Benjamin Wardhaugh - Gunpowder and Geometry

To add to the disruption, Green was asked to help out by doing some teaching in the upper school, delivering quadratic equations and practical geometry to those who needed it. The lower-academy students he would normally have been teaching were presumably neglected as a result, compounding the problem of students entering the upper inadequately prepared. In 1782 an assistant mathematics master was belatedly added to the strength in a more robust attempt to fix the situation, though it remained the case that the quantity of mathematical instruction being delivered was large in relation to the number of mathematical staff. At the same time a pay rise was awarded based on the number of days the different members of staff actually taught: it had the striking effect of making Hutton and Landmann, the new Professor of Fortification, better paid than either the inspector or the governor.

Discipline wasn’t improved by the disruption, and it made things no easier that the firm-handed Inspector Pattison was promoted to major general and posted to America in 1777. During the war years certain cadets were degraded for being ‘in liquor’ and the corporals of the cadet company collectively turned bad, threatening boys who had the temerity to outperform them academically. Cadets had to be forbidden to read ‘books of entertainment and newspapers’ during lessons.

Then in 1780 a rumour went around the boys that you would get a commission sooner if, rather than waiting to graduate into the Artillery, you got yourself thrown out of the Academy and had your parents obtain a commission in an Army regiment by purchase or interest. Result: a spate of boys courting expulsion. France having recently entered the war, the French master was their target of choice. Cadets threw stones at him while he was trying to teach and continued to pelt him with dirt and stones on his way home. The size of the stones is not recorded, but the incident had the character of a serious assault, not a prank. Those in charge at the Academy acted with unexpected wisdom. They duly expelled the leaders of the assault, then pardoned them .

Another indirect consequence of the American war was that convicts could no longer be transported to the North American colonies. From 1776 they were held instead in hulks moored in the Thames off Woolwich: three ships holding nearly two thousand men. Escapes were not uncommon, adding to the woes of the Woolwich site; on occasion gun battles ensued on shore before the convicts were recaptured.

The physical situation in Woolwich remained demoralising, not to mention unhealthy. Although the Royal Artillery itself moved to new quarters on Woolwich Common soon after the outbreak of war, the Warren site was still crowded with the ordnance and munitions installations and the cadets and their Academy. Water came from a conduit house in the superbly named Cholick Lane; by the later part of the century there was too little of it to go around. One officer received permission to move house on account of the ‘Horrid Smells’ from the latrines.

To the chaotic situation at Woolwich was added for a while an air of national panic: in the summer of 1779 a Franco-Spanish fleet was at sea with the intention of invading Britain. That threat came to nothing, but panic was replaced in the longer term by national demoralisation. As poor strategic planning and steady underestimation of the American forces took their toll, it became increasingly clear that coercive military action was not going to solve a problem essentially political in its nature: that the seceding colonies would not be forced into submission, and that their independence was an accomplished fact. By 1780 Britain was isolated against America, France, Spain and the Netherlands, and the British public was losing its sense of why the conflict should be prolonged. The famous defeat at Yorktown in October 1781 was decisive for political as much as for strategic reasons.

When the Peace of Paris came in September 1783, Charles Hutton had been at the Royal Military Academy for ten years. It had been a draining period for the Academy and everyone connected with it, and although Hutton had established a strong position in the institution, it had cost him much in effort and exhaustion. Prone to lung disorders, he also developed chronic headaches, and he took to walking on the Academy’s roof where the air was fresher. From there you could see the shipping on the river, and, to the south, the open country of Shooter’s Hill and Woolwich Common. You could also see the City of London, and dream of all that it afforded.

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