WE HAVE ALREADY LOOKED at two of the standard academic questions that should be applied to any study of military history. There are two more which we should now ask: ‘Did they do a good job?’ and ‘Would they have done a better job if they had done it differently?’ In answering these questions, especially the second, it is necessary to remember that we are dealing with a very different world from our own and that what appears obvious with hindsight was not necessarily so obvious at the time. But first we must consider the two fundamental points: who ‘they’ were, and exactly what the job was.
It would be easy to define ‘they’ as the Victualling Board and its head-office employees; they were the people who gathered the ingredients of the seaman’s diet and sent them off to arrive on his plate. But they were not the only people involved: there were many others along the way who were involved in getting the job done and getting it done properly. As we have seen, this included the manufacturing, packing and despatch personnel at the Victualling Board’s depots at home and abroad, the individual commanders-in-chief who directed the intermediate stages of delivery, and the various people who dealt with delivery on board the ships – the captains, the pursers, the masters and lieutenants, the cooks and the stewards. Each of these, as we have seen, was concerned to get the food on the plate and then to leave the men in peace while they ate it, and each understood the importance of keeping the men well fed. There was a mechanism in place for complaints when things went wrong, but there seem to have been very few such complaints, certainly not enough dissatisfaction to cause a major mutiny such as affected the French Brest fleet in Quiberon Bay.
So just what was the job? To put it very broadly, you could say it was to provide the fuel that enabled the fighting machine to perform well in the face of the enemy. The key phrases here are ‘to perform well’ and ‘in the face of the enemy’. There can be no doubt that the British naval fighting machine did perform well throughout the period we are considering. Ignoring the manpower losses caused by disease, which affected the enemy as badly if not worse than they did the British, such failures as did occur during the various wars from 1750 to 1815 were caused by political indecision, grand strategic failures and some poor senior appointments, not by the lack of enthusiasm of the fighting man on the spot (you might say that the enthusiasm was lacking at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, but the men involved in those mutinies made it clear that they were prepared to do their duty if the enemy threatened). There are numerous little stories that show that enthusiasm. Typical of these is Sir Sidney Smith’s letter to Earl Spencer in 1795, describing his strategy of sending his ship’s launch ‘to seek adventure’ whenever they were close to land. He commented that not only did he have difficulty in selecting a crew from amongst the many volunteers, but that even the petty officers attempted to ‘slip in and secrete themselves in order to go’.1 Whilst a man might fight on a badly- or inadequately-filled stomach, he will not do so with enthusiasm and consistent success. There is a vulgar modern military aphorism which neatly sums it up: ‘You can’t **** on cornflakes’. So let us put aside the two big myths about Georgian naval food: it was not skimpy and it was not foul.
‘In the face of the enemy’ implies that the fighting man is in that position and can stay there for as long as it takes to do the job; in order to stay on station, whether the task is blockading or actively seeking out the enemy and fighting him, that ‘fuel’ has to be delivered regularly and in a timely fashion. It has been argued, to good effect, that the failure to do this, due to the inexperience of the Treasury staff who were given the task of supplying the British army in North America during the War of Independence, was the primary cause of the British failure in that war.2 The Victualling Board had many decades of experience to call on, and had set up systems to supply provisions wherever they were needed. With very few minor hiccups, they did so.
There were many subsidiary aspects to that broad task. Quality standards had to be established and maintained, and there had to be a system for dealing with sub-standard items. Opportunists and deliberate fraudsters had to be discouraged or caught and punished. Justice had to be seen to be done by discouraging the sort of favouritism that can lead to industrial unrest. And last, but by no means least, the public purse (or as they saw it, the King’s purse) had to be protected from excessive spending. Whilst the commanders-in-chief and shipboard personnel had their part to play in these desired results, the drive to achieve them had to come from the responsible body at the top of the pyramid, the Board of Admiralty. Here, with a couple of reservations, we can accept that the public employees did a fair job. The reservations relate to their attitude to the peripheral personnel – the commissioned sea officers, the pursers, the suppliers and the contractors. Here they often displayed the sort of pig-headed righteousness that tends to infect all bureaucrats. They were more concerned to get their forms filled in correctly than to allow a little leeway to the form-fillers; they certainly did not see it as any part of their job to be kind to pursers.
They were perfectly prepared to experiment in the interest of improving quality, saving money or solving the age-old problem of vermin. The records are full of suggestions received, trials being organised and reported on. A few, such as iron water-tanks, were successful and wholesale changes were made. Others, and there were many more than the few recorded in these pages, were so weird that one has to wonder whether they really believed they might work, or were just paying lip-service to an influential idea-suggester. Contemplating such ideas as the lobsters as weevil-repellents, one realises the depth of the void between the Georgian world and our own; we are so bombarded by information on all possible topics that it would surely be difficult to find anyone today who would believe that a lobster could survive in a barrel of weevilly flour, let alone drive out the weevils.
So why, we might ask, if they were so happy to experiment and happy to adopt new things which had proved successful in trials, did they not immediately adopt the new technology of food canning? Mainly because the concept came too late. The inventor of the process, the Frenchman Nicolas Appert, had offered samples to the French navy for trial in 1803 and they had responded with enthusiasm, as did the government committee appointed to investigate. He was awarded 12,000 francs to publish details of his process, but these were not available until 1810. The process was then patented in Britain and the Dartford firm of Donkin & Hall developed the process. After sending samples to Sir Joseph Banks and Lord Wellesley, they persuaded the Victualling Board to give their canned food a sea trial. The three captains who performed the trial in 1813 were also enthusiastic but the Victualling Board was not happy about the high price of canned food (nor, it should be said, was the general public when cans were put on general sale). Although it was supplied to ships bound on polar and other voyages of exploration from 1814, tinned food did not become a standard part of the ordinary ship’s provisions until 1847.3 It might have gained a wider and faster use if the invention had come ten years earlier but by the time those trials were completed, it was becoming obvious that the long war was coming to an end. The Victualling Board’s attention was increasingly focused on running down and then disposing of the food stocks they did have, and innovations were a long way down their priority list. So they cannot be blamed for not trying to fix something that showed no signs of being broken.
What about improving the seaman’s diet? Should they not have been doing something about that? Actually, no: the Victualling Board’s job was not to act as dietary consultants, even had the concept existed at the time. Their task was one of pure logistics – to obtain good-quality supplies and deliver them to the end user without delay, to get value for money and generally to see that the rules were complied with. When the rules were changed, for instance when it was decreed that fresh meat and vegetables should be supplied, they quickly set up systems to do so. It certainly was no fault of the Victualling Board that it took the medical profession so long to accept that citrus fruit was the answer to scurvy.
Could they have done a better job if they had done it differently? By the end of the Napoleonic War they were doing it differently from the way they had been doing it seventy years earlier. Although in some areas they had to be pushed by the Parliamentary Commissioners, in general they regularly refined and improved their systems and thus the effectiveness of what they achieved. They had gone from a situation where almost everything was supplied by outside contractors to a point where the greatest proportion was supplied by the Victualling Board itself. As the theatres of war expanded and shifted, so the Victualling Board organised local collection points for supplies and when those were not easily reachable, they provided the pursers with cash and a system which allowed them to buy supplies wherever they found themselves.
It is hard to see how they could have done anything else differently, allowing for the available technology and the administrative systems of the day. Reading about some modern examples of supplying fighting forces far from home, those of Vietnam, the Falklands campaign and the Gulf wars, one soon realises that modern technology does not make that much difference. The problem with modern technology is that it only works properly when a complex infrastructure exists: big aircraft need proper airports, big transport ships need proper unloading facilities, and both need proper storage facilities to put the goods in and road or rail transport systems to move the goods from the port to the user, all of which are vulnerable to enemy action.4 At the end of the day, you can use computers, aircraft and container ships but you are still at the mercy of the sea and the weather, the co-operation of the locals, and above all, the competence and drive of your personnel. And in the set of wars we are discussing, while those last two factors may not have been perfect, they were well above the average and well above that of the competition, and that made all the difference.
So, allowing for the fact that sometimes the desire to get value for money moved higher up the priority list than was strictly necessary, and allowing also for the fact that any government trough will always attract a number of opportunist snouts, we have to come to the conclusion that the Victualling Board and everyone else involved in the supply and delivery chain did a pretty good job most of the time. By reliable and regular deliveries of food and drink to the British fleet, that fleet was enabled to remain at sea, to reach its destinations and to remain on station, month after month, year after year, throughout all the long years of struggles against the French and Spanish, the Dutch and Americans, and all the other nations which threatened British freedom.