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hmsloop_hotspur2019-02-24 05:53 pm
sharpiefan) wrote in hmsloop_hotspur2019-02-24 05:53 pm
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The Marines: Who They Are, and What They Do (A Photo-essay in Two Parts)
Part 1 (originally posted at perfect_duet)
Apologies: This was going to be accompanied by quotes from the series for as much relevant material as I could glean to go with this, but I don't have enough time to hunting through all the books for what is, in most cases, no more than a short paragraph (if so much!) to do with Marines.
This entry is an essay and pics. I apologise in advance: Not all the screencaps are from Hornblower, though they all help to illustrate my points. (I hope!)
Two privates of the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot
The Marines were first raised in 1664 as 'The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot' and were administered by Horseguards, the Army equivalent of the Admiralty. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was decided that the regimental system of administration didn't work: Men and officers were sometimes not getting their back-pay for several years after their ship had paid off, because their whole regiment had to be paid at the same time, as the other Army regiments were. So, in 1755, when it was clear that Britain and France were going to end up at war once again (in what became known as the Seven Years' War in England and the French and Indian War in the US), it was decided that the Marines were a very necessary force to have and that they should come under the auspices of the Admiralty, although with its own administrative chain and set-up, which would report at its highest level to Admiralty.
A Royal Marine Private c. 1812, by Charles Hamilton Smith
This Divisional system is the set-up Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower would have known, though they wore white facings (collar and cuffs) until 1803 when they were granted the title 'Royal' thanks to the efforts of Lord St. Vincent, and changed from white to blue facings in keeping with the Royal regiments in the Army. It was also at this time that the style of jacket changed.
The Sergeant aboard HM Sloop Hotspur in Loyalty and Duty is shown incorrectly to be wearing stripes or chevrons as a mark of rank. These were not introduced until 1807 for the Royal Marines, and he should be shown as wearing a 'shoulder knot', a cord of white worsted hanging from his right shoulder. The rank markings of the Sergeant in Mutiny and Retribution are also not quite right. There is a sergeant in the film Master & Commander who's shown with the correct insignia, but he's really hard to get screenshots of!
Edit!! Got one! The Marine on the right in the front rank is, I think, a Corporal (he's not wearing a sash - which would, correctly, be a red woollen sash with a white stripe) but he is wearing a shoulder knot - it dates from the time when muskets were fired by wheel-lock, using slow-match, and NCOs had to carry and extra length of slow-match.
Each of the three main Royal Naval dockyard towns (Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth) had a Division of Marines based there, in its own barracks near the Dockyard. The Division Headquarters was where the men trained in the same drills and manoeuvres as the Army, so that they could fully support the Army in operations ashore. They were responsible for sending out recruiting parties - they recruited in the exact same fashion as the Army, which meant that every Marine was, technically, a volunteer and recruits to the Marines did not have to be from coastal towns or villages: Each Division was given an area to recruit in that corresponded in its broadest sense with a strip of the country going North from the Divisional headquarters.
The areas assigned were: The Chatham Division: Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland (in the East).
The Portsmouth Division: Hampshire, Sussex, Dorset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire (a broad swathe up the centre).
The Plymouth Division: Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland and Wales (to the West).
Whatever port a ship had listed as its home port was the Division it drew its Marines from. Both HMS Victory and HMS Temeraire were ships whose home-port was Chatham and therefore the Marines aboard each ship were drawn from the Chatham Division.
The duties ashore were mundane enough: Drills, parades, inspections and sentry-duties, in line with what any soldier in the Army would be expected to do. Once a Marine was considered to be fully trained, he would be put onto rotation to be posted to the guard-ship (at the Nore, Spithead or the Hamoaze, depending on which Division he was in), where he would begin to learn what it was like to serve at sea.
Once he had done a stint (something like three to six months) in a guard-ship, he would be added to the roster of men for sea-duty.
The size of a ship's Marine detachment depended on the number of guns she carried: Surprise of 28 guns would have had a detachment of about 20 Marines, (including a Sergeant, a Corporal and a drummer) under the command of a subaltern (an officer below the rank of Captain, i.e. a Lieutenant). The only reason I can think of that Howard was a Captain in the series is that because otherwise he would be too easily mistaken (on paper, in the first instance) for a Naval Lieutenant, and the film carried this rank over. I am not sure that his rank was ever actually explicitly stated in the film; I've just always presumed it to be 'Captain' because that's what the sources say. Edit: Having double-checked the pics at the amazing Denim Blues site, he's wearing two epaulettes, which denotes a Captain in the military.
Day-to-day duties included: Standing sentry outside the Captain's cabin, the wardroom (gunroom in frigates), magazines and spirit room, as well as standing sentry by the quarterdeck steps. If there was anyone in irons, a Marine was posted to stand sentry over him. It was a Marine tasked with turning the glass and striking the bell every half-hour, to keep time.
Marine sentry allowing Hollom into the Great Cabin of HMS Surprise
Marine turning the half-hour glass (you can just make out his jacket cuff)
Howard and a midshipman
In action, Marines were to be found acting as sharpshooters (though Nelson forbade them from going into the tops at Trafalgar for fear the musket wads would set the sails alight). They were also to be found acting as part of the crews of the 'great guns':
A Marine working as part of a gun crew
Lieutenant Roteley, an officer in the Royal Marines who was aboard HMS Victory at Trafalgar, has been quoted in several works: The poop became a slaughter-house. The two senior lieutenants of Marines and half the original forty were placed hors de combat. Captain Adair then ordered me to bring him up a reinforcement of Marines from the great guns. I need not inform a seaman of the difficulty of separating a man from his gun. In the excitement of action the Marines had thrown off their red jackets and appeared in check shirts and blue trousers. There was no distinguishing Marine from Seaman – all were working like horses.
Marines were also stationed as sentries at the magazine (to prevent unauthorised persons, or authorised persons not wearing list slippers from entering) and at the companionways, to prevent people from trying to seek shelter below the waterline, thus abandoning their duties. My shot of the latter is, unfortunately, not very clear; it's taken from a documentary DVD titled (I think) Nelson and Trafalgar:
.
The Marines lived aft of the seamen and forard of the gunroom or wardroom: directly between the sailors and the officers. This was a visual demarcation of territory and a deterrent to mutineers - as far as I have yet discovered, the only single-ship mutinies that succeeded were ones where there were no Marines aboard (as in the Bounty) or where the Marines were eliminated or otherwise put out of action (as in the Hermione) or where they were active participants (the 1801 mutiny aboard Temeraire got further than it would have otherwise because of a Marine name James McEvoy).
On land, they were expected to stand sentry to make sure that watering parties etc were not surprised by an enemy, and that no sailor would desert. Where a fleet or squadron had to take a fortification for some reason, there were considered to be enough trained troops (in the marines) for such an operation to be viable without having to wait for a regiment or two who have to be transported in slow troop-ships. (The Marines would take the position and the Army would come along later to take over and garrison it, was the thinking at the time.)
They performed some of the hard physical work aboard ship (helping to get in the boats, brace the yards around &c) when not otherwise employed and were 'generally expected to make themselves otherwise useful'. The fact we don't hear very much about them is simply because the despatches home were written by Naval officers.
And naturally, they were still expected to drill regularly, and have inspections, and otherwise live at sea much as they would on land. They would drill wherever they would not be in the way of the sailors working the ship, which usually meant the quarterdeck or poop deck (in those ships that had a poop deck!), but could also mean the gangway on the weatherdeck, as shown below:
I hope I've given a little insight into the lives and duties of a part of Surprise's crew who would otherwise be overlooked.
"We shall beat to quarters!"
I wanted to embed these, but they seem to have removed the option to use the old version of the embed code, and the new version doesn't work here on DW. So, have links to a couple of vids I made previously focussing on the Marines in action on screen, both in M&C and in Hornblower:
perfect_duet)Apologies: This was going to be accompanied by quotes from the series for as much relevant material as I could glean to go with this, but I don't have enough time to hunting through all the books for what is, in most cases, no more than a short paragraph (if so much!) to do with Marines.
This entry is an essay and pics. I apologise in advance: Not all the screencaps are from Hornblower, though they all help to illustrate my points. (I hope!)
Two privates of the Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot
The Marines were first raised in 1664 as 'The Duke of York and Albany's Maritime Regiment of Foot' and were administered by Horseguards, the Army equivalent of the Admiralty. By the mid-eighteenth century, it was decided that the regimental system of administration didn't work: Men and officers were sometimes not getting their back-pay for several years after their ship had paid off, because their whole regiment had to be paid at the same time, as the other Army regiments were. So, in 1755, when it was clear that Britain and France were going to end up at war once again (in what became known as the Seven Years' War in England and the French and Indian War in the US), it was decided that the Marines were a very necessary force to have and that they should come under the auspices of the Admiralty, although with its own administrative chain and set-up, which would report at its highest level to Admiralty.
A Royal Marine Private c. 1812, by Charles Hamilton Smith
This Divisional system is the set-up Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower would have known, though they wore white facings (collar and cuffs) until 1803 when they were granted the title 'Royal' thanks to the efforts of Lord St. Vincent, and changed from white to blue facings in keeping with the Royal regiments in the Army. It was also at this time that the style of jacket changed.
The Sergeant aboard HM Sloop Hotspur in Loyalty and Duty is shown incorrectly to be wearing stripes or chevrons as a mark of rank. These were not introduced until 1807 for the Royal Marines, and he should be shown as wearing a 'shoulder knot', a cord of white worsted hanging from his right shoulder. The rank markings of the Sergeant in Mutiny and Retribution are also not quite right. There is a sergeant in the film Master & Commander who's shown with the correct insignia, but he's really hard to get screenshots of!
Edit!! Got one! The Marine on the right in the front rank is, I think, a Corporal (he's not wearing a sash - which would, correctly, be a red woollen sash with a white stripe) but he is wearing a shoulder knot - it dates from the time when muskets were fired by wheel-lock, using slow-match, and NCOs had to carry and extra length of slow-match.
Each of the three main Royal Naval dockyard towns (Chatham, Portsmouth and Plymouth) had a Division of Marines based there, in its own barracks near the Dockyard. The Division Headquarters was where the men trained in the same drills and manoeuvres as the Army, so that they could fully support the Army in operations ashore. They were responsible for sending out recruiting parties - they recruited in the exact same fashion as the Army, which meant that every Marine was, technically, a volunteer and recruits to the Marines did not have to be from coastal towns or villages: Each Division was given an area to recruit in that corresponded in its broadest sense with a strip of the country going North from the Divisional headquarters.
The areas assigned were: The Chatham Division: Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Hertfordshire, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, County Durham, Northumberland (in the East).
The Portsmouth Division: Hampshire, Sussex, Dorset, Wiltshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Warwickshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire (a broad swathe up the centre).
The Plymouth Division: Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire, Westmorland, Cumberland and Wales (to the West).
Whatever port a ship had listed as its home port was the Division it drew its Marines from. Both HMS Victory and HMS Temeraire were ships whose home-port was Chatham and therefore the Marines aboard each ship were drawn from the Chatham Division.
The duties ashore were mundane enough: Drills, parades, inspections and sentry-duties, in line with what any soldier in the Army would be expected to do. Once a Marine was considered to be fully trained, he would be put onto rotation to be posted to the guard-ship (at the Nore, Spithead or the Hamoaze, depending on which Division he was in), where he would begin to learn what it was like to serve at sea.
Once he had done a stint (something like three to six months) in a guard-ship, he would be added to the roster of men for sea-duty.
The size of a ship's Marine detachment depended on the number of guns she carried: Surprise of 28 guns would have had a detachment of about 20 Marines, (including a Sergeant, a Corporal and a drummer) under the command of a subaltern (an officer below the rank of Captain, i.e. a Lieutenant). The only reason I can think of that Howard was a Captain in the series is that because otherwise he would be too easily mistaken (on paper, in the first instance) for a Naval Lieutenant, and the film carried this rank over. I am not sure that his rank was ever actually explicitly stated in the film; I've just always presumed it to be 'Captain' because that's what the sources say. Edit: Having double-checked the pics at the amazing Denim Blues site, he's wearing two epaulettes, which denotes a Captain in the military.
Day-to-day duties included: Standing sentry outside the Captain's cabin, the wardroom (gunroom in frigates), magazines and spirit room, as well as standing sentry by the quarterdeck steps. If there was anyone in irons, a Marine was posted to stand sentry over him. It was a Marine tasked with turning the glass and striking the bell every half-hour, to keep time.
Marine sentry allowing Hollom into the Great Cabin of HMS Surprise
Marine turning the half-hour glass (you can just make out his jacket cuff)
Howard and a midshipman
In action, Marines were to be found acting as sharpshooters (though Nelson forbade them from going into the tops at Trafalgar for fear the musket wads would set the sails alight). They were also to be found acting as part of the crews of the 'great guns':
A Marine working as part of a gun crew
Lieutenant Roteley, an officer in the Royal Marines who was aboard HMS Victory at Trafalgar, has been quoted in several works: The poop became a slaughter-house. The two senior lieutenants of Marines and half the original forty were placed hors de combat. Captain Adair then ordered me to bring him up a reinforcement of Marines from the great guns. I need not inform a seaman of the difficulty of separating a man from his gun. In the excitement of action the Marines had thrown off their red jackets and appeared in check shirts and blue trousers. There was no distinguishing Marine from Seaman – all were working like horses.
Marines were also stationed as sentries at the magazine (to prevent unauthorised persons, or authorised persons not wearing list slippers from entering) and at the companionways, to prevent people from trying to seek shelter below the waterline, thus abandoning their duties. My shot of the latter is, unfortunately, not very clear; it's taken from a documentary DVD titled (I think) Nelson and Trafalgar:
.The Marines lived aft of the seamen and forard of the gunroom or wardroom: directly between the sailors and the officers. This was a visual demarcation of territory and a deterrent to mutineers - as far as I have yet discovered, the only single-ship mutinies that succeeded were ones where there were no Marines aboard (as in the Bounty) or where the Marines were eliminated or otherwise put out of action (as in the Hermione) or where they were active participants (the 1801 mutiny aboard Temeraire got further than it would have otherwise because of a Marine name James McEvoy).
On land, they were expected to stand sentry to make sure that watering parties etc were not surprised by an enemy, and that no sailor would desert. Where a fleet or squadron had to take a fortification for some reason, there were considered to be enough trained troops (in the marines) for such an operation to be viable without having to wait for a regiment or two who have to be transported in slow troop-ships. (The Marines would take the position and the Army would come along later to take over and garrison it, was the thinking at the time.)
They performed some of the hard physical work aboard ship (helping to get in the boats, brace the yards around &c) when not otherwise employed and were 'generally expected to make themselves otherwise useful'. The fact we don't hear very much about them is simply because the despatches home were written by Naval officers.
And naturally, they were still expected to drill regularly, and have inspections, and otherwise live at sea much as they would on land. They would drill wherever they would not be in the way of the sailors working the ship, which usually meant the quarterdeck or poop deck (in those ships that had a poop deck!), but could also mean the gangway on the weatherdeck, as shown below:
I hope I've given a little insight into the lives and duties of a part of Surprise's crew who would otherwise be overlooked.
"We shall beat to quarters!"
I wanted to embed these, but they seem to have removed the option to use the old version of the embed code, and the new version doesn't work here on DW. So, have links to a couple of vids I made previously focussing on the Marines in action on screen, both in M&C and in Hornblower:
no subject
And yay, a photo of the shoulder knot! I was trying to envision what that might look like (and had vague memories of paintings that maybe showed it?), so I'm glad of the reference.
no subject
Sloops did have a Marine detachment, 13 privates, one corporal and one drummer, all under the command of a sergeant.
Technically the officers lived in the gunroom of a frigate and the wardroom of third-rates and up with the warrant officers in the gunroom.
(My days in the Aubreyad fandom are showing here. Oops.)
no subject
And at the risk of making you pull out your reference works again, what should it have been on the Atropos? Sixth-rate, 22 guns. ETA: Sorry, I see you have the table up now!
And yes, I eventually did decide that the wardrooms on the Hotspur and Atropos were imaginary, but it's nice to have the confirmation. :-)
no subject