NRS VOLUMES
This is the second volume edited for the Navy Records Society to deal with the post-1945 Royal Navy. It begins in June 1950 and the outbreak of the Korean War, an event which upset many previous planning assumptions and initiated a short-lived rearmament programme. It concludes with the publication of the 1957 Defence White Paper, named after its principal author, the Minister of Defence, Duncan Sandys. Subsequent volumes will continue the narrative until the end of the Cold War in 1990.
The 1950s saw what the naval historian Norman Friedman calls ‘The Postwar Naval Revolution’, a period of rapid technological developments at sea. It was also an unprecedented time in strategic terms as the Cold War solidified, became partially ‘hot’ in Asia, and Britain also faced the twin challenges of rapid decolonisation and postwar economic recovery. The growing nuclear threat also posed questions for the continuing utility of naval forces in a major war.
Despite this complex background, the Royal Navy of the early- to mid -1950s was largely living off the fat of the residual wartime fleet, some of it extensively modernised. Most new ships joining the Fleet were actually delayed wartime construction, especially a new generation of aircraft carriers. Only towards the end of the period did the RN start to receive ships of postwar design.
The rapid technological, strategic and financial changes in these years meant that there was, in effect, a new Defence review almost every year and naval planners could never assume that they had a settled basis on which to work. Even the Korean War rearmament programme was, so far as the Navy was concerned, something of a misnomer. It amounted to little more than an acceleration of existing plans and was soon found to be unaffordable anyway. Major statements of Defence Policy and Global Strategy in 1950 and again in 1952 were soon followed by a two-stage ‘Radical Review’, then a ‘Way Ahead’ and then a ‘Long Term Review’. Throughout, the aim was to devise forces to meet still huge overseas commitments within a constrained defence budget.
During these years the Navy remained the smallest of the three Services, in terms of both manpower and budgets. This was because of the priority accorded to building up the UK’s first-generation nuclear deterrent in the form of the RAF’s medium bomber force, and the substantial requirements for Army garrisons in Germany and across large parts of the dwindling Empire.
The sometimes uncertain role of naval forces in thermonuclear war meant that the Admiralty increasingly stressed the Navy’s tasks in peace and limited war. This approach appeared to be vindicated by the Suez intervention in November 1956, but this demonstration of the utility of naval forces in meeting the unforeseen had, at best, mixed results for the Navy’s future force structure. Something similar was to be true a generation later after the Falklands campaign.
The Naval Staff did, however, manage to neutralise the more extreme views of the anti-carrier Duncan Sandys, such that the outcome of the 1957 Defence Review seemed to provide a sustainable basis, finally, to plan for the future.
Admiral Sir John Thomas Duckworth had several years of experience of command in the West Indies during the first phase of the French Revolutionary War, including during the short peace with France in 1801 – 1803. He was then recalled to Britain and given a series of commands in European waters. This did not tie him down in any way. In 1806 he chased a French squadron across the Atlantic, once again into Caribbean waters. He lost sight of them – the French ships were faster. He sailed south, but decided that the French were actually headed west; he detached one of his ships to warn British commanders in the Indian Ocean, but gambled that the French ships had headed for the West Indies. He was correct and came up with the French squadron at Santo Domingo and destroyed it, even though it outgunned his ships.
Next year (1807), probably because of his decisive victory, he was sent into the eastern Mediterranean to threaten the Ottoman Empire. This was a side show of the conflict with Russia. In this, he sailed through the Dardanelles to threaten Constantinople. This appears to be the first time any Western European fleet had made that voyage, and he defied opposition from the Turks on both sides of the Strait. This venture, however, was unsuccessful, partly through Turkish prevarication, and partly through understanding the Turkish preparations. In effect, he was outmanoeuvred. He withdrew his force, to Alexandria, where a British force had been landed, then returned to Britain. The crisis with Russia also involved Duckworth in commanding a fleet which menaced Copenhagen, Denmark being a French ally. Whereas Admiral Nelson had famously ignored orders to withdraw from Copenhagen in 1801, Duckworth was able to land forces to attack Copenhagen, and to bombard the city fiercely, much of the city being destroyed. He was then posted to Ireland, always a sensitive spot for the British government, which had been also the object of French manoeuvres more than once in the past years. The squadron he commanded was dispersed and more or less vanished on various patrolling
exploits. He had thus been fully employed, as one would expect of a successful commander in a time of war, but he seems to have been less than popular with the politicians in London.
Perhaps he was too independent for their taste. After some time ashore, during which he married, and bought a house in Devon, he, in desperation for employment, proposed himself as governor of Newfoundland, clearly not expecting to be taken up on this. To the First Lord of the Admiralty, however, this clearly was a fine chance to get rid of him – it was a three- year appointment. This in effect was the end of his seagoing career, even though he carried out his duties in Newfoundland successfully (war with United States occurred in 1812). He was then elected as MP for a few years. He took up a final post of governor of Plymouth, intervened to secure better conditions for French and American prisoners in the Dartmoor prison, and finally died in 1817.
This diary was written by Petty Officer Samuel George Hobbs between September 1912 and November 1916. It is held in the archives of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth.
The Final Part: Part III: The Sinking of the Dresden, March 1915
This post presents an account by Captain Edmund Hooper of the loss of HMS Jarak off Singapore in 1942. A subsequent post will publish Hooper’s excellent sketchbook detailing the sinking and his imprisonment at the infamous Chungkai prison camp.
This transcribed passage is but one interview from the courts martial proceedings during the 1776 trial of Mr Ford Forster, who had been serving as Master aboard the Carcass. The trial was held in New York on 15 December, in the midst of the American Revolutionary War, and resulted in Forster being ‘Dismissed from His Majesty’s Service, and rendered incapable of serving as an officer in it’.[1] The peculiarities of Forster’s ‘very mutinous and disorderly behaviour’ – and the manner in which Forster’s case was handled by the assembled court – gives us insight into how naval authority and discipline was exercised, in times of war and an ocean away from home.
[1] ‘Ford Forster Master of the Carcass Bomb Vessel for Mutinous behaviour’. TNA, ADM 1/5307/589-592, Courts Martial records.
A 3- part post exploring the fascinating history of Gilbert Blane. Sir Gilbert Blane (1749-1834), has a considerable reputation as a reformer of naval health, especially in terms of preventative health measures and he has been hailed as “the father of naval medical science”. He was educated at the University of Edinburgh and, after qualifying, he was recommended to George Rodney, who appointed Blane as his personal physician to look after his health needs and those of his crew. In 1779 Blane sailed with Rodney to the West Indies on board HMS Sandwich. He was swiftly promoted, by Rodney, to the position of Physician to the Fleet in 1780 and served in that role for 3 years during the American Revolutionary Wars.
This is the second and last excerpt from a notebook of 24-year-old Lieutenant Alexander Colvill, written during the unsuccessful attempt to capture Cartagena in 1741. It is presented as an exclusive preview of papers now being catalogued by archivists at the Caird Library of the National Maritime Museum. Members of the Navy Records Society who visited the library in February 2019 were shown some of the many documents donated by the Colville family. In this part, Colvill’s ship, the bomb ketch Alderney, is again in the forefront of the action as the large British amphibious force attempts to bombard and storm the fort of San Lazaro (now known as the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas). Capture of the fort would have opened the way to take the nearby centre of Cartagena. The failure of the attack in 1741 hastened the fall of the government of Robert Walpole the following year and has been debated among historians ever since.[i]
[i] Accounts of the Cartagena expedition can be found in B. McL. Ranft, The Vernon Papers, (London, Navy Records Society, Vol. 99, 1958), including Ranft’s introduction and a selection of Vernon’s correspondence; Richard Harding, Amphibious Warfare in the Eighteenth Century: The British Expedition to the West Indies 1740-1742, (Woodbridge, A Royal Historical Society Publication published by the Boydell Press, 1991), pp. 83-121; Julián de Zulueta, ‘Health and Military Factors in Vernon’s Failure at Cartagena’, Mariner’s Mirror, Vol. 78, Issue 2, 1992, pp. 127-141
This was Thomas’s second sea service; before Devonport, he had spent 3 years on the Mediterranean Station with HMS HUSSAR, a Dryad-class torpedo gunboat only an eighth of the tonnage of his new posting. HMS KENT was a Monmouth-class armoured cruiser of 9,800 tons, completed in 1903 but put in reserve, and now recommissioned for the China station.
“Said goodbye to my dear young wife. I never thought I should have felt so “cut up.” Never felt so bad before in my life!! However I had to bite my lips & grin & bear it!!! That’s the worst of a seafaring life.” (pp.6-7) For all that, Thomas seems to have taken the opportunity of the voyage to absorb as many new experiences as possible, from “ginrickshaws”* to the occasional “flutter” at the gambling tables of Macao, then a Portuguese territory where pastimes forbidden in Hong Kong attracted visitors both Chinese and European.
*Rickshaws; a variant of the original spelling jinrikisha, according to the Oxford English Dictionary from the Japanese jin man + riki strength, power + sha ve
The 22-year-old Victor ‘Dick’ Hutley records his voyage as part of the Royal Tour of West Africa, South Africa and South America from the sick berth of the battlecruiser, HMS Repulse.
Part IV: Simonstown Hospital
Part V: Treating the Prince.
F. (Thomas Frederick) Richards, born in Scilly, joined the Royal Navy on the 8th January 1897, not long after his 21st birthday, as an Acting ERA (Engine Room Artificer) 4th class on the books of HMS Vivid II, the Stokers and Engine Room Artificers School in Devonport. Eight years later, in 1905, he was promoted to the warrant rank of Artificer Engineer. The First World War Medal Roll records him as Chief Engineer Artificer Thomas F. Richards, sent the “Pip, Squeak and Wilfred” trio (1914/15 Star, British War Medal, Victory Medal) in 1920/21, when he was again on the books of HMS Vivid, at that time the RN barracks. At a later date he was promoted to officer rank. The notebook featured here, with its various enclosures, is among the private papers of Thomas Richards’s descendants. It opens with details and general characteristics and dimensions of HMS Revenge. Directly afterwards that the diary begins with February 1 1916, the date on which Revenge was commissioned, and continues until June 5 of the same year, a few days after the Battle of Jutland.
Mervyn Stawell Norris Bryan was born in 1851, youngest son of Reverend J W Bryan, of Cliddesden, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England. He wrote three journals describing his experiences in the Royal Navy. He also left a photograph album of his travels between 1869 and 1879. His visited many Mediterranean ports, the Azores, St Helena and Ascension Island, the West Coast of Africa, South Africa, the West Indies and Australia.
Lieutenant Bryan’s diaries cover his life at sea, commencing as a midshipman on HMS Royal Albert and HMS Caledonia, as a sub-Lieutenant, on HMS Hector and HMS Encounter, as a Lieutenant on HMS Barracouta and HMS Boxer.
This brief article focusses on his time in the Navy during the 3rd Ashanti War (1873-4), on the Gold Coast of Africa, aboard the Encounter and Barracouta.
The downturn in naval orders starting 1922 with the Washington Treaty sent shockwaves through the armaments industry, starting with the collapse of the Coventry Ordnance Works in 1925, but eventually toppling industrial giants like Beardmore and Palmer’s. How the industry reacted and adapted to this change is still understudied. The extracts presented represent one of the most novel, but also shocking, attempts to do so in the 1920s and 1930s: by fixing prices for Admiralty contracts through the formation of a cartel. By examining two cases from the years preceding rearmament, it shows both the costs and benefits of such a scheme to the British state.
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