Ahoy there!
We’ve seen before how the University of Southampton was founded by a bequest from Henry Robinson Hartley. Today we’re going to look at a college which grew out of the university, and then became part of another one.
Hartley died in 1850, but his bequest was not finally clear of the courts until 1858, and the town could then think how to create the institution he had suggested. The advice of the government was sought, and in April 1859 Professor Lyon Playfair – secretary to the Department of Science – proposed that the new institution should include a school of trade and navigation. His argument was reported in the Hampshire Advertiser on 15 May 1858:
Did the council listen to this advice? They did not. And so the Hartley Institute – the nascent University of Southampton – did not have a school of navigation.
Or not yet anyway. In 1909 Captain Gilchrist opened the South of England Navigation School to prepare students for the Board of Trade’s maritime examinations. And in 1932, the school – now known as Gilchrist’s Navigation School – was incorporated into University College Southampton as the Department of Nautical Training. At a celebratory luncheon with the Southampton Master Mariners’ Club, the university college principal Kenneth Vickers said that “it was preposterous to think that a university was going to teach a man his practical job when he got to it.”
The department taught the theoretical foundations of navigation and seamanship, enabling its students to progress to apprenticeships on merchant vessels and, in due course, to take the exams to become qualified second mates.
In the second world war the school continued to train sailors for the merchant marine, but also taught for the navies of the allied countries. It moved in 1942 to Warsash, a site further down the Solent, which was shared with a Royal Navy training site teaching the use of landing craft. (Fun fact: Royal Navy land bases are called HMS – HMS being His Majesty’s Ship. In this case the base was called HMS Tormentor.)
After the war HMS Tormentor was decommissioned, but its site and buildings were added to the school of navigation. And by the late 1950s new accommodation was built at the school, to replace the WW2 pre-fabs. And it is the design for this that you can see on the card.
In 1970 the school ceased to be part of the University of Southampton. My guess is that this was related to how technical education was funded: this would have been a move into local authority control. And in 1984 the school merged with the Southampton College of Technology, forming the Southampton Institute of Higher Education. And this in time became what is now Southampton Solent University, but more of that another time.
The school is now known as the Warsash Maritime Academy, and operates both from a city centre site and, I think, in part still from the waterside site at Warsash. There’s a fabulous site maintained by alumni which includes memories from former students – well worth a browse when you have a little time to spare.
The card was written and posted on Wednesday 18 May 1966. Very unusually, it is a typed message. A busy senior staff member, perhaps, who had access to secretarial support?
And here’s a jigsaw of the postcard – I found it a slightly more challenging one this week. Enjoy!
