome Georgian frontage was not built for boy sailors. It was built for a Marine garrison in the Napoleonic wars, and the Navy simply moved in.

A Shore School for Gosport's Boys

The shore establishment that inherited the name opened at Gosport in 1927, training boy sailors in much the same tradition as the better known HMS Ganges at Shotley in Suffolk, the two establishments effectively operating as sister schools turning teenage recruits into sailors through the middle decades of the twentieth century.

What that actually meant is worth setting out, because boy service has no modern equivalent. Boys joined at fifteen or sixteen, signed on for twelve years that did not begin to count until their eighteenth birthday, and were taught seamanship, signals, gunnery, knots, boat work and drill in an environment of relentless discipline. They were paid a fraction of a rating's wage, marched everywhere, and were subject to physical punishment that the Navy did not abolish until well into the century.

For a great many of them it was also a considerable step up. A boy from a mining village or a city back street got three meals a day, clothing, a trade and a future, and the letters home from these establishments are full of astonishment at the food.

St Vincent and HMS Ganges ran the same system at opposite ends of the country, and the two are usually spoken of in the same breath by the men who went through them.

HMS St Vincent continued this role for over four decades, closing at the very end of the 1960s, with the exact year recorded slightly differently across different sources, a small discrepancy that seems fitting for an establishment whose more famous Suffolk counterpart tends to dominate popular memory of Royal Navy boy training.

The Six Years When There Were No Boys At All

There is a whole chapter between 1927 and the 1960s that usually gets left out, and it is the most interesting thing that ever happened there.

In 1939 the boys were evacuated. Gosport sits between a naval base, a submarine base and an airfield, and it was going to be bombed, so the boy seamen were moved to HMS St George on the Isle of Man, about as far from the Luftwaffe as anywhere in Britain.

What moved in behind them was the Fleet Air Arm. St Vincent spent the war as a training establishment for naval aircrew, putting men through their initial training before they went on to fly. A torpedo training section opened on 22 July 1940.

So for six years the parade ground at Forton was full of trainee naval airmen rather than fifteen-year-olds, and a good number of the men who flew Swordfish, Albacores, Seafires and Barracudas off British carriers began the process in a Napoleonic barracks in Gosport. It reverted to boy seamen on 1 December 1945.

A Name That Outlived the Navy's Use of It

Gosport today is home to St Vincent College, a further education and sixth form college whose name is a direct and deliberate echo of the naval establishment that once stood in the town, a nice piece of continuity even where the exact physical relationship between the old naval site and the modern college campus is not always straightforward to trace.

The uncertainty about the closing date has a tidy explanation, and it is that two different things happened four months apart. The establishment was officially closed on 8 December 1968. The White Ensign was not lowered for the last time until 2 April 1969, and the site was sold to developers the day after that.

So a source describing the administrative decision gives 1968 and a source describing the last morning gives 1969, and both are correct. It is worth pausing on the second of those dates. Lowering the ensign is the moment a naval establishment stops existing, and after forty-two years and a great many thousand boys, somebody did it for the last time on a spring morning in April and everybody went home.

Most of the historic buildings were demolished in the years that followed. St Vincent Secondary School opened on the site in 1975 and St Vincent Sixth Form College in 1987, and the two eventually became the college that stands there now.

It is a quieter, less documented story than some of the Royal Navy's grander shore establishments, but no less a part of the pattern by which the Navy spent much of the twentieth century turning teenage boys from across Britain into professional sailors, one training establishment at a time.

There is a wider point about Gosport that this establishment sits inside. Within about two miles of Forton, the Royal Navy also ran HMS Dolphin, the home of the submarine service and its escape training tank, HMS Sultan, where it taught marine and air engineering, and Royal Hospital Haslar, the naval hospital that had been mending sailors since the eighteenth century.

Add the dockyard and the barracks across the water in Portsmouth and you have, in a couple of square miles, the place where the Royal Navy recruited, trained, doctored, armed and buried its people for the better part of two hundred years. Almost all of it has now gone or changed use, and St Vincent is the pattern in miniature: a Marine barracks, then a boys' school, then an aircrew school, then a boys' school again, and now a college.

The name has proved the most durable thing about it. Forton Barracks lasted a hundred and sixteen years and its name is gone. St Vincent lasted forty-two and is still on the gate.