by Roger Knight
From the time of his appointment as inspector-general of naval works in 1796, Bentham had been used as an agent for change, independent of the Navy Board, but with some of its responsibilities. Although confrontation with the Board was inevitable, it was far from desirable, for, as the Commission of Naval Revision pointed out,
when a difference of opinion arises, [it] occasions much altercation and correspondence, and frequently delays the execution of the Works. The appointment of an Inspector General of Naval Works, with powers independent of the Navy Board, produces an interference and counteraction of interests in the Dock Yards, which cannot fail to be injurious to Your Majesty’s Service, by lessening the authority of the Navy Board in the eyes of their inferiors.111
From late 1808 Bentham continued to work as a Navy Board commissioner, but, as working in a team was contrary to his nature, he was no longer powerful. Pettiness and tension marred his last years: immediately there was a disagreement as to where Bentham was to sit around the boardroom table – in other words, a disagreement over seniority – which was not resolved until the Admiralty ruled in the Board’s favour.112 By 1812 Bentham had begun to absent himself from the Navy Office. His post did not long survive the appointment of the younger Lord Melville as first lord in March of that year. For the rest of his life Bentham’s achievements went unrecognized.*
At heart, Bentham believed that the dockyards could be made so efficient that contractors of all sorts could eventually be dispensed with. Though he did encourage those under him to seek contact with private industry, Bentham’s vision of state dockyards having minimal contact with the commercial world flew in the face of reality after the resumption of war in 1803. This would have required more docks and steam engines, new machine tools and a complete reorganization of the dockyard workforce, managed according to his principles of individual responsibility.113 Bentham had flourished in the 1790s and under St Vincent, but the increased scale of the war had put demands on all parts of the state industrial machine that it could not meet alone. Like his erstwhile supporter Lord St Vincent, negotiation and trust were not part of Bentham’s personality; he needed a position of power from which he could dictate and control. Negotiating with contractors was neither to his liking nor within his capabilities.
In spite of the contribution of the private sector, there was still pressure at various times to expand or relocate the state dockyards. Delays in getting ships away from the Thames yards during easterly winds had long been recognized as a problem. In 1806 Lord St Vincent advised Charles Grey, as first lord, to buy Pitcher’s Yard at Gravesend, just where the Thames widens sufficiently so that a ship could, with the tide under her, beat out of the river. He further suggested that Deptford Dockyard could with profit be given over entirely to the Victualling Office.114 Strong feelings on this subject were held by many naval officers. Deptford and Woolwich were ‘almost useless’, Admiral Berkeley wrote to the first lord in 1810.115 Improvement plans and reports were compiled by John Rennie for the dockyards at Deptford, Chatham, Sheerness, Pembroke, Bermuda and Malta; there was even one in 1813 to improve the harbour facilities at Heligoland after it had been captured in late 1807. Many of these did not materialize, usually because they were too costly.116
The Commission of Naval Revision asked Rennie to write a report on all the dockyards, and the eminent engineer found the Thames and the Medway silting up, with some of the moorings in the Medway so shallow that warships were taking the ground at spring tides. He recommended that the Deptford and Woolwich yards should not be developed, and that a new dockyard should be built at Northfleet, near Gravesend. The government baulked at this major investment and, as a result, money was allocated to expand existing facilities at all the eastern dockyards except Deptford.117
The other great problem was where a fleet anchorage should be sited in the south-west. William Marsden wrote to his brother in 1804: ‘What is your idea of the best plan for remedying the want of a safe and convenient anchorage for our Western Squadron? To improve Torbay by a pier? To improve Falmouth? To run out a pier at Cawsand, or a pier on the opposite shore by the Mewstone? … Something must be done.’118 John Rennie was even asked to report in 1808 on the possibility of building breakwaters for moles in the Scilly Islands, but the estimated costs of over two million pounds were far too high.119
The debate focused on whether or not to build a major fleet base at Falmouth, an ideal harbour for the fleet blockading Brest to shelter in during strong westerly winds. The idea had been mooted from the beginning of the war, but the issue came to a head in 1806, when new ministers from the Ministry of All the Talents came to power. Admiral Sir John Borlase Warren and a captain named James Manderson were in favour.* Captain Thomas Hurd, soon to be appointed hydrographer of the navy, recommended that the new first lord should go ahead, reckoning that steam dredging would achieve a depth of six fathoms in quick order: ‘it only remains to consider the expense of such an undertaking, the necessity of the thing being taken for granted.’120 Against the project were the Cornishman Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Pellew, who called Falmouth ‘that hole’, and Lord St Vincent – as he wrote to Rear-Admiral Markham, ‘the difficulty of getting out of Falmouth in winter time is so great that it cannot be depended upon; in other respects much may be made of it.’121 However ingenious the proposals might have been, nothing could alter the fact that a frigate could sail close enough to the wind to beat out of the harbour in a south-westerly, but not a ship of the line. One neutral observer reasoned,
that although it is the nearest port to Brest, and a very snug harbour to lay in, yet that the difficulty of working a fleet of battle ships out of it, on the wind moderating, in consequence of the Rock in the middle of the narrowest part of the entrance, it is a less eligible Rendezvous than Torbay.122
Moorings were laid, and further up the harbour a small stores depot at Mylor was established, but the Black Rock at the entrance to Falmouth Harbour was the main obstacle to building a new fleet base with which to prosecute the war in the Western Approaches.
The solution was eventually to be the building of Plymouth Breakwater, to halt the Atlantic swell that endangered shipping within Plymouth Sound. The initial ideas may have originated with St Vincent, and he certainly encouraged the project. John Rennie and Joseph Whidbey, master attendant at Woolwich, surveyed Plymouth Sound in March 1806.123 They made a good team: St Vincent advised Tom Grenville that ‘no two men understand each other better.’124 They proposed a breakwater of just under a mile in length, east–west across the entrance to the Sound, to a depth of thirty-five feet. After some five years of debate, this huge project was pushed through by Charles Philip Yorke when first lord, despite resistance from Spencer Perceval, then chancellor of the Exchequer. John Barrow recorded that Yorke threatened resignation if the breakwater estimate was not accepted. ‘ “Barrow, it is time for me to quit the Admiralty, and I shall do so very soon … On this score,” said Mr Yorke, “I shall not yield, and the estimate shall remain and be produced in the state it is.”’125 The scheme was adopted by the Admiralty in January 1811 and authorized by an order-in-council in June 1812.126 The quarries at Oreston near Plymouth were opened on 7 August 1812, and the first stones were dropped on the seabed that month. Joseph Whidbey oversaw the project, with the contractors working to him.* On 31 March 1813 the breakwater made its first appearance above the surface, when the tide was at low water springs.127 The shelter it gave to shipping in Plymouth Sound in southerly gales was immediate. Nothing impressed the French naval engineer Charles Dupin more than this immense project. He left a description of the work on the breakwater, recording a scene at the nearby limestone (or ‘grey marble’) quarries managed by contractors. The stone was transported by horse-drawn trollies to barges, a cargo of sixty tons being loaded in fifty minutes, with a gang of eight men manning the winches and tackles. Dupin marvelled at
those enormous masses of marble that the quarry-men strike with heavy strokes of their hammers; and those aerial roads
or flying bridges which serve for the removal of the superstratum of earth; those lines of cranes all at work at the same moment; the trucks all in motion; the arrival, the loading, and the departure of the vessels; all this forms one of the most imposing sights that can strike a friend to the great works of art. At fixed hours, the sound of a bell is heard in order to announce the blasting of the quarry. The operations instantly cease on all sides, the workmen retire; all becomes silence and solitude; this universal silence renders still more imposing the noise of the explosion, the splitting of the rocks, their ponderous fall, and the prolonged sound of the echoes.128
From the quarries, the larger stones, some over five tons, were taken by purpose-built government barges with hinged sterns, and, inside the hull, trolleys on rails on an inclined plane, to aid the offloading of the stone into the sea. Smaller stones were taken by vessels provided by contractors, and every one was carefully placed when dropped. By 1816 an average of over 1,000 tons of rock were being sunk daily; in total, from the start of the project, nearly a million and a half tons were sunk. The greatest quantity of stone sunk in one week was estimated at over 15,000 tons. During the project the contract price for both quarried stone and transport was pushed downwards, so that the average cost per ton over the whole project was estimated at 8s.1¼d. The number of skilled men and labourers employed on the project never rose above 650.129 By contrast, the French had employed 5,000 when they attempted to build the Cherbourg Breakwaters in the 1780s.
The Plymouth Breakwater underlined the country’s naval strength – and its ability to persevere with an enormous undertaking after many years of a long war – better than any other project to that point. The British had combined financial and contract management with the new steam technology to great effect. The breakwater was not substantially complete until 1847, and suffered storm damage in 1817 and 1824, to be repaired by a further half a million tons of rock.130 But before the end of the war in 1815 it furnished the shelter for naval and merchant shipping that it had been designed to provide. It still resists the surging Atlantic swell today and protects the seaward approaches to the naval base at Plymouth.
13
Blockade, Taxes and the City of London 1806–1812
To carry on the war on the present scale of expense with the ordinary means of the country … is utterly impossible … it follows therefore of absolute necessity that unless our expenses can be very greatly reduced we cannot continue to exist long as an independent nation.
– George Rose, treasurer of the navy, to Spencer Perceval, just before he became prime minister, 11 November 18091
How to finance the ever-expanding war was the central issue in British politics between 1806 and 1812. From 1793 to 1815, the army, navy and Ordnance cost a total of £830 million.2 At the same time, £578 million of new funded debt was created to add to the national debt.3 These amounts of money were quite unprecedented. When Lord Grenville left office in 1807 he was convinced that the country could not raise sufficient cash to finance a significant army on the Continent.4 The Tory administrations of Portland, Perceval and Liverpool managed to prove him wrong. These governments had to perform four very difficult tasks simultaneously: to raise vast sums of money by taxes and loans; to ensure that trade flourished in order for money to be available for those taxes and loans; to pay the interest on a sharply escalating national debt and provide very large amounts of gold and silver to meet the expenses of Wellington’s army in the Peninsula; and, finally, they had to subsidize their allies, through cash, credit and war materials, to keep the Continental armies operational and active against Napoleon. It was a close-run thing, but Britain held out until weaknesses started to appear in the Napoleonic juggernaut.
The first way by which ministers increased revenue was to persuade parliament that their proposed taxation measures were sound and reasonable. British citizens had always been taxed more heavily than those of other nations through the previous century, allowing the government to invest in a large and successful capital-intensive navy. Whereas taxation in Britain had accounted for roughly 20 per cent of national income, in France it ranged from 10 to 13 per cent.5 Before the French Revolutionary War around £18 million a year was raised in taxes; but remarkably an additional £12 million on average was extracted every year between 1793 and 1815. After the shock of the financial crisis of 1797, Pitt took the art of raising revenue to a new level by persuading parliament to impose an income tax, for the first time in the country’s history (as we saw in Chapter 3). From 1799 two shillings in the pound were to be paid on all incomes over £200; those with incomes between £60 and £200 paid less than two shillings.6 The new tax raised a great deal of money: in all, £155 million before 1815.
Raising more taxes to contain the scale of borrowing marked a sharp change of course. Before the Peace of Amiens, loans to meet war expenditure from the City covered more than 70 per cent of military costs, but during the Napoleonic War they reduced dramatically to only 30 per cent, largely because of the contribution of income tax to government funds.7 Income and property taxes were immensely unpopular, although during Addington’s premiership the Treasury introduced the idea of taxing separate parts of an income, rather than the total, dividing it into ‘schedules’. This allowed the parts to be taxed in different ways, and the innovation reduced the resistance to payment considerably.* Taxes were largely paid and collected efficiently: Pitt ensured that, while the propertied classes might oversee the process of tax gathering, assessment was carried out by salaried surveyors and commissioners, much to the displeasure of the Whigs. Thomas Creevey, diarist and backbencher, as well as briefly secretary to the India Board of Control between 1806 and 1807, wrote to the chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Henry Petty, when he heard that there was to be little change when Grenville’s government took power in 1806:
of all existing Taxes the Property Tax is the most odious … most offensive to the general feelings of the country. It is Pitt’s child, and it is worthy of him … The measure has all the air of the oppressive, unfeeling policy of the Grenvilles, and was I in your situation, I would have nothing to do with it … For the first year, at least, I would go on by loans and loans only.8
Not for the first or last time would an Opposition coming into power find its freedom of action circumscribed, and between 1806 and 1807 the Talents ministry retained income tax, as well as the bewildering array of indirect taxes already in place. At least twenty-one goods and services were newly taxed during these wars, including not only salt, beer and spirits, thread and lace, banker’s notes, fire and marine insurance, auctions, ships’ hulls and material, but also windows, carriages, stage coaches, farm horses, silk, hops, servants, newspapers, dogs, and even hair powder and armorial bearings. Some taxes were extraordinarily effective. Over the twenty-two years of war, foreign spirits yielded £30 million and domestic spirits £21 million; even the tax on farm horses amounted to over £9 million. Some new revenue-raising ideas did not work: hair powder was given up and armorial bearings were not used, though hunting continued in spite of the tax on dogs. The taxes on luxury hit the rich, but they submitted to the will of parliament, paying £345.5 million on all these items, the greater part of the immense grand total of £542 million paid in direct and indirect taxes between 1793 and 1815.9 The elite’s fear of military defeat and invasion ensured compliance with this tough tax regime.10
The need to raise government income continued to 1815. The last five years of the war saw a great crescendo of expense, swollen by the larger and larger subsidies paid to Continental powers to enable them to continue the struggle against Napoleon. Over the whole of both wars, £65,830,228 were paid to over a dozen countries, not only to the main Allies, Austria, Russia, Prussia and Sweden, and later Portugal and Spain, but also to Hanover and the smaller German states, Sardinia and Sicily. Over half this total was paid in the last five years of the war. In 1814 alone Britain spent £10 million; a small payment was even made to hitherto-hostile Denmark. The same amount was
spent in the following year when over thirty European countries, great and small, shared in British subsidies.11
It was not until 1811 that Hansard printed a consolidated, easily understood table of annual public expenditure.12 Total government expenditure came to just over £85 million. The largest share, £43 million, the cost of the army, navy and Ordnance combined, accounted for half that figure.* Alarmingly, interest on the national debt and Exchequer bills totalled only slightly less, at £35 million. The remainder consisted of civil costs and subsidies to Continental countries, the latter totalling 7.3 per cent of total expenditure. Government income from land-assessed taxes, property and income taxes (£26.8 million), customs and excise duties (£39.4 million), and profits from the Post Office (£1.7 million) raised only £69.2 million towards this outlay.† Thus there was a spending deficit of nearly £16 million, with the result that the government turned again to loans from the City.
