Abstract
An overall aim of Evan Wilson’s new book, A Social History of British Naval Officers, 1775–1815, is to replace the heroic with the quotidian: to shift attention from the celebrated admirals of the Great Wars against France towards the ‘vast majority’ of ordinary officers who ‘toiled in obscurity’, but upon whose efforts national victories equally depended (p. 2). Wilson succeeds, assisted by a data-driven methodology and an appropriate awareness of wider literatures.
To a considerable degree this book is in dialogue with Michael Lewis’ work of 1960 –A Social History of the Navy, 1793–1815—which it effectively supplants as the authoritative work. Wilson’s effort is not only historiographically up-to-date, its data is more accurate, its chronology more extensive, and it is more firmly rooted in the wider field of social history.
The book has two principal strengths. The first is its method. For the study, Wilson assembled two powerful database samples from the navy records of the period 1775–1815, one composed of 556 commissioned officers (lieutenants through to admirals), and another of almost 400 warrant officers (masters, pursers, chaplains, and surgeons). These archival records, analysed through statistically appropriate techniques, were then combined with other written contemporary sources in an effective exercise in prosopography. Discussion is assisted (and a certain colour added) with reference to the usual literary remains of the officer corps (letters, diaries, memoirs), with particular reliance on four detailed officer memoirs of the period. Importantly, Wilson’s samples were random, which represents the fundamental difference between his method and that of Lewis. While the records of over 1800 naval officers informed Lewis’ study, there was a bias towards the patrician classes since all the information came, not from the Admiralty archives, but from contemporary guides to naval officers in which socially aspirant families and officers were more likely to be featured. From Wilson’s superior data then, comes an important discovery: the commissioned officer corps of the Royal Navy was less socially exclusive than previously held, with only twenty per cent coming from titled families or the landed gentry (half as much as Lewis claimed) (p. 86). Drawing further on contemporary income data allows Wilson to uncover that the majority of naval officers came from families whose earnings placed them in the middling ranks of Georgian society. Such conclusions have significance (which Wilson discusses), not just for the navy as an institution, or the navy officer as a profession, but also for wider social concepts such as merit, honour, and ‘interest’, and also for arguments about the increasing attraction of the landed classes to the navy in the period of its greatest success.
A second strength of the work is that, for all of its statistical focus, Wilson is consistently forthright about revealing the limitations of his data. For instance, when he turns to consider warrant officers, he makes an important point about the relative inferiority of their archival footprint. In mandating that no man take the lieutenant’s exam before the age of 20, the navy required that candidates present records of birth. These have survived, and permit Wilson to examine the ages and social backgrounds of those who eventually became commissioned officers. But warrant officers did not take the lieutenant’s exam, thus the navy had no need to collect information on their birth (and with it indications of their social background). Wilson thus asks for caution in accepting his finding that ‘warrant officers seem to have come from social backgrounds broadly similar to those of commissioned officers’ (pp. 92–3). All cautions aside, this finding is interesting, because it has been so commonly assumed that the lesser prestige that attached to warrant officers would have been reflected in backgrounds of lowlier social origin. Clearly there was a line somewhere – as Wilson points out in a number of places, the inferior social status of the warrant officer was real – but his data does not seem granular enough to reveal it fully. At this point evidence from the contemporary memoirs assists. It shows that within the navy itself, little attention was paid to such social distinctions. The commissioned and warrant officers of the wardroom socialised as a wardroom, both on-board and ashore: masters and pursers, for instance, were not excluded from dinner invitations offered to ship’s officers. But this claim to gentility did not extend fully throughout British society, and the commissioned officers themselves were apparently mindful of the difference. This is perhaps most powerfully suggested by the fact that lieutenants overwhelmingly preferred to risk the possibility of a life of underemployment and half-pay, rather than taking on more certain employment as a master, a position for which, due to the similarity of their skill-sets, they were qualified (pp. 81–2).
As has no doubt become apparent, the question of social status is the overwhelming theme of Wilson’s work. It is present in the early chapters and then fully considered in the final one. In considering it Wilson contributes to a body of work that has emphasised the meritocratic attributes of Britain’s navy, but he also contributes to wider discussions concerning professionalization and gentility. For quite some time, naval historians have emphasised the degree to which the late-eighteenth century Royal Navy effectively fused notions of merit and privilege. Wilson provides the detailed evidence for seeing how this worked in terms of the career arc of the naval officer. Connections mattered most in the earliest years of one’s career, when finding a captain willing to grant a place on ship (most joined between the ages of 12 and15) was necessary in order to gain the required six years of experience at sea. The lieutenant’s exam (which could not be taken before age 20) was a real exam which tested real knowledge. Eighty per cent of those who passed got a commission as a lieutenant within three years, but almost 60 per cent advanced no further (p. 35, p. 41). Some of those who did advance further went on to form what Wilson identifies as the real elite that mattered in the navy: the ‘small elite who were wealthy and high-ranking’, thanks to their receipt of regular commissions and prize-money (p. 106). Social rank was not a predictor of further promotion, but being commissioned at the outbreak of a conflict was, for it provided greater opportunities to display merit, upon which further employment and promotion depended (p. 108). While interest did operate, ‘the navy’s patronage system rewarded those who took merit into consideration’ (p. 127). Some degree of advantage appears to have lain with those whose fathers had themselves been naval officers – a third of them reached the rank of post-captain, in comparison to twenty per cent of the entire group (p. 116). As is the case with academia today, when it came to making post, many were called, few were chosen, and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that those not chosen might have been equally competent. The issue for naval patrons was whether an officer was incompetent. Since the threat of court martial loomed over any captain who lost a ship, for whatever reason, it can perhaps be taken as evidence of professional effectiveness that less than five per cent of these naval officers were dismissed from the service via court martial (p. 52). Interestingly, even fewer left the service as a result of death in combat – which is perhaps the most salient reminder that the life of Nelson is an atypical guide to the experience of the naval officer corps in this period.
Overall, A Social History of British Naval Officers, 1775–1815 is to be highly recommended, both as an excellent guide to the late eighteenth century naval officer corps, and as a model for conducting naval history in combination with social and cultural perspectives.