The Sun.
London, England, 1859-09-29 00:00:00

NAVAL EXPENDITURE.

The rapid increase of our naval expenditure en-
tailing upon the Ministers of the day the necessity
of producing and defending estimates of enormous
magnitude in Parliament, it. occurred to Sir John
Pakington, when First Lord of the Admiralty, to
fortify his department by appointing three Com-
mittees of Investigation, upon whose reports our
naval administration might be, in case of need, im-
proved or vindicated. There was the Financial
Committee, consisting of Messrs. Corry, Hamilton,
Anderson, and Sir Richard Bromley, to inquire
why the navy is more expensive than formerly ; the
Committee on the Steam Machinery of the Navy,
of which Admiral Ramsden, Mr, Nasmyth, and Mr.
Ward were members ; and, lastly, there was a Com-
mittee to inquire into the labour in our dockyards.
The desirableness of revising the scheme and exa-
mining the efficiency of our naval establishments,
from time to time, will be seen from the fact that
we have spent in the course of the last six years
no less than £12,286,000 on shipbuilding, steam
machinery, and fitting ships for sea and commission.
The amount voted for establishment charges for
the naval yards of Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham,
Sheerness, Portsmouth, Devonport, and Pembroke,
for this present year is £l15,000; while the sum
voted for workmen's wages in the same yards
is £1,232,000. The wages are paid to 13,290
persons,: to 4,000 shipwrights, 330 caulkers, 610
joiners, 342 sawyers, 876 smiths, 486 millwrights
and workers at mills, 394 riggers, 204 sailmakers,
427 spinners, 1,105 exercising unclassified trades,
and 2,076 labourers, and 2,240 men engaged in the
steam factories. We quote these figures to show the
grand scale upon which every organic defect in our
dockyard administration must be repeated. The
labours of the last Dockyard Commission followed
the Parliamentary committee on naval expenditure
which sat in 1848, since which date as we all know,
great and important changes have taken place in
our naval requirements.
The dockyard committee was composed of Rear-
Admiral Smart, chairman; Mr. H. Chatfield, mas-
ter shipwright at Deptford ; Mr. A. Murray, chief
engineer at Portsmouth • Mr. R. Laws, storekeeper
at Chatham and Mr. ite Bowman, civil engineer
and ship builder, of the East India-road. The re-
port is only signed by four of these gentlemen, Mr.
Chatfield strongly protesting against the conclu-
sions of his colleagues. The committee in the first
place take a general view of the whole system of
conducting the business of the dockyards, and
then report in detail upon each trade. Their first
remark is, that " the quantity of the work done
in the dockyards is still below the standard of
well-conducted private establishments." This is
the key-note to the whole report. The committee
constantly compare the results of Government labour
with those of commercial enterprise, and the result
is what might have been expected. Mr. Chatfield,
on the other hand, and Sir Baldwin Walker, Sur-
veyor-General of the Navy, in his "Remarks,"
which are appended to the Report, struggle with
this tendency. Mr. Chatfield maintains that so far
from assimilating the management of work in the
royal dockyards to the system observed in private
establishments, we should take great care to avoid
imitating that system. He complains, or at least
points out, that the proposal to conduct the dock-
yards on factory principles and to adopt the system
practised in the private trade, is due to the fact that
there were two engineers on the committee, whilst
he alone represented the ship-building department.
A brief account of a report which consists of more
than a thousand paragraphs, and extends over 93
folio pages, must needs be very general. The corn=
mittee recommend changes affecting the whole con-
stitution and working of the dockyards. They esti-
mate every mode of working and paying simply by
its results. They find that the supervision of the
yards is defective; that there is too little concert
among the officers as to the business of the day ;
that responsibility is too much divided and not
sufficiently defined; that while the quality of the
-work has received great attention ,its cost has been un-
d ulyneglected; that the position and authority of the
practical foremen in the yards is not sufficienly se-.
cured in the eyes of the workmen; and that the
system of superannuation, which is founded on the
permanence of employment, hinders the discharge
of inefficient workmen. They further condemn the
three systems under which payments are made to
the workmen for their labour performed in the yards.
' They condemn the " task and job" system, by which
a definite sum of money is paid for each specific
work in detail, according to an established system
of prices, because they find that the system does not
provide for limiting the cost of the whole ship.
Thus they report that " sister corvettesof 1,462 tons
have cost upwards of £3,000 more for shipwrights'
labour in one yard than another, though both were
paid for by measurement of the work upon them,
under the same scheme of prices, and though the
work upon both must have been nearly identical."
In like manner they condemn the system of " day
work with cheek measurement," because, it cheeks
the energies of the men who are virtually induced
to value the work as it progresses, and to execute
no more than will equattheir wages. They propose to
abolish these two systems altogether. As a substi-
tute they propose that when a ship is to be built,
the plan to be followed shall be that practised by the
shipbuilders in the Thames ; that is to say, to fix a
price per ton for shipbuilding our for the ship,
s
the price varying according to the class and pro-
portions of the ship and the scantling and the qua-
lity of the work required. The ship being divided
into certain stages of work, the price to be paid for
workmanship is also so divided. The only super-
vision, then, necessary is thus reduced to seeing
that the work is of the best quality. They attach
little value to the periodical visits of the Lords of
the Admiralty to the dockyards, and point out the
expense as a charge which might be spared ; ha;
they recommend that a shipwright and an engineer
from the surveyor's department should frequently
visit the dockyards. A still more important recom-
mendation is that, to supply the Mt want of a
proper stimulus to Government officers for the effi-
cient and economical management of the works
under their charge, the cost of every ship built and
fitted for ordinary, or completed for sea, and the
balance.sheets of the chief manufacturing branches,
showing the net cost of the work*oduced. in the
different dockyards, should be . printed annually
with the Navy Estimates, and presented to Parlia-
ment, and circulated to all the doCkyaids.
It is easy to see froM thevaininents of the Sur-
veyor-General, as well as those of other persons
high in office,.that great resistance will be made to
the introduction. of many of these changes. Never-
theless, since their comments are not made in a spirit
of obstructiveness and opposition-to improvement,
the discussion they provoke will be fay ourable to the
increase of exact knowledge upon this important
subject, and tend to mature the plane by which the
present system is destined to be superseded.—
Daily Neics.