In 1877, the men who would soon be running the steam engines of the British battle fleet were living inside a beached wooden warship. HMS Marlborough, a three-decker of the line by then well past her sailing days, was moored at Keyham dockyard as a floating dormitory for engineering students. Two years later, work began on a proper shore college on the dockside. For the next century and a bit, the Royal Navy's engineer officers - the men whose job was to keep the empire's warships running, from the last days of sail to the dawn of nuclear propulsion - trained in Plymouth. The institution had three different homes, two different names, and a single, very specific purpose.
Construction of Keyham College began in February 1879 at a cost of 30,000 pounds and the building opened in July 1880 as the Training Schools for Engineer Students. The students moved out of the Marlborough hulk and into proper rooms. The training programme was demanding: five years living at the college, undergoing practical training in the dockyard workshops, then two more years at the Royal Naval College Greenwich, before finally being assigned to ships as Assistant Engineers. The first building held only accommodation. A second was added later, containing lecture theatres, a laboratory, and a gymnasium that was eventually converted into a test engineering shop. A bridge connected the two. Workshops, a covered parade ground, and an 1895-97 extension for 50 more students followed. By the early 1900s, Keyham was producing the engineers who would face the U-boats, the dreadnought arms race, and the long slog of two world wars.
In 1903, the Royal Navy tried to abolish the distinction that Keyham existed to maintain. The Selborne-Fisher scheme was Admiral Sir John Fisher's bold attempt to give all naval officers - engineers and deck officers alike - the same basic training. Engineers, the thinking went, would be socially less segregated, and deck officers would gain enough technical literacy to command the increasingly mechanical ships of the new century. The immediate consequence for Keyham was closure in 1910. It reopened in July 1913. On the outbreak of war the following year, the students were yanked out of their classrooms and sent to serve on warships, and the college turned over to special entry cadet training for the duration. When the war ended, engineer training quietly resumed at Keyham, the Selborne scheme having quietly faded into a less radical reform.
By the late 1930s the dockside site was cramped and outdated, and plans were announced in 1937 to relocate the college to Manadon, a wooded estate a few miles inland with an old manor house at its centre. The new RNEC Manadon opened in May 1940, and almost immediately the Second World War swallowed it whole. The college expanded at frantic wartime pace. By 1945 the grounds held a sprawl of new permanent and temporary buildings, with the original manor house repurposed as staff accommodation. In December 1946 the establishment was commissioned as a shore stone frigate and given the splendidly Victorian name HMS Thunderer. A recreation block followed in 1947, then a major instructional block, boiler house, and factory workshop in 1951.
For roughly half a century, HMS Thunderer produced about 150 Royal Navy engineer officers every year. The graduates ran the engine rooms of conventional carriers, frigates, destroyers, and increasingly through the 1960s and 70s the nuclear-powered submarines that lay at the heart of British deterrence. Alongside the engineers, a small number of seaman branch officers were also read for undergraduate arts degrees at the college - an unusual mix of cap-tally and gown. The list of commanding officers reads like a roll call of twentieth-century naval engineering: Captain Robert Lowry, Rear-Admiral Martyn Jerram, the long roster of Engineer Captains who oversaw the transition from coal to oil to nuclear power. The old Keyham buildings closed in 1958 and were reused briefly as the Dockyard Technical College before being demolished in 1985.
Defence economies finally caught up with HMS Thunderer in the mid-1990s. The final Manadon students completed their third year of BEng and BA degrees at Plymouth University in 1996. In-service first-degree education had already been transferred to the University of Southampton from 1994. The specialist postgraduate work that had been done at Manadon went to HMS Sultan, the engineering school at Gosport, and to HMS Collingwood, the weapons school at Fareham. Artefacts from the instructional blocks and the Wardroom found their way into glass cases at the two surviving schools. The Manadon estate was sold off and is now a quiet Plymouth housing development. The trees of the old manor park still survive, but the lecture rooms that taught a hundred and fifteen years of Royal Navy engineers are gone, replaced by family homes.
The original RNEC Keyham site lay on the Devonport dockside at roughly 50.385 deg N, 4.183 deg W - now built over. RNEC Manadon was further inland on the northern fringe of Plymouth, roughly 50.41 deg N, 4.12 deg W. From the air, neither site is now recognisable as a college; both have been absorbed into modern Plymouth's housing fabric. Best identified by referencing the still-active Devonport naval base immediately to the south. Exeter (EGTE) is the nearest commercial airport.