Abstract
This chapter looks to understand what, by 1914, had been the effect of a shift from sail to steam power half a century earlier. Examining the decision to shift from coal to oil power, it considers the long-term effects of the ramifications of a coal-powered navy as well as the effects that a shift to a fuel, the type of which Britain did not control a ready supply. In doing so, it shows how a shift to oil meant that Britain lost its advantage in terms of fuelling infrastructure and instead faced the same difficulties encountered by its rivals during the age of steam.
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Notes
- 1.
Warwick Michael Brown, ‘The Royal Navy’s Fuel Supplies 1898–1939: The Transition from Coal to Oil’ (PhD Thesis, King’s College London (University of London), 2003, 133.
- 2.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 116–118.
- 3.
James Goldrick, ‘Coal and the Advent of the First World War at Sea’, War in History, 21, 3 (2014), 322–337.
- 4.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 121, 132.
- 5.
Goldrick, ‘Coal and the Advent of the First World War at Sea’, 322–337.
- 6.
R.H. Walters, The Economic and Business History of the South Wales Steam Coal Industry, 1840–1914 (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 323; D.A. Thomas, The Growth and Direction of Our Foreign Trade in Coal During the Last Half Century: Read before the Royal Statistical Society, 19th May, 1903, and Extracted from the Issue of the Society's Journal for Sept. 1903 (London: Royal Statistical Society, 1903), 55–56; British Parliamentary Papers, 1905 [Cd. 2353], Royal Commission on Coal Supplies. Final report of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies. Part I. General report, 21.
- 7.
‘A Second String’, Punch, 10 April 1912.
- 8.
Jon Tetsuro Sumida, ‘British Naval Operational Logistics, 1914–1918’, Journal of Military History, 57, 3 (1993), 461.
- 9.
‘What The World Says’, Derby Mercury, 30 December 1896; British Parliamentary Papers, 1904 [Cd. 1991], Royal Commission on Coal Supplies. Second report of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies. Vol. II. Minutes of evidence and appendices, 143–155; Martin Gibson, ‘British Strategy and Oil, 1914–1923’, PhD Thesis, University of Glasgow 2012, 33.
- 10.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 133, 136.
- 11.
Sumida, ‘British Naval Operational Logistics, 1914–1918’, 462.
- 12.
‘Experiments in ships using liquid fuel’ can be found in ADM 265/26.
- 13.
Dahl, ‘Naval Innovation’, 52; Daniel Owen Spence, A History of the Royal Navy: Empire and Imperialism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 82.
- 14.
‘Material relating to the Oil Commission, The Papers of 1st Lord Fisher of Kilverstone’, FISR 6, Churchill Archives Centre.
- 15.
Goldrick, ‘Coal and the Advent of the First World War at Sea’, 322–337. Goldrick states that “the 1914 battlecruiser Tiger (with 39 boilers) had an engineering complement of 600 on coal and oil. By comparison, the post-war Hood, which could develop nearly half as much power again with 24 boilers on oil alone, had one of 300.”
- 16.
Sumida, ‘British Naval Operational Logistics, 1914–1918’, 461.
- 17.
Nuno Luís Madureira, ‘Oil in the Age of Steam’, Journal of Global History, 5, no. 1 (2010), 75–94.
- 18.
Gibson, ‘British Strategy and Oil’, abstract.
- 19.
Madureira, Oil in the age of steam, 88.
- 20.
Dahl, Naval innovation, 54–55; Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’, 86.
- 21.
Sumida, ‘British Naval Operational Logistics, 1914–1918’, 471.
- 22.
Goldrick, ‘Coal and the Advent of the First World War at Sea’, 322–337.
- 23.
See, for example, Dahl, Naval innovation, 50–56; Gibson, British strategy and oil; Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies.
- 24.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 134.
- 25.
Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’, 89–90.
- 26.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 137.
- 27.
Sumida, ‘British Naval Operational Logistics, 1914–1918’, 464.
- 28.
Cited in Timothy C. Winegard, The First World Oil War (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 102.
- 29.
Maclay to Hankey, 13/8/1917, TNA, ADM 116/1804. Cited in Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 246.
- 30.
Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’, 90.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
For an in-depth study of the effects of the change to oil on the Middle East, see Gibson, British strategy and oil, 1914–1923; Martin Gibson, Britain’s Quest for Oil. The First World War and the Peace Conferences (Solihull: Helion, 2017). For a study of the transformation of oil into a geostrategic commodity, see Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’. The geopolitics of oil are perhaps most famously discussed in Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).
- 33.
Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’, 90.
- 34.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 228–230.
- 35.
Ashley Jackson, The British Empire: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 11.
- 36.
Daniel Owen Spence, Colonial Naval Culture and British Imperialism, 1922–67 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015), 17.
- 37.
Brown, The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies, 231–232.
- 38.
Madureira, ‘Oil in the age of steam’, 90.
- 39.
Bruce Taylor, The Battlecruiser HMS Hood: An Illustrated Biography 1916–1941 (Barnsley: Seaforth Publishing, 2008), 70.
- 40.
Imported Oils Duty, House of Commons Debate, 24 April 1928, Hansard, vol. 216, cols. 854–860.
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Gray, S. (2018). Epilogue. In: Steam Power and Sea Power. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57642-2_10
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