ABSTRACT
The closure of the Royal Naval College Portsmouth as a young officer training establishment meant that from 1837 all youngsters embarking on a naval career proceeded directly to sea to pick up practical skills from ship’s officers and such mathematical instruction as was deemed necessary from the ship’s schoolmaster who, as one commentator noted, was often afforded ‘as little facility for imparting knowledge as the commanding officer could manage’.1 Reversion to the so called ‘pitchfork system’ with its notions of apprenticeship and practical skills was not without controversy, not least because the number of naval schoolmasters was already inadequate and the prospect of young officers, who would previously have trained at the College, joining the fleet was going to tax their minimal services further. The disestablishment of the College and the provision of education at sea were debated in the House of Commons on 7 April 1837. Participants included former First Lord of the Admiralty Sir James Graham, the advocate of public economy, and Member for Montrose, Joseph Hulme, future First Lord Sir Charles Wood and Admirals Sir Charles Adam and Sir Edward Codrington. The debate opened with regrets expressed about the recent closures and with Hulme claiming that the decision would have detrimental effects on future generations of naval officers. Graham, not surprisingly, disagreed, noting that a uniform system of education would now apply to all officers based on the concept that ‘in every man o’ war except they were very small craft indeed, there should be a schoolmaster appointed’.2 Notwithstanding that this was the policy that the Admiralty had pursued throughout the previous century, with a singular lack of success, it was announced that ‘in every ship of war there should be attached a competent schoolmaster with an adequate salary’ and that in future candidates must be ‘taken from an English or Scotch university’.3 This measure, noted Wood, would produce for the naval youth a method of ‘blending their scientific education with that general system of education which it is desirable that every gentleman who entered the navy should possess’.4 The man charged with this responsibility was now to be termed the ‘naval instructor’.
