by Roger Knight
Addington’s government was forced out of office in May 1804, and Henry Dundas, ennobled as Lord Melville, was appointed first lord.Immediate changes were needed within the Admiralty. The radical second secretary, Benjamin Tucker, went immediately, and was replaced by the much travelled Lancastrian John Barrow. It was Barrow’s talent as an author that had come to Lord Melville’s notice, for Barrow had journeyed to China with Lord Macartney between 1792 and 1794, and spent some time at the Cape, where his reports and writing had impressed General Frank Dundas, Melville’s nephew. The general had then taken Barrow to a dinner with Pitt and his uncle, where Barrow found that his views on the Cape of Good Hope accorded with those of the first lord. When Barrow later had his interview with Melville, he was urged to start at once: ‘I need not say how much pressed Marsden finds himself … the sooner you put yourself into harness the better.’ Barrow left the first lord’s office and went straight to his new desk.46 This was the start of a remarkable career, for, although Barrow lost his job briefly to Benjamin Tucker when the Talents came to power in early 1806, he resumed it in 1807 and did not retire for thirty-eight years.* A further personnel change was not so easy, and even Pitt was dragged into the business of replacing Osbourne Markham, who refused to be transferred to the Transport Board.47Markham had caused a furore among the rest of the Board by ostentatiously entering his own minutes into a private book in Navy Board meetings, noting the separate opinions of other commissioners. He would not be bound by collective decision-making and abstained from signing anything with which he did not agree, believing in the Whiggish concept of individual responsibility.48 His patent to the Navy Board was revoked in July 1805.
Encouraged by Admiral Sir Charles Middleton, Melville set up his own commission, more ambitious than St Vincent’s Naval Enquiry. On 8 January 1805 the Commission of Revising and Digesting the Civil Affairs of the Navy was established by Letters Patent under the Great Seal.49 Middleton, appointed as chairman, surrounded himself with people whom he trusted, none of them politicians. He had worked on the Commission into Woods and Forests with John Fordyce, an able administrator who was the surveyor-general of crown lands,* and he made Fordyce’s membership of the commission a precondition of his accepting the chairmanship.50 Another trusted friend was the evangelical Ambrose Serle, a theological author, another experienced administrator and currently a commissioner of the Transport Board.51 Two largely politically neutral admirals completed the commission, although neither was a friend to St Vincent. Admiral Sir Roger Curtis had been a follower of Howe, and had a good reputation as a staff officer. Rear-Admiral William Domett was a protégé of Lord Bridport, one of the Hoods; a highly respected seaman, aged fifty-three, he had come ashore because of ill-health. They were assisted by junior civil servants in their early twenties, two of whom, John Thomas Briggs and John Finlaison, were to rise to great eminence later in their careers. Finlaison, born in Caithness, the son of a fisherman, had come to London after an education in Edinburgh; at this time he was only twenty-three, but already demonstrating a formidable logical brain and an immense capacity for work.†
With the publication of the Tenth Report of St Vincent’s Commission of Naval Enquiry, on 13 February 1805, attention was turned on the treasurer of the navy, and a real political crisis ensued, as we saw in Chapter 8, which led to the resignation of Lord Melville in May, succeeded by Sir Charles Middleton, now Lord Barham. Under political pressure, Pitt decided that the army and Ordnance departments also warranted a detailed enquiry. On 5 June 1805 the Commission of Military Enquiry gained the royal assent. No politicians were appointed to the new commission, only men with military, legal and financial expertise. The chairman was a serving major general, Hildebrand Oakes, though he was soon sent on active service as quartermaster-general, Mediterranean. His place was taken by another military administration specialist, Colonel John Drinkwater, who had acted as commissary to the 1799 Den Helder expedition. (He had sufficiently impressed William Windham to be offered the undersecretaryship of the secretary of state for war in 1807, though he declined.) With the backing of the prince of Wales, Drinkwater was to lobby very strongly for the post of commissary-in-chief in 1810, but had to make do with comptroller of army accounts, a post that he occupied until the office was abolished in 1835. As can be seen in Appendix 2, the other members of the commission were from the military, financial and commercial worlds. The Morning Herald was not sanguine about their success, noting in mock military style that they
will require, that they be not only men of inflexible pretension, but of assiduity and unconquerable temper also; for … they will have to pass mountains, and labyrinths of figures, drawn up for years in great martial array, and to explore defiles of subtleties which nothing but patience and perseverance can possibly pass through.52
Seeking still to espouse the cause of reform, Pitt also approved a major restructuring of the Treasury, promulgated by a Board minute of 19 August 1805. The functions of the first and second secretaries were redefined in 1804 and their tasks separated, based on a plan submitted by Charles Long. The first secretary now became the parliamentary secretary, dealing with patronage and appointments; while the second secretary’s responsibilities were solely financial.53 The secretary to the Treasury at the time was William Sturges Bourne, another member of the Christ Church network. The department was still very small, with only thirty-six clerks, but the changes were radical. The existing four chief clerks were no longer to have generalized advisory roles, or to form a hierarchy governed by the anticipated yield of fees. Instead, they were to lead six separate sections, organized by function, which led to an increase of specialist knowledge. The first section, for instance, was to deal with war finance, and American, West Indian and Mediterranean business. The Treasury’s Revenue Department prepared weekly, quarterly and annual revenue accounts for its Board. Though a dozen temporary clerks were taken on by 1809, it still remained small, and such was the pressure of work that by this time clerks were working on Sundays between ten and four o’clock.54
Perhaps the most important element of the Treasury reorganization was the establishment of a new non-political post of assistant secretary, under the first and second secretaries. George Harrison was appointed and was to take a critical role in further Treasury reform before the end of the Napoleonic War. The occupant of this position was forbidden to enter parliament, a step first suggested by the Commission on Fees in 1786.* Harrison was a 38-year-old lawyer who was an expert in taxation. As might be expected of a bright young man picked by an astute prime minister, Harrison made an immediate impact. Almost all Treasury business went through his hands, including the responsibility for the efficient transaction of the Board’s orders. He signed directions for executing orders-in-council, and it was he who accepted bills of exchange drawn on the Treasury. He also served as a part-time legal counsel to the War Office. He had total control over the clerks (only he, for instance, could grant them leave of absence). Harrison’s relations with every prime minister – in the prime minister’s capacity as first lord of the Treasury – from Grenville to Perceval and Liverpool were excellent. The assistant secretary’s human qualities and capacity for work transformed a position that might have been regarded as a superior clerkship into a confidential adviser to several prime ministers.†
The Whig Ministry of All the Talents came to power in February 1806. Building on Pitt’s reforms, Grenville’s work ethic continued to energize the Treasury. Charles Abbot reported that Grenville ‘was determined to make the Treasury as remarkable for its punctuality in business as it had been heretofore for the contrary’.55 Grenville’s brother, the marquis of Buckingham, warned his relative, the newly appointed junior secretary William Henry Fremantle, not to ‘relax in exertion’ when he took up his post.56 William Wickham, back from Ireland as one of Grenville’s Treasury commissioners, built on and extended the previous government’s reorganization. Efficiencies came to departments working directly to the Treasury, including customs and exci
se and the Post Office.57
With both sides of the political spectrum vying with each other in pressing for reform, one small department, the Sick and Hurt Office – under the Admiralty and responsible for sick and wounded seamen – itself became a total casualty. The Seventh Report of the Commission of Naval Enquiry, published in mid 1804, had been very critical of the administration of contracts at the Naval Hospital at Plymouth, and had found much fault with conditions on board the Le Caton hospital ship. More than anything the department was behind with its accounts, as were almost all departments; it simply did not have sufficient clerical staff. On 6 March 1806, in the dying days of his period of office, Lord Barham ordered the Sick and Hurt Office to transfer its books, papers and instructions to the Transport Board, which he had helped to create and which had a good accounting reputation.58 Nevertheless, it eventually had to hire more clerks in addition to the complement of the Sick and Hurt Office to get through the backlog.
The Ministry of All the Talents was too short-lived to make much impact, yet reforming ideas were being developed by the little known members of the Commission of Naval Revision and of the Commission of Military Enquiry, who between them rewrote the regulations and accounting procedures by which the armed services were governed. These reforms were of critical importance to the conduct of the last eight years of war.
The Commission of Naval Revision worked away through 1806 and 1807, pointedly ignored by the Whig first lords who succeeded Barham, Charles Grey (who became Lord Howick in April 1806) and Tom Grenville.59 The commissioners and the supporting clerks moved out of the Admiralty and into premises in Craven Street. Lord Barham, by now eighty-one, lived for most of the time away from London in the Kent countryside and left the bulk of the work to John Fordyce. Barham was much discouraged by the lack of interest taken by the Whigs as well as by the criticism of the commission in parliament by Grey and Samuel Whitbread.60* Grenville, for instance, refused to let Joseph Whidbey, the master attendant at Woolwich Dockyard, have a week’s leave to advise the commission on the proposed new dockyard at Northfleet, for the first lord considered that the commission was acting beyond its brief.61 The commission’s report on the new dockyard was subsequently shelved and never published.62
The commissioners completed fourteen reports in December 1807, and in March of the following year John Fordyce wound up its business, a year after the end of the Whig government. Persuading Lord Mulgrave, who succeeded as first lord in April 1807, to accept their recommendations proved no easy matter.63 In the event, the reports were implemented only after endless discussions between Fordyce and Mulgrave. The commission’s secretary, John Thomas Briggs, observed that fear seemed ‘to be a much more guiding principle with Lord Mulgrave than the spirit of amendment’.64 Eventually the first lord’s concerns were assuaged and eleven of the thirteen reports were adopted by an order-in-council, and published in April 1809.
In spite of this delay and lack of political confidence, the impact of the reports by the Commission of Naval Revision was considerable. The reports avoided political blame and concentrated instead upon providing new methods of administration, and criticism was trenchant. The Tenth Report, on the Victualling Office, made things absolutely clear on the first page: ‘nothing short of a new system [is] likely to be effectual.’ Much of the drafting of the reports had been left to the professionals and the clerks. For example, the Eleventh and Twelfth reports, on the Victualling service, were the work of the young second clerk of the commission, John Finlaison.
The Victualling Board and Office were reorganized on the lines of the other naval departments, which the Board had been resisting for a decade. Some of the senior officers at Deptford Victualling Yard were downgraded, so that their positions equated with similar roles in other yards, and radical clerical staff cuts were proposed. The duties of every officer were set out in detail, and the layout of every newly designed printed form and account was reproduced in the appendices.65 A very efficient Victualling commissioner, Nicholas Brown, was appointed as first commissioner for accounts and cash. This complete overhaul was notably successful, and accounting time improved dramatically, resulting in the production of contractors’ accounts, as well as their checking and auditing, in three weeks. By 1814 the Victualling Office had worked through the backlog of accountancy delays.66 Operationally, an immediate improvement could be seen, for instance, in the early months of 1810. The previous year had seen a great strain in shipping thousands of tons of provisions to Admiral Saumarez’s fleet in the Baltic, for the army in Spain and the Walcheren expedition had also to be supplied; some transports had left England for the Baltic with only partially filled holds. Better systems enabled the Victualling Board in London to take a long-term view, and two main shipments a year were now planned, with larger convoys of ships with full holds, rather than the hand to mouth planning that was prevalent before.67
In the dockyards outstanding issues on the pay and the organization of the shipwrights and other dockyard workers remained, and these complex difficulties were resolved by the energy and talent of another young man, John Payne, well known in the Navy Office for his organizing ability, who had become the chief clerk in the Navy Board secretary’s office at twenty-seven. In 1809 he put forward a long memorandum to the Navy Board in which the confusing and differing interpretations that arose between the Third and Eighth reports on the dockyards – particularly over the calculation of task and job work for the different classes of workers – were resolved. After further Navy Board hesitation, and a consequent loss of patience by the new first lord, Charles Philip Yorke, the two reports were ordered to take effect on 1 January 1811.* Still there was confusion, and Payne was sent down to the yards, where he settled most of the issues in a matter of days, though at Plymouth he had to stay for two months. The measurement of work performed by the workmen was put on a more detailed and systematic basis by the use of a printed table; and the dockyard wages bill was reduced by 5 per cent. The Navy Board was therefore able to inform the Admiralty in June 1812 that ‘the accuracy of the measurement and of the accounts may now be relied upon.’68 Unfortunately the administrative talents of John Payne were lost to the navy, for he died suddenly at the age of thirty-two of meningitis.69 His wife’s petition for a widow’s pension, which cruelly was not successful, claimed, without exaggeration, that Payne had ‘new modelled almost the whole of the internal economy of the Dockyards’.70 The copy of Payne’s recommendations to accompany the petition runs to over a hundred pages.71 Two years after his death his scheme of superannuation for the dockyard workers was adopted.72
The Commission of Military Enquiry took longer but was no less effective. Seven years and nineteen reports were needed to work through all the army and Ordnance departments.73 Evidence gathering was thorough, under oath with witnesses present, questionnaires were used, and the commissioners visited all the establishments they were investigating.74 Detailed appendices laid down comprehensive regulations and procedures that were to be implemented immediately. Just in case the notably independent regimental colonels thought that these new regulations did not apply to them, one paragraph in the First Report begins: ‘And we do hereby direct and require the Commanding Officer of each regiment …’75 It was part of the process by which the colonels of regiments lost their autonomy and effectively became a layer of middle management during the war, even if their patronage within their own corps remained powerful.76 A parallel process had been taking place in the navy: the powers of appointment of the captains of warships had been steadily curtailed, to be taken over by the Admiralty.
The First Report of the Commission of Military Enquiry appeared after only nine months, on the department of the barrack master-general. The commission thoroughly analysed its history and tabulated the accounts in a report of 113 closely printed pages. Oliver De Lancey had been hastily appointed by Pitt and Dundas to the demanding post of barrack master-general just before the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War.* In 1806 each one of nearly 200
regular, militia and volunteer barracks in Britain needed to be supplied with 120 items of equipment, such as furniture, bedding, utensils and tools, in various quantities.77 By 1807 it was stated in parliament that there were 591 clerks in the Barrack Department.78 De Lancey’s accounts over fifteen years were a shambles: little auditing was done, and there were huge sums outstanding to his account at various times. Although his ‘negligence’ was exposed by the commission, the only action the government took was to seize his house in order to meet his liabilities.79