Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  12

  The Defence Industries 1800–1814

  It might be thought perhaps going too far to say that the battle of Trafalgar would not have taken place if the new mode of repairing ships had not been adopted … instead of 34 sailing of the Line, the Mediterranean Fleet would not possibly have exceeded 24 sail of the line at the time the action happened … by the ordinary method of repairing ships.

  – John Barrow to Lord Melville, February 18061

  The removal of soil, earth, or rubbish, the conveyance of stones, sand or lime, everything is done by little four-wheel carts, drawn by a single horse on iron-railways … The advantage which they represent is immense. England owes to them a part of her wealth. Never without them could coal, iron-ore, lime-stone, slate, and other raw materials, have been conveyed such distances, and nevertheless at a very trifling cost.

  – Captain Charles Dupin, Narratives of Two Excursions to the Ports of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1816, 1817 and 18182

  The account of the post-war travels in England by Charles Dupin of the French Corps of Naval Engineers is interesting not so much for what he observed but rather for what he thought was remarkable or impressive. To him the most surprising thing about Britain in 1816 was its prosperity. ‘Everywhere throughout impoverished Europe’, Dupin wrote, ‘the commerce of England seemed to recede before our victorious banners. We imagined that Great Britain, exhausted, was on the brink of ruin.’3 He discovered how wrong this belief had been. Britain thrived on its war economy, since most of the considerable sums that the government raised in taxes and loans was spent in the domestic economy, while overseas trade, though disturbed for periods, hardly ceased.4 Although the Napoleonic War was many kinds of conflict, it was not least a conflict between competing economies.

  That Dupin in his first pages picked out the seemingly insignificant horse-drawn railways emphasizes the technological ingenuity that the British exercised before the wholesale application of steam power. Although most of British industry was powered by water, wind and horse-mills, many of the revolutionary changes brought about later by steam have tended to obscure its use during the Napoleonic War. According to a contemporary survey in London in 1805, 112 steam engines were already at work in London, used mainly for pumping, in public waterworks and docks, but also in breweries, distilleries and flour-mills. The new motive power was also beginning to be applied to manufacturing: a handful of London forges, foundries, machine-makers, roperies and a sailcloth weaving works accounted for fifteen engines, although they generated in total only 120 h.p.5 The adoption of steam in industrial establishments was not straightforward. Early engines were not efficient, and before the rotary steam engine was introduced its only possible use in the dockyards was for pumping out docks. This task, of course, was not continuous, and thus the pump would have long periods of idleness, and was only marginally more economical to use than horse or human power. It was when steam began to be used for powering machine tools that it became an economic and practical proposition.6

  Britain’s industries made spectacular advances during the war. Cotton production increased three times between the mid 1790s and 1813; in the same period iron and steel manufacturing output increased fourfold. Investment in town improvements and new roads abounded, while house building, which had stagnated in the 1790s, flourished between 1810 and 1813. The great civil engineers, Thomas Telford and John Rennie, built canals, many of which were completed in the course of this war. Docks were dug at Dundee and Hull, and a graving dock on the Tyne, while London, which could already claim to be the greatest port in the world, opened the West India Dock on the Isle of Dogs in 1802, the London Dock in 1805 and the East India Dock at Blackwall in 1806, as well as docks on the south side of the river.7 The Pitt government’s interest in such enormous projects, and the Treasury’s intervention, were crucial factors in their construction.* Steam pumps kept the docks dry while building, and, when completed, the new bucket-ladder steam dredgers, invented by Samuel Bentham and operational by late 1802, kept them from silting up.8 From the turn of the century the use of steam began to increase in the state dockyards. Other well-known figures of the Industrial Revolution had many dealings with state industries, including Matthew Boulton and James Watt, who built the first rotary steam engine. Henry Maudslay, from his engineering factory at Lambeth in South London, set new standards of precision engineering using lathes of his own design and making, but also produced steam engines, one of which, a 6 h.p. engine, he sold to the Woolwich Arsenal in 1809.9 For harnessing this power, a price occasionally had to be paid, and steam caused some severe industrial accidents. At Woolwich Dockyard in December 1812, for instance, ‘the machine used for bending and seasoning ship timber, unfortunately burst in consequence of being overcharged’. The explosion killed eight men, and another fourteen were dangerously hurt, suffering broken legs and thighs.10

  Even where steam was not introduced, new machinery could make manufacturing more efficient, as in the improved rope-laying machines installed by Maudslay in 1811 in the Chatham Dockyard ropery.11 Rope-laying had always been an extremely strenuous activity. Even so, 220 men were still required to lay a 24-inch cable, and only two could be laid a day before the men became exhausted.12 However, such were the complications, including the risk of fire, that steam was not introduced into this process until 1837.†

  Innovation in the production of military weapons was driven less by commercial competition than by the increasing scale of the war and the fear of French power. Gunlocks to fire the long guns gave the British gunners a considerable advantage at sea, as, for example, in the slow Atlantic swell in the early stages of the Battle of Trafalgar; they were quicker, safer for the gunner and far more accurate at long range than the old slow-match still used by the French. The small, close-range British carronade, accurately machined to reduce ‘windage’ – the gap between the barrel and shot so that less powder was needed, thus making reloading quicker – was devastating. This small gun came to dominate British battle tactics and became known as ‘The Smasher’.13 Napoleon, frustrated by the lack of French carronades, issued reprimand after reprimand, writing in 1805 to his minister of marine, ‘Here’s ten years we are behind their Admiralty … I see no attention being paid to it.’14

  The artillery saw another technological breakthrough when, in 1802, Colonel Shrapnel’s bursting shells, or ‘spherical case-shot’ as they were known, were adopted. A fuse lit before firing exploded an inner casing full of small-shot as the weapon reached its target, making it generally effective as an anti-personnel weapon.15 William Congreve’s rockets had a chequered wartime existence. The son of William Congreve, comptroller of the Royal Laboratory at Woolwich, the younger William broke all the rules. He was not an army officer, but from 1804 he developed the rockets at his own expense, achieving a range of 1,500 yards. He courted advancement, at the cost of his own popularity, by successfully seeking the patronage of the prince of Wales, whose influence pushed Congreve’s ideas forward over the heads of the professionals.

  By 1806 Congreve was producing 32-pounder rockets that had a range of 3,000 yards, but accuracy was not a strong point. In October of that year the rockets were given a large and very fair trial in a night attack on Boulogne. The weather was moderate and the night very dark. Four frigates, nine sloops and seventeen gun-brigs were issued with over 1,500 rockets, of which 400 were discharged in half an hour, each vessel firing two at a time. The rockets caused much consternation among the French, and buildings were set on fire: but the invasion flotilla in the basin was unharmed.16 Congreve argued that the rockets had sufficient range, but that the failure had arisen ‘from a sufficient number not having been fired exactly in the direction for them’, as he explained to the prime minister, Lord Grenville.17 The rockets were next used at the siege of Flushing in 1809 during the Walcheren expedition, where they did great damage to the town, but not to the docks that were actually their target. One officer noted that they fell short and caused havoc among the
British forward picquets; he also noted his general impression of Congreve, who ‘had arrived too newly from the perfumed atmosphere of Carlton House to relish too close a proximity to the coarser smell of shot and powder’.18 Charles Chambers, surgeon aboard the fireship Prometheus, observed that

  Congreve the rocket maker is become the jest of the whole Fleet, insomuch that every person is sporting wit upon him; some have conferred on him the appellation of Commodore Squib, etc.; he appears determined to make himself conspicuous, as he wears a white hat and coat; consequence seems his leading characteristic, which cannot be wondered at with a salary of £2,000 per annum, for an invention which hitherto has proved futile.19

  The rockets failed on a number of counts: partly because of technical faults, and partly because they were operated by the Ordnance rather than by the regular army. Congreve became even more unpopular when he accepted, and styled himself with, a Hanoverian army rank. Yet, although his rockets were rightly regarded as risky, they were successful when maintained, tested and fired with care: the diary of William Laycock, a senior non-commissioned officer, demonstrates that he was clearly devoted to his rockets, journeying with them between 1808 and 1815 to Sweden, Portugal, Holland, Spain, Minorca and the Waterloo campaign. At the siege of Cádiz in 1810, for instance, Laycock’s rockets set four French gunboats ablaze and destroyed them.20

  Some of the military thought the rockets a dangerous development, ‘teaching the French to burn our Navy’, as Admiral William Young wrote in 1811 to Charles Philip Yorke, first lord of the Admiralty: ‘They appeared to me to be the most dangerous experiments that we could make, and I should have been extremely glad to have prevented their being tried.’21 Rumours of French experiments with ‘Fire Balls’ reached London, as an intelligence report from John Wilson Croker forwarded to Philippe D’Auvergne reported: ‘all the French officers confirm that bad as your Congreve Rocketts are these will be ten times more mischievous.’22 Congreve could claim, however, a late spectacular success at the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, when a 200-strong British rocket troop had an overwhelming moment: 2,000 enemy troops were panicked by the rockets and surrendered.23 On 1 January 1814 a Rocket Corps was formed, a measure organized by the master-general of the Ordnance, Lord Mulgrave, with the patronage of the prince regent.24 The following April, two Rocket teams proved their worth during the complex crossing by Wellington’s army of the fast-flowing River Adour, near Bayonne: a French counter-attack by a force of 1,000 infantry was repelled. A guards officer wrote of the enemy panic after the first volley: ‘Instantly the drums ceased, and the large column burst and fled in irretrievable confusion.’25

  These weapons were developed pragmatically, as a result of trial and error. By contrast, theoretical approaches came to nothing in these years. The Society for the Improvement of Naval Architecture, founded in 1791, was a failure, at least in the short term, in its attempts to analyse the motion of a ship’s hull through water, and to determine the nature of the friction that it generated. A series of expensive experiments bankrupted the Society, although the thinking behind it led to the establishment of the School of Naval Architecture in Portsmouth Dockyard in 1811, too late to be of any practical use in the prosecution of this war.26 Less worthy, though more persuasive, were the dubious claims of Robert Fulton, a young American who tried to convince the French that he could build a submarine. In May 1802 strangers were ordered to withdraw from the House of Lords while their lordships were told about ‘the improved construction of a Diving Boat in France … to blow up a first-rate man of war, with only fifteen pounds of powder’.27 When the French rejected his ideas, Fulton came to England, and under an assumed name met senior members of the British government. This time the proposition was the design of underwater, explosive mines. The trial of one carefully staged demonstration was successful, but when tried against the French at Boulogne Fulton’s mines failed. Paid off with a handsome sum, he returned to America to try to revive interest in his underwater weapon, and later found fame with the first steam vessel.28 The civil engineer John Rennie met Fulton and thought him ‘a man of very slender abilities though possessing much self confidence and consummate impudence’.29 The same qualities were part of the complex character of Lord Cochrane, who in 1812 proposed ‘Secret Plans’ to the prince regent for the use of vessels full of sulphur and charcoal, to be burnt to the windward side of any port in which Napoleon’s fleet were blockaded. This early form of chemical warfare was fortunately turned down by a committee chaired by the duke of York, and it remained only a theory for a hundred years.30

  In the great scale of things, technological breakthroughs mattered less than increasing industrial capacity. Napoleon, in command of several countries with immense resources, chose this as his battleground. The issue was thus one of supply – how to produce enough war materials without loss of quality and, even more difficult, at reduced costs. Fortunately, the British government could turn to the burgeoning private sector. Privately owned shipyards, foundries and factories, as well as state establishments, built the ships and created the heavy weapons and munitions with which the army and navy fought against France, with the contractors manufacturing far more than the state. The proportion that came from the private sector was many times greater from 1803 than it had been throughout the wars of the eighteenth century. The iron foundries of the north of England and Scotland cast and bored the iron cannon for the army and navy; muskets and rifles were supplied by Birmingham gunsmiths; and uniforms and army equipment were purchased from private manufacturers. As we have seen, wheat was grown and pigs and cattle reared by farmers all over the country, and purchased at the market by the Commissariat or the Victualling Board. Almost all sea transport was hired under contract in order to transport stores or men to and from destinations in Britain or overseas. For contractors in war-related manufacturing – trade and the production of foodstuffs – war was a profitable business, though the government ensured that whenever possible financial risks were transferred to the contractor.

  The relationship between contractor and state was least comfortable in the building of warships, the most complex and capital-intensive task of all. The Napoleonic War lasted longer and was of a much greater scale than any previous conflict, and even the great size of the six home dockyards, which reached their maximum combined workforce of nearly 16,000 artificers and labourers by 1813, could not cope with its demands.31 Where the private sector came into its own was in the accelerated building of warships. The capacity of the merchant shipyards to increase the navy rapidly to a completely different order of magnitude was remarkable. Between 1803 and 1815, 84 per cent of warships, or 72 per cent by tonnage, were built by private shipyards.*

  This was not achieved until the disruption created by St Vincent’s administration had passed. Sir Charles Middleton wrote privately shortly after the renewal of war that Britain was ‘ill-guarded by Sea, & I still think the number of ships & other craft inadequate to the Service that may be required of them. But what is equally alarming, we have a worn-out fleet & no Timber to repair it.’32 When Lord Melville came to the Admiralty in May 1804, a year after the resumption of war, not enough ships were at sea and radical measures were needed. The Navy Board and the dockyards had to be shaken out of the defensiveness and low morale that followed in St Vincent’s wake. The new first lord also had to mend relations with the shipbuilding contractors, whom the previous administration had alienated, by quickly placing orders for new ships, and even sending some warships to private yards to be repaired, which had very rarely been done before. The priority, however, were those ships that needed to be repaired and immediately sent to sea, and here Melville drove through a radical idea against the Navy Board’s wishes.†

  The traditional method of repair involved the laborious replacement of each rotten timber by a new one. Instead, Melville ordered twenty-three ships of the line to be ‘doubled and strengthened with riders’. This was a method used by the East India Company, pioneered by its surveyor, Gabriel S
nodgrass, who had in print virulently attacked dockyard standards of building and repair – hence new practices advocated from this quarter were going to be resented.33 Instead of replacing the timbers, the yard gave the hull another timber bottom, laid over the existing one, while the internal timbers were strengthened with diagonal braces fastened with iron pieces. The new process was deeply unpopular among traditionalists, one of them being Rear-Admiral Thomas Troubridge, a member of St Vincent’s Board. He had written in 1803: ‘I have long reprobated riders. Every Taylor in the Country knows they destroy a Ship.’34 The method, however, had the merit of enabling ships to be repaired in very fast time. Ships of the line needed to be docked for as little as two weeks, or perhaps a month, rather than several months. Melville faced a hard bureaucratic struggle to get the new measures adopted. He sent Sir Andrew Snape Hamond, the comptroller of the Navy Board, and Sir William Rule, the surveyor, down to Portsmouth and Plymouth to give orders directly to the yard officers concerning the new methods to be implemented, and the time within which they were to be repaired. Iron straps and standards were manufactured in Woolwich Dockyard, then taken by ship to the southern yards. Portsmouth was to repair eleven ships and Plymouth nine in a year. John Barrow wrote to Melville in early 1806 after the first lord had left office: