Steam Power and Sea Power

Coal, the Royal Navy, and the British Empire, c. 1870-1914

Steven Gray

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781137576415
• eBook ISBN: 9781137576422
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Argues that coal was a key facet of naval and imperial defence

Develops a new angle to the study of industrial commodities

Enhances our understanding of the connections and complexities of the British Empire

© The Author(s) 2018

Steven GraySteam Power and Sea PowerCambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Serieshttps://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57642-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Steven Gray¹

(1)

History, SSHLS, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK

Steven Gray

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

On 12 July 1871, the sea-going monitor H.M.S. Devastation —“by far the most formidable of its kind yet constructed”—was launched in Portsmouth . Attracting a great crowd despite inclement weather, the ship “slowly glided out of the dock” as the Royal Marine Band played the national anthem and sailors on nearby ships “hurrahed tremendously.”¹ It was a truly revolutionary ship, its ground-breaking design shown through the presence of large coal bunkers: H.M.S. Devastation was the first Royal Navy ship powered purely by steam and was entirely without sails. Moreover, it was the first ocean-going capital ship with all of its armaments mounted on the hull with “exceptionally heavy armour and armament.” This radical break with tradition meant that, unsurprisingly, its trials attracted international attention, with commentators being unsure if the ship was truly seaworthy.

These fears were not unfounded but were based on recent history. Less than one year earlier, the sea trial of another innovatory ship with turret guns, H.M.S. Captain , had ended in disaster when the unstable ship had sunk taking nearly 500 lives. With its mastless design, H.M.S. Devastation was more radical even than the Captain. It is perhaps unsurprising then that this new technology aroused fears of the unknown and a suspicion that ship architecture had moved into the realm of the impossible.

An American commentator, aboard for a sea trial, questioned whether it was even a ship at all:

the Devastation moves slowly ahead, and glides through the water as if she were a ship, instead of being a sort of infernal machine created by some tremendous engineering mind, when in a state of nightmare. In fact she is more like one’s infantile idea of a bogie than anything we have ever seen.²

Yet these suspicions were soon allayed. Although never designed for long cruises of imperial waters, the Devastation was still “able to steam over long distances and keep the sea for a considerable time.”³ It may have been otherworldly to contemporary eyes, but it proved to be far from a nightmare, except for Britain’s enemies. Instead, it was concluded that “she can steam; she can fire; and all works well … she is a wonderful vessel.”⁴

The ship marked the beginning of the new era of the mastless steamship whose decks allowed better-positioned guns, thus making warships far more formidable in battle. Whilst more hybrid ships with sail and steam engine were built for the navy, the last of these was launched just 4 years later. It is not surprising, therefore, that H.M.S. Devastation has an iconic status in naval history by marking a watershed moment in ship design. It also has a cultural legacy, which lasts even to this day, as the ship famously featured at the centre of the design for “England’s Glory” matches (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

H.M.S. Devastation pictured on the “England’s Glory” matchbox. Courtesy of Marcus Böckmann

This watershed created new issues for Britain. The free mobility of the Royal Navy in the age of steam has often been assumed, yet—as a correspondent aboard for the trial of Devastation suggested, the ship, “if working up to full power all day … consumes 150 tons of coal per day.” Without coal, therefore, as well as the engineers and stokers to manage the engines, “the Devastation becomes the veriest hulk in the navy.”⁵ The American Admiral Asa Walker echoed these remarks in 1900, stating that ‘the modern man of war presents no canvas to the winds; within her bowels is an insatiable monster whose demand is ever for coal and still more coal’.⁶ Therefore, Britain was only able to project its power, both militarily and culturally, and to protect British interests and commerce globally in the period from 1870 to 1914, because of the global coaling infrastructure it controlled for the use of its navy. This was, of course, central to the ability of the Royal Navy to either fight or be an effective deterrent. To this end, perhaps the most influential naval theorist of this period, A.T. Mahan , suggested in 1911 that “fuel stands first in importance of the resources necessary to a Fleet. Without ammunition, a ship might run away, hoping to fight another day, but without fuel, she can neither run, nor reach her station, nor remain on it, if remote, nor fight.”⁷

Supplying a fleet as large as Britain’s, with operations both diverse and global, required an immensely complex series of operations. Suitable fuel had to be found, tested, bought, and, transported. Strategic spaces had to be found to store the coal; labour was needed to load it; and plans were needed to protect them. Moreover, stock had to be managed and maintained to ensure that ships would have enough fuel to load when they arrived. The establishment of coaling stations also had ramifications for both those sailors who found themselves with leave after refuelling was done and for residents of those spaces who found naval visitors to be free-spending consumers, drunken nuisances, and carriers of disease.

This book therefore looks to understand the global changes wrought by a shift from a sail to a steam navy. To do so, it will not only look at the huge geopolitical and infrastructural issues caused by such a change but also the social and cultural ramifications for sailors, imperial labourers, and those residing at coaling stations. It also raises important questions about the British Empire itself. As Daniel Headrick suggests, when considering new imperialism, we must ask, ‘How did technological forces shape its development?’⁸ Indeed, when we frame it this way, coaling stations, and the networks that emanated from and around them, emerge as an important layer of the “British world-system” of the period of Pax Britannica. Much as John Darwin suggests in The Empire Project, these systems and processes often fall outside the term “British Empire,” which nonetheless played a vital role within the global British-world system .⁹ The Royal Navy was, as Andrew Lambert suggests, the “shield of Empire” (including its economic interests), and thus coaling stations were an integral part of the maintenance and expansion of global British influence in the last quarter of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth century.¹⁰

This study, then, is far more than a technocentric history of naval architecture. Instead, the book argues that the navy’s reliance on coal, a substance “utterly lacking in glamour,” in fact had important consequences that shape and augment our understanding of British strategy, geopolitics, infrastructure, and transnational and imperial history in this key episode of the Pax Britannica.¹¹ It shows that the Royal Navy had profound effects not just on defence issues but also on labour forces, indigenous societies, imperial networks, and imaginations of empire. The navy was a key “tool of empire” and thus understanding a radical change of technology within it is crucial to our understanding of the period of high imperialism, part of “hundreds of diverse products and processes” which allowed Britain to consolidate its global power.¹²

The Coal Problem

Whilst H.M.S. Devastation was the first British warship to be powered solely by coal-powered steam engines, the need for a coaling infrastructure for the Royal Navy, thus allowing ships to be at least partly powered by their engines, predates its launch. Indeed, mastless ships were just one part of the huge changes in naval technology that occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rapidly improving technology of steamships, particularly those developed after the Crimean War, increasingly offered advantages with which sail ships could not compete. Steam propulsion allowed ships’ routes to be more direct, and their speed to be increased. Furthermore, it enabled the use of iron and steel in hull design, allowing more effective armour. This was especially important as new projectiles developed in the mid-nineteenth century, such as exploding shells, were devastating to wooden warships: in terms of armour that the “wooden walls” were no longer adequate. Thus, a ship design that had served Britain so admirably in the wars of the long 18th century was now obsolete.

These changes took around two decades to fully embed. It would take the radical design of the Devastation to fully shackle the navy to the coaling station as, until the 1870s, steam engines remained too inefficient to be the sole source of power for a warship. Thus, even though the Battle of Navarino in 1827 was the last to be fought by the British Navy entirely with sailing ships, the shift to a steam navy was a gradual one, with hybrid ships of both sail and steam, such as H.M.S. Warrior, common in the early part of this period. The shift was not instantaneous, but it did have enormous ramifications for the Royal Navy, the British Empire, and its global trade.

Structure of the Book

At its heart, this book is about mobility . Britain had global interests that it needed to protect, and thus the Royal Navy had to be able to move across the globe. As soon as it could no longer rely on the free and abundant power of the wind, its mobility relied on the presence of fuel at strategic points across the oceans. This need was a complex one, and had ramifications for imperial defence, created a need for infrastructure and vast labour forces, and meant that Royal Navy ships became far more common sites across the world, as they stopped to refuel. This book is comprised four parts, constituting a journey from the geopolitical planners in Whitehall, through the pits and coal export ports, to the imperial coaling stations, where sailors experienced both indigenous labour , local peoples, and exotic landscape s.

The first part of the book discusses the political issues resulting from a dependence on coal and uses the term “coal consciousness ” to describe the increasing awareness of the importance of coal to British imperial and commercial security. Rather than discuss the coal issue in isolation, however, it argues that it is imperative to see the wider context of the last quarter of the nineteenth century in order to understand the place of coal in discussions about imperial defence. Indeed, it shows that the emerging acceptance of the need to defend coaling stations in the later 1880s, and its important effects in terms of imperial defence and naval mobilisation, did not stem only from concern about the safety of coaling in war, but was also a result of a combination of interdependent changes in state, politics and popular opinion.

Chapter 2 considers how the Carnarvon Commission , compared with the earlier Colonial Defence Committee , created an enduring coaling knowledge. This was achieved through the sheer weight of evidence and data collected, reflecting wider belief in the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 1. The Rise of Coal Consciousness: Coal, State, and Imperial Defence
• 2. ‘An Enormous System Under Splendid Control’: The Development of a Coaling Infrastructure
• 3. Coaling Labour
• 4. Sojourning at the Coaling Station
• Backmatter