THE NAVY

See Also: THE ARMY; A BOAT GOAT OF NOTE; CATS Working Cats, Navy Cats; COLUMNS Nelson s Column; HORACE DE VERE COLE; EXPLORATION; FLAGS The White Ensign; LAVATORIES Convenience Combustibility; MILITARY CUSTOMS The Constable's Dues; NAUTICAL; THE OIL INDUSTRY; PALACES, DISAPPEARED & FORMER Greenwich Palace; SAMUEL PEPYS The Navy Office

Website: www.royalnavy.mod.uk

Admiralty Arch

Admiralty Arch (1910) was built as part of the remodelling of The Mall as a memorial to Queen Victoria.

In 1996 the Arch was put up for sale. Various former senior naval officers voiced their disquiet at this development. As a result, the Conservative Prime Minister John Major made it known that the building would stay in government use.

Location: The Mall, SW1A 2WH (red, blue)

Website: https://admiraltyarch.primeinvestors.com

Admiralty Communications

In the late 18^thC the Admiralty learned that Claude Chappe and his brothers had constructed a system of fifteen optical telegraph towers between Paris and Lille. The Rev Lord George Murray-designed twelve shutter telegraph towers¹ that enabled messages to be sent from Admiralty House to Portsmouth in under eight minutes. This was constructed in 1796.² In 1815, following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the Murray system was closed down. Seven years later the Admiralty started to use a semaphore machine that had two movable arms. This technology had been developed by Rear-Admiral Sir Home Riggs Popham.³ The system used fifteen relay stations.⁴ It was rendered redundant by the invention of the telegraph. It was closed down in 1847.

Location: (32) Whitehall, SW1A 2DY (blue, brown)

¹. Whitehall; Royal Hospital Chelsea; Telegraph Inn, Putney; Cabbage Hill; Chessington; Netley Heath; Telegraph Hill, Hascombe; Tally Knob, Blackdown; Portsdown Hill; and Southsea Common, Portsmouth.

². There were plans to construct a system that would have linked Admiralty House to Plymouth. However, these were never followed through. As a result, Murray profited far less from his invention than he might have done.

³. Popham had devised the system of signalling flags that Nelson had used at Trafalgar (1805).

⁴. Whitehall; Chelsea; Putney Heath; Coombe Warren. Kingston-on-Thames; Cooper's Hill, Esher; Chatley Heath, Cobham; Hastle Hill, Haslemere; Holder Hill, Midhurst; Beacon Hill, South Harting; Compton Down; Camp Down, Portsdown Hill; Lumps Fort, Southsea; and Portsmouth.

The Citadel

The Citadel (1942) is a breeze block-faced building that was constructed during the Second World War to house sensitive communications equipment that the Admiralty was using; to its east is The Admiralty House. The Citadel's fa ade, although largely covered by vine foliage, has, in view of its setting, a deeply incongruous air about it.

On top of the building there is a layer of soil that is said to be three feet thick. This has a lawn growing upon it. The purpose of this was to try to make the structure look like part of the Green Park from the air.¹ During a 1955 House of Commons discussion about the facility's unprepossessing character it was pointed out by one speaker the space was large enough to accommodate the construction of two tennis courts.

That it is not known publicly what now goes on within the building prompts speculation that whatever activity it might be is of a sensitive character.

Location: Horse Guards Parade, SW1A 2NS (blue, orange)

See Also: SKYSCRAPERS Security Service Developments; SPYING The Admiralty, Room 40

¹. The oxidised copper roof of the Ministry of Defence Building is also green. As are the belioned cupolas of Admiralty House.

The Admiralty House

The Admiralty House (1788) was built as the home of the Admiralty, the government body that supervised the Royal Navy. The building is no longer connected with the service.

Location: (32) Whitehall, SW1A 2DY (blue, brown)

Furniture

Elephantine Accommodation

The Conservative politician George Ward Hunt served as the First Lord of the Admiralty in the mid-1870s. The table in the Admiralty Board Room has a semi-circle cut into one end of it. This was created in order to physically accommodate the M.P.'s enormous belly. Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli assured Queen Victoria that the man has the sagacity of an elephant as well as the form .

See Also: FOOD Extreme Obesity

Resolutely Present

H.M.S. Resolute was sent to try to ascertain what had happened to the Franklin Expedition of 1854. She became ice-bound. The vessel was found by an American whaler. Members of the latter s crew sailed her back to the United States. The Federal government returned her to Britain. She continued but eventually reached a point at which she was decommissioned. Queen Victoria arranged for some of timbers to be made into a 1300lb. (590kg) desk. This was presented to President Hayes in 1880 and is still the desk in the Oval Office.

See Also: DEPARTMENT STORES Liberty & Company; EMBASSIES The United States Embassy

Website: www.whitehousehistory.org/photos/treasures-of-the-white-house-resolute-desk

H.M.S. Belfast

H.M.S. Belfast (1939) is a former Royal Navy cruiser. She was launched in 1938 and participated in the Arctic Convoys, the D-Day landings, and the Korean War. She was decommissioned in the late 1960s. In 1971 she was moored on the Thames. In 1978 the Imperial War Museum acquired her.

It is reputed that the craft's guns are trained on Scratchwood Services, the first service station on the M1 motorway when travelling northwards from London.¹

Location: Morgan's Lane, Tooley Street, SE1 2JH

See Also: MUSEUMS The Imperial War Museum

Website: www.iwm.org.uk www.iwm.org.uk/visits/hms-belfast

¹. This is not because a gunnery officer had had a bad experience at the facility. Rather, it derives from the prosaic reality that they have to be pointing towards somewhere.

Dazzle

The American artist Abbott H. Thayer lived in the backwoods of New England. There, he studied nature intensively. This led him to devise a series of laws of camouflage. He observed that many animals had dark coloured backs and light-coloured underbellies. This he deduced was because in daylight an object appears to be light on its top and dark underneath. Therefore, shade and light would be disrupted when they fell upon creatures that were patterned so. Some of the painter's views extended out into the realms of eccentricity. He managed to persuade himself that flamingos were pink so that they could blend into the sunset while they fed.

John Graham Kerr, the Regius Professor of Zoology at the University of Glasgow,¹ came across Thayer's ideas. Soon after the First World War had broken out, he sent the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, a memorandum in which he suggested that the Royal Navy's ships should be painted so that they could avail themselves of counter-shading and thereby become harder for enemy vessels to detect. The example that he gave was of the zebra. The Admiralty examined the proposal but concluded that it was best off painting its warships a monotone grey. The high rate at which its craft were lost to German U-boats in the Atlantic prompted a reconsideration of the academic s proposal. In 1917 fifty merchantmen were painted with bold black and white patterns. The technique was dubbed Dazzle.

Painters from the Vorticist school, a movement that in part drew upon Cubism, were employed to create the designs.

¹. Professor Kerr's expertise was in the subject of lungfish embryology.

The Navy Office

In 1656, during the English Republic, the Navy Office was opened in a building on Crutched Friars. In 1660, following the restoration of the monarchy, Samuel Pepys was appointed as the Clerk of the Navy Acts. The Office survived the Great Fire of 1666 intact but burned down seven years later. Christopher Wren designed the new one. It was completed in 1682. Physically, it stood apart from its neighbours to reduce the risk of being destroyed by fire. In the 1780s it was transferred to the west and river wings of Somerset House. In 1788 the Crutched Friars building was demolished.

Location: Crutched Friars, EC3N 2AU (blue, blue)

Somerset House, Strand, WC2R 1LA (orange, purple)

See Also: SAMUEL PEPYS The Navy Office

Nelson

See Also: COLUMNS Nelson's Column

Mortality and The Battle of Trafalgar

At the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) the British lost only 449 men and no ships.

92,386 sailors died during the course of the Napoleonic Wars. However, only 6663 (7%) were killed by enemy action.¹ The other 93% died through accidents, diseases, or shipwrecks.

Location: Trafalgar Square, WC2N 5DN (purple, grey)

See Also: FLAGS The White Ensign; ST PAUL's CATHEDRAL The Crypt

Website: www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/what-were-nelsons-last-words

¹. Almost 50,000 soldiers were killed at the Battle of Waterloo (1815).

H.M.S. Temeraire

The original Temeraire was a French warship. She was captured by the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War of 1756-1763. A new vessel was built in the 1790s. She was given the Temeraire name.

In 1801 the Peace of Amiens was declared between Britain and France. A mutiny occurred on the Temeraire, the crew refused to sail anywhere other than Britain. The mutiny was suppressed and twelve of its leaders were hung from the vessel's yardarm.

At the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) she followed the Victory as she breached the French line of battle. She took on in single battle the Spanish vessel Santisima Trinidad, which was then the world's largest ship. She then prevented the Victory from being captured.

In the 1820s and the 1830s the Temeraine served as a prison hulk and a stores depot.

J.M.W. Turner's painting The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged To Her Last Berth To Be Broken Up (1838) depicted the vessel being towed up the river by a paddle steamer at sunset so that she could be broken up.

The present-day H.M.S. Temeraire is a land-based physical training facility.

See Also: PRISONS, DISAPPEARED; TRAFALGAR SQUARE

Website: www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/joseph-mallord-william-turner-the-fighting-temeraire

Uniforms

In 1744 the 4^th Duke of Bedford was appointed the First Sea Lord. He himself was not much given to performing as an administrator. However, he had the good sense to allow two of his colleagues - Lord Anson and the 4^th Earl of Sandwich - who inclined to do so do so. In retrospect his tenure of the office was one during a number of important reforms were made. One of the lesser innovations was the introduction of naval uniforms. These were reputedly based on an outfit that was worn by the Duchess of Bedford.

See Also: TAILORS Gieves & Hawkes

David Backhouse 2024