THE SECOND PART of the Victualling Board’s core task of supplying the Royal Navy and the army abroad with victuals and victualling stores was the delivery of bulk supplies to army garrisons abroad, the delivery of those items to warships on stations at home and abroad, and to troopships leaving Britain. Although the general principles of performing this task were the same regardless of location, each had their own types of difficulty to overcome. Abroad, there were problems relating to distance and communication times, with occasional clashes of personality; at home problems tended to arise from shortages and delays caused by the weather or the arrival of unusually large numbers of ships for revictualling.

With very few exceptions, the arrangements for delivery of victuals to warships at home through contractor depots worked without requiring major Victualling Board intervention; apart from a few minor cases of fraud so did the third strategy of ad hoc purser purchases. Delivery by the first strategy via the victualling yards at the outports produced no ‘acute’ problems beyond those created by adverse weather conditions and occasional complaints from commissioned officers about shortages or delays; nor were there any at Deptford. However, the 11th Report of the Board of Revision made it clear that the administration of operations at all these yards had degenerated over the years into a state so chronic that major reorganisations of procedures, management and personnel had to be instigated.

Secondary source material on the delivery of victuals to warships from yards and contractor depots is somewhat sparse. There is, however, copious primary source material in the correspondence and board minutes which enables a fairly detailed picture to emerge, despite an unfortunate paucity of surviving correspondence between the victualling office in London and the individual yards.

Second and third strategies: contractor depots and ad hoc purser purchases at home

Of the three strategies described in Chapter 2, acquisition of victuals for warships at home by individual pursers was, in terms of magnitude, the least of them. Very few warships in home waters, and these mostly the smallest, operated so far from either yard or contractors’ depot that they had to rely on pursers’ ad hoc purchases.