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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.
Conclusion In an evil hour there came a man of science with ideas about steam, and then another with a notion of an iron plate, and between them they made wild work of the old navy. Late nineteenth-century authors grew increasingly fascinated by how the introduction of steam and iron transformed the Navy, some casting the ‘man of science’ in the ‘despicable’ role of bringing an end to the wooden walls.1 Modern science has, however, so changed the art of sea warfare that mere animal courage is only one of the many elements required to make a great naval commander
story, but before its credit sequence, an off-screen narrator announces: ‘And now Mister Serling’, as lighting fades up from black to reveal the rough planks of a wooden wall and the closed shutters of an unglazed window. The camera is positioned outside a wooden cabin at night, and Serling opens the shutters inwards so that he becomes visible in a lighted interior space, in medium shot, wearing a dark suit and tie and a white shirt. Serling addresses the viewer: Next week we bring you a show called
diagonal on the revolve for Ibsen’s Wild Duck which the performers had to climb precariously, and in the Oresteia, he positioned a very narrow forestage as sole space for the actors to perform in front of a gigantic The tremor of speculative negation 111 Figure 7 A pictorial space that has physical impact on the actors: Michael Thalheimer’s production of Hauptmann’s Rats (Deutsches Theater Berlin, 2007; set design: Olaf Altmann). Photo: Barbara Braun. wooden wall that again closed up the entire height and width of the proscenium (see Figure 8). In its later
platform opened onto the underworld. The wall and stage thus hinged the representations of the natural and supernatural worlds as inverted doubles. For Bondy's The Winter’s Tale in the same year's festival, Peduzzi also designed a huge wooden wall, itself replicated on a smaller scale by wooden panels that encased Hermione's statue in an endless mise-en-abyme . The scenography emphasised the dual structure that underlies metaphysical and theatrical illusions, and highlighted the ability of the Honour Court to reveal the theatricality of the supernatural. In one
voiced the argument that, v 176 v Naval heroism in the mid-Victorian family magazine Every thing that can tend to illustrate the history of the Royal Navy, must always be regarded with feelings of the highest interest by Britons. Associated with the most brilliant passages of our annals, the essential protection of our mercantile enterprise and national prosperity, and rendered illustrious by the names and deathless examples of a Nelson, a Collingwood, or a Blake, it is difficult to reflect on the ‘wooden walls’ of our country, without a glow of enthusiasm, or burst
, unchanging as adamant: Even as everything else will be seized in Cecrops’ realm, And in the refuge of holy mount Cithaeron, Omniscient Zeus grants Athena’s desire That the wooden wall shall not be overcome, but will aid you and your children. But do not wait for the swarm of cavalry and infantry marching from Asia, Do not be still, but turn away and retreat from the enemy. There will come a day when you can confront him head-on. Divine Salamis, women’s sons you will slay When the corn is scattered, or the harvest gathered in. (Herodotus 7.141) Confronted by a party who
itself to us when we first went on board;– and; it would be equally difficult for any one who had not seen it, to comprehend the amount of misery, the suffering and, the horrors, that were contained within the wooden walls of that little craft.’ 96 In reality, commitment to the cause may not always have been driven by anti-slavery sentiment. But to judge these men for being more concerned with
of which were embedded behind her in the wooden wall, quivered all over her’ (1982b: 91). This has an unnerving similarity with the fate of another movie star, Sharon Tate, the wife of the film director Roman Polanski and the most well-known victim of the Manson family murders, who was stabbed sixteen times by members of the Manson gang. Her brutal murder, along with that of four others, was the catalyst for the apocalyptic Helter Skelter,13 when intruders entered her secluded house, overlooking Benedict Canyon and West Hollywood. There is a fictional parallel in
in Europe led British politicians to adopt a Tory-style isolationist stance, behind the shield of the navy’s ‘wooden walls’. By 1767 the then First Lord of the Treasury Grafton could reflect that British policy was ‘constantly to have a fleet in forwardness equal to what both houses of Bourbon could bring forth’.32 Financial economies introduced by that parsimonious Premier Grenville in fact denied the navy adequate funding. During the 1760s most of the fleet of 150 ships of the line were laid up, only a basic squadron of twenty guardships being kept in active