Royal Naval Engineering College
Steam brought painful change to the training of Royal Navy
officers. Finding a place for the engineers in traditional RN ranks demanded
considerable time and effort. The first RN vessel to have a steam-powered
propulsion system was the 1819 tug Comet. In 1828 the Navy List included its
first steam-powered ship, HMS Lightning, built in 1823. HMS Dee, completed in
1832, was the first steam-powered fighting ship. By 1840, the Navy List named
70 steam-powered vessels. They were all paddle-wheelers and were mostly
employed towing ships of the line in and out of harbour.
Izambard
Kingom Brunel
In 1840 I.K. Brunel concluded that a screw would propel
Great Britain, then building in Bristol. The Admiralty accepted Brunel’s
wisdom and fitted HMS Rattler with a screw in 1842. Rattler, in trials in 1845
with HMS Alecto, a paddlewheeler sloop, demonstrated the superiority of screw
propulsion. With the dawning of this new technology came the requirement for
technical support to operate and maintain the machinery. Machinery suppliers
provided civilian “engine-men” to operate and maintain the new
equipment until 1837, when the RN gave warrant rank to ships’
engineers.
The year 1837 was a milestone for the engineers in the navy.
The Admiralty first established the Steam Department and followed up with the
Engineering Branch Afloat. Ships’ engineers were warranted and equated
with other civil officers, such as masters, surgeons, pursers and
chaplains.
In 1843 the Royal Dockyards established schools for the
education of dockyard apprentices and some of these “engineer boys”
entered the Navy on completion of training. Some engineers were commissioned
from 1847 and all were commissioned after 1862. From 1863 the “engineer
boys” became “engineer students” with examinations for all ranks
to chief engineer, a rank equivalent to lieutenant commander today.
That
year also saw engineer students educated separately at the new Royal School of
Naval Architecture and Marine Engineers in Kensington. Engineer students joined
at the age of 14 for the four-year course. It was also 1863 when civil officers
introduced distinctive colours between their gold stripes, although only
“real” officers had the curl in the upper stripe. The four colours
introduced in 1863 were blue for navigators, red for surgeons, white for
paymasters and purple for engineers.
In 1873 the RN transformed the 18th
century Royal Naval Hospital buildings at Greenwich to accommodate the old
Royal Naval Academy in Portsmouth and the Kensington engineer students. Between
1876 and 1886 the students had yet another home, HMS Marlborough, an old wooden
screw-driven battleship in Portsmouth, while the navy built a permanent naval
engineering college near Devonport Dockyard. The Devonport Training School for
Engineer Students opened in 1880, but it soon became known as Keyham
College.
known as Keyham College. Dating from the introduction of heavy
machinery in ships, engineering personnel were regarded with disdain from the
bridge. Many naval officers viewed the new steam engines as a menace, not only
to their ships but their way of life. “Their Lordships feel it is their
bounden duty to discourage to the utmost of their ability the employment of
steam vessels, as they consider the introduction of steam is calculated to
strike a fatal blow at the naval supremacy of the empire,” wrote Lord
Melville, First Lord of the Admiralty in 1828.
The pride of the Royal
Navy was the sparkling appearance of warships that were cleaned and scrubbed
from morning till night. Showers of sparks and soot blew out of the
engineer’s funnels and settled everywhere, entailing much extra cleaning
and scrubbing to keep ships sparkling. An Admiralty Fleet Order of the 1860s
directed that the practice of firing muskets up the funnels to dislodge the
offending soot be discontinued.
|