Thine Oaks descending to the main,
With floating forts shall stem the tides,
Asserting Britain’s wat’ry reign
Where’er her thundering Navy rides:
Nor less to peaceful arts inclin’d,
Where Commerce opens all her stores,
In social bands will league mankind,
And join the sea-divided shores:
Spread then thy sails where Naval Glory calls:
Britain’s best bulwarks are her WOODEN WALLS.
So goes the second stanza of Henry Green’s poem The Wooden Walls of England, first published in The Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser on 25 June 1773. Green was purser aboard the 74-gun ship-of-the-line HMS Ramillies, which had been launch at Chatham Dockyard in 1763. The poem, which the author ‘humbly inscribed to the king’, was set to music by the composer Thomas Arne in 1782, the same year the Ramillies was lost during a hurricane in the mid-Atlantic, while escorting a convoy from Jamaica. The ‘Wooden Wall’, the all-wooden broadside ship-of-the-line, is most closely associated with the Nelsonian era. However, the all-wood constructed battleship would remain a key constituent of the Royal Navy well into the 1860s, and many would survive into the 20th century as training vessels and port guard-ships.
Her wooden walls were undoubtedly Britain’s best bulwarks in the age of sail. Naval victories at the Battles of Lagos and Quiberon Bay had saved the country from ‘invasion from… adverse Gauls’ in 1759, and blockades and attritional warfare against the navies of the ‘tyrannic realms’ of France and Spain ultimately prevented Britannia’s continental enemies from landing on English shores during French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. The list of military campaigns and land battles fought between 1794 and 1812 had been, to quote Eric Hobsbawm, ‘one of virtually uninterrupted French triumph’. At sea however, the Royal Navy’s ‘floating forts’, led by a succession of illustrious admirals: Rodney, Howe, Jervis, and above all Nelson, had succeeded in ‘asserting Britain’s wat’ry reign’ virtually uninterrupted for almost half a century.
Many associate the demise of the wooden wall with Turner’s famous painting ‘The Fighting Téméraire’. Turner’s 1839 canvas depicts the illustrious veteran of Trafalgar being towed up the Thames by a steam tug to a breaker’s yard at Rotherhithe. By this time, most wooden walls of the Nelsonian era had long since met their end. However, new and even greater warships of wooden construction were still being built. In fact, no fewer than 12 ‘liners’ were launched between 1839 and 1842. These included the 110-gun 1st rate HMS Queen. Designed by Surveyor of the Navy William Symonds, she would be the last Royal Navy battleship to spend her entire career under sail. Primarily responsible for the evolution of British warship design between 1832 and 1847, the conservative-minded Symonds was slow to institute major technological changes such as iron hull construction and steam propulsion.
The first steam warships were driven by paddle wheels. Although the Royal Navy commissioned a number of smaller paddle-sloops during the 1840s, the design was not regarded as feasible for line-of-battle-ships for two reasons. Firstly, the external paddle box greatly reduced the number of guns that could be carried amidships. Secondly, it was concluded that the paddles would be extremely vulnerable to enemy fire. However, the introduction of the ‘screw’ propeller solved both of these problems as the driving mechanism was relocated safely below the waterline at the warship’s stern. Even so, Symonds and others on the Navy Board were reluctant to build steam ‘liners’ before other major navies as this would make all their existing ships potentially obsolete. British commanders were initially content to use steam-power to tow their prized ‘wooden walls’ into battle.
It wasn’t until the French started work on Napoleon, the world’s first screw battleship, that the Royal Navy hastily followed suit. There followed an intense and costly period of competitive building and screw conversions between the two rival powers during the 1850s. However, even those ships fitted with steam engines carried a conventional rigging and in outward appearance closely resembled traditional ships-of-the-line. Steam power was still regarded as auxiliary to sail, and fighting instructions were still the same as they’d been in Nelson’s day.
It is interesting to note that the 1853 Naval Review at Spithead was an all-wooden affair. Among the 13 screw steamers was the 131-gun three-decker Duke of Wellington, and the brand new HMS Agamemnon. All nine paddle-wheel steamers, if not strictly wooden walls, were wooden-hulled. In addition, there were three traditional sailing ships-of-the-line; HMS Queen, the 30-year-old Prince Regent, and 90-gun London.
Arguably, the death knell for the wooden wall had been sounded the same year at the Battle of Sinope. In the preliminary engagement of the Crimean War, a fleet of Russian frigates armed with the new Paixhan shell-gun annihilated a squadron of Turkish warships. With the development of the incendiary shell, it was immediately obvious that the wooden ship-of-the-line was doomed. The Crimean War also saw the first appearance of ‘iron walls’ with the French navy’s deployment of a number of iron-hulled floating batteries, albeit with mixed results, against the forts of Sevastopol. Smaller all-iron warships were already in commission with the Royal Navy as gunboats and troopships. However, concerns about the corrosion and fouling of iron hulls as well as the potential of wrought iron to splinter under fire, thus making it difficult to plug shell holes, meant that the construction of all-iron battleships would not begin until the early 1860s
In fact, the 1850s witnessed the construction of some of the largest ever wooden warships. Introduced in 1858, HMS Mersey and Orlando had the longest hulls of any Royal Navy vessels; at 336ft, they were almost twice the length of HMS Victory. At 7,000 tons displacement, HMS Victoria and her near-sister Howe weighed twice as much as Nelson’s flagship, and had double the weight of broadside. Laid down in 1859, HMS Repulse was the Royal Navy’s last major warship of an all-wood design, although she and other vessels of her type then on the stocks would be completed as ironclads. The result was that even as the mighty Warrior began to take shape on the stocks at Portsmouth, Britain’s defence of the realm depended almost entirely on the ‘wooden wall’ with around 60 operational ships-of-the-line, all of them sail-rigged and a sixth of them still not converted to steam. Not until 1870 was the last unarmoured wooden battleship, HMS Rodney, finally decommissioned.
The 1860s saw the rapid adoption of iron-hulled frigates and the conversion of the last wooden-hulled battleships to ironclads by the Royal Navy. With the introduction of the gun turret and the removal of sail rigging from front-line warships in the 1870s, the modern British battleship finally began to look substantially different to the ‘wooden wall’ archetype, and modes of fighting at sea began to be re-imagined.
Bow Creek to Anatahan 