Ships Don’t Last Like They Used To
Robert G. Albion was a notable historian of maritime affairs. He taught at Princeton and Harvard, and was one of the US Navy’s chief historians during World War II. In one of his books, Albion examined how timber management in Britain affected naval shipbuilding and maintenance policies.
In the late 1700s, the British Empire was more dependent on the navy for power projection, home defense, and security of maritime trade. In the age of sail, the average ship life was between 10 and 20 years. In the 17th century, British naval ships lasted 25-30 years. Albion found their average service life to be only 13 years in 1771. By 1792, service life fell to 12 years. In the Napoleonic period, the lifespan fell to only 8 years.
“The ‘life’ or duration of a ship was reckoned from the date of her launching to the time when her condition necessitated repairs as costly as the construction of a new ship.” The British determined service life by a basic level of repair analysis.
The British Empire also depended on oak timber for its commercial power and its colonial exploitation of India. Trade with India was conducted by the British East India Company, whose large armed merchant fleet functioned as a second navy. The East India Company’s chief naval architect, Gabriel Snodgrass, was reporting to Parliament with concern about the falling service life of navy ships and his recommendations for repair programs. The problem of short ship life was known at the time, and Parliament essentially commissioned an external design review by the East India Company.
In 1786, the navy was requesting special repair budgets for an intensive four-year repair program to deal with a backlog of battle damage and maintenance deferred during recent wars. (Webb) However, the navy comptroller was also cutting the future budgets because dockyard renovations were supposed to result in more efficient repair operations.
Using Repair Rates to Predict Operational Availability
In 1791, Charles Derrick was a clerk in the office of the Surveyor of the Navy. Today, Derrick’s title would be something like Senior Lifecycle Strategy Analyst, because he studied the frequency of major ship repairs. He estimated that about 10 major repair periods a year were required to maintain a fleet of 100 line-of-battle ships. Derrick also studied dockyard workforce production output for the prior six years. He concluded that the dockyards were barely capable of performing the ten major repairs. To complete the work, they needed budgets for overtime and to skip repairs on the smaller frigates. Instead, frigate repairs could be contracted out, but this also had to be factored into future budgets. Derrick had to consider the conversion of iron hull bolts to more expensive copper alloys since the fleet was undergoing a design change that was also intended to reduce maintenance requirements.
Derrick revised the 1791 budget request based on his analysis, doubling the supplementary request for special repairs. He warned that by funding this higher rate of repair of line-of-battle ships, the health of the smaller frigates would suffer. Frigates performed as scouts, messengers, convoy escorts, and independent commerce raiders. The ratio of frigates to major ships would be lower, so that admirals would have to change tactics. In 1805, Admiral Horatio Nelson complained about the lack of frigates to help with blockades. The shortage was rooted in the budget and repair priorities set years earlier. (Webb)
In 1812, Richard Pering wrote that Derrick’s conclusion of 10 years between major repairs had been optimistic. In A Brief Enquiry into the Causes of Premature Decay…, Pering found that service lives that were now only 5-6 years might be extended to 8 years with expensive repairs. Pering proposed that prevention of rot would be the solution that provided an affordable maintenance burden and practical fleet size. (Morriss, Foundations p. 159) Pering was the Clerk of the Cheque at Plymouth Dockyard for over 20 years, and would later make major design improvements to standard anchor design.
Building an average ship of the line required 3200 loads of English oak and 400 loads of other wood. A load was 50 cubic feet, or 600 board feet, approximately one mature oak. A mature English oak was 80-120 years old. Ship construction took at least 3 years, but length delays were common. (Albion) Britain could no longer sustain the rate of shipbuilding and repair with native oak. Meanwhile, France had a forest management system that provided a dependable 10-year stock for repair and construction.
A similar analysis was presented in Fincham‘s 1851 History of Naval Architecture. At the time, Fincham was relating history that was relatively recent. Fincham was using Pering’s 1812 assumptions to estimate oak material requirements to maintain the navy, British commercial shipping, industrial use, and the fleet of the East India Company.
Albion’s analysis of dockyard repairs found that there was the largest demand for repairs near the waterline. There were four causes: unseasoned timber, selection of the wrong species of wood, improper construction, and lack of ventilation. (Albion)
Repair was not just an economic problem. Albion described the operational impacts of rot, repairs, and lack of replacement masts in the 1780s. The British Navy was fighting simultaneous wars in remote locations: the American Revolution, worldwide conflicts with France, and in the Caribbean theater of the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. (Albion) The erratic supply of masts limited deployment options in the Caribbean and along the North American coast. Re-masting took the ships off station for long periods. The British Navy’s absence for maintenance and repair prevented the British Army from repositioning along the American east coast at will. Eventually, French naval involvement forced the British surrender at Yorktown. The loss of the American colonies further impacted Britain’s supply chain of ship repair material.
British naval agents often purchased timber and rope in Europe. Napoleon’s movements and influence began cutting off continental sources of naval materiel. After the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, Britain made personnel cuts at the dockyards, and began to reform the dockyards and the naval supply system. Excess stores, ships, and timber were sold. However, the peace was temporary, and England was unprepared for the resumption of hostilities with Napoleon in 1803. The supply system was unprepared, as the British had less than a single year’s stock of timber in the yards. (Albion p. 316-9)
The Battle of Trafalgar
A shortage of timber for repairs nearly prevented the British victory at Trafalgar, which would have allowed Napoleon to invade England. In 1803 and 1804, the British blockaded Toulon to prevent France from unifying an invasion fleet. Horatio Nelson was the British blockade commander. The scarcity of repair timber in Britain limited the number of ships he was provided with. During the long blockade, Nelson had few relief vessels from Britain, so he had to send his ships off-station to Malta for minor repairs. Nelson reflected that small repairs would have provided more reinforcements for the mission. (Albion p. 84, p. 330)
The British Navy approached the Battle of Trafalgar with a fleet in declining health. With little timber and so many ships needing major repairs after sustained blockade duty, unseasoned wood was used. Repairs with green timber were not durable and resulted in ballooning repair backlogs. The British Navy had a numerical advantage in 1803, but the constant sea duty and lack of time and material for repairs reduced unit effectiveness by 1805. (Albion p. 385)
Albion commented that rot was a “serious matter throughout the war” and that “…the decayed condition…not only from general neglect…but building of ships with unseasoned timber.” The original faults from construction and deferred maintenance could not be repaired into a state of high reliability. (Albion p. 313-5)
Under threat of invasion, Britain prioritized temporary repairs for specific line-of-battle ships. Albion found that 23 of Nelson’s 27 ships had major repairs in the year leading up to Trafalgar, and that 3 of the 27 had major repairs in the month before the battle. Overall, 30% of the British Navy had major repairs in 1804. A temporary method of adding diagonal bracing in the hull invented by the East India Company was adopted. This allowed 27 unserviceable ships to be temporarily assigned to convoy duty. The healthier vessels they relieved were reassigned to more aggressive combat roles.
After Nelson’s victory, the Admiralty and British government realized how risky Nelson’s patched-up fleet was. A common opinion was that the hurried repairs had made the difference between Nelson’s victory and an invasion by Napoleon. In the years after Trafalgar, the Royal Navy’s rebuilding program consumed even more timber, further stressing supply chains and driving down the quality of new construction and permanent repairs. The problem got worse.
Albion gave 15 examples of the soaring cost to rebuild ships in the years following Trafalgar. An infamous example was the Queen Charlotte, which rotted within one year. Repairs doubled the cost of the ship before it could be put to operational use. The original construction cost £88,254, but the 1811 repairs to make her seaworthy cost another £94,499. “Dry rot because the talk of the day.” Preventing defects and wood rot was existential to the British Empire.
Maintenance Philosophy in the 1806 Navy Regulations
The 1806 regulations included a new requirement to report the waste of timber resources: “…if an Officer shall discover any wasteful expense of Timber,…appropriated to the Repairing of the Ship…or any negligence or idleness in the Artificers employed on such Repairs…” Conserving timber was now a formal responsibility of every officer.
The 1806 regulations also added repair to an admiral’s responsibilities, that commanders should “…keep the Fleet or Squadron under his Command in the most perfect condition for Service that circumstances will admit.” And in port to ensure “…carpenters, caulkers, and any other artificers…shall be employed in Repairing any ships which may stand in need of repairs.”
Identification of defects and completion of repairs was pushed to the individual commanders. Captains were to repair what was possible with their own crews and supplies. Pepys’ 130-year-old philosophy of frugality and accurate record-keeping continued. The formal handover of inventories and account statements from an officer to his relief was important. This prevented blaming one’s predecessor or dumping problems on one’s successor without documentation.
The ship’s Carpenter was one of the commissioned officers. The Carpenter was required to act quickly to correct defects. Keeping minor repairs local relieved the stressed dockyards: “…always repairing every damage they may sustain as soon as he discovers it, that when the ship shall return to port, the workmen of the Dockyard may have only the Material defects of the ship to repair…” The dockyards were involved in the major repairs, and while the size of the fleet had doubled, the dockyard workforce had not. This was a practical conservation measure. The local repair approach was not emphasized in earlier regulations and is perhaps the origin of the organizational, intermediate, and depot-level maintenance strategies common in modern armed forces. This is an early version of Total Productive Maintenance or Operator Basic Care, where specialized maintenance resources are reserved for special situations, yet the asset benefits from frequent attention from the local operator.
There was a new requirement to “Frequently examine the ventilators.” Ventilators were meant to prevent dry rot and improve health. John Fincham’s officially sanctioned 1851 “History of Naval Architecture” described the ventilators and their use from 1753 to 1798. This history also included a testimonial, but no data, about how effective they were. Fincham commented on how the design of ships of that era prevented good ventilation.
Another new regulation showed the importance of repair parts. The carpenter was required to be “particularly careful in keeping the pumps in good order, always having at hand whatever may be necessary to repair them.”
Conclusion
From 1770 to 1806, the Royal Navy was aware that the service lives of their key assets were declining. They analyzed how shorter service life would affect their maintenance infrastructure and the effect on budgets. Parliament commissioned an external design review and repair recommendations from the East India Company. A targeted emergency repair program and the East India Company’s diagonal bracing method would allow the Royal Navy to put enough ships to sea to survive the Battle of Trafalgar. After Trafalgar, the navy revised regulations to formalize new approaches to organizational-level maintenance. These revisions strengthened the internal controls started by Samuel Pepys 125 years prior and help the Royal Navy continue on its journey to modern maintenance management.
References
Albion, Robert Greenhalgh, 1896-1983. Forests And Sea Power. Cambridge: Harvard university press, 1926. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015058425045
Fincham, John A History of Naval Architecture: to Which Is Prefixed, an Introductory Disertation On the Application of Mathematical Science to the Art of Naval Construction. . London: Whittaker and co., 1851. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044044835676
Morriss, Roger, The Foundations of British Maritime Ascendancy: Resources, Logistics and the State, 1755–1815, 2010
Webb, Paul, ‘The Rebuilding and Repair of the Fleet, 1783-93’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 1977, pp194-209.
Pering, R. (1812). A Brief Enquiry into the Causes of Premature Decay, In Our Wooden Bulwarks: With An Examination Of The Means, Best Calculated To Prolong Their Duration. Plymouth-Dock: Wilkie and Robinson, London. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t5h991x4s
Pering’s service history: https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_crewman&id=41317
Great Britain. Admiralty. Regulations And Instructions Relating to His Majesty’s Service At Sea London, 1806. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951002462540r
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