Board, private offices and committees

Slowly, over the nineteenth century, British government planning became less individualistic and more institutionalised, including in defence matters. By at least 1818, as Huskisson told us, problems to be brought before the Cabinet by the First Lord of the Admiralty would first be discussed by him in an ad hoc way with the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Such meetings continued, but from the 1850s there was also a formal Cabinet sub-committee on defence, though it did not necessarily meet very often. Its main duty seems to have been to discuss the naval estimates, but it might also have had to deal with some of the growing number of technical defence matters. Even by then, more specialised advisory bodies had appeared, albeit only temporary ones; a later tendency was towards permanency. We have seen already the example of the Colonial Defence Committee (CDC) of 1878–9. Even its supersession by the Carnarvon Commission proved passing; 1885 saw a resurrection, and the CDC became the forerunner of a whole series of permanent interdepartmental or Cabinet defence-planning bodies, including the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) of 1902. The latter proved to be highly fecund, spawning the committees and sub-committees on which much British war-making was to be based.

We see something of the same kind of development within the Admiralty. But before looking at the new naval standing committees that resulted, we first have to understand what happened with regard to the Board itself.