HMS Conway: Celebrating one of Liverpool’s lost symbols

Aug 10 2009 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

A great Mersey maritime institution has celebrated its 150th anniversary in Liverpool reports Peter Elson

SHE is one of the great lost symbols of Liverpool, along with the Overhead Railway, Green Goddess trams and the Custom House.

When the great old cadet training ship HMS Conway literally hit the rocks while leaving North Wales for a refit in Birkenhead, a part of the city sank with her.

Yet this ageing Nelsonian “wooden walls” ship was in essence just a small portion of a bigger world the public did not see.

HMS Conway was the floating part of a naval college founded in 1859. Although the school housed for most of its life aboard three successive 19th-century wooden sailing warships, it was later relocated ashore.

After HMS Conway (the third to hold the name) was herself wrecked in 1953, the training school continued operating still called Conway, at Plas Newydd, Anglesey, dubbed a “stone frigate”.

From the late 1940s, Army surplus tents had been used to expand the school ashore, later replaced by huts and then a purpose-built college in 1964. Sadly this new investment was not to last.

With the drastic reduction in the British merchant marine through the 1960s, the school finally closed in 1974 when the Government, via Cheshire County Council, withdrew grant aid.

Although it is a century and a half since Conway’s inauguration and 25 since it ceased to operate, nearly 800 old boys and their partners gathered in Liverpool to celebrate the 150th anniversary.

Conway was arguably the UK’s foremost naval cadet training school, its only rival HMS Wellington, on the Thames.

The Conway Club for ex-alumni still thrives, especially on Merseyside. There are around 1,600 Old Conway boys. Several affiliated overseas clubs also exist in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US.

The weekend included special dinners at the Britannia Adelphi Hotel, Liverpool, with a banquet attended by the First Sea Lord, Sir Mark Stanhope.

There was also a visit to the Conway Chapel at Birkenhead Priory, a Liverpool Cathedral service and a wreath laying from a Mersey Ferry in the Sloyne off Rock Ferry, where HMS Conway was anchored until 1941.

After several near bomb misses during the Liverpool Blitz, HMS Conway was moved from her Mersey anchorage in 1941 to the Menai Straits off Bangor.

Amid some controversy she was later she was relocated nearer to Plas Newydd House, where shore facilities were introduced. It was from this more southerly location on the Straits that she made her final voyage.

The school had started in the mid-19th century because of demand for a reliable standard of naval officers.

After several maritime disasters and exposures of malpractice, ship owners fearing government legislation and tighter controls, set up an organisation to train and educate officers properly.

This was done through the Mercantile Marine Service Associations (MMSA), in which Liverpool shipowners had a huge influence.

They were also to be the major beneficiaries of the supply of well-trained cadets coming from the school.

The famous third HMS Conway, still well within living memory, was lent by the Royal Navy to the MMSA in 1875.

Looking like a miniature version of Admiral Lord Nelson’s flagship, HMS Victory, she was a small two-decker, 205ft long, 92-gun, wooden line of battle ship, launched in 1839 as HMS Nile.

She survived many worldwide adventures, including the Crimean War and American Civil War. Nearly a century old, she had a big refit at Birkenhead during 1936-8.

Given a new figurehead representing Nelson, carved by Edward Carter Preston, this was unveiled by the Poet Laureate and former Conway boy, John Masefield.