The British and French Navies 1650-1815

Sail of the centuries

Jonathan Dull is an American historian of the 18th Century who has already published studies of the French Navy in both the Seven Years’ War and the War Of American Independence, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

Both won him awards and good reviews, such as Professor Rodger calling the former “a tour de force in combined diplomatic, political and naval history.”

His new book – The Age of the Ship of the Line: The British and French Navies 1650-1815 (Seaforth, £25 ISBN 978-1- 84832549-4) – is a study of the maritime dimension of the major wars from 1650 to 1815, based on the importance of battle fleets in these conflicts. Dull emphasises the key role played by fleets made up of the ‘ships of the line’ that form his title.

As in his previous volumes, he puts the maritime operations into their overall strategic and diplomatic context which means there is much fascinating material on the general history of the period. It is easy for amateurs to get lost in such background discussion but this author is too professional to fall into this trap and his account is admirably balanced.

It is balanced in another way too. As an American, the author is able to take an admirably neutral perspective in a period where most accounts come from the British point of view.

The author’s knowledge of the French side of the story gives the book a rather Gallic flavour but the British side is well known by the Anglophone audience whereas the French is not. Most readers will learn something from the book and see well-known events in new ways.

The book is short but generally well-written and is an engaging read. Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press it is fully-equipped with endnotes which both display the author’s mastery of the literature and give critical guidance for further reading.

The author points to the fundamental advantage that allowed Britain to prevail in the conflicts he reviews. Insular Britain was able to put more investment into its navy than continental France.

In the War of the Austrian Succession of 1744-48, Britain spent the equivalent of 71, 300,000 French livres per year on the navy, France less than half that figure, 32,170,000 livres.

In the Seven Years’ War the annual figures were even more in Britain’s favour, 111,160,000 livres against 36,670,000.
The British Admiralty and Navy Board were getting more than three times the annual provision of their French counterparts.

Only in the American War of Independence 1778-82, with no continental opponent and Britain forced to deploy larger ground forces, was France able to approach Britain’s expenditure, 138,435,000 livres against Britain’s 157,900,000.

No wonder Britain was able to afford more ships of the line than France as well as a higher proportion of more heavily-armed ships.

France had a much larger population than Britain and higher overall government income but, as Dull points out, much of the latter “was spent on pensions, public works and administration”.

The classes represented in the British parliament allowed themselves to be taxed to a remarkable degree. British 18th-Century taxpayers were paying twice to three times as much per head as their French counterparts.

The British government was also credit worthy and its investors willing to accept lower rates of interest. On such mundane but crucial foundations were the achievements of Anson, Hawke and Nelson built.

Dull sympathetically explains the difficulties the French had in manning their ships with effective crews, an absolutely fundamental factor when men were the mechanism of the ship, both in terms of propulsion and armament.

Even before the Revolution French fleets could be manned, with “novice sailors” prevented from training to efficiency by British blockaders. Thus was Conflans’ fleet “run ashore” by Hawke “steering to glory” in Quiberon Bay in the “wonderful year” of 1759.

The balance of training of the two fleets was the decisive factor.

What made it all the worse for the French, as Dull points out, was that it was already clear that invasion was not possible but Conflans’ sense of honour forced him to unnecessary action and defeat.

One reason for French difficulties in 1759 was the serious epidemic that had affected its fleet sent earlier successfully to relieve Louisbourg in North America. When it got back to France its contagions spread to the ports of Brest and Rochefort.

Nearly half the fleet’s personnel strength of 12,000 died. A similar fate had overtaken a French expedition to Cape Breton Island in 1746.

The superior standards of cleanliness in British ships were a major strategic advantage throughout this period.
Although the author  admits that Britain’s overall advantages were decisive, he puts forward the interesting argument that the more centralised French political systems did have some advantages, producing “tough and skilled” administrators who could turn situations round quite quickly when required.

An example of this was when Andre Jeanbon Saint-Andre managed to replace the grievous losses of 1793 and put 50 French ships of the line into service the following year.

Sadly, however, a lack of crew training was again endemic, not helped by the disastrous effect of the Revolution on the French officer corps and Saint-Andre’s own mistake of January 10 1794 in abolishing the corps of naval artillerymen.

Dull’s conclusion is that “on balance, the British Navy was strongest at the bottom with its incomparable sailors and shipboard officers, while the French was strongest at the top with its often excellent naval ministers.”

The author is clearly saddened by what he sees as the rather unnecessary conflicts of two countries he likes and respects. He points to the period of Anglo-French alliance after 1716 as almost a golden age and characterises the mid-18th Century as an era of “foolish wars.” He is critical – probably rightly – of the factors that caused Britain to attack Spain in 1739 and those which persuaded Louis XV to escalate the European conflict shortly afterwards.

Louis’ 1744 plans to invade England to install a Stuart king under the cover of only 15 ships of the line have all the realism of Hitler’s impractical invasion plans of almost two hundred years later, and the latter had more excuse.

The account is short and generally comprehensive but I would have liked a bit more in places, notably on the War of the Third Coalition after Trafalgar. The book’s title is also a bit misleading: perhaps the subtitle should have read ‘A Strategic History of the Maritime Wars 1650-1815.’ Nevertheless, these are only quibbles.

I can recommend this excellent book most heartily as a highly-accessible balancer to more conventional naval histories of the period.
  

Landing Room Only

WORLD War 2 was a triumph of a maritime strategy that, after a faltering start in Norway and evacuation operations from France, Greece and Crete, progressed through amphibious raids of differing levels of success to the fully-fledged large-scale landings on the coasts of North Africa and Italy and, finally, of France.

In all these activities the basic platforms for landing infantry were the small assault landing craft, designated ALC to early 1942 and LCA thereafter, writes Prof Eric Grove of the University of Salford.

The story of these craft has now been excellently retold in Assault Landing Craft: Design, Construction and Operations (Seaforth, £19.95 ISBN 978-1-84832-0505) by Brian Lavery, the distinguished maritime historian who made his reputation in his study of the Nelsonian ship of line and has enhanced it by his recent increasingly-prolific work on the Navy of WW2.

He traces the development of the LCA from its conception by the Inter-Service Training and Development Centre set up in 1938. Two prototypes were rapidly produced in 1939, one by the lifeboat manufacturer Fleming and the other by Thornycroft, the major shipbuilder. It was decided to put the latter’s craft into production as it would be easier to add necessary armour; 18 were on order by September 1939. It was produced throughout the war to the same basic design and remained in service in the post-war Navy, being used in the Suez landings in 1956.

The LCA was made of wood, built with a ‘V’ shaped chine hull and a bow door. The twin screws, recessed in the stern, were powered individually by Scripps V-8 petrol engines, versions of a Ford car engine. As mass production gathered pace, non-marine factories were brought into the LCA programme, notably the Lebus furniture factory which could launch its craft directly into the River Lea in North London.  

Almost 2,000 basic LCAs were built, plus related variants used for fire-support duties. The author calculates that they might have landed as many as half a million troops of various nationalities. They were carried on board Landing Ships Infantry, converted merchantmen of various shapes and sizes operated by both Royal and Merchant Navy crews. More than 50 such LSI were commissioned and most (45) were present at the Normandy landings in June 1944 where they landed American forces as well as British and Canadian.

The first four ALCs went into action carrying French Foreign Legionnaires at Bjerkvik – the first Allied landing of the war – and then in the brief capture of Narvik. Given the significance of these separate operations it is a pity that they are conflated into one in the author’s brief accounts of his subject’s combat debut.

As the first craft were being used offensively, seven others were being pressed into service to help evacuate the Allied forces from Dunkirk. In a reversal of their designed function they carried troops out to the larger ships assembled off shore although three brought troops back all the way on their return. Two were lost on the beaches, one was sunk by bombing next to a destroyer and one was towed back when its engines gave out.

The next attempt to use ALCs was in the abortive Operation Menace at Dakar which failed partly through shortage of landing craft.

1941 and 1942 saw a mixed bag of operations, some more successful than others as well as Assault Landing Craft playing key roles in the evacuations from Greece and Crete. There then followed the large-scale amphibious landings.
Lavery is very interesting in his account of these, pointing out that considerable difficulties had to be overcome in operations that rarely went according to plan and were closer-run things than they have seemed in retrospect. The achievement of the LCAs on June 6 in landing through obstacles which had not been cleared as expected was a key factor in the success of the operation, although serious delays could not be avoided. As the author laconically puts it “it would take longer to defeat Germany than planned”.

As is to be expected from his important work on personnel and training in this period, the author pays full attention to the training of the LCA crews.

Four men were needed per craft and, as numbers increased, many ‘Hostilities Only’ men were drafted into Combined Operations to man them.

It took time to set up an effective system and, for a time, Army personnel lost confidence in the ill-trained crews but by late 1942 an effective system was in place: two weeks’ initial training at the former holiday camps that formed HMS Northney on Hayling Island, followed by six weeks of advanced training at the evacuated Royal Naval College at Dartmouth or HMS Helder at Brightlingsea. Only then were the newly-formed LCA flotillas ready to be passed north for operational training at Inveraray.
Flotillas were normally of 12 craft: four groups of three; they were commanded by RNVR lieutenants with a sub-lieutenant in charge of each group and an engineer sub-lieutenant running a six-man maintenance section.

In September 1943 policy changed and it was decided to man minor landing craft with personnel from the existing Royal Marines Division; its men were in comparatively-less demand for their traditional big ship duties.

A new training complex was created in Wales and by the time of the Normandy landings two thirds of the LCA crews were Royal Marines. This was an important dimension of the transition of the Corps into an amphibious force.

This fascinating and multi-dimensional story is well told in a short (128 pages) but well-illustrated and enthralling book. The way in which the craft were operated are fully described in a highly seamanlike way.

As mentioned above, there are one or two errors of context here and there, but these do not diminish either the book’s interest or utility.

One strength of the work is its critical nature; the author is not afraid to give the story ‘warts and all.’ The weaknesses of the ‘Hedgerow’ mine clearance spigot mortars are clearly described as is the initial failure of the Landing Craft Obstacle Clearance Units. I am sure there will be few who do not learn something from this comprehensive and well-written survey.

How the lower deck was born

TODAY’S Senior Service likes to claim the Armada as its first battle honour and take inspiration from Nelson and his ‘band of brothers’.

But really the modern Royal Navy owes many of its defining characteristics to the days of steam and iron, as Brian Lavery shows in the second book of his history of the lower decks.

His account of ratings began with Royal Tars which took the story up to 1850… precisely where Able Seamen (Conway, £25 ISBN 978-1-84486-140-8) begins.

Mr Lavery is (a) prolific – Able Seamen is one of half a dozen books he’s produced in the past two years alone – and, more importantly, (b) first-rate.

And Able Seamen, which spans nearly a century of lower deck life up to the outbreak of WW2, follows the same excellent vein as its predecessor.

The first couple of decades covered by the book shaped not just the future RN, but many of the world’s navies: the square collar and bell bottoms were introduced, the petty officer and leading seaman ranks created, industrialisation led to the need for increasingly skilled technical sailors, physical training became a part of the daily routine, the Naval Salute, and the White Ensign was formally adopted as the Fleet’s standard flag.

Able Seamen covers every aspect of lower deck life you could possibly wish to dip into – life on board, pay, training, recruitment, discipline, sex (one area of Chatham ‘enjoyed’ “a most remarkable history of sin known in most parts of Greater Britain”), and, lest we forget, battle.

The post-Trafalgar/Waterloo era up to the Great War has come to be known as the age of Pax Britannica. In fact, in the 1860s the Navy was responding to around 20 pleas for intervention every year: gunboat diplomacy, tackling pirates or the slave trade.

And there was little pax in Africa throughout the latter half of the 19th Century – the Zulu wars, the Sudan, the Boer War – while the last major intervention by naval brigades occurred at the turn of the 20th Century in the Boxer Rebellion in China.

By the time of the Boxer uprising, technology had transformed the Royal Navy totally from a world of sail and wooden walls to one of steel battleships capable of 18kts and with 12in guns.

Technology brought with it the increasing specialisation of the branches – which in turn meant growing differences. Rivalries and distinctions which persist today date back to the mid-Victorian era. Artificers in particular regarded themselves – and were regarded as – a different breed, stokers earned more than leading seamen, and the ship’s police were universally unpopular (and often corrupt). “They lead useless, idle lives and seem to try to justify their existence by reporting men for petty trifles,” one sailor fumed in the late 1870s.

The author paints a grim picture of the life of a stoker (although they did receive better pay and promotion prospects). By 1910 they outnumbered seamen (to the latter’s chagrin), were generally looked down upon (there was the infamous ‘on the knee’ mutiny in Portsmouth’s new barracks in 1906) and were proving difficult to recruit as the Dreadnought age saw a massive demand for stokers.

Enter George Falkner and Sons of Manchester who produced a colourful recruiting poster espousing the benefits of world travel with the Royal Navy – and depicting stokers in white uniforms striking dramatic poses in the boiler room.  It seemed to do the trick…

Life in the battleships of the Grand Fleet was very different from the recruitment posters, however, as Winston Churchill acknowledged. Joining the Navy to see the world, instead the stokers and bluejackets saw nothing beyond the North Sea and a few anchorages. There was nowhere on board for lower decks to relax, no recreation room, just cramped and unhealthy mess desks. Ratings, the First Lord of the Admiralty observed, endured a life of “pitiable discomfort”.

Conditions in the castles of steel were, at least, healthier than in the new submarines. The early boats did little more than day run out of Portsmouth, but it was a hard life – there was no chance to wash or keep warm, the smell was foul and water and diesel permeated the food. Worse still, on the first boats there were no heads. ‘Personal business’ was carried to the upper deck on the surface, left on the casing, and a quick dive would swill it away…

In addition to immense technological changes sweeping through the Navy at the beginning of the 20th Century, there were huge social changes rocking the world of the ratings; it came to be known as the ‘lower deck movement’ with newspapers lobbying – with varying degrees of success – for improved pay and benefits.

The chief moderniser on the social side of things appears to have been Churchill – not least expanding the opportunities for commissions from the lower deck; for nearly a century not a single rating was promoted to the exalted ranks of the officer corps which remained the preserve of “men trained in the traditions of the ‘gentry’”.

All of which quickly became academic as the Navy faced its first true test in 100 years when war broke out in 1914. For the men of the Grand Fleet, life at sea was hard, life in base at Scapa bleak and at Rosyth, home to the battle-cruisers, little better with only a couple of hours’ leave granted ashore.

Such strict controls were soon relaxed – the Admiralty was competing with the Army for manpower and so began to offer improved terms of service: better prospects of promotion, more pay, discounted rail travel, duty-free cigarettes at sea, more leave when alongside.

If such ‘creature comforts’ could lift morale, defeat in battle could rapidly dent spirits. Sailors returned in their scarred ships to Scapa Flow after Jutland unsure of the battle’s outcome yet “quite confident” the Hun had been sent to the bottom.

Not so – the rumours going around the natural anchorage suggested otherwise – “that the honours were with the Germans and that we had suffered a moral defeat,” one rating wrote. “It was beyond belief and we concluded that the news was German-inspired – but it did have a somewhat chilling effect on our self-confidence.”

Despite the disappointment of Jutland, the Royal Navy would attain the greatest victory in its history with the surrender of the entire German Fleet in November 1918. The High Seas Fleet was interned at Scapa Flow, where the ships were inspected by Royal Navy teams. The Germans, they found, were unrepentant. “Some of the crew seem to be quite prepared to start building another navy with the object of BEATING us in the future,” a perturbed Yeoman of Signals J E Attrill observed.

And that is a story for the concluding volume of this trilogy, All Hands, due out next spring. It’s eagerly awaited in these offices.