by Max Adams
The first seven of these were girls, of whom three survived into adulthood and ripe old age: Mary (1738–1815), Eleanor (1739–1835) and Dorothy (1741–1830). The last three were boys: Cuthbert, born on 26 September 1748; Wilfred, baptised on 11 October 1749, and John, baptised on 1 June 1750.5 The choice of the first two boys’ names is interesting. Cuthbert was clearly a family name, but it harked back to a very ancient period, when St Cuthbert, the exemplar of the ascetic monk, was a reluctant Bishop of Lindisfarne. St Wilfred was a seventh-century contemporary: Bishop of Hexham, but of an entirely different stamp. While Cuthbert had been brought up in the spiritual, insular Irish tradition of Iona, Wilfred was a Romanist who sought to reflect God’s glory in his own earthly splendour. It was Wilfred whose counsel prevailed at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664, spelling the end of the Irish church in Britain. The two naval brothers were, by all accounts,6 as different as these two in character, but they were held together by the bond of a service which was at least not riven by doctrinal dispute.
Cuthbert Collingwood was born in a house in Newcastle on a street called the Side. It is a steep, narrow street that runs up from the Quayside at Sandhill, past Dog Leap Stairs, up under the shadow of the medieval Black Gate, and towards the fourteenth-century cathedral of St Nicholas, where Cuthbert was baptised. The houses were all torn down in the nineteenth century, at which time the Collingwoods’ house belonged to a tobacco manufacturer, but above a doorway of the Victorian redbrick office which stands there now is a bust of Cuthbert, Lord Collingwood, which most natives of the city pass by without noticing. The house lay within a biscuit’s toss of city walls which had last been manned against the Scots as recently as 1745. Just two years before Cuthbert was born, the last battle on British soil had been fought at Culloden, and Geordies (a name derived from the army nickname King George’s Men) would have been well aware that one of the prime objectives of the Young Pretender’s attempted invasion of England was to strangle the coal trade between Newcastle and London by taking that city.
Newcastle in 1748 was still essentially a medieval city. At its heart lay the ‘new’ castle built by William the Conqueror’s son Robert in 1080, after ten years of rebellion and destruction had laid waste most of the northern counties. For the next six hundred years Newcastle was a border town, garrisoned by the King’s troops against the threat of invasion from Scotland. In 1644 it held out under siege for three months before being taken by Parliamentary troops, and for two years after that the counties of Northumberland and Durham were occupied by Scottish forces.
In 1748 the city still had walls which entirely enclosed it, from Close Gate and Westgate in the west to Sand Gate in the east, from the River Tyne in the south to Newgate and Pilgrim Street in the north.7 During Collingwood’s lifetime most of the walls would disappear as the town boomed in the early wealth of the industrial revolution. Ancient houses would be torn down to build grand new streets; bridges would span wooded denes; street lights, mains water and sewers would appear. Cuthbert would miss most of it.
In 1748 the castle dungeon was still being used as the county gaol, where prisoners were chained to the walls and exhibited by the gaoler for twopence a piece. The Side, where the Collingwoods lived, was close enough to the Quayside, an infamous haunt of ‘coarse and impudent wenches’,8 to be primarily mercantile. It was ‘from one end to the other filled with shops of merchants, goldsmiths, milliners, and upholsterers’.9 The Quayside itself was permanently ranged with vessels of every kind: keels, which carried coal from upriver down to sea-going colliers near the river’s mouth at Shields; coasters, barges, sloops, fishing cobles and ferry boats. From the bottom of the Side, beneath the towering walls of the castle, a single bridge spanned the river to Gateshead and the Great North Road. This ancient bridge, like that of medieval London, was still lined with shops and houses. Across it, once a week, the South Mail coach would come, ‘guarded by a man before on horseback with a drawn sword and, behind, by another with a charged blunderbuss’.10
Since 1711 Newcastle had boasted a newspaper: the Courant, joined by the Journal in 1739. Newspapers would be read by subscribers, very often shared amongst the patrons of dozens of coffee houses (more numerous even than today), and merchants kept a very close eye on news from across the world. Regional papers of the eighteenth century were necessarily less parochial in outlook than their modern equivalents. Parliamentary debates were frequently reported in great detail. In the week Collingwood was born in 1748 the paper contained dispatches from St Petersburg, Rome, Dresden, Stettin and elsewhere, wherever there were British interests – which indeed spread across the world.11 There was a report that nineteen privateers had sailed from ‘Havannah’, and there was anticipation that peace might soon be signed with France and Spain at Aix-la-Chapelle. The paper also contained news that locusts had appeared in Orkney, and that at the Assembly Room in Durham there was to be a concert on the Cymbalum, the only instrument of its kind in England. There were advertisements too: for Daffy’s Elixir and Dr Bateman’s Pectoral Drops.
Newcastle was on the cusp of great things. Although the town had been shipping coal to London for hundreds of years, the engineering achievements that would liberate the region’s latent wealth were in their barest infancy, supporting a population of only twenty thousand people and as yet untarnished by industrial pollution, labour strikes and unemployment. John Wesley, building in Newcastle the second Methodist chapel in England in 1742, liked it very much: ‘If I did not believe there was another world I should spend all my summers here.’12 Coal was plentiful and still easy to win at shallow depths: Daniel Defoe reported his impressions of ‘Mountains of Coal’ to an ignorant London audience. Getting the coal to the river was another matter: for miles around, the countryside was laced with wooden wagon ways, the coal hauled by horses across the world’s first ‘railway’ bridges and embankments to reach the Tyne and the Wear. The North’s first coking plant had just been opened at Chester-le-Street, and where Thomas Newcomen’s ‘atmospheric’ steam engines were in use, they were employed in pumping water: either out of mines, or from streams into millponds to keep water-wheels turning.
Coal export from the River Tyne was still primarily aimed at the domestic market in London. Its use as the power to drive the steam age would have to wait for developments in steam engineering and iron-making technology. The lush pastures and easily tilled glacial soils of Northumberland’s hills and plains, for so long neglected because of border warfare, had yet to become, as they soon would, the most productive land on the planet. And the region’s greatest resource, its engineers, were either infants or had not been born. The main impetus behind these developments would be war.
Apart from twenty years of relative peace during the reigns of George I and George II, the major powers of Europe had been in more or less constant conflict during the eighteenth century. France’s chief area of interest was its trading colonies in the West Indies, America and Canada, settlements in India, and the protection of its trade in the Mediterranean. Spain was concerned primarily with South America and the West Indies. The Dutch also had colonies in the West Indies, but more importantly in the East: India and the Spice Islands. Great Britain, reliant even more heavily than its rivals on maritime links, had interests in all those areas. The result was a series of wars, some under the guise of dynastic squabbles, in which these four great powers sought to keep their existing investments, and expand their interests at the inevitable expense of the others. At various times these wars involved all the other powers of Europe: Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Austria, all linked by complicated familial and political ties, and all seeking to exploit the resources increasingly available through international maritime expansion.
Exploration, colonisation and trade were all primarily naval achievements, and it was through naval power that such trading colonies were protected. North America and Canada offered tobacco and fur and a growing export market; the West Indies were exploited for sugar, and to the south there was gold in seem
ingly limitless quantities. To the east, from India and beyond, came spices and silks. Increasingly, too, Africa was being exploited for its minerals and for its supply of slaves, to be employed in America and the West Indies on plantations.
In 1756, when Cuthbert Collingwood was eight, a simmering conflict with France over tensions in Canada and New England was brought to a European boil: by threatening invasion of England, France aimed to tie down a British navy consisting of three hundred ships and seventy thousand fighting men.13 Although France’s plans caused panic in Britain, the attempt was a feint. A more convenient target was selected. That year the French fleet at Toulon carried an invasion army to Menorca and captured the island. What must the eight-year-old Collingwood have thought when it was reported that Admiral John Byng, having failed to prevent the invasion, was to be court-martialled and shot for cowardice? Twenty years later Collingwood would twice be court-martialled himself.
It can hardly have been Byng’s fate that decided Collingwood on a naval career. As the oldest son he might be tempted, or expected, to follow his father into business as a trader, except that the business was going bust. He could otherwise have joined the merchant marine, where he might travel the world and where the pay, if one survived, was good. He must have had many opportunities to talk to sailors along the Quayside in Newcastle and it is hard to imagine that exotic items brought from across the world failed to stir his imagination.
There was no great naval connection in the family, although Cuthbert’s mother’s sister had married Richard Braithwaite, who was a frigate captain. Something, though, must have enthused the three brothers: Wilfred, the second son, was to join the navy too. He served with distinction alongside his older brother and their friend Horatio Nelson in the West Indies, before dying at the age of thirty-eight. John joined the customs service and outlived the rest of his family, dying in 1841 at the age of ninety-one.
Perhaps it was the events of the year 1759 that determined them, the year Collingwood turned eleven. This may have been the year14 that he attended the Royal Grammar School at Newcastle, along with the two Scott brothers who later became Lords Eldon and Stowell. Known in their day as the Head School, its headmaster was Hugh Moises, a hard but highly capable teacher whose traditional curriculum was classically based: ‘Latin was the meat course and salads and desserts were few.’15 It was drummed into young boys using a combination of authority, passion and flogging. It has been said by all of Collingwood’s biographers that his character was formed under this determined administration, but the school’s archivist insists that Collingwood did not attend for more than about six months. Unfortunately, all the school’s records from that period have been lost during a series of relocations. Certainly Collingwood cannot have attended beyond the age of thirteen, because by then he was at sea with Captain Braithwaite.
The Year of Victories, as 1759 came to be called, was a turning point for the fortunes of the British in the Seven Years’ War with France. Its architect was Admiral Lord George Anson, famous for his circumnavigation of the globe in the 1740s and for his naval victories against the French and Spanish, and subsequently First Lord of the Admiralty. By 1759 he had engineered a service that was the largest industrial organisation in the western world and so efficient, despite its many shortcomings, that it could operate in every potential theatre of war simultaneously.16
In May it was reported that a British force operating in the West Indies, having failed to take and hold Martinique, had successfully landed on Guadeloupe and captured it from the French. In August the Duke of Brunswick defeated the French army at Minden. That same month, rumours of an invasion fleet had British squadrons patrolling the Channel ports and French Atlantic coast, and the famous Cornishman Admiral Boscawen, reacting to a report that a French squadron had left Toulon and been seen making its way through the Strait of Gibraltar, pursued them into Lagos Bay on the south-west tip of Portugal and defeated them, taking three ships and burning two others.
There was another, less decisive victory in September when Admiral Pocock won a bloody face-off with a French squadron off Pondicherry in south-east India. In October came dramatic news that General Wolfe’s expedition up the St Lawrence River had finally come to fruition with the storming of the Heights of Abraham and subsequent capture of Quebec. Wolfe had died heroically.
Finally, in November, Admiral Hawke had come up with his French counterpart Conflans in Quiberon Bay off the west coast of France. In a gale of shocking force, and navigating through treacherous shoals in almost reckless pursuit, Hawke’s squadron drove three French ships on shore and two others foundered, while one was captured – her value, in accordance with naval tradition, being divided among the victorious crews as prize money.
One by one, though not necessarily in chronological order, these victories were reported in the Newcastle Courant. Eighteenth-century news was always dislocated from events by a combination of tide, weather, distance and a variety of other fates. Nevertheless, the cumulative effect of these victories on the public was electrifying, and it is easy to imagine how the eleven-year-old Cuthbert and his younger brothers might decide they wanted to emulate their heroes.
Hero-worship was not the only reason for a young man to go to war. To begin with, no family with money or land would let the oldest son join the navy: there was too great a risk of him dying and leaving no one to inherit title or business. But Collingwood senior, who let both his oldest sons join, had little in the way of business to pass on, given what in the eighteenth century was the liability of three adult sisters to be provided for. In such impoverished circumstances few other professions were open to them. The law, the army and business all required capital. A career in the navy had its dangers, but it required very little in the way of financial input, and had at least the surety of a career structure. Boys who left home young cost nothing to keep, less to educate.
Apart from the glory that might one day come his way, there is no doubt that a young boy would have heard of prize money: the value of a captured enemy ship shared by the entire victorious crew or crews, but distributed very much in favour of the officers.17 Collingwood himself would earn little in the way of prize money until Trafalgar, but he died leaving more than £160,000 to his daughters.18 It may also be that the prospect of a life at sea, full of adventure, seemed more attractive than the favours of his headmaster, just as today the prospect of a career of fame and fortune, however illusory, seduces small boys into believing that a scout from a Premiership football club is watching them practise in the park. Nor should one forget aspects of eighteenth-century culture that seem faintly strange today: duty and service. Collingwood may very well have grown up asking himself how he might best serve his country.
In 1761 Cuthbert’s father paid £30 for him to volunteer, probably as a servant, to Captain Braithwaite aboard Shannon, a 600-ton 28-gun frigate (very like Jack Aubrey’s beloved Surprise). This type of ship, known as a ‘jackass’ frigate, was by this time considered too small to be of much use as a fighting ship. It was a true ship (that is, it had three masts, was square-rigged, and was commanded by a post-captain) and although it might have sailing qualities that could be described as nimble, its armament was too light for it to take on anything much larger than itself. Shannon had an internal length of about 110 feet and a beam of just over 30 feet. She carried fourteen nine-pounder guns to a side on a single deck, throwing a broadside weight – the mass of shot she could discharge in one round from one side – of 126lbs. This compared to the broadside of a first-rate line of battle ship, of something over 1,500lbs in a single discharge. Shannon’s crew numbered about two hundred, of which eighteen were officers, divided into those who held commissions (the captain and two lieutenants) and those who held warrants: master, boatswain, gunner, carpenter, surgeon and so on. Their mates, and the four midshipmen, were ratings, without warrant or commission.
As a volunteer, the thirteen-year-old Collingwood had a theoretical career laid out for him. He was both an appren
tice seaman and an apprentice officer. To begin with he would be taught to hand, reef and sail: to learn the ropes (more than thirty miles of them, even in a frigate) and their very technical, sometimes arcane names: shrouds, ratlines, cross catharpins, futtocks, timenoguys and the like. Most future officers would be given into the care of a ‘mother’ or ‘sea-daddy’, an old and preferably wise seaman of infinite experience, who would teach them the niceties of knotting and splicing, sewing and shipboard etiquette, and protect them from the worst of any bullying that went on. Forty years later one of Collingwood’s own midshipmen, Robert Hay, described the process:
It was my lot to fall into the hands of Jack Gillies, than whom a handier fellow never left the Emerald Isle. The cutting out and making of jackets, shirts and trousers, the washing of them when soiled, and the mending of them neatly when they began to fail, took precedence… From the knotting of a rope yarn to the steering of a ship under bare poles in a tiffoon, Jack excelled in all.19
Collingwood did not instantly become a midshipman the day he arrived in Shannon. Midshipman was a rating, not a commission. To become midshipmen (variously known as snotties, monkeys or more significantly young gentlemen) and thus have the right to walk on the holy quarterdeck, wear a dirk and order men to be punished, volunteers had to show that they were capable of bearing the responsibility that went with the rating. A mid’ would have to earn respect from men old enough to be his father. Collingwood would be at sea for five years before he was rated midshipman.