by Roger Knight
to suffer no Person to pass out of the Dock Gates with Great Coats, large trousers or any other dress that may conceal stores of any kind. No person is to be suffered to work in Great Coats at any time over any account. No trousers are to be used by the Labourers employed in the Storehouses and if anyone persists in such a custom he will be discharged the yard.30
There were, however, limits to what the comptroller could achieve, in respect of this order at least, and he had to report failure to the Admiralty: the workforce at Portsmouth ‘in a body refused complying with it … and their determination seemed preconcerted as the officers could not discover any individual more active than the rest.’31 Chips were eventually commuted to an increase in wages in 1801.32
Middleton also reorganized the administration of the immense quantities of naval stores in the dockyards. He issued detailed instructions about ‘a great variety of species’, according to Charles Derrick, a clerk in the Navy Office and very much one of Middleton’s men, ‘for the general magazines, at each of the Dockyards, and also at the several other Naval Stations, both at home and abroad. This was truly an original and great plan, no idea of the kind having probably been ever entertained at any former period.’33 To speed mobilization, the ready-use stores were rearranged so that all the equipment for a particular ship was in one place in the storehouses, rather than being grouped by type.34 Previous failures to maintain ships ‘in ordinary’ – those dismantled and moored out in the harbours or rivers – were tackled by the appointment of ‘Superintending Masters’ and the issue of new orders on the routine to be followed. Improved double moorings were laid for the ships. Stricter financial controls and accounting systems were set up. Estimates were expected to mean something. Middleton sent a standing order to the dockyards in 1784:
You are on the whole to observe that no excuse will be received for exceeding the Annual Grants, and no support will be given to any officer who attempts it … we find the sums expended under the head of Ordinary in the last year to have exceeded the grants very considerably, by which inattention, this Board has been led into mistakes concerning the Service, the House of Commons and the Admiralty have been misinformed, and the public drawn in Expenses for which no provision has been made.35
Middleton battled for years to get the dockyard accounting punctual and accurate. In 1787 the Navy Board had to admonish the yard officers because ‘it had yet to receive their reports on stores issued in 1784 and 1785, at which we are much displeased.’36
Middleton threw himself into another great work: the development of the docks and buildings in the royal dockyards. This was not an easy task, because the great cost of building the new docks at Portsmouth and Plymouth led to hesitation and delay, different plans being drawn up in 1785, 1786 and 1789 respectively. By the closing years of the eighteenth century the docks were hemmed in by buildings and workshops, for the dockyards had developed piecemeal over many years, and none, with the exception of Plymouth, was ideally laid out.37 Nor were these his only problems, for the dockyards constituted a battleground between him and Howe. The comptroller lost the battle to continue to employ an expert builder, John Marquand, to supervise building contractors in the yard. The shipwright officers objected to this job being taken away from them, and Howe backed them: Marquand was dismissed.38
The dockyard-building projects that Middleton saw to completion are still in evidence today. Prompted by near-catastrophic fires at Portsmouth in the American Revolutionary War, and the poor condition of the rigging- and rope-houses at Chatham, the three great storehouses at Portsmouth were built in the 1780s. A new 1,000-foot-long rope-house was constructed at Chatham. Here the rope-makers twisted and tarred the yarn, and laid cables of up to 900 feet, the length needed to hold the anchor of a ship of the line. This impressive building served the navy until it left Chatham in 1984, and rope is still made there today. At Plymouth the most northerly dock was built in the 1780s, 250 foot long and with 27-foot clearance on the sill of the gate.* Even more complex was the rebuilding of the wet and dry docks at Portsmouth, which were to prove critical in the coming conflict (warships were floated into the wet dock, which was then drained so that essential maintenance on ships’ hulls could be completed).39 During the American Revolutionary War, the largest ships of the line could be docked at Portsmouth only at spring tides, which occur every fortnight, and this had led to severe delays in refitting. Such was the wear and tear on these docks that by the end of the war in 1783 only one of the five was in working condition.40 Further, the size of ships of the line had steadily increased through the century, resulting in deeper draughts: by this time a first-rate ship had a draught of about 22 feet, and a 74-gun ship about 20 feet, while some of the French and Spanish prizes captured after 1793 were even deeper.41 Without the dockyard capacity to maintain and refit warships of all sizes, and to do so continuously, British naval power would have been severely curtailed.
The most important new dockyard buildings and docks were undertaken by the long-established partnership of the contractors James Templar and Thomas Parlby, who had been responsible for the major civil engineering works at Portsmouth and Plymouth since the expansion of the yards during the Seven Years War and whose first major contract had been for the Royal Naval Hospital at Plymouth as long ago as 1758. Both had humble beginnings: Templar had been a house carpenter and Parlby a stonemason. Generally, Templar supervised the construction of buildings and Parlby the docks, which were built in Portland stone and granite. The two partners developed formidable management skills, controlling a large workforce on several sites. The partnership was at its most productive at the time of the American Revolutionary War, during which they built up their own quarries, lime kilns, regional depots and transport system. Templar died in 1782, but Parlby, with some of the next generation of the family, continued to manage large projects during the 1780s, and the contract for the double dock at Portsmouth was awarded to him in 1787.42
These complex works, incorporating a large wet dock linked to four dry docks, went forward slowly, and were modified by Samuel Bentham in 1796. For the first time docking a ship of the line could be completed without the aid of spring high tides. At its completion in 1802 this system was the most modern in the world, with dock gates being replaced by a wooden, boat-like structure known as a caisson, hollow and watertight, which was floated across the mouth of the dock, then flooded and sunk and held in vertical grooves in the side of the dock. It thus kept water out of the dock, which was then pumped dry. Caissons may have been among the least acclaimed of Samuel Bentham’s innovations, but they were one of the most important. By the 1840s they were made of iron and are still widely used today.43 These four docks radically enlarged and speeded the maintenance capacity of the fleet. In 1793 the navy had fifteen single and double docks available in all six home dockyards; after 1801 it increased to nineteen single and three double docks. But the roots of the improvements to these crucial facilities lay in decisions taken and investments made many years before the outbreak of war.44
These pragmatic and practical developments were to prove of greater worth than the breathtaking schemes conceived by some Continental nations. The Swedes and the Russians, for instance, were developing plans for docks and basins at Karlskrona and Kronstadt respectively, which were huge, architecturally spectacular and had no chance whatsoever of being built: their size and cost were far beyond the resources of these states and their much less well-developed economies.45 And the French dockyards were in a dismal state in comparison with their British counterparts. By the end of the decade not only were improvements and maintenance lacking, but they were so starved of funds that in October 1788 the authorities at Toulon took the desperate decision to close the gates of the dockyard for two days a week: only the discontent and violence among the workers there, facing economic deprivation from high bread prices, forced them to return to full working the following month.46
Important technological decisions were also taken by the navy on the copper sh
eathing that from 1778 had been fitted to all warships, and the advantages of the new sheathing were considerable. Ships’ bottoms were kept clear of weed, enabling them to sail faster, giving British warships clear tactical advantages. It lessened the need for dockyard refits and thus reduced their time in port. It also provided protection from the teredo navalis worm, which had long ravaged ships’ hulls in tropical waters and was now infesting those around the home naval ports. Risks had, however, been attached to the use of copper since experiments in the 1760s, when the corrosive effects of electrolytic action on the iron bolts that held the ships together could be clearly seen. Nothing was then known of the theory of electrolysis, or of how electricity was conducted by salt water between copper and iron.47 The dockyards attempted to protect the heads of the iron bolts from the salt water by sealing them with tarred paper, but this turned out to be completely inadequate. Doubts began to surface about the whole process. Then in September 1782 four ships of the line returning from America foundered in a mid-Atlantic storm, with the loss of 3,500 lives.48 Although nothing could be proved from the hulls of the ships, which were on the seabed, it was presumed that weakened bolts had given way. The Navy Board was forced to rethink.
The solution was provided by Thomas Williams, the principal government contractor and a well-capitalized industrialist, who possessed the metallurgical expertise that the government lacked.* In 1783 his technicians perfected a cold-rolled alloy bolt that was hard enough to withstand being driven by sledgehammers into a ship’s hull, but was chemically similar to the sheathing, thus ensuring that the bolt would not waste.49 Such an innovation could have been undertaken only by operating on a large scale, and coppering developments, as well as the supply of bolts, sheathing and nails, lay entirely in Williams’s hands. During the 1780s he also had access to the supply of raw material, having gained control of the Parys and Mona mines in Anglesey. In addition to his factories in Birmingham, he owned several smelting works – his site at Ravenhead near St Helens in Lancashire was the one most involved in naval copper, where the braces and pintles that supported the rudder, and which could weigh up to a ton and three quarters, were cast in the new metal. The bolts were manufactured in Holywell on the banks of the Dee in a works powered mainly by large water wheels. The copper alloy was drawn through a number of grooved rollers that gradually diminished in size, so forming the bolt, which was then finished under an enormous tilt-hammer. An 8- or 10-foot bolt could be made perfectly round in a minute. Bolts for the larger ships could be 20 feet long. Operations such as these were at the very limits of pre-steam technology.50
After three years of debate by the Navy Board and the dockyard officers, in August 1786 the Admiralty finally ordered all guard ships (those warships permanently in commission, anchored at the naval bases) to be fastened with the new copper-alloy bolts, ‘as fast as docks can be spared’.51 Thenceforth every ship that came into dock had the new bolts and fittings driven into the hulls, a lengthy and costly operation that was largely complete by 1793. The new bolts were three times the cost of iron and the rebolting process cost £1,500 for each ship of the line, adding approximately 5 per cent to its total cost.52 But the ships were now seaworthy.
However, it was impossible to keep the secrets of manufacture away from the French, whose constant efforts at industrial espionage in the British iron and textile industries were notable. In peacetime some contractors had little loyalty to the government. Before the American Revolutionary War, the coke-smelted iron process, pioneered by John Wilkinson at his works near Wrexham, had been exported to France by his brother William, who had set up the large cannon foundry at Nantes and then directed the building of the great coke-iron making plant at Le Creusot. Other industrialists were wary of having strangers in the factories, but clever ruses could get through slack security. Once the American Revolutionary War was over, the French government sent two artillery officers, de Givry and de Wendel, to look at areas of England that had achieved advances in munitions manufacture. They went to Williams’s foundries in Cheshire and Lancashire, and then to Holywell to view the cold-rolled bolt forging process. De Wendel reported to his French masters that:
we found that there was nothing difficult in getting a good view of English Manufactures, one needs to know the language with facility, not show any curiosity, and wait till the hour when punch is served to instruct oneself and acquire the confidence of the manufacturers and their foremen, one must avoid recommendations from Ministers and Lords which do little good and make contact with some of the principal industrialists who can open every door …53
The French thus learnt the coppering process. British expertise and production at its copper mines kept the country ahead of its rivals, but in the coming wars the clear advantage that had been enjoyed by copper-sheathed British warships in the American Revolutionary War disappeared.
Many other long-term worries about naval power exercised the minds of the Admiralty and the Navy Board. Quite apart from the vulnerability of supplies of hemp and mast timber from the Baltic, fears that the traditional supplies of British oak were running out had first occurred in the late 1760s.54 By the 1780s the navy had difficulties in procuring the timber that it needed on the London market, challenged in particular by the East India Company’s building of ever-larger ships. In March 1786 Middleton questioned the purveyor of Deptford Yard, Benjamin Slade: ‘Why are the merchant yards plentifully supplied, while dockyards are so greatly distressed and the service much retarded?’ Slade’s six-page reply was a story of traditional practices, rigid naval pricing and the merchants’ advantages with their access to ready money.55 In 1792 Middleton presided over the Commission into the Administration of Woods and Forest, set up to investigate the reason for, and the extent of, the shortage of British oak. The commission found that timber prices had gone up, though not uniformly or disastrously; but, because opinion was divided as to the cause, the government took no action. Its report made the first official mention of the potential for the use of iron in the construction of wooden warships, a practice that the East India Company had already adopted. Nevertheless, the feeling persisted that the Company took a disproportionate share of scarce timber resources to build its ships.56
Progress in the maintenance of the fleet by the second half of 1785 can be measured, using evidence from the plethora of documents produced in reaction to criticisms made by Howe after his dockyard inspection. Pitt called for papers from Middleton and they arrived in quantity, together with a pronouncement from the comptroller:
Mr Pitt will observe, that the progress in bringing forward the fleet since the peace, and making provision for it against a future war has been very great, and that there is good reason to believe that by the end of 1786, there will be upwards of ninety sail of the line, including the present guard ships, fit for service, and as many frigates of twenty guns and upwards, exclusive of those now in commission.57
This was fair, although Middleton neglected to mention the very serious problem of the corrosion of the iron bolts. The dockyards received their first test in the successful mobilization of 1787 during the Dutch Crisis, when a large fleet was ready in a few weeks. George White, the veteran master shipwright at Portsmouth, wrote to Middleton ‘to assure you … that a more cheerful and Spirited Exertion was never shown by both Officers and men at this time to expedite the equipping of the Fleet’.58 Middleton’s dockyards passed muster because he had ensured that the machinery of naval maintenance had been thoroughly overhauled.
Tense personal relations were not limited at this time to the comptroller and the first lord of the Admiralty. In Somerset House, another of the subsidiary naval organizations, the Victualling Board oversaw the assembling and packing of provisions purchased under contract from merchants, agents and farmers, as well as baking bread and biscuit, and slaughtering cattle and pigs before salting the meat in casks. In England the main victualling yard was at Deptford, but substantial establishments were at Portsmouth, Plymouth, Dover and Deal, as well
as all the major overseas bases, while there were depots at most ports.59 This organization was also experiencing friction between its commissioners. This was chiefly caused by the case of Christopher Atkinson, a very large grain merchant and MP for Hedon in Yorkshire, who had been appointed during the American Revolutionary War by the Board as sole agent for the purchase of wheat for the navy from the markets. At first all went well, but as the war progressed Atkinson began to pad out his prices, telling the Board that he had purchased wheat at a higher price than he actually had. After a bitter row, the reformers at the Victualling Board eventually won the battle to prosecute Atkinson, by four votes to three, aided by the jealousy of other merchants at the London Corn Exchange. He was charged, went through the courts, and was given a year’s prison sentence.60 He had to stand in the pillory and was expelled from the House of Commons. After another dispute in 1785 between the commissioners over a clerk who had divulged commercial confidences, a reforming Board member resigned in disgust when the Admiralty failed to support sanctions against the clerk.
From this point the Victualling Board slowly regained its reputation. The chief reformer was George Phillips Towry, who had started his career in the navy and been appointed as a Victualling commissioner in 1784. He had considerable success in stopping illegal payments to the clerks in the administration of contracts, and ensured that commissioners did not receive a premium from clerks as a condition of employment. Whenever a problem required the presence of a commissioner away from London, it was Towry who did the travelling.61 This tough Scot, who was still at his post when he died in 1817 at the age of eighty-three, was one of the few exceptions to the dominance of young men in the British government and civil service.*