On the knee: Stoker Moody and the Portsmouth Barracks riot, 1906

Not the usual fare here, but it's an incident I wanted to research.This post is the companion to the short film On the knee, on the riot at the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth, in November 1906. The sources, quotations and caveats follow.

The navy in 1906

In 1906 the Royal Navy was the largest in the world, held by policy to the Two-Power Standard: a fleet equal to the next two navies combined. Its last great fleet action, Trafalgar, was a century past. Germany's Navy Laws of 1898 and 1900 had begun a battle fleet aimed at Britain, and a further law in 1906 added six large cruisers (Massie 1991). On 10 February 1906 Edward VII launched HMS Dreadnought at Portsmouth Dockyard: a turbine battleship whose eighteen boilers, like those of every ship in the fleet, burned coal shovelled by hand (Roberts 1992). The men who fed them were stokers.

HMS Dreadnought, c. 1906–07. US Navy Historical Center NH 63367.

 

The stokehold of a battleship. C. J. Staniland, before 1916.

Sunday 4 November

At evening quarters some 390 stokers were kept standing longer than usual in cold weather; when a heavy shower came on, some broke ranks and ran for cover. All were mustered again in the gymnasium, where the senior gunnery officer, Lieutenant Bernard St George Collard, ordered them "On the knee", a command used in gunnery training but unfamiliar to stokers. Many refused and shouted "no", and went down only when the order was repeated with a threat of punishment (Carew). The Admiralty later listed among the causes of that night's disorder "a feeling of resentment on the part of the stokers caused by the misuse of the drill order 'On the knee'" and "the retention of the stokers on parade on the Sunday afternoon during rain" (Hansard, 17 December 1906).

A year earlier

In November 1905 Collard had ordered a single stoker, Acton, on the knee for answering "Here" rather than "Here, sir" (Carew). On 28 November 1906 Hugh Lea MP asked the Secretary to the Admiralty about "the allegation that Lieutenant Collard on one occasion addressed a stoker with the words, 'Down on the knee, you dog'". Collard denied using abusive language, and his court martial accepted the denial (Carew).

Monday 5 November

The gate of the Royal Naval Barracks, Portsmouth. Postcard, c. 1903–10.

Disorder resumed in the barracks the next evening. Outside, a crowd of over a thousand, locals and former sailors among them, gathered at the locked gates, threw stones and broke windows; a hundred armed Royal Marines were called out from Eastney Barracks (Carew). The Admiralty Minute calls it "a contemporaneous riot on the part of civilians and other persons" outside the barracks.

The courts martial

Eleven stokers were court-martialled. Edwin Moody, Stoker First Class, was sentenced on 26 November to five years' penal servitude (Hansard, 28 November 1906). The Secretary to the Admiralty told the Commons that "Stoker Moody was not charged with refusing to obey the 'On the knee' order, but with having on two occasions incited others to take part in disturbances." Moody's written statement presented him as little more than a spectator; the court preferred a report that he had urged stokers to "stick together" (Carew). Of the others, Day received 18 months, McMichael and Leigh nine months, Fachney and Brown six, Colclough and Beddard three, and Reddish 42 days; two were acquitted (Carew).

The sentences as passed, bars to scale.

Collard was court-martialled too. The Admiralty Minute records that he was "convicted of an act to the prejudice of good order and naval discipline, and the sentence of reprimand has been noted."

The Admiralty's verdict

The Minute, read in the Commons on 17 December 1906, relieved Commodore Stopford of his appointment, superseded Commander Drury-Lowe, and relieved Commander Mitchell "by allowing a drill order to be used for other than drill purposes". It directed that "the drill order 'On the knee' is not to be used for other than drill purposes", and reduced Moody's sentence "from five years to three years' penal servitude". Asked in February 1907 whether the sentences would be reconsidered, the Secretary to the Admiralty had "nothing to add".

The outcry

The affair, in Carew's words, dominated the press at home and abroad. In Parliament it came up at least 22 times between 8 November 1906 and 18 February 1907: 21 questions and statements in the Commons and one in the Lords, found by reading the Hansard index for every sitting day of those months. The Humanitarian League protested at the severity of Moody's sentence, and protest meetings were held (Carew). On Sunday 20 January 1907, between one and two thousand people gathered in Trafalgar Square under the banners of the Social Democratic Federation, hoisted on the plinth of the Nelson monument. The Evening Express of Cardiff reported that the speakers "intended to 'let the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty know that they would not have the stokers of the Navy go 'on the knee' to mortal man.'"

Evening Express (Cardiff), 21 January 1907. National Library of Wales, Welsh Newspapers Online.

What lasted

With the order confined to drill, "to all intents and purposes it now disappeared" (Carew). The wider campaign against degrading summary punishment, led by Lionel Yexley's lower-deck paper The Fleet, bore fruit in 1912: a committee under Rear-Admiral Brock, set up by Churchill as First Lord, led to the end of the "10 A" routine of standing facing the bulkhead and eating under a sentry, to cells being limited to three days, to officers below the rank of Commander being barred from awarding heavy punishment without approval, and to a copy of King's Regulations being carried for ratings to read. 1912 was the first year in which summary punishments were fewer than the men of the lower deck (Carew).

Royal Navy recruiting poster, "Stokers Required", September 1913. Imperial War Museums, Art.IWM PST 0805.

In the summer of 1933 Edwin Moody, out of work, knocked on the door of a retired naval officer, Lieutenant Commander Charles Drage, near Kensington Palace, looking for a job (Carew).

Notes on the film

Hansard text is shown as published, reset in type, with omissions marked. Moody's defence, the crowd figures and the eight lesser sentences come from Anthony Carew's history, which draws on the court-martial record; the court-martial papers themselves were not consulted. Carew states that Collard's reprimand was for the 1905 punishment of Acton and that no penalty followed for the order in the gym; that is not shown in the film until a primary source confirms it. Hansard gives Moody's sentence as penal servitude; Carew describes all the sentences as with hard labour.

Sources

• House of Commons Debates, 28 November 1906, vol. 166 c35, "The Disturbances at Portsmouth". Historic Hansard.
• House of Commons Debates, 17 December 1906, vol. 167 cc1008–10, "The Disturbances at Portsmouth — Admiralty Minute". Historic Hansard.
• House of Commons Debates, 18 February 1907, vol. 169 cc522–3, "Sentence on Stoker Moody". Historic Hansard.
• Evening Express (Cardiff), 21 January 1907 (third edition), "'On the Knee, Dog!' Lurid speeches under Nelson's statue". Welsh Newspapers Online.
• Carew, A., "The Stoker, the Gunnery Lieutenant and Issues of Naval Discipline around the 1906 Portsmouth Barracks Mutiny". anthonycarew.org.
• Massie, R. K. 1991. Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War. New York: Random House.
• Roberts, J. 1992. The Battleship Dreadnought. London: Conway Maritime.

Contains Parliamentary information licensed under the Open Parliament Licence v3.0.