Royal Naval School

The Royal Naval School was an English school that was established in Camberwell, London, in 1833 and then formally constituted by the Royal Naval College Act 1840. It was a charitable institution, established as a boarding school for the sons of officers in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. Many of its pupils achieved prominence in military and diplomatic service. The school closed in 1910.

A purpose-built school building was designed by the architect John Shaw Jr, and opened in about 1844 at New Cross in south-east London (close to Deptford and Greenwich, both areas with strong naval connections). However, the school soon outgrew this building and relocated to Mottingham in 1889. (The building remained in educational use, being sold to the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths for £25,000, and being re-opened by the Prince of Wales in July 1891 as the "Goldsmiths' Technical and Recreative Institute" – more commonly known simply as the "Goldsmiths' Institute". In 1904, it became the main building of Goldsmiths College.)

The Royal Naval School remained at Mottingham (in a building today occupied by Eltham College) until it closed in 1910.

Author Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler was wife to one of the teachers at the Royal Naval School before it closed.

At the same time as the boys' school was founded, in 1840, The Royal Female School for the Daughters of Vocal and Marine Officers was founded 'in a candle-lit, rented house on Richmond Green' which later changed its name to The Royal Naval School or RNS - as it is still known today by its old girls. RNS was due to the inspiration of Admiral Sir Thomas Williams, a Royal Navy officer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who had served with distinction in numerous theatres during the American Revolutionary War, French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. As the dust jacket of the history of the school, published in 1975 states:

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