Jeremiah Owen

Report of the First and Second Meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to which Owen contributed

Whig reforms of the Royal Navy which would bring about the dismissal of the eminent naval architect Robert Seppings as Surveyor of the Navy formed the immediate context for Owen's first known intervention in the wider debate in 1832.[15] Sepping's support for scientific training in naval architecture, was matched by the dislike for the School of Naval Architecture by his proposed replacement, William Symonds. At the second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in June, Owen had encouraged the Association's members to promote the idea of large-scale scientific experimentation within government circles.[16] His 'Remarks upon the Neglect of Naval Architecture in Great Britain' were read alongside George Harvey's suggestion for the 'cooperation of men of science [to study the subject of Naval Architecture], under the auspices of a public Board.'[17] Neither Owen nor Harvey's suggestion found traction within the Navy. Their interventions had also come too late to help Seppings who had been forced to resign his position just six days earlier.[18] The appointment of Symonds, an amateur ship designer, in Seppings’ place sealed the fate of the school.

Competing positions about the relative merits of scientific training and established practice governed by rule of thumb emerged in Symonds’ subsequent moves against the School of Naval Architecture. At a presentation on naval architecture at the third meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in June 1833, Owen continued to represent the case for academic discipline and funding of naval architecture.[19] Arguing that only national governments could properly fund the scientific enquiry into naval architecture, he mounted the case for the continuation of scientific method to improve shipbuilding. He was also likely a contributor to a popular pamphlet, circulated a month earlier and widely believed to be authored by teachers and recent graduates of the School. The pamphlet questioned Seppings’ dismissal and the plight of naval architecture without proper funding.[20] In it, the authors argued the case for scientific training and meritocratic appointments to the technical roles in the Navy.

Such was the notoriety of the pamphlet, that Captain Frederick Marryat wrote a rejoinder in The Metropolitan Magazine, launching a counterattack on its authors, who he named as the students and staff of the School. Marryat suggested that Sir Thomas Byam Martin’s descriptions of Owen and his fellow students as ‘highly gifted young men’ was preposterous.[21] Marryat delved into the parentage of the students to suggest many were not the sons of gentlemen, and so could not harbor the talent Byam Martin ascribed to them. His vicious attack on the class background of many of the students conveniently excluded Owen, whose father was a leading architect in Ireland. But it revealed the ingrained prejudice within the Navy that the college and School faced in the years leading up to its abolition in 1837.

Like his classmate, Thomas Lloyd, Owen escaped the unfortunate fate of many of the school's scholars, having recently received promotion to a scientific position within the Admiralty. But the continuing gap left in the training of scientific officers would remain for the next twenty years. Ironically, his biographer, Mike Chrimes, has argued that family contacts, rather than meritocracy, were responsible for Owen gaining an important post in the Admiralty.[1] There is no evidence for this claim. Rather Owen's assignment role as metallurgist to the Navy, first based at Portsmouth, was the result of Inman's recommendations in the 1831.

His turn to metallurgy was assisted by his former mentor at the School of Naval Architecture. In 1831, Professor James Inman recommended that he be placed in charge of the Navy's metal mills.[24] The role was based initially at Chatham dockyard. By 1846, the new role of Chief Metallurgist (also known as Supervisor of metals) was created for him at the recommendation of the committee on metals.[25] Owen remained in his specialist role for eighteen years, contributing to the Navy's scientific knowledge of the use of metals during that period. His role as Chief Metallurgist required extensive travel across the Navy's dockyards.[26] His appointment was not without a familiar controversy. Despite his scientific credentials and research, criticisms of the appointment of ‘shipwright’ over an ‘officer of the trade’ followed Owen in his supervision of the Navy's smitheries.[27]

Owen was based at Somerset House from the 1830s

Based in Somerset House, Owen sat on a number of scientific committees, including the Admiralty Committee on Metals in the 1840s.[1] Owen, along with his fellow committee members visited numerous dockyards and private establishments in the course of their inquiry.[28] Many of the published findings of the committee continued to find an audience into the 1860s and 1870s.[29][30] However, at the time, Owen's fellow committee member, James Nasmyth, acknowledged that ‘I have reason to know that many of the recommendations of the committee, though cordially acknowledged by the higher powers, were by a sort of passive resistance practically shelved.’[31] Elsewhere, Owen acted on the Admiralty Committee on Dockyard Manufacturing, publishing reports on metals central to the expansion of the navy in the nineteenth century.[32]

Criticism of Owen's lack of apprenticeship-based training in the smithies that he supervised followed him. The role of Chief Metallurgist was abolished in 1849. Reasons for this were unclear. It was later reported that his 'special office' had come 'within the range of the economical fit of the Admiralty'.[23] Other more critical descriptions of the role in the press labelled it as 'a mere sinecure,'[33] presumably designed to keep Owen salaried while he carried out his substantive work as a scientific officer on the Committee of metals. There is some reason to dispute this characterisation of the role as calls for the re-establishment of the role were voiced over the next decade.[27]

Owen died after a brief illness in August 1850.[lower-alpha 3] His premature death cut short his career. Opportunities for naval architects over the lean years of the 1840s meant that he was forced to take up a non-scientific role in the Navy, though he continued to be based at Somerset House and retained his former salary. Within the next decade, Owen's close associates, Isaac Watts and Thomas Lloyd went on to design the Warrior-class ironclads. Joseph Woolley noted in the 1860s that, for a generation of naval architects educated at the School of Naval Architecture in the 1820s and 1830s, ‘the value of their services, were for many years—the best years of their lives—lost to the country.’ [34] A decade after his death, the Royal Institution of Naval Architects was founded, followed four years later by the re-established Royal School of Naval Architecture in 1864.

In 1834, a Polish refugee community was founded in Portsmouth after the Marianne, carrying 212 Polish deportees from Prussia, landed there.[36] The appalling conditions they had suffered in Prussian labour camps following the November uprising and their forced deportation to the United States drew Owen's attention. That year, Owen numbered among a few Englishmen and women in Portsmouth whose ‘noble feelings’ were said to have led them to support the cause of Polish liberation. He soon formed a relief committee for the Polish refugees. Historian Peter Brock notes that Owen was one of the most active members of the committee along with Augustus Creuze, Henry Craddock, and W.R. Lang.[37] The fact that all had been Owen's contemporaries at the School of Naval Architecture suggests he was also the committee's most active recruiter. His brother Thomas Ellis Owen, later mayor of Portsmouth, and James Bennett, another former student of the school, are also listed amongst the committee's members.[37] The plight of the deportees soon drew the attention of Lord Dudley Stuart whose intervention helped secure their eventual asylum in Portsmouth.

The role of the Polish relief committee and the people of Portsmouth in raising awareness of the Marianne 212 deportees is commemorated in a memorial which proclaims in Polish and English: ‘Lest we forget the kindness shown and the help given by the people of Britain’s premier naval port – Portsmouth to 212 Polish soldiers, members of the first Polish community in Britain, who arrived in Portsmouth in February 1834, after having taken part in the November uprising against Tzarist Russian oppression, which took place in Warsaw in 1830 – 1831. The majority of those soldiers were laid to rest in this very place in a common grave. At a time when merchants of human rights joined forces in order to destroy liberty – the people of Portsmouth rallied to the aid of those, who fought for that liberty.’[38]

Polish historian Żurawski vel Grajewski has suggested that Owen was suspected as an accomplice to the 1844 escape of eleven Polish soldiers from the Irtysz while it docked at Portsmouth.[39] Over the 1830s and 1840s, the Polish relief committee assisted the campaign for Polish liberation through active assistance publicising the cause in print and through public lecture series, such as that carried out by Captain Franciszek Stawiarski at the beginning of 1844.[40] Throughout the same period, Portsmouth's Polish community quickly became an intellectual melting pot of socialists and communists as the émigrés became embroiled in debates over private and common land ownership in a liberated Poland.[41] The public facing debates that captured the local Portsmouth community were far more targeted at British sympathies for Polish nationalism.[42][43] But when a Russian ship landed in Portsmouth carrying Polish soldiers bound for exile in Siberia in 1844, members of the Polish expatriate community, perhaps recalling their own uncertain fate a decade earlier, were not willing to rely on public sympathy and English intervention. Eleven of the imprisoned soldiers were smuggled from the Portsmouth Dockyard prison. Owen's role in the escape remains unclear. Captain Franciszek Stawiarski's published letters suggests Owen had no knowledge of the soldiers escape plans although he himself had orchestrated their passage to London under the protection of Lord Stuart.[44] It is known that Owen was called on to intervene in the matter on behalf of the watch who risked losing his rank without the return of the prisoners.[44] Given his position on the relief committee there was little reason to think Owen believed the expatriate community would give the escaped prisoners up in the face of certain exile. Owen contacted his friend and leader in the Portsmouth community Captain Stawiarski and quickly accepted his principled silence as to the soldiers whereabouts. Although Stawiarski made public his account of the escape, including Owen's letters, there seems to have been no diplomatic repercussions from their publication.[44]