by Roger Knight
The domestic market supplied most military provisions. Salt beef and salt pork were the staple diets, for they had a long shelf life. To provide the meat for salting and packing into casks, cattle were sent to London from every part of Britain as well as from the south of Ireland, while pigs were raised nearer London. Oats came from Scotland and the north of England, cheese from Cheshire, and wheat from the centre of England and East Anglia, to be processed into bread, biscuit and biscuit meal. Barley was made into beer, malt and vinegar. Butter came in casks from Ireland, which also began to export greater numbers of cattle to north-west England. As a result of this growing demand, the agricultural industry expanded substantially.
The largest purchaser in the whole country by far for all this livestock and produce was the Victualling Board in Somerset House. The main victualling yard and distribution centre was at Deptford, downriver from London on the south bank of the Thames. Although this was a considerable industrial site, its workforce was much smaller than those required for shipbuilding and repairing warships in the royal dockyards. In the victualling yard were bakers, slaughtermen, brewers, coopers and labourers. A government tide-mill to grind wheat was near by at Rotherhithe. From this central victualling yard provisions were distributed to other naval bases; warships and army transports leaving on a commission or on an amphibious expedition were supplied from the smaller state victualling yards at Dover, Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth. The agent victualler at these ports purchased stores such as bread or cattle on the hoof directly from local contractors; but these provisions were supplemented by large quantities of stores sent by coastal shipping from Deptford. Overseas garrisons and naval squadrons abroad were supplied by merchant ships, chartered by the Transport Board, which were convoyed directly from Deptford. Smaller depots, usually provided and manned by private contractors, were spread around Great Britain at ports such as Hull, Newcastle, Leith, Whitehaven, Cork and Falmouth, and these supplied smaller warships cruising in home waters or engaged in convoying around the coast.30
Most of the Victualling Board’s food and services were provided by a variety of contractors that fell into three main groups. The first, usually based in London, consisted of a few well-capitalized commission agents, who bought very large amounts of wheat or live cattle for the Board, taking their profit on a percentage basis, but the Board was chary of this arrangement after the fraud exposed by the Atkinson affair in the 1780s. There was always a danger in giving a monopoly to one merchant, but the Board, nevertheless, allowed a small number of commission agents to dominate for large periods of the wars, a practice that for the most part provided what the Board required. In 1797, for instance, Edward Knight supplied over 40,000 quarters of wheat for the Board at Deptford and Portsmouth, although eventually he overreached himself and went bankrupt in 1809.31
Most contractors were of the second type, who supplied particular commodities to the Board for a specified period, usually with a six-month notice of termination from either side. These could vary from rich City merchants such as Sir Charles Flower, who supplied butter and cheese in great quantities, often in different partnerships, to small, independent merchants such as Richard Morris, who signed a one-year contract in October 1813 to supply onions, turnips, carrots, cabbages and potatoes to ships in Plymouth Sound from March 1814.32 These contractors were chosen with care through competitive tendering, and the lowest tender was not always awarded the contract, because probity and credit standards had to be met.* They were well administered, and the Board carefully considered adjustments of the contract price when the market price rose out of the contractor’s control.
The third category of contractor involved merchants who undertook to supply a ship or an army garrison with every type of provision at a particular port. ‘Sea-provision contractors’ had to be well capitalized and well organized. The merchant with the most contracts, at home and abroad, was Thomas Pinkerton, but his eventual bankruptcy demonstrates the way the government successfully managed to transfer risk to the private sector. At first all went well for Pinkerton. He held the contract to supply all the warships at Falmouth, Leith and Hull, but his biggest contract was for the Leeward Islands. In the first years he was in profit, but in the autumn of 1807 the commander-in-chief of the station sent some ships on the station without warning to Halifax, Nova Scotia, leaving Pinkerton with an unused surplus of food. Deteriorating diplomatic relations with the United States, from which he purchased flour, rice and fresh beef, and rapid price rises when Jefferson’s embargo of 1807 was imposed, increased his difficulties.* Having purchased at a high cost, he was left with provisions that had cost him dear when the embargo was lifted and prices dropped again. By 1810 all his contracts had been taken on by other contractors, and in 1812 Pinkerton was declared bankrupt. Another powerful contractor in these years was the truculent Basil Cochrane, who held the sea-provisions contract for the East Indies Squadron, based at Madras and Bombay. He was also to supply all ships in the East Indies. Not surprisingly, this was the most expensive naval station to supply, and profit and risks were correspondingly high. Cochrane’s long-running dispute with the Victualling Board over the settlement of his payments continued for more than twenty years.33
The British victualling system relied upon the London Corn Market, in Mark Lane in the City, and the meat market at Smithfield, as well as other specialist merchants, some of them with international businesses, based in London. It was aided by an expanding and increasingly integrated agricultural industry. Greater demand for the military played its part in affecting prices, and contributed to periods of dearth. But the advantages that stemmed from a competitive market-based system, backed by the extensive London distributive and credit systems, with open and fairly administered contract tendering by government, gave the British advantages over their antagonists in both price and supply. Britain never favoured the monopoly of individuals or of the state, as did the forces of France and Spain, which, as we shall see, suffered from an inferior supply chain. Though there were occasional delays and difficulties, in general the British system was a remarkable success.34
The Victualling Board was crucial to this success, and its commissioners did not have an easy job. They naturally had to take account of the seasons, which dictated the optimum time and price at which to purchase wheat and cattle: most cattle were sold in the winter months. Some food processing could not take place in the summer: during warmer months beer could not be brewed in case it went sour; beef and pork could not be salted and casked because of the risk that the meat would decay. Foreign produce arrived in the London docks at particular periods of the year: tropical products such as sugar, rum and coffee, for instance, arrived in the autumn because the trade left the West Indies before the hurricane season in August and September. And the Board had to operate in domestic food markets in which price rises were politically sensitive. For protracted periods the commissioners sat for seven days a week, always on hand in case of unanticipated food-price movements. No longer could the Victualling commissioners take easy hours and be absent for parts of the week, as had been the case earlier in the eighteenth century.
The composition and expertise of this Board was therefore of supreme importance in determining the success or failure of Britain in keeping its armed forces operationally effective. After the Atkinson scandal of the early 1780s, the Board regained its reputation under the chairmanship of George Cherry until 1799, when he retired. The less effectual John Marsh, nephew of George Marsh of the Navy Office, then took over the chairmanship until 1808. Both had spent a lifetime in the administration of army or navy provisions, and were expert and honest.
George Phillips Towry was, however, perhaps the most remarkable of all the lesser administrators in Whitehall during the wars against Napoleon. Towry was just the man for a crisis, always ready to travel to sort out problems. His portrait when in his early sixties shows strong features with a personality to match. When St Vincent became first lord of the Admiralty in 1801, he sent Towry
with clerks from the Victualling Office on a special mission to Lisbon to sort out the long-overdue accounts of the agent victualler there, David Heatley. The party was captured by a French privateer just before the packet boat reached Lisbon, but they were fortunate, as the Peace of Amiens was signed soon afterwards, and they were soon taken to Gibraltar and released. It was, nevertheless, an unusual distinction for the commissioner of a government board based in London to be captured by the enemy. Within days of returning to the office in Somerset House, Towry was off to Newcastle and Edinburgh to deal with a strike of bakers.35
While the Victualling Board had been given the extra responsibility of provisioning the army abroad in 1793, it no longer chartered merchant ships for government service; this duty was transferred to the newly constituted Transport Board in 1794. When long distances were involved, even within Britain, coastal ships were the economic option for transporting bulky agricultural products. It was quicker and much cheaper to move grain and milled flour downriver by barge. At the port at the mouth of the river the cargo could be offloaded on to a seagoing vessel, although merchant ships in this coastal trade averaged perhaps seventy tons and, being relatively small, could often extend their range upriver.36 East Anglia and the counties to the east and north exported tens of thousands of tons of grain to London annually. Sailing barges from the Essex and Suffolk rivers, the Colne and the Blackwater, the Stour and the Orwell, the Alde and the Deben, brought wheat directly to the London mills, and barley and malt to the city’s breweries, returning with manure from the thousands of horses in the capital as fertilizer for the fields. The River Bure connected the new steam flour-mills of Norwich to warships lying in the Yarmouth Roads, and to soldiers waiting to embark on transports there. The Ouse River and canal system, which reached deep into the heart of England, brought the local shallow-draughted vessels known as keels and wherries down to King’s Lynn, where their cargo of wheat and barley would be sent on to London and Deptford.
Improved inland navigation benefited other agricultural products that went part of the way by sea. In the 1770s the Mersey and Severn and Trent rivers had been linked by canal, and in 1789 the Thames and Severn Canal was opened, giving agricultural products a considerable distribution network.37 In Cheshire the River Weaver Navigation was used to transport rock salt to Liverpool for onward journeys of 600 or 700 miles to London and the East Coast fishing ports. By 1800, 150,000 tons of rock salt a year were leaving the Mersey for refineries elsewhere in the British Isles.38 The opening of more canals was the key to bringing down the costs of bulk goods and ensuring predictable delivery.* Large numbers of Canal Acts were passed by parliament during the war years, and many waterways were under construction.39 The Grand Junction Canal, which joined the Midlands to London, was started in 1793 and was operational, if not finished, by 1805; the Grand Union Canal was workable by 1806. To our modern eyes the canals of England look too narrow to be effective, but at the time they were built they represented a major improvement in efficiency. The advantage of inland water transport can be illustrated by the comparative cost of taking a 280-pound sack of flour from Reading to London: after the Thames navigation was improved in 1796 it dropped from 4s.6d. a load, the price by horse and wagon, to 6d. by barge.40 England, with more accessible and sheltered coastal waters, kinder terrain and straighter rivers, fared better than France; Paris and its ports were ill served by the great meandering rivers of central France.41 Such was the growth in canal traffic that in 1796 Pitt proposed to levy a tax on the carriage of goods by inland waterway, although after protests he dropped the idea.42
The movement of livestock from distant farms and pasture to the centres of population, to the victualling yards, and to the fleet and army at home was organized on a completely different basis. Pigs could not travel far, because they lost weight very quickly when on the move, and as a result they were intensively reared near London. Most were fed on the waste barley and malt from breweries, which were sited to the south of the city at Battersea and Vauxhall. The capacity of the London breweries was impressive: in 1781, 1.2 million barrels of strong beer were brewed annually; by 1815, 1.7 million.43 By the time of the Napoleonic War, the malt and barley waste went to feed an estimated 40,000 to 50,000 pigs reared annually in and around London.
Cattle and sheep moved on the hoof, as a ‘vast animal migration’, extending over the whole of the British Isles.44 By the end of the eighteenth century an immense, loose organization of farmers, drovers and graziers, cemented by local systems of credit and trust governed by family or community, straddled the whole of Great Britain. Cattle in herds of perhaps 300 or 400 would travel twenty miles a day overseen by drovers on horseback. Those beasts with hundreds of miles to travel were given iron shoes like horses, although this posed a problem, because cattle, unlike horses, cannot stand on three legs, and they had to be laid on their side to be shod. Farmers would sell their animals to the drovers, who with their dogs moved them down what are still known today as drovers’ roads along routes that had developed over hundreds of years. Little was written down: a drover would take away thousands of pounds’ worth of animals, usually on credit, and not return for weeks.* Their destination would be a grazier nearer to market, who would buy the animals to fatten them. Anglesey cattle, for instance, were swum across the Menai Strait at low tide in herds, a boat on each side keeping them in line, taken to a local fair and sold on to drovers, who in turn drove them across country and sold them to graziers at Barnet Fair near London.
Scots cattle travelled to Norfolk for fattening and those from Ireland were shipped across the Irish sea to ports in the north-west, also heading to Norfolk. One estimate of 1794 reckoned that 20,000 fattened bullocks went from Norfolk to London annually, and that only a quarter had been bred originally in Norfolk.† In 1811, for instance, 44,553 cattle were shipped across the Irish Sea. Cattle from the East Riding of Yorkshire were driven to Hull for the use of the Victualling Office, a beast of sixty-eight stone losing about four stone in the process. Romney Marsh farmers, who always had plenty of grass for fattening, purchased Welsh cattle. A beast born in the south-west might spend the middle part of its life grazing in Herefordshire or Somerset, before being driven to Buckinghamshire for finishing, and thence to Smithfield.45 Virtually every area in Britain contributed to feeding the great centres of population in London and the south of England, swelled as it was in war time by concentrations of seamen and soldiers.
A good many cattle went straight to the naval bases because the crews of ships were supplied with fresh meat when at anchor in Plymouth Sound, Spithead or the Nore. Live cattle, as already noted, were stabled on the upper gun-deck with the requisite amount of hay, particularly in ships sailing out to spend months blockading enemy ports. In 1808, at the port of Ystad in southern Sweden, Admiral Saumarez gave orders to the effect that if a British ship ‘is in want of Live Bullocks, she is to hoist a white flag at the Main and fire one gun, when a supply agreeable to the following proportion with fodder will be sent to her.’46 Ships of the line were given thirty cattle, frigates twenty and sloops twelve. The craving for fresh meat aboard could lead to discipline problems. At Malta in 1809 Admiral Collingwood took firm action against six midshipmen for stealing a cow from the shore and slaughtering it. ‘It is disgraceful, but I will stop it if possible,’ he wrote to another naval officer. ‘They were marched with a file of marines to the Chief Magistrate in the middle of the day and are now in Prison. The inhabitants have a horror of them … It requires exemplary punishment.’47
Constant high demand combined to create prosperity for farmers in the war years, their incomes estimated to have increased continuously by one or two per cent a year.48 It was a period of investment and increased output, as illustrated by the case of West Sussex. The landscape of the South Downs was changed permanently: high wool and corn prices ensured that the scrub that had always naturally prevailed was cleared for wheat sowing and sheep runs. Arthur Young estimated in 1813 that 240,000 sheep were grazing on the
Downs, and these immense flocks manured the land for high corn yields.49 A keen interest in improving the stock of the local cattle at the annual Petworth Fair was stimulated by a series of valuable cups for the best bull, the first presented by the eccentric George O’Brien Wyndham, third earl of Egremont in 1795.50
From his seat at Petworth House, north of the Downs, Egremont exercised a more than benevolent ownership over his 110,000 acres and into the county beyond. He organized extensive and regular charity for the poor, especially in the years of dearth.51 He mistrusted Pitt and kept out of national politics, though he was a member of the Board of Agriculture. He brought prosperity to the area by financing the Rother Navigation from the navigable River Arun to Midhurst at a cost of £13,300, completed in 1794, with eight locks raising the river by 54 feet, all the work done by his employees. This investment enabled more corn, flour and timber to be transported to the sea at Littlehampton, for onward shipment to Portsmouth; it also enabled lime for dressing the soil, much needed in the area, from the chalk pits at Houghton to be shipped upriver on the Arun (40,000 tons a year during the war years). In doing so, of course, the earl raised the value of his land adjoining the newly navigable river. It was chiefly through his efforts in 1811 that the Wey and Arun Canal was financed.52 This could take barges from London to Littlehampton, by-passing the need for the sea voyage from London to Portsmouth, a route hazardous in winter and always subject to attacks from enemy privateers.*
