A new naval history

James Davey, Quintin Colville

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781526113832
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia britannica moderna

A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this field is researched and understood and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the socio-cultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.

Part I

Sociocultural analyses of the Royal Navy

1

Particular skills: warrant officers in the Royal Navy, 1775–1815

Evan Wilson

Warrant officers are the forgotten men of the Georgian navy. Above them, commissioned officers have received substantial historical attention, beginning with, but not limited to, the ever-increasing biographies of Nelson.¹ Below them, the lower deck has come under growing scrutiny, much of it focused on the question of impressment.² Warrant officers of wardroom rank, on the other hand, have only been studied in fits and starts. These men – the master, the purser, the surgeon and the chaplain – lack the glamour of commissioned officers and the political salience of impressed men on the lower deck. But the failure of the historical profession to study warrant officers should not be seen as a reflection on their value to the navy and its operations. They were prominent members of every ship, and the master, purser, and surgeon had particular skills that were unique on board and essential for life at sea. They ate and in some cases berthed alongside commissioned officers in the wardroom, and saw themselves as socially and professionally comparable.

What has been written about warrant officers originates, as does so much of the social history of the navy in this period, with Michael Lewis. His pioneering work on commissioned officers relied on a large database; he was unable to compile a similar database for warrant officers because of a lack of available sources, but he did study warrant officers in the context of other members of the ship’s company.³ Few since have followed his lead. More recent studies have tended to focus on only one kind of warrant officer, such as Gordon Taylor and N. A. M. Rodger’s work on naval chaplains, or Janet Macdonald’s research on pursers.⁴ The most common of these studies focus on surgeons.⁵ Medical historians have contributed significantly to our understanding both of surgeons’ roles in medical discoveries and their naval careers. While the work of John Cardwell, in particular, has significantly advanced our understanding of surgeons’ lives, its scope is narrow.⁶ It is long past time to revisit Lewis’s work and include all warrant officers – not just surgeons – in the new social history of the navy.

The foundation for this chapter is a database of warrant officers selected at random from seniority lists compiled by naval administrators from 1775 to 1815. It includes all four warrant officers of wardroom rank, and it is designed to cover roughly 10 per cent of the men who served during the French Revolutionary (1792–1802) and Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). The database provides opportunities to compare warrant officers both to each other and to commissioned officers. Using online genealogical databases, we can suggest some preliminary conclusions about warrant officers’ families and their geographic origins. By tracing the paths that warrant officers took into the navy, the pattern of their movements from ship to ship within the navy, and whether they decided to remain in the navy for their whole careers, we can reveal a more comprehensive picture of warrant officers’ careers and lives than any previous study.⁷ They were typical members of Georgian Britain’s middle classes, and they aspired to the respect and status of professionals, including doctors, lawyers, and clergymen as well as commissioned army and navy officers. Some succeeded, using the navy as a platform for advancement in the civilian world, while others remained in naval service. Those who remained waged a successful campaign for higher pay and more elaborate uniforms to close the social gap with commissioned officers. Masters and chaplains, though, struggled with lingering uncertainty about their employment prospects and their place in the naval hierarchy.

Most warrant officers were English, and few were born outside the British Isles, as Table 1 shows. Within the British Isles, there are some interesting patterns. Note that there are no Scottish chaplains in the database, because chaplains not born in England tended to come from Church of England territory – namely Wales and Ireland. As naval historians have long suspected, and as Cardwell’s work also shows, surgeons were disproportionately Scottish and Irish.⁹ Educational opportunities were significantly greater for surgeons in Ireland and Scotland, as will be discussed later. Surprisingly, nearly one in three masters seems to have been Scottish but, unlike surgeons, the remaining majority was heavily English rather than split between England and Ireland. Masters’ records were the most difficult to uncover and, as a result, the percentage of Scottish masters may be exaggerated. But Master Murdo Downie’s career provides some hints as to why there may have been so many Scottish masters. Born in Aberdeen, Downie grew up working in the North Sea coastal fishing trade before joining the navy. He published a chart of the east coast of Scotland in 1792, and was later cited as an expert on the North Sea in a book entitled The New Seaman’s Guide, and Coaster’s Companion.¹⁰ The maritime communities of Scotland were a fertile recruiting ground for the navy. English-born masters were also likely to come from maritime communities, where they would have been exposed at an early age to the seamanship and navigation skills necessary for survival at sea.

Table 1 Geographic origins in the wardroom⁸

Warrant officers came from social backgrounds broadly similar to those of commissioned officers.¹¹ This conclusion goes against most of what has been written about members of the wardroom. Historians have assumed that since a commission was undoubtedly more prestigious than a warrant, commissioned officers would naturally have come from more socially elite backgrounds than warrant officers.¹² Instead, it is more accurate to say that the majority of commissioned and warrant officers shared similar professional and commercial backgrounds. A typical wardroom in a ship of the line might have five lieutenants, four warrant officers and three marine officers. On average, nine of these twelve men would have come from middling backgrounds, and only one or two from a landed family.¹³ The social distance between wardroom members, and in particular between the commissioned and warrant officers, was small. Chaplain Edward Mangin provides corroborating evidence when he notes that there was only one ‘independent man’ in his wardroom on board the third-rate Gloucester; the rest came from backgrounds on the fringes of genteel society.¹⁴

We need not spend any time on the ‘titled people’ category here, since no warrant officers came from the elite. The professional category similarly requires little explanation: professionals were often the sons of other professionals. Two straightforward examples are surgeon James Thynne, whose father was an apothecary and surgeon in Scotland, and chaplain Edward Brice, whose father was also a clergyman.¹⁶ Purser John Henry Bond crossed two categories: his father was a surgeon in the navy, and his grandfather was a purser.¹⁷ There are dozens of other examples in the database, as roughly half of all members of the wardroom came from professional backgrounds. The ‘business and commerce’ category refers to the widest range of family incomes, from Surgeon Samuel Gage Britton, whose father was a tailor in Bristol, to Captain Christopher Bell, whose father was a merchant who owned one of the largest houses in Great Yarmouth.¹⁸

It is noteworthy that that the commissioned officer, Bell, came from a relatively wealthy commercial background, while the warrant officer, Britton, did not. There was a social gap between the backgrounds of commissioned and warrant officers, such that in each category commissioned officers tended to come from the higher end of the social spectrum. They were more likely to be the sons of prominent professionals – admirals, generals, physicians, bishops – than warrant officers. Nevertheless, the gap was not so large that warrant officers would have necessarily felt socially inferior to commissioned officers. Most men in the wardroom were members of the upper quartile of British society, but not members of the landed elite. As members of the middle classes, they could not rely on family wealth and so followed their fathers in pursuing a profession requiring training and education.

The most surprising result in Table 2 though is that, on a typical ship of the line, the surgeon was as likely to come from a landed background as one or two of the lieutenants. For a Scottish or Irish gentry family, sending their son into the medical profession was a relatively safe, if moderately expensive, choice. Surgeons incurred medical training expenses of between £50 and £100, but the potential payoff for such an investment was a steady career as a medical service provider with the chance of further education leading to becoming a physician.¹⁹ Service in the navy, as we will see, was a useful way to gain valuable experience and possibly a useful connection. The reputation of naval surgeons also increased steadily across the eighteenth century.²⁰ In his 1748 novel Roderick Random, Tobias Smollett famously portrayed naval surgeons as incompetent and untrained. At his exam, Random is asked, ‘If during an engagement at sea, a man should be brought to you with his head shot off, how would you behave?’. Smollett was aiming more for black humour than truth, but other commentators were similarly sceptical of surgeons’ abilities. A former surgeon lamented the ‘absurdity’ of employing ‘raw apothecaries’ boys … whose whole education had been acquired in the course of a year or two behind the counter’.²¹ By the end of the century, though, training and expertise seem to have improved. Surgeon John McHugh had in fact been trained as an apothecary before he joined the navy, but he was more than just an apothecary’s boy: he was a licensed apothecary in Dublin in his own right.²²

Table 2 Social backgrounds in the wardroom¹⁵

Source: Wilson, ‘The Sea Officers’, chapter three. The categories derive from Lewis’ work on commissioned officers, and while they are imprecise and slightly old-fashioned, they are still helpful in distinguishing wardroom members’ relative social prestige

Other surgeons attended teaching hospitals or attended classes at a Scottish university before joining the navy. Since the ancient English universities did not offer medical classes in the same way, we can see one reason why a disproportionate number of surgeons were Scottish. Even those without any kind of higher education would have been educated locally and learned at least the fundamentals of Latin, which was essential for medical practice. Peter Cullen, for example, attended a grammar school in Glasgow for four years before matriculating at the College of Glasgow; he began his apprenticeship with a local surgeon when he turned fourteen.²³ Most future naval surgeons joined the navy as young men in their late teens or early twenties as assistant surgeons. There was no qualifying exam, and naval service provided ample opportunities for hands-on learning. As the contemporary commentator John Atkins argued, ‘I know of no better School to improve in, than the NAVY, especially in Time of War, Accidents are frequent, and the Industrious illustrate Practice by their Cures’.²⁴ When the candidate felt he was prepared, he would attend one of the twice-monthly meetings of the Surgeons’ Company at its headquarters near Newgate Gaol. There, with other candidates for service as surgeons in the armed services and the East India Company, he would be interviewed by one of the examiners. T...