INTRODUCTION

In December 1794, Charles Middleton, erstwhile Comptroller of the Navy, believed that the exertion of the fleet in a great measure depends on the diligence and punctuality of these boards [The Navy Board, Victualling Board, Sick and Hurt Board and the Ordnance Board].1 The Ordnance was, thus, one of the integral elements in the successful prosecution of the war by the Navy. Of these four, three came under the responsibility of the Admiralty; the only one that did not was the Ordnance. The Office of Ordnance had a long history, much of which has been neglected by historians. Tomlinson gives a history of the Ordnance from its earliest ancestry in the fourteenth century until the early eighteenth century and he gives a detailed study of the period under the Restoration Stuarts.2 Jenny West also gives a brief history up until the middle years of the eighteenth century.3 Throughout these years, until its abolition in 1855, the Ordnance was responsible for the contracting (or manufacturing) of stores and their subsequent supply to the army and the navy. Of the Ordnance, Tomlinson writes: The failure of historians to consider the department in depth in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is surprising. For in this period of intermittent, if not incessant, warfare, the Ordnance Office had a vital role to play in the defence of the kingdom.4 Much the same could be said of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Even though Tomlinson was writing in 1979 the study of the Ordnance Office has not been continued.5 Part of the reason for this stems from the fact that until relatively recently military logistics has generally been ignored by historians. In contrast, the administration of the navy has begun to receive much more attention.6 Historians are also beginning to see how the navy fitted into the organization of the British state as a whole rather than seeing it as an independent entity.7 This book is an attempt to demonstrate that the Office of Ordnance, a much maligned department, was actually an integral factor in the successful prosecution of the Great Wars for the British. A new interpretation of its operations is possible by a study of the remaining records of the office itself rather than through the records of the other government departments with which it com1

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municated. Previously, the fundamental structure of the Ordnance has been misunderstood. This has led, in turn, to a misunderstanding of how the office operated. From this has flowed a general assumption that the Ordnances operations were slow, haphazard, conservative and detrimental to the British war effort. One of the aims of this work is to show that these criticisms are unfair to the Ordnance. In fact, it will be shown that by the late 1820s the Ordnance was being held up as an example of how a board system should operate. However, this book is not only a study of logistics; it is also a study of government administration and bureaucracy in the time of Pitt the Younger and his contemporaries. Although having to fit in with the administrative structure in place, the Ordnance was in a unique position. Unlike other government departments, it effectively had two heads: the Master-General and the board. No other department had this structure. This enabled another unique attribute. All of the Master-Generals were senior, serving, soldiers. Two of the MasterGenerals, the 1st Marquess Cornwallis and the 2nd Earl of Chatham held active field commands while holding the position.8 No other government department could have operated as effectively as the Ordnance with its head out of communication and, indeed, out of the country. It would have been inconceivable for any First Lord of the Admiralty to have commanded a fleet while holding their government post. These were not unique events, previous Master-Generals had also done the same,9 and the last Master-General, Lord Raglan, commanded the troops in the Crimea concurrent with his Ordnance position.

The British Bureaucratic State at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century

It was the pioneer of modern, technologically focused warfare It was for a very long time the leading exporter of arms. It had a state machine operated not just by bureaucrats but also by technicians. It had intimate links with business, and indeed it successfully intervened in the economy.10

David Edgerton was talking about the British state in the middle fifty years of the twentieth century but the same statements could be made for the period 17801830. This book will show that during the period of the Great Wars the Ordnance was at the cutting edge of technology, exported millions of pounds worth of arms to Britains allies, increasingly used military experts and inventors alongside its civilian workers and became a major operator in a number of commercial markets. John Brewers Sinews of Power has to a greater or lesser extent framed the debate about the role of the British state in the eighteenth century.11 However, much of this debate has neglected one, essential, element of any state structure; that of its bureaucracy. In Morrisss most recent work he writes: Almost at the

Introduction

bottom of a hierarchy of explanation for Britains maritime ascendency has been bureaucracy. Throughout British history the back-room bureaucrats have often been scapegoats for the blame of its military leaders.12 However large or small the state they all had a bureaucracy. The role of the clerks and junior officials has largely been ignored (or fitted neatly in tables of employees). This book does not intend to be a general examination of the British bureaucratic state at the end of the long eighteenth century.13 Instead, it examines in detail the internal workings of the Office of Ordnance and how this department fitted into the British state of the time. In doing so, it will highlight the bureaucratic challenges faced by a large, complex department and how the impact of war increased these challenges. An important distinction must be made at this juncture. This book is not about politics; the British military forces needed supplying whatever the political make up of the government. As we shall see, politics did have an impact on how the Ordnance was run, but this was surprisingly minor. Only at the levels of Master-General and board member were the personnel changed when new governments were elected, and even here there were no wholesale removals. One of the major themes of the book is that throughout the war years, power and responsibility was increasingly decentralized within the Ordnance structure, and this in itself limited the effect that any political changes could have. Additionally, Chapters 4 and 5 will show that not only was there a decentralization but there was also a shift away from civil authority towards military authority as regards the supply of major stores such as gunpowder and iron ordnance. Henry Parris argues that the modern civil service can trace its roots to the period between 1780 and 1830.14 Even during this period, it is difficult to see a single civil service. This book will show that the Ordnance structure was fluid in that clerks and officials were moved between sub-departments, but only at the central offices were officials moved between different government departments, that is, the positions which were political appointments.15 As such, the bureaucratic structure on which the state was formed cannot be seen as a single entity. In the decade before the outbreak of war in 1793, Pitt tried to implement administrative reform within the government bureaucracy. He was only partially successful.16 One department that did introduce reform was the Office of Ordnance.17 These reforms were integral to the increased efficiency and performance within the Ordnance and are one of the major themes running throughout this book. The reform was not total and the Ordnance was, for example, still paying fees, although at a reduced rate, to employees a long time after the end of the wars. The Ordnance was not alone in this.18 The size of Pitts task can be seen in the numbers of men employed by the British state at this time. Using official returns, Harling and Mandler state that there were 16,267 public officers in 1797 rising to 24,598 by 1815.19 However,

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The Supply to British Armed Forces at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century

the actual number of people employed by the state, either directly or indirectly, at this time was much greater. In 1815 the Royal Dockyards alone had over 15,000 employees20 while the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich employed over 5,000. As very little work has been published on the bureaucratic state at this time it is impossible to estimate the actual numbers employed by this state but the figures were surely not insubstantial. As the population of the UK was approximately 18.5 million a significant proportion of this population was reliant on the state for its income. To the numbers of officials, artificers and labourers, the armed forces themselves must of course be added. In 1811 the navy was nearly 131,000 strong and the regular army, including militia, approaching 320,000. Thus, nearly 2.5 per cent of the population was serving in these two forces and 0.1 per cent in the dockyards and at the Royal Arsenal. To this number must also be added the approximately 25,000 men serving in the various branches of the Royal Artillery.21 However, the State could not do everything. As we shall see in Chapter 3 the relations between the Ordnance and the private contractors were of vital importance for the successful supply of arms throughout the period of the Great Wars. However, little has actually been written on such an important topic. Three significant works came out in the 1970s and two have recently been published examining different aspects of supply in the long eighteenth century.22 On the whole, all of these are complimentary about the contracting systems in place.

Two names stand tallest when one thinks of the British armed forces of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Horatio Nelson and Arthur Wellesley. Nelson was of course a naval officer and Wellesley, later to become Lord Wellington,23 was an army officer. Each of them won a run of victories against the enemies of Britain that has immortalized them throughout history. However, neither of them would have been as successful as they were without an effective administrative and logistical train behind them. In addition, the forgotten members of the British armed forces were the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers, both commanded by the Ordnance. These two latter corps do not feature much in this book. They were important elements of the armed forces of the period under examination but they deserve to have a full study by themselves. In addition, as the focus of this work is on the navy they do not fit easily into the structure. The army of the period grew in both size and reputation throughout the wars. From being seen as something of a joke force at the start it became a successful fighting force under commanders such as Abercrombie, Moore and Wellington, successfully defeating the French throughout the Peninsular campaign and finally being part of the allied force triumphant at Waterloo. In terms of size,

Introduction

the regular army grew from 38,945 effectives in 179324 to 330,663 in 1813.25 This is an increase of nearly ten times. All of these men needed to be armed and equipped. This happened on a vast scale. Between 1803 and 1816 the Ordnance issued 349,882 small arms to the regular army, 59,405 to the militia, 151,969 to the local militia, 307,583 to the volunteers in addition to 215,233 to the Naval Service. Each of these numbers, though, is dwarfed by the 2,143,643 arms supplied to Britains allies over the same period.26 Armies on campaign also used a large amount of stores. Wellingtons army at Waterloo expended just over 569 barrels of gunpowder27 and a magazine was established at Ostend to support his army that contained 42,000 barrels of powder, exclusive of the whole current consumption of his army in the field. This may seem a lot for battle but the campaign of 1815 contemplated a succession of sieges as well as of battles. It was calculated that a siege of Lisle (Lille) would have consumed 20,000 barrels and Antwerp 15,000 barrels.28 To put this in context, 4,000 barrels were expended at the siege of Lisle in 1792, three days firing at Copenhagen (in 1807) 1,800 and the bombardment of Algiers 2,000.29 In contrast, Howes fleet at the Glorious First of June expended over 5,000 barrels. This expenditure is one of the reasons this book is focusing on the supply to the Royal Navy over this period and not to the army. The navy used the Ordnances stores (with the exception of small arms) on a far more regular basis and in far greater quantities than the army. Gunpowder is just one example. Cannon and carronades is another; Wellingtons army at Waterloo had 204 cannon. At Trafalgar, Nelsons fleet carried 2,148 in just the ships of the line.30 What is perhaps little understood is just how many articles the navy and army used, which the Ordnance needed to supply. Morriss gives a list of stores required to supply a ship of the Royal Navy in 1795.31 However, this is not a full list. The Ordnance needed 385 individual ordnance stores and 39 armourers stores to be able to equip the fleet in 1795.32 These ranged from 42-pounder cannon through five different types of nail to powder horns. This was only for the Navy. The army also needed different types of stores from the cannon through cartouche boxes to forage for the artillery horses. Each of these needed to be contracted for or manufactured, checked, delivered to the correct outstation and then placed on board naval vessels. The navy that carried these stores into battle was, by 1815, the dominant force at sea. It had not faced a serious challenge to its supremacy since Trafalgar in 1805, and although numerous small raiding squadrons put to sea from French or French-occupied ports, this domination was never seriously threatened. Even when the War of 1812 broke out and the navy suffered a number of defeats in single ship actions, reinforcements sent to the theatre soon forced the United States Navy onto the defensive. However, how the navy was armed has been almost totally ignored. Baugh is explicit in his introduction: the activities of

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the Board of Ordnance are omitted.33 He adds in a note that this is because the Ordnance was not subject to Admiralty control.34 Herein lies one of the reasons for the absence of the Ordnance from the historiography of the Royal Navy. As seen above, other works looking at the administration of the navy at this time have focused on either the Admiralty Board itself or its subordinate boards, that is, the Navy Board, the Sick and Hurt Board and the Victualling Board. As these were all under the umbrella of the Admiralty they have been able to fit into a study of the navy. However, as the Ordnance was its own department, equal in status to the Admiralty, it has not traditionally been considered part of naval history. Things are beginning to change. Roger Morrisss latest work includes a chapter entitled Ordnance and Technology and in 1987 James Pritchard included a chapter on The Ordnance Problem in his study of the navy of Louis XV.35

The International Experience of Supply

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Every country had its own unique supply structure and the difficulties that came with their own strategic situation. Pritchard has shown that the French suffered numerous difficulties during the Seven Years War in actually equipping their ships with enough cannon of the correct calibre. Even by the time of the Great Wars, the French still had difficulty arming all of their vessels with French made cannon. When Le Cerf, a French Brig, was captured in 1804 her armament consisted of six 18-pounder carronades and six 6-pounder cannon all of English manufacture.36 This was not an isolated occurrence. In addition, it is known that both the French and the Americans suffered with gunpowder supply during the period of the American Revolutionary War.37 The difficulties the new American nation experienced obviously continued into the War of 1812. When the USS Chesapeake was captured in 1814, her cannon were found to be of foreign fabric and of many different lengths. The Russian Navy also carried less than ideal cannon as late as 1813 and some which were inspected by British Officials would have been considered in our service as defective guns. The most consistent opponent of Britain over the period of the wars was of course France. Even before the Revolution in 1789, the French logistical situation was very different from that of Britain. Frances major ports were not geographically close and Toulon and Brest were in different oceans with the Iberian Peninsula (and thus the British occupied Gibraltar) between them. This contrasts with Britain where supplies could easily be sent to Woolwich and then shipped to each of the major dockyards and gun wharves. Thus, in France, each of the major ports actually had to be supplied independently and have its own reserves and stocks; again different to Britain where the major reserves were held at Woolwich until needed at the ports.

Introduction

The French imperial and strategic position was also weaker than that of the British. This can be seen in the supply of saltpetre. As discussed in Chapter 4, this was one of the three items that were mixed together to make gunpowder. Without a guaranteed and regular supply, warfare of the period would not have been possible. The best saltpetre came from India so once the French lost their Indian territories they were cut off from this supply. The only other solution was to use home-produced saltpetre. The endemic fraud discovered in the private production of this in France led to a decree of 24 June 1775 changing the saltpetre industry from private to government operation.38 That the French government took this seriously is evident by the appointment of one of the leading French scientists of his day, Antoine Lavoisier, as one of four administrators of the new organization, La Rgie des Poudres et salptres. The French Revolution and the subsequent changes in government again allowed private production to flourish and by the middle of 1794 state production, under the Rgie des poudres, had been successfully suppressed. However, Multhauf states that by this time, however, the private production was hardly less regulated than had been the Rgie Saltpetre production materials were nationalized, and producers were forbidden to refine it.39 These difficulties were further compounded by the political turmoil of the revolutionary period. One historian of the French Directory has written that frequent changes amongst senior bureaucrats for personal and political reasons undermined administrative expertise.40 As we shall see, one of the strengths of the British system was a permanent bureaucracy that was immune from political turmoil and intervention. During the terror, senior French bureaucrats and scientists could suffer far worse fates than just losing their job. Lavoisier, himself, was guillotined on 8 May 1794.

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The Office of Ordnance at the End of the Long Eighteenth Century

By 1815 the Ordnance could lay claim to being one of the largest organizations within the British state and, as such, within Britain as a whole. In this year, the number of officials employed was 886.41 As a comparison, the War Office at the same date employed 208 people. Although the Customs Office of Great Britain employed 10,807 persons, the Ordnance figure excludes the thousands of labourers and artificers that were also employed at the numerous Ordnance depots and outstations. Although it was still headed by the Master-General of the Ordnance and the Board of Ordnance, it had undergone a number of important administrative and structural changes since the end of the American War of Independence. These changes not only affected the central Ordnance departments examined in the next chapter, but also established a number of military inspectorates of which three will be examined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6.

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The Master-General was the head of the department. In the period under examination he was also a cabinet minister. Below him, but not directly answerable to him, was the Board of Ordnance. This was made up of five members, called the principal officers, who were also heads of their own subordinate offices. These five officers were, in seniority: the Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance, the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, the Clerk of the Ordnance, the Principal Storekeeper and the Clerk of the Deliveries. As stated, each of these men had their own office for which they were directly responsible. The actual roles and responsibilities of these positions are examined in Chapter 1. These positions were based at the Ordnance headquarters in the Tower of London. Also based in London, although not at the Tower, was the Secretary to the Board. This was a relatively late addition to the Ordnance structure and was only established in 1777 and separated from the Office of the Clerk of the Ordnance in 1782. On this separation, the Office of the Secretary to the Board was moved firstly to Westminster and then, in 1806, to Pall Mall. Below board level, there were a number of officials known as the inferior officers. Perhaps the most important of these was the Treasurer of the Ordnance and, as the name suggests, it was his office that made all the payments to the Ordnances outstations, personnel and contractors. Outside of the Tower, the most important Ordnance establishment was at Woolwich Warren, known from 1805 as the Royal Arsenal on the orders of George III. Based here were a number of important and large Ordnance offices. These included the Royal Laboratory, the Royal Brass Foundry, the Royal Military Academy (until 1806), the Royal Carriage Department and the Office of the Inspector of Artillery. As such, it was one of the most important military establishments in Britain, on a par with the much more famous Royal Dockyards at Plymouth and Portsmouth. Although numbers arent the whole story, in August 1810, 1,347 men and boys were employed at the Royal Laboratory. In July 1810, the Royal Carriage Office employed 711 artificers and labourers. The Inspector of Artillery had 173 men under him in 1812. As can be seen, the Arsenal employed a substantial workforce and with all the departments combined was one of the largest employers in Britain along with the major dockyards at Plymouth and Portsmouth.42 In fact, with a total workforce of approximately 5,000 the Royal Arsenal could lay claim to being the largest employer in Britain. A number of these Woolwich-based departments also had subordinate stations to aid their work. The most well known of these were the Royal Powder Mills at Faversham and Waltham Abbey bought by the Ordnance in 1759 and 1787 respectively to help in the supply of powder. Although they had their own establishments these were under the superintendence of the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory. In addition to the mills, separate establishments were set up at Plymouth and Portsmouth to aid in the sifting and repairing of powder. These

Introduction

were also under the Comptrollers superintendence. The Royal Carriage Works had a satellite station at Rotherhithe, further up the Thames. The establishment of the military inspectorates was arguably the most radical innovation in the Ordnances long history, in that power and responsibility was removed from the civilians on the board onto military experts. The first military figure appointed was Lieutenant Dickinson (later promoted to Commander) who was the Inspector of Ordnance Shipping from 1781. This, though, was a small department and was not a radical break. This came with the appointment of Thomas Blomefield as the Inspector of Royal Artillery in 1782. Tasked with improving the cannon supplied to the navy (and less so to the army) his appointment meant that the responsibility of proving ordnance was transferred from the civil department of the Office of the Surveyor General to Blomefields own, military, office. Later, during the Great Wars, departments on the pattern of Blomefields were established to run the supply of small arms and gun carriages both under military officers, Lieutenant Colonel Neville and Colonel Cuppage respectively. In addition, by 1804,43 William Congreve, Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory, himself a serving artillery officer, had been given more power over the supply of gunpowder, effectively turning his post into a military inspectorate. The Ordnance wasnt the only department that introduced these reforms, but it can lay claim to being the first and, as such, the model on which others were based.44 The offices of the Comptroller of the Royal Laboratory, the Inspector of Artillery and the Inspector of Ordnance Shipping will be examined in Chapters 4, 5 and 6. Unlike other government departments such as the Victualling Board, the Ordnance also established a large number of overseas bases to support the operations of the navy and army. Knight and Wilcox write that it was impracticable for the navy to maintain a victualling yard in every part of the world where ships operated, and too expensive to justify doing so at ports in the British Isles where ships touched more or less occasionally.45 The Ordnance did just this as the demands of this department were very different. Food and drink could be purchased overseas but, with the exception of the East Indies where most of the stores were procured through the East India Company, the Ordnance needed to transport items from Britain and then store them close to the area of operations. Thus, new bases were set up and personnel employed to run them as the conquests continued. A list dated 10 November 1809 names seventy-three station storekeepers who needed to send accounts into the Surveyor Generals Office.46 Of these, twenty-nine were overseas in all corners of the globe from the Cape of Good Hope in the south to St Johns, Newfoundland, in the north, and Ceylon in the east to Jamaica in the west. The establishments ranged in size and importance from the major gun wharves supporting the naval bases of Portsmouth and Plymouth to small depots manned by just a handful of men. For example,

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the depot on the Isle of Man was manned by a storekeeper and two labourers.47 Chapter 7 will explore these bases and their operations in more detail. The Ordnance was unique amongst government departments in having both a civil branch as well as a military branch. This was because the Master-General of the Ordnance was also the Colonel in Chief of the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers. The history of the military inspectorates has been outlined above but each of the larger outstations had both a civil department and an engineers department. The latter was not under the responsibility of the former but reported directly through to the Master-General as Colonel in Chief. Consequently, as they had very little, if anything, to do with the supply of arms, the engineer departments will not be discussed in any great detail. However, for a full appreciation of the work of the Office of Ordnance their existence does need to be acknowledged. The American War of Independence can be seen as the catalyst for most of these changes. The demand of war caused the creation of the Secretary to the Board, and the creation of the Office of the Inspector of Artillery was a direct response to the numerous failings of the cannon supplied to the navy. What the results of these changes were for the Ordnance, and how it coped with an even larger and more encompassing conflict, is one of the main themes of this book and starts in the next chapter when the roles of the Master-General and Board Officers are examined.