From Coal Consciousness to Coal Consensus

Gray, Steven

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57642-2_3

Steven Gray⁴

Part of the book series: Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series ((CIPCSS))

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Abstract

This chapter shows that, even with such a glut of recommendations from the Carnarvon Commission, progress on the coaling station defence was still subject to the political ideology of the incumbent government. Responses to a coal consciousness were advanced or impeded by party politics, economics, and popular views of imperial and naval weakness. As long as Gladstone’s liberal imperialism held sway, little progress was made. Yet with an increase in pro-imperial activism, measures were eventually taken to consider the coaling issue, thus leading to increased naval spending. The chapter then considers the legacy of coal consciousness arguing that it placed coal at the centre of a growing imperial defence movement and allowed Britain to respond quickly and effectively to the German maritime threat during the First World War.

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Notes

1.
Coal consciousness is described as the realisation of the crucial part that the security of coal and coaling infrastructure played in the protection of British interests abroad. See Chap. 1.
2.
See, for example, James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). For a history of the Admiralty, see C.I. Hamilton, Admiralty The Making of the Modern Admiralty: British Naval Policy-Making, 1805–1927 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
3.
This is also reflective of the wider Victorian state “machinery” in general along with the increase in statistical collection and reporting; increasing desire to categorise and quantify Victorian society (classes) and industry; and the subsequent explosion in recording and bureaucracy, particularly after the introduction of Birth, Marriage and Death recording as well as standardised census taking and recording.
4.
J.P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 335.
5.
Ibid., 339.
6.
Hugh M. Clokie, and J. William Robinson, Royal Commissions of Inquiry: The Significance of Investigations in British Politics (London: Octagon Press, 1969), 123.
7.
‘Memorandum circulated 24 July 1882’, TNA, CO 323/353.
8.
W.C.B. Tunstall, ‘Imperial Defence, 1870–1897’, in J.H. Rose, A.P. Newton, E.A. Benians, and H. Dodwell (eds), The Cambridge History of the British Empire. Vol. 3: The Empire–Commonwealth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 232.
9.
Donald M. Schurman and John F. Beeler, Imperial Defence, 1868–1887 (London: Frank Cass, 2000, 127–128; ‘The Report on the Defences of British Coaling Stations Abroad; and of Colonial and Indian Defended Ports (1894)’, TNA CAB 18/14.
10.
The Times, 7 November 1884.
11.
W. Sydney Robinson, Muckraker: The Scandalous Life and Times of W.T. Stead, Britain’s First Investigative Journalist (London: Robson Press, 2013), 64.
12.
W.T. Stead, ‘The Truth About the Navy and Its Coaling Stations by One Who Knows the Facts’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 15 September–13 November 1884.
13.
John Beeler, ‘In the Shadow of Briggs: A New Perspective on British Naval Administration and W.T. Stead’s 1884 “Truth About the Navy” Campaign’, International Journal of Naval History, 1, no. 1, (2002).
14.
Joseph O. Baylen, ‘Stead, William Thomas (1849–1912)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; The Pall Mall Gazette, 22 September 1884; Dennis Griffiths, The Encyclopedia of the British Press 1422–1992 (London: Macmillan, 1992), 453.
15.
The article particular to coaling stations was published on 16 October 1884.
16.
Beeler, ‘Steam Strategy and Schurman’, in Kennedy, Neilson, and Schurman (eds.), Far-Flung Lines, 37; Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1866–1880 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 265; Schurman and Beeler, Imperial Defence, 130.
17.
‘Press Reaction’, The Pall Mall Gazette, 22 September 1884; ‘The Truth About the Navy’, Morning Post, 19 September 1884.
18.
Stead, ‘The Truth About the Navy and Its Coaling Stations by One Who Knows the Facts’.
19.
The Times, 7 November 1884; TNA, CO 323/357.
20.
The Times, 14 November 1884.
21.
Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 354, 367.
22.
Ibid., 369.
23.
See, for example, Franklyn Arthur Johnson, Defence by Committee: The British Committee of Imperial Defence, 1885–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960).
24.
See Parry, ‘Liberalism and Liberty’, in Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 72; Duncan Bell, ‘Empire and Imperialism’, in Gareth Stedman Jones and Gregory Claeys (eds.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 87.
25.
Memorandum from Childers to Gladstone, 18 December 1884, cited in Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 357.
26.
Cain, ‘Radicalism, Gladstone, and the Liberal Critique of Disraelian “Imperialism”’, in Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
27.
Dane Kennedy, ‘The Great Arch of Empire’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian World (London; New York: Routledge, 2012), 57–72.
28.
Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 367–370.
29.
Ibid., 372.
30.
Parry, ‘Liberalism and Liberty’, in Mandler (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, 99.
31.
Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 345–349.
32.
Green, The Crisis of Conservatism, 61; Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 360.
33.
See, for example C.A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 228–243; Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 323, 355.
34.
Ronald Robinson, John Gallagher, and Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London: Macmillan, 1961).
35.
Palmerston famously remarked that ‘it is the business of the government to open and secure the roads for the merchant’.
36.
Jackie Fisher in 1904 exclaimed ‘If the Navy is not supreme, no army, however large, is of the slightest use. It is not invasion we have to fear if our Navy is beaten, it’s starvation!’ TNA, ADM 116/942.
37.
See P.J. Cain, and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (London: Longman, 1993), 28–29.
38.
Donald Currie, Maritime Warfare: The Importance to the British Empire of a Complete System of Telegraphs, Coaling Stations and Graving Docks. A Lecture (London: Harrison and Sons, 1877).
Many of these were also witnesses called by the Carnarvon Commission.
39.
Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 345.
40.
Green, The Crisis of Conservatism, 66.
41.
Beeler, ‘Steam Strategy and Schurman’, in Kennedy, Neilson, and Schurman (eds.), Far–Flung Lines, 232; Roger Parkinson, The Late Victorian Navy: The Pre-Dreadnought Era and the Origins of the First World War (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2008), 103–105; Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, 356.
42.
Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 177; Oliver MacDonagh, ‘The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government’, in Peter Stansky (ed.), The Victorian Revolution: Government and Society in Victoria’s Britain (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973), 9.
43.
Matthew Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, Mariner’s Mirror, 81, no. 1, (1995), 74.
44.
He was Prime Minister for eleven of the twenty years from 1868 to 1887.
45.
Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 171; P. Smith, ‘Ruling the Waves: Government, the Service and Cost of Naval Supremacy, 1885–1899’, in P. Smith (ed.), Government and the Armed Forces in Britain, 1856–1990 (London: Hambledon Press, 1996).
46.
Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 36, 208.
47.
Ibid., 187.
48.
‘Measures taken in relation to Colonial Defence—Printed for 1887 Colonial Conference’, TNA, PRO 30/6/131. This is not to be confused with the 1878 committee of the same name.
49.
Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century, 335.
50.
Schurman and Beeler, Imperial Defence, 134; ‘The Report on the Defences of British Coaling Stations Abroad; and of Colonial and Indian Defended Ports (1894)’, TNA CAB 18/14.
51.
These are discussed in some detail in ‘The Report on the Defences of British Coaling Stations Abroad; and of Colonial and Indian Defended Ports (1894)’, TNA CAB 18/14. See also Jon Tetsuro Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889–1914 (London: Routledge, 1993), 12–14; Lambert, ‘Economic Power, Technological Advantage, and Imperial Strength’; M.J. Daunton, ‘“The Greatest and Richest Sacrifice Ever Made on the Altar of Imperialism”: The Finance of Naval Expansion, c. 1890–1914’, in Robert J. Blyth, Andrew Lambert and Jan Rüger (eds.), The Dreadnought and the Edwardian Age (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 31–50.
52.
Imperial Defence Act, 1888.
53.
‘Summary of Carnarvon Reports’, TNA, PRO 30/6/131.
54.
Malcolm Pearce, and Geoffrey Stewart, British Political History, 1867–1990: Democracy and Decline (London: Routledge, 1992), 162.
55.
Ibid., 167.
56.
Roger Willock, Bulwark of Empire: Bermuda’s Fortified Naval Base, 1860–1920, 2nd ed. (Bermuda: Bermuda Maritime Museum Press, 1988), 27.
57.
Archibald S. Hurd, ‘Coal, Trade, and the Empire’, The Nineteenth Century, November 1898.
58.
Hurd, ‘Coal, Trade, and the Empire’.
59.
‘King Coal’, Western Mail, 9 November 1898.
60.
George O. Squier, ‘The Influence of Submarine Cables Upon Military and Naval Supremacy’, National Geographic Magazine, Vol XII, no. 1 (January 1901), 1.
61.
Interestingly, little is said about the security of the colliers delivering coal.
62.
Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 65.
63.
TNA guide to intelligence records, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/intelligence-records.html.
64.
Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 66–68.
65.
Ibid.
66.
Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 188; Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 69–71.
67.
The FIC reports contain information on Germany, France, Egypt, Russia, Italy, Turkey, Korea, and Japan. Some report about defences of the Mediterranean and Australia but none specifically about coal. ‘Reports of the FIC’, TNA, ADM 231.
68.
Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 65.
69.
‘Report of the Preparations Made by the Admiralty in Anticipation of an Outbreak of War in the Spring of 1885’, TNA, ADM 116/3409.
70.
Ibid.
71.
Beeler, ‘Steam Strategy and Schurman’, in Kennedy, Neilson, and Schurman (eds.), Far-Flung Lines, 37.
72.
‘Lord Charles Beresford’s Paper on War Organisation’, TNA, ADM 116/3106.
73.
‘Evan Macgregor’s memorandum on Naval Mobilisation, December 1880’, TNA, ADM 116/3106.
74.
‘Lord Charles Beresford’s Paper on War Organisation’, TNA ADM 116/3106. Author’s italics.
75.
Ibid.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Ibid.
78.
Pall Mall Gazette, 13 October 1886.
79.
Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 72.
80.
Ibid., 74–75.
81.
Ibid., 75.
82.
Ibid., 73–75. See also S.T. Grimes, Strategy and War Planning in the British Navy: 1887–1918 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012).
83.
Stuart D. Gordon, ‘The Mobilization of a Man-of-war’, Navy and Army Illustrated, 9th July 1897, 108–109.
84.
Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 185.
85.
Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’, in Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 3, the Nineteenth Century, 339; Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, 3rd ed. (London: Fontana, 1991), 193, 209; Parkinson, The Late Victorian Navy, Abstract, 161–162; Lambert, ‘The Royal Navy: 1856–1914’, in Neilson and Errington (eds.), Navies and Global Defense, 79.
86.
New York Times, 6 March 1892.
87.
‘The Report on the Defences of British Coaling Stations Abroad; and of Colonial and Indian Defended Ports (1894)’, TNA, CAB 18/14.
88.
Captain Stone, Paper read at United States Institute, January 1889. Cited in C.H. Crofts, ‘Naval Bases and Coaling Stations’, in Sir John Lubbock (ed.), The Isle of Man, Gibraltar, Malta, St. Helena, Barbados, Cyprus, the Channel Islands, the British Army and Navy: Historical, Political, and Geographical History (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Company, 1902), 200–203.
89.
New York Times, 6 March 1892.
90.
‘Coaling Stations’, 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.1911encyclopedia.org//Coaling_stations.
91.
There is much debate about when Britain came to view Germany as its main threat. The most convincing case is made by Seligmann, however. He also argues that Germany’s Atlantic liners, with their high speeds and relatively long range of operation, were a major threat to British trade. See Matthew S. Seligmann, The Royal Navy and the German Threat 1901–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–6.
92.
G.M. Bennett, Naval Battles of the First World War (London: Penguin, 1968), 410–420; Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Random House, 2003), 255. Sir Julian Stafford Corbett, Naval Operations. Vol. 1, to the Battle of the Falklands, December 1914 (London: Longmans Green and Co., 1920), 243, 255.
93.
Built after a Royal Commission in 1860 into the French-invasion scares of the 1840s and 1850s, these were hugely expensive. They were, however, largely obsolete by the time they were built. See Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 18–19.
94.
Andrew Lambert, ‘The Royal Navy and the Defence of Empire 1856–1918’, in Kennedy (ed.), Imperial Defence, 117.
95.
Ibid., 115.
96.
Treaties and alliances with other powers such as Japan were also key.
97.
‘Measures taken in relation to Colonial Defence—Printed for 1887 Colonial Conference’, TNA, PRO 30/6/131; Schurman and Beeler, Imperial Defence, 134; Brian Bond, ‘Introduction’, in Smith (ed.), Government and the Armed Forces in Britain, xv.
98.
Allen, ‘The Foreign Intelligence Committee and the Origins of the Naval Intelligence Department of the Admiralty’, 67.
99.
See, for instance Hamilton, The Making of the Modern Admiralty, 180.
100.
New York Times, 6 March 1892.
101.
Ibid.

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History, SSHLS, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, UK
Steven Gray

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Gray, S. (2018). From Coal Consciousness to Coal Consensus. In: Steam Power and Sea Power. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57642-2_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57642-2_3
Published: 28 September 2017
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57641-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57642-2
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