This thesis presents a study of UK Merchant Navy Officer cadetship. The study was conceived in the context of both a declining UK shipping fleet and seafaring workforce, and prompted by the lack of research on the experiences of UK seafarer officer cadets. The initial purpose of the study was to understand the experiences in training of Merchant Navy Officer cadets through their own voices. The need to understand the impact of recent UK Government policy initiatives connected to Merchant Navy cadetship became a further motivation. As data collection and analysis progressed, interviewee and questionnaire data on the cadet experience were combined with three further data-strands using a mixed methods approach. The reflexive methodology permitted the interactive linking and patterning of the data-strands, realised in the narrative representation of cadetship. Two further research outputs are: a concise set of descriptors of the experience of seafarer officer cadets and, the construct of 'total occupation' used as a generic window through which to (re)view cadetship and seafaring. The study found that for most cadets entry into training was a positive process in which they saw the Merchant Navy as having specific attractions. Their ship-board experiences varied with each unique combination of voyage, ship, officers, and crew. For some cadets, the overall experience of training was rewarding. However there were others who had experiences of distress some of those went on to resign from training, and suffered a sense of failure and disappointment. All cadets interviewed in the study displayed ambivalence in varying degrees towards aspects of the seafaring experience, notably its 'totalness'. The study findings suggest that structural determinants of the cadet experience were open to individual agency in which a sense of calling and tradition were factors.

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The introduction of steam propulsion during the early nineteenth century presented the Royal Navy with two interlinked challenges. In the first, steam propulsion had to overcome the sceptics and the challenges of technical development until it proved a reliable and superior alternative to sail. The second was a challenge to the social infrastructure of the Navy which struggled to integrate increasingly large numbers of engine room personnel into a traditional close knit naval hierarchy dominated by seamen. The engineers’ struggle for commissioned status and equality with the executive branch is well documented, as is the history of the engine room artificers’ branch. By comparison, where naval and historical custom has promoted and celebrated the ideal of the Royal Naval ‘bluejacket’ or seaman, its stokers have become subjects of censure while their story has been largely ignored and corrupted by prejudice and myths. Tradition dictates that stokers are portrayed as coarse, uneducated men with a reputation for being trouble makers. As a result, they were judged to have the worst discipline record on the lower-deck. Because of the physical nature of their work and the filth and detritus from the coal they worked with they were also commonly believed to originate from the lowest classes of contemporary society. Yet without stokers no ship could leave harbour let alone engage the enemy. Every item of machinery and equipment onboard a ship relied on the steam produced by stokers. But far from being seen as equals or given any credit for their endeavours in the miniature hell of the stokehole, stokers became social outcasts. No other branch of men in the Navy has been subjected to such longstanding and deep seated censure. The negative stereotypes which surround stokers continue to perpetuate a disservice to a much overlooked and maligned branch of men. In order to determine the reasons why stokers attracted such negative sympathies this thesis will separate the facts from the myths and offer a new perspective on the men condemned by history as ‘the lowest of the low.’

Intersecting the fields of naval, imperial and Caribbean history, this thesis examines the Royal Navy’s interactions with the inhabitants of the British Caribbean islands between 1756 and 1815. Traditional histories of the Royal Navy in the Caribbean have focused on operational matters, producing narratives that neglect examination of the navy as a socio-cultural force in the region. This thesis aims to address this imbalance by focusing on the navy as a unique social group with multiple roles, which was a constant presence in the Caribbean during a particularly turbulent period at the height of the sugar industry. In conjunction with Catherine Hall’s hypothesis that metropole and colony were ‘mutually constitutive’, the navy is placed at the centre of this study, as it was a powerful institution at the forefront of British imperialism that had a vested interest and connection to both the metropole and the Caribbean. It offers a new perspective that broadens our understanding of the navy and Caribbean society, as part of the wider Atlantic community. Through the often overlooked personal narratives found in correspondence, journals, sketchbooks, and published memoirs of naval observers, this thesis explores how naval seamen represented and reflected upon their experiences and encounters with inhabitants of the Caribbean, highlighting their widespread integration and impact on the region, which previous studies have undervalued. With overlapping themes that engage with debates on empire, nation and identity, it argues that the navy was more than just a protective force as naval seamen were instrumental in the changing social and cultural landscape of the Caribbean, impacting both elite and non-elite communities. In exploring the navy’s social prominence in the region, this thesis offers a textured view of both colonial society and the naval community.

The aim of this thesis is to apply computer technology, specifically data management systems, (commonly referred to as computer databases) to the study of the social history of the Royal Navy of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815). The muster, and to a lesser extent, pay and log books of three British Royal Navy frigates of the period HMS Trent, Amazon and Glenmore have been transcribed onto a series of Microsoft Access databases. The databases have then been interrogated in order to produce statistical information that has been applied to specific questions relating to the social history of the Royal Navy of the period. The emphasis of the thesis is the men of the lower deck although one chapter looks specifically at commissioned officer development. The major questions addressed revolve around the duties of the ships and men (Chapter 2)recruitment of men to the three ships (Chapter 3), the use of child labour (Chapter 4), the recruitment and development of volunteers new to the sea (Chapter 5)and the development and career prospects of midshipmen. The thesis provides a unique view of the men and boys who served on board Royal Navy vessels of the period that is not reliant on controversial memoirs but concentrates on exploiting primary sources recorded on a day-to-day basis. The findings demonstrate that the use of computer databases is a powerful weapon in the naval historian's armoury and have made a significant contribution towards answering some important social questions regarding the lower deck of Nelson's navy.

This thesis proposes major revisions to the history of the naval defence of Britain’s Eastern Empire during the critical period 1935 – 42 as the Royal Navy (RN) sought to manage the increasing risks posed by three potential Axis enemies across divergent theatres. It challenges the prevailing historical interpretation which explains the successive defeats suffered by the RN at the start of the war with Japan as the inevitable consequence of resource weakness and imperial overstretch already evident in a deeply flawed pre-war strategy “Main Fleet to Singapore”. The dominant narrative argues that: Britain never had the naval resources to protect a two hemisphere Empire let alone cope with a triple threat from Germany, Italy and Japan; it certainly could not pose any effective counterweight to Japan once it was fighting for its life in Europe; and it compounded resource weakness by consistently underestimating the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) and failing to recognise the potential of modern airpower at sea. Britain’s strategy for defending its Eastern Empire through naval power therefore rested on convenient self-deception regarding Japanese intent and the balance of relative capability whereas in reality the RN was decisively outmatched. Furthermore, most historians suggest that, while Britain’s initial war with Japan ended in ignominy, this had little impact on the overall global struggle against the Axis because Britain’s role in the East was essentially irrelevant to the Allied cause whatever the losses to its own imperial standing. This thesis contends that the dominant narrative is neither satisfactory nor sufficient and reflects important gaps in the historical record. But it also argues that the historiography of the last 50 years has defined the RN role in protecting the Eastern Empire in very narrow terms, focusing almost exclusively on the defence of the Far East territories and the prospects of deploying a fleet to Singapore. In reality, the Eastern Empire encompassed a much wider area and it faced existential threats on its western boundary as well as in the east. Ensuring the security of this wider area had profound implications not just for Britain’s own war-making potential but for the overall Allied cause too. The thesis therefore offers an interpretation which, for the first time, investigates thoroughly the inter-dependencies between different theatres of war hitherto viewed principally in their own terms. By taking this wider perspective, it demonstrates that not only was there more coherence and continuity to RN policy and strategy towards the Eastern Empire in this period than historians have traditionally accepted but that it also reflected greater realism about what truly mattered and where naval resources should best be concentrated at any given time. In doing so, it shows how and why prevailing accounts are defective. The thesis proposes five main arguments across the period 1935 – 1942. First, it shows that the RN of 1939 was stronger, more capable, more innovative, and more ambitious in its strategic goals than the mainstream accounts of its inter-war history have generally ii accepted. It is simply not the case that meeting the demands of a multi-theatre war over the next three years as the output of the rearmament programme became available was out of reach as many have argued. It then demonstrates that British strategy to ensure adequate security through naval power for the core territories of the Eastern Empire in the face of the Triple Threat was more flexible and realistic, and better directed at what would prove to be the critical points in the first half of the war, than the prevailing historical narrative recognises. Thirdly, by looking at all relevant theatres simultaneously, it argues that Britain’s investment in the Middle East, and the RN commitment to the Eastern Mediterranean, from 1940 – 42, were essential both to protect the Eastern Empire and its resources and to enable it to generate maximum war potential. This commitment also vitally influenced the security of the Atlantic lifeline. It was not a diversion but an essential complement to meeting the threat from Japan. The thesis then re-examines the disasters suffered by the RN in the first phase of the war with Japan. It argues that promises of US naval support in the Atlantic and exaggerated expectations of the deterrent power the US could exercise against Japan allowed Britain’s war leadership to believe it could maintain a forward defence strategy in the Middle and Far East theatres simultaneously. This goal was never realistic with the resources Britain was able and willing to deploy overseas; yet it was the Admiralty, rather than the Prime Minister, who showed a reckless disregard for the resulting risks in the immediate run-up to war. In reality, the exercise of naval power to secure what mattered in the Eastern Empire did not ultimately depend on holding Singapore. The final line of argument is that it is simply not possible to reach a secure judgement on the eastern theatre without a proper understanding of how it interacted with the other war theatres and how this then influenced the decision-makers of the day. The thesis shows how the entry of Japan into the war confirmed that the Indian Ocean was an inescapable defence commitment, critical not just for Britain but also the wider Allied cause, ranking indeed second only to the Atlantic lifeline in importance. Despite the defeats suffered in the first months of the Far East war, the thesis demonstrates how the RN could still generate sufficient power by mid-1942 to defend this theatre against any naval force Japan was likely to deploy. The 1935 start date for the thesis marks the point when the threats posed by a resurgent Germany, an increasingly hostile Japan, and unpredictable Italy, moved from theoretical to real. The end of 1942 is an appropriate finishing point because, as the thesis explains, it marks the end of any credible threat from the Axis to the core Eastern Empire through either the Indian Ocean or the Middle East.

This thesis applies the theoretical perspective of Bourdieu to investigate the development of a Royal Navy habitus. It is one of the first studies to uncover distinct social processes within the Royal Navy that otherwise would have largely remained unknown to a wider academic audience. An ethnographic methodology was used to investigate the attitudes of serving members of the Royal Navy using an approach that was informed by the Biographical Narrative Interview Method (Wengraf 2001). In my analysis, I constructed a complex picture of how individuals develop a particular habitus, showing how the interplay between the institutional and individual habitus influences the process and pattern of their choice making. Through the development of the institutional habitus and its internalisation by each person, the previously unthinkable becomes possible, the possible becomes routine and not doing the routine, unthinkable. This sets the pattern for subsequent behaviours which are passed on to the next generation. Although each reproduction is subtly different it falls within the broader outline of the institutional habitus as constituted at that time. The Royal Navy creates aspiration through division by developing competition between the different ranks of its personnel within the organisation. Strong familial relationships, kinship bonds and the development of an affective dimension through traineeship produce the Royal Navy habitus that becomes the structuring principle for agents’ future career development. Through the imposition of an institutionally defined cultural capital, agents engage in this process in order to realise their career ambitions.

This thesis explores the representation of negative and subversive aspects of the Royal Navy and its seamen during the French Wars, 1793-1815, in contemporary print culture. Visual analysis, supported by archival research, is used to show that evasion and exaggeration were key in the representation of such subjects. The figure of Jack Tar (the common seaman) and the facets of his service referenced in works on paper are investigated as constructs. It is argued that such historical documents confirmed and perpetuated misconceptions informed by dominant expectations, values and concerns. Such depictions, often satirical, are indicative of broader material and ideological contexts. Issues collectively and individually salient for Britons’ and naval seamen are shown to have included those of identity, liberty, state power, subordination, morality and sacrifice. These are revealed to be central to the construction of the notorious naval tar by printmakers, audiences, writers, publishers, politicians, officers, seamen themselves and even historians. In a chronological narrative from recruitment to cessation of service, the thesis explores the experiences of this infamous naval character through his contemporary representation.