A whole lotta history!

Our team had a great afternoon tour of the yard with local historian Janie Dymock recently. We spent over two and a half hours walking the site and could have stayed talking for much longer – the yard is just teeming with history! Here’s some of our favourite facts we learned along the way…

1. The area where Royal William Yard now stands was once just a hillside of land. The yard as we know it was in fact excavated out of the land in 1825 - 1827 by British convicts. Over 370,000 tons of limestone, rock and dirt was removed to level the land, making way for the victualing yard. If you look at the slightly curved wall at the back of the yard, you can see just how much of the land has been removed – fascinating!

2. The limestone excavated from the site was used for the buildings in the yard, with Cornish Granite imported for the more ornate finishings.

3. The lookout point behind Residence One (now a boutique hotel owned by Bistrot Pierre) once had its own lookout tower. The tower was dismantled and re-built on the other side of the Tamar and can now be found at Mount Edgecumbe country park as a folly.

4. Melville was the second building completed in 1827 and would have been the nerve centre of the victualling yard where all money was exchanged and business accounted for. The Admiral’s boardroom, overlooking the harbour was the perfect location for naval clerks and administrators to oversee the work being carried out in the yard below.

5. The Melville clock was designed by the Queen’s clock maker, Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy who also went on to draw up the specification for Big Ben. Surprisingly, the pendulum in the Royal William Yard clock is longer at 14ft, compared to Big Ben’s 13ft!

6. The clock at Melville is made up of 1093 separate components. The person assigned each year to wind up the clock was paid just ￡6 annually. It was said that at one time, all Plymouth kept time by the chime of the Royal William Yard clock.

7. Charles Darwin’s ship, The Beagle was refitted in Plymouth’s Devonport dockyard and moored in Barn Pool for over three months, overlooked by Royal William Yard. During Darwin’s stay, he visited the yard regularly and also enjoyed fossil hunting at West Hoe.

8. There is in fact a 400 million year old angel wing brachiopod fossil that can be found on the yard if you have a keen eye (and a lot of time to search!) Alternatively, contact Janie for a private tour – well worth it for this and her general wealth of knowledge about Plymouth and the yard!

9. Despite Plymouth taking a devastating hit during World War Two, Royal William Yard surprisingly survived completely unscathed.

10. During the 70s and early 80’s, Number Two Raiding Squadron occupied the Brewhouse which was used to repair and store torpedoes. It is said that the torpedo that took out the Belgrano in WW2 was worked on here. The Belgrano was the only ship to have been sunk during military operations by a nuclear-powered submarine.

?For more information on yard History, download the fantastic History Brochure from the Royal William Yard website.