272 Chapter Eight
idle much of the time, because the demands of the Royal Navy did not
suffice to keep such an installation busy—or anything near. Inter
national sales, of the kind Krupp and Armstrong had learned to thrive
on, were the only way in which a new capital plant could come close to
full utilization. This meant, in turn, that arsenal costs of production
would certainly exceed those of private companies so long as Wool
wich only served the British government.
Thus the ground rules agreed to in 1886 had the effect of allowing
Armstrong and, after 1888, Vickers as well, to undercut the arsenal
systematically. Woolwich simply could not compete; and in fact the
officers in charge never wanted and never got the enormous expansion
of capital plant that would have been needed to keep up with the ex
plosive pace of technical change resulting from the new form of
naval-industrial collaboration that prevailed throughout the thirty
years between 1884 and 1914.
Woolwich and the Royal Naval Dockyards continued to do a great
deal of work for the navy,^15 but they did not, as a rule, introduce im
portant innovation. Woolwich did sometimes take on new weapons
after initial development work had been done elsewhere. This was the
case with self-propelled torpedoes, for example, which were built at
Woolwich after 1871. The fact that Robert Whitehead, the inventor,
was willing to sell his patents to the Admiralty made room for the ar
senal in this instance.^16 When, however, an inventor preferred to set
up a new company, as Hiram Maxim did in 1884 to make his newly in
vented machine guns, the law did not permit Woolwich to infringe
patents.
The army rather than the navy was, of course, the principal British
purchaser for Maxim’s machine guns; and the fact that truly efficient
designs could be secured only from private manufacturers after 1884
probably reinforced professional suspicion of the new weapon. At any
rate the War Office purchased very few Maxims despite the fact that
their lethal efficiency was demonstrated repeatedly in colonial cam
paigns.^17 Before the Boer War (1899–1902) the British army re-
- Private firms handled only 35.7 percent of the navy’s total expenditure for muni
tions between 1881 and 1890, but the proportion of contracts let to private firms
steadily increased, to 46.1 percent in 1890–1900 and 58.5 percent in 1900–1910. Clive
Trebilcock, “Spin-off in British Economic History: Armaments and Industry, 1760–
1914,” Economic History Review 22 (1969): 480.
- Gray, The Devil’s Device, pp. 71, 88. Whitehead did subsequently set up a private
company in England to manufacture torpedoes for sale to foreign countries. It merged
into Vickers in 1906.
- Cf. John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun (London, 1975), pp. 79–109–
Mockery is easy in view of what happened in 1914–18; but an army that sought to
