Woolwich. South of the Thames, east of the City of London. The ‘Warren’. Rabbits were bred there in the Middle Ages, and by 1773 it’s an apt name once again. The teeming site is now Britain’s biggest munitions manufactory, its largest ordnance store.
Five hundred people working in a hundred acres. The closest thing in the Georgian world to a modern factory. Warehouses, workshops, laboratories, furnaces. A canal, a barracks, a parade ground. The Royal Artillery is quartered there; so is its cadet company. So is its band.
It’s loud; it’s dirty, dusty, smoky. The smells of gunpowder, its smoke and its ingredients hang heavy in the air: sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal. A harsh, confusing landscape, security-conscious and alienating to outsiders. Not so different from the collieries, perhaps.
There were two sides to the change in Charles Hutton’s status. He was no longer a member of that despised class the provincial schoolmaster, with a merely de facto high standing among British philomaths. His status was no longer based solely on his own furious efforts at self-promotion. He was no longer vulnerable to catastrophe the moment the fashion in Newcastle schools changed or a rival published a cheaper textbook. He was now a man who had received public recognition for his talents and his hard work, in the form of a teaching appointment in an institution of national significance.
On the other hand, Hutton had left a situation as absolute lord and master of a thriving business and had become an employee. He had changed from headmaster to ordinary teacher, and, what was more, he was becoming a civilian employee in a military establishment. He would have to work with a new set of colleagues and teach a new kind of pupil. He would have been less than human had he not experienced moments of doubt about what he was getting into during the summer of 1773.
First impressions were certainly discouraging, and in some ways Hutton retained mixed feelings about his new situation for years, as his letters show. The Royal Military Academy occupied a few rooms in the bustling military installation at Woolwich, downstream from the city of London and on the opposite side of the river. Docklands territory today, it was then barracks, ordnance factory, munitions depot and more. The dockyard went back to Henry VIII’s time, ordnance testing over a century. There was a laboratory for making gunpowder and a foundry for making ordnance and shot. By the mid-eighteenth century the ever-increasing collection of buildings and activities was straining the limits of possibility. Laboratory, arsenal stores and ordnance testing were much too close together, and from time to time there were fires or unplanned explosions. The latrines stank. There was too little water to go around. The four battalions of the Royal Artillery would move out of the site in 1777, but the Academy – despite sporadic complaints and a serious attempt to find a new site in the 1780s – would remain at the Warren until the next century. Contemporary guidebooks tried to talk the place up, with varying success:
The Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.
In the warren, or park, where trial is made of great guns and mortars, there are some thousand pieces of ordnance for ships and batteries; with a prodigious number of shot, shells, and grenadoes, heaped in large piles of various forms, and which have a very striking and pleasing appearance.
Even today, with the mounds of weaponry gone and the site sleepy, and with a good map in your hand, it takes an effort to find the building in which the Royal Military Academy held its schoolroom. The two imposing floors by Vanbrugh had windows east and west to let the light all the way through, with one big high-ceilinged room on the top floors. There were also a barracks for the cadets and dedicated houses for the two principal masters, of whom Hutton was now number two. His house needed ten pounds’ worth of repairs, hastily carried out during the summer he arrived.
The human landscape was not much more encouraging. Hutton’s family didn’t at first accompany him to Woolwich, and his new colleagues were a somewhat sorry crew. The Academy had existed for over fifty years, with a formal king’s warrant since 1741, but it was proving hard to get the setup right. Reform after reform had taken place. Initially it was meant as a sort of regimental university, providing lectures to anyone in the Royal Artillery who chose to attend: officers, NCOs, cadets, all those associated with the regiment. A series of mid-century reforms had given it a more manageable role as a sort of superior school for the Royal Artillery cadet corps. There was now an inspector-of-studies, with military rank, to look after the daily running of the Academy, to oversee the curriculum and make sure it was being delivered. Above him stood the Lieutenant-Governor, who reported to the Board of Ordnance and its Master-General. (The Ordnance, by the way, was not strictly speaking part of the Army: it was structured and governed separately, which goes some way to account for the uniqueness of its Academy.)
Some of the teaching staff had never accepted the changes to the style of the institution, or the inspector’s attempts to regulate what was taught and how it was taught; possibly they preferred the idea of themselves as university lecturers to that of schoolteachers. The chief master, Allen Pollock, had all but declared war on the management, doing everything he could to make the inspector’s task difficult. In principle he taught the prestigious subject of fortification and artillery. In practice he increasingly tended to teach absolutely nothing. He lived miles away from Woolwich without ever receiving permission to do so, and it was his habit to appear literally hours late for his lessons, then waste more time shuffling his books and his papers. For every adjustment to his teaching duties he demanded a direct written order.
There were also masters for French, dancing, fencing and ‘classics, writing and arithmetic’. The first two struggled to command the respect of the cadets – to put it delicately – while the last, a Reverend William Green, followed Pollock’s lead in calculated awkwardness.
Gentlemen Cadets.
Hutton would have learned at least some of this over the summer, while his new house was being repaired and he was finding his feet after the upheaval of his move from the North. When the boys arrived after the summer recess and the actual teaching began, it may have been something of a relief. The cadets, numbering about fifty, were a well-dressed body of young men with a rather splendid uniform: blue coats trimmed with scarlet and gold; lots of lace, hair neatly queued and powdered.
They may have looked genteel, but they ranged in age from twelve to about nineteen, and there were predictable problems with their behaviour. Some ingratiated themselves with the masters, sending home for hams, hares, pheasants and other little gifts that might smooth their passage through classes and exams. Others indulged a tendency to riot. Orders and letters from the governor remarked again and again on matters of discipline, expressing futile outrage and lamely prohibiting misdemeanours after they had taken place. Cadets must not ill-use the masters, must not treat them with disrespect or insult them. They must not disrespect their superior officers, nor use indecent or immoral expressions. They must not wilfully destroy fixtures, bedding, furniture, utensils or windows, nor must they force locks or open or spoil the desks of the teachers or other staff. They must not ‘nasty the walls or chimneys’.