After his holiday at Outlands and nearly six weeks of manoeuvres in Sharpshooter, Scott took up his place in HMS Vernon, the navy’s Torpedo School Ship at Portsmouth. He would only have had to see a Lieutenant Philip Colomb – another great name in the Victorian navy – on the same list as himself to know what he was still up against, but if there was anywhere that might have symbolised a different navy, it was Vernon, an elegant and streamlined relic of the age of sail that had been laid up, dismasted and brutalised into shape to serve the service’s newest technical arm.
The Vernon had begun its new life as a tender to HMS Excellent, the naval gunnery school, but as the importance of the new weapon became obvious, Vernon broke away from Excellent to become an independent command in her own right. She was lucky enough to have Jacky Fisher for her first captain, and when he was followed in turn by another formidable naval legend and future First Sea Lord, ‘old ’ard ’art’ Wilson, who had hacked and brawled his way to a VC at the Battle of El Teb in 1884, the future of the school was assured.
By Wilson’s and Scott’s time, Vernon had grown in size and importance, with a motley collection of hulks, workshops and a flat iron gunboat with a horizontal funnel jutting out of her stern added to the original establishment. In some ways the unsanitary, rat-infested warren of vessels must have conjured up memories of Britannia and Hindostan for Scott, but the filth and bustle of nineteenth-century Portsmouth was about as far a cry from the quiet beauty of the Dart as Vernon was from anything in the navy Scott had known before.
It was an exciting time to be there, with the torpedo undergoing constant improvements since the first above-water-launched model had been slid into the sea off a mess table. The year before Scott arrived had seen the introduction and testing of a new eighteen-inch weapon with a greater range, speed and accuracy than anything tried before, and for the first time in his life he had the chance to develop – or discover in himself – the technical and scientific aptitude that would so strongly mark his future work.
Even in Vernon, however, the most modern and innovative of establishments, Scott found himself in a culture that paradoxically reinforced those centralising, controlling, anti-initiative tendencies that were the hallmarks of the nineteenth-century service. In his brilliant study of Britain’s pre-First World War navy, Andrew Gordon identified four key institutions – Vernon, the Royal Geographical Society, Royalty and Freemasonry – as comprising a kind of ‘checklist’ of naval ‘authoritarianism’, and what he says of Vernon holds a special resonance for anyone interested in Scott’s later record as an explorer in the unpredictable world of Antarctica. ‘The work of the Torpedo School took place on the frontiers of practical physics,’ he wrote, ‘the staff formed (at least in their own opinion) a naval science vanguard, and their leadership of their profession away from art and into science may have inclined them towards a highly regulated “Newton’s clock” view of the universe, in which the unpredictabilities concomitant with devolved authority had no place.’
If there was one other aspect of Vernon life that was regressive in its tendencies, it was a Raglanesque assumption that any future enemy must be French. During the summer of 1890 exercises around Portland and Plymouth had showed how dangerous boats issuing from creeks on the French coast could be, and over his two summers in Vernon, Scott was involved in similar manoeuvres to counter the threat.
It was the first time that he had commanded anything bigger than a ship’s boat, and he could not have made a more disastrous start. On 12 August 1893 he headed for Falmouth as part of the torpedo flotilla, but the next day somehow succeeded in running Torpedo Boat 87 aground, suffering the humiliation of having himself towed back into dry dock at Keyham with ‘severe injury to propeller’.
It was an acute embarrassment for a young officer – ‘due care and attention does not appear to have been exercised’, Scott’s service record reads – but it was no more than that. In the official report on the incident he was ‘cautioned to be more attentive in future’, but Vernon’s commander, George Egerton, would always remain one of Scott’s greatest admirers, and a First Class in his theory examination, and a First Class Certificate in his practical, certainly suggest that the incident led to no lasting damage to his prospects.*
It is just possible, though, that it cast a shadow over his first appointment as a qualified Torpedo Officer to the unglamorous Depot ship Vulcan. The appointment was not ‘considered good in the Vernon’, but in the dogged way that would become typical of Scott, he was determined to make the best of his opportunities. His reasons for remaining with the ship, he wrote to his anxious father from Vulcan,
are firstly that I look upon her as a latent success, as a splendid but undeveloped and misused experiment dependent on her present handling to establish her utility, a utility which in war time would be apparent and patent to all. For this reason I take a very great interest in her welfare and do as much as lays in my power to forward it. Secondly, and in consequence of my first reason, I have hopes of establishing a reputation for myself.
Thirdly, I am losing nothing; in fact gaining a very great deal in general service experience – In general service work, of which we do as much as most other ships, I have a stake and take a position far above that which I should have in other ships – In addition I keep watch at sea with the fleet, and as they generally put us in the fighting line, am precisely in the same position to gain experience as if on board a battleship …
To fall back on the torpedo work again at which I have worked exceedingly hard, I look upon this ship as the best practical experience that could possibly befall an officer; in fact I look upon myself now as an authority on the only modern way of working a minefield and such like exercises – but what is better, the Captain and Currey do likewise.
Even if I fail, the practical knowledge and experience will be invaluable. I am conscious that by self-advertisement I might make myself heard now, but the position is a delicate one, and I should be sorry to advocate anything in which I did not believe. Meanwhile things constantly annoy and irritate one – but as you see, I work for a larger than ordinary stake, and with this I will conclude adding, that the welfare of body if not of career remains good.
It would be another decade before Scott would be able to tick off the other three boxes on Gordon’s ‘authoritarian checklist’ – the RGS, Freemasonry, and Royal connections – but the inevitable process of institutionalisation had begun. ‘We are getting very well known in the fleet,’ he told his father in the same letter, sounding alarmingly like some embryo ‘Pompo’ Heneage; ‘no function takes place but that we come pretty well out of it, the athletic sports, the rifle meetings, the regattas, events which though very far from you are very near to us out here; fate has kept us before the public in all. But best of all we had a most triumphant inspection, the Admiral said publicly that he should report us as the most creditable to all concerned, and privately that we were the cleanest ship he’d inspected, an opinion fully endorsed by Levison and others who accompany him on these occasions, they adding that no ship could “touch us”.’
This was no momentary aberration either. ‘The ship is still very dirty,’ he complained to his mother of his new ship, the Empress of India, ‘but I think improving – a great improvement has been commented upon in my small share of the cleaning part and I feel if only we could get the commander to smarten up a bit we should get the ship all straight – but he is unfortunately lamentably slack.’ Just over a week later, virtue was rewarded when a ‘somewhat disastrous’ admiral’s inspection confirmed ‘that the only clean parts of the ship were the torpedo department – and also that at drills etc