Feeding Nelson's Navy

by Janet MacDonald

  The terms of the contract under which he operated must, one assumes, have been acceptable at the time but to the modern eye they seem a masterpiece of charging not only very high rates for the provisions themselves, but very high rates for moving these provisions about and keeping them in stores. For instance, the price of a hundredweight of biscuit was 16s 6d at Calcutta, £1.14.0 at Bombay, and £2.10.6 at Prince of Wales Island (now Penang); and he charged two shillings per cask for moving casks from ships to his godown, the same for moving them from godown to ship, and one shilling per month while they were in the godown. His business went along quite nicely for ten years until he resigned and returned to England rather abruptly in 1806, when his friend Admiral Peter Rainier handed over the command to Admiral Edward Pellew. Whether, as has been suggested by C Northcote Parkinson, this was to evade an investigation into his victualling affairs is a moot point but on his return home he proceeded to bombard the Victualling Board with demands for payment. It took until 1818 to get his money out of them.11 One small amusement in reading the Victualling Board papers relating to this ongoing saga is that the clerks who entered details of the incoming letters into the abstract books abbreviated ‘Honourable’ to ‘Honble’ with a flourish which makes it look, at a quick glance, as though the letters have come from ‘the Horrible Basil Cochrane’; one hesitates to suggest that this was deliberate, but it could well have been the way those clerks thought of him!

  One of the problems was that the Board had portioned out his accounts amongst several different clerks who had managed to lose half of the vouchers. He provided another set for the whole ten years’ worth of transactions and offered to pay for a clerk to check them but this was refused. This saga included a court case over some £9000 which the Victualling Board said he owed them. This ended with a decision in Cochrane’s favour: the Board actually owed him about £1000. Between 1818 and 1824, he published several long pamphlets, accusing the Victualling Board of incompetence on a grand scale. In the circumstances one can hardly blame him. The strange thing about this whole affair is that the Victualling Board could have dealt with the situation far less expensively by hiring its own warehouses in India and employing agents victualler to run them, because the East India Company had an agreement with the government to ship military supplies out to India free of charge.12

  THE SUPPLY CHAIN

  As well as using contractors to deliver provisions to the remoter victualling stations, the Victualling Board used them to supply raw materials and finished products to their British warehouses. Although they preferred to manufacture what they could, the Victualling Board was not in a position to cope with the fluctuating requirements of wartime and at the various times when the manning requirements increased substantially, they had to buy in beer, meat and biscuit from outside.

  A system of competitive tendering was introduced to ensure the best possible prices; invitations to tender were advertised and as tenders were received, they were entered in a book and prices and quantities offered were compared; contracts were not necessarily awarded to one merchant for the whole of the annual requirement, but spread among several.13 The conditions of tendering were firmly enforced. For instance, in April 1804 one of the largest firms of Irish contractors, Messrs Bogle, French & Co, headed a group which complained that they had not been awarded any of the contracts for that year. This complaint was rejected on the grounds that they had missed the required date for submission of tenders, as a result of which the contracts had already been awarded elsewhere. Later contracts also specified delivery in batches throughout the agreed period and this not only kept the amounts in store at a manageable level but also spread the payments over the year. This did not mean that provisions were never purchased outside the tender system. The minutes contain frequent reports of letters received from merchants offering supplies, which were sometimes accepted but more frequently refused because the Board had sufficient stocks or thought that the price was excessive.14

  There was an ongoing concern over the development of monopolies and price-fixing and the Board was perfectly capable of deciding not to buy any particular item at all if the prices were excessive, as happened in the autumn of 1803 when there had been a prolonged drought. The normal tenders were invited for annual supply contracts of butter and cheese but when the tenders arrived the prices asked were all exceptionally high and on enquiry it was found that a group of speculators in Ireland had cornered the bulk of the supply on the assumption that the Victualling Board would pay whatever they were asked. The Victualling Board were not prepared to be taken advantage of in this way and recommended to the Admiralty that it would be ‘expedient for the present wholly to suspend the issue of butter and cheese, and to substitute the issue of rice and sugar, tea and sugar, or cocoa and sugar…’. The Admiralty agreed, and an order was issued to this effect, remaining in place until the following autumn, when the Victualling Board suggested returning to an issue of butter and cheese, but at only half the usual quantity.15 This particular incident shows another source of supply: when recommending that rice should be issued as a substitute, the Victualling Board remarked that they had ‘a considerable quantity of East India rice’ in store, bought from the East India Company at the Treasury’s prompting.16

  MANUFACTURING

  Working on the premise that the best way to ensure quality was to manufacture provisions in their own yards, the Victualling Board brewed beer, slaughtered and packed meat, and baked biscuit at various locations in London and round the Channel coast. The three main manufacturing yards were at Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth, where at the busiest times there were up to 2400 tradesmen (brewers, butchers, bakers, coopers, storekeepers and labourers), all working away six days a week, and at various critical stages in the wars, being actively encouraged to work overtime.

  Over half of these tradesmen were engaged in making casks, something the Board had decided they should do themselves after finding there was a monopoly operating amongst the main firms of coopers in London. Prices had risen at the onset of the American War when supplies of stave wood, traditionally imported from Virginia, were cut off. Attempts were made to obtain stave wood from Canada but with only minimal success and for some time there were complaints about the resultant casks. Either the heads were made of deal, which tainted the contents with the smell of turpentine, or the staves were unseasoned and warped as they dried out, making the casks leak. It was some years before the situation settled down, with stave wood eventually coming from various sources: the Baltic, Canada and Britain itself.

  The general term ‘cask’ does not refer to a specific size but just means a wooden barrel, bound with iron hoops (or, for some smaller sizes, twisted withies). There were a number of standard sizes (listed in Appendix 1) but they were all the same shape: wider at the waist than the ends, which meant they interlocked when stacked. With the exception of bread, which was packed in bags, all the provisions were packed in casks, as were much of the ships’ other stores; they were to the Georgian world what the shipping container is today. Unfortunately they did not last forever and although they were generally regarded as a returnable item, there was a constant need for new ones.

  As with beer, the Victualling Board manufactured as much biscuit as it could but also had to buy a great deal from outside bakers. One of the largest of these was Moody and Potter of Southampton, conveniently close to Portsmouth; they also made biscuit for the army. Biscuit production is not something that can be increased overnight; new ovens have to be built and that takes time. Each oven was served by a team of five men who worked and shaped the dough, put it in the oven and took the cooked biscuits out, producing some seventy biscuits a minute. But that did not mean seventy per minute every minute of the working day. These were brick ovens, the principle of which is that they are heated by lighting a fire inside them to heat the bricks, then raking out the ashes and baking until the oven has cooled down, then starting again with another fire.

  The fires were of wood. This was
bought from outside until 1801, when an amusing little story unfolds in the Victualling Board letter files. The Victualling Board premises at Deptford were adjacent to the naval dockyard, where the Navy Board had been growing more and more annoyed over the years about abuse of the traditional shipyard workers’ perquisite of ‘chips’. Chips are offcuts of wood, and the workers were allowed to take these home for their domestic fires, but as inevitably happens, this privilege had come to be abused. A chip was defined as any piece of timber under three feet long, and just as happened with miners who sawed up perfectly good pit-props to take home, dockyard workers could be seen marching through the gates every evening with a neatly-cut piece of wood on their shoulders which measured exactly two feet eleven and three-quarter inches. It was said that most of the workers’ houses near dockyards were built in multiples of this measurement. After a long struggle, the Navy Board had finally managed to put a stop to the practice. It was not many weeks before the Victualling Board received a letter from the Navy Board, remarking that they had some spare chips and wondered if the Victualling Board would care to have some rakes and peels made for the bakery? The Victualling Board would indeed like some, and shortly after another letter arrived to say the implements were ready. Then, a few days later, another letter arrived, this time nonchalantly remarking that the dockyard had rather a lot of chips to dispose of, and wondering if the Victualling Board would like them to fire its bread ovens.17

  We do not know exactly how many bullocks and pigs passed through the hands of the Victualling Board’s slaughtermen and butchers into barrels of brine at the depots, but some rough estimates can be made from the amounts of meat stated in the annual estimates: the figure given for 1797 of 110,000 men, gives about 23,000 bullocks and 115,000 pigs.18 Even allowing for the fact that much of the beef (but not the pork) came from Ireland, the mind immediately turns to the sheer logistics of the task, given that it was a seasonal activity and thus compressed to about six months. It is not the actual saltable meat that makes the mind boggle, it is the by-products: the bits that would not salt down. The hides went off to make leather, the tallow was used for soap and cheap candles and the feet went to the glue makers. But the heads (less the ox-tongues), the bones and the offal, all had to be disposed of. The Victualling Board, of course, sold it, but that only shifts the problem; what did happen to it? The answer is that the bones and some of the offal went for agricultural fertiliser and the rest was made into cheap meat products: black and white puddings, sausage, meat pies, tripe and so on. But the suspicion lingers that a fair amount just got dropped in the river – hopefully when the tide was going out, when it would add to the richness of the estuarine mud-banks and help to fatten the crabs and oysters.

  The last of the manufacturing activities in the victualling yards was brewing, which was done at London (at first at the Hartshorne Brewery at Tower Hill, then at Deptford), Portsmouth and Plymouth. It was particularly important that beer should be brewed at all three depots, as it does not take kindly to excessive shaking, and the additional handling involved in transporting it from London to the two Channel ports may have been too much for it, especially in bad weather. As with all other aspects of naval victualling, the Victualling Board received a steady stream of suggestions on different or ‘improved’ beers; for a while they toyed with the idea of replacing the small beer with the stronger porter which might have travelled better, and experimented with other schemes for concentrating the beer to save on space. None of these worked as well as had been hoped and so the idea was abandoned.

  STORAGE

  Having purchased or manufactured all these provisions, they were put into store at the various victualling yards to await ships’ requisitions. As well as the three main victualling depots in London and the Channel ports, there were others round the British Isles, notably at Leith, Cork and Great Yarmouth, although the importance of the last waxed and waned as the locus of wars shifted. When the Dutch were the enemy, and when the Danes and other Baltic countries, including Russia, were involved, the squadrons operating in the North Sea and Baltic were augmented and Yarmouth became more important. In foreign parts, there were numerous victualling yards in locations which depended on the locus of any given war; Gibraltar was the oldest permanent yard, while others opened and closed as necessary.

  All the British yards outside London were referred to as outports and these, like the main yard at Deptford and those on foreign stations, were run by an official called the agent victualler. This was an important man, earning a substantial salary – by 1800 between £400 and £600 per year, depending on the size of the yard he controlled, sometimes with an additional 15 shillings per day for ‘table money’ and sometimes with a house provided. Most of the clerks at Head Office earned £80 to £90 per year. The agent victualler had charge not only of the provisions in his stores but also the staff who ran them and the clerks in his office. However, at the home yards he did not control the manufacturing side. This was managed by the master tradesmen: the master brewer, master baker, master cooper and master butcher; they reported direct to the Board commissioner responsible for each type of product, as did the master hoytaker, who organised waterborne deliveries.

  Not only were the different species of provisions stored appropriately (for instance, the butter and cheese were kept in cool cellars), they were all marked with numbers and letters which indicated where they came from and when. This was for two reasons: firstly so that any problems could be traced back to the origin and appropriate action taken; secondly so that nothing was kept too long; they had to be issued on a ‘first in, first out’ basis. The stories of salt meat many years old are exaggerations: the rule was a maximum of two years for meat and bread, six months for butter and cheese. We have already seen that the rule was enforced for butter and cheese; the same applied to everything else. The purser who tried to return to stores any item that he had kept beyond its ‘use by’ date was likely to be refused credit for it. This does not mean that no seaman was ever given very old food. The past use by items were sent out of the victualling yards for sale by auction and it is quite possible that chandlers who supplied merchant ships bought it and sold it on to merchant captains and that is where some of the stories of ancient ‘salt horse’ originated.

  THE DELIVERY CHAIN

  The best of the victualling yards were those where all the storehouses were close together and the items requisitioned by each ship could be assembled in one spot for collection. Some of the outports, notably Plymouth, had their victualling stores spread out over some distance, so collection parties from ships had to go to different locations to collect all their stores, or the agent victualler had to arrange for the hoytaker to organise boats to collect and deliver them. Of course, the larger the ship and the longer its intended voyage, the more of each item had to be provided and the longer it took to accept the full load and stow it all away. The picture of a busy naval port like Portsmouth with a large squadron arriving for restocking is one of potential chaos; in such circumstances the agent victualler had to be a master of organisation to avoid mistakes.

  As well as the standard items of provisions, the agent victualler had to supply fresh meat and vegetables to ships while they were in port, and also to maintain and issue stocks of tobacco. He also had to provide pursers with necessary money, the cash with which they bought essential non-food items such as candles, stove fuel and turneryware for the men to eat off; and, if the ship was bound for places where there was no victualling yard, sufficient to buy small quantities of fresh food as well. All of this required a complex accounting system. Weekly details of stores received, issued and remaining had to be sent to London, quarterly accounts had to be prepared and submitted, and everything had to be ready for the annual commissioners’ inspection.

  The instructions to supply ships were of two sorts. Ships that were fitting-out were only allowed three days of provisions at a time, the purser putting in an application for sufficient provisions for the number of men on board d
uring each three-day period, a number which increased as new batches of men joined the ship. This was known as extra petty warrant’, and the rule still applied after the ship was commissioned and fully manned but still in the port, even if fully stocked with her ‘sea’ provisions. These sea provisions were specifically for use when the ship had left port; by using the extra petty warrant system it meant that when she did sail, it was with her main provisions still intact.

  When a ship was newly commissioned (which term includes those ships which had a new commanding officer as well as those which were newly built or were coming back into use after being in Ordinary for a while), the order for her provisions started with the Navy Board. They sent an order to the Victualling Board for the named ship to be supplied with provisions for so many months for either Channel or foreign service. For Channel service the normal period was three or four months, for foreign service (never defined any more than that) it was usually six months. Sometimes the order just said ‘all species of provisions’; sometimes it would be more detailed: ‘four months of all species except for biscuit, of which three months,’ or ‘and as much beer as she can stow’, or even ‘as much beer as she can stow with due regard to her trim’. The main difference between supplies for Channel or foreign service was the type and amounts of alcohol: ships on Channel service were not meant to have spirits, ships for foreign service would only take three months’ worth of beer, butter and cheese.

  Having received this order from the Navy Board, the Victualling Board passed one copy of it to the appropriate agent victualler and one to the ship’s captain, who produced it at the victualling yard. Once a ship was in commission and needed to top up her supplies, which they were encouraged to do at regular intervals, the paperwork was different and did not involve the Victualling Board head office or the Navy Board. Instead, a three-part form listed all the standard items, with spaces for the amounts required. The first part of the form certified that there was a want of those items, the second part ordered the agent victualler to deliver them, and the third part certified that they had been received on board. A different form, also in three parts, dealt with fresh beef, the difference between this and the previous form being that the agent victualler was required to furnish it ‘from time to time, until further orders’ with the third part certifying the total quantities received during the stay.