‘Noble-minded friends and comrades’: Statistical and personal network analysis of Royal Navy officers between 1840 and 1889

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Notes

1 The literature on technological aspects of these revolutions is vast; for general overviews see for the ironclad revolution Baxter, The Introduction of the Ironclad Warship; Berry, The Pre-Dreadnought Revolution; Greene, and Massignani, Ironclads at War; Brown, ‘The Age of Uncertainty’, 75–94; Roberts, ‘Warships of Steel’, 95–111; for the pre-dreadnought revolution Berry, The Pre-Dreadnought Revolution; Roberts, ‘The Pre-Dreadnought Age’, 112–33; for the dreadnought revolution see Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy; Lambert, Sir John Fisher’s Naval Revolution.

2 The officers’ service records can be found in the National Archives, Kew (hereafter TNA), ADM 196.

3 Rasor, English/British Naval History, 237.

4 The 23 participants were divided into different groups, each focusing on specific issues like webscraping, data modelling, statistical analysis and visualization; apart from tools specifically developed for the purpose using Python, existing open source solutions – like R-Studio (statistical analysis) and Gephi for (visualization) – were used.

5 As this is an ongoing research project at the authors’ institution, the inclusion of engineers into the database is planned in the near future; with regard to the overall question of how the officers’ corps reacted to technological change their rise to prominence is of particular interest.

6 See for example the career of Thomas William Curme (1827–92): he joined the navy in 1847, served on a variety of smaller sailing vessels mostly on the China station, where he was twice gazetted (TNA, ADM 196/36/791) for before promoted to commander in 1859, served then as executive officer on HMS Algiers, was promoted to captain in 1864 and gained his first independent command only four years later, commanding the troopship HMS Euphrates for over a year; he then commanded in succession three flagships, the ironclad HMS Repulse on the China Station in 1872/73, HMS Duncan at Sheerness and HMS Indus in Plymouth; in 1880 he was promoted to Rear Admiral, flying his flag in HMS Indus; he eventually rose to Admiral Superintendent of Devonport dockyard between 1880 and 1885 before put on the retired list where he was promoted to vice admiral in 1886; he was back in active service from 1890 onwards as Commander-in-Chief of the Nore until his death in 1892 (TNA, ADM 196/16/275); in all, Thomas Curme had quite a successful career, which even a collision of HMS Euphrates with a merchant vessel in 1870, for which he was found ‘much to blame’ (TNA, ADM 196/ 36/791) had apparently little influence on.

7 While the dataset is at present too incomplete to allow gauging the effect of service aboard troopships on an officer’s career, the case of Thomas William Curme resulted in a small preliminary study of the currently available material, which produced slightly unexpected results: among 78 officers so far identified as having served aboard troopships, the percentage of those gaining flag rank was similar to that of all officers in the database – around 4 per cent; even more surprising, of all lieutenants serving aboard troopships the chance of being promoted to captain was significantly higher than among all officers; given the present state of the database it is however impossible to decide whether these numbers actually reflect reality.

8 For the purpose of the present study, this ‘promotion probability value’ reflects the six main ranks currently included in the database (lieutenant, commander, captain, rear-admiral, vice-admiral and admiral); there is some distortion as the promotions factored into the ‘promotion probability value’ include those on the retired list.

9 On HMS Devastation see Ballard, The Black Battlefleet, 223–7, Parkes, British Battleships, 195–202; on HMS Agincourt see Ballard, The Black Battlefleet, 30–3, Parkes, British Battleships, 59–67; on HMS Sultan see Parkes, British Battleships, 161–5; on HMS Temeraire see Ballard, The Black Battlefleet, 203–13, Parkes, British Battleships, 222–9.

10 This career path was tested against a small sample of eight officers who were born in the mid-1820s to mid-1830s, began their career in the mid-1840s to mid-1850s and attained flag rank in the 1880s. With minor deviations, their careers broadly fit to the results quoted above; the eight officers in question are Thomas Brandreth (1825–94; see TNA, ADM 196/16/268), Henry Dennis Hickley (1826– 1903; see TNA, ADM 196/16/306), George Willes Watson (1827–97; TNA, ADM 196/16/301), Anthony Hiley Hoskins (1828– 1901; see TNA, ADM 196/16/280), John Erskine Baird (1832–1908; see TNA, ADM 196/16/250), Edward Henry Howard (1832–90; see TNA, ADM/196/16/249), Henry Phillimore (1833–93; see TNA, ADM 196/13/372) and Sir Algernon Lyons (1833– 1908; see TNA, ADM 196/16/303).

11 Individual careers could of course be quite different; to take but one example, Henry Dennis Hickley (1826–1903) was promoted captain in February 1864 at the age of 37 and thus slightly behind fellow officers, yet he managed to gain flag rank at the ‘standard’ age of 53 (TNA, ADM 196/16/306).

12 There appears to have been little difference between captains who went on to attain flag rank and those who eventually left the navy at the rank of captain; for an example of the latter see Richard Carter (1829–85; see TNA, ADM/196/13/299), who was promoted to lieutenant in 1853, to commander in 1862 and to captain in 1869, a rank he held for the following 15 years; in 1876, Carter gained some notoriety in the navy for driving HMS Repulse around Cape Horn under sail, the only British ironclad ever to do so; while the cruise of HMS Repulse was without doubt a considerable feat of seamanship, Carter was relieved during the first landfall after the rounding as his senior medical officer considered him dangerously insane (Ballard, The Black Battlefleet, 153); although Carter continued to find commands he never attained flag rank, and his next command, the iron corvette HMS Volage, could be interpreted as a step down from the ironclad HMS Repulse; Carter went on to command HMS Hector from 1880 to 1882 and finally HMS Royal Adelaide until his retirement in 1884.

13 Quite typical are careers like that of Albert Whish (1845–1913; see TNA, ADM 196/15/365); Whish, a nephew of Scottish poet Robert Burns (Rodgers, Genealogical Memoirs, 21), was promoted to lieutenant in 1863, served in several ships, including nearly three years in the gunboat HMS Leven, before serving more than nine years on coast guard duty as Inspecting Officer in Montrose; on retirement in 1887 he was promoted to commander; compare e.g. to Francis Clarence Rechab Baker (1841–1904; see TNA, ADM 196/15/86), who was promoted to lieutenant in 1861, serving in HMS Endymion and HMS Cherub in between longer periods in HMS Excellent; from 1875 onwards he served for a decade on coast guard duty before retiring in 1885 without ever being promoted to commander.