It will be realised from this that the fate of the Britannia hung in the balance in 1863; and it is quite probable that the Duke of Somerset counted on an adverse decision, or at any rate on a majority upon which he could act.
Several witnesses alleged that the cadets, when they went to sea, had to begin at the beginning, both in seamanship and other subjects; and this, no doubt, is what Mr. Inskip alludes to in his final remarks, above quoted.
There is abundance of contrary evidence, however, in letters already quoted; and the captains and naval instructors who had this experience must surely have been exceptionally unfortunate in the youngsters sent to them.
Dr. Woolley, late Director of Naval Education, stated that in 1868 the examinations on board the Britannia, which had until then been conducted by the staff of the ship, were undertaken by his department: a far more satisfactory arrangement, one would imagine, for all concerned. Dr. Woolley, while as reticent as the committee would permit him to be, distinctly gave the impression that the examinations failed in some degree as a true test, in consequence of the examiners knowing too much about the capabilities of individuals; and though he repeatedly disavowed any implication of unfairness, he pointed out, with some show of justice, that where the answers to a paper were below what might have been expected of the individual, there was a tendency to give him a lift if possible.
This contention, though plausible on the surface, is, however, greatly discounted by Mr. Inskip’s figures, already quoted, which show that the cadets retained their relative places in subsequent examinations with quite remarkable regularity; and it is all to the credit of the instructors on board the Britannia that, although called upon to conduct an important examination of their own pupils, they should have arrived at a result so obviously just. The papers were, it is true, distinguished only by numbers, the key to which was held by the captain until the examination was over; but this would, in the majority of instances, prove but a flimsy disguise.
He also made the somewhat disturbing statement that the discipline was not satisfactory, and that a considerable number of cadets had misbehaved, or wilfully done badly in the examinations, in order to obtain their discharge from the Service.
The committee presented their report on October 6th, 1874, and in February of the following year a new circular appeared, commendably brief as compared with the last one of importance.
The whole machinery of competition is wiped out, and a qualifying test substituted as follows:—
| Marks. | |
| Writing English legibly from dictation | 100 |
| Reading English intelligently, parsing, etc. | 100 |
| Arithmetic: Proportion, and vulgar and decimal fractions | 200 |
| Latin: reading, translating, and parsing, and to render English into Latin | 200 |
| French: reading, translating, and parsing; or, as an alternative, modern geography | 100 |
| Scripture history | 100 |
| Total | 800 |
Four-tenths of the total marks to be obtained in each subject, 320 marks in the aggregate.