Abstract
The British state that fought the wars of 1793–1815 to a successful conclusion has been fundamentally reappraised in the last few decades. Whereas previously it was often assumed that Britain fought its wars on the cheap and with a ramshackle administrative machine, more recent scholarship has emphasized the ability of the British government to raise money more cheaply and effectively than its rivals, and to translate it via an array of subordinate bodies into armies on the march and fleets at sea. Gareth Cole’s work on the Office of Ordnance (commonly referred to as the Ordnance Board), which was responsible for the supply of cannons, gunpowder, and related stores to both the navy and army, is a timely contribution to this literature.
The Ordnance Board occupied a unique position in the state machine. Unlike all the other boards charged with supplying stores to the navy, it was not subordinate to the Admiralty, and its members were political appointees, the Master-General of the Ordnance being a Cabinet member. The Admiralty could thus advise and request but not order the Board to do anything. This could have created scope for departmental conflict and disarray when governments changed, and with them the composition of the Board, but in fact careful management and the institutional memory created by the large number of permanent clerks and other staff ensured that this did not happen. As chapter 2 highlights, however, there were frequent and sometimes serious problems of communication between the Ordnance and other departments.
If the Ordnance was distinctive in institutional terms, it was similar to the boards controlled by the Admiralty in that it stood at the head of a very large industrial organization, employing several thousand men, either manufacturing or contracting for large quantities of goods, and delivering them to where they were needed. Cole advances a mass of detailed evidence drawn from the Board’s archives and other sources to demonstrate how these functions were discharged at national and local level, and how the mechanisms for storing, testing, and distributing guns and powder worked. The chapter on the relationship between the Board and its contractors is rather less detailed, perhaps inevitably given the paucity of surviving contractors’ papers. However, there is sufficient detail to highlight some of the difficulties inherent in managing contracts, with combinations of gun manufacturers at times seeking to drive up prices, and powder manufacturers agitating for the sale of the Board’s own powder mills. It is also evident that the Ordnance Board was well behind some other departments of state in adopting competitive tendering.
Nevertheless, it is made clear that the Ordnance Board was not immune from the currents of reform that swept through large parts of the state machine from the 1780s, and that the pressure of war after 1793 forced further reform. The effects of this were generally beneficial, and although there were some localized supply problems, at no time throughout the wars was the navy seriously hampered in its operations by lack of ordnance stores. In a succinct but detailed work, Cole has done a good job of reassessing the ‘much maligned’ (p. 1) Office of Ordnance and demonstrating that, in terms of keeping the navy in the weapons it needed to defeat its rivals, it was more than adequate for its task.