The Admiralty office was an inconspicuous building in Whitehall beside the Horse Guards. It was set around a small, gloomy court-yard and shielded from the clamour of Whitehall by an elegant screen wall designed by Robert Adam. In the high-ceilinged board room with its Grinling Gibbons carvings, its rolled-up maps on the walls, and its wind indicator linked to a weather vane on the roof, their lordships decided on the movements of fleets, and the appointment and promotion of naval officers. Although the Admiralty Board managed an operation involving hundreds of ships, thousands of men, and naval bases around the world, it was a surprisingly small department. Sitting on the board were six or seven Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, three or four of whom were usually senior naval officers. They were assisted by the Secretary, a civil servant who occupied a key position in the department. He read all the incoming correspondence, decided which letters should be referred to their lordships, and answered the correspondence on their behalf. From 1763 to 1795 the Secretary was Philip Stephens and it was to him, or to his successor Sir Evan Nepean, that the captains of the Bellerophon addressed their letters when reporting the arrival of their ship in port, putting in a request for leave, or recommending an officer for promotion. Behind the scenes in the Admiralty office were some thirty staff which included administrators, clerks, messengers, porters and "1 necessary woman".
The board was headed by the First Lord of the Admiralty who was a member of the Cabinet and was sometimes a senior admiral and sometimes a civilian politician. The most astute and effective civilian First Lord in recent times had been Lord Sandwich, a large, shambling man of great charm who had supported Captain Cook's voyages of exploration, reorganised the dockyards and ensured that the navy recovered from the disasters of the war with America. He had retired in 1782 and had been succeeded briefly by Admiral Keppel and then by Admiral Howe. Howe was a formidable and much-respected admiral but he was more at home on the quarterdeck of a warship than in the corridors of power in Westminster. He had less influence with William Pitt, the Prime Minister, than Charles Middleton who was the Controller of the Navy and the man in charge of the Navy Board.
The Navy Board was answerable to the Board of Admiralty but was responsible for most of the day-to-day business of running the navy, including the maintenance of the ships and buildings, the administration of the dockyards, and the appointment of warrant officers (masters, surgeons, pursers, boatswains, carpenters and cooks). It also supervised the Victualling Board, and the Sick and Hurt Board, and it made agreements with civil contractors for the building of ships. It was the Navy Board which carried on all the correspondence with Edward Greaves, drew up the contract for the building of the Bellerophon, and decided on the amount and manner of the payments for the ship, and the date by which the construction must be completed.
When the Bellerophon was launched in 1786 the Navy Board was still situated in Seething Lane behind the Tower of London but in 1789 the whole department moved to Somerset House in the Strand. There, in the magnificent new building designed by Sir William Chambers, the Navy Board operated for the next fifty years. The offices overlooked the Thames and were conveniently close to the Admiralty office in Whitehall. Much of the credit for the strength of the British Navy at this time must go to Middleton, who was Controller of the Navy from 1778 to 1792. He had been appointed by Lord Sandwich and proved to be an outstanding administrator. He was priggish and narrow-minded with an arrogant belief in his own abilities and a contempt for the abilities of those around him, including the various First Lords he served under. He was, however, a master of detail and capable of getting through a mountain of work each day. As one of his clerks observed, 'The Comptroller is the most indefatigable and able of any in my time. The load of business he gets through, at the Treasury, at the Admiralty and at his own house is astonishing . . .'
Next in importance to Middleton on the Navy Board were the two Surveyors of the Navy, who were responsible for ship design and building. (Sir Thomas Slade would have attended the meetings of the board in the 1760s.) Other members included the commissioners of the royal dockyards, and the Clerk of the Acts who acted as secretary to the board. The minutes of the meetings of the board and the letters addressed to the commissioners can be seen today in the Public Record Office and they make awesome reading. Middleton himself described the correspondence as 'very voluminous, and the business, from its variety, inexpressibly intricate.' Day after day, with scarcely a pause for Christmas, the board made decisions on every naval matter imaginable: on a given date this might include the building of a 98-gun ship at Woolwich, the construction of a storehouse in the dockyard at Antigua, the despatch of 2,000 hammocks from Deptford to Plymouth, the appointment of a ship's cook to a frigate, and sending a rat-catcher to destroy the rats infesting the ships at Chatham.
In an age when every letter and every order had to be hand-written and then delivered by a messenger on foot, on horseback, or by a sailing vessel for an overseas destination, communications were inevitably slow and unreliable. Moreover the sheer volume of work which faced the members of the Admiralty Board and the Navy Board meant that hasty decisions were often made, and important matters were sometimes overlooked or passed on the nod. And not all Board members were as able or as conscientious as Middleton, who observed that, 'Some members were overloaded with business, while others came and went as best suited their conveniency; and it fell of course to my share to bring things to some conclusion out of this undigested heap, before the day ended, be it right or wrong.' And yet in spite of the difficulty of communications, the ignorance, incompetence and lax attitudes of some Board members, and the inevitable instances of bribery, corruption and nepotism, the system worked remarkably well. It would be tested to its limit during the next thirty years and would prove more than equal to the challenge.
THREE
His Majesty's Dockyard at Chatham
1787-90
For six months after her launch the Bellerophon remained out in midstream, moored bow and stern to buoys which were anchored deep in the river bed. On calm days she lay quiet, the wintry sunshine warming her newly laid decks, but when the wind got up she tugged impatiently at her mooring lines as the wind and rain lashed her hull. She was one of a long line of moored vessels which stretched for nearly 5 miles from Rochester Bridge, around the Frindsbury peninsula, past Chatham dockyard and Upnor Castle to Gillingham. It was a formidable sight and a French spy surveying the scene from the tower of Frindsbury church would have gained a great deal of information about the strength of Britain's navy at this time. He would have counted no fewer than sixty-three warships moored out in the river. These included two massive first-rate ships of 100 guns, four second-rate ships of 90 guns, and no fewer than thirty-one third-rates, mostly 74-gun ships like the Bellerophon. There were also twenty-one frigates, three fireships, and two armed sloops. All these ships were lying in ordinary; that is to say they were lying in reserve with their upper masts or all their masts and rigging removed until such time as the Navy Board decided to put them back into commission. If the spy had visited the other naval anchorages he would have discovered that out of the total fleet of 308 ships and vessels, Britain had 215 ships lying in ordinary at this time. The 93 ships in commission were either acting as guardships to protect key anchorages or were on patrol around Britain's coasts, or were stationed in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland or the West Indies. Soon all this would change and the ships in ordinary would be hastily fitted out, armed, provisioned and made ready for action.