ABSTRACT
Throughout the discussions about the nature of higher education in the Royal Navy and in particular the quality of the work undertaken at the Royal Naval College, there was enduring criticism of the educational standards achieved at the earlier, initial stages in HMS Britannia. The particular accusation was that despite an extensive mathematical syllabus and an inordinate amount of time devoted to it, the ship failed to establish the bedrock of appropriate skills. The result was that when the young officer returned to the College after four or five years at sea he had forgotten almost all he had learnt and had to devote a significant time to relearning the basics. This as we have seen was a problem as old as the provision of naval education itself, indeed it was one of the reasons why the concept of the sea going schoolmaster was introduced at the start of the eighteenth century. By the mid 1870s the argument from Greenwich had something of an ironic flavour to it for, as pointed out in the previous chapter, in the wake of the decision to dispense with the Admiralty Director of Education, the admiral president of the College now had the power to oversee, amend and modify the pattern of young officer training in the ship, if he so wished. At no point up to 1902 was this initiative taken and apart from the supervision and moderation of the passing out examinations by the Greenwich director of studies, there was little point of contact between the two institutions. In fact the policy adopted towards young officer education in the last two decades or so of the nineteenth century was not the product of an overseeing department at Greenwich, but rather of individually appointed official Committees, the first of which was convened on 29 June 1874.
