ALL THAT FOOD AND DRINK did not appear on the ships by magic. Although the specific methods by which it arrived could vary, all were organised or controlled by the Victualling Board, which reported to the Board of Admiralty. Victualling had originally been administered by the Surveyor of Victualling; he was replaced in 1683 by the Board of Victualling Commissioners, which continued until 1832 when they were in turn replaced by the Victualling Department.
In its earliest days victualling was dealt with through a system of contracts, whereby the contractor agreed to supply, for a set number of men, the standard provisions at an agreed rate per man per day, delivering these to specific locations. For reasons of quality control and efficiency of operation this system changed over time, until by the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 all but the most remote stations were fed under the direct control of the Victualling Board. The supply chain and the delivery chain were separated, with an intervening period when provisions went into Victualling Board warehouses, thus more easily achieving both accounting control and quality control.
The Victualling Board received its day-to-day instructions from the Board of Admiralty, although many of these, such as instructions to supply victuals to individual ships, had originated with another sub-division, the Navy Board. It also had some dealings with the Sick and Hurt Board,1 in such matters as providing meat to make portable soup, as well as with the Transport Board which arranged ships to send provisions to the British outports and the agents victualler and fleets abroad. The Victualling Board consisted of seven commissioners who met every day except Sunday, the day-to-day work being done by an establishment of clerks in the Victualling Office situated first at Tower Hill and then at Somerset House. This establishment consisted of about seventy people: in the secretary’s department there was the secretary himself, a deputy secretary and up to sixteen clerks; in the cash department there was an accountant for cash, two chief clerks and a total of twenty clerks; in the store department there was one accountant, three chief clerks and up to twenty-four clerks; and finally there was a secretary to the committee of accounts.2 During busy times – that is, those when Britain was at war – ‘extra’ clerks and other staff were taken on.
The chain of supply and delivery started with the Victualling Board receiving an instruction from the Admiralty, telling them the size and localised makeup of the navy for the following year and asking for an estimate of costs. The Victualling Board responded with a detailed figure; for instance, in 1797, the figure given for the following year for 110,000 men was £2,758,268.1.10½.3 The Board of Admiralty, armed with these figures, then added them to the rest of the spending requirements that made up the ‘Naval Estimates’, which went before Parliament.
As the eighteenth century progressed, as well as the move away from direct delivery by contractors to delivery by the Victualling Board itself, the Victualling department manufactured and packed increasing amounts of the food on their own premises. All this required substantial numbers of staff. At the manufacturing yards there were bakers, brewers and butchers; at all of the victualling yards there were storekeepers, ‘hoytakers’ (who organised boats to move provisions from the storehouses to the waiting ships), watchmen and gatekeepers, numerous labourers and not a few rat-catchers. The labourers were mostly paid by the day and engaged as and when needed; most of the other yard workers, as well as all the clerks at the outports and in the office at Somerset House, were engaged on a more permanent basis and, after serving faithfully for a great number of years, were able to retire on a superannuation or pension. With the clerks and the master craftsmen, when anyone retired, everyone below them moved up a step: the second clerk moved into the first clerk’s position, the third into the second’s and so on down the line, until the first extra clerk moved into the lowliest permanent position and the rest of the extra clerks performed the same upward dance. This, until 1800, was done in the same way as officers advanced in the army: except at the highest levels, government offices were a saleable commodity, so when there was a position available, everyone down the line bought the job above them and sold theirs to the person below them.4
Several of the more senior clerks and department heads decided to retire in 1799, at the point when it became obvious that the payment structure was about to alter. This had been on the cards for a long time and came about as a result of the beginnings of a change in the eighteenth century middle-class mindset. Previously the system of patronage and sinecures had resulted in a situation where people were put into high-level jobs not because they were efficient but because either it was felt they deserved a nice little sinecure, or because putting them there allowed a favour to be paid off or because other advantages would accrue to the patrons. To this was added the conviction that senior positions could only go to gentlemen, whose mere gentlemanly status rendered them capable of doing anything they set their minds to – as long as they were not expected to actually acquire expertise in the job (a trait which was far beneath them) or even spend any time in their office attending to it. This would not have mattered too much if the clerks had been given free rein, but they were restricted by the post-holders’ conviction that what we would now consider to be office mail was actually their private property and should not be opened by anyone else. This would have been acceptable if the addressee had actually opened it; many of them could not be bothered. There are numerous reports of unopened packets of mail being found at these officials’ homes, or their going off to the country for the summer and ignoring the calls of business. William Mark, a purser who served under Nelson in the Mediterranean, was called in to sort out the office of the Commissioner at Malta after his secretary had been sick for some months. The commissioner had made no attempt to deal with, open, or even note the date of receipts of any of his letters, just throwing them over the half door of the secretary’s office; by the time Mark got to them, he estimated there was at least a wagon-load.5
Add to all this the fact that many of the clerks were deeply attached to the traditional ways of working and averse not only to doing things in new ways but also to doing new things, and you begin to see why eighteenth-century government administration was so inefficient and so expensive. There were one or two lights in this wilderness, including the talented administrator Charles Middleton, Comptroller of the Navy in the early 1780s. A typical example of incompetence was Middleton’s complaint that the Navy Board clerks did not even sort the matters for Board meetings into topics, but presented them to the meeting at random. This level of disorganisation, which was repeated in all the various government departments, led in 1779 to a petition being presented in Parliament by the Opposition, calling for a committee to investigate public expenditure, the methods of accounting for it, the abolition of sinecures and the reduction of excessive emoluments. A committee was set up and between 1786 and 1788 produced a series of ten reports, two of which were on the activities of the Victualling Office.6 As well as various recommendations on procedures, the committee recommended that the staff payment system should be changed from a small salary and the right to charge fees for various transactions (such as signing contracts or copying documents) to a larger salary and nothing else. The reports had gone through a prolonged process of comment and counter-comment on each of the committee’s recommendations and at long last, in 1800, most of the recommendations were put into effect.
It was not that long before the combination of a fixed salary and inflation, caused partly by the length of the war and partly by several years of bad weather which led to crop failures, caused major dissatisfaction. In 1804 an anonymous petition was presented by the Victualling Office clerks requesting salary increases. This was considered by the Board of Admiralty and turned down. It was followed by another similar petition from the clerks at Portsmouth, which was also turned down. The Victualling Board secretary wrote again; he pointed out that the clerks were not allowed to work overtime and the press of business was such that they were falling more and more behind. The weekly lists of unanswered letters which the Admiralty demanded were getting longer because the clerks were unhappy and were leaving to go to other bodies such as the Customs where the workload was lighter and the salaries higher. This letter struck home. The Admiralty enquired what salaries the secretary felt should be paid. He responded with a long list and in due course the new salary levels were agreed and everybody in Somerset House got a pay rise.7 Inflation continued throughout the rest of the war and these requests for pay rises continued, coming at irregular intervals from different groups of workers, from coopers to labourers to clerks, until in 1811 the Admiralty agreed to a new system which brought in regular pay rises linked to length of service.8
Apart from the six-day working week for everyone from the commissioners down to the humblest junior temporary clerk, the work itself was laborious. Almost every piece of paper which passed through their hands had to be copied at least once and all the accounting work had to be scrupulously correct. These were people who could nit-pick over a fraction of a penny and who would not only produce seven-figure estimates for the government of the cost of a year’s naval provisions calculated down to the last farthing but also required that every account submitted matched every other that touched on the same items. This can be seen in the system of imprest accounts against the salaries of the pursers and captains whereby the cost of whatever foodstuffs passing through their hands was charged to their salary and not removed until a full set of information had been received and checked (see Appendix 5). This information might involve the pursers of other ships (if, for instance, swaps of provisions had taken place between ships) and since there were over 1000 ships in operation at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, it involved balancing a vast set of interlocked accounts.
Another of the ongoing tasks of the head office staff was that of fraud prevention. Like all government departments throughout history, the Victualling Board was seen as fair game by various types of predator, from the low-level clerk who earned a few extra guineas by colluding with contractors over tenders, to the serious money which could be diverted by the contractors themselves. Neglecting this policing task resulted in several public scandals. The most serious of these included those of Thomas Ridge, the contract brewer at Portsmouth, who was found in 1711 to have colluded with some pursers over false deliveries; the biscuit contractor Christopher Potter, who had a monopoly contract, and was accused in 1782 of using bad wheat and making short deliveries; and that of Christopher Atkinson, who used his political connections to obtain monopoly contracts, first for supplying malt for brewing beer, then as agent for the supply of all cereal products and pease.9 After several years Atkinson was accused of buying supplies himself and selling them to the Victualling Board at a profit as well as taking his agency commission, and of padding’ his expenses. The Victualling Board investigated and dismissed him. He had, by this time, been elected to Parliament and he attempted to clear his name by instigating a House of Commons investigation. This found him guilty; he sued for libel and ended up being convicted of perjury and being expelled from the House of Commons. At about the same time, criticism of the Treasury’s practice of awarding Army victualling contracts to Members of Parliament led to the so-called ‘Clerke’s Act’ which excluded contractors from the House.
Another major fraud a few years later, concerning the dockyard and the victualling yard in the Leeward Islands, was reported to the Admiralty by Nelson himself. Nelson arrived in the West Indies in 1784 and discovered several dubious practices. The first of these was the way all the merchants and officials encouraged American ships to trade with the British islands; being no longer British subjects, Americans were forbidden to take part in this trade. Nelson was then tipped off about a series of fraudulent practices being perpetrated by the naval storekeeper and the agent victualler at the Leeward Islands; sums in excess of £300,000 were suggested. As so often in these situations, the story is convoluted and not made any clearer by the accusatory letter from the ‘whistle-blower’ Wilkinson, which is long, rambling, and tends to go off track as the writer fumes about the guilty parties: ‘the most rascally and bungling Villainy!’, ‘a gentleman…perfect in the habits of Public Deception’, ‘famed for some time past in assisting bungling peculators’, and ‘where money is to be got by fraud and peculation, Mr Druce appears.’ The basic story as far as the victualling side of it goes is that the agent victualler and his assistant, in collusion with various other parties, had for many years been falsifying the accounts with non-existent purchases and over-statement of everything else. For example, they hired a sloop to transport provisions at £4 a day and charged it at £5, they paid £150 rent for a store and stated it at £192, bought 13,911 pounds of meat at 15 pence a pound and stated it as 35,662 pounds at 18 pence. To try and prevent the truth coming out, the conspirators had had Wilkinson and his partner Higgins thrown into jail for debt, where Higgins contracted a fever and died and Wilkinson languished for over a year.
It transpired that Wilkinson really did have a debt problem, which he had sought to alleviate by asking the conspirators for £10,000 to keep what he knew to himself. They turned him down and so he took his story to the senior naval officer on the station, who at that time was Nelson. Wilkinson proposed to Nelson that he and Higgins would conduct the investigation for the navy, for a fee of £15,000 for the first £100,000 of the amounts recovered and 7½ percent of the rest, and he gave Nelson some details which were duly passed on to the Admiralty in London. At the point at which the bundle of documents stops, the Board of Ordnance had agreed to this proposal, the Navy Board had put their file into the hands of the Attorney General, and the Victualling Board had passed their file to their solicitor with instructions to proceed to prosecution. The end result of these prosecutions has, alas, not come to light.10
Another interesting story is that of the victualling contractor for the East Indies station, Basil Cochrane. An uncle of the brilliant but difficult frigate captain Thomas Cochrane (later tenth Earl of Dundonald), who was found guilty of a Stock Market fraud in 1816, the Honourable Basil had taken over the victualling task from his brother John in 1796. Basil had gone out to India as a junior writer in the East India Company and had worked his way up to a senior position when he was involved in a scandal over the deaths of two Indian clerks who he believed to have been falsifying accounts. The story was that he had flogged them so badly in the attempt to get confessions that they both died. This turns out to have been a bit of an exaggeration, as one of them was found to be alive and well some time later, but the other had died several days after the flogging. The East India Company decided it was time to part company, and Basil, who by this time was already operating as Commissary to part of the army, moved over to concentrate on his personal business affairs, including that of victualling the Royal Navy on the East Indies station.
The terms of the contract under which he operated must, one assumes, have been acceptable at the time but to the modern eye they seem a masterpiece of charging not only very high rates for the provisions themselves, but very high rates for moving these provisions about and keeping them in stores. For instance, the price of a hundredweight of biscuit was 16s 6d at Calcutta, £1.14.0 at Bombay, and £2.10.6 at Prince of Wales Island (now Penang); and he charged two shillings per cask for moving casks from ships to his godown, the same for moving them from godown to ship, and one shilling per month while they were in the godown. His business went along quite nicely for ten years until he resigned and returned to England rather abruptly in 1806, when his friend Admiral Peter Rainier handed over the command to Admiral Edward Pellew. Whether, as has been suggested by C Northcote Parkinson, this was to evade an investigation into his victualling affairs is a moot point but on his return home he proceeded to bombard the Victualling Board with demands for payment. It took until 1818 to get his money out of them.11 One small amusement in reading the Victualling Board papers relating to this ongoing saga is that the clerks who entered details of the incoming letters into the abstract books abbreviated ‘Honourable’ to ‘Honble’ with a flourish which makes it look, at a quick glance, as though the letters have come from ‘the Horrible Basil Cochrane’; one hesitates to suggest that this was deliberate, but it could well have been the way those clerks thought of him!
One of the problems was that the Board had portioned out his accounts amongst several different clerks who had managed to lose half of the vouchers. He provided another set for the whole ten years’ worth of transactions and offered to pay for a clerk to check them but this was refused. This saga included a court case over some £9000 which the Victualling Board said he owed them. This ended with a decision in Cochrane’s favour: the Board actually owed him about £1000. Between 1818 and 1824, he published several long pamphlets, accusing the Victualling Board of incompetence on a grand scale. In the circumstances one can hardly blame him. The strange thing about this whole affair is that the Victualling Board could have dealt with the situation far less expensively by hiring its own warehouses in India and employing agents victualler to run them, because the East India Company had an agreement with the government to ship military supplies out to India free of charge.12
As well as using contractors to deliver provisions to the remoter victualling stations, the Victualling Board used them to supply raw materials and finished products to their British warehouses. Although they preferred to manufacture what they could, the Victualling Board was not in a position to cope with the fluctuating requirements of wartime and at the various times when the manning requirements increased substantially, they had to buy in beer, meat and biscuit from outside.
A system of competitive tendering was introduced to ensure the best possible prices; invitations to tender were advertised and as tenders were received, they were entered in a book and prices and quantities offered were compared; contracts were not necessarily awarded to one merchant for the whole of the annual requirement, but spread among several.13 The conditions of tendering were firmly enforced. For instance, in April 1804 one of the largest firms of Irish contractors, Messrs Bogle, French & Co, headed a group which complained that they had not been awarded any of the contracts for that year. This complaint was rejected on the grounds that they had missed the required date for submission of tenders, as a result of which the contracts had already been awarded elsewhere. Later contracts also specified delivery in batches throughout the agreed period and this not only kept the amounts in store at a manageable level but also spread the payments over the year. This did not mean that provisions were never purchased outside the tender system. The minutes contain frequent reports of letters received from merchants offering supplies, which were sometimes accepted but more frequently refused because the Board had sufficient stocks or thought that the price was excessive.14
There was an ongoing concern over the development of monopolies and price-fixing and the Board was perfectly capable of deciding not to buy any particular item at all if the prices were excessive, as happened in the autumn of 1803 when there had been a prolonged drought. The normal tenders were invited for annual supply contracts of butter and cheese but when the tenders arrived the prices asked were all exceptionally high and on enquiry it was found that a group of speculators in Ireland had cornered the bulk of the supply on the assumption that the Victualling Board would pay whatever they were asked. The Victualling Board were not prepared to be taken advantage of in this way and recommended to the Admiralty that it would be ‘expedient for the present wholly to suspend the issue of butter and cheese, and to substitute the issue of rice and sugar, tea and sugar, or cocoa and sugar…’. The Admiralty agreed, and an order was issued to this effect, remaining in place until the following autumn, when the Victualling Board suggested returning to an issue of butter and cheese, but at only half the usual quantity.15 This particular incident shows another source of supply: when recommending that rice should be issued as a substitute, the Victualling Board remarked that they had ‘a considerable quantity of East India rice’ in store, bought from the East India Company at the Treasury’s prompting.16
Working on the premise that the best way to ensure quality was to manufacture provisions in their own yards, the Victualling Board brewed beer, slaughtered and packed meat, and baked biscuit at various locations in London and round the Channel coast. The three main manufacturing yards were at Deptford, Portsmouth and Plymouth, where at the busiest times there were up to 2400 tradesmen (brewers, butchers, bakers, coopers, storekeepers and labourers), all working away six days a week, and at various critical stages in the wars, being actively encouraged to work overtime.
Over half of these tradesmen were engaged in making casks, something the Board had decided they should do themselves after finding there was a monopoly operating amongst the main firms of coopers in London. Prices had risen at the onset of the American War when supplies of stave wood, traditionally imported from Virginia, were cut off. Attempts were made to obtain stave wood from Canada but with only minimal success and for some time there were complaints about the resultant casks. Either the heads were made of deal, which tainted the contents with the smell of turpentine, or the staves were unseasoned and warped as they dried out, making the casks leak. It was some years before the situation settled down, with stave wood eventually coming from various sources: the Baltic, Canada and Britain itself.
The general term ‘cask’ does not refer to a specific size but just means a wooden barrel, bound with iron hoops (or, for some smaller sizes, twisted withies). There were a number of standard sizes (listed in Appendix 1) but they were all the same shape: wider at the waist than the ends, which meant they interlocked when stacked. With the exception of bread, which was packed in bags, all the provisions were packed in casks, as were much of the ships’ other stores; they were to the Georgian world what the shipping container is today. Unfortunately they did not last forever and although they were generally regarded as a returnable item, there was a constant need for new ones.
As with beer, the Victualling Board manufactured as much biscuit as it could but also had to buy a great deal from outside bakers. One of the largest of these was Moody and Potter of Southampton, conveniently close to Portsmouth; they also made biscuit for the army. Biscuit production is not something that can be increased overnight; new ovens have to be built and that takes time. Each oven was served by a team of five men who worked and shaped the dough, put it in the oven and took the cooked biscuits out, producing some seventy biscuits a minute. But that did not mean seventy per minute every minute of the working day. These were brick ovens, the principle of which is that they are heated by lighting a fire inside them to heat the bricks, then raking out the ashes and baking until the oven has cooled down, then starting again with another fire.
The fires were of wood. This was bought from outside until 1801, when an amusing little story unfolds in the Victualling Board letter files. The Victualling Board premises at Deptford were adjacent to the naval dockyard, where the Navy Board had been growing more and more annoyed over the years about abuse of the traditional shipyard workers’ perquisite of ‘chips’. Chips are offcuts of wood, and the workers were allowed to take these home for their domestic fires, but as inevitably happens, this privilege had come to be abused. A chip was defined as any piece of timber under three feet long, and just as happened with miners who sawed up perfectly good pit-props to take home, dockyard workers could be seen marching through the gates every evening with a neatly-cut piece of wood on their shoulders which measured exactly two feet eleven and three-quarter inches. It was said that most of the workers’ houses near dockyards were built in multiples of this measurement. After a long struggle, the Navy Board had finally managed to put a stop to the practice. It was not many weeks before the Victualling Board received a letter from the Navy Board, remarking that they had some spare chips and wondered if the Victualling Board would care to have some rakes and peels made for the bakery? The Victualling Board would indeed like some, and shortly after another letter arrived to say the implements were ready. Then, a few days later, another letter arrived, this time nonchalantly remarking that the dockyard had rather a lot of chips to dispose of, and wondering if the Victualling Board would like them to fire its bread ovens.17
We do not know exactly how many bullocks and pigs passed through the hands of the Victualling Board’s slaughtermen and butchers into barrels of brine at the depots, but some rough estimates can be made from the amounts of meat stated in the annual estimates: the figure given for 1797 of 110,000 men, gives about 23,000 bullocks and 115,000 pigs.18 Even allowing for the fact that much of the beef (but not the pork) came from Ireland, the mind immediately turns to the sheer logistics of the task, given that it was a seasonal activity and thus compressed to about six months. It is not the actual saltable meat that makes the mind boggle, it is the by-products: the bits that would not salt down. The hides went off to make leather, the tallow was used for soap and cheap candles and the feet went to the glue makers. But the heads (less the ox-tongues), the bones and the offal, all had to be disposed of. The Victualling Board, of course, sold it, but that only shifts the problem; what did happen to it? The answer is that the bones and some of the offal went for agricultural fertiliser and the rest was made into cheap meat products: black and white puddings, sausage, meat pies, tripe and so on. But the suspicion lingers that a fair amount just got dropped in the river – hopefully when the tide was going out, when it would add to the richness of the estuarine mud-banks and help to fatten the crabs and oysters.
The last of the manufacturing activities in the victualling yards was brewing, which was done at London (at first at the Hartshorne Brewery at Tower Hill, then at Deptford), Portsmouth and Plymouth. It was particularly important that beer should be brewed at all three depots, as it does not take kindly to excessive shaking, and the additional handling involved in transporting it from London to the two Channel ports may have been too much for it, especially in bad weather. As with all other aspects of naval victualling, the Victualling Board received a steady stream of suggestions on different or ‘improved’ beers; for a while they toyed with the idea of replacing the small beer with the stronger porter which might have travelled better, and experimented with other schemes for concentrating the beer to save on space. None of these worked as well as had been hoped and so the idea was abandoned.
Having purchased or manufactured all these provisions, they were put into store at the various victualling yards to await ships’ requisitions. As well as the three main victualling depots in London and the Channel ports, there were others round the British Isles, notably at Leith, Cork and Great Yarmouth, although the importance of the last waxed and waned as the locus of wars shifted. When the Dutch were the enemy, and when the Danes and other Baltic countries, including Russia, were involved, the squadrons operating in the North Sea and Baltic were augmented and Yarmouth became more important. In foreign parts, there were numerous victualling yards in locations which depended on the locus of any given war; Gibraltar was the oldest permanent yard, while others opened and closed as necessary.
All the British yards outside London were referred to as outports and these, like the main yard at Deptford and those on foreign stations, were run by an official called the agent victualler. This was an important man, earning a substantial salary – by 1800 between £400 and £600 per year, depending on the size of the yard he controlled, sometimes with an additional 15 shillings per day for ‘table money’ and sometimes with a house provided. Most of the clerks at Head Office earned £80 to £90 per year. The agent victualler had charge not only of the provisions in his stores but also the staff who ran them and the clerks in his office. However, at the home yards he did not control the manufacturing side. This was managed by the master tradesmen: the master brewer, master baker, master cooper and master butcher; they reported direct to the Board commissioner responsible for each type of product, as did the master hoytaker, who organised waterborne deliveries.
Not only were the different species of provisions stored appropriately (for instance, the butter and cheese were kept in cool cellars), they were all marked with numbers and letters which indicated where they came from and when. This was for two reasons: firstly so that any problems could be traced back to the origin and appropriate action taken; secondly so that nothing was kept too long; they had to be issued on a ‘first in, first out’ basis. The stories of salt meat many years old are exaggerations: the rule was a maximum of two years for meat and bread, six months for butter and cheese. We have already seen that the rule was enforced for butter and cheese; the same applied to everything else. The purser who tried to return to stores any item that he had kept beyond its ‘use by’ date was likely to be refused credit for it. This does not mean that no seaman was ever given very old food. The past use by items were sent out of the victualling yards for sale by auction and it is quite possible that chandlers who supplied merchant ships bought it and sold it on to merchant captains and that is where some of the stories of ancient ‘salt horse’ originated.
The best of the victualling yards were those where all the storehouses were close together and the items requisitioned by each ship could be assembled in one spot for collection. Some of the outports, notably Plymouth, had their victualling stores spread out over some distance, so collection parties from ships had to go to different locations to collect all their stores, or the agent victualler had to arrange for the hoytaker to organise boats to collect and deliver them. Of course, the larger the ship and the longer its intended voyage, the more of each item had to be provided and the longer it took to accept the full load and stow it all away. The picture of a busy naval port like Portsmouth with a large squadron arriving for restocking is one of potential chaos; in such circumstances the agent victualler had to be a master of organisation to avoid mistakes.
As well as the standard items of provisions, the agent victualler had to supply fresh meat and vegetables to ships while they were in port, and also to maintain and issue stocks of tobacco. He also had to provide pursers with necessary money, the cash with which they bought essential non-food items such as candles, stove fuel and turneryware for the men to eat off; and, if the ship was bound for places where there was no victualling yard, sufficient to buy small quantities of fresh food as well. All of this required a complex accounting system. Weekly details of stores received, issued and remaining had to be sent to London, quarterly accounts had to be prepared and submitted, and everything had to be ready for the annual commissioners’ inspection.
The instructions to supply ships were of two sorts. Ships that were fitting-out were only allowed three days of provisions at a time, the purser putting in an application for sufficient provisions for the number of men on board during each three-day period, a number which increased as new batches of men joined the ship. This was known as extra petty warrant’, and the rule still applied after the ship was commissioned and fully manned but still in the port, even if fully stocked with her ‘sea’ provisions. These sea provisions were specifically for use when the ship had left port; by using the extra petty warrant system it meant that when she did sail, it was with her main provisions still intact.
When a ship was newly commissioned (which term includes those ships which had a new commanding officer as well as those which were newly built or were coming back into use after being in Ordinary for a while), the order for her provisions started with the Navy Board. They sent an order to the Victualling Board for the named ship to be supplied with provisions for so many months for either Channel or foreign service. For Channel service the normal period was three or four months, for foreign service (never defined any more than that) it was usually six months. Sometimes the order just said ‘all species of provisions’; sometimes it would be more detailed: ‘four months of all species except for biscuit, of which three months,’ or ‘and as much beer as she can stow’, or even ‘as much beer as she can stow with due regard to her trim’. The main difference between supplies for Channel or foreign service was the type and amounts of alcohol: ships on Channel service were not meant to have spirits, ships for foreign service would only take three months’ worth of beer, butter and cheese.
Having received this order from the Navy Board, the Victualling Board passed one copy of it to the appropriate agent victualler and one to the ship’s captain, who produced it at the victualling yard. Once a ship was in commission and needed to top up her supplies, which they were encouraged to do at regular intervals, the paperwork was different and did not involve the Victualling Board head office or the Navy Board. Instead, a three-part form listed all the standard items, with spaces for the amounts required. The first part of the form certified that there was a want of those items, the second part ordered the agent victualler to deliver them, and the third part certified that they had been received on board. A different form, also in three parts, dealt with fresh beef, the difference between this and the previous form being that the agent victualler was required to furnish it ‘from time to time, until further orders’ with the third part certifying the total quantities received during the stay.
That worked well enough when ships came into port in small numbers and with time to spare. For the Channel Fleet, during the close blockade of Brest, the pressure to get large numbers of ships restocked and back on station led to a system where seven or eight merchant vessels, loaded with sufficient provisions for 15,000 men for one month, waited permanently at Dartmouth for the fleet to pass, then followed them in to Torbay and anchored by the fleet for transhipment. When St Vincent took over the command, he discouraged ships from returning to port for anything less than urgent repairs or seriously bad weather, instead arranging for victuallers to go to the fleet each month, carrying preserved provisions and supplies of fresh vegetables.
The task of the agents victualler on foreign stations was more complex than that at home. Unlike the agents at the British outports, who reported to the Victualling Board itself, the agents victualler abroad, although still employees of the Board and still obliged to account for stores and money under its rules, were under the immediate control of the commander-in-chief, through, if there was one, the naval officer or civilian commissioner in charge of the station. There was a fuss at the Victualling Office in 1811 when the agent victualler at Malta, Patrick Wilkie, had ordered a large quantity of bread and flour from a local supplier. The Victualling Board said he should not have done it and was personally responsible for the cost, some £5266. Wilkie replied that the new Instructions for the Agents of the Victualling Establishments Abroad said quite clearly that he must take orders from the senior naval officer on the station and that was what he had done. The Board had to back down and pay the Bills of Exchange which Wilkie had drawn and the senior officer, Admiral Boyles, had countersigned.19 In such situations the agent victualler also had to provide full details, certified by three local dignitaries, of the current exchange rates. In a location such as Malta, where he had to supply necessary money for pursers to make purchases in various countries or small islands, he had to be able to provide this cash in several different currencies, each with its exchange rate listed in his accounts.
When the yard did any manufacturing, as several of them did, the agent victualler had responsibility for that operation. He also had to pay the wages for all the yard and office workers and see to the repair and maintenance of the yard premises. The final task for agents victualler, whether at home or abroad, was to take back into store empty casks and bread bags, and to accept, inspect and dispose of any returned provisions which had been condemned as inedible.
One other way in which agents victualler on foreign stations differed from those at home, and for which there were detailed instructions, was in the necessity to deal with transport ships and ‘victuallers’. In home outports, almost all the items which were not manufactured locally arrived by sea from Deptford, carried in transports which delivered their cargo and went away, usually back to London. The agent victualler would return empty casks and bread bags on them but that was all. On foreign stations, while some of the transports arrived from England and went back there, others would remain on the station under the commander-in-chief’s command, and shuttle back and forth carrying supplies between the victualling yard and the more remote squadrons.
This was certainly the case in the Mediterranean. The main victualling yard for the Mediterranean station was at Gibraltar, at one end of a sea which was almost 2000 miles long end to end, and a minimum 400 miles across, and which was prone to some very contrary wind patterns. Add to this naval activities which might involve blockading Toulon (800 miles from Gibraltar), harassing the enemy in the Adriatic (some 1200 to 1500 miles from Gibraltar), convoying the Levant trade or supporting army activities in Egypt (1800 miles from Gibraltar), and you see why it was not feasible for ships to constantly return to Gibraltar to restock. There were supplementary bases at Port Mahon during the times when Minorca belonged to Britain and, after 1800, Malta, but these could also take many weeks of a ship’s time for the round trip there and back to her operating station. So the commanders-in-chief used a system of rendezvous where the transports could meet them. This meant the agent victualler had to despatch bulk supplies on the transports as well as supply individual ships which arrived at the yard. Whether originating from the main yard at Deptford or from victualling yards abroad, it was the norm to load these victuallers with proportionate supplies of all items of provisions, thus ensuring that an accident or capture of one of a convoy of victuallers did not deprive the recipients of any given item. It was also normal, where the destination was one of the larger victualling yards abroad which employed coopers, to include sets of disassembled wine and water casks for those coopers to make up.
When the Royal Navy requires transport ships today, they use what are inelegantly termed ‘STUFT’ (Ships Taken Up From Trade), and much the same happened in Nelson’s time. There had been a separate Transport Board between 1689 and 1714, but this had then been disbanded. In 1794 the Transport Board was reinstated to organise transports for all the different boards’ purposes, but in the interim each board had arranged its own as and when needed, causing some confusion when the boards started bidding against each other for shipping. This had created major difficulties in the American War of Independence, when as well as the Navy Board and Victualling Board supplying the navy, and the Ordnance Board supplying both navy and army, the Treasury had been given the task of organising both food and other supplies for the army (and made a dreadful mess of the job, too), ending with a bidding war that pushed freight rates sky-high.20
Once the Transport Board had been set up again, it handled all the merchant shipping for all the other boards, and things went more smoothly. The Admiralty owned, or had on long-term hire arrangements, a few vessels known as store-ships, which were operated by naval personnel: for instance the Hindostan and the William, which operated in the Mediterranean after the Peace of Amiens broke down. However, in general the Transport Board chartered merchantmen as transport ships, under the same terms and conditions prevailing in the commercial market. These ships might carry a mixed cargo of naval stores and victuals, and often passengers (Hindostan carried numerous dockyard artificers out to the Mediterranean in early 1804, while others might carry some troops), in which case they were referred to as ‘transports’. When their entire cargo was victuals, they were known as ‘victuallers’. These ships were hired direct from their owners or through brokers, either on charter for the use of the whole ship at an agreed rate per ton, or on ‘freight’ terms (either weight or volume of goods carried) which theoretically meant the ship could carry other goods as well – an advantageous situation for the owners of the ship, as it was the Victualling Board’s practice to give protection certificates to exempt the crews from impressment.
The Transport Board sent regular lists to the relevant commanders-in-chief of ships in use as transports for their station, showing which were on their way from England, which were already on station, and which were still loading. One of these lists, prepared for Nelson in 1804, shows eighteen ships already in the Mediterranean or on their way there, listing their tonnage, whether they were sheathed or coppered, and their charging rates per ton per month; the coppered ships were the most expensive. A secondary list shows sixteen others loading at Deptford, Woolwich, Portsmouth and Falmouth with a mixture of navy and army supplies. Accompanying these lists is a letter from the Transport Board asking Nelson to send home the ships on the first list as soon as those on the second list arrive, and retaining, if needed, ‘the lowest priced coppered ships as generally most fit for the service’. Whenever possible, the returning ships were loaded with a useful cargo such as wine or lemon juice. All of this added yet another layer of tasks to the commander-in-chief’s job, but it did allow him some flexibility of supply pickups.21
There were three other methods by which ships on foreign stations obtained provisions. The first was where the victualling was done by a contractor and where the man on the spot was an agent of the contractor rather than an agent of the Victualling Board. These contractors might be an individual, such as Basil Cochrane who supplied the navy in four separate locations (Bombay, Madras, Calcutta and Prince of Wales Island) as well as various sections of the army, or they might be a business firm based in London. As far as the pursers of the ships using these agencies were concerned, the procedure was more or less the same as for a Victualling Board yard: they produced the standard three-part form, the agent provided the provisions and the necessary paperwork for the pursers’ accounts.
The second method applied at ports where there were no formal arrangements and where one or a few ships arrived needing provisions. Here, the purser took himself off to see the local British consul if there was one, or the local merchants if there was not, and bought what the ship needed. He had to provide certification that the prices he paid were the local norm, obtaining three signatures from local dignitaries (one of whom should be the Governor or Consul), or in situations where this was not possible, such as farmers’ markets in towns where neither of these dignitaries existed, by taking some of the ship’s officers with him to witness the purchases.
The third method was used, by the approval of the Victualling Board, on occasions when a large squadron was operating in an area of its station which was remote from its victualling port, and needed supplies of provisions which could not conveniently be provided by transports from that port. What was needed was someone who could go off and make arrangements for provisions to be assembled at a convenient place for the individual ships of the squadron to collect as and when required, or someone whose own ship was prepared to collect bulk supplies and take them back to the rest of the squadron. Sometimes this person was a senior purser, sometimes he was a special Victualling Board employee appointed from London to do the job.
Amongst the pursers who did this job were Thomas Alldridge, who was deputed to victual the squadron blockading Alexandria after the Battle of the Nile, Richard Booth, appointed by Nelson at Copenhagen, Richard Bromley, purser of Belleisle in the Mediterranean with Nelson, and William Fitzgerald, who was with Pellew at Ferrol. Alldridge bought various batches of provisions, including fruit and vegetables, from Cyprus, Syria and St Jean d’Acre, for a total cost of just under £3500; although he had offered to do the job ‘without any profit’, he was given an allowance of 2½ per cent on the total of the transactions (just about the equivalent of a year’s salary for him). Richard Bromley also did a good job. In August, November and December of 1803, Belleisle collected bulk supplies of 987 cabbages, 42,201 pounds of onions, 272 bullocks and 142 sheep with 30 bags of fodder, first from Spain and then from the Maddalena Islands, each batch of which she had then taken back to the squadron cruising off Toulon.22
Richard Booth did not do so well. His appointed task was to buy fresh meat from Danzig for the fleet off Bornholm, having stated confidently that he could obtain this at a price of fourpence three-farthings per pound. Booth interpreted Nelson’s instruction as meaning he could buy live cattle if necessary; he thought he had some 600 beasts lined up when he found that the local butchers had ‘combined’ against him to push the price up. He then went to a local firm of merchants, Messrs Solly & Gibson, and asked them to go to an inland cattle fair and buy some bullocks there. They did so, buying 744 beasts, but by the time these had been bought, driven to a pick-up point, fed and delivered to the ships, the price was higher than expected. Added to this, a combination of hot weather and ship manoeuvres caused the hides to become seriously maggoty and smelly by the time they could be got ashore and the agent who received them then had so many complaints from his neighbours that he had to get rid of them quickly at a give-away price. Apart from the annoyance to the captains of the ships, who rather unkindly blamed Booth for the nuisance to their ships of the maggots and smell of rotting hides, the end product was that meat which should have cost fourpence three-farthings per pound cost fivepence halfpenny. This was bad enough, but then both Booth and Solly & Gibson asked for a 2½ per cent commission on the deal, Booth because he said Nelson had promised it to him and Solly & Gibson because it was their normal commission. Nelson was all for giving it to Booth but the Victualling Board disagreed; they thought that since he had handed the job over to Solly & Gibson, they should have the commission and Booth should have no more than his ‘reasonable expenses’. After much correspondence back and forth, the Victualling Board prevailed.23
William Fitzgerald’s story is not a pretty one. He was sent to buy bread and flour, wine and cattle for the squadron in the countryside behind Corunna and Ferrol and took advantage of the situation to line his pockets. Among his little tricks was charging for 164 pipes of wine, when the receipts only showed sixty-six, and charging eightpence per pound for the cattle when the local going rate was fourpence halfpenny. He had falsified the certificates of market price by filling them in with invented names, and had persuaded the farmers from whom he bought cattle to sign receipts when they could not read English. The last document in this story refers to the file being passed to the Admiralty solicitor to start a fraud prosecution.24
Apart from this sort of thing, the main problem with using pursers to do this job was that not only did the purser have his own job to do (not something he could lightly hand over to someone else), his ship also had a job to do and could neither turn itself into a transport indefinitely nor hang around waiting for its purser to complete his transactions. The answer was a dedicated agent victualler attached to the squadron, or, as they came to be known, an agent victualler afloat. Nelson had asked for such a person soon after he arrived in the Mediterranean in 1803; this was not a precedent, as such dedicated agents victualler had been appointed before. There had been two in the eastern Mediterranean not long before – Nicholas Brown supporting the fleet of warships and troopships off the coast of Egypt and the Levant under Lord Keith, buying food from various places from Sicily eastwards, and William Wills doing the same job in the hinterland behind Alexandria. This was not the easiest of tasks, Wills explained when asking for a proper salary: when buying provisions he was at risk from ‘the Bedouin and vagrant Turks who infest the desert around Alexandria’, he was exposed to the plague and other diseases, and finally put to much expense by being quarantined at Malta and Gibraltar when he was trying to get home. The poor man had also had nearly £600 of the Victualling Board’s money stolen from his house in Alexandria by a soldier, but since the culprit had been seen and was subsequently court-martialled (although the money was never recovered) and since there were no banks where the money could have been kept, Wills was absolved of responsibility. After some time, the Victualling Board agreed that he should be paid and awarded him a back-dated salary of £400 per annum.25
Although Nelson would have been aware of these two agents, and the many others who had done similar jobs, the precedent he quoted was ‘Mr Heatley, who would find the Fleet in everything’.26 Heatley was agent victualler at Lisbon, but had spent some time travelling round the western Mediterranean organising supplies for both the navy and the army during the Corsica campaign between 1794 and 1796. He seemed to be very good at this, writing in one letter of his success in finding food in Naples, Tuscany, Sardinia, Rome (where the Pope insisted neutral ships should be used) and Elba, where he had command of five biscuit ovens.27 What he was not so good at was paperwork: by 1801 the Victualling Board was sending him sharp letters about his failure to produce proper accounts, which they complained was preventing them from passing the accounts of all the pursers he had dealt with.
Heatley replied that it was not his fault, but that of the clerk who should have completed them but who had absented himself from the office after a quarrel with another clerk; Heatley then asked to be relieved of his post and allowed to come home.28 The Victualling Board agreed to this but sent out an audit team consisting of Commissioner Towry and a senior clerk, Richard Ford. With the exception of a few minor items, Heatley’s accounts were passed, Towry returned to England and Ford stayed behind to take over as agent victualler at Lisbon (a short-lived appointment which ended with the Peace of Amiens in 1802). During the peace, Ford returned to work in the Victualling Office and at one point accompanied two of the commissioners on their annual inspection visit to the victualling yards at Chatham and Dover.
These experiences, together with his previous work in the Victualling Office in London, made Ford the perfect man to attach to Nelson as agent victualler afloat. The Victualling Board recommended him, Nelson’s bankers Marsh & Creed reported to Nelson that he was well thought of, and he was duly appointed, given another Victualling Office clerk, John Geoghegan, as his assistant, and sent off to the Mediterranean to sort out Nelson’s problem. In December, the Admiralty gave them a passage out on the storeship Hindostan, but for some reason she was delayed and Ford showed his initiative by changing ships, travelling as far as Gibraltar in the frigate Diana and then in the Third Rate Donegal for the last stage. He and Geoghegan arrived with the squadron off Toulon by the middle of February; Hindostan did not arrive in the Mediterranean until April, when she promptly took fire and sank in Rosas Bay near Barcelona (fortunately with no loss of life, but with a quantity of Nelson’s personal supplies).
Ford took up the reins immediately, his first task being to take charge of the residue of public money which Nelson had been holding. This was 1050 ‘hard’ or Spanish dollars (a currency which was in common use in the commerce of the western Mediterranean and which was currently worth just over $5 to £1 sterling); James Cutforth, the agent victualler at Gibraltar had supplied Nelson with $6000, most of which he had issued to the pursers of his squadron to buy provisions. Ford’s accounts show that this was not reimbursements of specific sums spent, but small tranches of money for use when needed, varying from $200 for the frigates to $800 for the First Rate Victory.
Ford’s next task, having received a further tranche of $12,000 from Cutforth, was to pass some $3000 to the pursers so they could pay the crews their long-awaited money for short allowances and savings of provisions over the past year. This was something which, as Ford pointed out in his first progress report to the Commissioners for Victualling, was not covered in his instruction letter, but Nelson had given him written instructions to proceed. Another difficulty with his instructions which he pointed out in this report was the requirement that receipts for purchases should be witnessed by two commissioned or warrant officers. His buying trips to the Maddalena Islands had already demonstrated that this was impractical as he had only been able to buy cattle in small lots from different sellers at places some five or six miles from where the fleet was anchored, and since payment had to be made at the time of purchase (without any warning of the sellers arriving with their cattle), complying with this instruction would have meant officers having to attend him all the time. He would, he said, therefore fall back on the alternative of providing certificates of market prices from the consul or local merchants. His final comment in this report was that as four victuallers had arrived, the fleet ‘amounting to nine sail of the line’ was ‘now completed to five months victualling of all species’.29
This comment did not mean that his task was over for the time being. The nine ships he had referred to were only those with the commander-in-chief; there were a further thirty-three naval vessels in the Mediterranean at that time, and ‘complete of all species’ did not include wine or the desirable fresh food on which Nelson was so keen. There were also future supplies of beverages to be organised, so Ford now set off on a series of investigating and buying trips which continued throughout his service in the Mediterranean. His first trip, in March, was to Barcelona and Rosas, with a specific instruction to buy 200 pipes of wine, 30,000 oranges, 20 tons of onions and 50 sheep ‘for the use of the sick and convalescent’. Ford carried a letter of introduction from Nelson to the Rosas merchant Edward Gayner, which also expressed concern over the difficulties being raised by the Spanish authorities over supplying bullocks, sheep and other items.
The obstacles created by the Spanish authorities ranged from rigidly enforcing export duties on various products and export restrictions on live animals to treating naval personnel with a level of insolence which caused Nelson to complain to the British minister in Madrid, John Hookham Frere. Ford could do nothing about the insolence, but he shared with the locally-based British merchants an ability to think laterally when dealing with Customs personnel. One of the merchants in Barcelona, Walsh, had suggested that if necessary he would deliver wine by neutral vessels and Gayner had remarked that even if Spain declared war against Britain, he was confident that the wine he was holding for the fleet would not be confiscated, which implies that he knew who was ‘persuadable’. Ford, when reporting to Nelson from Rosas, remarked about cattle;
… they are in a great degree prohibited from exportation. The last that we had put on board the Active were without the public permission of the Revenue officers at Rosas tho’ with their knowledge and coment [sic].
This may explain the entry in his accounts, after ‘Duties on the live cattle’ and ‘Ditto on the slaughtered’ of ‘Paid Customs House officers’. On the matter of sheep, he said;
The sheep sent by the Niger for the use of the sick were obtained without the knowledge of the officers of Customs, who refused my application to ship so large a number in consequence of [an] order from the Spanish government. It was therefore necessary to provide them by other means.
Gayner seems to have been the most useful of the merchants in Catalonia and Ford was in regular contact with him during this period. As well as organising live beasts, vegetables and lemons and oranges, Gayner supplied wine itself and organised the manufacture and repair of casks. In June, when Ford was having difficulty in obtaining a supply of water at Rosas, Gayner agreed to fill casks and get them out to the ships at a better price than any of the other offers. He had also gone to the aid of the crew and passengers of the transport Hindostan after the fire, finding and paying for their accommodation and food. Nelson made sure that he was reimbursed for his costs in that matter, and was moved to write to the Admiralty secretary William Marsden and suggest that for this and for the fact that he ‘had on every occasion furnished us with articles prohibited by the Spanish government, without a motive of pecuniary reward’ Gayner should be given some sort of official recognition; the Lords of the Admiralty agreed with this suggestion and Gayner was presented with a 100-guinea silver cup. Nelson did not mention in that letter that Gayner was also feeding him with intelligence information, but he was clearly a very useful contact in what was about to become an enemy country. Alas, poor Gayner was thrown into prison in Barcelona when the Spanish declared war against the British in late 1804; so far the author has not been able to find out what happened to him after that.
There was, however, the constant concern over whether Spain would declare war against Britain and it was therefore necessary to explore other sources of supply. Apart from Sardinia and the Maddalena Islands, where Ford did buy substantial supplies, he began to investigate Sicily and much later, Tangiers. There is no indication that he ventured further east than Sicily or attempted to obtain provisions from Naples, where there was a risk that the French spies who infested the city would pass the word back to Bonaparte, who was thought to be seeking an excuse to invade. While Nelson was alive, the majority of purchases arranged by Ford were from Catalonia and the Maddalena Islands, but later he rented a house and storehouses in Palermo and made some purchases from North Africa. He was buying on a far greater scale than Bromley had done; within five months of his arrival, he had bought 1627 cattle, 219 sheep and lambs with fodder, 70,416 gallons of wine, 30,326 gallons of brandy, 99 cases of lemons, 21,300 oranges, over 30,000 pounds of onions, 913 cabbages and various other small amounts of ‘vegetables’ (undefined), soft bread, fresh beef, rice and sugar.
He continued to perform at this level for the rest of his time in the Mediterranean. We are fortunate in having a lot of documentation about him: his detailed appointment letter, which runs to twenty-four long clauses and reads very much like the printed instructions for victualling agents abroad, his accounts and his letter book. We also have some personal information, including his will, which shows that he left his house and other property to his sister Susannah. Neither she nor Richard ever married, which would explain why he was happy to move out to the Mediterranean for several years. At the end of 1807 both Ford and Geoghegan left the Mediterranean, Geoghegan to be agent victualler at Rio de Janeiro and Ford to return to London where the post of Accountant for Cash had fallen vacant. Ford was next in line for this job, which carried the substantial salary of £750. He may, by this time, have grown tired of dashing round the Mediterranean; he may also not have got on as well with Collingwood as he had with Nelson, or perhaps he thought it would be too long before another similar vacancy came up again. He was obviously a man of comparatively humble origins: despite his elevated position, he was still referred to as plain Mr Ford, not the coveted ‘Richard Ford, Esquire’ which would have marked his rise to the status of gentleman, and his letter requesting a pay rise when he was in London with Nelson in 1805, is in terms which are just on the borderline between due deference and grovelling.
Nelson clearly liked Ford; he took him along on the dash to the West Indies after the French fleet in 1805, and he wrote his own letter to the Victualling Board supporting Ford’s request for a pay rise. Knowing that Gayner was feeding Nelson with intelligence, it is not unreasonable to suspect that Ford, who visited Gayner regularly, may have been carrying that information back to Victory every time he returned to her. Ford was 31 years old when he joined Nelson in the Mediterranean, having joined the Victualling Board in 1790 at the age of 18; he retired in 1826 and died in 1836. We cannot be certain that he was multilingual, but it seems likely that he was, from the facility with which he dealt with merchants and farmers in Spain, Sicily, Sardinia and Morocco and the fact that at the end of the war in 1814, when it was decided to sell off the remains of Wellington’s supplies at Corunna rather than bring them home, Ford was recommended to go out and deal with this, being ‘well qualified’ for the task. There are a few passages of standard contract phrases at the beginning of his letter book in Italian but these are as likely to be for the benefit of his clerk as himself. What does come across strongly from the information we do have is that he was a man of high business acumen and resource; one of the unsung heroes on Nelson’s team who beavered away in the background and enabled the fighting teams to stay on station and do their work. There must have been many more like him.30