IN ADDITION TO THE CORE TASKS of obtaining and dispensing food and drink to the Royal Navy and parts of the army, the Victualling Board had numerous other tasks to perform. Some of these were of a regular nature, such as accounting, reporting to other government departments, property management, and staff management; others were of an ad hoc nature, although they tended to fall into certain categories such as feeding various groups of people who did not belong to the Royal Navy or British army, investigating complaints from commissioned officers, and investigating, and sometimes incorporating, innovations in food preparation, storage and preservation. There were a few other ad hoc tasks which involved the Victualling Board in considerable extra work, often to little or no useful effect, such as dealing with the edible cargoes destined for enemy countries on neutral ships which were seized at the beginning of the French Revolutionary war.

Accountancy

This aspect of the Victualling Board’s work is dealt with here, as a ‘noncore’ task, because it is clear from copious evidence (including two of the Parliamentary reports) that the commissioners of the Victualling Board regarded it in that light and gave it a lower priority in their daily deliberations than the tasks of obtaining and delivering victuals and victualling stores to the fleet; this despite the fact that by far the greater part of the staff at Somerset Place was in the two accounting departments, with only a small secretariat to deal with everything else.

The commissioners may have taken their lead from the original Instructions to the Commissioners of the Victualling, most of which fall into three categories: accounting for stocks of provisions, detailing the paperwork required from pursers, and ensuring that all bills were paid in course. The penultimate instruction, almost an afterthought, requires an annual account to be made up and passed to the Admiralty by the end of the following March. The first three sets of these Instructions are much the same, but the fourth is in a different format and commences with a warning statement about the performance of the two previous boards.