Other officially issued drinks were tea and cocoa but only as substitutes for cheese: ‘half a pound of Cocoa or a quarter of a pound of Tea, is equal to one pound of Cheese.’50 Since one of the other substitutes for cheese was sugar, it would have been possible for a mess of men to have taken their tea or cocoa sweet, but either drink would have been without milk unless the captain was indulgent enough to allow the crew to keep their own goat on board. To the modern mind, tea and cocoa are odd substitutes for cheese; while it can be seen that there is food value in cocoa, there is none in tea, so one can only conclude that these substitutes were chosen as being roughly equivalent in cost to cheese. Even so, economy prevailed: in 1803, when contemplating a purchase of tea, the Victualling Board discussed the available types of tea and then recommended the cheapest.51 This was not popular, and soon after this decision was made, Lord Keith wrote to report that there had been a murmuring in the fleet’ and that the men had thrown the tea overboard.
Despite being a substitute for cheese, tea and cocoa were generally taken at breakfast, when hot water was available, although some men made themselves a drink called ‘Scotch coffee’ which consisted of burnt biscuit ground up with hot water added.52 Tea was, by this time, a popular breakfast drink on land while cocoa had become not just popular but ultra-fashionable. The only source of supply for tea was the East India Company, which brought it back from China; it was ‘black’ tea, the sort made by fermenting the bruised leaves (of the camellia bush, Camellia sinensis) to allow oxidisation before drying. Cocoa, which is the powdery residue left after cocoa butter has been extracted from the beans of the cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), had been introduced to Europe by the Spanish after Cortes invaded Mexico. Originally found growing wild in Central America and the northern Amazon basin, the cacao tree was successfully cultivated in the West Indies and in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century most of Europe’s supply came from the Caribbean, arriving in solid blocks which had to be pounded into powder by the mess cooks, each taking it in turns to do this job for the whole ship.53 Popular then as now for its comforting nature, cocoa was also rumoured to be an aphrodisiac; it is perhaps best not to enquire too closely into how sailors found this beneficial!
Chapter 2
HOW IT GOT THERE – THE WORK
OF THE VICTUALLING BOARD
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ALL THAT FOOD AND DRINK did not appear on the ships by magic. Although the specific methods by which it arrived could vary, all were organised or controlled by the Victualling Board, which reported to the Board of Admiralty. Victualling had originally been administered by the Surveyor of Victualling; he was replaced in 1683 by the Board of Victualling Commissioners, which continued until 1832 when they were in turn replaced by the Victualling Department.
In its earliest days victualling was dealt with through a system of contracts, whereby the contractor agreed to supply, for a set number of men, the standard provisions at an agreed rate per man per day, delivering these to specific locations. For reasons of quality control and efficiency of operation this system changed over time, until by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 all but the most remote stations were fed under the direct control of the Victualling Board. The supply chain and the delivery chain were separated, with an intervening period when provisions went into Victualling Board warehouses, thus more easily achieving both accounting control and quality control.
HEAD OFFICE ADMINISTRATION
The Victualling Board received its day-to-day instructions from the Board of Admiralty, although many of these, such as instructions to supply victuals to individual ships, had originated with another sub-division, the Navy Board. It also had some dealings with the Sick and Hurt Board,1 in such matters as providing meat to make portable soup, as well as with the Transport Board which arranged ships to send provisions to the British outports and the agents victualler and fleets abroad. The Victualling Board consisted of seven commissioners who met every day except Sunday, the day-to-day work being done by an establishment of clerks in the Victualling Office situated first at Tower Hill and then at Somerset House. This establishment consisted of about seventy people: in the secretary’s department there was the secretary himself, a deputy secretary and up to sixteen clerks; in the cash department there was an accountant for cash, two chief clerks and a total of twenty clerks; in the store department there was one accountant, three chief clerks and up to twenty-four clerks; and finally there was a secretary to the committee of accounts.2 During busy times – that is, those when Britain was at war – ‘extra’ clerks and other staff were taken on.
The chain of supply and delivery started with the Victualling Board receiving an instruction from the Admiralty, telling them the size and localised makeup of the navy for the following year and asking for an estimate of costs. The Victualling Board responded with a detailed figure; for instance, in 1797, the figure given for the following year for 110,000 men was £2,758,268.1.10½.3 The Board of Admiralty, armed with these figures, then added them to the rest of the spending requirements that made up the ‘Naval Estimates’, which went before Parliament.
WORKING CONDITIONS
As the eighteenth century progressed, as well as the move away from direct delivery by contractors to delivery by the Victualling Board itself, the Victualling department manufactured and packed increasing amounts of the food on their own premises. All this required substantial numbers of staff. At the manufacturing yards there were bakers, brewers and butchers; at all of the victualling yards there were storekeepers, ‘hoytakers’ (who organised boats to move provisions from the storehouses to the waiting ships), watchmen and gatekeepers, numerous labourers and not a few rat-catchers. The labourers were mostly paid by the day and engaged as and when needed; most of the other yard workers, as well as all the clerks at the outports and in the office at Somerset House, were engaged on a more permanent basis and, after serving faithfully for a great number of years, were able to retire on a superannuation or pension. With the clerks and the master craftsmen, when anyone retired, everyone below them moved up a step: the second clerk moved into the first clerk’s position, the third into the second’s and so on down the line, until the first extra clerk moved into the lowliest permanent position and the rest of the extra clerks performed the same upward dance. This, until 1800, was done in the same way as officers advanced in the army: except at the highest levels, government offices were a saleable commodity, so when there was a position available, everyone down the line bought the job above them and sold theirs to the person below them.4
Several of the more senior clerks and department heads decided to retire in 1799, at the point when it became obvious that the payment structure was about to alter. This had been on the cards for a long time and came about as a result of the beginnings of a change in the eighteenth century middle-class mindset. Previously the system of patronage and sinecures had resulted in a situation where people were put into high-level jobs not because they were efficient but because either it was felt they deserved a nice little sinecure, or because putting them there allowed a favour to be paid off or because other advantages would accrue to the patrons. To this was added the conviction that senior positions could only go to gentlemen, whose mere gentlemanly status rendered them capable of doing anything they set their minds to – as long as they were not expected to actually acquire expertise in the job (a trait which was far beneath them) or even spend any time in their office attending to it. This would not have mattered too much if the clerks had been given free rein, but they were restricted by the post-holders’ conviction that what we would now consider to be office mail was actually their private property and should not be opened by anyone else. This would have been acceptable if the addressee had actually opened it; many of them could not be bothered. There are numerous reports of unopened packets of mail being found at these officials’ homes, or their going off to the country for the summer and ignoring the calls of business. William Mark, a purser who served under Nelson in the Mediter
ranean, was called in to sort out the office of the Commissioner at Malta after his secretary had been sick for some months. The commissioner had made no attempt to deal with, open, or even note the date of receipts of any of his letters, just throwing them over the half door of the secretary’s office; by the time Mark got to them, he estimated there was at least a wagon-load.5
Add to all this the fact that many of the clerks were deeply attached to the traditional ways of working and averse not only to doing things in new ways but also to doing new things, and you begin to see why eighteenth-century government administration was so inefficient and so expensive. There were one or two lights in this wilderness, including the talented administrator Charles Middleton, Comptroller of the Navy in the early 1780s. A typical example of incompetence was Middleton’s complaint that the Navy Board clerks did not even sort the matters for Board meetings into topics, but presented them to the meeting at random. This level of disorganisation, which was repeated in all the various government departments, led in 1779 to a petition being presented in Parliament by the Opposition, calling for a committee to investigate public expenditure, the methods of accounting for it, the abolition of sinecures and the reduction of excessive emoluments. A committee was set up and between 1786 and 1788 produced a series of ten reports, two of which were on the activities of the Victualling Office.6 As well as various recommendations on procedures, the committee recommended that the staff payment system should be changed from a small salary and the right to charge fees for various transactions (such as signing contracts or copying documents) to a larger salary and nothing else. The reports had gone through a prolonged process of comment and counter-comment on each of the committee’s recommendations and at long last, in 1800, most of the recommendations were put into effect.
It was not that long before the combination of a fixed salary and inflation, caused partly by the length of the war and partly by several years of bad weather which led to crop failures, caused major dissatisfaction. In 1804 an anonymous petition was presented by the Victualling Office clerks requesting salary increases. This was considered by the Board of Admiralty and turned down. It was followed by another similar petition from the clerks at Portsmouth, which was also turned down. The Victualling Board secretary wrote again; he pointed out that the clerks were not allowed to work overtime and the press of business was such that they were falling more and more behind. The weekly lists of unanswered letters which the Admiralty demanded were getting longer because the clerks were unhappy and were leaving to go to other bodies such as the Customs where the workload was lighter and the salaries higher. This letter struck home. The Admiralty enquired what salaries the secretary felt should be paid. He responded with a long list and in due course the new salary levels were agreed and everybody in Somerset House got a pay rise.7 Inflation continued throughout the rest of the war and these requests for pay rises continued, coming at irregular intervals from different groups of workers, from coopers to labourers to clerks, until in 1811 the Admiralty agreed to a new system which brought in regular pay rises linked to length of service.8
Apart from the six-day working week for everyone from the commissioners down to the humblest junior temporary clerk, the work itself was laborious. Almost every piece of paper which passed through their hands had to be copied at least once and all the accounting work had to be scrupulously correct. These were people who could nit-pick over a fraction of a penny and who would not only produce seven-figure estimates for the government of the cost of a year’s naval provisions calculated down to the last farthing but also required that every account submitted matched every other that touched on the same items. This can be seen in the system of imprest accounts against the salaries of the pursers and captains whereby the cost of whatever foodstuffs passing through their hands was charged to their salary and not removed until a full set of information had been received and checked (see Appendix 5). This information might involve the pursers of other ships (if, for instance, swaps of provisions had taken place between ships) and since there were over 1000 ships in operation at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, it involved balancing a vast set of interlocked accounts.
FRAUD, CORRUPTION AND INCOMPETENCE
Another of the ongoing tasks of the head office staff was that of fraud prevention. Like all government departments throughout history, the Victualling Board was seen as fair game by various types of predator, from the low-level clerk who earned a few extra guineas by colluding with contractors over tenders, to the serious money which could be diverted by the contractors themselves. Neglecting this policing task resulted in several public scandals. The most serious of these included those of Thomas Ridge, the contract brewer at Portsmouth, who was found in 1711 to have colluded with some pursers over false deliveries; the biscuit contractor Christopher Potter, who had a monopoly contract, and was accused in 1782 of using bad wheat and making short deliveries; and that of Christopher Atkinson, who used his political connections to obtain monopoly contracts, first for supplying malt for brewing beer, then as agent for the supply of all cereal products and pease.9 After several years Atkinson was accused of buying supplies himself and selling them to the Victualling Board at a profit as well as taking his agency commission, and of padding’ his expenses. The Victualling Board investigated and dismissed him. He had, by this time, been elected to Parliament and he attempted to clear his name by instigating a House of Commons investigation. This found him guilty; he sued for libel and ended up being convicted of perjury and being expelled from the House of Commons. At about the same time, criticism of the Treasury’s practice of awarding Army victualling contracts to Members of Parliament led to the so-called ‘Clerke’s Act’ which excluded contractors from the House.
Another major fraud a few years later, concerning the dockyard and the victualling yard in the Leeward Islands, was reported to the Admiralty by Nelson himself. Nelson arrived in the West Indies in 1784 and discovered several dubious practices. The first of these was the way all the merchants and officials encouraged American ships to trade with the British islands; being no longer British subjects, Americans were forbidden to take part in this trade. Nelson was then tipped off about a series of fraudulent practices being perpetrated by the naval storekeeper and the agent victualler at the Leeward Islands; sums in excess of £300,000 were suggested. As so often in these situations, the story is convoluted and not made any clearer by the accusatory letter from the ‘whistle-blower’ Wilkinson, which is long, rambling, and tends to go off track as the writer fumes about the guilty parties: ‘the most rascally and bungling Villainy!’, ‘a gentleman…perfect in the habits of Public Deception’, ‘famed for some time past in assisting bungling peculators’, and ‘where money is to be got by fraud and peculation, Mr Druce appears.’ The basic story as far as the victualling side of it goes is that the agent victualler and his assistant, in collusion with various other parties, had for many years been falsifying the accounts with non-existent purchases and over-statement of everything else. For example, they hired a sloop to transport provisions at £4 a day and charged it at £5, they paid £150 rent for a store and stated it at £192, bought 13,911 pounds of meat at 15 pence a pound and stated it as 35,662 pounds at 18 pence. To try and prevent the truth coming out, the conspirators had had Wilkinson and his partner Higgins thrown into jail for debt, where Higgins contracted a fever and died and Wilkinson languished for over a year.
It transpired that Wilkinson really did have a debt problem, which he had sought to alleviate by asking the conspirators for £10,000 to keep what he knew to himself. They turned him down and so he took his story to the senior naval officer on the station, who at that time was Nelson. Wilkinson proposed to Nelson that he and Higgins would conduct the investigation for the navy, for a fee of £15,000 for the first £100,000 of the amounts recovered and 7½ percent of the rest, and he gave Nelson some details which were duly passed on to the Admiralty in London. At the point at which the bundle of documents stops, the Board of Ordnance had
agreed to this proposal, the Navy Board had put their file into the hands of the Attorney General, and the Victualling Board had passed their file to their solicitor with instructions to proceed to prosecution. The end result of these prosecutions has, alas, not come to light.10
Another interesting story is that of the victualling contractor for the East Indies station, Basil Cochrane. An uncle of the brilliant but difficult frigate captain Thomas Cochrane (later tenth Earl of Dundonald), who was found guilty of a Stock Market fraud in 1816, the Honourable Basil had taken over the victualling task from his brother John in 1796. Basil had gone out to India as a junior writer in the East India Company and had worked his way up to a senior position when he was involved in a scandal over the deaths of two Indian clerks who he believed to have been falsifying accounts. The story was that he had flogged them so badly in the attempt to get confessions that they both died. This turns out to have been a bit of an exaggeration, as one of them was found to be alive and well some time later, but the other had died several days after the flogging. The East India Company decided it was time to part company, and Basil, who by this time was already operating as Commissary to part of the army, moved over to concentrate on his personal business affairs, including that of victualling the Royal Navy on the East Indies station.
Feeding Nelson's Navy Page 6