Janet Macdonald 
The British Navy’s Victualling Board, 1793-1815 [PDF ebook] 
Management Competence and Incompetence

An examination of the Royal Navy’s Victualling Board, the body responsible for supplying the fleet.


During the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy increased its manpower from fewer than 20, 000 to more than 147, 000 men, with a concomitant increase in the quantities of food and drink required to sustain them.The organisation responsible for this, the Victualling Board, performed its tasks using techniques and systems which it had developed over the previous 110 years. In terms of actually delivering supplies to warships, troopships and army garrisons abroad, the Victualling Board performed well given the constraints of long-distance communications and intermittent difficulties in obtaining supplies. However, its other areas of responsibility showed poor performance, as evidenced by the reports of several Parliamentary enquiries. This book examines in detail the processes by which the Victualling Board performed its core and non-core tasks, identifying the areas of competence and incompetence, and establishing the underlying causes of the incompetencies.


JANET MACDONALD, author of the highly acclaimed
Feeding Nelson’s Navy (Chatham, 2004), has recently completed a thesis at King’s College London. After a business career, and running an equestrian organisation, she spent ten years as a freelance writer, publishing more than thirty books.

Mục lục

Introduction. Historiography and early history of victualling

The work of the Victualling Board. Core tasks: Supply

Core tasks: Delivery at home

Core tasks: Delivery abroad

Non-core and ad hoc tasks

Staff at Head Office

Staff at the yards

Fraud and other misdemeanours

Parliamentary enquiries

Conclusions