ABSTRACT
The navy, therefore, must take its boys at the age when they leave the preparatory school; that is, at 12 or 13, at which age the boys should enter the Britannia, where they should remain for not less than four years. In the days when Britannia ruled the waves, a naval officer was a gentleman with a passport round the world. To get boys into the navy, therefore, preoccupied many preparatory schools in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Radical change occurred at Portsmouth royal naval college in 1837–38 when the Admiralty, in order to meet the problem of a surplus of junior naval officers, turned the College into a kind of ‘in-service training’ institution for ‘mates’ for the next twenty years. Instead of being pitch-forked into service at sea at the age of thirteen, the future naval officer was to receive his theoretical and practical training on board the two-decker HMS Illustrious under captain Robert Harris.
