HC Deb 10 March 1864 vol 173 cc1762-7
MR. H. BERKELEY

said, he rose to call attention to the defective state of the Armament of the Royal Navy. The welfare of the navy was naturally a matter of such deep interest in this country, that he felt he need make no apology for bringing this subject under the notice of the House. He trusted he might assume that a British ship ought to leave her port perfectly built, perfectly manned, and perfectly armed. As regarded the construction of ships, they were for a long time disgraceful in that respect, the models being largely borrowed from foreign nations, and the best of them from France. Of late years the Admiralty had, however, made great improvements in shipbuilding, and we now possessed the finest navy belonging to any civilized Power. For many years there was also good ground of complaint as to the manning of the navy. Lord Dundonald drew attention to the very bad state of things which prevailed; but it continued for a long time afterwards; and in the time of Lord Minto it was so disgraceful, that one of the Board of Admiralty resigned his seat because he held that the Board did not do its duty on this point. At present, however, no ship was sent to sea without being perfectly well manned with a crew worthy of the British navy. He now came to the third branch of the subject—the armament; and here he regretted that he could not give the same approbation as in the two other cases. We had always been behind foreign countries, and particularly the Americans, in the armament of our ships. At the time when Lord Dundonald was complaining that our ships were manned with the sweepings of the gaols and by dint of press-gangs, the armament was also in a very defective state. We then sent out frigates carrying 18-pounders to cope with powerful ships carrying 24.pounders; and it was owing to that great mistake of the Admiralty that the Americans were able to take into port, with the British ensign lowered, our Macedonian, Guerrier, and Java, that two of our "jackass" frigates were captured at once by a single American frigate. The Admiralty unfortunately did not find out the blunder till too late; but then they despatched the Endymion, armed with 24-pounder guns, which fully vindicated the honour of our flag in the contest with the President. It could not be said that the latter was vanquished in fair fight, since she struck her flag to a squadron of frigates, but she was cut in pieces by the 24 pounders of the Endymion. The next improvement of our guns was introduced by Sir Thomas Hardy, by the equalization of the calibre of the guns throughout the navy, the 32-pounder being taken as the standard. For some time the Americans did not gain any great advantage over us in weight of metal, though they secured a very powerful gun called the Columbiad. We then introduced the Paixhan shell-gun into our navy, which was also used by the French, who however, in addition, had 36-pounders instead of 32-pounders, as we had. He believed that the French still retained their 36-pounders. But what did the Americans do? They were determined to procure a more powerful armament, and they succeeded. A very clever naval officer, Admiral Dahlgren, invented a gun on the Paixhan plan, of nine-inch calibre; and they equipped the whole of their ships with shell-guns of that one calibre. Although our frigates were more shapely to look at, the Americans contended that their ships, armed with nine-inch shell-guns, could pour forth a more formidable broadside. There could he little doubt of the prodigious effect produced by shells. At Sinope the Russians destroyed the Turkish fleet entirely by shells, and with one shell the Alabama sent the Hatteras to the bottom of the sea. On referring to naval history he found that in one case a French ship received 3,000 solid shot and never went down; but if that ship had received 300 shells, what would have been the consequence? He consequently contended that up to the last few years the American vessels carried more powerful batteries and were better armed than our ships. We had now arrived at the epoch of iron ships. He did not wish to criticize the building of iron ships; he presumed we were at least on an equality with other nations, and he was contented to believe that every Board of Admiralty would carry on the best system of construction. But he trusted we should not fall into the great mistake of supposing that, if we could build iron ships, the Americans could not do the same. Their iron was superior to ours, and the Americans were an ingenious go-a-head people, who would never allow themselves to be beaten by us in any work of this sort. Six years ago, at the battle of Solferino, the Emperor of the French made a complete revolution in the armaments of the world. He there produced a rifled gun which had a greater trajectory power than any that had ever appeared in a field of battle before. So great was the improvement supposed to be that all the nations of Europe set to work to arm their navies and armies with rifled guns. The French had already armed their navy with these weapons. What had we been doing to place ourselves on an equal footing with other countries, and how had we succeeded? We had spent £3,000,000, we had been six years hard at work, and now at last we were going back to the old gun which had been well termed the" Brown Bess" of the navy. The history of our operations was rather curious. It appeared that the Duke of Newcastle met somewhere with an engineer named Armstrong who made a few guns. The hon. and gallant Member for Huntingdon (General Peel) during his administration at the War Office laid hold of the same Armstrong, and it must be confessed that he got more out of him than any one else, for he set Armstrong upon doing that which Armstrong could do, and did not try him beyond his means. Under the superintendence of the hon. and gallant Gentleman, Armstrong produced 12-pounders which were excellent field-pieces, and he also turned out 40-pounders. It was not for him to decide whether the breech-loading principle was the one that ought to be preferred above all others; but this he knew—that it was not the general opinion throughout the Artillery service that the breech-loading system was the best. However that might be, Armstrong made 100-pounders and 110-pounders for the navy; but it was a remarkable fact that all the guns he produced other than those ordered by the hon. and gallant Member for Huntingdon, were dead failures. As our seamen said, they fired at both ends; they blew away their breech plugs, and destroyed the hair and whiskers of our artillerymen with what was called a "mild escape of gas." The evidence taken before the Select Committee was decisive that these guns were faulty and perfectly useless for the navy. Captain Wainwright declared they were the worst guns he ever saw in a sea-way; and his evidence was confirmed by the proceedings at Japan, where the guns were devious in their firing, and in some cases actually refused to go off at all. What was to be done? Were we to go to sleep in the happy belief that the Americans were in the same position as ourselves? He hoped we should do nothing of the kind. The Times always befriended Armstrong, but it was remarkable for its excellent correspondence, and it not unfrequently happened that its correspondents went very much in opposition to the gentlemen who wrote the leading articles. In one of his letters, the Richmond Correspondent of The Times had stated that Parrott guns in the North and Brooke guns in the South possessed penetrative powers against which no armour plates could avail; he raised a warning voice to his countrymen in England, and expressed his astonishment at the apathy of our War Office and Admiralty, which did not send over competent persons to watch the progress of armament in America, and see it brought to proof in actual warfare. The same gentleman, in a second letter, wrote as follows:— Again I feel tempted to raise a warning voice about the disparity of the armament on board of the English and American navies. It is impossible for those who have been many months absent from England to be well informed as to the actual state of public opinion at the present moment upon this vital subject. But, judging from the officers of Her Majesty's navy, who have at rare intervals brought vessels of war into Confederate ports, it appears still to be held that the 68-pounder, or 8-inch smooth bore, is England's best weapon of offence against ironclad vessels. The experience gained at Charleston enables me confidently to affirm, that as well might you pelt one of the Yankee Monitors or the Ironsides with peas as expect them to be in any way damaged by their 8-inch shot. Another disagreeable question forces itself upon an Englishman's attention, when he is cognizant of the terrific broadside thrown by the eight 11-inch guns of the Ironsides—one of the most formidable broadsides, in the opinion of the defenders of Charleston, which has ever been thrown by any vessel. Have we any ship in existence which could successfully resist such a broadside, and respond to it with anything like commensurate weight and vigour? I should be faithless to my duty if I did not mention that it is the universal opinion of all the English officers serving in the Confederate army with whom I have conversed, that England is behind America in the weight and power of the guns sent by both nations to sea. The other day there sailed from Portsmouth one of our armour-clad ships, the Hector. She was originally intended to carry 34 guns; but her present armament was 24, of which 20 were the old 68-pounders and four were Armstrong rifled 110-pounders. The facts were given by The Times' correspondent at Portsmouth, and The Times remarked that when it was considered that the guns on board the Hector only fired cast-iron projectiles, it could be of little consequence, as against armour-clad ships, whether she carried 1 or 50 of such weapons. That ship was going to the Mediterranean, and would anchor alongside the Solferino and the Magenta, which were armed with 6½-inch guns, on the pattern of a certain gun that was tried in 1860 near L'Orient, which carried 27lb. of powder, and which, at 1,100 yards, sent its shot through and through a target representing the side of La Gloire. Suppose a war were to break out, and the Hector fell in with either the Solferino or the Magenta, what would become of her? But how were we in that state? Because in this age, when our Ministers propounded the doctrine of throwing everything open to competition, they yet allowed a profound monopoly to exist in guns, shutting out all our most competent engineers. Everything must be done by Sir William Armstrong, who, when he made an expensive failure, was not discharged but was left to try again; whereas everybody who opposed him received the cold shoulder. Mr. Whitworth said he had never had a fair trial, though it was said he was now about to get one. Yet Mr. Whitworth had declared that he had no faith in the persons whom the War Office trusted in these matters. Again, there was the Mersey Ironworks Company, represented by the hon. Member for Liverpool, and which had made the Horsfall gun—a weapon allowed by engineers to be of the finest wrought iron that ever came out of a workshop. Their gun had stood every test, and it was presented in the handsomest manner by the company to the Government. Yet, when it was done with, it was thrown into the mud, and the company were never thanked for what they had done, nor employed to make other guns, because that would interfere with Sir William Armstrong. Why were not other persons to be allowed to compete with Armstrong, with Whitworth, or with any one else? To such men the Government turned the cold shoulder, and they were compelled to seek customers elsewhere. The Mersey Ironworks Company were now making excellent guns for foreign Governments. Then there was Captain Blakeley, who was making guns successfully for America and Russia—the same kind of gun with which the Alabama sunk the Hatteras. He offered to try his gun against the guns of Armstrong or Whitworth at his own expense—offering, Englishmanlike, to back his weapon for a thousand guineas. Our Government, he repeated, gave the cold shoulder to native talent, and that talent was now seeking a market elsewhere. He thought that in bringing the question of our artillery under the notice of the House, he had done no more than it was his duty to do.