Britain Against Napoleon

by Roger Knight

  Cannon were provided by a small number of large foundries, with Walker’s of Rotherham and the Carron Company of Scotland supplying cannon every year throughout the wars; ordnance expenditure with the Carron Company was the largest by some way.* Although eight other foundries cast iron guns for the government, these two companies dominated the market, and satisfied the large, continuous demand for shot.68 The lack of competition was noted with some misgiving by the Commission of Military Enquiry. There were, however, risks involved.69 In August and September 1804, for instance, a quarter of carronades supplied by the Carron Company failed their proof test at Woolwich Arsenal: 29 of a batch of 110. High costs and a manufacture from a difficult material, combined with a continuous rise in proofing standards imposed by the Ordnance, resulted in company failures, notably the Clyde Iron Works. By 1812 and 1813 only five companies, Carron and Walker’s among them, were supplying the ordnance with cannon.70

  Elsewhere in Woolwich Arsenal was the Royal Laboratory. In 1802 the Board of Ordnance had devolved to William Congreve (the elder) complete responsibility for the production of powder.71 Elaborate proof testing of all powder, including that captured from the French, was conducted throughout the war, and improvements continued: building on the more powerful cylinder powder, introduced in 1787, the process by which charcoal was produced was further refined. This powder was superior to that of the French, who still had difficulty with their supply of saltpetre.72

  The Ordnance Department had to take steps to increase quantity as well as quality. As the scale of warfare expanded, production had to increase several-fold. By 1807, with Napoleon astride Europe, demands from Britain’s Continental allies for munitions became strident, even if they were not yet engaged in hostilities with Napoleon: 70,000 muskets were sent to the Baltic and 24,000 to Sicily; in April, Prussia’s demands amounted to 40 howitzers and cannon, 10,000 muskets, three million ball cartridges and 100,000 flints, all of which were despatched within a month. Still the Allies demanded more. The Ordnance could not supply the 15,000 pistols that the Prussians wanted: it had only 2,000 in store.73

  Contractors again came to the aid of the state to expand war production. The East India Company doubled imports of saltpetre from India, from 6,000 tons in 1808 to more than 12,000 tons in 1810.74 Once the raw material had arrived in the country, the Ordnance supplied the merchants with saltpetre on payment of a deposit, but they were expected to procure sulphur and charcoal themselves. Imports of sulphur from Sicily and southern Italy subsequently increased: in 1807 well over 4,000 tons came from Italy, with Malta acting as a supply depot.75 In 1793 at least 60 per cent of the gunpowder issued to the navy had been from private contractors, such as Charles Pigou at Dartford, or Edmund Hill, or Taylor & Co. at Hounslow.76 But eventually state production expanded – great quantities of gunpowder were produced by the state mills at Faversham and Waltham Abbey – and the private sector was eclipsed: the proportion of powder manufactured by contractors fell to 40 per cent by 1809.77 For the last few years of the war, the average annual consumption of gunpowder grew to 80,000 barrels of ninety pounds each.78 The navy used by far the largest amounts of gunpowder and shot: at Trafalgar there had been 2,148 British cannon, a contrast with the 90 of much smaller calibre in Wellington’s siege train at Vitoria. Three times the quantity of gunpowder and shot was consumed by the long bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807 than at Waterloo.79

  State and contractor combined to speed up the production of small arms. In the last nine months of 1803 the army took delivery of only 40,000 muskets; in the twelve months of 1804, this rose to 167,000.80 By 1805 the number of muskets, carbines and rifles produced reached 181,000 and by 1809, 270,000. In the two years to July 1810, Birmingham gunsmiths supplied no fewer than 1,045,000 barrels and locks for final assembly.81 An Ordnance Board proof office for muskets and rifles was established in Birmingham in 1804, and this remained the chief area for contract small-arms manufacture. The new inspection regime, under Lieutenant-Colonel James Miller, enabled defective weapons to be detected on the spot.

  The Ordnance expanded its own factories, in particular for the finishing of small arms. In Lewisham in South London an old Ordnance Department armouries building was updated, staffed with welders, lock-makers, grinders and polishers, all with highly specialized skills, mainly from the Midlands.* They assembled and finished gun barrels, gunlocks, rammers and bayonets. The lathes in this factory were powered by water, although the weak flow of the small River Ravensbourne in the summer caused problems; later a steam engine was added as the factory expanded. Fifty thousand sets of rifles, muskets and components a year came from this mill. In 1811 the workshops at the Tower of London were moved to Lewisham, but the disadvantages of the site and the lack of capacity for expansion again caused the Ordnance Board to look elsewhere. A better site at Enfield, north of London, was selected, and, although this factory was to have a long and distinguished history, it did not come on stream properly until after the war’s end; many workers from Lewisham were transferred there from 1816, the last of them by barge from Deptford Creek in 1818.82

  The final assembly of ammunition, calling for great care and supervision, was undertaken by the state. By 1812 Congreve’s workforce in the laboratory at Woolwich had increased to over 1,400, most of them engaged in assembling ball cartridges.* These men were paid by the day, rather than by piecework, because, as the Commission of Military Enquiry noted, that ‘would be running a great risk of having the ammunition imperfectly made up’. It was soon realized that the output of ammunition from Woolwich was insufficient. In 1804 temporary ‘Laboratories’ at Portsmouth and Plymouth were established – assembly plants without the testing facility that was a function also carried out Woolwich.83 In 1810, for instance, as a newspaper report ran, the Amazon frigate left Plymouth carrying 10,000 muskets for the Spanish patriots, ‘and a proportionate quantity of musquet ball cartridges, fit for their calibre, which were manufactured in the laboratory of the gun-wharf at this port, where 400 children are daily employed in forming and filling ball cartridges’.84 Plymouth manufactured 70 million cartridges between 1806 and 1814. The War Office volumes record that the laboratory at Portsmouth made precisely 52,953,970 rounds between 1807 and 1814. In December 1813 it employed 353 people, of whom 294 were boys.85

  Another area of improvement in the Ordnance’s performance lay in better distribution and storage, made possible by considerable state investment. The 2,440-foot-long wharf at Woolwich was built; the estimated cost in 1801 when it was started was £10,000, but it was not finished until 1813, by which time it had cost £197,000. The following year the accompanying complex of riverside military warehouses, known as the Grand Store, was complete.86 Magazines were enlarged in old fortifications, such as Dorchester or Chester. In the forests of West Sussex, charcoal works were built at Fernhurst and Fisher Street. Some new establishments were small, as at Horsea and Stamshaw, on the north and east shores of Portsmouth Harbour, and St Budeaux, north of Plymouth Dockyard. Their task was to restore older powder by drying it and dusting it, for gunpowder degrades over the years. Horsea and Stamshaw together ‘restoved and dusted’ 13,000 barrels of powder during 1813, a vital task at this stage of the war.87 The design of land magazines developed and became safer; Purfleet on the Thames and Upnor Castle on the Medway were expanded; at Great Yarmouth a magnificent magazine was built, where it still stands today by the River Yare, in the centre of the town, boarded up and neglected.

  The amount of gunpowder and munitions stored at naval bases was substantially increased by the conversion of a number of old warships into floating magazines. Their use was expanded during the Peace of Amiens, as decommissioned ships sent back their surplus powder.88 Powder ‘hoys’, used to transport munitions to ships lying off, increased in size, a change made possible by new piers and buoys. Distribution became safer and more dependable thanks to the newly built canals, and there was no longer a need to trust to the wind-bound vagaries of coastal transports.* In Northamptonshire
, halfway up the Grand Union Canal, the Ordnance built a very large, fortified magazine at Weedon Bec,89 which supplied much of the ordnance and munitions to the expedition that left from Yarmouth to sail to Copenhagen in 1807. The magazine was finally completed by 1810.

  This investment and expansion boosted production and the figures of munitions distributed from the summer of 1812 to Russia, Prussia and Sweden were now measured in hundreds of thousands; 120,000 muskets were sent to Sweden and Russia alone before the end of that year. In 1813 the Prussians received 100,000 muskets, with powder accoutrements and flints, an order that was repeated for Russia; and 40,000 were sent to Crown Prince Bernadotte in Sweden, together with uniform cloth. In the summer of 1813, for instance, one order to Sweden consisted of 2,000 barrels of gunpowder, 5 million musket cartridges, carbines, pistols, flints and 20,000 muskets. At the same time the army in the Peninsula had to be supplied: by the autumn of 1813, 201,000 muskets, 41,391 swords and 23.5 million cartridges had been sent.90 Moreover, these exported small arms were probably superior to those produced in other European countries.91 The difficulties experienced by the Ordnance in supplying the Peninsular armies at the start of the hostilities five years previously were now resolved.*

  None of the credit for this great expansion can be laid at the door of the master-general from 1801 to 1806, the lethargic Lord Chatham. His predecessor, Lord Cornwallis, was scornful, writing privately in 1803: ‘It is a cruel thing at this time that so important a department should be placed in hands so incapable and improper.’ John Barrow at the Admiralty had no doubt who was responsible for the improvement in small-arms manufacture.92 William Wellesley-Pole had been appointed clerk of the Ordnance in 1802, a post that he held (except during the Talents ministry) until he moved to the Admiralty as secretary to the Board in 1807 (as we saw in Chapter 11). According to Barrow, Pole ‘had, by his attention and activity, brought the small arm department of the Ordnance to a degree of perfection it had never before attained, and the Ordnance Department generally was greatly improved by his skill and vigilance’.93 Even Lord Grenville, not known for issuing praise, reckoned that Pole was ‘one of the most efficient men that ever filled the station he held at the Ordnance’.94

  The search to reduce costs in war production was continual. It was the objective of cutting production costs that led to the building of the block mills at Portsmouth, often cited as the first example of mass, standardized production in the world, a project fully operational by late 1807. Blocks, or pullies, small and large, used mainly in the rigging, were a substantial part of a ship’s equipment, and those in continual use wore out regularly. A 74-gun ship was equipped with 922 blocks for its running rigging and another 450 for working the guns. They were produced at the time by two contractors, Henry Taylor of Southampton and Bartholomew Dunsterville of Plymouth.95 Three generations of Taylors had supplied most of the navy’s blocks since 1759.96 Their contract had been slackly administered, because no other manufacturer was apparently able to provide blocks in the quantities the navy required, nor had the Navy Board made any effort to find an alternative. The Taylors thus enjoyed a monopoly; by 1800 they had been allowed a 20 per cent increase over 1791 prices.97

  Though pulley blocks appear to be simple to manufacture, a considerable number of woodworking processes were needed to complete them. Marc Brunel, a young émigré Frenchman, had designed a series of machines to do this, and in the 1790s had been in America hoping to interest manufacturers in his new method of production. Coming to Britain in 1799 to try his luck, he first turned to Henry Maudslay, who constructed a model of one of Brunel’s machines.* Brunel married almost immediately he came to England, opportunely to the sister of the chief clerk of the secretary’s office in the Navy Office. With his new brother-in-law’s introduction, he took his ideas to the Taylors, but they chose not to consider them, confident that their horse-powered circular saws were sufficiently effective. Brunel secured an introduction to the inspector-general of naval works, Samuel Bentham, who took up the plans enthusiastically, having been working on the problem himself, though his ideas, with machines dependent upon wooden rather than the more rigid iron frames, were less sophisticated than Brunel’s. In the spring of 1802 Brunel took his model to Lord St Vincent’s Admiralty Board, which ordered Bentham to develop it and to build a mill at Portsmouth yard.98 The main advantage was its ability to cut costs. Bentham and Brunel were eventually to deliver ships’ blocks more cheaply, in greater quantities and faster than they were being manufactured by the Taylors.

  Bentham combined these new production ideas with an immense construction project. Centred on a steam-pumping system for the dry docks at Portsmouth, it used an adjacent, large reservoir holding water that had been pumped out of the docks. Bentham thus created much needed space by building the new block mills over the reservoir. It was a complex project. Constructing the intricate woodworking machines for making the blocks also involved the active and long-term cooperation of Henry Maudslay in his factory in Lambeth in South London, where the machines were built. Manufacture would not have been possible without his precise machining of the screw threads from his screw-cutting lathes, or his practice of frequent and precise measurement, or the rigidity of construction of the machine conferred by the use of a metal framework.99

  Thirty-eight machines for making blocks of seven to ten inches were ready by the end of May 1803, all of them to be driven by a steam engine, the power transmitted by a pattern of great overhead leather belts.* Installing the complex steam engine and the woodcutting machinery took another two years and further difficulties had to be overcome until the block mills were fully operational.100 The Taylors were served notice that their contract was at an end in 1802, but it was renewed four times for limited periods between 1803 and 1805 because of the delays in bringing the dockyard block mills into production.101 Bentham’s continual and overconfident assurances about the early completion of the project did not help. Some idea of the level of emotion that this engendered can be discerned from the bitterness of a letter from the Taylors to the Navy Board in November 1804:

  We are compelled to say, that We cannot suffer ourselves to be so completely at the service of General Bentham and a Frenchman who we have no trouble in asserting, will bring your Hon[our]ble Board into great trouble and difficulty, for if our Manufactory is suffered to decay, which will be the case whenever the Contract ceases, the Fleet will never again be supplied, for double the money now paid.102

  The Taylors were wrong. As long as the project had high-level naval support, it would succeed, even though the set-up costs of the Portsmouth block mills were far in excess of any investment the private sector could have afforded. A further complication arose in 1805 when Bentham was ordered by Lord Barham, the first lord of the Admiralty, to travel to Russia to explore the possibilities of Russian dockyards building warships for the British Navy. No longer enjoying the support of St Vincent, Bentham suspected that he was being sidelined, for when he returned his post as inspector-general had been abolished, and he was given the title of ‘Civil Architect and Engineer’, though a seat had opened up for him on the Navy Board.103 In his absence Bentham’s assistant, Simon Goodrich, had been left in charge of the project. Goodrich handled the introduction of this new process with subtlety and firmness, very much better than Bentham would have done. Many difficulties interposed before the block mills came on stream, not least the training of dockyard workers in new practices, for they became machine operatives rather than craftsmen.104 The power requirement was larger than had originally been estimated, and another steam engine proved to be needed. In spite of disagreements between Goodrich, the state employee, and Brunel, the contractor, the new machines were fully operational by 1807. In 1808 the navy used 154,285 new blocks of many different sizes, all produced by the Portsmouth block-mills with a workforce of forty-two day workers and fifteen piece workers, with a weekly wage bill of £89.105

  The appearance of metal-processing mills in the dockyards through the
se years was another of Bentham’s innovations, also brought to completion and into production by Simon Goodrich. The supply of copper sheets and bolts was taken back from the contractors. This industry had never been competitive, as both the mines in Anglesey and Cornwall, and the manufacture of the copper sheets, had been in the hands of a small number of industrialists since the introduction of the process, in particular Thomas Williams, until his death in 1802.106 Dockyard practice before the late 1790s had been to strip the worn copper sheets off the bottoms of the ships in dock, clean them and return them to the contractor. At the start of the Napoleonic War the price of copper was rising again. Between 1803 and 1805 a smelting-and-rolling mill was built in Portsmouth Dockyard, driven through by Bentham, and by 1807 it was manufacturing 800 tons of rolled, recycled copper sheathing annually, as well as two thirds of the navy’s bolts requirement.* A year later dockyard production had risen to 1,000 tons.107 The wood- and metal-working mills brought changes in the dockyard workforce: the first ‘millwright’ appeared in the dockyard pay books in 1805; by 1813 there were seventy-seven.108

  This was the end of Bentham’s reforms, for his influence was waning. Instead, the Admiralty repeatedly sought the advice of John Rennie. Much of Rennie’s work involved writing reports on the state of the country’s dockyards, and, on the occasion when he inspected the pumps at Portsmouth in 1807, Goodrich commented acidly in his journal that ‘[Rennie’s] observations convince me that he is deficient in experience and judgements about such matters or that he willingly slanders.’109 Nevertheless, Rennie’s opinion was increasingly influential. Bentham wanted to construct a new machine for blowing air into the smith’s furnace at Chatham. The issue came to the fore in 1807, when Bentham was away in Russia and the Navy Board, as it wrote to the Admiralty, ‘consulted Mr Rennie, the civil engineer, for his opinion of the propriety of erecting this apparatus, and having received his answer, we are now of opinion that it will not be expedient to erect it, and have therefore given orders for providing bellows, as in other smitheries.’110