(^274) Chapter Eight
example, who became chief naval designer in 1885, had worked at
Armstrong’s for a two-year spell immediately before assuming his new
post. He became perhaps the principal link between the Royal Navy
and private industry thereafter.^20 Captain Andrew Noble moved the
other way. He abandoned a career in the navy to work for Armstrong
and rose to become head of the firm in 1900 when the founder died. It
was also possible to start at the top, as Admiral Sir Astley Cooper Key
did in 1886 by becoming chairman of the board of a newly established
armaments firm, the Nordenfeldt Gun and Ammunition Company.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, it was even possible for
Admiral Sir Percy Scott to enter into royalty contracts with Vickers
for inventions he made “on the side” in the course of his professional
work.^21
Pecuniary self-aggrandizement did not become really respectable in
the navy any more than in the army; and Admiral Scott was greedy
rather than businesslike. Nevertheless, extensive dealings with one
another and continual consultation over technical and financial ques
tions between private businessmen and naval officers went a long way
to break down older mistrust.
Friction and subterfuge were never entirely eliminated from the
relationship, which revolved, after all, around the ancient ambiva
lences between buyer and seller. But in spite of occasional accusations
of bad faith, collaboration in the myriad problems of how to design
new and better warships prevailed. In effect, a small company of tech
nocrats constructed a slender bridge across the chasm which had pre
viously divided naval officers from the manufacturing and business
world. In doing so, they provided a means whereby the new poten
tialities of democratic and parliamentary politics could be realized in
the form of successive generations of new weaponry, each more for
midable, more costly, and more important for the national economy as
a whole than its predecessor.
The bridge between the navy and the arms industry was still weak
and carried relatively little traffic in 1889, when the building program
of 1884 ran out. A Naval Defence Act was duly brought in by the
government. It cost £21.5 million, nearly four times the supplemen
tary appropriation in 1884; and the number of ships to be built, half of
them in private shipyards, reached the impressive total of seventy.
- Cf. Frederic Manning, The Life of Sir William White (London, 1923).
- A notably cantankerous and inventive naval officer, he successfully sued Vickers
in 1920 for withholding some of his royalties. Cf. Peter Padfield, Aim Straight: A
Biography of Admiral Sir Percy Scott (London, 1966), pp. 262–68.