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The nineteenth-century Royal Navy was transformed from a fleet of sailing wooden walls into a steam powered machine. This book provides the first cultural history of technology, authority and the Royal Navy in the years of Pax Britannica. It brings to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy. The book demonstrates the ways in which naval architects shaped naval thinking about ship design and influenced how ships were employed in active service. The 1830 Whig government's Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties and made the self-fashioning of the enlightened 'sailor-designer' identity a priority. The book focuses on the implications of steam for the management of naval architecture. The shaping of the Warrior and the introduction of iron into the British warship took place against the backdrop of projecting naval power and actors building credibility for new materiel. HMS Captain fully represented Cowper Coles's ideas of what a turret ship should be, and her launch the culmination of over ten years' effort, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. The Royal Sovereign was one of the Royal Navy's first warships built under the 1889 Naval Defence Act, which provided £21.5 million for ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers and other smaller vessels. The Navy is one of the most historically significant, and yet singularly neglected, institutions in the history of technology and war.
insoluble? It is the tendency of many men to say this. The Engineer emphasises the peculiarities involved in settling engineering questions in the Navy, the latest being how to spend the £21.5 million granted for ship construction by the Naval Defence Act.2 On 26 February 1891, Queen Victoria presided over a spectacular naval double-header, the launch of HMS Royal Arthur and floating out of HMS Royal Sovereign. It had been thirty-six years since the monarch had launched a ship, HMS Marlborough (1855). This was a newsworthy occasion, made all the more interesting to
Royal Sovereign, a 121-gun three-decker converted in 1862. Osborn promoted Coles’s design ideas throughout the 1860s and 1870s, and defended his fellow officer from the criticisms of naval architects and engineers. When called to testify to an Admiralty committee on warship design, he maintained Coles’s criticism of Reed’s turret ship HMS Monarch as ‘very seriously defective as compared with ships of the “Captain” class, or, again, as compared with the large Monitor turret-ships of America or of Russia’.4 Osborn also introduced Coles to Hugh Burgoyne, a naval officer
focused on stability and safety, the main design concern of naval architects at the time. From HMS Captain, through HMS Devastation and on to HMS Royal Sovereign, this issue attracted attention in Parliament and the press, and provided actors with an opportunity for redrawing the boundaries of the naval architect’s authority. Making naval power Naval architects had a stake in being able to guarantee the design and construction of a safe and stable vessel, but their role in ship design transcended the calculation of displacement, freeboard and centre of gravity. This
precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.8 The transition has degenerated into an impasse from which there is no 197 198 198 Conclusion release. In assessing the political landscape, Gramsci ascribed to ‘interregnum’ a specific meaning that drew on social, political, and legal structures. In the words of Zygmunt Bauman: The term ‘interregnum’ was originally used to denote a time-lag separating the death of one royal sovereign from the enthronement of the successor … Gramsci
This book aims to revisit the county study as a way into understanding the dynamics of the English civil war during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a ‘county community’. It investigates the responses of the county’s governing elite and puritan religious establishment to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I’s Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of the petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire during 1641-42. This important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English Revolution.
and cost £2.5 million. On the night of 15 October 1987, a few months after I moved to London, there was a major hurricane in the south of England. From Wikipedia, on ‘The Great Storm of 1987’: The strongest gusts, of up to 100 knots (190 km/h; 120 mph), were recorded along the south-eastern edge of the storm, hitting mainly Hampshire, Sussex, Essex and Kent. The Royal Sovereign lighthouse 6 miles (9.7 km) off Eastbourne recorded wind speeds on their instruments pegged at 110 mph offscale high, i.e. could read no higher … The storm caused substantial damage over much
privileges should be upheld by a king who was a judge and administrator, sworn to protect such laws. Taxation other than customary dues could be collected only with consent. A division of authority and mutual spheres of actions of the component parts of the state would ensure its harmonious existence.56 The traditional picture of the downward-spiralling effectiveness of royal authority during the religious wars has been modified by studies of local communities, particularly towns. Despite difficulties of practical government, there were developments in royal sovereign
urged to buy Huntley and Palmer’s ‘Royal Sovereign’ biscuits, baked with a royal crown etched out in apricot jam; or they might acquire the Ensignette camera (‘the camera that fits a waistcoat pocket’), advertised using the Royal Navy ensign. 75 Other naval allusions were broached by the Belfast tobacco company, Gallaher, in their popular ‘Senior Service’ brand of cigarette. Visitors to the Belfast
, marchionesses, countesses and baronesses, as widows [viscountesses are omitted, presumably accidentally] Treasurer and comptroller of the royal household, principal secretary, Dean of the Chapel Royal, sovereign’s almoner, Master of the Rolls Lord chief justice of the Court of King’s Bench, warden of the Cinque Ports Quota unlimited 8 6 5 4 3 2 2 1 What made the statutory privileges available to a chaplain was a letter of ‘qualification’ – a document under the signature and seal of the patron testifying to the chaplaincy. Given to the clerics concerned, four Elizabethan