HC Deb 02 June 1865 vol 179 cc1224-30
COLONEL HERBERT

, in rising to ask the Question of which he had given notice, said, that during the war in New Zealand the reinforcements of troops sent out brought up the total to 10,000 men. There was only one chaplain of the Church of England with them, and the Bishop of New Zealand volunteered the services of himself and several of his clergy. They performed that duty, it was needless to say, most efficiently. But as it was somewhat inconvenient, not to say derogatory, to these clergymen that they should be indebted for their food and the forage of their horses to the hospitality of officers, whenever they visited the camp, representations were addressed to the Secretary of State, who immediately sanctioned the issue of the pay and allowances attached to the office of acting mili- tary chaplains. But, by an Order dated February, 1865, stated to have been issued in consequence of a letter from Lord de Grey, all these clergymen were turned off by General Cameron without a days' notice. He trusted that this Order had arisen from a misconception of the instructions conveyed in Earl de Grey's second letter, since it was wholly opposed to the spirit of his former despatch. The House, he believed, would agree with him that our troops, scattered as they were, ought not to be left without the advantage of clerical superintendence, wherever this could be obtained; and also that clergymen giving their services to the army, ought not to be expected to act gratuitously. He therefore begged to ask the Under Secretary of State for War, Whether any instructions have been sent to General Cameron which have induced him to withdraw from the Clergymen acting as Chaplains to the Troops the pay and allowances given them while performing duty with the Troops; what number of Clergymen had been drawing such pay and allowances at any one time; what number of Military Chaplains of the Church of England are serving in Now Zealand, and the number of troops now there; and whether he will have any objection to lay upon the table of the House any instructions bearing upon the subject?

MR. HUSSEY VIVIAN

said, that having acted for two years on the Select Committee, the difficulty and doubt which he had always felt was as to the person responsible for the adoption of any particular arm. During the past few years serious mistakes had been made, both as regarded small arms and ordnance; but one might almost defy any person to say who was responsible for these mistakes. What was needed was the guiding hand in this branch of expenditure. In the navy, if defective ships were built, there was a Constructor who could be blamed or superseded; but in the army there was no corresponding official. In former times the Master General of the Ordnance was responsible for the Vote for small arms and big guns; but the noble Lord would hardly say that the present Director General of Ordnance was responsible for the selection of any particular arm. As regarded the Select Committee, questions were no doubt submitted to them for their opinion, but they were not entitled to make suggestions.

THE MARQUESS OF HARTINGTON

said, the question of responsibility just raised by the hon. Member for Glamorganshire had been fully discussed on the last occasion, when the subject of heavy ordnance was before the House, and it was then agreed on all hands that the Secretary of State for War, and no one else, was responsible to the House for the adoption of any gun or system of ordnance. The functions of the different offices enumerated by the hon. Member were perfectly defined. The Select Committee was a consultative body, principally charged with carrying out such experiments as were necessary to ascertain the merits of the different inventions, and to make reports for the guidance of the Secretary of State. These reports were made to the Director of Ordnance, to whom also, in the first instance, the proposals of all inventors relating to improvements in ordnance were referred. The Director of Ordnance was the adviser of the Secretary of State, and was held responsible by him to a considerable extent for the advice which he gave; but the responsibility of making any change, or of deciding upon any new system, rested, as far as that House was concerned, finally and solely on the Secretary of State himself.

With regard to the statement of the hon. Member for Inverness (Mr. H. Baillie), he would not follow the hon. Member into all his details. The complaint of the hon. Gentleman against the Select Committee was two-fold—that in defiance of what had been stated by the right hon. Member for Huntingdon and himself, the Committee were inventors; and that they had not carried out the competition as to the 7-inch gun in a fair and satisfactory manner. As to the first of these allegations, he was not aware that the gallant General had ever stated that no Member of the Select Committee should bring forward any invention of his own, or that any positive rule had been laid down prohibiting the Members of the Committee from being inventors. No doubt, their functions were not inventive; but if any of the members were in a position to suggest any useful improvement or important alteration, the regulation seemed an absurd one that would debar them from doing so. The hon. Gentleman, after considerable research, had only brought forward two cases—he said that General St. George had invented a rifled gun, and that another Member of the Committee had invented a new gun-carriage, which had been adopted. He was not in a position to say whether the inventions by Members of the Committee had been correctly described in those two instances; but if, during the seven years or more that the Committee had exercised their functions, those were the only cases that could be adduced, the Committee certainly had not been an inventing body to any great extent. The hon. Member also stated that the Select Committee had invented a gun. The facts simply were that Mr. Bashley Britten and Mr. Jeffrey having brought forward different systems of projectiles for rifled guns, without having proposed any special gun to give them, it seemed to the Committee unnecessary to have two guns to try the different systems. One gun, therefore, was prepared capable of testing these different projectiles; there was nothing peculiar about it, but as it could not correctly be called the Bashley Britten gun or the Jeffrey gun, it was called by the name of the Select Committee, and it was used solely for trying these two kinds of projectiles. A more important point appeared to be the manner in which the competition between the 7-inch guns had been conducted; and, perhaps, it would have been well had the hon. Gentleman postponed his observations on that point, until the Report of the Select Committee which had been moved for was produced. So far from departing from the conditions laid down in the printed programme, he believed they had not done so in any instance. The 22nd Article said— The Committee reserve to themselves full latitude in the use of this second 100 rounds to fire them in such a way as to bring out the strong or weak points of any one of the systems in such a manner as they judge best calculated to answer the purpose of this inquiry—namely, which of these five systems of projectiles and four systems of rifling is to be preferred, and to determine whether any one of them is to be recommended for further trial or adoption. The Committee in other respects laid down very stringent conditions, which had been scrupulously adhered to, as to the way in which the competition was to be conducted. The hon. Member said that up to a certain point the competition was entirely in favour of Commander Scott. But when the Report should be laid upon the table the hon. Gentleman would see that he was completely in error in that statement. The hon. Member said that another gun was then introduced in which the different merits of the different systems which had been proved by experience were adopted, and that was done for the purpose of competing with Commander Scott's gun. Where the hon. Gentleman had got his information he could not say, but he could assure the House that no alteration whatever had been made in any one of the guns from the time that the competition originally begun. The complaint which Commander Scott made against the Committee was that they refused to allow him to make certain alterations which would add to the efficiency of his gun. But the Committee were willing to allow him or any of the competitors to make any alterations which appeared reasonable, and which would not clearly prolong the time within which the competition should take place; but they were not willing that such alterations should be made as would necessarily take too long a time and seriously delay the trial. Besides, this competition was not ordered with a view of enabling competitors to work out by experiments a good system of rifling. The object of the Committee was to test five different systems, each of which had been so far tried by experience as to have assumed at least, in some respects, the characteristics of a complete system of rifling. The hon. Member had asked what was this Woolwich gun. He would explain that. In the course of the competition the Committee recommended that a system which had not been brought forward by any inventor in England should also be tried. That was a system of rifling on the French principle, and the gun rifled upon that system was what the hon. Member thought fit to designate as the gun of the Select Committee. But the Select Committee had no sort of interest in that gun, except that knowing it had been adopted by the French Government they thought it desirable that the system upon which it was rifled should be tested in comparison with the other systems. The only alteration which was made and which the article of the programme to which he referred fully admitted, was the alteration in the position of the sights on the French gun. That alteration consisted solely in reversing the position of the large and small sights, but no alteration whatever was made which effected the general principles of the system. As to the assertion of Commander Scott, that the Committee adopted his plan of centring the shot, the Committee entirely denied that Commander Scott had any right whatever to what he now claimed as his invention of this principle of centring the shot. In his first communication to the Government, I Commander Scott described his system of centring the shot as very analogous to Mr. I Whitworth's, and, as the Committee had shown, the very system which Commander Scott claimed as his own had been in use among some of the oldest inventors; and they further expressed a strong doubt whether this mysterious operation of centring the shot ever took place at all.

With regard to the statement made by the hon. Member for Maldon (Mr. Peacocke) he (the Marquess of Hartington) certainly did say that it was extremely inconvenient that matters involving the character of the Select Committee should be brought forward in the form of a question, inasmuch as within the limits of an answer it was not possible that a satisfactory explanation could be given. The hon. Member stated, that in the competition which took place one gun was fired from a wooden platform and the other from an iron platform. That fact might have given some advantage during part of the trial to one gun over the oilier, but if the hon. Member had not been so precipitate in asking the question the error might have been corrected, for it was intended by the Committee to do what was ultimately done—to change the gun from one platform to the other. The hon. Member stated that the shunt gun had less windage allowed than the French gun. That might be accounted for in this way. The first supply of shot to these guns was ordered to be made with a smaller windage than the second and third supplies, in order to bring out as fully as possible all the best qualities of the gun. It was obvious that the smaller the windage the greater the accuracy, and it was probable that the shunt gun was fired with shot from the first supply, while the French gun was fired with shot from the third. As he had said before, the Select Committee had no interest whatever in I these guns beyond what everybody had in securing a good system of rifling for the guns of the service. Neither did the Committee claim any merit whatever as inventors of the French gun, and although it was true, as stated by the hon. Gentleman, that they recommended that the guns now rifling should be rifled on what was called the Woolwich system, that was simply and solely because the results obtained by that system had been considerably superior to those of any other system. He believed there was no other point brought forward by the hon. Member upon which an answer was required. It was a matter of great consequence that the trial in so important an affair should be conducted in the fairest possible manner. No one had any ground for stating that the Committee had shown any favour whatever to any of the competitors, and he was quite certain that they had shown none whatever for what was called the French system, but was now denominated the Woolwich principle of rifling.

With respect to the question put by the hon. and gallant Gentleman opposite (Colonel Herbert) he was not aware that any Orders had been sent out to General Cameron on the subject of chaplains, except an Order in October, 1863. There was at that time a very large number of officiating chaplains employed with the forces, and General Cameron was informed that Lord de Grey was desirous of reducing the number. At the date of the last Returns for the quarter ending the 31st of December, 1864, there were in the colony five Church of England, six Roman Catholic, and five Presbyterian officiating clergymen, in addition to the commissioned chaplains of the forces, of whom there were two Church of England, two Roman Catholic, and one Presbyterian. He had no knowledge of any such order as that attributed to General Cameron having been issued by him; but if issued, it had been under a misapprehension of the order of the Secretary of State. It would be seen that some reduction had been made, but General Cameron had full authority to employ as many clergy as he might consider necessary.

Motion agreed to.

House at rising to adjourn till Thursday next.