Chatham Dockyard (8 page)

The resident Commissioner may well have been regarded as the most senior officer of the yard, but his authority was fundamentally limited to that of receiving and passing on instructions from the Navy Board. Nevertheless, his residence was an exceedingly fine building and was completed in 1704. This is an early plan produced for the house and it is interesting to compare this with the house as actually built.

In any modern-day industrial enterprise there will exist one clear and indisputable manager: a person from whose office a variety of orders, guidance notes and day-to-day directions emanate. In addition, through the appointment of both a managing director and various sub-managers, a clear line of authority will be apparent and areas of individual responsibility firmly established. For the dockyard at Chatham, from the
time of its inception through to the early years of the nineteenth century, this was not how things were arranged. Instead, the applied management system was confused, directionless and top heavy. Furthermore, it was impossible for anyone to be held entirely accountable for shortcomings in areas of dockyard output, as often there were two named managers responsible for undertaking similar duties.

The Commissioner’s House (now known as Medway House) as it appears today. Constructed at the behest of George St Lo, who was resident Commissioner from 1703–14, its most outstanding feature is that of a magnificent ceiling painted at the head of the main staircase and which depicts Neptune crowning Mars. Supposedly it was originally painted for the great cabin of
Royal Sovereign
and transferred at a time when this vessel had been brought into Chatham either for a rebuild in 1728 or when she was broken up in 1768.

As to why this should be, and to offer a partial defence, this relates to the uniqueness of what was being achieved at this time. Nowhere else in the world, other than the royal dockyards, was there any single industrial enterprise employing such a large workforce. Between them, the six royal dockyards were employing, by the end of the eighteenth century, over 10,000 labourers and artisans, with only the fighting forces able to boast a number that was greater in total. In their efforts to direct and control this massive workforce, the various managers of the dockyards were pioneers, working to achieve something that no other business enterprise had ever been called upon to undertake; as such, they developed both new systems of management and a methodology for measuring and improving efficiency. For achieving what they did, they should be lauded. Mistakes made were prolific, with lessons often appearing unlearned. Eventually however, albeit over a long period of time, reforms were introduced and past failings obviated. Finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, the dockyards had established an approach to management that was eventually borrowed and effectively used in a great many other expanding industrial enterprises.

Standing at the pinnacle of naval administration and charged with overseeing all matters relating to the Navy (including the dockyards) was the Board of Admiralty. At one time, the duties of the Board had been performed by an individual holding the title of Lord High Admiral or directly by the Crown. The Duke of York had himself been appointed Lord High Admiral for life, a post he continued to hold upon succeeding to the throne as James II. However, from 1689 onwards, and with a few brief interludes, the Board had become a permanent feature of naval administration. Consisting of a First Lord and six subordinates, the Board of Admiralty regularly met at the Admiralty offices situated on the west side of Whitehall. As an organised body, the Board of Admiralty had overall responsibility for the preparation and disposition of fleets, being additionally concerned with the supply and manning of warships, together with the appointment and promotion of particular officers. Some of these powers however, were indirectly exercised, particularly with regard to the dockyards.

It was the Navy Board that oversaw the dockyards on behalf of the Admiralty, having to submit regular reports to the superior Board. A body of long standing, the Navy Board actually predated the Board of Admiralty, having been originally established during the reign of Henry VIII. As to the precise responsibilities of the Navy Board, these were, from time to time, laid down in written form, with the Instructions of 1662 of particular significance. James, Duke of York, had promulgated these when he had held the office of Lord High Admiral, and listed twenty duties for which the principal officers and Commissioners of the Navy Board were responsible. These confirmed the Navy Board’s overall responsibility for the material condition of the fleet, the building, fitting out and repairing of ships, the administration and maintenance of the dockyards, the purchase of naval stores and the appointment and dismissal of dockyard workers.

Originally, the London offices of the Navy Board were in Seething Lane, with a move to larger offices in Somerset House completed in 1789. As with the Admiralty, the Navy Board held regular meetings, usually for purposes of making policy, approving expenditure and justifying their actions to the Admiralty. Central to the workings of the Navy Board were the principal officers who, according to the Instructions of 1662, actually comprised the Navy Board. Although each was an expert in their own right and appointed because of past accumulated experience, none had overall control of a particular area, the Board adopting a consensus approach to decisions taken, so undermining the possibility of any one single officer being held accountable for any actions taken. This was in contrast to the Admiralty, where the First Lord could, and frequently did, overrule his colleagues. The senior officer of the Navy Board was the Comptroller, commanded by the Instructions of 1662 ‘to lead his fellow officers as well as comptrol their actions’, a phrase that fell far short of giving him absolute authority. Always drawn from among the ranks of senior naval captains, this provided him with a degree of status that helped him in the upholding of the terms of his office.

Of particular significance for the dockyards was the office of Surveyor, generally considered to be second in seniority to the Comptroller. Given responsibility for the design, construction and maintenance of ships, anything presented still required the approval of
the entire Board. Always appointed from among the senior shipwright officers within the royal dockyards, it was from Chatham that Sir Robert Seppings, generally reckoned to be one of the most successful holders of this post, was appointed. It was from the office of the Surveyor that the sheer draught or plans of any new vessel originated, being dispatched to Chatham or an alternate building yard. Any new class of vessel first had to be approved by the Surveyor, while the design or alteration to any vessel might well be the product of the Surveyor himself. Apart from responsibility for ships, the Surveyor also concerned himself with the raw materials needed for a successful construction and repair programme, together with the design of buildings and the overall layout of a yard. An obvious weakness of this system was that a trained shipwright would need to be able to direct himself in this diverse range of skills. Further to this, by always being appointed from among those already employed within the royal dockyards, it meant that the appointee rarely had an appreciation of advances made within some of the commercial building yards and which could be applied to the naval dockyards.

Other members of the Navy Board who had a particularly close connection with the dockyards were the Controller of Storekeepers’ Accounts, the Extra Commissioners appointed to the Board, and the Clerk of the Acts. The first of these, the Controller of Storekeepers’ Accounts, had most of his attention directed to the overseeing of stores supplied to the dockyards, ensuring their quality and proper distribution. It was to his office that the Storekeepers of each dockyard were supposed to submit their regular
accounts. As to the Extra Commissioners, whose numbers varied according to the demands placed on the Navy Board at any point in time, they had no precise duties, being there to support the other officers of the Board. As such, they might be involved with either the Storekeeper or Surveyor and were occasionally called upon to visit the dockyards and report on particular issues or problems that had emerged or were under consideration. Finally, the Clerk of the Acts was, as much as anything, a secretarial post, with all instructions from the Navy Board passing through his office. During the seventeenth century, when one such post holder included Samuel Pepys, this post had carried with it principal officer status. Over time the post underwent changes, including occasional suppression, with the holder of the office becoming a servant of the Board rather than a voting member. In recognition of the changed status, the office holder, who supervised all of the clerks of the Navy Office, eventually acquired the title of Secretary.

Between the Navy Board and Admiralty there existed an occasional strained relationship that would contribute to an overall hindering of managerial efficiency. Consequently, the system of having two Boards overseeing the affairs of the Navy was sometimes presented as one of the failings of the system. Quite the opposite, however, it was a very real strength, the Admiralty not being the obvious body to handle the intricacy of matters associated with ship construction, maintenance and repair. Instead, the Board of Admiralty needed to give attention to strategy and direction without being sidelined by background detail. In reality, the problem was that of the inferior Board having acquired too much authority, able to ignore and challenge the superior Board. Underpinning this ability to reject Admiralty requirements was the simple fact of the appointed officers of the Navy Board being secure for life with removal, even by an irate Board of Admiralty, quite impossible.

Samuel Pepys. A regular visitor to the dockyard during the late seventeenth century, he was a senior member of the Navy Board, holding the office of clerk of the Acts.

With the Admiralty unable to remove those who had been given the task of overseeing the dockyards, individual personality differences became a feature of the more serious clashes that occurred between the two Boards. In addition, and also helping discourage full cooperation, was that of those composing the two Boards having both differing backgrounds and objectives they wished to meet. Frequently, Navy Board members had been involved in administration for decades, while those in the Admiralty had a more recent association with the fighting side of the Navy. In the words of Mahan, writing in 1908:

The military man having to do the fighting, considers that the chief necessity; the administrators equally naturally tends to think the smooth running of the machine the most admirable quality.
¹

That this proved very much the case with members of the Navy Board is partly shown by their apparent stubbornness concerning Admiralty requirements for an increase in the size of warships during the time of the War of Austrian Succession (1740–48). For the Admiralty, such an increase in size was the means to acquire greater fighting efficiency; for the Navy Board it was a matter of simple inconvenience. Apart from anything else, each dockyard would have to hold in store additional sets of equipment, while dry docks would have to be increased in size. Mahan, once again, says of the naval administrator, that he:

Tends to over value the orderly routine and observance of the system by which it receives information, transmits orders, checks expenditure, files returns, and, in general, keeps with the service the touch of paper; in short the organization which has created for facilitating its own labours.
²

Even the fighting man, once caught up in administration, can also succumb to some of the attached dangers, as seems to have happened with Sir Andrew Hamond, Comptroller of the Navy Board in 1801. Although a former ‘dashing’ commander of the seventy-four-gun
Roebuck
, he seriously clashed with the Board of Admiralty and, in particular, its first Lord, John Jervis, Earl of St Vincent. John Markham, a close companion of St Vincent, but one who had also served under Hamond, commented upon how the latter had seemingly switched his loyalty: