As the crimes escalated, so did the punishments. (‘The first Cadet that is found swimming in the Thames shall be taken out naked and put in the Guard-room.’) We read in mid-century accounts of solitary confinements, bread-and-water diets, imprisonments in a dark room, degradations and a few exemplary expulsions. In the long run, things improved, but outbreaks of quite serious violence remained more frequent than anyone could have wished. The constant presence of a duty officer in the classrooms had little effect. There was continued noise, hallooing, shouting; there was window-smashing, and ‘pelting’ of the masters. A lieutenant lost the use of his middle finger. A cadet spent three years on the sick list after a prank whose details he permanently refused to specify but which he steadfastly described as a piece of ‘fun’.
Charles Hutton was suddenly a very long way from the genteel sons and daughters of middle-class Newcastle: the grammar school boys and girls taking advanced mathematics lessons; the private pupils paying a few guineas extra for dancing classes and a few more for the course of lectures on astronomy. Yet his orders required him to teach the cadets, and to teach them a demanding curriculum that ranged across pure and applied mathematics. Teach it he would. The theory classes were on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Professor Pollock – if he bothered to turn up – taught the boys his notions of fortification and artillery for three hours in the morning; in the afternoon Hutton took them for mathematics from three till six.
Facing about twenty-five of the older or cleverer boys, grouped at least notionally into four graded ‘classes’, he covered Euclid’s Elements of geometry, killing two birds by using algebraic explanations wherever possible. Trigonometry as applied to fortification and measuring, such as finding inaccessible heights and distances, and using logarithms for the calculations if needed. Conic sections (the shapes you get when you slice a cone using a plane). Mechanics with reference to moving heavy bodies (such as pieces of artillery): levers, pulleys, wheels, wedges and screws. The laws of motion with reference, naturally, to projectiles. Calculus – ‘fluxions’, in the Newtonian rather than the Continental style – and whatever uses could be found for it. Much of this would have been familiar stuff from his Newcastle classroom, but the style of teaching still made it an exhausting round.
As in any other Georgian classroom, the boys were mostly at their desks, called forward one at a time or in small groups. Each boy did some exercises, showed them to the teacher, copied them and the relevant section of the textbook out fair: and repeated that round for the whole three hours. For Hutton it might mean fifteen minutes with one cadet on calculus; fifteen minutes with another on Euclid. Then algebra, then logarithms, then something else. He also gave periodic lectures – virtually the only university-style lecturing still taking place at the Academy – on geography and the use of those favourite pieces of eighteenth-century teaching apparatus the terrestrial and celestial globes: two hours every other Wednesday.
When they weren’t in the theory classroom, meanwhile, the boys were instructed on the other days of the week in the practical arts of gunnery: loading and firing the artillery pieces, and pointing them in the right direction; exercises in hitting marks. Various other practical matters: transporting burdens by making pontoons, floats or bridges; mortars and their use; trenches and mines: how and where; the composition of gunpowder; the names of the parts of a gun. Casting and weights of artillery pieces and shot. Handling of stores.
As if that wasn’t enough, from 1778 a separate building was set up as a ‘military repository’. Here the boys were taught the finer points of handling the equipment: mounting and dismounting ordnance, crossing obstacles, and ‘overcoming by resourcefulness difficulties which did not arise in the ordinary routine’.
As far as dangerous fun for boys went, this was infinitely more attractive than the classroom work, and the cadets were after all in training for a severely practical life as officers in the artillery or in some case the Engineers’ corps. On graduation at about eighteen most of the boys were at once commissioned as second lieutenants in the Royal Artillery regiment.
This, then, was the real stuff of an artillery officer. Cannon up to ten feet long and weighing up to three tons; iron balls moving at the speed of sound. Howitzers; mortars for lobbing shells high overhead. Roundshot, grapeshot, case-shot; explosive shells. The relentless drill of firing: four men at work, and every action had to be right every time or disaster would follow. Loader puts the charge down the muzzle, in its paper cartridge. Ventsman blocks the vent with his thumb, and spongeman rams the charge home. Ventsman pricks the cartridge, primes it with quickmatch in a tube pushed down the vent. Loader puts the projectile in the muzzle, spongeman rams it up against the charge. Run the gun up, point it at its target: traverse, align, adjust the elevation. Firer touches the vent with his portfire. The blast of several pounds of gunpowder, and an iron ball travels a thousand yards. Check the recoil. Spongeman sponges the barrel clear. Repeat. Furious speeds were possible; with a light gun seven rounds a minute could be achieved in an emergency: nine seconds from one shot to the next.
In alternate years the summer saw a full-scale attack upon a polygonal front built at Woolwich for the purpose, done ‘with all the form and regularity that is used in a real siege’. Trenches, batteries, mines made by the besieged to blow up the batteries, mines made by the besiegers to make breaches in the walls. Fortunately there was a well-equipped hospital on the site.
With all this going on, it may be no wonder there was a problem getting the boys to attend to their theoretical studies. Some of them at least itched to get away from the mathematics and the theory, and there were still in Hutton’s day at least some officers of the regiment who thought the whole Academy a waste of space. General Belford wished it disbanded, and in the late 1770s wrote a stinging letter to the Master-General of the Ordnance suggesting that instead ‘a number of fine young fellows [be] appointed as Cadets to every Battalion’, where they might do practical work and see real action.
He may have had a point. The long series of reforms and adjustments had made the Royal Military Academy an institution whose details were not easy to defend. Admittedly some kinds of knowledge were best acquired in a school-like setting, but why should an artillery officer need to know algebra, geometry, trigonometry?
But the training was not so much about what you needed to know as about producing a particular kind of man with a particular kind of mind. The Academy, unique and exceptional in some ways, was nevertheless part of a much more general eighteenth-century trend in English education. Mathematics and the sciences enjoyed increasing prestige at the English universities, with Cambridge in particular stuffing its curriculum full of Euclid and Newton to the oft-remarked exclusion of almost anything else. Newtonian mathematics, together with the philosophy of John Locke and the rational theology of such as Samuel Clarke, ‘went hand in hand through our public schools and lectures’, said one contemporary. Cambridge University’s official calendar, too, boasted specifically of the ‘many excellent lectures in mathematics’ delivered in the colleges. John Locke himself had written that mathematics was ‘a way to settle in the Mind an habit of Reasoning closely and in train … In all sorts of Reasoning, every single Argument should be managed as a Mathematical Demonstration.’ It enlarged the mind, instilled intellectual humility, and taught the habit of clarity in one’s ideas.
It was a similar picture at the so-called Dissenting Academies. These were advanced schools or mini-universities for those whose non-Anglican commitments excluded them from Oxford and Cambridge. By mid-century there were dozens of them, and they enjoyed a fine reputation, often teaching curricula based on mathematics and natural philosophy as well as logic and theology, sometimes with the specific intention of disciplining the mind, teaching logical thought and a reliance on pure reason.
So the Royal Military Academy was doing nothing