This appears to be a view of the first drill ship constructed in 1843 for the 'sea exercises' of boys of the Greenwich Hospital School, in front of the Queen's House, which is seen in the background with the Observatory beyond. According to Dorothy McCall (‘When that I was’, Faber and Faber, 1952) she was built for £250 largely by the school carpenters and the boys, under the direction of Lt John Wood Rouse, Lieutenant-Superintendent of industrial training at the School, using old timber from the Hospital and redundant ship parts from Chatham Dockyard.

She was modelled on a naval brig but ship-rigged, as shown here with the boys 'manning the yards'. The immediate site, also shown here, was then surrounded by walls. These had enclosed the girls' play area of the School - they being resident in the Queen's House until girls' education was discontinued in 1841. Turner says the figurehead was the lion from Anson's 'Centurion' but, although that certainly fell to pieces in the School grounds after removal from the Anson Ward of the Hospital, this was probably in the late 1860s and is not shown here (it was certainly very much larger).

The surrounding walls were taken down in 1861 and this ship demolished about the same time, as beyond repair, and replaced after a short interval by a second version. This too had only a brief life and was replaced by the third, called 'Fame', in 1872-73. The best-built (by Green's of Blackwall, the last great builders of Indiamen), she lasted until demolished after the (by then) Royal Hospital School left for Holbrook, Suffolk, in 1933, though de-rigged for safety by the 1920s. Her beak and figurehead of Fame with a trumpet survive, dramatically mounted (and recently restored, 2008) on the south end of the School rifle range at Holbrook, looking out over the playing fields and River Stour. All three of these ships are sometimes called 'Fame' but that was only the name of the last. The first was intended to be called 'Princess Royal', but with the second (name, if any, unknown) seems more generally to have been just called 'the ship'.


The image here is one of many designs published by Rock & Co. as illustrated headed notepaper.