THE MESSES
Most captains allowed their men to chose their own mess and change it if they wanted. These changes were allowed once a month, after asking permission from the first lieutenant. A new captain, coming to a ship for the first time, would be able to gauge the nature of the crew by studying the purser’s mess-lists. Few changes would indicate a settled crew; several changes which were not associated with drafts of new men or battle losses might indicate some short-term problem; a lot of changes continuing over a long period would indicate general unhappiness which might flare up into trouble.
Given the tendency of different trades to form cliques, it is likely that men who worked together would eat together, in a mutually self-supporting team of mess-mates. Such a group would probably include a boy, taken under the wing of one of the older men, but it would have been difficult for adult newcomers to find a place except with other newcomers. In fact, such newcomers, especially groups of newly-recruited landsmen, would tend to stick together for some mutual support against the scorn of experienced seamen. But there must also have been some anti-social men who made themselves obnoxious to everybody and who were refused entrance to established messes, ending up eating alone or with other misfits. One captain, Anselm Griffiths, made a practice of designating some punishment messes: a ‘thieves’ mess or a ‘dirty’ mess, in which those found guilty of those crimes, remarking that ‘placing a man in one of these messes … had more effect on his conduct than corporal punishment’.15
The marines, part of whose purpose was to protect the officers from mutiny, were never encouraged to mix with the seamen and were also required to eat in their own messes. Petty officers were usually forbidden by captains’ orders to mess with the other men, for obvious reasons of discipline, and thus would eat together. The actual location of the mess tables for these men is not known, but since some had reserved hammock spaces under the cable tier on the orlop, it is possible they may have eaten there too.
Although some reports do occasionally suggest larger numbers, most messes consisted of between four and eight men; Victory, with her complement of 800-plus, had 165 messes, which gives an average number of five men to a mess. The size of messes may have been related to the size of ship, the higher-rated and thus wider ships having room for longer tables. Basil Hall mentions messes of ten to twelve men in a frigate, each at a separate table, then remarks that the line-of-battle ships had larger tables which seated two messes, one each side. However, twelve does seem rather a lot and most other reports give lower numbers and also say that each mess had its own table.
The mess tables were either suspended from the beams above at both ends or resting against the side (sitting on a batten) at the outboard side and suspended at the other. Originally the suspension was by ropes, later by rigid Y-shaped bars – whichever, the tables could be rapidly drawn up to clear for action. It is generally stated that the mess tables were between the guns, which some of them undoubtedly were (this was in the larger two- and three-decked ships; frigates had no guns on their mess deck), but when you do the arithmetic on the number of inter-gun spaces, the number of men to a table and the size of the complement you realise that unless they ate in shifts (which we are told they did not) there must have been some other tables. A print of Vengeance, dating from 1796, shows two sets of tables on either side of the ship, one between the guns and one inboard, with some others on the centre line between the hatches: eighty-seven tables in all for a complement of about 600 men. This print is the only available evidence for this practice but that does not mean it was not common.
A Cruikshank cartoon of men drinking and yarning at their mess table shows a rack on the ship’s side containing plates. This has been taken to indicate that this was the norm and has even been extended to assume that cutlery was also kept there; both these assumptions are dubious. The cutlery is the easiest to deal with, for there would have been little. Each man would have owned an all-purpose knife, which he used for everything from cutting his meat to working cordage or whittling wood; he would have carried this with him all the time. They would also have had a spoon, made of wood, tin or horn, and would have been more inclined to tuck this away in their ditty-bag than leave such an easily-stolen item on a rack in clear view. The mess as a whole might have had a large spoon for serving soup and gravy but equally might have used a mug for this. Stirring, when called for, can be done with any piece of dowel and does not need a spoon as such. The plates and bowls also belonged to the individual men, who would be more likely to stow them away when not in use than leave them out where they could be filched. There is also the problem of putting such things away in a hurry when clearing for action. So perhaps Cruikshank’s plate racks were an artistic shorthand for ‘this is where the men eat as well as drink’, or perhaps they were used to let the dishes dry off before they were stowed, rather than as permanent storage. It must also be remembered that the mess decks were also sleeping decks; hammock space was cramped enough without such things as plate racks intruding.
The mens plates and bowls would only rarely be ceramic, even the strongest stoneware being too vulnerable to breakage in rough seas. The better-off men might have pewter, purchased on shore; the others would have wood, either purchased from the purser or made by the owner. The square plates consisting of one or two flat pieces of plank with nailed-on batten rims which gave rise to the expression ‘a square meal’ were probably made by the men, as the items stocked by the purser were referred to as ‘turneryware’, which means they were made on a lathe and therefore round. The purser would also stock spoons and, for those who felt the need, forks. Each man would also have his own mug, bought from the purser or made up from wood or horn, or a combination of both: horn sides with a wooden bottom. To what extent the mess kids were supplied or privately owned by each mess is not known; there is no mention of them in any of the Victualling Board documents. They needed to be watertight, so would have been made by coopers; it is possible that the ship’s cooper, where there was one, made them up as part of his duties.
MESS COOKS
The members of each mess took it in turns to act as mess cook, each serving for a week at a time and presumably to an unofficial rota. Although there may have been some men who did not want to do it and others who would prefer such work to the alternatives, the inevitability of a permanent mess cook being considered idle by both officers and crew rendered such a scenario unlikely. The only men officially exempted from this job were those belonging to the boats when the ship was in harbour.
The mess cook’s duties were those which would allow the others to do no more than come to the table, eat, drink, and go away again. So as well as collecting the food and drink when it was issued, he did any pre-cooking preparation, such as mixing the flour, suet and raisins for puddings (whistling while doing so, as it is impossible to clandestinely eat raisins while whistling), taking such items to the galley in their labelled bags or nets and seeing them placed in the boiler. There are, incidentally, other things besides raisins which you can add to a suet pudding to make it a bit more interesting, and this is where the private bumboat-bought stocks come in. Any sort of dried fruit (including apples) will swell to softness in the cooking process. Chopped bacon (or some of yesterday’s salt pork), carrot or onion will give a savoury version. There are even recipes using mussels for those occasions when a watering party had been ashore at low tide.
The mess cook then collected the food when it was cooked and served it out to his mess, having in the meantime lowered the table into place, fetched the benches and generally made everything ready for the meal. When serving meat, he carved it and handed it out at random, again using the question ‘Who shall have this?’, with someone else, with his back to the table, singing out a name. When the meal and the socialising was over, the other men went back to work and the cook tidied up. One assumes that any edible crumbs went to the poultry or pigs and the rest went overboard in the approved manner; the order book for Superb says that bones, dirt a
nd dirty water are to be disposed of down the heads and not thrown out of the gun-ports.16 This order book also says that the mess cooks were responsible to the officer of the watch; Jack Nastyface says he might also be subjected to the judgement of a ‘court’ of other mess cooks, called by hoisting a mess swab or beating a tin dish. ‘Crimes’ might include failing to prepare the food properly or not keeping the table and utensils clean; the obvious punishment would be for the culprit to forego some of his drink ration.
TIMING OF MEALS
Although theoretically the time and duration of meals was at the captain’s discretion, when a squadron was working together such things were laid down by the senior officer. Sir Edward Pellew took over the East Indies squadron in 1805 and put out a general order that said ‘The commander-in-chief…will hoist a red pennant at the main when he makes it noon, that all the crews may dine at the same time… [they] are to breakfast at eight bells [in this case, 8am] and sup at half past five pm.’ This makes good sense: a commanding officer who is contemplating mass manoeuvres wants people available to perform them and since mealtimes were sacrosanct he would want to know when they were. The norm was forty-five minutes each for breakfast and supper and an hour and a half for dinner.17 Pellew stated this and went on to say that ‘the meal times of the people are not [to be] broken in upon’; Nelson remarked in one of his general orders about turning the men up for muster when demanded by the senior officer at a port ‘meal times excepted’, and many captains said much the same in their own order books.18 So we can accept that with the exception of essential watch-keepers such as lookouts or steersmen, who were known as ‘seven-bell men’ because they ate half an hour early, all the crew (ie everyone except the officers) ate together. Mealtimes were piped by the boatswain.
At this point one begins to wonder whether they ate their meat dinners hot. This doubt comes from contemplating the length of time it would take for the meat to cook, and the time it would take the cook and his assistants to serve each mess cook. Obviously this varied according to the size of the ship and the number in her crew – a large ship bearing less than her full complement having less of a problem than one which mustered nearly 100 per cent of her complement – but since we do have some actual figures for Victory, we will continue to use her as an example. During the first year when Nelson had her as his flagship in the Mediterranean July 1803 to June 1804) she was carrying an average of 811 men, so although the officers would not be eating from the main boilers we can say that roughly 800 were. Whether there were still 165 messes, as five years previously, is not known, but it seems likely. On a pork day one boiler would contain pork, the other pease; on a beef day one beef and the other vegetables or pudding. We can say that with fair conviction because the pease, vegetables and pudding would not take as long as the meat to cook and would anyway be awkward to cook in the same pot. Even so, the boilers were going to be pretty full of nets and bags, each of which had to be given to the right mess at serving time.
The cook also had to skim off the slush. Because the boiler was full of nets, because the lid was high up and because the slush was suspended in the water during cooking, this could not be done during the cooking process. Another consideration here was the danger of dripping wet greasy liquid down the outside of the hearth and onto the deck in the process; one of the earliest things any cook learns is that the floor should not be allowed to get wet and slippery around stoves (even more dangerous when you are short of a limb). So the best time to remove the slush would be when the cooking was complete and the liquid could be drawn off through the cocks into tubs; the fat would then rise to the top and could be removed easily. However, the cook could not leave the meat in the boiler as without liquid it would stick and burn; it had to come out straightaway.
The cook had another problem, which was ensuring that each mess got its own net and bag. Without some organised way of doing this, he would end up with a time-consuming gridlock at serving time and many of the messes would have had a long wait for their dinner. What follows is pure conjecture, but would work: to start with, he had to put the nets and bags into their respective boilers in number order. He did this by arranging them in batches before they went in the boiler, perhaps using a spare tub, and then he had a set of hooks on the rail which went round the stove and attached each batch to one of these, still in order and perhaps having previously tied each five or ten nets together, or even put them into a larger net (not too many in a batch as he would end up with too much weight to handle).
By serving time, he had emptied both boilers and he then had one tub full of meat nets, one full of pudding/pease bags, and a tub full of soup/gravy, lining these up across the back of the galley, with himself and an assistant standing by each. He needed to have this operation completed a good half-hour before dinner time. Meanwhile, the mess cooks had lined up, in mess number order, kids in hand, and as soon as the cook was ready, they filed past the tubs, collecting their own net/bag and some ladlesful of soup and off they went to their messes, getting there before the general stampede that followed the boatswain’s pipe for dinner. In the interests of fairness, the cooks would have to change the mess number order from day to day. Maybe one day they started with the lowest number and worked through to the highest, the next starting in the middle and the next starting at the end and working backwards. To prevent confusion, they would always do it in a particular order on certain days of the week. But even so, the food was not going to be very hot. Actually, that would not matter too much with the meat, which tastes just as good and may be easier to cut when cold. Cold soup is not pleasant, but the tubful could be reheated, either by returning it to the boiler until the last minute, or by dousing some hot irons in it. What about those seven-bell men? It would cause considerable confusion if they ate anywhere other than in their usual mess, so the cook kept a separate hook for the seven-bell messes, the mess cooks announced that status when they brought their food to be cooked and they came back to collect it a good 35 minutes before dinner time.
One other piece of evidence for cold meat (or possibly reheated meat, although that raises the question of where it was kept in between cooking and reheating) is another part of St Vincent’s order quoted above:19 ‘[to save fuel] no fire to be lighted in the ranges of the ships of the fleet until 11 o’clock in the forenoon and [to be] put out as soon as the captain’s dinner is served…’. This means a total of three hours of fire, and given that it would take at least half an hour for the water to boil, leaves no more than two and a half hours for the meat and other items to cook. One suspects that this particular order was either ignored when St Vincent was not in sight of the galley smoke, or that someone pointed out its impracticality and it was countermanded.
A few more questions to which we have no definitive answers but which inevitably come to you when you start thinking about all this. Did they really have three ‘Banyan’ days each week when their dinner consisted of no more than biscuit, pease (on two of those three days) and a little butter and cheese? Such rations would not go far with a hungry man. Perhaps they saved some of their meat and duff. Maybe these were the days when they had soup; there are numerous references in Nelsons and other commanders-in-chief’s letters and orders to ‘the men’s soup’. Or perhaps, since those three Banyan days are the days when oatmeal features, they really did only have porridge on three days, and then in such quantities that it kept them going through dinner time. Or maybe those who were on good terms with the cook were able to do something with the remains of their porridge. Thick porridge, when cold, can be sliced and fried like polenta or baked into a sort of oatcake.
And for that matter, were those days of the week shown on the ration table meant to be absolute or merely advisory? Were they the days when specific items of food should be eaten, or just when they should be issued, keeping in mind that salt meat would have to be steeped for many hours before cooking? One would hope that masters’ logs, which in Nelson’s fleet at least were meant to record the opening of casks
of meat, would throw some light on this, but they do not. Many do not mention opening meat casks at all; others mention it but show it to have been done on different days of the week, with no discernible pattern; others show both beef and pork casks being opened on the same day.
How long did it take to cook the dinner? This is something that has a number of variables, not least of these being how well done they liked the end product. To the modern eye, the cooking times given by some Georgian cooks for vegetables are far too long; Hannah Glasse remarks ‘most people spoil garden things by over-boiling them’ but then goes on to say that cauliflower should be boiled for fifteen minutes, which is more than enough to reduce it to mush. She also advocates boiling young spring carrots for between half an hour and an hour, and ‘Sandwich’ carrots (which probably means large main-crop) will take, she says, two hours. From all this it seems that the vegetables would cook for about an hour. Suet and pease puddings take quite a bit longer, from two and a half hours depending on the size. Porridge takes about twenty minutes once the water has boiled and the oatmeal is thrown in.
Feeding Nelson's Navy Page 14