Officers - Recruitment and Promotion
At the highest levels of British society, there were broad rules as to how the sons of noble birth ordered their lives. The oldest son normally inherited the titles and properties. The second son purchased a commission in the Army, and served in a prestigious regiment. The third son joined the Navy - unlike the Army, commissions were not purchased, and prize money could be substantial.
Royal Navy officers can be split into two groups: commissioned officers and warrant officers. Commissioned officers included the following ranks: Admirals (also known as flag officers), Commodores, Captains, Commanders and Lieutenants. Warrant officers included: Gunners, Boatswains, Carpenters, Surgeons' Mates, Armourers, Sailmakers, Master At Arms, Caulker, Ropemakers and Coopers. In addition, Masters pre-1808, Surgeons pre-1843, Pursers pre-1843, Chaplains pre-1843 and Engineers pre-1847 were all warrant officers. After these dates these ranks were all commissioned officers.
The captains of men-of-war in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries may be divided into two categories : those who were bred seamen, chiefly serving their apprenticeship in the merchant navy, and usually in ships owned or commanded by relatives, and those who entered the Royal Navy by influence or interest, and generally with little or no previous knowledge of the sea.
Because the title Captain was given to all officers who commanded ships, regardless of their rank, Captains were always known in the eighteenth-century as 'Post Captains' by virtue of their commission to command a 'post ship', one of the 5th Rate or larger (6th Rate from 1713). Below Post-Captain came the rank of Master and Commander, commanding officers ('commanders', in the language of the time) of small men of war of the 6th Rate and below. These smaller vessels were not allowed Masters for navigation purposes. In social terms, the officers' entry and training system instituted in the 1670s envisaged that this rank would be occupied by men of humble birth, from the lower deck or the merchant service, who would normally rise no further.
The regulations were thoroughly elastic, and admitted of at least three methods of entering the commissioned ranks - methods differing in detail, but conforming in principle to the established rules. Some officers entered with the king's letter, and directly at the public expense; these were generally sent to serve under some distinguished naval officer or Court favorite. The "servant" system still existed and remained in force until 1794. Youngsters went to sea with a friend or neighbor of their fathers', and were either rated on the ship's books as a servant of the admiral, captain, lieutenant, purser, or some other officer. It mattered not, however, whether they entered as king's letter boys, through the academy, or with these bogus ratings, all served their apprenticeship in the same way on the quarter-deck and were intended for officers.
King's Letter boy, the usual description in the British Navy given to the rating of 'volunteer-per-order' [VPO], which was an early method of entry into the Royal Navy of 'young gentlemen' destined to become officers. The rating was introduced by Samuel Pepys in 1676 and the recipient received £24 a year and a letter from the crown which virtually guaranteed him promotion to commissioned rank after the specified training and passing the examination for lieutenant. The last entry by this system was in 1732 but a similar one, as captain's servant, continued for some decades.
More often than not, these officers, whichever way they entered the king's service, were of what it was the fashion to call "good family"; they belonged to the middle class, but they were poor. They chose, in fact, the sword wherewith to cut themselves a portion in life. Nevertheless, there were exceptions, and scions of the aristocracy, like Edward Montagu, Earl of Sandwich, were to be found cheek by jowl with Sir Christopher Myngs, who is said to have boasted that he was a shoemaker's son.
Young gentlemen served their apprenticeship, as it were, as page to some man of note or position, and worked their way up, partly by influence and partly by talent, to the higher grades of their chosen professions. Page-boy or cabin-boy, it was a similar method of beginning a career under the most promising auspices, and was followed by rich and poor alike, provided only that the essential patronage was forthcoming.
Most of them passed for lieutenant, and then whether they obtained a commission and rose any higher, depended something on merit, but a great deal more on interest. no one who entered by these methods could be said to have risen from the ranks, or, as the phrase in the Navy has it, have "entered at the hawse-holes," meaning to come in as the cables do, through the lower deck. It was possible to enter the commissioned ranks through the hawse-holes, although it was very far from common for those who did so to rise beyond the rank of lieutenant. In this case apprenticeship in the merchant marine was a sine qua non. Although very few captains and flag-officers came in at the hawseholes, it was common enough in the first quarter of the 19th century to find lieutenants who had learnt their trade on the forecastle.
An Order in Council of April, 1794, effected a great alteration in the mode of entry of officers, for it swept away nearly all the "servants," and substituted for them "boys" of three grades or classes. At this time the flag-officers' retinue varied in numbers from fifteen to fifty; captains were allowed four "servants" for every hundred men of their ship's complement; and the lieutenants, master, second master, purser, surgeon, chaplain, and cook were each allowed one "servant".
By the new rules, only flag-officers were allowed servants, and these were to be bona-fide "domestics." Of the boys who took the place of the remainder, one-fifth were to be young gentlemen volunteers, intended for officers, who were not to be entered under 11 years of age; three-fourths were to be between the ages of 15 and 17, and were to keep watch and watch with the seamen ; the rest were to be between 13 and 15 years of age, and were intended as bona fide servants of the other officers.
In 1677, the king established rules "for the qualification of persons to enable them to become lieutenants." From that time no person could become a captain until he had passed for lieutenant, while one of the qualifications for that rank was previous service in the Royal Navy in a lower grade. The principal conditions were three years' sea service, including one as midshipman ; that candidates should not be under 20 years of age ; that they should produce certificates of sobriety, diligence, and ability ; and that they should pass an examination before a commander of the Royal Navy and two other officers, or three principal officers in a fleet or squadron. The qualifying sea service was increased to six years in 1703, and that the examination was transferred to the Navy Board in 1728, when the king's letter was abolished, and the Naval Academy at Portsmouth instituted. On promotion from Lieutenant, officers were appointed to a small ship eg. sloop, cutter etc.(equivalent to today's rank of Commander) and after sufficient experience was given command of a rated ship (1st - 5th rate) as a post (equivalent to today's rank of Captain).
In 1718, it was, for the first time, formally ordered that captains should, if duly qualified, be promoted by seniority to flag-rank, and so onward to the rank of full admiral. By the rule of the British navy, an officer up to "post" rank - the rank, that is, of full, or post, captain, could be advanced by selection; thenceforth he waited, through the long succession of seniority, for his admiral's commission. Until nearly the middle of the eighteenth century, the flag-list was of very modest proportions, and betrayed no tendency to swell to the enormous size which it assumed later. The list consisted merely of an admiral of the fleet-or, as he was then called, an admiral and commander-in-chief - an admiral of the white squadron, an admiral of the blue, a vice-admiral of the red, one of the white, and one of the blue, and a rear-admiral of the red, one of the white, and one of the blue, or nine flag- officers in all, with sometimes three more holding the offices of admiral; vice-admiral, and rear-admiral of Great Britain. The rank of superannuated, or retired, rear-admiral was not established until 1747 ; so that at most there were but twelve flag-officers at any given moment. Promotion from post-rank was, consequently, increasingly slow, for, though there were so few admirals, there were always, necessarily, many captains.
Until 1743 there was in principle only one officer of each of these ranks. By that time the Navy was acutely short of admirals, and as soon as George II was persuaded to allow a multiplication of flag officers, their numbers increased rapidly. The growing complexity and scale of naval warfare required ever more flag officers at sea, and as operations came to be carried on in all seasons, with very prolonged cruises and blockades (especially during the Great Wars against France), the physical strain on admirals, and the rate at which they had to be relieved, seem to have increased.
Captains soon began to grow very old ere, in consequence of deaths above them, they became eligible for advancement. If, also, the order had been loyally carried out - which it was not - and had not been followed by other modifications, it would presently have resulted in a flag-list composed exclusively of officers too aged to go afloat. The threatened evil was fended off by the gradual increase of the flag-list in 1743 and subsequent years, and by the provision, in 1747, of arrangements in virtue of which senior captains, indisposed, or too infirm, to accept active flag-rank, might be superannuated as rear-admirals, with pay at the rate of 17s. 6d. a day. The first officers to be superannuated under this scheme were captains of 1713, or, to put it otherwise, captains of thirty-four years' service in that rank. Some of them were septuagenarians. In 1747 the superannuation of captains being authorized with promotion to flag-rank, gave rise to the term "yellow admirals" [admirals not assigned command of a squadron].
It will have been noticed that the rank, so called, of admiral of the red, did not exist. The position was filled by the admiral of the "Admiral of the fleet, who, however, flew not a red flag but the union at his main-truck. There was, nevertheless, a popular superstition, which was even shared in high quarters, to the effect that the rank of admiral of the red had existed at some previous time, and had been abolished, owing to an admiral of the red having been taken by the enemy. There was no ground for this superstition; yet it was so firmly rooted all through the eighteenth century, that when early in the nineteenth century admirals of the red were first established, the event was officially chronicled as a "restoration" of the rank to the Navy. Sir George Ayscue, who was taken by the Dutch in 1666, and with whom the fable appears to have been generally associated, was admiral not of the red but of the white squadron. In 1805 the rank of Admiral of the Red was created.
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