HMS Vernon: The Torpedo School That Became a Shopping Centre

Born Afloat, in the Shadow of Jacky Fisher

HMS Vernon began life in 1872 as a torpedo and mining school, a tender to the gunnery establishment HMS Excellent, based aboard the hulk of an old 50 gun fourth rate frigate that had herself been named Vernon back in 1832.

The man generally credited with getting the school off the ground was Commander John Fisher, later the formidable First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher, who ran torpedo and mine training at Excellent in the early 1870s.

Vernon became an independent command in her own right on 26 April 1876, moored in Fountain Lake in Portsmouth Harbour, her floating complex gradually growing over the following decades to include the former frigate Ariadne, the workshop vessel Actaeon, the two decker Donegal, the mighty 121 gun Marlborough, and by 1904 the pioneering ironclad HMS Warrior herself, pressed into service as a floating workshop, power plant and wireless telegraphy school.

It was a notably eclectic flotilla of retired Victorian warships doing quiet, technical work far removed from the glory of the battle line.

One of them is still here. HMS Warrior had been the most powerful warship in the world in 1861 and was obsolete within a decade, and she spent her Vernon years generating electricity for a torpedo school. It was the least glamorous imaginable use of a revolutionary ship, and it is also the reason she survived: a hulk with a job does not get scrapped, and every other ship in that flotilla went for scrap in the mid 1920s. She is moored today a few hundred yards across the water from where Vernon stood, restored and open to visitors.

Coming Ashore

The gradual move from ship to shore began after the First World War, with the Mining School relocating first to the old Gunwharf site by 1919, the Torpedo and Electrical Schools following soon after.

On 1 October 1923 the establishment was formally reconstituted as a shore base, HMS Vernon, Gunwharf, Portsmouth, and the old hulks that had carried the name for so long were sold for scrap over the following two years, bringing more than half a century of floating tradition quietly to an end.

Teaching the Fleet to Fight With Torpedoes and Mines

Vernon's original purpose was training sailors in the use of the newly adopted Whitehead torpedo, with around thirteen hundred men passing through every year, able seamen completing a four month course before earning the coveted Torpedoman's badge and a corresponding rise in pay, with mandatory refresher courses every three years given how quickly the technology kept moving.

Over time the establishment grew into the Royal Navy's principal centre for mine warfare doctrine and training too, covering contact, magnetic, acoustic and pressure mines, and running courses that stretched from new ratings up to commanding officers, including the demanding cross tide navigation and probability theory needed to sweep influence minefields safely.

A dedicated squadron of Ton class minesweepers and minehunters operated out of Vernon, pioneering new minehunting equipment and remote mine destruction systems, and reportedly among the first small ships in the fleet to use satellite navigation.

The Mine That Changed the War

Vernon's most consequential single achievement came early in the Second World War. On 23 November 1939, a team led by Lieutenant Commander John Ouvry, together with Lieutenant J. E. M. Glenny, Chief Petty Officer C. E. Baldwin and Able Seaman A. L. Vearncombe, recovered and made safe an intact German magnetic mine from the mudflats at Shoeburyness, the first of its kind to fall into British hands.

The intelligence this dangerous piece of work provided allowed rapid development of degaussing and related techniques to protect ships against magnetic mines, and King George VI personally decorated the team on 19 December 1939, in what are recorded as the first Royal Navy decorations awarded during the entire war.

How They Actually Did It

The method is worth setting out, because it explains what the decorations were for. The mine was a magnetic weapon lying in mud, which meant that steel tools were not merely unhelpful but potentially fatal. Two brass fittings on the casing plainly had to come off. So the party took a rubbing of them, sent it to an army workshop nearby, and had a set of non-magnetic tools made up on the spot to fit fittings nobody had ever seen before.

Then they split into two. One pair went forward to the mine and began taking it apart. The other pair stayed back at what was optimistically called a safe distance and wrote down every single move the first pair made, in order, as they made it. The purpose of the notes was not record keeping. It was so that if the mine detonated, the next team sent out to the next one would know exactly which action had killed the first.

It did not detonate. The mine went back to Vernon in pieces, and the man who turned those pieces into a countermeasure was Commander Charles Goodeve RNVR, a Canadian chemist in the naval reserve working at the establishment, whose answer was degaussing: running a current through a cable wrapped round a ship's hull to cancel out her magnetic signature. A rubbing of two brass screws in a Thames mudflat led, within months, to a fleet that magnetic mines could no longer see.

A Price Paid at Home

The work was not without real danger closer to home, either.

On 6 August 1940, a booby trapped German mine detonated while being stripped down in the mining shed at Vernon itself, killing five men: Commissioned Gunner Reginald Cook, Petty Officer Cecil Fletcher and three able seamen, a sober reminder that the same skill being celebrated in Parliament and the press carried a real and continuing cost for those who practised it.

The three able seamen had names, and there is no good reason to leave them out: William B. Croake, William J. Stearns and Alfred E. Stevens. It was a Tuesday morning, and they were killed in a shed in the middle of a working naval establishment by a weapon designed by somebody who had anticipated exactly what they were about to do to it.

Mine examination work was subsequently moved to a disused chalk quarry near Buriton, nicknamed HMS Mirtle, for safety.

Portsmouth's heavy wartime bombing also forced much of Vernon's own work to disperse, with the main torpedo, mining and electrical school relocating to Roedean School for Girls in Brighton from May 1941 until June 1945, and further outstations established at Havant, Brixham and Helensburgh on the Clyde.

The Roedean posting has generated one of the most durable stories in the Royal Navy, and it is worth separating the true half from the invented one. The true half is that the study bedrooms of a girls' boarding school came fitted with a bell push beside each bed, and the label under the button read ring for mistress. The Navy did not remove them.

The invented half, told in every wardroom since, is that the first intake of sailors pressed every button in the building and kept pressing until an extremely unamused chief petty officer arrived to explain the position. The accounts that repeat the yarn also point out that the dates do not work. The bell pushes were real. The night of ringing was not.

The Brixham outstation matters far more than its billing suggests. It was there, as Vernon(D), that the P Parties were trained: Naval Parties 1571 to 1575 and 3006, formed to go into the European ports after D-Day and clear them of German ordnance, mines and booby traps so that the Allied armies could actually be supplied through them. That work ran through to 1945 and is where clearance diving as a distinct trade in the Royal Navy genuinely begins, six years before anybody got round to founding a school for it.

One frequently repeated claim, that a raid on the main Portsmouth site itself destroyed a building called Dido and killed around a hundred personnel, could not be independently corroborated in the sources checked and should be treated as unverified rather than settled fact.

The Home of Naval Diving

Responsibility for naval diving transferred to Vernon's Torpedo Branch on 1 October 1944, and a dedicated Clearance Diving School was formally established there in 1951, unifying training for deep sea and clearance divers alike.

Divers working from the diving support ship HMS Reclaim set genuine deep diving records from Vernon's era, Petty Officer Wilfred Bollard reaching 535 feet in June 1948 and Lieutenant George Wookey reaching 600 feet in October 1956, extraordinary depths for the diving equipment of the day.

The human scale of all this is best measured in decorations. In the Second World War alone, personnel trained at or through Vernon were credited with 23 George Crosses and at least 134 George Medals for bomb and mine disposal, a tally the establishment's own historians reckon matched the other two services combined. The mine and bomb disposal work went on long after 1945, through Suez, the Falklands and the Iran Iraq Tanker War, and brought its own separate list of decorations, but the wartime figure is the one that stops people in their tracks, and it is a wartime figure rather than a career total.

One man is worth singling out. Robert Selby Armitage holds both the George Cross and the George Medal, which only eight people have ever managed, and he earned them both on bomb and mine disposal. John Mould, posted to Vernon in March 1941, is another of the eight. Two of the eight people in the history of the awards to hold that combination came through one establishment on the edge of Portsmouth Harbour, which says something about the nature of the work being taught there.

It is all the same institutional habit: sending people very carefully into places that would kill them, and writing down what happened. The record dives from HMS Reclaim (A231) and the Ton class minesweepers working out of Vernon through the Cold War were the peacetime continuation of what the P Parties had done in the ports of Europe, and of what the men in the mining shed had been doing when it killed them.

It is worth noting for anyone wondering whether the name lives on: naval diving training today is delivered by the Defence Diving School at Horsea Island, administratively under HMS Collingwood, and no evidence could be found that the specific title HMS Vernon Diving remains in current active use.

Closure and a New Life as Gunwharf Quays

HMS Vernon ceased to exist as an independent command on 31 March 1986, absorbed for a time into HMS Nelson, and her remaining functions were gradually wound down through the 1990s, diving training moving to the new Defence Diving School in September 1995 and mine warfare training to HMS Dryad that November, before the site finally closed its gates for the last time on 1 April 1996.

The thirty two acre site was sold on and redeveloped from 1998 by the Berkeley Festival Waterfront Company into Gunwharf Quays, the shopping and leisure development that stands there today, complete with the landmark Spinnaker Tower, which was meant to be finished in 2003 and in the event opened on 18 October 2005, five years late and some £11 million over budget, with Portsmouth City Council obliged to put £11.1 million of its own money into a £35.6 million tower. On the opening day the council's own project manager was trapped in the external glass lift thirty metres up for more than an hour and had to be reached by abseiling engineers, which is either an embarrassment or an omen, depending on temperament.

A handful of genuine heritage survives amid the shops: the Grade II listed Vulcan Building, which actually predates Vernon herself, having been built as an ordnance storehouse in the early 1810s, along with the old main gate, administration building and infirmary, now repurposed as pubs and apartments, and a Mark 8 torpedo and Mark 17 moored mine still on public display.

It is worth knowing how far that building predates everything around it. Its foundation stone was laid by the Duke of Clarence, later William IV and known to the fleet ever after as the Sailor King, on 28 November 1811, and when the complex was finished in 1814 it was among the largest storehouses the Board of Ordnance possessed anywhere outside Chatham. It was built to hold guns and powder, it spent the twentieth century holding torpedoes and mines, and it now holds flats.

There is a certain symmetry in how it ended. Vernon began in 1872 as a tender to HMS Excellent, borrowing a corner of somebody else's establishment to teach a technology nobody yet took seriously. It spent the next century becoming the most technically demanding school in the Royal Navy, and then it was taken apart and parcelled out among its neighbours: the diving to Horsea Island under HMS Collingwood, the mine warfare to HMS Dryad, the shore commitments to HMS Nelson. It started as somebody else's tender and finished as everybody else's inheritance. The name went; the trades did not.

In 2022, following a public fundraising campaign that raised over a quarter of a million pounds, a dedicated Mine Warfare and Diving Monument, a bronze sculpture depicting divers and a moored mine set in a seawater pool, was formally dedicated on the site, the only national memorial to the Royal Navy's mine warfare community and a fitting acknowledgement of just how much quiet, dangerous work was once carried out where shoppers now walk.