The British Navy's Victualling Board, 1793-1815: Management Competence and Incompetence

An examination of the Royal Navy's Victualling Board, the body responsible for supplying the fleet. During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy increased its manpower from fewer than 20,000 to more than 147,000 men, with a concomitant increase in the quantities of food and drink required to sustain them.The organisation responsible for this, the Victualling Board, performed its tasks using techniques and systems which it had developed over the previous 110 years. In terms of actually delivering supplies to warships, troopships and army garrisons abroad, the Victualling Board performed well given the constraints of long-distance communications and intermittent difficulties in obtaining supplies. However, its other areas of responsibility showed poor performance, as evidenced by the reports of several Parliamentary enquiries. This book examines in detail the processes by which the Victualling Board performed its core and non-core tasks, identifying the areas of competence and incompetence, and establishing the underlying causes of the incompetencies. JANET MACDONALD, author of the highly acclaimed Feeding Nelson's Navy (Chatham, 2004), has recently completed a thesis at King's College London. After a business career, and running an equestrian organisation, she spent ten years as a freelance writer, publishing more than thirty books.

Table of Contents:
Introduction. Historiography and early history of victualling The work of the Victualling Board. Core tasks: Supply Core tasks: Delivery at home Core tasks: Delivery abroad Non-core and ad hoc tasks Staff at Head Office Staff at the yards Fraud and other misdemeanours Parliamentary enquiries Conclusions

About the Author :
Janet Macdonald has published books on numerous subjects. Her first book on naval history was Feeding Nelson's Navy: The True Story of Food at Sea in the Georgian Era; her second, the British Navy's Victualling Board, 1793-1815: Management Competence and Incompetence. She took her MA in Maritime History at the Greenwich Maritime Institute, London, and her PhD at King's College London, where she was awarded a Laughton Scholarship. Her thesis was on the administration of naval victualling. Her most recent books are From Boiled Beef to Chicken Tikka: 500 Years of Feeding the British Army, Sir John Moore: The Making of a Controversial Hero, Horses in the British Army 1750-1850 and Supplying the British Army in the First World War.

Review :
An exhaustive study [and] a fine example of academic research and analysis. Combines some penetrating analysis with much interesting and entertaining material. [...] There is a wealth of biographical and statistical information, and the glossary is particularly useful. (reviewed together with Sustaining the Fleet) Rare is the occasion when two excellent books are written about the same subject within the same year. [...] Both books are well written and well documented, utilizing a vast array of primary sources. [...] For those who study the Royal Navy in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods both [...] are simply must have books. Provides an excellent examination of the actual inter-workings of the Victualling Board.