QUIZ NIGHTS ABOARD HMS VICTORY? THE GUNNER'S COMMONPLACE BOOKS
- Paul Weston
- Aug 27
- 2 min read
I recently had the opportunity of examining the ‘commonplace’ books of William Rivers in the archive of the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth. Rivers was the Gunner of HMS Victory when she fought at Trafalgar.
The books, small leather bound notebooks, are an astonishing record of the thoughts of a man, who, though he inhabited a world very different from our own, seem in some ways astonishingly contemporary. In 1805, Gunner Rivers was 53 years old, an experienced tradesman who appeared to have some influence, as his son, also William, was a midshipman in Nelson’s flagship.
Paper was not plentiful, Rivers made use of almost every square millimetre of space, and the cramped handwriting takes a bit of getting used to, but they are written in a version of English not much different from the one we use.
There are copies of letters that he sent, and notes of expenditure for the Board of Ordnance, but what really struck a chord with me, as an engineer, are what might be called ‘technical notes’ – notes similar to those I would probably have made, if I had been a master gunner.
A table gives the characteristics of different guns, from ½ to 42 pounders. A 32 pounder, for example, is listed as being 9’ 6” (2.9 m) in length, weighing 55 hundredweight (2.3 tonnes) with a point blank range of 633 yards (580 m), and an ultimate range, at 8o elevation, of 1¾ miles (3.2 km). In contrast, a 32 pounder Carronade of the type carried aboard my fictional HMS Oleander, weighs only 17 hundredweight (0.9 tonnes), but its range was much smaller. As a rule of thumb for the propellent, Rivers uses powder ⅓ of the weight of the shot.
He suggests that a gun crew should consist of one man per 5 hundredweight of gun weight, and gives a formula for calculating the circumference of a roundshot for a particular weight. There is a table for calculating the number of balls in a pile of shot, whether it be square, rectangular or triangular, and notes on making rockets. A 6 pounder rocket, for example, has a 4” pipe, weighs 6 pounds, and requires a stick ‘of straight pine’ 15’ long.
At Trafalgar, his son, Midshipman Rivers, had his leg amputated, and Gunner Rivers took time off from his busy battle schedule to visit him. Midshipman Rivers was close to Nelson when he fell, and wrote an account of it – even claiming to have been ‘the man who shot the man who shot Nelson’, but I am not sure if this assertion has been independently verified.
There was a page dedicated to cures for various aliments, and unexpectedly, lists of apparently random things, including ‘earthquakes of the last 1000 years’, and ‘European wars’. Did they have quiz nights aboard Victory, and was William Rivers both Master Gunner and Quiz Master?
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