Building the Steam Navy: Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Victorian Battle Fleet, 1830-1906 [Hardcover]

David Evans (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2004

By the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Royal Navy's shore-based facilities employed nearly 16,000 people in Great Britain and formed the greatest manufacturing complex in the world. This volume recounts the development of the dockyards and their infrastructure, logistics, and operations as the introduction of new technology forged a revolution in ship design and construction. It spans the construction of the first purposebuilt workshops for maintenance and repair in 1830 to the symbolic end of the Victorian era in the Royal Navy with the completion of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. The book includes chapters on Woolwich and the first steam factory; iron construction; the technological edge; Greene, Scamp and the integrated factory; HMS Volcano and the development of mobile logistics; mechanization; building the first iron warships; and coaling the navy. Fully illustrated with plans, drawings, engravings, and maps, this comprehensive history is both an essential reference and fascinating reading.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: US Naval Institute Press (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 085177959X
• ISBN-13: 978-0851779591
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 10 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,062,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Not a lightweight intro book..., August 15, 2008

By 

Carl P. Beetz "Golden Bear" (Oregon) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Building the Steam Navy: Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Victorian Battle Fleet, 1830-1906 (Hardcover)

This book covers a vastly neglected part of the history of the Royal Navy during the most fascinating period of invention and experimentation. It focuses on design of dockyards, buildings and machines associated with the ever larger metal ships. There are copious photographs, maps and drawings. There are links to the ongoing history of ship development but it probably leans more to development of industrialization generally. You don't need to be an engineer to understand it but should at least have a technical bent to follow. It is detailed and intriguing but not probably for everybody. It acts as a complement to the books on British naval development by people like Burt, Brown and Beeler.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A triumph of scholarship, January 7, 2007

By 

Alexander T. Gafford "alex" (Midland, Ga United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Building the Steam Navy: Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Victorian Battle Fleet, 1830-1906 (Hardcover)

Building the Steam Navy is subtitled "Dockyards, Technology and the Creation of the Vistorian Battle Fleet". A better subtitle would have been the "The Industrial Infrastructure of Royal Navy Dockyards" since only the Government owned yards are described and the focus is the the functional architecture of the built structures. Given that and some other limitations to be further discussed this is a wonderfully researched work that really immmersed me in the Victorian time. The level of detail unearthed and the beautiful old technical plans, blueprints and illustrations reproduced testify to the historians art and craft. Of particular note are the occasional asides into social history relating to pay scales, work rules, social classes, and the like - all in ferment and change under the impact of an emerging industrial technology. By letting many of the protagonists speak for themselves, David Evans has brought to life a full array of characters with the normal mixture of human motives and aspirations. It is clear from this work that the Royal Navy as an institution was by no means technically retrogressive in it's

construction of dockyard facilites and incorporation of the latest technology in applied power to them. In fact, the period of maximum progressive adoption would appear to be from 1850 to 1880, the time we might normally think of as being under the sway of white headed old admirals raised in the sailing navy. Evans does an adequate job of relating the constructional and equipment programs of the RN dockyards to the political and military climate of the times, certainly a better job than most naval histories of the era do in considering the shore infrastructure of the Navy.

Given all this praise, why did I give this book just three stars ? First, due to the really pretty narrow focus and the architectural emphasis in the early chapters. I am concerned that a casual student of naval affairs would not realize that this is a specialist treatment focused more on description and discovery than explanation and interpretation. In many respects this is a scholarly book for academic use and as I am not an academic my judgement will be limited. Second, and related to the academic character of the book, many things could have been done to make this work more acessible. For example, a single map showing all the naval bases covered would have been helpful. Also some of the beautiful old plans were reproduced in too small a scale to allow reading the text on them. In those cases arrows and boxes with labels would have made many things clearer. In addition there was good description and illustration of the machine tools introduced in these dockyards but not always helpful explanations of how they actually worked. I suppose these these remarks are simply a request for a "popularized" version of this work, though actually the best that can be realistically hoped for is an incorporation of some of the insights gleanable from this work into some the the popular works that continue to be produced on the ever-fascinating Victorians.