The Royal Navy of the 1880s

STRATEGIC DOCTRINE & THE ROYAL NAVY

Strategy has already been discussed in Chapter 1, with reference to Castlereagh and the origins of the two-power standard, as well as Palmerston's and Wellington's statements concerning the introduction of steam-propelled ships and their influence on defence policy. It needs repeating that Sir Baldwin Wake-Walker's classic statement that the premier naval power should not initiate technical change unless a potential rival does so is one of the few statements of core strategic doctrine that survives in writing. With so little core strategy written down, an analysis of the deployment of Victorian warships sheds some light on strategy and policy.

From 1860 onwards the parameters of naval power changed with the introduction of the ironclads; these ships were big and expensive. Even a cursory examination of the career histories of the ironclads shows a Navy that was, to a surprising degree concentrated in home waters and the Mediterranean against European threats. For most of the three decades after 1860 at any one time there were only three armoured ships deployed on overseas stations, the flagships on the North American and West Indies Station, the China Station and the Pacific Station.

In addition to the large broadside and central battery ironclads built in the 1860s and 1870s, there were a number of low-freeboard, often single-turret coast-defence monitors, breastwork monitors, and ironclad rams.