by Roger Knight
The staffing of the Transport Office itself was small, since the main business in London was contract tendering, but agents for transports reported to the Board from afloat with every large convoy, and from every naval base at home and abroad. These were commissioned naval officers who had developed a specialized knowledge, usually with the rank of lieutenant, although the senior agents were captains.
The workload of the Transport Board increased markedly by 1796, when, in addition to its main task of chartering transports, it was given the responsibility for healthy prisoners of war, formerly administered by the Sick and Hurt Office. A complex, countrywide organization had to be administered, although security at depots and prisons was the responsibility of the militia.55 In 1796, for instance, there were 11,534 French prisoners in England and 4,932 British prisoners in France.56 Due to exchanges with the French in the 1790s, numbers were kept down. Nevertheless, in 1799 there were 25,000 prisoners of war to feed and manage, and between 1796 and 1801 the cost of feeding and confining them was the considerable sum of £1,238,950.57 The Office oversaw agents at each prison depot, and at each of the fifty to sixty parole towns in Britain, spread eventually over England, Wales and Scotland. A minority of prisoners were paroled, and these included commissioned officers down to ensigns and midshipmen and also the masters and subordinate officers of privateers and merchant ships over fifty tons. Those paroled gave their word of honour not to escape, and signed a form promising to obey the laws of the country, and not to engage in clandestine correspondence or to go outside the limits of their parole, usually a mile in any direction, without permission. If they broke their parole, they were sent to a depot or prison ship.58
The Transport Board then arranged ‘cartels’, merchant ships that would sail to France or Spain to exchange prisoners under a flag of truce. Difficulty in settling the numbers of prisoners to be exchanged were encountered with the French authorities, but negotiations with the Spanish agent were much more cordial.* As a result Spanish prisoners were relatively quickly exchanged. Between 1796 and 1802, the years of hostilities between the two countries, the numbers of Spaniards in captivity fluctuated, but totalled 4,536.59 They remained in captivity for relatively little time: a minimum of two weeks and a maximum of six months. The task of administering prisoners was to be greatly increased during the Napoleonic War.
The Victualling Board constantly monitored prices in the food markets across the country, which meant that its members, like those of other boards, worked long hours. In his usual trenchant style, George Phillips Towry, the deputy chairman of the Victualling Board, wrote (‘Private and Confidential’) to Lord Spencer’s private secretary, proposing that he and the chairman of the Board ‘should have houses at Somerset Place’. He complained of the level of pay and house allowance, particularly unrewarding compared with that of the Navy Board: the situation was doubly unfair ‘on account of their attendance upon the Board every day of the week’. He continued with a growing sense of frustration, and perhaps beyond the limits of official decorum:
Indeed considering the sacrifices he has voluntarily made, in the bestowing his Patronage solely to friends of Government, and on giving his time entirely to public business, while the World is rapidly slipping from under him, without having one farthing to add to his fortunes. He hopes & trusts, that Lord Spencer will see his situation as worthy of attention, and will pardon him for his freedom upon the present occasion.60
With such a complex hierarchy and divided responsibilities, conflicts between departments were inevitable. Disputes between the Admiralty and the subordinate Navy Board have already been noted, but the Admiralty also failed to communicate as well as it might have done with the Ordnance Department, and there was little collaboration on forward planning, although relations between representatives of the two departments were better at the outports.61 The Admiralty prepared its own estimates, which it brought before the House of Commons, receiving its revenue from the Treasury through the treasurer of the navy, and issuing navy, victualling and transport bills for paying its contractors. But the beginnings of Treasury encroachment can just be discerned at this time. A small example took place in 1799 when the stationery contract was removed from Admiralty control to the Stationery Office, which was answerable to the Treasury.62 Each department fiercely defended its independence from the Treasury. In the last days of Pitt’s government in December 1800, William Windham, secretary at war, complained to the prime minister of Treasury interference when allegations of irregularities in the War Office were investigated without his leave: ‘the irregular and very unceremonious way which the Treasury sometimes has of stepping into different Departments without any previous notice, publick or private, to those who are at the head of them’.63
In spite of this friction, the government bureaucracy was of a considerable size and maturity. The number of clerks in almost every department swelled by two or three times as the scale of war increased towards 1815. Nor did this upsurge in numbers come any too soon. Few of the departments with direct involvement in running the war escaped the accounting backlog that was to clog up the financial machine in the latter years of the conflict: they were undermanned until the later years of the Napoleonic War.
Subordinate boards were constantly complaining to the minister about staffing shortages in relation to the amount of work to be done, and petitions likewise from clerks about their inadequate salary levels had to be considered.64 Of the clerks we know little beyond their tasks, pay and conditions. Holidays were infrequent, although that did not stop parliament in 1798 from debating a bill regulating ‘the number of holidays to be allowed clerks in certain public offices’.65 Promotion was largely by seniority.* Most of the junior clerks kept the letter books (copies of letters sent) in a neat hand, and copied reports for circulation around Whitehall. Only when clerks reached senior positions did they draft letters or documents for ministers or senior officials.† A clerk’s tenure was permanent, and, if he grew too old or ill, a pension was awarded; but sackings were not unknown. When Henry Dundas arrived at the Home Office he ensured that four inefficient clerks were soon retired. In 1795 one clerk, Edward Raven, letting his personal feelings get in the way of government policy, protested against granting pardons to criminals who agreed to enter military service. In 1800 Portland finally sacked him for failing to prepare pardons for some mutineers.66
By the end of the eighteenth century the system of payment to Whitehall clerks was outdated and inefficient, built up by precedent and ossified by custom over many years. The practice of fees and perquisites, strongly condemned by the Commission on Fees in the 1780s, and, as mentioned previously, studiously ignored by Pitt, led to anomalies and inefficiencies. The relationship between contractors and officials in the Whitehall departments, which awarded hundreds of contracts, was open to abuse. A timely ‘present’ could, for instance, ensure that a navy or victualling bill was made out expeditiously. In wartime, with business increased several fold, the resultant level of fees led not only to huge and inappropriate rises in incomes, but also to further ‘presents’ from those tendering contracts. These gifts were increasingly seen as illegal payments: by the end of the century they became known, at least by the Navy Board, as ‘disgraceful transactions’.67
It is worth examining the position of one clerical post in some detail. William Pollock, the chief clerk in the Home Office, had been in the post since 1782. In 1793 he had no government salary at all, yet he had an annual income from his work in the Home Office of about £1,200. It was made up from a great variety of sources, including one half of the gratuities received from certain warrants signed by the king, five guineas a year from the East India Company, a commission on presents bought on behalf of newly appointed consuls (to be given to the ruler of the relevant country) and £100 in lieu of the privilege of franking letters and of franking newspapers to Ireland, formerly enjoyed by all clerks. He also received 10s. a sheet when he copied papers required by someone outside the Home Office. In additi
on, Pollock received £250 a year from the sinecure office of the clerk of the Crown in Quebec, stemming from the fact that the Home Office was responsible for the colonies until 1801.68 Such anomalies could not be allowed to continue.* In 1795 the Home Office implemented the reforms recommended by the Commission on Fees, and thereafter Pollock received a fixed salary in lieu of these fees and perquisites, as did all clerks. His £1,000 a year was funded by a departmental consolidated fee fund.
This problem of personal fees was tackled head on by a zealous reformer and a stickler for detail, who did not fear to upset entrenched interests. Charles Abbot had been a prize-winning scholar at Christ Church, was very much an independent MP, sitting in a seat under the patronage of the duke of Leeds, with whom he had been at school at Westminster.† Abbot had defended Pitt’s unpopular Assessed Taxes Bill, and as a result was made chairman of the Select Committee on Finance, which sat in 1797 and 1798. It produced thirty-six reports, very quickly, many of which were written by Abbot himself, the result of ‘diligent but tactless investigations’.‡ ‘He is a firm man and a very little man,’ wrote Sylvester Douglas disparagingly; but after Abbot’s election in February 1802 as speaker of the House of Commons he was to gain very general respect.69
Abbot and the Select Committee made the scale of the problem public. The fees to War Office officials had increased between 1792 and 1796 by 800 per cent to a total of £43,000; in the Home Office by 350 per cent to £28,000.The annual salary of the clerk of the Cutting House at Deptford Victualling Yard was £135 in 1792; his fees alone came to £1,500 in 1797.70 Under the spotlight of this sort of publicity, the departments had no option but to reform.
Not only money was involved in the abolition of fees, but also status. Three very senior Navy Board clerks protested to the first lord of the Admiralty that the changes had particularly singled them out, as the ‘reduction of emolument from the alterations of 1796 were heavier than others, whereas in our hands, next to the Secretary, we know, and may without presumption say that the spring and power of the business of this great Office are.’ The result was that it tended ‘to do away that difference in rank, respect and profit’.71 Gradually, department by department, both fees and presents were eliminated, although the payment of clerks remained a problem for over twenty years. When clerks were finally able to compare their salaries with those in other departments, they found they had cause to raise petitions, and much time was expended on these by senior officials and politicians.
Bureaucrats in Whitehall also had to be alive to the problems posed by labour disputes among the wartime workforce. In 1793 the home dockyards were manned by 3,000 skilled shipwrights and 8,000 labourers.72 These large industrial establishments were prone to labour problems and wartime urgency was no bar to widespread strikes, most marked at times of high food prices.* Pitt’s repressive legislation caused stoppages in the winter of 1795, when all grades of workers in the dockyards, unusually unanimous, suspected that the law was going to be used to declare a wartime strike treasonable. At Chatham Dockyard in November 1795 the entire workforce quietly walked out of the dockyard at lunchtime to sign a petition against the legislation, not returning until the next day.73 Violent strikes took place in 1801 that had to be brought under control by the military. The shipwrights of the larger dockyards had considerable bargaining power, particularly during the urgency of a mobilization, and the first months of every war of the eighteenth century saw them strike for better pay and conditions. Between 1803 and 1805 they petitioned the Navy Board seven times.74 Workers in private shipyards were less likely to strike, but they did so during the Peace of Amiens, when the royal yards tried to lend the merchant yards some caulkers to break the dispute – with the result that the royal yard workers ‘were driven back from the Merchant Yards in the Thames and have declined returning, although a Military Guard had been provided for their protection’.75
Administrative posts were also expanding overseas. During the French Revolutionary War a great many bases were added: dockyard officers were appointed to Ajaccio in Corsica in 1794; the Cape of Good Hope in 1795; Martinique in 1796; Port Mahon in Minorca when it was recaptured in 1798; Malta in 1800; and even, for a short time, Alexandria in 1801. The Ordnance and Victualling offices, too, had depots at these bases. An important group of British naval officials was positioned at Lisbon to organize support for the considerable number of British warships that was replenished and refitted there. A storekeeper was appointed to the East Indies squadron in Bombay and Madras, and a master attendant to Trincomalee. Where the fighting navy went, administrators were not far behind.
An example of a senior naval administrator appointed to a number of these foreign yards as the Navy Board resident commissioner was Captain Isaac Coffin. He had been injured while on active service and from 1790 was unable to serve at sea. Between 1794 and 1800, in rapid succession, he administered the bases at Ajaccio, Lisbon, Minorca and Halifax, Nova Scotia. He had a forceful personality, with the same mixture of distrust of his juniors and propensity to bully them as did his mentor St Vincent.76 In 1801 he returned to England to become resident commissioner at Sheerness, where, with the first lord’s backing, he carried out a thorough reorganization, on one occasion nearly losing his life when surrounded by furious yard workers.*
The ability of government to formulate policies was to a large extent dependent upon the reliability and quality of the evidence at its disposal. Very important but less obvious measures were being put in hand to improve the information available to government, which were to shape political decisions in the years ahead. The first effort was devoted to finding how many people lived in Great Britain. Wartime costs were rising far beyond previous experience, so it was vital to know whether the country could shoulder the increased tax burden, raise sufficient capital and muster enough manpower. A long debate on the ‘political arithmetic’ of the nation had taken place in the 1790s, which divided economists into ‘optimists’ – those who estimated that between eleven and twelve million lived in the country – and ‘pessimists’ – those who reckoned the population to be no more than seven or eight million.77 Charles Abbot played his part in this debate by promoting the Population Bill of 1800, which led to the 1801 Census and the first accurate statistics.78 It silenced the pessimists, and reassured the political world that a sufficient tax base could be provided.*
Greater confidence was also generated in the estimates of national income as a result of the work of Thomas Irving, the inspector-general of imports and exports in the Customs department: he produced an accurate annual account by opportunely using the returns already collected by the department under the Convoy Act of 1798, which required merchants to declare the value of their cargo. Out of his work new calculations of the national income were revised upwards to £200 million a year.79 We now know that trade figures were moving sharply upwards at the end of the century, but it was not obvious to contemporaries and Irving’s work was of the first importance.†
The work of the Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement from 1793, managed by its industrious chairman and secretary, Sir John Sinclair and Arthur Young respectively, also needs to be recognized. Young had a considerable reputation from his writing on political economy, and he had already drawn attention to the areas of uncultivated land in his 1773 work Observations on the Present State of Waste Lands of Great Britain. His energy and knowledge were now put to good use in centralizing information on agricultural output. The Home Office requested that the lords lieutenant of the counties provide crop yields for the harvests of 1794 and 1795.80 In 1795 the Board published a report estimating that 7.8 million acres in England and Wales, or a fifth of the total, were uncultivated.81 High wartime prices for foodstuffs encouraged investment. The enclosing of common and waste land in the wheat growing areas in central England increased, always controversial because of its impact on the lives of the agricultural poor.* Gross corn output rose from 19.8 million quarters in 1790 to 21.1 in 1800, and to 24.4 in 1810.82 The state of
the agriculture of each county was written up in detail and published, and improvements in breeding, crop rotation and ploughing were encouraged by landowners. The Board kept up a steady flow of agricultural reports and information beyond 1815.
Weaknesses in the government of the country still remained, notably in the neglect of accurate and up-to-date accounting, tackled only after scandals in the years following Pitt’s death in 1806. The reforming effort would be redoubled when war resumed. For now there were few immediate diplomatic and strategic results. By the end of the Revolutionary War, French power on the Continent was as strong as ever. It is unsurprising that even the mild William Marsden reacted bitterly to the welcome given by the public to the Peace of Amiens, after nearly eight years of unremitting effort: ‘I had occasion to witness, from the Admiralty Office, with no small indignation, the disgraceful scene of the bearer of the French despatch being drawn in triumph, by an English rabble, about the parade at the Horse Guards.’83 Twelve further years of war lay ahead, of a far greater scale and intensity than anything that had gone before, and it was only later in the Napoleonic War that the quiet labour of the politicians and administrators was fully recognized and came into its own.
5
Intelligence and Communications 1793–1801
