by Roger Knight
* One direct result of the Commission of Naval Revision was that the Admiralty increased its control over the bases in the Indian Ocean, which had hitherto been complicated by the influence of the East India Company. From 1809 newly appointed resident commissioners at the Cape of Good Hope, Bombay, Madras, Trincomalee and Penang became responsible not only for the local naval yard, but also for the naval hospital and victualling (Day, ‘Naval Power in the Indian Ocean’, pp. 324–33).
* In 1804 the Treasury had tried to press Sir Brook Watson, the commissary-general, to take on the supply of the barracks. Watson refused this task, which he described as ‘of a magnitude & Intricacy requiring the utmost attention’, although eventually, after Watson’s retirement, the Commissary-General’s Department did take it on (29 Nov. 1804, commissary-general secret letter-book, TNA, WO 58/170).
* It went some way to compensate for an embarrassment for the Tories, the hushed-up disgrace of ‘Honest Tom Steele’, friend of Pitt, and joint paymaster of the forces between 1791 and 1804. Canning met Thomas Steele in 1793, describing him as ‘perhaps the most popular man in Administration. I have never heard him mentioned without praise’ (Jupp, Canning Journal, p. 29). In 1799 and 1800 Steele had appropriated over £20,000 without authority. He confessed to the Select Committee on Finance in 1807 and paid the money back with interest, but it was never known why and for whom he acquired the money, though apparently Pitt knew; even the cabinet in 1807 was not told (Thorne, House of Commons, Vol. V, p. 260).
* Palmerston also had to solve the problems of the Army Medical Board, from which all three members had had to resign in February 1810 after the medical disaster of Walcheren. Each member of the Board had been responsible for completely separate tasks, and its culture was to follow orders and take no initiative as a Board. Relations between the physician-general and the surgeon-general were governed by professional differences between physicians and surgeons. In 1810 the different functions of each member, imposed in 1798, were swept away. Three newly appointed commissioners, led by a director-general, were jointly responsible for every activity of the Army Medical Service, directly contrary to the principles of Benthamism (Ackroyd et al., Advancing with the Army, pp. 28–30; Howard, Walcheren, pp. 207–8).
* In 1805 the master shipwrights of the royal dockyards protested to the Navy Board over the cessation of the ancient privilege of the presentation ‘of a piece of plate on the Launching of a Ship in the respective Yards … which is esteemed by us far above its intrinsic Value, arising from that Laudable pride which every man feels who has been the principal in conducting the executive part of the great machine a Ship’ (Navy Board to Admiralty, 17 Apr. 1805, NMM, ADM BP/25a). Several of these handsome pieces still exist.
* Appointing bright young men attracted criticism, as in the scathing notice in the Opposition Morning Chronicle, 11 Nov. 1809: ‘Next to the mismanagement of public affairs, the distribution of places to incapable men forms the most conspicuous part of the conduct of the present wretched Ministry. The appointment of Mr Croker to the Admiralty has attracted universal notice, and Lord Palmerston, as Secretary at War, and some say a Member of the Cabinet (though this we cannot believe) almost surpasses Mr Croker’ (Brightfield, Croker, p. 35).
* A typical efficiency implemented by Mulgrave’s Admiralty Board was to overturn long-established custom by sending orders directly to the Victualling Board, rather than via the Navy Board, ‘for the purpose of giving celerity to the Victualling Board … to cause the utmost dispatch to be used’ (Admiralty Orders and Instructions, 12 July 1808, TNA, ADM 2/154).
* One former employee of the Hydrographic Office complained to the Admiralty Board of Dalrymple’s ‘want of a regular system of management’, prolonged absences from the office and the general incompetence of staff: the advisory Admiralty Chart Committee persistently complained of lack of cooperation. Hurd’s appointment brought about an immediate operational improvement. In the next six months he sent out 113 boxes of charts to ships on various stations, including thirty-three boxes to the Baltic. From 1809 onwards Admiral Saumarez’s correspondence was free of complaints about the state of Admiralty charts (Davey, ‘Hydrographical Office’, pp. 94–5, 97, quoting John Cooke to Admiralty, 18 Dec. 1807, TNA, ADM 1/3522; Chart Committee to Wellesley-Pole, 26 May 1808, TNA, ADM 1/3523).
† Officials over sixty who had more than twenty years’ service were awarded pensions equivalent to two thirds of their former salary; those who had served from ten to twenty years received half their salary (Harling, ‘Old Corruption’, p. 118). Similar principles of government superannuation still hold today.
* In 1810, just before he became first lord of the Admiralty, C. P. Yorke accepted the sinecure of a tellership of the Exchequer worth £2,700 from the prime minister. This had an immediate effect at the general election of that year. Yorke, the long-established member for Cambridgeshire, was roundly booed every time he tried to speak at the hustings, could not make himself heard and withdrew from the election (Harling, ‘Old Corruption’, p. 120; Thorne, House of Commons, Vol. II, p. 30; Vol. V, p. 671).
* A deeply humane side of George Rose can be discerned from a long list of causes he supported in parliament, including legal support for friendly societies in 1793, measures to alleviate unemployment, Poor Law relief (on which he wrote a pamphlet in 1802), apprenticeship regulation for all trades and a minimum wage for cotton weavers (Thorne, History of Parliament, Vol. V, p. 52).
* The government effectively bought off vested interests opposing the scheme. The Legal Quays were purchased by the crown, and the Consolidated Fund compensated those who lost income from the changes (Palmer, ‘London’s Waterfront’, p. 12).
† One piece of Maudslay’s original machinery used in the final twisting of the rope is still in its original place in the ropery at Chatham Dockyard, and was in regular use, after 173 years, when the navy left the dockyard in 1984. It is still used in demonstrations of rope-laying today (Coad, ‘Chatham Ropeyard’, p. 165).
* Of a total of 515 warships (337,579 tons), 433 (242,619 tons) were built in British merchant yards between 1803 and 1815 (Knight, ‘Devil Bolts and Deception’, pp. 5–7; Morriss, Royal Dockyards, p. 28).
† Melville’s effectiveness during his year in office was helped by the experience of his private secretary, William Budge, a Home Office clerk, who had served in the navy as a midshipman during the American Revolutionary War, but had left the service afterwards in the ensuing peace because there were no prospects. Budge still, however, retained a keen interest in the navy, as his obituary notes: ‘perhaps no individual, in any country, possessed a more accurate knowledge of the state of the different navies in Europe’ (Naval Chronicle, Vol. XXXV (1816), p. 2). As was the custom for the private secretary of a first lord, Budge was appointed as commissioner of Victualling in 1805, retiring due to ill-health in 1808.
* Much was demanded from these small ships, and they suffered considerable losses. In June 1805, for instance, three gun-brigs foundered in the Channel, without trace, and 350 men were drowned. Such losses were widespread (Grocott, Shipwrecks, pp. 196, 237, 285–7). The senior navy hated the new gunboats. Captain Graham Moore tried to reconstitute his frigate’s crew, which had been temporarily dispersed into the gunboats, where the men ‘have been obliged to play the part of advanced Picquets until the end of Dec[embe]r, very much exposed to the weather, not a little to the enemy’s shot, and cooped up in a vessel not much bigger than a sentry box. It has ruined my ship’s crew’ (Moore to Thomas Creevey, 9 Jan. 1810, Life and Times, pp. 45–6).
* Between 1739 and 1802 there were 386 months of war, during which 694 warships were built in British merchant and state yards combined: output per month was 1.79 ships, or 1,305 tons. Between 1803 and 1815 there were 150 months of war, during which 515 ships were built and output increased to 3.43 per month, or 2,250 tons. (Knight, ‘Devil Bolts and Deception’, pp. 3–9).
† A country-wide survey was made in Apr. 1804 and returns were submitted to parliament: 8,675
shipwrights were employed in merchant yards (Parliamentary Papers, 1805 (193), Vol. VIII, p. 185).
* One indication of the booming local economy comes from a participant in the 1807 Copenhagen expedition: ‘The watermen are more exorbitant in their fare at Yarmouth than any port I ever was at, not excepting Deal. It is no uncommon thing for them to demand 30s. and 2 guineas for just rowing off to a ship, and if from certain exigencies they conceive your case to be desperate (such as your ship getting under weigh with a probability of being left behind, etc.) will with great deliberation impose a much larger sum’ (Chambers, Chronological Journal, p. 429).
† Dorset, Devon and Cornwall shipyards built 90 warships (32,921 tons); on the Thames, merchant yards built 84 warships (79,947 tons); Solent area, 62 (30,007 tons); Medway, 48 (30,790 tons); Essex and Suffolk, 43 (15,919 tons); north-east England and Scotland, 40 (20,805 tons); Kent and Sussex, 33 (9,643 tons); Norfolk, 27 (4,373 tons); and other locations, 9 (3,771 tons).
* One of them was the bomb vessel Terror, 102 feet long of 333 tons. These stoutly built ships came to be favoured for Arctic exploration because of their ability to withstand pressure from the ice. The Terror was selected for Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated expedition in 1848. At the time of writing, maritime archaeologists are still searching for it.
* Admiral Lord Collingwood did not think much of the designs of new large warships, writing in 1808 from the newly launched Ocean (90 guns): ‘The new whimsies and absurd inventions of those who, having little science, would be thought to have it because they have an office from which science should proceed, has introduced many odd schemes in the construction of ships. And as this Ocean was intended to be perfection, unhappily they were all applied to her, and the consequence is that in a severe storm we had lately … she had like to have gone to pieces’ (Collingwood to his sister, 17 Dec. 1808, Hughes, Collingwood, p. 259).
* Maintenance of the docks themselves was also a problem, and wear and tear had reached a critical stage by 1800. Admiral William Young reported to Lord Spencer that the docks ‘at Portsmouth will be shut up for at least twice as long as was reported, and the great dock at Sheerness is found to be so bad that it can no longer be used without considerable repair’ (8 Oct. 1800, Althorp Papers, BL, Add. MSS 75847).
† The effective size of the fleet reached its maximum in 1809, when 709 ships, measuring 469,227 tons, were in commission, in which year 82 ships, of 116,422 tons, were building; 46 ships, 51,713 tons, were in reserve, or ‘in ordinary’ (Winfield, British Warships, p. xiv). Most British warship losses were from fire, foundering or wreck, rather than from enemy action. In the ten years from 1 Jan. 1797 to 31 Dec. 1806, 137 warships of all sizes were lost, at an average of 14 per year (Navy Board to Admiralty, 31 July 1807, NMM, ADM BP/27). Between 1807 and 1812 seven ships of the line were lost, an average of 1.4 a year (17 July 1812, NMM, ADM BP/32c).
* Carron’s payments between 1803 and 1814 totalled £368,968, compared with £293,157 paid to Walker. The single largest annual sum was £63,735 paid to Carron in 1805 (Moss, ‘Cannon to Steam’, p. 475).
* Some of the imported workers from Wednesbury in Staffordshire, north of Birmingham, brought the tradition of bull baiting to Lewisham, a matter which came before the magistrates at Blackheath, who ensured that it stopped. Local opinion of the incomers was not high, as recorded in a local history of 1815: ‘the men being for the most part a low bred set of fellows from Birmingham, committed many depredations around the neighbourhood’ (Macartney and West, Lewisham Silk Mills, p. 43).
* Another responsibility of Woolwich Arsenal was to supply the potent mixture by which fireships were set ablaze. On board the Prometheus, preparing for the Copenhagen expedition in 1807, two Arsenal workers installed barrels of sulphur, nitre and charcoal in the fire room, surrounded by barrels of charcoal and tar, to be lit by elaborate, hidden fuses. The Prometheus was new, fast and well appointed and was later converted to a sloop; she took Arthur Wellesley and his staff to Copenhagen (Chambers, Chronological Journal, pp. 372–3).
* Accidents did happen inland. In a strong westerly wind in Dec. 1802, four barges were about to ‘shoot’ (lowering sails and mast rapidly and relying on the tide to keep way on) the centre arch of London Bridge. The wind forced them together and they jammed under the arch. The centre barge was loaded with 21,000 bricks. Three sank after they got clear, though no lives were lost (Grocott, Shipwrecks, p. 135, quoting The Times, 15 Dec. 1802).
* The total French production of muskets, carbines, rifles and pairs of pistols was 3,956,257, presumably including the production of French-occupied countries. Total British production 3,143,366 (Glover, Peninsular Preparation, p. 47, quoting Dupin, The Military Force of Great Britain, Vol. II (London, 1822), p. 175). More reliable are Ordnance figures that between 1793 and 1815, 2,834,485 India-pattern muskets were produced under Ordnance contract (Bartlett, ‘British Army’, p. 217).
* These remarkable models still exist in the collections of the Science Museum and the National Maritime Museum.
* Some of the block-making machines remained in production until 1966, and a small number are still in their original position in the now unused building at Portsmouth.
* The dockyard-produced copper sheets were still politically disputed. An 1808 visitation had among the party Joseph Tucker, the master shipwright of Plymouth Dockyard, brother of Benjamin Tucker, St Vincent’s one-time private secretary. Tucker criticized the Portsmouth-produced sheets as inferior to those from contractors. Goodrich noted on a letter sent to him: ‘NB Mr Tucker’s brother married one of Mr William’s (the great Copper Contractor’s) Daughters’ (Coats, ‘Block Mills’, p. 78, quoting Henry Peake to Goodrich, 10 Feb. 1808, Science Museum, Goodrich Papers, SML, GA A234).
* In 1813 Bentham sent to the Admiralty two lists of his measures. The first is of forty-one manuscript pages, the second of thirty-four (Bentham to Croker, from Hampstead, 30 Apr., NMM, ADM BP/33B; 24 Apr., BP/33C). He then published them as Services Rendered in the Civil Department of the Navy (1813). These individual technological discoveries and improvements represent a formidable achievement, even if the implementation of his management ideas came to nothing.
* Manderson was to publish a 150-page pamphlet extolling the virtues of Falmouth, addressed to the prime minister: Twelve Letters Addressed to the Right Honourable Spencer Perceval … (London, 1812).
* Whidbey was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as a result of this work (Lambert, ‘Science and Seapower’, p. 17).
* In 1801 a tax rate of 2s. in the pound produced £5,628,813. After Addington’s scheduling in 1803 a rate of only 1s. in the pound yielded £5,341,907 (Daunton, Trusting Leviathan, p. 184). Between 1806 and 1816 a country of fewer than 14 million people paid nearly £142 million in income taxes alone (Sherwig, Guineas and Gunpowder, p. 352).
* From a sample of three years, 1804, 1809 and 1810, it has been estimated that naval and military costs went proportionally towards pay, 50 per cent; food 16 per cent; shipbuilding 15 per cent; chartering of transports 5 per cent; clothing 4 per cent; arms and ammunition 4 per cent; building and construction 3 per cent; horses, barracks, stores and prisoners of war 1 per cent each (Rodger, ‘Military Revolution to Fiscal-Naval State’, p. 125, quoting O’Brien ‘The Impact of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815, on the Long-Run Growth of the British Economy’, Review of the Fernand Braudel Center, Vol. 12 (1989), pp. 335–95).
† There were other small sources of income which took this total from £67.9 million to the total of £69.2 million (Mitchell and Deane, British Historical Statistics, pp. 392, 396, 581).
* Between 1803 and 1815 the number of City members of parliament fluctuated between 112 and 124, of whom approximately half were bankers, out of a total of 658 MPs (Thorne, History of Parliament, Vol. I, pp. 4, 318).
* The system of redeeming government bills was reformed in a parliamentary Act of 1796, which limited the period of paying navy, Victualling and Transport bills to three months (‘ninety day
s’ sight’). Improved government accounting therefore enabled these bills to be paid with ready money, ending many years of incurring interest on unpaid bills. Before 1796 bills were paid ‘In Course’, or when the government made funds available for them, often years after the bills had been issued. This is the origin of the phrase ‘in due course’ (Cope, ‘Goldsmids and the Money Market’; Binney, British Public Finance, p. 143; Beveridge, Prices and Wages, p. 527).
* The royal forests in England supplied about 4,000 loads annually to the dockyards, but oak was generally expensive on the British market. Had the Navy Board been prepared to pay high contractors’ prices, there might well have been enough to satisfy the demands of the navy (Crimmin, ‘Timber for the Navy’, p. 192).
* The extensive business of army agents likewise grew. Each regular, militia and volunteer regiment appointed a London agent, who performed the same functions as naval agents. The largest such partnership was that of Cox & Greenwood.