A great deal has been written about the actions of seagoing fleets, the individuals who commanded them and the vessels that made up those fleets. In contrast, the organisational infrastructure necessary for the purpose of building and preparing warships for the fleet has often been ignored. It was this failure to recognise an important aspect of naval history that first spurred me into several decades of researching and writing the history of naval dockyards. In britain, which had the first industrial revolution, the royal dockyards could boast a civilian workforce that was considerably larger than that of any other industrial enterprise long before the industrial take-off. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the seven home yards of the Royal navy employed a workforce of nearly 16,000 men and even some women. Even among industrial and social historians this scale of employment has often been ignored. Yet, on account of their size, the dockyards add much to our understanding of developing social processes. For it was within those yards that a system of recruitment, training and supervision of a large-scale workforce was pioneered. At the same time the artisans and labourers of the yards developed their own particular response to the means by which they were managed, attempting to ensure their own interests were protected and acknowledged.

My entry into the field of dockyard research was eased by the seminal work of Michael Oppenheim on Tudor and early Stuart naval administration, of John Ehrman on the navy of the late seventeenth century, and of Daniel Baugh on naval administration during the early eighteenth century. By fully integrating the function and working of the dockyards into their overall research, these three naval historians established the importance of the yards while indicating necessary directions for future research. Publications by the Navy Records Society added depth to my knowledge by issuing two volumes of collected documents edited by Baugh and Merriman. While the former revisited and underpinned his earlier publication, expanding his time frame, Merriman examined naval administration, including the dockyards, during the age of Queen Anne (1702–14). Later but also of importance were the works of Roger Morriss and Jonathan Coad. Both focussed specifically on the royal dockyards, morriss undertaking an in-depth study of the wartime period 1793–1815 while Coad, in two illustrated books, concentrated on the architecture of the yards.