Barrington, the BSHS and 'the Board'

24 Jan 2011

Both Becky and Richard have already discussed Nevil Maskelyne in this blog. Maskelyne features as the 'baddie' in Dava Sobel's story of John Harrison 'The Lone Genius who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time.' Along with other commissioners on the Board of Longitude, Sobel accuses Maskelyne of personal animosity towards Harrison and of seeking to win the prize himself for the lunar distance method.

This view of Maskelyne is challenged by a small archive of documents which the National Maritime Museum purchased in 2003. These thirteen manuscripts and a pamphlet belonged to William Wildman Barrington, Viscount Barrington, who, as Treasurer of the Navy, was a Commissioner of Longitude between 1762 and 1765.

These were key years for the Board and Harrison, when a new Act was passed by parliament that clarified what was necessary to win the 'great reward' of £20,000 which had been established by the 1714 Act. It also clarified the Board's powers over awarding the money. The Barrington Papers revolve around a speech that Barrington gave to the House of Commons in 1765 explaining the Board's relationship with Harrison and their decisions over awarding him the prize. The papers show how complex this relationship was and how carefully the Commissioners and parliament considered the wording of the Act before it was passed. They also show that the Commissioners were at some pains to convince Parliament of the reasoning behind their decisions.

In relationship to Maskelyne, one document is particularly interesting. This is an unlabelled note stating that no commissioner would be eligible to win the prize money. Given that Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal - and therefore a Commissioner of Longitude - the day before the meeting at which the Board resolved to apply to parliament for the 1765 Act, this shows that Sobel's narrative of animosity is unfair. 

I have considered these papers at length in an article recently published online in Notes and Records of the Royal Society, called ''Explaining' themselves: the Barrington Papers, the Board of Longitude, and the fate of John Harrison.' This will be available free online until the next issue of NRRS is posted, and will be published in paper form in July.

I also presented a paper discussing the Barrington Archive at the British Society for the History of Science (BSHS) Post-Grad Conference in Manchester in January 2011. This was an invaluable opportunity to meet other graduates in the field, to compare research ideas and skills, and to gain feedback on my work. One question that came up was whether the Commissioners saw themselves as specifically promoting government investment in science, and whether they saw their decisions as affecting the reputation of the scientific community as a whole. These are modern questions to be asking about the relationship between government and science, and particularly pertinent among current debates over government funding. For us, it relates to the problem of how the Board actually existed in its early years. Alexi has noted how 'the Commissioners' were not discussed as 'the Board' until well into their history, and we have no official record of their meetings for the first 23 years. It is such small treasure troves as the Barrington archive that will allow us to map what happened in these early years.

Image credits: Cropped image of BGN/10 © Jonathan Betts.