Arms and the State

Sir William Armstrong and the Remaking of British Naval Power, 1854–1914

Marshall J. Bastable

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351957250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

Arms and the State is a history of Britain's first and foremost modern armaments company, the Armstrong Whitworth Company, from its origins in 1854 to 1914. It focuses on the role of Sir William G. Armstrong, an engineer and entrepreneur who transformed his modest mechanical engineering business into a vast industrial enterprise which invented, developed, manufactured and sold heavy guns and warships throughout the world. Arms and the State reconstructs the global arms trade as it follows Armstrong's companies selling the latest weapons to both sides in the American Civil War, Egypt, Turkey and Italy in the 1860s, to China, Chile and Japan in the 1870s and 1880s, and became Britain's leading armaments company in the age of the naval arms races that preceded the First World War. In so doing, it discusses varied topics such as the social and political nature of technological innovation, the quality of Britain's late-Victorian entrepreneurs, and the impact of armaments on British politics, defence policies, the international arms trade and imperialism. Arms and the State situates the history of the company in its technological, political and international contexts, with particular attention given to the role of British Parliamentary politics and the inner workings of the War Office and Admiralty bureaucracies. The central narrative is Armstrong's role in the militarization of technology in the 1850s, the commercialization of the armaments trade on a global scale in the 1860s and 1870s, and the emergence of the British military-industrial state in the 1880s and 1890s. Arms and the State provides a history of the people, the technology and the business of the Arms trade. It is a fascinating story of the domestic politics, the foreign policy and strategic calculations, the manipulation of the press and the bureaucratic intrigues that lay behind the invention, production and proliferation of the first weapons of mass destruction.

PART I

INVENTING THE ARMSTRONG GUN, 1854–65

CHAPTER ONE
War, friends and competitors

I

On a December day in 1854, William Armstrong, a successful businessman and engineer from Newcastle, was ushered into the office of the Duke of Newcastle, the British Secretary of State for War. Armstrong carried drawings of a new cannon which he believed constituted a significant advance over all existing artillery. The War Office, the department of the army responsible for supplying both the British army and the navy with their guns, had not responded to the many civilian engineers who had submitted designs for new weapons, and Armstrong thus sought the assurance from Newcastle that, once he had developed his idea into an actual gun, the War Office would give it a fair trial. Access to the duke had been cleared for Armstrong by his good friend James Rendel,¹ the navy’s chief civil engineer. Rendel had asked the First Lord of the Admiralty, Sir James Graham, to arrange the meeting between Armstrong and the duke.² Thus helpful friends in high places gave Armstrong an enormous social advantage over other inventors clamouring for the government to give attention to their ideas.

Newcastle listened to Armstrong eagerly. The Crimean War had barely begun but was already turning into a military and hence political disaster for the government.³ The most obvious problem was the poor supply lines to the troops, administrative confusion and incompetent military leadership, but there were three related technical problems: the range of British smooth-bored guns was shorter than the rifled small arms of the Russians, they had not the power to break the walls of the huge fortress at Sebastopol and, thirdly, they were of such bulk and weight that it was extremely difficult to manoeuvre bronze and iron smooth-bored cannon quickly around the muddy hills of the Crimean battlefields.⁴ The problem was revealed during the Battle of Inkerman on 5 November 1854. The Russians attacked and Lord Raglan, the Commander-in-Chief of Britain’s expeditionary force, ordered two 18-pounders brought up to defend their position. No draught horses were available, however, and it required 150 soldiers and eight supervising officers three hours to haul the two-ton guns into position.⁵ The Russian attack at Inkerman was finally beaten back, but only upon the arrival of allied infantry armed with French Minié rifles and fierce hand-to-hand fighting which cost 2500 British casualties.

The invention by the London Times of publishing reports sent from the battlefield had a tremendous impact in England. It captured the interest and imaginations of its readers, and made the war an immediate event in their lives, which provoked reactions in many quarters. It drew Armstrong’s attention to the state of armaments engineering as compared to civilian accomplishments, and presented a new engineering opportunity for Armstrong to pursue. The political scandal of the war centred on the administrative chaos, the breakdown of the supply lines and the costly tactical mistakes made by the government at home and by generals on the battlefields. Armstrong, however, concentrated on the outdated British artillery. He read the newspaper report on Inkerman at breakfast in the London home of James Rendel, with whom he stayed whenever business brought him down from Newcastle. Rendel raged against British military engineers who had not improved artillery since the seventeenth century. Compared to civil engineers like himself and mechanical engineers like his friend Armstrong, he said, military engineers were an apathetic and backward lot who remained wedded to heavy cast-iron material which was too brittle to be rifled. Wrought iron was lighter and softer and a gun forged of it could be rifled as small-arm gun makers had proved. Rendel proclaimed Armstrong the man to bring British artillery into the nineteenth century and pressed his friend to turn his skills to artillery.

Armstrong accepted the challenge as an interesting engineering problem, not as a new business adventure. This distinction is important in that it reminds us that technological innovations are not always motivated by profits. Armstrong’s hydraulic crane and mechanical engineering business was prospering, and Armstrong was open to new areas of engineering. He did not envision moving into the armaments business in 1854, and indeed entered the business reluctantly in 1863. He entered the armaments business from a different context and for very different reasons than did the Vickers brothers in 1889. They switched because the demand for rails had dried up, and the demand for naval armour was on the rise. In 1854, Armstrong looked at armaments as an engineering challenge. Business considerations came later. Which of these motives is the more entrepreneurial? From which come truly innovative changes in technology? Armstrong’s entrepreneurship straddled both technology and business, but his move into armaments began with an engineering problem which had haunted military engineers for centuries.

II

The history of gunpowder weapons in Europe begins in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Medieval gun makers had tried to build guns of wrought iron but found them weaker than bronze or, to a lesser degree, cast iron, and they returned to casting their heavy guns.⁶ These heavy and crude mechanisms were dragged to the battle site by oxen and worked entirely by hand. Their range and accuracy were matters of luck as much as the skill of the gunner. These great iron monsters gave rise to the era of early modern siege warfare during which gun makers and military architects engaged in a see-saw battle of offence against defence.⁷ This ‘military revolution’ of early modern Europe was not fully embraced in Britain. It remained ‘a zone where the transformation in fortification and siege craft was incomplete, gradual and relatively tardy’.⁸ English military architecture came to a virtual halt after the War of the Roses when, in the era of Tudor peace, the great landowners built comfortable manor houses to replace their fortified castles. When Henry VII built a string of forts to meet a French invasion, he refused to hire a European professional military architect and was only brought round by the reality of such an attempt in 1545.⁹

Artillery emerged as an effective weapon during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when its size was reduced and mobility increased. Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494–5 was successful in large part because his artillery, drawn in wheeled vehicles by horses instead of oxen, was never far behind his infantry. Mobile artillery allowed him to accomplish in a few hours what had once taken days.¹⁰ In the seventeenth century, Gustavus Adolphus lightened his artillery with differing bronze alloys, sought to standardise it to three calibres and developed a rote-learned system of speedy loading which allowed his gunners to fire 20 rounds an hour, a rate which approached that of musketeers.¹¹ The French made further technological improvements during the eighteenth century. Their more precise boring techniques reduced the windage (the space between the shot and the inner wall of the barrel) and directed more of the explosive force against the shot. Less powder – and thus less explosive force – imparted the same muzzle velocity and hence artillery could be made with thinner walls. The weight of a French 4-pounder fell from 1300 pounds to 600 and the French 12-pounder fell from 2400 pounds to 1200.¹² Artillery had become an effective mobile battlefield weapon by the time of the French Revolution and played a major role in Napoleon’s sweep across Europe.¹³

Throughout this period major developments in artillery were products of European inventors and military leaders. The English contributed little to either the technology or the tactics of artillery warfare. Gustavus Adolphus directed 90 pieces of artillery at an action in 1632, but in some battles of the English Civil War field guns were entirely absent. Many attempts to imitate European light and mobile 3-pounders ended in failure.¹⁴

Small-arm gun makers reclaimed some advantage for Britain after 1815 with the development of conical bullets, percussion caps and rifling. The range and accuracy of ‘rifles’ exceeded those of artillery and hence infantry could drive back the artillery. Infantry’s advantage was enlarged further when Johann Nicholas von Dreyse invented the needle-gun in 1836 and opened the way to breech-loaded rifles with which soldiers could fire and load from crouched or prone positions. The French Minié muzzle-loaded bullet gave rifles a range of 1000 yards in the 1850s and it was followed by breech-loaders with ranges up to 1600 yards.¹⁵ Artillery inventors attempted to adopt these new technologies in the 1830s and 1840s but failed to produce a practical rifled artillery piece with which to counter the small-arm rifle.¹⁶ Inventors in America and France had made progress by the 1850s, but an artillery piece that combined the latest developments in small arms eluded them.

England seemed the least likely place for a breakthrough to occur. Britain was the first industrial nation, but, as Rendel remarked, her military engineers remained content with their guns and her civilian engineers were busy making steam engines, roads, railways and ships. Even Napoleon’s triumphs had failed to generate new thinking about British field guns. The complacency among military authorities, bred by victory in 1815, was underscored by British middle-class faith that material progress and international trade were making war obsolete. The gentry who supplied the officers and the rural labourers who supplied the soldiers for the British army were the declining classes of the ...