HMNB Devonport - History

History

In 1588, the ships of the English Navy set sail for the Spanish Armada through the mouth of the River Plym, thereby establishing the military presence in Plymouth. Sir Francis Drake is now an enduring legacy in Devonport, as the naval base has been named HMS Drake.

In 1689 Prince William of Orange became William III and almost immediately he required the building of a new dockyard. The town of Plymouth he dismissed as inadequate. Edmund Dummer a Naval Officer travelled the West Country searching for an area where a dockyard could be built; he sent in two estimates for sites, one in Plymouth, Cattewater and one further along the coast, on the Hamoaze, a section of the River Tamar, in the parish of Stoke Damerel. On 30 December 1690, a contract was let for a dockyard to be built in the Hamoaze area, which was the start of the Devonport Royal Dockyards.

At Devonport, Dummer was the designer of the first successful stepped stone dry dock in Europe. Previously the Navy Board had relied upon timber as the major building material, which resulted in high maintenance costs and was also a fire risk. The docks Dummer designed were stronger with more secure foundations and stepped sides that made it easier for men to work beneath the hull of a docked vessel. These innovations also allowed rapid erection of staging and greater workforce mobility. He discarded the earlier three-sectioned hinged gate, which was labour intensive in operation, and replaced it with the simpler and more mobile two-sectioned gate. He wished to ensure that naval dockyards were efficient working units that maximized available space, as evidenced by the simplicity of his design layout for Devonport (which then was known as Plymouth Dock, not to be confused with the nearby town of Plymouth). He introduced a centralized storage area and a logical positioning of buildings, and his double rope-house combined the previously separate tasks of spinning and laying while allowing the upper floor to be used for the repair of sails.

The nearby Royal William Victualling Yard was established in Stonehouse in the mid 18th century for supplying the Royal Navy but is no longer in military use and is now open to the public.