Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  As the measure of bringing forward ships from a state of ordinary by doubling and strengthening them with diagonal braces, according to the plan of Mr Snodgrass, is wholly your own, and was adopted in spite of a determined prejudice against it in every one of His Majesty’s Dockyards, it may not be unsatisfactory to your Lordship to know the success of an Experiment which was undertaken in every department by something like compulsion and carried into effect with the utmost reluctance … Not one third of the number could have been brought forward in the same time as by the plan of Snodgrass.35

  This temporary measure was a risk, but proved to be a success. Nor were the twenty-three ships repaired in this way given easy duties. One of them, the Caesar, the 80-gun flagship of Sir Richard Strachan, led the squadron in a hard four-day beat to windward, chasing the French ships that had escaped from Trafalgar. All four were captured.

  The country, however, also needed more small warships and needed them quickly. Frigates, brig-sloops and gun-brigs were the ships building on the slips of merchant yards. A gun-brig, for instance, was about eighty feet long, measured 170 tons, and could be built by an efficient yard in as little as six months.* Now that hundreds of small ships were required, the Navy Board had to use shipbuilders from all over the country, rather than those favoured on the Thames or in the Solent area. St Vincent had been convinced that the Thames shipbuilders had been colluding in raising prices, but the evidence points to increased labour costs affecting shipbuilding at the time of a boom. Another disadvantage for the shipyards of the Thames was that the work of shipwrights and caulkers was demarcated, while others in the country enjoyed greater flexibility of labour, with shipwrights sometimes doing the work of caulkers.36 In any case, St Vincent placed no orders for major warships on the Thames, but he did place an order for two large frigates with Benjamin Tanner at Dartmouth, even though Tanner had never built anything of this size before. But St Vincent forced the Navy Board to select Tanner, as he had submitted the lowest tender.37 As we shall see, this was pushing too far.

  The Navy Board did not like the new policy of using many widely dispersed private shipyards, feeling that it had lost control over the quality of building. As market forces began to exert an influence on the tendering process, the long-standing and carefully built relationships between the Navy Board and particular shipbuilders broke down. The Board had always had more confidence in yards on the Thames, in Essex or on the Solent near Portsmouth Dockyard, where the building could be inspected regularly and conveniently. These arrangements were safeguarded by the appointment of a senior royal dockyard shipwright to the merchant yard as an ‘overseer’ to monitor building standards. Now established shipbuilding businesses lost their dominance and, though they still built for the navy, Barnard’s, of Ipswich and the Thames (at this point directed by Barnard’s widow, Frances), and John Martin Hilhouse & Sons at Bristol were no longer forces to be reckoned with.38 On the other hand, the Board gained the advantage of competition between the yards, which was at times intense: between October 1809 and September 1813 a total of 140 warship-building tenders were received by the Board – with just 21 per cent successful.39

  Shipyards in more distant areas of the country, including the north-east, now tendered for, and were awarded, warship contracts. Very small naval vessels were even built abroad, a practice against which the Board had always fought. Private yards on the Medway, hitherto spurned, were taken up, including that of John King of Upnor. A surviving copy of the contract of 1812 for a 36-gun frigate built in this yard is a hundred pages in length, and indexed, demonstrating just how complex such hugely detailed specifications were by this stage in the war.40 Another Medway yard was that of Mary Ross, who took over her husband’s yard on his death in 1808. Under her notably efficient management, the yard built nine ships, from a 74-gun to a dockyard lighter, all within the specified contract time.41

  Some of the Navy Board’s fears were justified. To maintain standards, it instituted a sort of apprenticeship system for yards by starting with orders for smaller ships: if a builder completed a gunboat satisfactorily, an order for a brig-sloop would follow, and then perhaps a contract for a frigate. As contracts were effectively fixed-price, at a time when prices were rising, under-capitalized builders could and did bankrupt themselves. A fair proportion of these vessels were never completed by their original builder.42 An Admiralty document of merchant-yard building times between 1801 and 1806 lists 238 as ‘early’, 23 ‘on schedule’ and 240 as ‘late’. Financial penalties for late delivery might be mitigated by the Navy Board for larger ships, but for smaller vessels penalties were levied in full.43 Nevertheless, the overall performance of merchant yards was impressive, and they built their (admittedly smaller) ships faster than the royal yards.

  In spite of mistakes and business failures, warship building in the twelve and a half years of the Napoleonic War was virtually double that of the previous four major wars of the eighteenth century. Between 1803 and 1815, 518 new warships measuring 323,136 tons, were built: 84 per cent of these were built by contract (72 per cent by tonnage). Private shipyards built 436 warships (228,176 tons), while the Royal Dockyards built only 82 warships (94,960 tons). (A further 52 (15,510 tons) were built in Bermuda, Halifax, Bombay and Penang.*) Great Britain possessed some 12,000 shipwrights and caulkers, a quarter of whom were employed in the royal dockyards.† The private-sector workforce was widely dispersed between 510 merchant shipyards, averaging sixteen shipwrights a yard.44 Only ten ports had more than 200 shipwrights. The area around North and South Shields on the north-east coast saw the greatest concentration, with over 2,000. London and the Thames came a poor second, with just over 1,200, followed a long way behind, and in order, by Liverpool, Leith, Hull, Greenock, Whitby, Bristol and Great Yarmouth. Shipyards in all these areas, with the exception of Greenock, built warships for the navy, while continuing with their staple output of merchant ships. The east coast benefited from the heightened naval activity in the North Sea and the Baltic, with commercial ports fulfilling the role of minor fleet bases. In 1804 an influential dockyard officer, Joseph Whidbey, the master attendant of Woolwich Dockyard, recommended to Lord Keith, the commander-in-chief, that Leith be made ‘an arsenal in the Firth, where the expense would be very small and soon repaid in saving the expense on craft and time’.45 By the next year, Leith had a naval storekeeper, and by 1806 a master attendant and a master shipwright.46

  Great Yarmouth in Norfolk grew rich from the war and government contracts. Its population rose from 14,800 in 1801 to 18,000 in 1811, very much faster than the national average.47 From the start of the Napoleonic War the Yarmouth Roads off the harbour entrance increasingly came to be used as a fleet rendezvous, where warships and convoys assembled to take on replacement spars and equipment, provisions, fresh meat and vegetables and water.48 From there several major amphibious operations were launched, including the attacks on Copenhagen in 1801 and 1807.* Naval and Ordnance depots grew rapidly to service these fleets, and a small repair yard was established. The vessels supplying the fleet needed constant upkeep, and maintenance was often performed by one of the private shipyards. By 1804 there were fourteen in the town, manned by 237 shipwrights and caulkers.49 Fifteen brig-sloops and gun-brigs were built here after 1804, their small size dictated by the shallowness of the entrance of the River Yare. Three 4-gun schooners, Crane, Pigeon and Quail, were launched in one day, on 26 April 1806, by Custance & Stone; all three had been ordered just four months before, on 11 December 1805. The speed with which these 56-foot vessels was built was exactly what the navy needed.

  No area of the country exemplified this rapid expansion of naval shipbuilding more than Devon and Cornwall.† Before the Napoleonic War, the merchant shipyards of these two counties had never launched a ship for the navy; but between 1804 and 1815 they built sixty-eight warships, measuring just over 23,000 tons. Nor were these all small vessels, for the average size of these ships came to 340 tons, twice the size of a gun-brig. The 1804 survey lists 867
shipwrights working in fifty-eight Devon and Cornish shipyards, dispersed between thirty ports. Some of these were in tiny inlets, with a yard that employed only a handful of people, and so they were unable to take on government contracts; but other small ports, no more than villages fronting the sea, built sizeable warships. A Barnstaple shipwright called Richard Thorne moved his men three miles to the shore at Fremington, a hamlet on the south bank of the River Taw. From here he launched two ships: the Delight in 1806, 93 feet long, measuring 284 tons; and, in 1807, the Ranger, a 26-gun sloop, 111 feet long, 422 tons, one of the largest built in Devon. By contrast, Bideford, Dartmouth and Topsham were well established, building 57 warships between them. At Dartmouth, however, Benjamin Tanner, who had been awarded the contract for frigates in St Vincent’s time, was caught out by underbidding at a time of rising timber prices. By January 1805 he was employing 200 shipwrights, but he had expanded too rapidly and with insufficient oversight: in February 1807 a critical point was reached when the Thais, an 18-gun fireship that he had built, was sent back to him on the grounds of poor workmanship, with a demand from the Navy Board for a return of all payments. He protested that he was ‘thunderstruck at the sudden, unexpected and unmerited display of disapprobation’.50 The Navy Board was instructed to act against Tanner for breach of contract, and he was driven into bankruptcy, with debts of £12,000.51

  Someone who fared better was Robert Davy of Wear, just outside Topsham on the River Exe in South Devon, a shallow, silting river even in those days. Topsham’s record was notable, for its three shipyards launched twenty-six warships, of nearly 9,000 tons, each ship averaging 340 tons. Davy had other businesses: lime-burner, coal and timber merchant, farmer grazier and even a little trading to Newfoundland, and was thus a businessman rather than a shipwright, for which trade he had not served an apprenticeship.52 In August 1804 the local Exeter newspaper reported six warships building at Topsham.53 Davy’s yard produced warships steadily through the war, accelerating production in the last three years. In 1813 he sent four ‘government vessels’ downriver in one tide.* The writer of a memoir on Davy recalled that

  He was so exact and prompt in completing his government contracts within the time specified, that he never had a complaint, while many others were fined most heavily. But when the Government offered handsome premiums per day during the hottest part of the war, just prior to the close of it, about say 1812 to 1815, to all those who would complete their contracts prior to the time stated, he received very large sums in that shape, having finished all his ships more or less before time.54

  Shrewd and well capitalized, Davy took on no more contracts after 1814, when the naval shipbuilding boom came to an end. He was, in any case, in ill-health, although he lived to be a hundred.

  The enlistment of these yards inevitably reduced building quality in some areas. Naval opinion was split and opinions strongly held, some arguing that speed of construction rather than quality was paramount. However, Nelson, out in the Mediterranean commanding the British Fleet, wrote a long memorandum on the subject, advocating the minority view.

  The gun brigs for the present service are not wanted to be built of such stout materials as those formerly, for the service being temporary, if they last a little longer that [sic] the French flotilla is all that is required: of course the vessels can be run up in a much shorter time than heretofore and being slighter will both tow and sail better.55

  The question of quality was a complex issue, and views were inflamed by St Vincent’s conviction that all merchant shipbuilders were rogues, and that their ships were built with ‘devil bolts’, shortened to save money, thus weakening the ship. He attributed the sinking of some ships directly to this alleged fault. The case of the Ajax is often cited as an example of poor building, but an examination of the case shows the contractors in a different light. In 1807 the Navy Board sued Samuel and Daniel Brent for £40,000, alleging that the ship suffered from bad workmanship and caulking, poor timber and low-grade ironwork. The arbitrators, however, dismissed the case and found that the only breach of contract was that the iron was not of ‘best tough Swedish iron’ but of ‘rolled iron’. The shipbuilders were fined £450.56 Another stick with which to beat the contractors was the ‘Surveyor’ class of 74s, all built by merchant yards, which, according to John Barrow, ‘a facetious naval lord of a subsequent Board of the Admiralty called the “forty thieves”’, though much of their unpopularity lay with their poor sailing qualities, the result of their design by the surveyors of the navy.57

  The unprecedented shift to private shipbuilders enabled the extensive state dockyards and depots to fulfil several crucial tasks. The royal yards continued to build a few of the largest of the ships of the line, beyond the capacity of the facilities of any of the private yards, often building in a dock since these vessels were too large to launch down a slip.* Of the six great 120-gun ships built at Chatham and Plymouth dockyards, only the Caledonia, completed and commissioned in 1808 at Plymouth, saw any real service.58 However, the royal dockyards altogether completed 82 warships, of 94,960 tons, between 1803 and 1815, averaging 1,160 tons, only a fifth of the number of ships constructed in private yards, but only less than a third of the merchant yard total if measured by tonnage.

  Operationally the most important dockyard task was the docking, repair and refitting of ships returning from a commission, or taken out of ‘ordinary’, and the maintenance of their hulls, spars, rigging, guns and equipment. Although the crew of a commissioned ship was continually employed in painting and carrying out maintenance jobs, the ships still needed regular docking.* Iron, still at a relatively early stage of its development, with a tendency to be brittle, was used not only for guns but also increasingly in the structure of wooden ships. Though a hardwood, oak was by no means indestructible and was susceptible to dry and wet rot. Three years between dockings was considered the safe maximum time between refits, although a winter on blockade, battered by gales, or a protracted period of service in the West Indies, could reduce that time considerably. William Marsden wrote to his brother Alexander from the Admiralty in 1805, ‘I wish we had peace, and could lay our ships up in dock. They are worn down like post-horses during a general election.’59 Keeping a vast stock of ordnance and a greatly augmented fleet fully operational meant that all these establishments had to run at full capacity.† By contrast, French ships, and those of France’s allies, rarely left port.

  As a cost-saving measure, timber masters were introduced into the dockyards through an order-in-council in May 1801, suggested by Samuel Bentham. These new officers were to cut the waste of timber in the yards, precisely measuring the work done by the shipwrights: ‘he is not to trust to his eye, but to apply the straight edge of a batten or rule to ascertain the flatness.’60 They also applied strict regulations when accepting timber from the merchants, which made for a good deal of contention because of the notorious difficulties involved in evaluating such an inexact material. The contractors objected when large amounts were rejected, and even the appointment of agents to act on their behalf made little difference to these refusals by the dockyards. In addition, the hardwood shortage pushed prices up further, which St Vincent at the Admiralty declined to pay. As a result, the timber contractors supplied less and less timber, and reserves in the dockyards fell to a dangerously low level. War resumed in May 1803, and once St Vincent was out of office, and Pitt was returned to government, the problem could be alleviated by the paying of higher prices.61

  Ingenuity had also to be exercised to overcome the shortage of hardwoods after 1803, which again pushed up the price of timber. The world was scoured for new sources: attempts were made to secure wood from southern Europe; two shipwrights were sent to South Africa to sample the hardwoods there; while ships sent out to New South Wales with convicts brought back timber that was tested in Woolwich Dockyard in 1805. Unexpected snags were found. The dockyard sawyers found the blue-gum trees, stringybark and mahogany from Australia so hard that it blunted their tools and t
hey were put to ‘additional expence of Files, and the necessity of frequently whetting the saws … there is twice the labour in the Sawing compared to Oak Timber.’62 As the men were paid by the task, the master shipwright asked the Navy Board for an increase in pay for the sawyers.

  In 1804, after earlier experiments of 1795 and 1796, the navy began to build frigates from fir timber, which was cheaper because of the ease of working softer wood, and this in turn speeded building. Their anticipated life was only eight years, and, in spite of another round of fir shipbuilding in 1812, the frigates were not deemed a success.63 Ships’ timbers were reduced in size, and old ships were broken up in order to save good timber; but, after a period of experimentation that lasted the length of the war, new structural techniques were eventually found. These changes were introduced by a number of shipwrights, both in and out of the dockyard service, of whom the best known was Robert Seppings, who brought about an influential method of diagonal bracing very different from that proposed and adopted by Snodgrass.64 In time, ships came to be built of teak in India. The first of these, the 38-gun frigate Salsette, was launched in 1805, while the first 74, the Minden, was ordered in 1803, but had to await the completion of the building dock in the East India Company’s Bombay yard in 1807, and was not launched until 1810.65

  Additionally, the state yards acted as reception, storage and distribution depots for equipment and raw materials provided by contractors. Royal yard clerks and workers checked incoming stores: when the items were delivered, they were inspected for quality and quantity, according to the specification of the contract. The Artillery Inspectorate at Woolwich Arsenal, for example, developed and grew as a department that specialized in inspecting contractors’ goods. As we saw in Chapter 2, Thomas Blomefield had started on the task of inspecting and proofing the nation’s stock of heavy guns in 1780 and was on the way to completing an overhaul by 1793. By 1812 Blomefield’s inspectorate had expanded to 102 personnel, with sixteen clerks, specialists and overseers, with smiths and labourers making up the total. The introduction of Blomefield’s ‘New Pattern’ cannon made for a more reliable weapon, one able to withstand a greater rate of fire; replacement of the old guns was largely complete by 1810.66 After a career of thirty-five years of heavy (and noisy) toil, with tens of thousands of cannon delivered by contractors passing through the inspectorate, Blomefield was rewarded with promotion to lieutenant-general of the Ordnance and a baronetcy.67