Champions of the fleet

by Edward Fraser

On the 20th of September, 1758, Lord Anson, First Lord of the Admiralty, after commanding at sea on Special Service off the coast of France all the summer, arrived in London to resume his duties on the Board. Nine days later, in the old parsonage house of Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk, was born into this world the infant boy to whom six days later was given the name Horatio Nelson. The two dates are a coincidence of interest in our story of the Victory.

Anson came back to town to hold conference with Mr. Secretary Pitt, the War Minister. Pitt had laid his plans for the future, and was ready. There were first of all to be no more half-military, half-naval expeditions up and down the coast of France. They had done little real harm to the enemy, and in two cases had ended in downright failure. The wits of St. James’s were not to get a second chance for a sneer that “the French were not to be conquered by every Duke of Marlborough” (an allusion to the general commanding the troops employed—the second Duke). The Channel Fleet was not to be received a second time on returning to Spithead with a dumb peal on the bells of Portsmouth Church. That plan of campaign had been to some extent a legacy to Pitt from the previous Ministry; he was prepared now to set on foot his own scheme. Great Britain would henceforward take the offensive vigorously and deal with the enemy at all points. Pitt’s plan was to make it first and foremost a naval war, to attack the oversea possessions of France all the world over, utilizing every ship at the disposal of the nation. The striking success achieved by Boscawen at Louisbourg had shown the way, and what could be done.

The War Minister’s projects made known to him, Anson acted. On the 14th of October the First Lord called on the Navy Board—the Department charged with the general administration and dockyard business of the Navy—for a detailed return of every seaworthy ship in the fleet, and of every ship capable of being made seaworthy. On the 24th of October he called for a Supplementary Return of the older ships, which, if for the present available, would necessarily, through wear and tear, go off the effective within three years and need replacing. Both returns, from details specially supplied by each dockyard, were presented to the Admiralty on the last day of November. They were considered forthwith, and a decision in regard to them was come to on the 13th of December. Five days later, as the result, a shipbuilding programme to add twelve ships of the line to the fleet was laid, with the Navy Estimates for the coming year, on the table of the House of Commons. Nine of the twelve men-of-war proposed were to be put in hand at once—five in the dockyards and four in merchants’ yards. At the head of the list was a new first-rate of a hundred guns, as to the preparations for which the Commissioner of Chatham Dockyard had already received instructions. That ship was the future Victory.

They were ready at Chatham. They had been expecting an order of the kind for some years. Ever since, indeed, the autumn of 1746, when the Admiralty had made inquiries at Chatham in regard to a new first-rate that it was then proposed to build at Chatham, “in the room,” as the official term went, of the three-decker Victory, old Admiral Balchen’s ship, lost with nine hundred men and officers on board, on the Casquets in the terrible shipwreck of October, 1744. The project for various reasons had been shelved, but the dockyard authorities at Chatham had not lost sight of it. To that fact, probably, we owe it that the next Victory, when she at length did come into existence, lasted to fight at Trafalgar, and also, in some degree, that the Victory remains afloat at the present hour.

Any summer’s day in the early Fifties of the eighteenth century the wayfarer among the uplands of the Kent and Sussex Wealds would have met processions of “tugs,” as the local timber conveyances were called, drawn by teams of oxen, laboriously hauling along the rough oak trunks, lopped and barked, stamped with King George’s broad arrow, and each numbered with a smear of red paint, that were in the course of events to form the frame and side timbers of the Victory. From Frant and Ashdown, Eridge and Mabledon, over all the wooded country round Tunbridge Wells where Kent and Sussex march, by Wadhurst, Buxted, and Mayfield, from Horsham on the north to nearly as far south as Lewes, they might have been seen working slowly along the clay-bound forest roads, two-and-twenty oxen to one trunk in wet weather sometimes, in charge of smock-frocked, leather-breeched Wealden peasants (“them leather-legged chaps o’ the Weald”), toiling from cross-road to cross-road towards Maidstone, where, alongside Messrs. Prentice’s wharves, the Medway timber hoys for Chatham lay in waiting. Kent and Sussex oak was proverbial at that day as being without equal in strength and toughness for the frame timbers and sides and upper works of a man-of-war—the fighting parts of a ship. And, at the same time, the wayfarer in another land, wandering where the Vistula rolls its sluggish course northwards to the Baltic, would have met a great part of the rest of the future Victory in the long rafts drifting downstream from the oak forests of Poland and East Prussia, floating slowly along, to arrive at length at the Dantzic contractor’s yard, and thence finally pass oversea to the saw-pits of Chatham. For the under-water timbers and planking of our old-time men-of-war and other parts of a ship exposed to salt water there was no timber in the world, so it was generally considered at that time, to compare in durability with “East Country” oak—“‘K’ brand, Dantzic,” in particular. Also it was cheap. By the end of the year 1754 the pick of the best shipbuilding timber in England and in all Europe had been placed in store on the berths and racks at Chatham, available for the expected big ship, thenceforward to season gradually and improve in keeping year by year.

The order to the Dockyard Commissioner at Chatham to get ready to take the Victory in hand was dated the 13th of December, 1758. It directed Commissioner Cooper to “prepare to set up and build a new ship of 100-guns as soon as a dock shall be available for the purpose.” A sum of £3200, it also informed the Commissioner, would be set aside in the coming Navy Estimates for preliminaries. It was the custom at that time to build first-rates in a dock; they were thought too big to build on a slip.

The new ship—no name was as yet officially announced for her—was to be, as we should nowadays say, an “improved” Royal George (the Royal George was our latest completed big ship, the same Royal George that came at a later day to so unfortunate an end), and for six months the draughtsmen in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy, under the supervision of Mr. Thomas Slade (afterwards Sir Thomas), Senior Surveyor of the Navy, the designer of the Victory, were busy on the working plans. These were completed by the first week of June, 1759, and laid before the Admiralty. They were formally passed on the 14th of June, and a few days later the Rochester stage-waggon from London stopped at the dockyard gates to deliver the box with the duplicate plans, all ready to be laid off and chalked down in detail, each part of the ship the actual size, on the mould loft floor. Master-Shipwright Lock would then get his mould-boards and have the saw-pits set going, in readiness for the arrival of the regulation Navy Board Order to commence building. That order came on the 7th of July.

The dock allotted for the building of the new ship at Chatham was that then known as the “Old Single Dock,” the dock now called “No. 2 Dock,” near the Admiral Superintendent’s Office and opposite the old yard clock and bell turret. There, on a Monday morning, the 23rd of July, 1759—an auspiciously bright and sunny morning as it befell—the keel of the Victory was laid.

The ship was to be afloat, according to Admiralty calculations, within thirty-three months—by the 31st of March, 1762. That meant, in the existing state of things at Chatham, working on her, at any rate during the earlier stage of getting the vessel into frame, day and night. They had two 90-gun three-deckers and two seventy-fours in various stages of building, besides the Victory to take in hand; and in addition they had nearly every week extra refits or repairs to undertake for ships coming in from the fleets at sea—a complication of tasks which involved the keeping of every man and boy of the two thousand and odd hands then on the muster-sheets of Chatham yard hard at work from Monday at daylight to Saturday at dusk. Half the establishment alternately were on overtime, working on Sundays and nightly through the week, for spells of three or five hours after bell-ringing—in dockyard lingo, “double tides” and “nights.” It was the same just then in all our dockyards; the day-gangs as they worked having each man’s meals brought from home into the yard to him, to eat in the half-hour allowed, near by his job; the night-gangs all toiling on under the flaring light of cressets and links, without a break, until past ten o’clock.

Amid such surroundings at Chatham they began building the Victory, a hundred and fifty men being employed on the ship at first, to set up and bolt together the various frames and floor timbers, and fit and fix together in place the stem and stern pieces and brackets and the huge rib timbers and beams, as fast as the converter and the sawyers could supply them. So things went on from August to the following January (1760). Then the gangs of shipwrights employed on the Victory were reduced, and the rate of working allowed to slacken down. With the French Mediterranean Fleet broken up by Boscawen—one half taken or burned and the other half cut off and shut up at Cadiz—and the French Channel Fleet shattered by Hawke, and its refugee ships lying broken-backed and stranded up the Vilaine, on the sandbanks above the bar, the stress of the war was past. And there was little need to trouble for the immediate future with only M. Berryer at the Ministry of Marine.