by Roger Knight
The difficult Alexander Dalrymple at the Hydrographic Office was tactfully told in May 1808 by William Wellesley-Pole that new arrangements were to be put in place and that it was felt that, at his age, Dalrymple would not be able to fulfil the new duties. This was an unsurprising judgement in view of the hydrographer’s stubbornness and lack of cooperation. The splenetic Dalrymple never got over the shock of this decision, and died a few weeks later, aged seventy-one.107 He was replaced by Captain Thomas Hurd, ten years younger, a practical seaman and administrator, who transformed the system and operation of distributing charts to warships.* Some exceptions proved the rule. George Phillips Towry at the Victualling Board survived, although concerns were raised in the Commons when the changes were debated in March 1809. William Windham could always be relied upon to ask the awkward question: ‘If age were considered a ground for removal, he would wish to know how Captain Towry was retained?’ Towry was seventy-six at the time.108
The issue of age and efficiency was largely solved by an Act in 1810 that provided pensions for government servants.† The principle of superannuation had been approved by the 1797 Select Committee on Finance, and schemes had been in operation for some time in the customs and excise departments, and from 1801 in naval departments in London, with pension scales determined by length of service and behaviour. This government-wide scheme, controlled by the Treasury, was effective: immediately after its introduction, for instance, eight dockyard officers applied for their pensions.109 It helped to develop uniform terms of employment, and to rid the government service of the idea of office as property, supported by sinecures. Officials were on their way to becoming salaried and pensionable civil servants.110
The Commission of Naval Revision and the Commission of Military Enquiry brought about an improvement in clerks’ salaries, established grades and seniority systems, and achieved parity between clerks at similar levels of responsibility in different departments. Those in the navy and the dockyards were established by orders-in-council in 1807 and 1808.111 Lord Mulgrave did not, however, accept all the Naval Revision’s recommendations, rejecting a £200 increase in salary for the Navy Board commissioners on grounds that have a modern ring: as he remarked to George Rose,
I did not think that increase necessary, whilst so many eager candidates were pressing for the situation. If the Paymaster to the Treasurer of the Navy has his salary raised, will not the Commissioners of Victualling and Transport Boards, whose duties are so constant and laborious, especially the former, have a claim to a similar advance?112
Nevertheless, in 1811, in order to keep up the standard of applicants, the Navy Office had to establish a minimum salary for clerks, increasing from the basic level of £90 after two years and rising after twelve years to £200. Other offices followed this practice slowly, with most not reaching these levels of pay until after the end of the war.113
Sinecures and reversions, which allowed a select few to enjoy anomalous privileges and to accumulate a fortune for no effort at all, were further problems that were steadily being eliminated. The radicals continued to challenge the practice as fiercely as ever. In his address to the constituents of Westminster in 1812, Lord Cochrane attacked the marquis of Buckingham’s sinecure as teller of the Exchequer. This sinecure was the equivalent, Cochrane pointed out, of the annual cost of all the navy’s overseas victualling establishments, while another sinecure equalled the pensions to be paid for wounded naval officers: ‘1,022 Captain’s arms or; 488 pair of Lieutenants’ legs’.114 Thomas Grenville warned his brother in late 1808: ‘the encreased pressure of taxes in latter days has here produced in the people at large, & in Parliament too, a very jealous & feverish suspicion of offices & emoluments’.115 Defence of ‘inefficient’ or ‘irregular emoluments’ centred on the difficulties of bringing impecunious men of talent into politics. This could be argued in the cases of George Rose and George Canning, men who had received such benefit but were clearly hard-working. The problem had been tackled intermittently since the days of Pitt: by 1809 the number of placemen and sinecurists in the Commons had shrunk to eighty-four.116 Sinecures were still, however, an emotional political issue.*
The sale of offices was another problem needing to be addressed. In the wake of the Mary Clarke affair (see Chapter 8), Perceval introduced the Sale of Offices Prevention Act in 1809, which made it ‘highly penal to solicit money for procuring offices, or to circulate any advertisement with that in view’.117 Civil servants were being appointed less now on grounds of party allegiance than on merit and appropriate experience. At the Victualling Board, for instance, John Clarke Searle had been appointed by Lord Howick, first lord of the Admiralty in the Whig ministry of the Talents; but Searle was promoted to be chairman of the Board by a Tory first lord, Lord Mulgrave. Searle, in turn, was able to persuade Mulgrave that a good candidate, Nicholas Brown, ex-purser and secretary to Lord Keith, should be appointed to the Board. Keith, who was Brown’s main sponsor for such a post, had no connection to the ministry.118 Brown was a notable success.
As the talents and specialist knowledge of senior officials improved, so did the skills of government clerks, as illustrated by the experience of the Commissariat. The first problem was to manage the expectations of the world outside the department. The first commissary-in-chief, Thomas Ashton Coffin, received letters of application for clerical posts containing bribes. For instance, he was offered £1,000 by a ‘respectable merchant’, who quoted testimonials from members of parliament; the prospective employee grandly announced that he would ‘have no objections to any required duty or attendance’.119 Coffin’s successor, Colonel Willoughby Gordon, regulated promotion by establishing rules in 1809 whereby all clerks had to serve at least one year at junior level and for four years at higher levels.
The third occupant of the post, John Charles Herries, took reform much further. Herries came from a Scottish mercantile family and would likely have pursued a career in his father’s bank, had it not bankrupted itself in 1798. He had been educated in Leipzig and was fluent in French and German, the latter eventually proving extraordinarily useful. Through the contacts of his father, Charles Herries, who was colonel of the Light Horse Volunteers of London and Westminster, a regiment full of politicians, the younger Herries secured a post in the Treasury.120 He joined as a twenty-year-old copying clerk, and his assiduous work and talent made for a fast climb to high office. During the Addington ministry he became private secretary to Nicholas Vansittart, secretary to the Treasury, and in succession spent time in Ireland, wrote a pamphlet against William Cobbett and was offered a customs appointment by Grenville in Buenos Aires. On the fall of the Ministry of All the Talents, which Vansittart did not join, Herries was out of work. His father, still the colonel of the Light Horse Volunteers, wrote to Spencer Perceval, just appointed chancellor of the Exchequer, and Herries was taken on as his private secretary. A further succession of posts brought him to the position of commissary-in-chief in 1811, over which appointment Perceval had a battle with the prince regent to ensure that the post went to a civilian and not to Colonel Drinkwater, the chairman of the Commission of Military Enquiry. Herries succeeded in overseeing the extraordinarily difficult job of supplying Wellington’s army in the Peninsula. When he took up the post he was thirty-three.
One of Herries’s first projects, by arrangement with Charles Arbuthnot, by now secretary of the Treasury, was to institute a short examination in English and arithmetic for candidates for clerical positions in the Commissariat. The first results demonstrated the need for such tests. One candidate approved by the Treasury was found to have been court-martialled and cashiered from the army. Another, sponsored by a senior member of the government, was illiterate: he sought to impress his prospective employers by writing in his exam that he was ‘lernging a letel French’. Herries wrote to Arbuthnot that ‘I feel that I am getting into terrible hot water in consequence of my endeavours to purify this department.’ In the War Office, Palmerston put every new entry clerk on probation f
or two months, after which a full report on the clerk’s performance was considered. As a result, thirty-three probationaries were rejected between 1810 and 1833.121 The consequence was an increasing status for the clerks, reflected in their inclusion in the Army List in 1812.122
Office systems were changed, in line with recommendations of the naval and military commissions. One of the first reforms that William Wellesley-Pole set in train in the Admiralty was the reform of record keeping, or, in modern terms, information retrieval. The compilation of ‘Digests’ had long been a favourite scheme of Charles Middleton from as far back as the American Revolutionary War and he had pressed it on Lord Melville when the latter had been first lord of the Admiralty.123 During the course of the Commission of Naval Revision it became apparent that the Admiralty had difficulty in producing the documents that were demanded. When John Finlaison had finished his work at the Commission of Naval Revision he entered the Admiralty, where a new branch called the Admiralty Record Office was created.124 By December 1809 it had six clerks, and by January 1813 an additional twelve supernumerary clerks were employed, with the result that papers were produced promptly thereafter.
Perhaps the most noticeable difference was felt by the House of Commons, which began to receive clear and readable accounts. In 1810, for the first time, a detailed, printed Naval Estimate of expenditure was presented to parliament.125 Equally importantly, the senior government boards began to use up-to-date management accounts, which were a real help in formulating policy decisions. By 1812 the Navy Board, for instance, was providing the Admiralty with all manner of useful information: monthly cash accounts to date; yearly office and salary costs, with ‘increase and diminution’ from the previous year; ships in commission, as well as ‘ships and vessels not mustered with reasons’. The total average costs of fitting out ships, broken down by rate, provided the Board of Admiralty with information that it had never had before. In October an account came before the Board of the costs of ‘equipping the Russian ships for voyages to Russia, as against what money would be raised by selling them’. Perhaps the most remarkable was a table containing a breakdown of the annual costs of keeping different rates of ships at sea, on Channel or Foreign Service.126 Such a concentrated analysis – encompassing information from across the organization and the Ordnance, and consisting of the costs of supply, maintenance, wear and tear, manning and provisioning, as well as Ordnance costs – would have been unthinkable in earlier years.
Significant improvements came, too, in the distribution of pay and prize money to families and widows of seamen and soldiers, as well as of pensions to veterans. There were pragmatic reasons for improving these systems. The strain on manpower was evident at an early stage in the war, and any measures that increased the support for service families would provide some encouragement for enlistment. The costs of poor relief, particularly near naval ports, were increasing, and money from the navy would alleviate the strain on local parishes. Statistics presented in 1812 to the House of Commons indicated that approximately a quarter of seamen and soldiers were heads of families.127 The commander-in-chief, the duke of York, had already established a system of casualty returns in 1797, and for the benefit of widows the army issued in 1810 Regulations for Ensuring the Prompt Payment of Sums Due to the Relatives of Soldiers Killed or Dying in His Majesty’s Service.128 Customs, excise or tax officials would handle the payment on behalf of both services, after having been in receipt of documents from the Navy or the Army pay offices. Although soldiers may well have had the benefit of regimental generosity to fall back on, the army’s systems did not have the sophistication that the navy’s would eventually attain. Admittedly the navy’s task was an easier one, since seamen were confined to a ship and were less dispersed than soldiers. Since 1728 the navy had a system of ‘allotments’ by which seamen could decide to send home a proportion of their pay for their families, though it did not work well.129 The transaction would be witnessed by the commanding officer of the man’s ship, who sent a signed, printed ‘remittance’ to allot some or all of the wages home, at the same time as the regular musters were forwarded to the Navy Pay Office in Somerset House. Identification of the wife or relative would be attested and a document signed by the local parish priest. Those wives or relatives who lived in London would come to Somerset House to be paid, while those who lived within five miles of a dockyard (and many of them did) would deal with the clerk of the cheque of each yard. The same system would also ensure the payment of prize money, and on the death of a seaman it would pay a lump-sum that included both prize money and wages that were due to a family. It was a complex arrangement and it needed the active engagement of those who administered it in London.
George Rose, made treasurer of the navy in 1807 at the age of sixty-three, set about making the payment of allotments and pensions efficient. This indefatigable worker had been a solid supporter of Pitt, close to the centre of power as senior secretary of the Treasury since the early 1780s, though never, to his disappointment, quite achieving cabinet rank. The treasurer of the navy was a relatively junior post, though well paid, one that was generally used to finance young up-and-coming politicians. Twenty years before, the Commission on Fees had damned the treasurer of the navy with faint praise, and the post had been the downfall of Melville in 1805.130 Yet, when he was appointed in 1807, Rose strove to make something of the department and was determined to see a fair deal for seamen.* When he arrived in the office, as he recalled, he sent to ‘every parochial clergyman in England, Scotland and Ireland, to the number of 15,000 or 16,000, complete information of the steps necessary to be taken by any of their parishioners who might have, or who might suppose they had, claims to wages or prize money, due for service of themselves or of deceased relatives’. In 1809 he dined with Lord Mulgrave and the Board of Admiralty to discuss his plan ‘for ensuring regular adjudication and speedy distribution of the proceeds of prizes’. At that point, Samuel Hancock was appointed prize officer in the Navy Pay Office, and improvements followed. Hancock questioned, probed and picked up mistakes and provided information to Rose, who produced a report on prizes in 1811 pointing to the areas where payment was still delayed. Finding that his clerks were slow in answering enquiries, Rose
divided the alphabet amongst the clerks in the inspection branch, assigning to each certain letters in it, that I might know with whom the responsibility rested, who should not perform his duty. That has been followed up by mulcts (which perhaps I had no right to impose) and reprimands. At one time I had the whole branch into my room, and stated to them, in the most impressive terms I could find language to express myself in, my fixed determination to dismiss the first person against whom a well-founded complaint should be made; on which I had remonstrances for having disgraced the branch … My servants have general orders, never, under any pressure of business to refuse admittance to seamen or their relatives; or, indeed, to any poor enquiring person.131
It was an admirable effort for one so late in his career, and it was in tune with the spirit of the whole administration during the last years of the Napoleonic War.132
Nine years after the start of the war in 1803, much had altered in Whitehall and in the state establishments. The shock of the impeachment of the all-powerful Melville in 1806 made it clear that the old order was on the way out. From this point, change and improvement were continuous until the end of the war. The war departments of government doubled in size, their accounts were brought largely up to date, and money was saved. After twenty years of experience of war, thousands of contracts were made and managed with economy and efficiency. Annual parliamentary estimates actually bore some relationship to expenditure; and the public availability of accounts, now printed in Hansard, brought greater transparency to contemporaries and historians alike. Administrators in critical positions were younger and more energetic, and they supported their ministers with better information and systems. Military and naval officers who might have expected senior administrative posts gave way to efficie
nt ‘men of business’.133 The internal disputes of administrators twenty years before had vanished. The tensions of the 1780s – for instance, between the first lord of the Admiralty, Lord Howe, and the comptroller, Charles Middleton, over naval promotions for officers who had come ashore and were administrators, and which had led to Howe’s resignation – were long past. Expectations had changed. The promotion of two Navy Board commissioners, Thomas Boulden Thompson and Thomas Hamilton, to rear-admiral in 1809 while serving on the Board passed without comment. Faced after 1803 with a war of unprecedented scale, such old jealousies were outdated and inconsequential.
The productivity of the state industrial establishments was markedly higher, and they were free of strikes, in contrast with every eighteenth-century war since 1739; the throughput of warships at Portsmouth Dockyard, measured in ‘ton-dock’ days, more than doubled between 1793 and 1815.134 Though contractors were mainly responsible for the increase in the rate at which ships and equipment were manufactured, the output of all industries increased sharply year after year until 1815, as we shall see in the next chapter. All this was achieved against a background of vituperative debates between politicians, frequent changes of political administrations and the taunts of the newspapers. A silent revolution had taken place across government: the quiet triumph of the ‘men of business’.