The Late Victorian Navy: The Pre-Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (review)

Do historians regularly agonise over steel hull and bulkhead manufacture, or the introduction of deck plating? Are their imaginations excited by coal supplies, gun turret instability, rising boiler pressures per square inch, or the advent of compound and three-stage triple expansion steam engines? The answer, predictably, is no. And what of dockyard reforms and naval architects? Those are usually hurriedly passed over. Sometimes, however, such apparently mundane or technologically complex matters emerge from the shadows and take centre stage. Few writers, perhaps, have an ability to do this, but Roger Parkinson certainly proves capable. His is a meticulously researched and carefully constructed book that opens wide a window onto the Royal Navy. It does so by blending the advances and failures of late-nineteenth-century technology with the strategic challenges that Britain faced in maintaining mastery over the seas. We've got the ships, we've got the men, we've got the money too, Victorian music halls proclaimed. In fact, manpower had often been a problem, and by the late 1870s, confidence in ship quotas ebbed. Fortunately, taxpayers' grumbles notwithstanding, British governments could always raise the money.

Parkinson revisits the so-called dark ages of the Royal Navy—the 1870s and early 1880s. Dark because the post-Crimean decades are generally less attractive to naval historians, and because of an abiding sense that a conservative and complacent Admiralty presided over an iconic arm of Britain's defence that had lost its former strategic role and had yet to find another. In an earlier age of coastal protection, sea battles, and blockades, the tasks facing the navy were obvious. But Trafalgar had given Britain maritime dominance. After Navarino in 1827 there were few opportunities for glory afloat. The navy was used against shore installations, such as those in the Baltic and Black Sea in 1854 and 1855, to fight pirates; to hunt down slavers; and as an adjunct to the army when sailors and marines were landed as naval brigades, as on many occasions between the siege of Sebastopol and the 1900 Boxer Rebellion. With a fleet at least as large as any two potential rivals combined could muster, the British usually took security for granted. It was only when international crises developed and when the press took an interest in the nation's preparedness for war that the natural order was disturbed.

Of course, ruling the waves had a purpose: to protect the vital trade routes on which Britain's commercial and industrial supremacy depended. In years gone by, the protection of shipping meant convoys. By 1880, however, as ship-owners themselves declared, convoys were of questionable value. Modern merchantmen could outrun a man-of-war; armed escorts would only slow them down. The navy's role might now be to patrol sea lanes and, during war, to keep them clear of hostile raiders. But over vast stretches of ocean no number of warships could ever be sufficient. A defensive navy thus risked becoming an ineffective one. A different mindset was required, and new ships were necessary—ships that could carry warfare to the enemy. Parkinson elaborates all this with clarity and an obvious enthusiasm. There is an element of repetition in the text—at least for readers familiar with the subject matter. For those new to the field, admittedly, occasional rehearsals might be welcome.

One impressive quality of The Late Victorian Navy is that it sustains a clear thesis throughout. Parkinson argues that even before the 1889 Naval Defence Act a combination of fresh strategic thinking and scientific advances had set fundamental change in motion. New navies were appearing in the 1880s: new, in so far as they were being acquired by nations hitherto outside the ranks of naval power, and because improved armour, gunnery, and speed made older vessels seem redundant. But were apprehensions of British weakness really justified...