The press gang and the Royal Navy's endless need for men
The press gang was the Royal Navy's answer to a problem it never solved in the age of sail: in wartime there were not enough trained seamen to go round. Impressment, or "the press" as most people called it, meant taking men into naval service by force. It was used in every major war from the later seventeenth century to the defeat of Napoleon, and it fell hardest on the men the Navy wanted most, experienced sailors from the merchant fleet.
The numbers explain the hurry. Between 1793 and 1812 the Navy grew from 135 ships to 584, and its seamen from about 36,000 to 114,000. Privateers, merchant owners and the King's ships all competed for the same small pool of able seamen, and merchant wages in wartime could run to double the naval rate. Naval pay had been fixed in 1653 and was not raised until 1797, when the crews of the Channel Fleet at Spithead, off Portsmouth, mutinied over it. Plenty of men still volunteered, drawn by regular food, a bounty and the chance of prize money. It was the gap between volunteers and the size of the fleet that the press existed to fill.
The legal basis of impressment
Pressing men rested on the old power of the Crown to call its subjects to defend the realm. Parliament confirmed it in statute from Elizabeth I's reign onward, with an act of 1563 for "the maintenance of the navy" and the Vagabonds Act of 1597, which added vagrants to those who could be taken for the fleet. By the time of the Civil War the army had given up pressing soldiers, but Parliament judged the Navy too valuable to make the same concession for seamen. Successive governments after 1649, 1660 and 1688 came to the same view.
The practice was never popular, even with the people who ran it. Some town councils refused to approve press warrants, and juries acquitted men who had fought off a gang. The courts nevertheless upheld it repeatedly as necessary to the defence of the country. An act of 1695 describing a register of seamen called pressing "barbarous and unconstitutional", yet the press carried on. The last law on the subject, passed in 1835, limited a pressed man's service to five years and barred pressing anyone twice. It was never repealed.
How a press gang worked
By the later eighteenth century the press was run by a permanent shore organisation, the Impress Service. Each major port had a regulating captain, smaller ports a lieutenant, and the local headquarters was known as the rendezvous, sometimes simply a house in the town. The officer hired local men as the gang and paid them travel money plus a reward for each man brought in. Pressed men were held aboard a tender, a small vessel moored off the harbour that served as a floating prison until they could be shared out among the ships of the fleet.
The law limited the press to seafarers: merchant seamen, fishermen, collier crews, longshoremen and the like, roughly between the ages of 18 and 55. Men with no sea experience, known as landsmen, were exempt from 1740, though in an emergency that was not always respected. Most recruits were in fact taken at sea, not ashore. Warships waited off the coast for homeward-bound merchantmen and took the best of their crews, by law putting other hands aboard to bring the ship in. Seamen learned to hide below in specially built hiding places, and some masters put favoured men ashore in Ireland before reaching an English port.
Ashore, the gangs worked the seaports: Portsmouth, Plymouth, Harwich, Yarmouth, London and the Tyne among them. A seaman in the street would be offered the chance to volunteer first, and many pressed men chose to sign as volunteers anyway, since a volunteer received a bounty and two months' wages in advance. The famous trick of dropping the King's shilling into a man's beer, said to have led landlords to fit glass bottoms to their tankards, is a legend: press officers could be fined for trickery.
Resistance could be violent. On the Isle of Portland in 1803 a gang trying to take quarrymen at Easton fired on a crowd and killed four people.
Protections and the hot press
Many men carried a protection, a written certificate exempting them from the press, and had to keep it on them at all times. The Admiralty, the Navy Board and the Ordnance Board all issued them. Apprentices to the sea, crews of outbound merchant ships, dockyard labourers, some bargemen and the masters of merchant vessels could all be covered, along with men in trades the government considered vital, such as the coal trade that supplied the cities. Foreigners were normally safe, until they married a British woman or had served two years in a British ship. Whaling owners found their own dodge, putting a stand-in master aboard while the ship lay in port so the crew could not be touched.
None of it was proof against a hot press. When the Admiralty needed men urgently it ordered the gangs to ignore protections altogether, and papers that had kept a man safe for years counted for nothing that night.
The end of the press after 1815
By some estimates more than half of the Navy's sailors at the time of Trafalgar in 1805 had been pressed, worth remembering on the gun decks of HMS Victory. Once Napoleon was finally beaten in 1815 the fleet was cut back sharply and the gangs were stood down. Britain never pressed men again, though it never formally gave up the power either.
What replaced it was better service. By the time of the Crimean War, fixed terms of engagement were bringing in enough volunteers, and through the rest of the nineteenth century improved pay and conditions, with reservists recalled when needed, kept the ships manned. Compulsion did not return until conscription for all the armed services in 1916.
The songs the press gang left behind
The press lasted longest in folk memory, and nowhere more than on Tyneside. Newcastle and Sunderland were second only to London in the number of men they supplied to the Navy during the French wars, and the coast there produced a whole family of press-gang songs. The best known, "Here's the Tender Coming", was printed in Northumbrian Minstrelsy in 1882. Its first verse names the hated tender lying at the mouth of the Tyne:
Here's the tender coming, pressing all the men;
Oh! dear hinny, what shall we do then?
Here's the tender coming, off at Shields Bar,
Here's the tender coming, full of men o' war.
Another Tyneside fragment, "Captain Bover", was taken down by Thomas Doubleday from a woman singing in the street; nobody ever found more of it. Its sailor dares not go ashore for fear of Bover and his gang. John Bover commanded the press on the Tyne for many years, and the nineteenth-century collector John Stokoe noted that he seems to have carried out a harsh law as leniently as he could. "The Lowlands of Holland", known well beyond the North East, is sung by a woman whose husband has been taken away to sea.
They were never work songs: they were sung ashore, by the families the press broke up. They sit naturally beside the naval repertoire described in Royal Navy songs and the merchant work songs in sea shanties. For the Portsmouth side of naval song in more recent times, see the story of Shep Woolley.
FAQ
What was a press gang?
A party of men, usually led by a naval officer, who seized seamen and forced them to serve in the Royal Navy. The practice was called impressment, or simply the press.
Was the press gang legal?
Yes. It rested on the Crown's right to call subjects to defend the realm, was confirmed by Acts of Parliament from the reign of Elizabeth I and was repeatedly upheld by the courts.
Who could be pressed into the Navy?
In law, men with seafaring experience, broadly aged 18 to 55. Landsmen, apprentices and men carrying a valid protection were exempt, except during a hot press.
When did the press gang stop?
The Royal Navy last pressed men during the Napoleonic Wars, which ended in 1815. The power was never formally abolished, but volunteers on fixed engagements replaced it.
What songs are about the press gang?
Traditional examples include the Tyneside songs Here's the Tender Coming and Captain Bover, and The Lowlands of Holland, sung by a woman whose husband has been taken.