Search results
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.
had now definitely resolved that the naval history of the future shall not be unworthy of its past’.4 The Royal Sovereign linked contemporary imperial politics with Britain’s naval past and ongoing questions about ship design. In 1884 the journalist W.T. Stead had published a powerful article on ‘The truth about the navy’ in the Pall Mall Gazette. He critiqued the frugal naval spending of the past decades and contended that the Navy was ill-equipped to protect Britain’s vast trade networks and imperial interests that spanned the globe. Utilising the grow ing
which to ground your building system. Viscount Palmerston exhibits his knowledge of hydrodynamics in an 1845 speech in the House of Commons.1 To many readers, Viscount Palmerston’s speech on the problems that faced Britain’s warship designers will be as surprising as the Victorian Prime Minister was informed. It should not be so. Naval construction and ship design were frequently the subjects of parliamentary speeches, newspaper articles and periodical 1 ‘Supply – the Navy estimates’, Hansard 78 (31 March 1845), 1290 –1. 2 Shaping the Royal Navy essays
, technology, and experience aboard the USS Monitor (Baltimore, MD, 2000), 7–12. 272 Shaping the Royal Navy institutional authority of their makers.4 It has brought to light the activities, backgrounds, concerns and skills of a group of actors who literally shaped the Royal Navy; and rather than taking them for granted, it has examined their authority to act by resurrecting controversies and has recovered the politics of ship design. Through this contextual approach it has shed new light on the history of naval architecture. It has followed naval architects through the
comfortable assurance about warship design’.7 This chapter examines the concerns of those actors involved in the management of naval architecture, locating the introduction of steam within a larger debate over what were the ‘correct’ principles of ship design. Their work was complicated by steam, but not driven by it. Ship designers, administrators and politicians increasingly talked about managing naval architecture in terms of ‘principles’ and ‘systems’, exploring which principles ensured conversion to steam at the least cost and waste of material and labour. The
his ships. An officer on Symonds’s HMS Vernon places his faith in the controversial ship.2 HMS Vernon was one of Captain William Symonds’s first ships built for the Royal Navy. When she was laid down he was neither a member nor a trusted associate of the Navy Board that controlled naval shipbuilding. By the time she began her trials, he had been given unprecedented authority over naval ship design. The 1830 Whig government’s Board of Admiralty abolished the Tory-controlled Navy Board and appointed Symonds to oversee many of its duties. These reforms were among a
and uncertainty that surrounded this class of ship for so much of the 1870s. Actors contending for authority in ship design drew her into the wake of the Captain catastrophe and Reed’s resignation from the Admiralty. In Parliament George Goschen, First Lord of the Admiralty, faced questions, innuendo and intrigue about this unfamiliar vessel. On a number of occasions he was drawn to remark that if the Admiralty were unable to prove the Devastation’s stability in heavy seas, she would be a failure.14 The ship was kept close to Britain’s harbours until this question
, involving public engagements and political manoeuvres, to secure what he considered an ideal trial for demonstrating his design ideas. Coles had no formal training or connection to Admiralty naval architects. He was in fact a vocal critic of the Chief Constructor, Edward James Reed, and his designs. Coles formed his ideas on turrets and ship design from personal naval experience and by reading accounts of contemporary naval battles. Beginning in the Crimean War, he advocated new ways of delivering the firepower of heavy guns to shore and sea targets. Encouraged by
) devoted to all the grossness and barbarity of war, while they are deprived of every thing attractive to the sailor. Let the new iron frigates be as invulnerable as iron and mechanical skill can make them, and let us, by all means, have a fleet of them ready without delay to match any that can be brought into the sea from other shores. But let them be ships that officers and men can take pride in . . .3 The process of confronting iron in ship design was deeply embedded in many aspects of naval culture, both imagined and experienced. Britain’s trusted maritime defences
appreciated. He believed that successive boards of Admiralty had worked on the premise that they should order the most powerful ships recommended to them in order to stay materially ahead of their greatest naval rivals. This often entailed making elementary comparisons between the strengths of their and rival nation’s fleets, highlighting key qualities such as number and power of guns, speed and the thickness of armour. There was very little connected discussion between the naval officer, naval architect and administrators concerning how ship design affected tactics and