ABSTRACT
During the American War of Independence, Britain had been almost overwhelmed by the naval forces of France, Spain, Holland and the United States. At the beginning of the French Revolutionary War, the Admiralty took seriously the need to improve naval ship and dockyard construction and to keep at sea the largest possible proportion of the British fleet. At the same time, Samuel Bentham put forward proposals for new ship designs and for dock and basin reconstruction at Portsmouth that promised the Admiralty ‘for their present estimate to treble the capabilities of the yard’. He was then invited to define the consistency of a new office at the Admiralty in terms of the skills needed, the staff it required and the responsibilities of the person appointed. The brief did not fail to deride the incompetence of the Navy Board, which managed the dockyards, and its hostility dated from this time. Nevertheless, the office of the Inspector General had the support of First Lord of the Admiralty, George Spencer, and of Bentham’s stepbrother, Charles Abbot, soon to be chairman of the Select Committee on Finance, then Speaker of the House of Commons. Bentham was also supported by the temporary secondment to his office of Henry Peake, who would become a Surveyor of the Navy in 1806; by an office staff which included from 1799 Simon Goodrich as Mechanist; and by an extraordinarily competent wife, Mary Sophia Bentham.
