Pepys and the Thirty Ships
Bernard Pool describes how Pepys regarded the Naval shipbuilding programme of 1677 as his greatest administrative achievement.
A present-day administrator maybe tempted to think that the problems he has to face in planning a large production programme, and the questions of priority, and of labour and material shortages that arise, are peculiar to the modern industrial age.
In fact, difficulties of this kind are not new, and have been encountered in past centuries, as, for instance, in the case of what must be the first major naval shipbuilding programme—The Thirty Ships of 1677. On that occasion, Samuel Pepys and his colleagues at the Admiralty, and at the Navy Board, handled with conspicuous ability, skill and energy, the complicated priority and production issues with which they had to deal.
The Third Dutch War had ended in February 1674; and, except for some small warships of the Fourth and Fifth Rates in the Mediterranean on anti-piracy patrol, the main fleet had been laid up. France had been our ally in the war, and French squadrons had served with the English fleet. But it was now belatedly recognized that commercial rivalry between England and Holland was outdated.
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