Nelson & His World

Discussion on the life and times of Admiral Lord Nelson
It is currently Thu Mar 28, 2024 11:57 am

All times are UTC [ DST ]




Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 20 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2
Author Message
 Post subject: Musters
PostPosted: Thu Sep 17, 2009 11:39 pm 
Offline

Joined: Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:17 pm
Posts: 217
Tony!
The Order in council of 1794 tried to do three things – 1) to regularize the system of entry by aspirant officers by replacing the old system of captain’s servants by one in which all entered as with universal rank of First Class Volunteer; 2) to establish a pay rate for the Volunteer separate from the captain’s own system of allowances and 3) to control the size of the entry by restricting the number of Volunteers to 4 per 100 men in the crew.
My impression is that in terms of 1) and 2) the Order was generally successful. In terms of 3) I am not so sure. The reason is that many other parts of the system remained the same. For example,
A 97% of officers entrants were still appointed by captains without Admiralty knowledge or involvement
B Patronage still underpinned Georgian society and a captain’s ability to take the sons of family members and of the influential and rich was an important part of it.
After 1794, there were still relations and influential people lobbying captains for favours and there is anecdotal evidence in memoirs etc which suggests that captains did not immediately abandon this perk but continued (illegally) to take young men on in other rates when the allocation of Volunteers was filled.
Likewise the OinC did not mention ‘false’ muster. The problem here was the fact that to become a lieutenant, candidates had to be 20 years old and to have had 6 years sea time of which 3 was spent as a midshipmen. There are plenty of examples of false ages being written into musters to get people to commissioning age earlier than they should have, and still (though fewer) examples of children being (illegally) entered in musters to give them theoretical sea time when they were still at home.
Evidence of how much of this continued to go on is difficult to come by. There were occasionally whistle blowers (generally discontented junior officers who used muster irregularities as a way of getting back at their captains) but generally most people from the Lords of the Admiralty downwards seemed to prefer to let sleeping dogs lie.
An order in 1808 that in future all musters (taken about every fortnight) should be signed as accurate by the captain and all the lieutenants was probably a recognition that more safeguards was needed.
Over the twenty two years of the wars, it appears that the number of muster irregularities did decline. This is not surprising. The navy during this period became more professional, and better organized and managed and – can one say? – more democratic in that the proportion of officers from non-aristocratic backgrounds enormously increased.

Brian


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Sep 20, 2009 10:31 pm 
Offline

Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:11 pm
Posts: 1258
Location: England
Brian, thank you for your very comprehensive reply. Yes, I was concentrating on 'book entries' where the man (or boy, rather) was not present, but there is no reason to suppose that the other irregulatories would not have continued. I was thinking that perhaps some officers would draw the line at drawing pay for someone not present, but then again, established practice was probably more important than the legalities. Perhaps a more likely reason would be that after 1794 during the war, a captain would prefer to use the reduced number of places available to him for volunteers who were actually ready to learn their profession. And with the incentive of prize money during the war there would have been no shortage of those.

I'm interested in your suggestion that the navy might have become more democratic during the wars. I seems to me that although there was a big influx of officers from the middle classes (to use the modern term), in some ways the navy perhaps became less democratic. The social standing of the navy had increased towards the end of the 18th century, aided no doubt by Prince William Henry's entry in the American War of Independence, and evidently in the fleet at the battle of Trafalgar the proportion of 'right honourables' amongst quarterdeck 'young gentlemen' was greater than it had been at the battle of Quiberon Bay almost fifty years before. Michael Lewis refers to a 'temporary democratization', and apparently Dillon, in his narrative, complained of the increase in officers from unsuitable backgrounds. However, despite some being promoted through merit, it seems to have been still overwhelmingly those with aristocratic and parliamentary connections who achieved rapid promotion. As you say, the Admiralty had not succeeded in controlling numbers, and with the over-supply of officers, interest counted more than ever. I think it was 1807 when St Vincent is reported to have said:
Quote:
The Navy is so overrun by the younger branches of nobility, and the sons of Members of Parliament, and they so swallow up all the patronage, and so choke the channel to promotion, that the son of an old Officer, however meritorious both their services may have been, has little or no chance of getting on.”

Presumably those without either aristocratic connections or service connections had still less chance of getting on?

One of the things that interests me about Trafalgar is the undertones and possible frictions between captains of different backgrounds. Anna, perhaps that could be one theme for your talk on Nelson's captains?

_________________
Tony


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Sep 21, 2009 6:01 pm 
Offline

Joined: Wed Oct 22, 2008 3:17 pm
Posts: 217
Tony!

I don’t think we are far apart on this. Unfortunately there seem to be no statistics which provide a definitive answer. It has to be a matter of judgement. Members of the Forum who are less familiar with the scene might like to know that William James tells us that the comparative figures for officers were
1793 - 55 admirals; 446 post-captains; 1580 cmdrs/lieuts; total 2081
1815 - 219 admirals; 824 post-captains; 3973 cmdrs/lieuts; total 5016

Prima facie, the ‘middle classes’ would have supplied most of the increase. However, as you say, the possibilities of prize money and the increased prestige accruing to the navy following its victories attracted a larger number of the aristocracy and landed gentry as well.

I agree that it seems likely that the superior ‘interest’ and ‘pull’ of the last group would have given them the advantage in getting promotion to the senior ranks.

However, the statistics which Michael Lewis produced when trying to make a correlation between rank and social origin does not bear this out. He found that 60% of 710 officers identified as being of aristocratic and country gent background reached post-captain/flag rank, compared with 55% of 970 'middle class' officers. Not much difference…….but Lewis’s figures can’t be relied on. As I am sure you will recall (1) he lumped all officers who joined between 1793 and 1815 together – so could not show how the percentages changed over the period of the war; and (2) he relied upon O’Byrne’s ‘Naval Biography’ of 1846 which only listed the careers of those officers who were still alive at that date. Thus, his statistics are based on only 1800 out of the 5016 officers around in 1815. I am no statistician, but imagine that this must be a major flaw.

Likewise, bald figures based on the Navy List are misleading in that they do not show the numbers who were actually employed. In the race for sea going appointments people with ‘interest’ would certainly have got priority. St Vincent (a man of modest origin himself) when he became First Lord, was certainly shocked to find that most of the officers who had been promoted following the battle of St Vincent were unemployed with appointments being monopolized by sprigs of the nobility.

Brian


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 5:14 pm 
Offline

Joined: Mon Feb 18, 2008 7:11 pm
Posts: 1258
Location: England
Brian, apologies for this belated reply.

Yes, I agree that there is a problem with Michael Lewis’s statistics, and have been careful not to draw any conclusions from them either way! To be fair on him, he does draw attention to the problem himself. As well as being incomplete, his sample was self selecting (being officers who had given their social background to O’Byrne), and therefore, more likely than not, unrepresentative.

I think perhaps what I am trying to say is that the democratization was a temporary trend that had already started to reverse during the Great Wars.

Your comment on the number of officers actually employed is important. NAM Rodger provides some good statistics on this in ‘Commissioned officers' careers in the Royal Navy, 1690-1815’. He shows that as the number of officers increased during the Great Wars, the percentage employed decreased. He comments that ‘the phenomenon of unemployed Captains and Commanders during the Great Wars, particularly the Napoleonic War, and of officers promoted for gallantry but obliged to wait several years for a command, will be familiar to all who know the memoirs and correspondence of the period’. His figures show that ‘in the year of Trafalgar barely half the Captains and Commanders on the list were actually serving’. By 1810 only 41% of captains and 44% of commanders were actually employed. They also confirm that unemployment was highest among the most recently promoted, and his conclusion is that ‘it cannot be explained by a growing proportion of the elderly or sickly; it must be the result of excessive promotions’.

Like yours, my own assumption is that the problem of unemployment was worst amongst those of lower social standing and carying the least 'interest'.

NAM Rodger’s tentative conclusion was that political and personal influence was gaining promotions more easily during the Great Wars than they had done during the Seven Years War or the American War. He suggests that Anson and Sandwich had probably been more successful in resisting political interference in naval patronage.

I recently read NAM Rodger’s biography of Sandwich, ‘The Insatiable Earl’, and must admit that I really quite took to him, although he obviously provoked much dislike in his time through being an ambitious professional politician – not at all a gentlemanly aspiration. Having also read ‘The War for America, 1775-1783’ by Piers Mackesy, my impression of Sandwich is a very able (and somewhat maligned) naval administrator, although too cautious in his views on naval strategy during the war.

In the first couple of years of the French Revolutionary War, the pool of lieutenants available for promotion to commander and captain were of those who had been promoted lieutenant during the American war. Many of those (such as my ancestor) were not from the landed gentry or aristocracy, and were probably themselves happy to take youngsters of lower social standing as their protégés, once they had obliged one or two of the local gentry. But later in the wars, as the trend reversed, it was perhaps these protégés who were pushed aside by those with greater interest.

The Great Wars also seem to have marked the start of a transition in the concepts of honour, duty and service. It seems that a gentleman’s honour was not something to be won, or to be bestowed on him, but was his by birthright. His first duty was to himself – to maintain his honour, and that duty came before any duty to serve the King. In fact it was more the case that the Admiralty had a duty to respect his honour by giving him an appointment that he would consider suitable (and profitable). But during the Great Wars there seem to have been more officers prepared to accept a continued duty to serve. Was this a change in attitudes, or was it purely that the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars presented a more serious threat to their way of life?

_________________
Tony


Top
 Profile  
 
 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Oct 04, 2009 6:01 pm 
Offline
Site Admin

Joined: Sun Feb 17, 2008 11:06 am
Posts: 2830
Location: mid-Wales
Tony:

Adam Nicolson in 'Men of Honour' (HarperCollins 2005) expands a little on some of the points in your post above:

He speaks of preserving honour as one of the 'central motors' of the fleet at Trafalgar.

'A body of officers coming from an uncertain and ill-defined social position needs to rely on the idea of their honour to establish their place in the social hierarchy. Anyone below or above the middle ground can be more relaxed about it. The securely placed aristocrat can behave as he will, in the knowledge that his status is unlosable.....but when, if you defined yourself as a gentleman, you had nothing else, as so many of them did not, honour was what you had. It was membership of a moral community, which is why the use of language was so critical. Your membership was defined by the respect with which other people treated you....

'Honour had mutated throughout the 18th century....It is a public virtue, virtually inseparable from 'reputation'. Inevitably, in a hierarchical society, 'reputation' acquired a social dimension. A man of honour was a man with the sort of reputation which men of the upper classes should have....among younger minds, though, by the time of Trafalgar there had been a subtle shift. Honour had gone inward and had begun to lose its social quality. Honour, around 1800, came to define a man simply as a man among men, without reference to his standing in society. It became very nearly equivalent to sincerity or integrity.'


He makes another point, comparing the aristocratic French and Spanish naval officers with those of the middle class officers of the Royal Navy:

'For an aristocrat, failure in battle does not erode his standing or his honour. He remains, as long as he has behaved with courage, the man he was born to be. For the younger son of the English gentry, or of a lawyer or of a merchant, as most British officers were, there is no such destined luxury. If he fails at sea, his standing is diminished,; he has not won the prize money that will set him up at home; his name is not gilded with honour; he has failed in the same way that a failing entrepreneur has failed. To preserve his honour and his name, he needs to win. Victory is neither a luxury or an ornament. It is a compulsion and a necessity.'

_________________
Anna


Top
 Profile  
 
Display posts from previous:  Sort by  
Post new topic Reply to topic  [ 20 posts ]  Go to page Previous  1, 2

All times are UTC [ DST ]


Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 83 guests


You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot post attachments in this forum

Search for:
Jump to:  
Powered by p h p B B © 2000, 2002, 2005, 2007 p h p B B Group