by Roger Knight
– Commission of Military Enquiry, Seventeenth Report, 17 October 18112
The growing scale and complexity of the war against Napoleon inevitably put an enormous strain on the bureaucratic machinery that underpinned the conflict. Numbers of officials and clerks in every government department swelled, and office space in Central London was insufficient. Office systems were weak, and appointments and promotion persistently relied on patronage, with the result that clerks with inadequate skills were often engaged. The abolition of personal fees paid to officials and clerks, first recommended by the Commission on Fees in the 1780s and subsequently raised by the 1797–8 Select Committee on Finance (see Chapter 4), had been only partially achieved: no compensating payment of salary had been put in place and departmental staff were restive. Nor had any cross-government scales of payment emerged, which caused jealousies and tensions across departments. Yet the government did adapt and change, and financial and administrative reform gathered pace after Pitt’s death in 1806. All ministries had to be committed to improving, in response to critics from within parliament as well as from the press (where William Cobbett, the radical and ex-sergeant-major of the 54th Regiment, was the most trenchant).3 The process of reform was to take several parliamentary enquiries, highlighted by political scandal and occasional high drama, and driven by the imperatives and urgency of war.4 One difficulty for successive administrations was that the radicals did not acknowledge what progress was being made.
It was not that the problems were unacknowledged. In 1806, for instance, at the beginning of the Whig Ministry of All the Talents, the chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Henry Petty, told the House of Commons that unaudited accounts across government amounted to the vast sum of £455 million.* No other failure in government caused more wastage. Long-established procedures in the spending departments allowed both serving officers and civilian officials to retain large sums of public money in their private hands.5 Problems of sinecures and the lack of transparency were also well known, while the obscurities and complications of Navy and Army Estimates precluded searching debate in parliament, since MPs hardly understood them. The Talents in their thirteen-month-long administration in 1806 to 1807 achieved very little in remedying these defects. When the Tories returned to power in 1807, they used the findings of two lengthy parliamentary commissions to bring the machinery of the army and navy to a pitch of efficiency equal to the immense task of surviving the dominance of Napoleonic France and eventually of overcoming it.
As the scale of the war increased, the government bureaucracy in London and the workforce in the state industrial establishments grew at a speed that inevitably led to serious strain. Following the collapse of the Peace of Amiens, the number of state employees more than doubled during the next dozen years of warfare against Napoleon. The expanding conflict generated greater amounts of correspondence, and an increase in the size and number of the volumes of accounts, personnel lists and records.* At the Treasury, for instance, there were just over 4,000 incoming letters for the first seven months of 1805; but ten years later, for the whole of the last year of the war, they numbered almost 20,000.6 Between 1798 and 1804 in-letters to the secretary of the Navy Board doubled, from 7,983 to 14,420. To deal with this, the number of clerks also doubled, from 101 in 1796 to 204 in 1815.7
This was the pattern through all departments. The number of Ordnance Department officials and clerks nearly doubled between 1797 (117) and 1815 (227) at the centre of the organization, although throughout the country it employed a much larger complement, with 353 in 1797 but rising to 886 by 1815.8 The Customs Department ended the wars with over 10,000 officials throughout the country and the Excise Department with 7,500. Officials and clerks in Central London in the navy, army and Ordnance departments multiplied over two and a half times, from 569 in 1797 to 1,476 in 1815. The complement of the War Office increased, in spite of attempts in 1805 and 1807 by the Treasury to control its numbers.9 Departmental staffing costs rose in line with these increases (see Appendix 1). By 1812 the army’s Commissariat had a staff of 53 in London, 20 commissaries-general and over 1,000 clerks serving abroad.10 By 1815 the ‘Retur on the Number of Persons … in all Public Offices or Departments’ stood at 24,598 and their salaries cost £3.2 million.11†
The large state industrial establishments followed suit. Swollen by the demands of a larger army and requirements to supply arms to Continental allies, the 1,500 workers in Woolwich Arsenal in 1800 had risen to 5,000 by 1814. Some of this large increase was due to additional artillery military personnel and a substantial number of convicts, housed in hulks in the Thames.12 Deptford was the most important and largest victualling yard, and by 1813 it employed 1,500 men, although Portsmouth, with no space to expand, grew only a little between 1797 and 1815, from 553 to 616.13 The six home dockyards ended the wars in 1815 with only a slight increase in their 3,000 shipwrights from 1793, but with nearly double the number of semi-skilled trades and labourers at 15,000.14 Portsmouth was something of an exception because of the investment in complex machinery, and the consequent need for a highly skilled workforce: in 1793 the yard had 1,401 skilled men on its books; by 1813 this had risen to 2,466.15 All the overseas dockyards had increased their workforces: between 1790 and 1814 Antigua had doubled, Halifax and Jamaica had substantial rises, while Malta, which had been acquired through conquest in 1800, added another 400 men to the total complement.16 In addition, dockyard officers and clerks were appointed to Buenos Aires and Montevideo between 1806 and 1807, and to Rio de Janeiro, Mauritius and Penang between 1811 and 1812; additionally, a sizeable complement served in Barbados between 1807 and 1815.17
Although it is difficult to calculate an exact figure, by 1815 the navy employed between 20,000 and 23,000 civilian officials, clerks and workers, from Whitehall to the West Indies.* The overall figure for government civilian employees of the armed services would double that if those state servants who supported the army and the Ordnance were included. Yet an accurate estimate of the total industrial workforce that prepared Britain for fighting these wars can only ever be guesswork, for the massive expansion of output required did not come from the state yards. These great establishments were working hard to repair, refit and maintain the large and growing fleets for the navy, and the heavy guns and small arms and other equipment for the army; but it was the additional numbers of contractors and their employees in private yards, mills, warehouses and offices whose building, manufacturing and trading led the country to victory.
The most mundane yet intractable problem was the shortage of government office space in Whitehall and elsewhere in London. An inefficient Office of Works, which had the task of building and maintaining government offices, did little beyond providing further temporary accommodation, although the area to the east of Whitehall around Scotland Yard was improved, and the Transport Office found a place there.18 The War Office, Ordnance Department and Admiralty were responsible for their own works.* Lack of resources limited expansion. Edward Holl was appointed as surveyor and architect to the Admiralty in 1804, and his responsibilities ranged beyond London to as far as the dockyards, for which he designed many buildings; towards the end of the war he designed and built Sheerness Yard, with John Rennie, a project that lasted until Holl’s death in 1823.19 Another floor was added to the Horse Guards between 1803 and 1805 (as we saw in Chapter 10), and in 1809 a new site next to the Admiralty was found for the Hydrographic Office, with its heavy printing equipment.20
Those departments of the navy occupying Somerset House were not much better off. The grand new buildings that had opened in 1786 had never really been adequate. The Victualling Office, the first to complain, did so only five years after it moved there. The office had arrived with 65 clerks; by 1805 the complement had risen to 105, and George Phillips Towry, the deputy chairman of the Victualling Board, wrote to William Marsden, secretary of the Admiralty, to say that the situation had become intolerable. He had no private office and had to work at the Board table, ‘subject to cons
tant interruption … nor has he any place in which to receive persons calling upon him on official business, except a small Slip without a Fire Place, which is likewise used as a Lumber Room.’ Basements and garrets designed to store books and papers were now occupied by clerks; offices designed for four or five clerks were now occupied by eight, nine or even ten. Many of them were under
a constant necessity of writing by Candle Light during the whole day … the Lobby for the Messengers which is but fifteen feet long by thirteen feet wide, is also the only place that can be used as a Public Waiting room for Merchants, Contractors and other persons attending at the Office; and it is besides unavoidably made use of as a Repository for the Secretary’s Department.21
Relief came only when the Sick and Hurt Office was abolished in 1806, its responsibilities transferred to the Transport Board, and the Victualling Office could move into the vacated space.22
The only answer was to expand outside Whitehall. The headquarters of the army was at the Horse Guards, but the department spread across sixteen other buildings, such as the Recruiting Department in Duke Street and the Department of Accounts in Duke Street and Crown Street.23 In 1808 the new office of the commissary-in-chief–centralizing all the army supply under one roof, ‘Ireland and the East Indies excepted’, but effectively created to ensure that the troops in the Peninsular War did not go short – found a home in Great George Street.24 The Ordnance Department was widely dispersed: the master-general was housed near Grosvenor Square and the secretary’s office, with its thirty-four clerks, in Pall Mall, where the Board of Ordnance met three times a week (these two offices were later combined). The bulk of the clerks, with the armouries and the Ordnance Survey, were housed at the other end of the capital, in the Tower of London. In the country as a whole the Ordnance was spread over 206 houses and 94 apartments.25 Its messengers received substantial expenses if they had to travel out of London.*
In addition to the physical difficulties of working in crowded offices, the clerks, most of whom had had their fees taken from them, were constantly unhappy about their salaries, which had not been augmented to make up for lost income. A stream of petitions and memorials were sent up to the senior boards of all the three services complaining about the level of salaries, the increasing workload and, as the Navy Office clerks described it in 1803, ‘the progressive advance in the price of every Article of Subsistence’. These complaints were contained in extensive documents sent up to the Board of Admiralty, in which the Navy Office clerks claimed that their equivalent pay had slipped behind that in other departments since 1796. Assuring their lordships of their loyalty, they justified their comments by stating ‘that they have borne their share in the public exertion and sacrifice without complaint or satisfaction: but … they observe their salaries to be so much inferior to those of every office not only in the Naval but in every other public Department’.26
When the Talents came to power in 1806, it was the signal for another tranche of letters of complaint from the Admiralty clerks, who claimed that their duties were ‘beyond those of all others, rigid, constant and laborious’ (sentiments echoed in letters by the clerks of the Marine Pay Office).27 Privately Lord Howick agreed, when he handed over the office of first lord to Tom Grenville: ‘The truth is that they all I believe [are] very inadequately paid … this is a troublesome legacy I have left you.’28 Another problem, recognizable today, was that clerks were tempted to leave government service by the higher salaries paid in the private sector: the Navy Board was informed, in late 1806, that one of its clerks on £80 a year had been offered £240 to work ‘in a Mercantile House in the City’.29 Petitions for greater pay came from the clerks in every dockyard through the following year, as well as from the naval storekeeper at Great Yarmouth, who wanted more salary and clerks for ‘the increased business and responsibility of this Port’.30 These problems began to be solved, as we shall see, only after 1808.*
St Vincent had been installed at the Admiralty just before the Peace of Amiens, convinced that the administration of the navy was wasteful and corrupt to the core. Although in most departments undersecretaries changed when Addington’s government came in, the first lord retained Evan Nepean as first secretary. The mild William Marsden, the second Admiralty secretary, wanted to resign: Spencer and Nepean persuaded him that ‘officers of the second class had … [a] duty to carry on the public business with as little injury or interruption as possible from the change of principals’. After three years even the first secretary, Evan Nepean, who had started his career as purser on one of St Vincent’s ships, wanted to leave and Addington appointed Nepean as chief secretary in Ireland to get him out of the maelstrom. In the opinion of John Barrow, the naval officers were to blame: ‘Nepean had absolutely been driven out by the professional members of the Board.’31 When Nepean left in January 1804, Marsden was promoted to first secretary, while the ambitious former purser, Benjamin Tucker, came in as second secretary, and was said to have a great influence over the first lord.*
The new first lord’s ideological stance was reinforced by the extreme views of the inspector-general of naval works, Samuel Bentham, who also shared some of St Vincent’s controlling and confrontational personality. Bentham saw society entirely ‘through the eyes of mathematical computation’ and believed that a complete change in the working methods of the dockyards was necessary.32 He made the unrealistic proposal that every move of a worker should be standardized and measured, and claimed that, when working with wood, no personal judgement was required of the worker, thus making no allowance for the notorious unevenness of the material. Bentham wanted to eliminate the delegation of decision-making to the junior officers or to the workforce: according to his doctrine of ‘individual responsibility’, all business was to be controlled by an individual in the centre of the dockyard, responsible to one man in London, rather than to a board of commissioners. The resulting increase of efficiency would do away with the need for contractors.*
St Vincent had three objectives: the reduction of the expense of government; greater efficiency by rooting out corruption; and getting rid of all naval contractors.33 Unfortunately these three principles were contradictory. An anonymous informer told Henry Dundas that:
For some time past it has been notorious that a system of terror has prevailed in the Dock yards. Spys have been set everywhere, informers have been encouraged and appointed to the places of those they accused so that no officer has any confidence in those that were acting with them. Their books and papers have been locked up and their minds agitated with some charge being laid against them before the Commissioners of Naval Enquiry.34
Matters got worse. Just as in the 1780s Middleton and Howe had been at loggerheads, so now St Vincent was very soon not on speaking terms with Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the comptroller of the Navy Board, and all business was conducted in writing. The antagonism continued in parliament for some years, and the first lord would have abolished the junior board if it had been within his power.35 Instead, St Vincent appointed Benjamin Tucker in November 1801, also an aggressive Whig, to a seat on the Navy Board, closely followed by Osbourne Markham, lawyer and brother of the Admiralty commissioner John Markham. The neutral Marsden kept his counsel:
I believe I am as little interested in the success of either party as any one can be, and yet I feel a lively interest in all that passes … I have not entered into one debate on the subject; but have read, and listened, and asked questions, with a view to assist my judgement.36
And of the Navy Board he wrote in December 1802:
They are not faultless. Like most other Boards and Public Offices they have left many things undone; but the visitation did not bring home to them any act of corruption or malversation. It was then tried to drive them out by the most abusive letters that ever were written from one Board to another; but they were too prudent to gratify our gentlemen in this way.37
Marsden’s moderation and pragmatism were, however, the exception in these years.
St Vin
cent persuaded Addington’s reluctant cabinet to appoint a commission to examine naval abuses, although the first fraught meeting rejected the idea: ‘Excepting my Lord Chancellor,’ the admiral is said to have said afterwards, ‘the whole cabinet has mutinied today! My commission is rejected! – but we’ll read them a lesson out of the Articles of War, tomorrow, Sir!’38* But St Vincent had no parliamentary allies talented enough or committed enough on the Commission of Naval Enquiry to carry through anything approaching his radical ideas. The one reforming firebrand whom St Vincent wanted to appoint, Benjamin Tucker, was objected to at the last minute, and the commission was thus composed of Whig politicians or sympathizers of the second or even third rank.39 Its chairman was Vice-Admiral Sir Morice Pole, recently elected an MP, whose wife was the cousin of John Markham. Pole’s first known speech in the House, on 4 May 1803, was to answer criticism on the commission’s apparent lack of progress.40 Markham’s brother-in-law, Ewan Law, lawyer and MP, was also appointed, but attended rarely; he wrote to a relative in 1804: ‘The attendance on the office I hold is too much for me; I shall not be surprised if the new lord of the Admiralty [Melville], the old jobber, should procure a stop to be put to our enquiries; as far as I am personally concerned, I should heartily rejoice at it.’41 These were hardly the sentiments of an avid reformer.
The reports of the Commission of Naval Enquiry, of which the first was published in May 1803, focused on known areas of weakness, such as casual corruption in the dockyards, badly administered contracts or insufficient quality control. The old principle of the senior dockyard officers acting as a single body in every matter, providing a ‘check’ on each other, had largely broken down by the 1790s as the officers’ workloads had increased at the same pace as the dockyards.’42 For instance, to ensure that the agreed number of cauldrons of coal was delivered to a dockyard, clerks and labourers, acting as ‘coal-meters’, counted in these very large deliveries. Through the years, over-friendly relations had been established that blunted the effectiveness of inspection. Money was paid as fees for the clerks, but food and drink also changed hands. The Commission of Naval Enquiry examined Plymouth Dockyard in detail: one merchant captain told the commission that after a voyage in 1803 he had left £5.11s.6d. for grog for ‘Treating the Foremen, etc., which at that time you know well was a Custom’.43 These misdemeanours and old customs were not, however, the fundamental problem. Content to score political points, the Commission of Naval Enquiry never attempted the reorganization and change of culture that the navy needed, failing to address the lack of accountability and muddled lines of responsibility, financial indiscipline, contractors’ accounts not cleared, slack management and laziness, men too old for their jobs because of the difficulties of obtaining a pension. It should, however, be credited with opening up the whole question of maladministration. The reports of the commission caused sufficient debate to bring about the passing of two Acts of parliament in July and August 1803: the first improved the administration of the Chatham Chest, the money collection from seamen that funded Greenwich Hospital; and the second the distribution of prize money to seamen.44 Reform after the Commission of Naval Enquiry made little headway, with the Navy Board’s immediate response being to demand job descriptions for each of the commissioners.45 There was even greater resistance to change from other offices, notably from the Victualling Board, which just ignored pressure to change.