The ‘Dark Ages’ of the Victorian Navy Reconsidered

TECHNOLOGY CHANGE & THE CRISIS OF THE MID-VICTORIAN NAVY

If there is a standard view of the Royal Navy of the 1870s and early 1880s, it is that expressed 50 years ago by Oscar Parkes, who described the ten year period 1873–83 as the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Victorian Navy. He attributed the ‘Dark Ages’ to extreme financial parsimony and an ineffective First Lord more interested in agricultural matters than naval administration. Another naval historian, Nicholas Rodger, has termed the period 1869–85 as ‘The Dark Ages of the Admiralty’. Rodger concluded that the administrative structure, and thus the central command of the Navy, was chronically ill organised. Both authors suggested that the Stead agitation of 1884, the famous ‘What is the truth about the Navy?’ articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, followed by the Naval Defence Act of 1889, effectively ended the ‘Dark Ages’. A third naval historian, Stanley Sandler, has concluded that, while the Devastation of 1870 was the germ of all future battleships, it was only with the commencement of the Admiral class in the early 1880s that the thread of progressive development was again taken up. By implication the Victorian Royal Navy lost the plot in the 1870s, and it is readily apparent that there is a general agreement among a number of naval historians that the 1870s were indeed the ‘Dark Ages’ of the Navy.