‘We Are Making No Sailors’: Apprenticeship and the British mercantile marine 1840–1914

Abstract

For more than a century and a half, apprenticeship was of fundamental importance to the recruitment and training of British seafarers. From the introduction of compulsory apprenticeship in 1703, through the removal of compulsion in 1850 and up to the outbreak of the First World War, tens of thousands of boys and young men served apprenticeships on British ships, making up a substantial proportion of the maritime labour force. Apprenticeship in the merchant shipping industry has received little attention and the whole question of maritime training remains under-researched. This article opens by revisiting the debates of the 1840s over the Navigation Laws and argues that shipowners’ attitudes to apprenticeship were ambivalent. It provides a survey of the decline and evolution of apprenticeship in the six decades following the repeal of the Navigation Laws, highlighting the unevenness of its decline and the existence of countervailing factors in some sectors. Finally, it examines the widespread concerns over the quality and skill of British seafarers and the impact of apprenticeship on recruitment to the Royal Navy.

Keywords:

• apprenticeship
• mercantile marine
• merchant shipping
• sailing ships
• maritime labour
• fishing industry
• navigation laws
• Royal Navy

For more than a century and a half apprenticeship was of fundamental importance to the recruitment and training of British seafarers.¹ From the introduction of compulsory apprenticeship in 1703, through the removal of compulsion in 1850 and up to the outbreak of the First World War, tens of thousands of boys and young men served apprenticeships on British ships, making up a substantial proportion of the maritime labour force. This paralleled the situation on land, where apprenticeship was the principal and sometimes only means of entry to a wide range of occupations.² Yet despite its importance, apprenticeship in land-based industries has not received the attention from labour historians that its importance warrants, and the same is even more true of apprenticeships at sea.³ Apprenticeship in the fishing industry, where between the 1850s and 1880s it was used en masse to ameliorate a severe labour shortage in the booming trawling sector, has been well covered by Pamela Horn, John Rule and Martin Wilcox.⁴ However, apprenticeship in the merchant shipping industry has received little attention. Passing references to apprentices and recollections of those who went through the system abound,⁵ but the only book on the subject is David Thomas’s impressionistic and anecdotal The Right Kind of Boy.⁶ Beyond this the only detailed comment on apprenticeship can be found in E. G. Thomas’s work on maritime apprenticeship under the Old Poor Law, Caroline Withall’s recent work on Marine Society apprenticeships, and Valerie Burton’s influential article on apprenticeship regulation and the repeal of the Navigation Laws, as well as her analysis of Liverpool apprentices in the mid-nineteenth century.⁷ Although Burton does present some figures illustrating the numerical decline of apprentices within the British maritime labour force, all of these works focus primarily on the period before 1850, and no detailed research has been done on the subsequent half-century. Indeed, the whole question of maritime training remains under-researched.⁸

The purpose of this article is to fill in some of the resulting blanks. Its main focus is deck apprentices in merchant shipping, though it is difficult to disaggregate officer apprenticeships altogether and these are mentioned where necessary, as is the fishing industry. It opens by revisiting the debates of the 1840s over the Navigation Laws and argues that, although Burton is correct to assert that shipowners sought greater labour flexibility, their attitudes to apprenticeship were ambivalent. It then moves on to provide a survey of the decline and evolution of apprenticeship in the six decades following the repeal of the Navigation Laws, highlighting the unevenness of its decline and the existence of countervailing factors in some sectors. Finally, it examines the continuing debate over apprenticeship and connects it to widespread concerns over the quality and skill of British seafarers, highlighting how, although apprenticeship in Britain was increasingly regarded as ‘a worn-out vestige of the past,’⁹ for many it remained the solution to a problem of the present and future.

Apprenticeship and the repeal debate, 1840–50

At sea, as on land, apprenticeship in Britain was the creation of craft guilds, and was commonplace by the sixteenth century. However, seafaring was not included in the Statute of Artificers of 1563, which introduced compulsory apprenticeship across a wide range of trades. State involvement came a century and a half later, in the form of an Act for the Increase of Seamen, in 1703, which obliged ships to carry a set number of apprentices in proportion to their tonnage. Unlike in land-based industries covered by the Statute of Artificers, however, there was no requirement for a seafarer to have served an apprenticeship. Compulsory apprenticeship in shipping aimed not to restrict entry to the profession, as did many apprenticeships ashore, but to increase seafarers’ numbers. Although seafaring apprenticeships could and usually did entail the acquisition of skills, many were ‘nothing more than introductions to the lower ranks of seafaring’.¹⁰ This remained the legal position until 1850, although the numbers of apprentices to be carried were revised by legislation in 1823. This was restated by the Merchant Shipping Act of 1835, which also introduced fines of £10 for shipowners failing to carry the required number of apprentices.¹¹ The apprentice laws were restated again without significant change under the Merchant Seamen Act of 1844.¹² It was thus the 1844 Act that was repealed, along with the rest of the Navigation Laws in 1850–4.

Shipowners’ attitudes to compulsory apprenticeship were not uniform. Some expressed themselves strongly in favour. William Schaw Lindsay sneered publicly in 1849 at the notion that abolition might be a ‘boon’ and demanded to know how boys should be trained to be able seamen in the absence of apprenticeship.¹³ His strongly pro-apprenticeship stance, which he was subsequently to recant, was a minority one, but equally, few owners seem to have been unequivocally opposed to apprenticeship, and individuals’ attitudes were heavily influenced by the trades their ships were engaged in. Liverpool shipowner John Palmer Younghusband, who felt that compulsory apprenticeship had ‘increased the number and improved the quality’ of seamen, acknowledged even so that abolition would be a ‘boon’ to ‘the owners of large ships that go short or severe or unhealthy voyages’.¹⁴ Fellow Liverpool owner W. R. Coulborn stated that ‘in the American trade we take as few apprentices as we can’ and that if there were no compulsion to take apprentices he would cease to do so there, but would continue in the East India trade. Colbourn argued that longer voyages attracted more respectable apprentices, and that there were fewer opportunities to desert or to ‘get into bad company in Liverpool’.¹⁵ Similarly, William Robertson Sandbach complained of the frequency with which his apprentices deserted in the West India trade.¹⁶ In general, then, it was shipowners engaged in the long-distance trades who tended to be relatively pro-apprenticeship while those whose ships traded over shorter distances, such as to America, the Caribbean and the Baltic, were more often opposed.¹⁷

Wage levels were another influence on shipowners’ attitudes. In the north-east, where seamen’s wages were comparatively high, many ships carried more apprentices than the law required, although some were older than the maximum age of 17 specified by the 1844 Act, and South Shields owner Robert Anderson remarked that he ‘never felt the [Apprentice] Act to be oppressive’, a view shared by Thomas Simey, Lloyd’s superintendent at Sunderland and a former captain.¹⁸ Sunderland merchant Joshua Wilson was less enthusiastic, but even he argued that the ‘inconveniences’ attending apprenticeship were ‘not exceedingly great’.¹⁹

Nevertheless, although shipowners’ attitudes to compulsory apprenticeship varied, there were good reasons for them to want rid of it. The principal one was, as highlighted by Burton, labour flexibility. Apprentices had to be accommodated and fed even when ships were idle. As London shipowner Henry Chapman put it in 1844,

I think that if you have constant employment for the ships, and the apprentices are well taken care of, and well selected, of responsible parents, and steady lads, they ought to be reckoned . . . an acquisition; but not when we come into a state of depression, and lay our ships by the walls; then we necessarily have to keep our apprentices, or send our ships to sea with the certainty of loss.²⁰

Robert Anderson, Chairman of the Shipowners Society of South Shields, argued that the problem was worse for London owners, who laid up their ships in docks and did not ‘require any body to take care of them’, whereas his ships lay in navigable rivers and he could employ his apprentices in maintaining them.²¹ Meanwhile, many owners bemoaned the fact that, for at least a year and often more, apprentices were ‘of no use . . . and all expense’ and that once they did become useful they frequently deserted.²² Many of them reputedly went into the American merchant service, leading to suggestions that the British merchant marine was training up men for one of its key rivals.²³ As William Lamport put it in 1860, ‘The practical result was not the bringing up of sailors for the British navy, but simply the giving to a parcel of idle lads of a free passage to America.’²⁴

The 1844 Act was disliked especially for its inflexibility. The register ticket system it introduced forced shipowners to bind apprentices immediately to obtain a ticket, without which it was illegal to take them to sea. In effect, it made trial trips illegal, and therefore made selection of suitable apprentices more difficult, exacerbating existing problems of desertion.²⁵ Partly because of the desertion problem, shipowners found themselves engaging in subterfuges to get around the law. Chapman accused colonial shipmasters of borrowing indentures from others to get their ships cleared.²⁶ Fifteen years later Lamport stated that this had been common, while other owners had encouraged unsuitable apprentices to desert and reported their indentures as still in force.²⁷ Bureaucracy, desertion, the obligation to take apprentices when it was unremunerative to do so and the overmanning of ships it could entail were all good reasons for owners to dislike the system.²⁸

Shipowners, then, did not strongly favour compulsory apprenticeship, but they did not think of it in isolation. They were well aware that its aim was to train up men for the navy and, in public at least, many expressed support for this aim. Joseph Somes stated in 1844 that ‘it is an expensive thing to me . . . but I approve of it from a national point of view’.²⁹ Others went further, making their acceptance of apprenticeship conditional upon continued protection. Duncan Dunbar, while saying that he was unsure how well the mercantile marine functioned as a ‘nursery’ of seamen and that only war would give the answer, stated that ‘if we do nothing for the good of the State, we are not entitled to protection’.³⁰

Outside the shipowning community attitudes were similarly varied. At both Select Committees in 1847 naval officers generally spoke in favour of the apprentice laws. Lieutenant J. H. Brown, by then the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen, expressed the classic view that the merchant marine was the ‘source and foundation of naval power’ and that apprenticeship maintained ‘a stock of good seamen’.³¹ Thomas Byam Martin said the apprentice law should not ‘on any account’ be given up, and accused shipowners of using it as a ‘convenient sort of plausible grievance, that they like to keep in hand to back up claims they have occasionally to make upon the government’.³² Even here there were exceptions, though. Thomas Cochrane came close to portraying the law as an irrelevance when he argued that

You might repeal the law, but . . . the result would be much the same; that you must have the same number of boys; a 700-ton ship can hardly do without two or three boys; she cannot send to furl her royal and studding sails a man of twelve-stone weight, and she must have her cabin boys.

Even he felt, though, that if repeal of the law, of which he admitted his ignorance (and which then mandated that a 700-ton ship should in fact carry a minimum of five boys), led to a decline in apprenticeship this would be ‘injurious’.³³ On the other hand, Captain James Stirling argued at the Commons committee that apprenticeship did not ‘produce a material benefit’ and that the law obliged masters to take boys from ‘a part of the population which is not likely to furnish the best subjects out of which to form good seamen’.³⁴ At the more protectionist Lords committee he took a less strident line, but even here said apprenticeship was ‘objectionable’ to shipowners, and less plausibly that their opposition to it was based on the amount of legal difficulty it created.³⁵

In the end, among the shipowning fraternity, the apprenticeship system was regarded with ambivalence. The same applied elsewhere, with protectionists and the naval lobby generally favourable or equivocal in their attitude, while free traders were against. In the latter camp, Newcastle-based lawyer and radical agitator William Lockey Harle poured scorn on the apprentice laws, along with the register ticket system, as ‘perfectly indefensible’ legislative interferences with the maritime labour market, designed to facilitate the ‘horrible scourge’ of impressment and serving only to impose costs on the shipowner and ‘nurse’ men for the American navy.³⁶ Yet Harle was unusual in devoting more than a few lines to apprenticeship in his pamphlet, and, reading the evidence given to the Select Committee on British Shipping of 1844 and the two Select Committees on the Navigation Laws of 1847, it is noticeable how little apprenticeship was discussed. At the 1844 Select Committee, for instance, only 16 questions addressed apprenticeship out of 3,357 in total, and many witnesses at all enquiries said nothing about it, including most shipowners. Burton points out that the campaign to repeal the Navigation Laws provided shipowners with a platform on which to agitate for the abolition of apprenticeship, but it was an opportunity many declined to take.³⁷ For them and for others, amid the wider debates around the state of British shipping and the future of the Navigation Laws, apprenticeship was a relatively minor issue.

Decline and adaptation, 1850–1914

The debates over the repeal of the Navigation Laws, and with them compulsory apprenticeship, took place against the backdrop of an improving outlook for the shipping industry after a long period of depression.³⁸ This is likely to account for the spike in recruitment of apprentices in the late 1840s apparent in table 1.

Table 1. Number of Registered Apprenticeships, 1840–1901 (five-year-averages

Source Return of the Number of Apprentices Registered from 1835 to 1860 (BPP, 1861, LVII); Committee of the Board of Trade to Inquire into Certain Questions affecting the Mercantile Marine (BPP, 1903, LXII), Appendix A9.

Note: fishing apprentices registered under Merchant Shipping Act until 1884

The peak of recruitment was in 1845, when 15,704 apprentices entered the industry, but recruitment remained over 10,000 per annum until 1849, before nearly halving to 5,055 in 1850.³⁹ The removal of the compulsion to take apprentices is likely to account for this, but recruitment then recovered, and ran at over 6,000 a year between 1853 and 1858. Renewed decline then set in, and, with only a few exceptions, fell in every year thereafter until the end of the century. These figures need to be treated with caution, partly because of the subterfuges mentioned above but principally because terminations of apprenticeships were not consistently reported to the Board of Trade until the 1880s.⁴⁰ Nevertheless, the trend is clear. For all that the likes of Thomas Cochrane believed that the removal of compulsion would have little effect, apprenticeship declined in absolute terms, and as a proportion of seafarers apprentices shrank from an estimated 12.7 per cent in 1840 to 2.3 per cent by the turn of the twentieth century.⁴¹

The reasons for this were in part those adduced by shipowners in the 1840s; the cost of keeping apprentices when not employed at sea, the desire for labour flexibility, high rates of desertion, and the fact that the law required shipowners in some instances to take more apprentices than they could usefully employ. However, there was also the development of the steamship, which had far less use for boys. Although sail-assist remained common into the 1870s, there was nevertheless much less work to be done aloft. Meanwhile, engineering was a specialist craft with its own hierarchies of training, and teenage apprentices were reckoned unable to cope with the arduous physical labour of the stokehold. Many steamship owners felt that stoking required little training anyway, although seamen’s trade unionists sometimes differed.⁴² All in all, as John Burns of the Cunard Line put it, sending apprentices on to steamships ‘would only be putting boys into a school where they would learn absolutely nothing’.⁴³ Some steamship operators disagreed, such as Walter Runciman, who estimated in 1903 that he was employing 82 apprentices in his 25-strong fleet, but he and the few others who took the same approach were very much in the minority.⁴⁴

Whatever the general picture, though, there were geographical and sectoral variations in how far and how fast apprentices disappeared from the industry. Table 2 presents the 20 ports taking the largest number of apprentices in 1875, and their recruitment figures for 1885 and 1890.

Table 2. Ports recruiting greatest number of apprentices in 1875, compared to 1885 and 1890

Source TNA, BT 150/13–4, 41–50. Board of Trade Registers of Apprentices

The persistence of apprenticeship at Hull, Grimsby, Ramsgate, Brixham and Lowestoft is accounted for by the fishing industry, where between the 1840s and 1870s the number of apprentices expanded rapidly in response to a labour shortage in the booming trawl fishery. Apprenticeship was held by many to be an effective means of training and it continued as such in well established and slow-growing ports such as Brixham and Ramsgate: in new and fast-growing ports such as Hull and Grimsby, however, cheap labour became the priority, with the added advantage from the smackowners’ point of view that attempts to desert could be met with summary imprisonment. Apprentice numbers peaked at more than 4,000 in the mid-1870s, and then declined as the labour shortage abated, legislation in 1880 and 1883 decreased masters’ control over their apprentices and increased their obligations, and steam trawlers came into use.⁴⁵

The coal trade, centred on the ports of the North East, continued to be a heavy user of apprentices owing to relatively high seamen’s wages.⁴⁶ This accounts for high recruitment figures at Sunderland, North and South Shields, Blyth, Robin Hood’s Bay and West Hartlepool. However, as table 2 indicates, recruitment fell away rapidly as steam colliers supplanted sailing vessels in this sector. Along with the introduction of steam, in the coal trade as elsewhere, went the centralization of the industry in larger ports, which probably explains the complete cessation of recruitment at small places such as Robin Hood’s Bay.

The other ports detailed in table 2 were mainly deep-sea ports which in 1875 still hosted substantial fleets of sailing vessels, on which the remaining deck apprentices were primarily employed. Here too, however, their numbers shrank. In part this was simply a function of declining vessel numbers, but it may also have been that the latter generations of sailing ships, which were much larger, carried spars of steel rather than wood, and did not have the studding sails or even in some cases the royals mentioned by Thomas Cochrane, had less use for physically immature workers than their predecessors. Moreover, they operated in a highly competitive market in which costs were cut to the bone and crews to the minimum, making owners less willing to bear the costs of carrying apprentices.⁴⁷ Desertion also remained a problem, leading some owners to employ apprentices only in trade to places which offered few opportunities to desert.⁴⁸ These factors perhaps explain why there was no revival of apprenticeship despite short-lived resurgences in sailing ship construction in the 1870s and 1880s.⁴⁹ That said, there were short-lived booms in local recruitment, probably a product of localized and temporary labour shortages, such as the brief doubling of recruitment at Cardiff in 1893–4.⁵⁰

However, by far the largest countervailing tendency to the decline of apprenticeship was its use as a means of officer training. This was not a new development. ‘Premium’ apprenticeships, for which a substantial sum was charged, had long been a feature of the professions ashore, and a similar model had long been used for apprenticeships to officers of large and prestigious vessels, notably those of the East India Company.⁵¹ At the enquiries of the 1840s, witnesses spoke of apprentices ‘of a superior class’ who were training to be officers, with owners charging a premium for taking them.⁵² After 1850 the latter made up an increasing proportion of apprentices. As Burton put it,

The abolition of compulsory apprenticeship prepared the way for a change in apprenticeship from a universal system embracing all juvenile recruits to a selective system concentrating on prospective masters and mates.⁵³

This was in part because the Board of Trade regulations for foreign-going masters required them to have served time in sail before obtaining their certificates.⁵⁴ However, we should be careful of overstating the transition in the context of sailing ships. Many apprentices continued to be deployed primarily on the ‘dirty work of the ship’ and some recollections of those who went through officer apprenticeships suggest that training was at best an afterthought, and sometimes accomplished more by the threat of violence in the event of a mistake than instruction in how to perform a task correctly.⁵⁵ Nor did some entertain a high opinion of the products of this form of apprenticeship, Frank Bullen commenting in 1901 that

[The] only effect at present is to flood the merchant service with an enormous number of certificated men, who cannot get ships as officers, and who find the fo’c’stle society disgusting, having trained themselves to expect something better.⁵⁶

On the other hand, there certainly were examples of officers paying great attention to training their charges, and it was almost universally held that service in a sailing ship remained a better training ground than in steam.⁵⁷ As George Duncan argued in 1878, a well-off boy could obtain a band around his cap in a prestigious liner firm, ‘but I do not think it makes them sailors’.⁵⁸ Duncan himself, like some others, took apprentices who could either remain on deck or aspire to command, perhaps illustrating the limited difference between these forms of apprenticeship, though he admitted that the ‘greater part’ wanted to become officers and only about a fifth did not do so.⁵⁹

It was, then, primarily the requirement for aspirant officers to have experience of sail that ensured the continuation of apprenticeship, though the transition was incomplete and apprentices training solely for the deck remained a feature of the industry until the end of the period. That was so in the large ports, at any rate. In the smaller ports, such as those of the south-west of England, apprentices disappeared along with the fleets of smaller sailing ships on which they had been employed. The port of Exeter apprentice books record 18 apprenticeships to Devon-based shipowners between 1855 and 1858, but only two in the 1860s and none at all thereafter.⁶⁰ Cornish ports recruited 26 apprentices in 1875, but just five a decade later and none in 1890.⁶¹

The apprenticeship and training question

At the same time as apprenticeship was declining, concern mounted over the maritime ‘manning question’ and in particular the quality and skills of British seafarers. The issue aired widely in the media, amongst learned societies, trade unions, professional associations, and at a succession of government enquiries beginning with the commissions on manning the navy in the 1850s and culminating in the Board of Trade enquiry into boy seafarers in 1907.⁶² At all of these, contemporaries agonized over the ‘deterioration’ of the British seafarer and its implications. As an influential pamphlet by naval captain Alfred Ryder and shipowner S. R. Graves put it in 1860,

The existence of this deterioration, and that to a most alarming extent, is universally admitted, and threatens to imperil our maritime supremacy, for the Mercantile Marine will be our last and most important reserve in time of War.⁶³

The truth was rather less clear-cut. The extent to which the mercantile marine would or could serve as a ‘last and most important reserve’ was both debateable and debated, while the deterioration of seamen was not ‘universally admitted’ although it was certainly the majority view.

For many, the cause of the malaise was obvious. As shipbuilder and owner George Frederick Young put it in 1860,

It is clear that the abrogation of the compulsion to take apprentices must have greatly diminished . . . the number of boys brought up in the merchant service, and properly trained for the sea service.⁶⁴

A dozen years later, a report for the Associated Chambers of Commerce remarked on the ‘extraordinary decrease’ of apprentices and warned that ‘it must sooner or later affect the character of the crews. With an increase of tonnage we must have resort to foreigners or to imperfectly educated hands.’⁶⁵ By then it had become a commonplace to attribute the supposedly poor quality and deficient supply of seamen to the abolition of compulsory apprenticeship. Some went further and argued, at least by implication, that the abolition of compulsory apprenticeship was in part what lay behind the spate of serious accidents in the 1860s and early 1870s that prompted widespread concern over safety at sea, and ultimately a government enquiry into unseaworthy ships.⁶⁶ That particular concern overlooked the fact that safety had been a serious issue well before compulsory apprenticeship ended, and in any case it faded from view from the mid-1870s. Nevertheless, pamphleteers and witnesses interviewed by successive enquiries into merchant shipping continued to argue that ‘we are drawing now on a market which is ceasing to supply; we are making no sailors’,⁶⁷ and blamed this for the deficient skills of the British seafarer and the increasing presence of foreigners in the maritime labour force, among other perceived and actual problems afflicting the industry.

For some, it followed that the remedy was a return to compulsory apprenticeship to ‘train up an improved class of seamen’.⁶⁸ As early as 1854 the Liverpool Shipowners’ Association and Bristol Chamber of Commerce both pressed for an amendment to that effect to the Merchant Shipping Act then making its way through Parliament, although in the former case a substantial minority dissented. Bristol went as far as to demand that no man should be rated able seaman without having served an apprenticeship, which, as we have seen, had not previously been required in the industry and since the repel of the Statute of Artificers in 1814 had not been required by statute in any trade ashore either.⁶⁹ At that time, calls for a return to compulsion were often bound up with demands for a reinstatement of protection. These faded as the depression that afflicted the industry in the 1850s passed and the economic climate improved, but concerns over the future labour supply persisted and with them calls from within the industry for a return to compulsory apprenticeship. Edward Stock Hill, a partner in his father’s shipping firm and later to become president of the Chamber of Shipping, described himself in 1873 as ‘a very strong advocate for some return to the principle of compulsory apprenticeship’ and later put forward the view that it was the duty of shipowners to train up men.⁷⁰ At the same enquiry George Munro, chairman of the General Shipowners’ Society, argued implausibly that compulsion was the only way to improve the quality of seafarers, and that even shipowners who had previously opposed compulsion would now accept it because the quality of seafarers was so poor.⁷¹ As late as 1903 Tyne-based magnate Walter Runciman could be found arguing for compulsion.⁷² There was also support from outside the shipowning fraternity. Naval personnel, who as in the 1840s tended to be less free trade-minded than the majority of shipowners and more concerned about the potential supply of trained seamen to the Royal Navy, frequently spoke in favour of greater state involvement, sometimes including compulsory apprenticeship. A committee of the Royal United Services Institute composed of naval officers argued for the latter in 1866.⁷³

The stock response to calls for a return to compulsion was to point firstly to the deficiencies in the pre-1850 apprenticeship system, and to the handicap it would impose upon shipowners in competing with foreigners, echoing the argument made by Dunbar in the 1840s that acceptance of the cost of apprenticeship was conditional upon protection.⁷⁴ Opponents also pointed to the extent of fraud prior to 1850, highlighting especially how fictitious apprentices had been taken on to give the appearance of complying with the law.⁷⁵ Walter Howell of the Board of Trade even suggested In 1896 that the recruitment boom of the 1840s had been a statistical fiction, and although this was an exaggeration it was true that the official figures had inflated the numbers of apprentices serving.⁷⁶ As a result, many concurred with the view of Thomas Gray, then the assistant secretary in the Marine Department of the Board of Trade, that the whole system had been a ‘gigantic sham’.⁷⁷

Perhaps more convincing was the argument that, whatever the rights or wrongs of apprenticeship in the past, it was inappropriate for the shipping industry of the present. Quite apart from the lack of opportunities to employ deck apprentices on steamships, there was also the fact that the old law had been based on ship tonnage and many advocating a return to apprenticeship assumed it would have to be again, failing to take into account the rapid increase in ship sizes. As William Schaw Lindsay, who by then had long recanted his pro-protection and pro-apprenticeship stance, pointed out in 1877, if the pre-1849 law was still in force Cunard would need 20 to 40 boys in each of its large steamers, when there was ‘no possible use for one-third or one-fourth of that number’.⁷⁸ The obvious answer was to decouple apprenticeship from tonnage and allocate a fixed number per ship, but that still left the problem of finding work for them on steamships and, as Burns pointed out in 1873, it would be unjust to require only sailing-ship owners to take them.⁷⁹ In the end, the apprenticeship system had developed in an era before steamships were a factor, and in the increasingly diverse shipping industry of the late nineteenth century, as one advocate of apprenticeship admitted, ‘what suits us may not suit others’.⁸⁰

Compulsion remained the preference of a small minority, but a wider cross-section of shipowners argued for incentives to take apprentices, either positively in the form of a subsidy to those who did, or negatively in the form of a tax on those who refrained.⁸¹ However, many suggesting this did not acknowledge the way that apprenticeship had bifurcated and continued to use the word in general terms or simply to ignore officer apprentices, even when proposing ways in which the system could be revived. The only contemporary to acknowledge it and to propose a formal two-tier system was Frank Bullen, as late as 1900.⁸² This lack of clarity about who was to be trained and for what position hardly strengthened the case of those calling for a revival of apprenticeship, still less those who wished to make it compulsory again.

If training seafarers was the problem, as most accepted that it was, then the alternative to placing apprentices aboard commercial ships was to expand the provision of static training ships, of which in 1903 there were 13, which sent a combined total of 1,121 boys into either the mercantile marine or Royal Navy.⁸³ However, although most acknowledged that training ships had their place, most also felt that such training as could be delivered aboard a static vessel was not a substitute for time at sea. As Bullen put it,

There is too much book learning . . . in the training ships already. What we want is that the boy when he goes to sea shall not be a mere theorist; that he shall have had practical experience of ship handling and sail handling.⁸⁴

Moreover, the majority of training ships were industrial schools and some were reformatories for those convicted of petty crime, whose erstwhile inmates were regarded with suspicion. As one shipowner argued it in 1872, ‘they did not want to train only the refuse of the streets and the bad characters of the town, but desired to get a good class of respectable lads who would grow up respectable men and intelligent sailors’.⁸⁵ Nevertheless, various schemes were proposed which combined time in a training ship with time at sea, and one such scheme was even recommended by the Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships, in its final report in 1874.⁸⁶ Some of these schemes involved a formal apprenticeship but others did not, representing a broadening of the debate away from a purely traditional apprenticeship and towards other ways of encouraging boys to go to sea whether under indenture or not.

However, all of this ran into ideological opposition, and the reluctance of the state to spend money. First Lord of the Admiralty George Goschen stated the stock laissez-faire position when he argued in 1872 that it was not the business of the state to train sailors. This was in response to a Parliamentary motion by Graves for an enquiry into the Royal Naval Reserve, supported by Lord Brassey, one of the foremost proponents of increased state support for maritime training.⁸⁷ Despite Goschen’s dismissal of the idea this debate did serve to put the idea of bounties for training in the air. In its wake, Gray toured the major ports and held meetings with shipowners, at which various proposals for a revived apprenticeship system were put forward. These were hardly likely to elicit much sympathy from ‘free market fanatic’ Gray, and while his stance was not universally shared by either civil servants or politicians, there was nevertheless a reluctance to intervene.⁸⁸ Moreover, there was no great pressure from the shipping interest to do so since, although most shipowners accepted that labour was a problem, there was widespread support for his laissezfaire approach and resistance to further government involvement in the business. A Plymouth shipowner spoke for many when he complained that ‘he could not move a step without government interference’ as it was, and rejected a return to compulsory apprenticeship or any other state involvement in training.⁸⁹

The other interest groups which might have been expected to express an opinion were the seamen’s trade unions, but prior to the founding of the National Amalgamated Sailors’ and Firemen’s Union in 1887 their influence was localized and sporadic, and their concern was to protect existing seafarers’ incomes rather than to increase their numbers. The emergence of a national union did give them a greater influence and their representatives gave evidence to most major enquiries thereafter, but few had much to say on the apprenticeship question, and while some did favour formal apprenticeships for trainees most either indicated they did not or failed to venture an opinion.⁹⁰ Even Havelock Wilson, himself a former apprentice, did connect a deterioration in skills to the decline of apprenticeship but expressed indifference as to whether future training schemes should involve a formal indenture.⁹¹ Of far more concern to him and his colleagues was restricting the employment of foreigners and improving conditions at sea, and he expressed confidence that if these could be achieved then ‘there would be an ample supply of good men to be obtained in all ports’.⁹² Thus did representatives of organized labour sidestep the issue of training and agitate for better accommodation and food and restrictions on foreign labour, which the government partly conceded in 1906 with the introduction of certification for cooks and a language test for foreigners.⁹³

In this climate, with no consensus within the industry over what should be done about the manning question and resistance to further state intervention, there was no compelling reason for government to abandon its hands-off approach to seafaring labour. Moreover, apprenticeship in general ran counter to the general drift of legislation on labour during the second half of the nineteenth century, which tended to favour freedom of contract and deprecate older forms of labour regulation, such as the Master and Servant Acts, which despite being widely used by employers as a means of labour discipline were repealed in 1875.⁹⁴ In this climate, it was hardly likely that the government would swim against the ideological tide and attempt to revive it in shipping. The only legislation which touched on apprenticeship was the Merchant Shipping (Fishing Boats) Act of 1883, which sought to protect apprentices in the fishing industry after a series of scandals over mistreatment.⁹⁵ It did not seek to encourage the apprenticeship system, which was in any case starting to decline, and when a delegation of trawler owners complained disingenuously that recent legislation had ‘abolished’ apprenticeship, Gray responded, ‘that is following what seems to me to be the inevitable in all trades – that apprenticeships are gradually being abolished’.⁹⁶

Intervention

The free-trade position was that, in the absence of government action, the shipping industry would have to resolve its own difficulties, and in the last decade of the nineteenth century some firms began to take steps in this direction. In 1890 Devitt and Moore, in partnership with Brassey, fitted out two sailing vessels in the Australian trade to take cadets, with training in navigation provided in addition to practical experience.⁹⁷ This aimed to train officers, but some who went through the scheme became ordinary seamen, and on at least some voyages it seems to have been the majority.⁹⁸ Meanwhile, the Shipping Federation launched a scheme in 1901 whereby boys wishing to go to sea could apply to the Federation. Applicants had be 15 to 17 years of age, to meet certain height and girth requirements and to produce a certificate of good character, in return for which they would be apprenticed for three years to a member firm, and paid £30–40 with an additional gratuity at the end to incentivize good conduct.⁹⁹ The Federation prided itself on the results of this scheme, though Cuthbert Laws, its general manager, admitted in 1903 that only about 400 boys had been recruited through it and ‘the number of lads shipped has not so far realised our hopes’.¹⁰⁰ The reasons for this, at a time when it was generally held that more boys wanted to go to sea than could be employed, are not clear. Laws attributed it to depression in the industry disincentivizing shipowners from investing in it, but it may also be that the Federation’s purpose as an anti-union, strike-breaking organization deterred recruits.¹⁰¹

By this time, however, the debate over seamanship had been sharpened by growing concerns over national security. The question of how the navy should be manned in wartime had always been present, and overlapping with arguments over apprenticeship was debate over how far the ‘nursery of seamen’ still existed, and the extent to which the Royal Navy could draw upon the merchant shipping sector for manpower in the event of a war.¹⁰² Many of those who had advocated a revival of apprenticeship had done so at least in part to augment the Royal Naval Reserve, though others pointed to the increasingly specialized nature of naval service, meaning that ‘the utility of the Mercantile Marine as a recruiting ground . . . will in all probability in the future be limited’.¹⁰³ To these concerns were added, from the 1870s, the growing number of foreign seamen serving about British ships, who could not be conscripted and who were widely suspected of diminishing the attractiveness of the industry to British boys, partly by depressing wages and partly through their habits. As Tory Lord and former naval officer Lord Ellenborough put it in 1906, British seamen ‘will not live in the present dirty dog-holes, mixed up with a number of foreigners of the lowest class’.¹⁰⁴ In this climate, the agitation of the Navy League, which explicitly wanted to ‘eliminate’ foreigners from the mercantile marine, found a ready audience. It also found some support within the industry, though mainly from bodies such as the Mercantile Marine Service Association, which represented older officers and tended to be fairly reactionary.¹⁰⁵

There was still no willingness to countenance compulsion, though some continued to advocate it, but under pressure from the Navy League and elsewhere the government finally did concede a measure of financial support in 1897, giving shipowners a 20 per cent rebate from Light Dues in return for carrying up to six boys per ship on a sliding scale according to its tonnage, and enrolling them in the Royal Naval Reserve.¹⁰⁶ The scheme lasted for six years and under it 4,416 boys went to sea, though only 253 under formal apprenticeship indentures. However, although the committee that reported on the manning of merchant shipping in 1903 believed that the scheme was a qualified success, others differed. In part this was because the scheme was tied to the Light Dues, to which there was almost universal opposition and which Laws characterized as a ‘red rag to a bull’ although others simply thought that the financial incentive was insufficient, and that the tie to the Light Dues meant that coasting vessels derived more advantage than those making long passages, which were held to be the best training ground.¹⁰⁷ From the point of view of the Admiralty it was a failure, as only 330 boys joined the Reserve, and it was allowed to lapse. Nevertheless, the Admiralty, perennially less of a bastion of laissez faire than the Treasury, developed a revised subsidy scheme to replace it, but the latter body declined to fund it, pointing to ‘the financial stress upon the Exchequer and . . . the importance of curtailing all expenditure not essential to the efficiency of the Royal Navy,’ which would derive only ‘indirect benefit’.¹⁰⁸

This was not the end of the matter, however, for the number of foreign seamen remained controversial, stoking continued fears that ‘the characteristics of the British as a sea-going race are deteriorating,’ as Brassey put it.¹⁰⁹ This, rather than the potential demands of the Navy, was why the Board of Trade appointed a further committee to consider how the number of British boys at sea could be augmented. It found no shortage of willing recruits, but a lack of opportunities for them across much of an industry that had little use for the labour of juveniles and was unwilling to bear the cost of carrying them. Even at this late stage compulsion was considered, though not seriously, and it was rejected both on ideological grounds and because of the cost to shipowners, concerns over which were perhaps sharpened by the depressed state of the industry.¹¹⁰ Nor did it advocate a subsidy to shipowners to take boys, though it encouraged them to do so, arguing that those bound under a formal apprenticeship indenture rarely deserted and remained in employment long enough to recoup the initial loss, and that ‘if shipowners gave a more extended trial to the indenture system they would find the employment of boy seamen to be attended with more satisfactory results’.¹¹¹ What it did recommend, for the first time, was a capitation grant to the training ships to combat ‘the disinclination of shipowners to take untrained lads on their vessels’ and to allow for an expansion of provision.¹¹²

Although, as the committee pointed out, the Exchequer was now providing grants to encourage technical training in other industries, its stance with reference to shipping remained resolutely laissez-faire, and although the Board of Trade professed to ‘regard with sympathy’ the committee’s proposals, no action resulted from them.¹¹³ However, extra-parliamentary agitation continued, with the Navy League positioning itself at its head by forming the National Committee on Sea Training in 1910, with the support of influential figures such as Brassey.¹¹⁴ Two years later it was able to exploit the political fallout from the Titanic disaster to emphasize ‘the vital urgency of providing an ample complement of thoroughly trained seamen in all passenger steamers’.¹¹⁵ It was this which finally broke the political logjam, and in December 1912 Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George promised a capitation grant of £10, less than half the level advocated by the 1907 committee, to boys in training institutions, though the government was not prepared to legislate and insisted that the Board of Education devise regulations for the grant within its existing statutory powers.¹¹⁶ This had had little time to take effect by the outbreak of war two years later, and although the Navy League tried to revive its campaign, in the depressed post-war climate and amid severe public spending cuts it met but little response. Along with the ‘deterioration’ question, the apprenticeship issue finally disappeared from view.

Conclusion

Apprenticeship did not fade away from the shipping industry after 1850. Recruitment continued at a higher level for a decade after the repeal of the Navigation Laws than it had in the early 1840s and, despite high rates of desertion, apprentices remained a substantial component of the labour force. While their prevalence then declined, they remained significant in the sail-powered sector of the fleet, both as deck crew and, increasingly, as officers. Moreover, apprenticeship remained influential in another sense; as a potential solution in the minds of some to the decline of the British sailor, and, increasingly, as a solution to the perceived problem, even danger, of foreign seafarers manning British ships. This article has sought to highlight that continuing presence and to connect more firmly debates over maritime training to wider issues of the manning of the Royal Navy and thus to national security, but large gaps in our understanding remain. The officer apprentice has not yet been subjected to the attention his importance warrants, while the experience of the apprentices themselves and where they fitted into the economics of the declining but nevertheless important sailing ship sector also await consideration. Much remains to be done.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Wilcox

Martin Wilcox is lecturer in history at the University of Hull. His research encompasses various aspects of modern British maritime history, including the Royal Navy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the fishing industry, maritime labour and the history of ports.

Notes

1 The author would like to thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their useful comments.

2 Dunlop, English Apprenticeship and Child Labour, 50.

3 Humphries, ‘English Apprenticeship’, 73.

4 Horn, ‘Pauper Apprenticeship’; Rule, ‘The Smacksmen of the North Sea’; Wilcox, ‘Role of Apprenticed Labour’; Wilcox, ‘Apprenticed Labour in the English Fishing Industry’.

5 See, for example, Jones, The Cape Horn Breed; Bisset Sail Ho!; Hayes, Hull Down; Whitfield, Fifty Thrilling Years at Sea.

6 Thomas, The Right Kind of Boy.

7 Thomas, ‘The Old Poor Law and Maritime Apprenticeship’; Withall, ‘“And since that time has never been heard of . . .”’; Burton, ‘Apprenticeship’; Burton, ‘“A Man Cannot Make a Sailor without Education”’.

8 Kennerley, ‘Writing the History of Merchant Seafarer Education, Training and Welfare’.

9 Quoted in Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 241.

10 Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 118; Loades, ‘The English Maritime Community’, 9–12; Burwash, English Merchant Shipping 1460–1540, 6–70; Thomas, Right Kind of Boy, 31; An Act for the Increase of Seamen (2 & 3 Anne, c.6).

11 5 & 6 William IV, c. 19; Davies, Belief in the Sea, 41; Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation’, 35.

12 7 & 8 Victoria c. 112.

13 Lindsay, Letters on the Navigation Laws, 43.

14 Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Policy and Operation of the Navigation Laws (BPP 1847, XX), qq 5,392–8.

15 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 6,497–8, 6,507.

16 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 2,000.

17 Brassey, The British Navy, 60.

18 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 4,555–7; 5,459; Select Committee on the state and condition of the Commercial Marine of the Country (BPP 1844, VIII), q. 1,833; Jones, ‘Community and Organization’, 35–66.

19 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 3,891.

20 S. C. on Commercial Marine (1844), q. 833.

21 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 5,459.

22 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 5,405, 6,503–4.

23 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 3,893.

24 Select Committee to inquire into the state of Merchant Shipping (BPP 1860, XIII), q. 2,614.

25 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 3,892.

26 S. C. on Commercial Marine (1844), q. 832.

27 S. C. on Merchant Shipping (1860), q. 2,601–2.

28 Select Committee of the House of Commons to inquire into the Policy and Operation of the Navigation Laws (BPP 1847, X), q. 5,045.

29 S. C. on Commercial Marine (1844), q. 502.

30 S. C. Commons on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 4,958, 4,993–4, 5,205.

31 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 7,521, 7,524.

32 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 8,365.

33 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 8,174, 8,210–1, 8,226.

34 S. C. Commons on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 4,586-7.

35 S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 5,962.

36 Harle, The Total Repeal of the Navigation Laws, 13–15.

37 Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation’, 32.

38 Palmer, ‘The British Shipping Industry’, 98.

39 Return of the Number of Apprentices Registered from 1835 to 1860 (BPP 1861, LVII).

40 Burton, ‘Counting Seafarers’, 305–20; Wilcox, ‘Apprenticed Labour in the English Fishing Industry’, 259.

41 Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation’, 46.

42 Report of the Committee appointed by the Board of Trade to inquire into the Supply and Training of Boy Seamen for the Mercantile Marine (BPP 1907, LXXV), qq 7,058–61, 8,672–5, 8,862–70.

43 Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships: final report (BPP 1874, XXXIV), q. 15,177.

44 Committee of the Board of Trade to Inquire into Certain Questions affecting the Mercantile Marine (BPP 1903, LXII), q. 16,687–8.

45 See Wilcox, ‘Role of Apprenticed Labour’.

46 Jones, ‘Community and Organization’, 35–66.

47 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 1; Foulke, ‘Life in the Dying World of Sail’, 114–15; Graham, ‘The Ascendancy of the Sailing Ship’, 74–88.

48 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), q. 7,649.

49 Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 421; Lubbock, The Last of the Windjammers, 116–17.

50 Board of Trade Committee to inquire into Manning of British Merchant Ships (BPP 1896, XL–XLI), qq 13,688–90.

51 Davis, Rise of the English Shipping Industry, 117–21.

52 See for example S. C. Lords on Navigation Laws (1847), qq 5,951–2; S. C. Commons on Navigation Laws (1847), q. 5,012.

53 Burton, ‘Apprenticeship Regulation’, 46.

54 See Kennerley, ‘Aspirant Navigator Training’, 41–76.

55 Report on Boy Seamen, Mins of Ev. (BPP 1907, LXXV), q. 1,235; Ritson, ‘With Ritson’s Fleet’, 140–2; Vyvyan, ‘Under Indentures’, 162–7.

56 Bullen, The Men of the Merchant Service, 224.

57 Weiburt, Deep Sea Sailors, 226.

58 S. C. Merchant Seamen Bill (1878), q. 2,312.

59 S. C. Merchant Seamen Bill (1878), qq 2,232–5, 2,243.

60 Devon Heritage Centre, DSR/EXE/10/2. Register of Apprentices Indentures, Port of Exeter, 1855–85.

61 The National Archives, Kew: BT 150/41–50. Board of Trade Registers of Apprentices.

62 Williams, ‘Quality, Skill and Supply’, 41–58.

63 Ryder and Graves, A Letter on the National Dangers, 4.

64 S. C. on Merchant Shipping (1860), q. 1,932.

65 Royal Commission on Unseaworthy Ships: Preliminary report (BPP 1873, 36), appendix XXXVII.

66 See for example ‘Octopus’, How Ships are Lost, and Why So Difficult to Man them with Seamen (London, 1875); Gilmore, A Naval Reserve of the Future.

67 Committee on Manning (1896), q. 5,598.

68 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), q. 58.

69 S. C. on Merchant Shipping (1860), appendices 4 and 10; R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), appendix XIX.

70 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), q. 8,461; S. C. Merchant Seamen Bill (1878), q. 1,860.

71 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1874), q. 13,198–9.

72 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), q.16,725.

73 Crutchley, ‘National Methods’; Royal United Services Institution, Loss of Life, 50–1; Wilson, ‘Merchant Service’, 76.

74 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), q. 10,023.

75 See for example S. C. on Merchant Shipping (1860), qq. 814–5; Report on Supply of British Seamen, Number of Foreigners on British Merchant Ships and on Crimping (BPP 1886, LIX), 3–4.

76 Committee on Manning (1896), q. 15.

77 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), appendix XXXVII.

78 Lindsay, Manning the Royal Navy, 82.

79 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1874), qq 15,177–81.

80 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1874), q. 15,236.

81 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), qq 17,188, 17,155–8, 18,414–7 and appendix XXXVII.

82 Bullen, Men of the Merchant Service, 224–9.

83 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 5.

84 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), qq 20,736–7.

85 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), appendix XXXVII.

86 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1874), xiv; Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), evidence of F. T. Bullen; Grey, Suggestions.

87 Hansard, HC Deb 30 July 1872, vol. 213, cc 118–53.

88 Williams, ‘Quality, Skill and Supply’, 290.

89 R. C. Unseaworthy Ships (1873), appendix XXXVII.

90 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), q. 8,818.

91 Wilson, Stormy Voyage, 20–1; Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), qq 5,378–9; Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), q. 11,166.

92 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), q. 10,999.

93 Dixon, ‘Seamen and the Law’, 267; Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 4.

94 Simon, ‘Master and Servant’, 192–8; Steinfeld, Contract, Coercion and Free Labor, 80–1.

95 Wilcox, ‘Role of Apprenticed Labour’, 184.

96 Report of the Sea Fishing Trade Committee on Relations between Owners, Masters and Men (BPP 1882, XVII), appendix 31.

97 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), q. 8,703 and appendix N.

98 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 6.

99 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), appendix K; Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), evidence of Cuthbert Laws.

100 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), qq 21,506–7; Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 5.

101 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), qq 21,526; Saluppo, ‘Strikebreaking and Anti-Unionism’, 570–96.

102 Wilson, ‘Merchant Service’.

103 Wilson, ‘Merchant Service’, 76; Grey, Suggestions; Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 4; HC Deb 30 July 1872, vol. 213, cc 118–53.

104 Hansard, HL Deb 05 July 1906, vol. 160, cc 163–72.

105 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), evidence of John Keay; Committee on Manning (1896), 6; National Maritime Museum (hereafter NMM): MYS/6/2. The Navy League: Seventeenth Annual Report (1912). I am grateful to Laura Burkinshaw for this reference.

106 Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), appendix M15.

107 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), q.9,557, Committee on Mercantile Marine (1903), qq 2, 118–19.

108 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 2.

109 Hansard, HL Deb 12 February 1908, vol. 184, cc 7–12.

110 Aldcroft, ‘The Depression in British Shipping’, 14–23.

111 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 4–5.

112 Committee on Boy Seamen (1907), 1–2.

113 Hansard, HC Deb 23 March 1908, vol. 186, c. 1082.

114 Jones, British Merchant Shipping, 131.

115 NMM: MYS/6/2. The Navy League: Seventeenth Annual Report (1912).

116 Jones, British Merchant Shipping, 135.