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Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796–1807, letters and papers

Vol 172 (2025), Roger Morriss
Portrait of Samuel Bentham painted between 1795–1800. A golden rectangular frame around it has an oval aperture.

Samuel Bentham, Inspector General of Naval Works, 1796-1807, built successful ships, advocated non-recoil gunnery and introduced steam powered machinery into the dockyards. The facilities he created at Portsmouth remain as a memorial to his ambition. As a technologist and ideologue, he straddled the 18th and 19th centuries and helped to create the steam navy. Yet, in virtually everything he did, he courted controversy, not least because he recognised vested interest and, like his elder brother, Jeremy, pursued the interest of the public by commitment to the Principle of Utility.

Trained in the royal yards as a shipwright, Bentham went to Russia in 1779 and entered the service of Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin. There he fostered his talent for invention and innovation, developed the concept of the Panopticon and learned the value of individual responsibility. Having equipped the flotilla of small craft that fought and defeated the Turkish navy in the Black Sea, he returned to Britain in 1791 aged 34 as a Brigadier General.

Attached to the Admiralty from 1795, he aimed to enlarge the capacity and efficiency of the dockyards, as measured by the turn-around speed of ships refitting and undergoing minor repairs. He admired ‘mill practice’ and developed the Wood and Metal Mills at Portsmouth to demonstrate the ability of the navy to become as efficient as private industry. To this end, he aimed to use contemporary science, logical thinking and education to enhance yard productivity. Economy naturally depended on cultural factors and in 1800 he advanced a programme of administrative reform based on personal accountability, detailed accountancy and central control.

Bentham was supported by First Lords Spencer and St Vincent, but avoided involvement in the latter’s Commission of naval inquiry into abuses in the naval departments. However, he aggravated members of the Navy Board by the works he directed at Portsmouth and he aroused their apprehension by his obvious ambition and condemnation of collective responsibility. In 1805 he was sent to Russia on a mission to build ships for Britain. That proved abortive. Yet, while he was away, his Admiralty post was abolished by the Commission of naval revision and in 1808 he was obliged to accept the post of Civil Architect and Engineer at the Navy Board. In 1812 that post too was dissolved and Bentham was forced to wait until 1815 for his pension and Russian expenses.

A brilliant man of extraordinary capabilities, a polymath who planted many modern ideas in the civil departments of the navy, Samuel Bentham was nevertheless a challenging figure. He has been too little known: his Mechanist and friend, Simon Goodrich, advised him he was regarded as a ‘strange creature’ at the Navy Board. Yet in 1812 he left his record of Services which became a source of guidance during the post-war rationalisation. The Whig government of 1806 also admired his ideas and, in conjunction with those of his brother, they continued to have influence in the nineteenth century when the Whigs returned to power.

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