ABSTRACT
On the great chart of British naval history the subject of officer education and training has been something of a backwater. How those who aspired to the quarterdeck mastered both the rudiments of their profession as fighting seamen, and the broader knowledge required for effective leadership, has attracted little detailed attention. In a sense this is surprising. Officers were and are important people in any military organisation – how they have been selected, trained and educated, and subsequently advanced, promoted and eventually retired, lies at the heart of any successful naval economy. Given that by the end of the seventeenth century the officer corps of the Royal Navy had already taken on a recognisable ethos and that this was refined into the profession at the helm of the world’s most powerful navy, we might have expected education and training to have been analysed more fully. The shortcoming is all the more notable because, as this work will show, some form of official educational provision had been around for more than three centuries and in its various forms has run like embroidered thread through the broader social history of the Service. Yet although several academic theses and learned journal articles have considered aspects of the topic, no dedicated book length study of how officers have been trained and educated has previously been written. Even the principal institutions associated with the task, the training ship HMS Britannia, the various Royal Naval Colleges at Portsmouth, Dartmouth and Greenwich, and the establishments dedicated to technical education, the Royal Naval Engineering Colleges at Keyham (and later Manadon) have attracted relatively little detailed historical attention.
