Suicide, Fraud and Debt: John Dickens’s Last Days at Chatham

Documents recently discovered at the National Archives at Kew, London, illuminate the working arrangements in the Navy Pay Office in Chatham during John Dickens’s time there from 1817 to 1822; they also tell a surprising and dramatic story about Chatham’s Chief Pay Clerk, and uncover another large debt incurred by John Dickens.

In 1815, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the war with the United States (1812–1814), the British Government was anxious to reduce its expenditure and recover some of the ruinous cost it had incurred. The expense of the war was estimated, rather precisely, at £1,657,854,518, and the national debt at the end of the war at about £850 million (Uglow 631). Initially, the size of the army was greatly reduced and in the navy the numbers of both ships and sailors were cut. Attention then turned to a reduction in the numbers of artisans and office staff at the dockyards and at Somerset House. It was through these years of change that John Dickens was based at the Navy Pay Office at Chatham.

Following two years of a desk-bound job at Somerset House in London, John Dickens’s removal to an outport at the beginning of 1817 meant a change of work routine. For a few months at Sheerness and then at Chatham he was back carrying out the tasks he had been doing at Portsmouth, paying dockyard workers and officers and seamen aboard the ships. Throughout his five years at Chatham his base was the Pay Office building, shown in a sketch by Robert Langton (fig. 1) and in a photograph as it appears today (fig. 2). The layout of the office, which occupied the whole of the first floor, is taken from a sketch made in 1822 (fig. 3).

Details of part of his work, the paying of artificers, was given in an earlier letter sent from the Navy Pay Office on 6 December 1814 to pay clerks at Portsmouth: between one and two o’clock each Saturday the pay lists would be delivered to the clerks and payments would begin immediately. The naval yard was split into gangs of workers and payment would be made to the leader of each gang. These leaders would provide a list of the men in their gang and the amount payable to them. This would be checked by

Fig 1 & 2.

The Navy Pay Office as it appeared in 1883 in Langton’s Childhood and youth of Charles Dickens (above), and as it appears today (below)

Fig 3.

The Pay Office occupied only the upper floor, the entrance to which is shown in the Langton sketch. The lower floor was reported in 1822 to contain the Admiral’s office together with offices for his Secretary and Clerk, and a large room for “accommodating the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Commissioners of the Navy at visitations, for mustering the men of the yard by the Commissioner, and for the sale of old stores, wood, etc.” (The National Archives, ref ADM 140/74, Chatham. Chapel, offices and residences. Pay Office, 1818–1822)

the pay clerks against their own lists, and if the two corresponded payment would be made. The payments would be in quantities of notes, silver and copper sufficient to distribute among the gang, and up to £6,600 would be handed out each week. Because of the amounts involved, the numbers of workers employed and, in winter, the fact that the handouts were made by candlelight, overpayment was often made. Unfortunately such overpayment was deducted from the pay clerks’ salaries, and amounted in 1813, for example, to between ten shillings and £12.13s each week. Understandably a representation was made by the pay clerks, including John Dickens, to have these overpayments reimbursed. The representation was accepted.¹

The clerks also had to go out to ships to pay the crews, a sometimes hazardous task, as pointed out in another letter from the clerks...