Family and Education

bap. 28 Aug. 1651, 1st s. of Thomas Dummer of S. Stoneham, Hants by Joane.  m. by 1679, Sarah, 3da. (2 d.v.p.).1

Offices Held

Asst. master shipwright, Chatham by 1686–90; asst. surveyor of the navy 1690–2; commr. of navy 1692–9.2

Freeman, Southampton 1696.3

Biography

Dummer’s family had been settled at Swaythling in Hampshire since the early 17th century, but he himself was descended from a junior branch and had to make his own way, which he did as a shipwright, learning his craft under Sir John Tippetts, surveyor of the navy from 1672 to 1685. As early as February 1679, Dummer was sending Samuel Pepys ideas for improvements in ship design. From 1682 he spent nearly two years in the Mediterranean in the service of the navy, surveying ports and dockyards there, and on his return was appointed assistant to Robert Lee, the master shipwright at the naval dockyard at Chatham. In 1686, when Pepys was searching for a replacement for Sir Anthony Deane on the navy board, Dummer’s was one of the names suggested, but Pepys, clearly considering him too inexperienced for the post, wrote that he was ‘an ingenious young man, but said rarely to have handled a tool in his life, a mere draftsman’. Dummer did not get the job. After the Revolution Tippetts returned to his old post as surveyor of the navy and took Dummer with him as his assistant. It was during this period that Dummer gave evidence before the commissioners of public accounts concerning the poor state of the fleet in 1689, which was the responsibility of the special commission for repair of the navy set up in 1686 and dominated by Pepys and Deane. He claimed that while he was assistant master shipwright at Chatham both he and the master, Lee, had been overruled by this commission, which had used its authority to conceal defective repairs. Deane counter-attacked by alleging that Lee was himself corrupt and Dummer so inexperienced that an ordinary shipwright had to be provided to do his work. Their report, he claimed, ‘carried on it deeper characters of remissness, ignorance and unfaithfulness, than we believe can be shown to have ever met in any one account of the navy’. The commissioners eventually exonerated Deane. A more fruitful achievement of this period was the friendship that Dummer developed with Robert Harley*, then serving as one of the public accounts commissioners. In 1692 Dummer succeeded Tippetts as surveyor of the navy, and during his tenure of the office made a lasting contribution by designing and supervising the building of the dockyards at Plymouth and Portsmouth.4

In 1695 Dummer was returned for Arundel on the Court interest, and was forecast as a probable Court supporter in the division of 31 Jan. 1696 on the proposed council of trade. Naval duties prevented his taking a very active role in the Commons and on 31 Jan. he wrote anxiously from Portsmouth to Robert Harley and Arthur Moore* soliciting their aid in case he should be unable to get back for the call on 3 Feb., which in fact was postponed a week. He signed the Association promptly, voted for the Court in March over fixing the price of guineas at 22s. and, in the next session, on 25 Nov. 1696, voted in favour of the attainder of Sir John Fenwick†. On 7 Jan. 1697 he was given leave to go to Portsmouth on navy business.5

Listed as a placeman in July 1698, Dummer did not stand in the general election of that year and was named again in an analysis of the old and new House of Commons of about September as a Court placeman. The following December he received a setback, which began a steady decline in his fortunes. During the building of the Portsmouth dockyard, he had criticized the work of one of the contractors, John Fitch, and thus brought about Fitch’s dismissal. Fitch retorted by accusing Dummer of taking bribes. On 24 Dec. Dummer in turn was suspended from his office. The charges were supported by another witness, who wrote:

With humble submission, how can this surveyor be ever capable to manage the high post of a surveyor of the navy, to examine and judge of other builders’ capacity, when this surveyor never built not one ship for his Majesty’s service, nor never was an actual warranted master shipwright in any of his Majesty’s shipyards . . . But doth not such a surveyor’s conduct and most sublime management sound like a bell, just like the abominable stone dock at Portsmouth, which falls down almost as fast as they can build it up, because they build the basis of it upon a sandy foundation; so that it is plainly a perfect cheat, and a kind of bottomless gulf (for our hopeful young surveyor to enrich himself by).

The charges were heard by the lords of the Admiralty, who upheld Fitch’s complaints, and on 10 Aug. 1699 removed Dummer from the navy board. Dummer then began an action for defamation, which was heard in May 1700. Although Fitch ‘brought the Earl of Bridgwater [John Egerton†], Lord Haversham [Sir John Thompson, 1st Bt.*] and the rest of the Admiralty with Sir Clowdesley Shovell* and commissioner of the navy to speak for him’, the jury found for Dummer and awarded him £364 damages. Afterwards he successfully petitioned the Treasury for arrears of pay during his suspension, but he was not reinstated in his job. He now had to rely for his living on the packet service he had started between London and Rotterdam.6

Dummer successfully contested Arundel in February 1701 but did not stand in the second general election of 1701, concentrating instead on attempts to interest the government in his proposal to run a packet service to the West Indies. With the assistance of Harley and Henry Guy*, who described him as ‘so very able a man that the giving assistance to any of his proposals will be a credit to him that gives it’, he obtained a contract in August 1702. He was elected once more for Arundel in 1702, possibly in the hope that being in Parliament would facilitate his return to the Navy Board. On 20 Aug., on hearing rumours that Shovell intended to resign as comptroller of the victualling accounts, Dummer wrote to Harley, ‘if you think it proper to mention to my lord treasurer any remembrance of me, in case Sir Clowdesley Shovell quits, as is said, it will be seasonable’. However, Shovell did not resign. Later, on hearing that the comptroller of the storekeeper’s accounts had died, Dummer wrote again to Harley on 24 Sept. 1702:

Providence has opened the way wherein if . . . I might succeed, I should be able to do much better service than ever I have done for the navy, and that is not a little if it were accounted to me in justice. I have made bold to move Mr Guy to give a hint to my lord treasurer not to be too precipitate in the disposal of this office. There is none at that board who understands it, nor hath it ever been understood rightly in my opinion. Nevertheless the Navy Board in a body this day recommended one of their members . . . for the same to the council of the lord high admiral. Some time or other there will be a severe reflection upon that board for having too great a balance of clerk-commissioners in that body. They may understand accounts, but the prudential judgement with relation to the bulk of that business is a science they are great strangers to . . . If this occasion be not made use on to show me some countenance for my abuses, I shall never think anything else in the navy worth asking for.

Again, he did not get the job, although in September 1703 he was granted a contract for a packet service to Lisbon. He remained loyal to the Court, and was marked as a probable opponent of the Tack in a forecast of 30 Oct. 1704. Harley still took the trouble to lobby him, and on 28 Nov. he duly voted against the Tack or was absent.7

Returned again for Arundel in 1705, Dummer voted for the Court candidate in the division on the Speaker on 25 Oct. Classed as a ‘Churchman’ in an analysis of the new Parliament, his increasing financial difficulties probably dictated that he follow Harley’s political lead and, although not listed among those supporting the Court in the proceedings on the ‘place clause’ of the regency bill on 18 Feb. 1706, the following day he joined Court Tories in voting against a Whig motion to appoint a day for hearing the Bewdley election. Meanwhile Dummer’s debts multiplied. Both his packet services had incurred heavy losses, and he was released from the Lisbon contract in 1707. On the West Indies service the terms of the original contract, which had laid down that £8,000 p.a. should be paid to the crown from the charge of carrying letters and passengers, had proved wildly unrealistic. Profit from letters and freight had only amounted to a few hundred pounds; several of the ships had been sunk or captured; and already Dummer had been allowed several times to defer payment. Eventually a new contract was negotiated and signed in early 1708.8

Classed as a Tory in a list of early 1708, Dummer stood down at Arundel in the election of that year, and his financial troubles grew steadily worse. Although it was generally agreed that his packet service was useful, losses of ships, delays in payments from the Treasury and the failure of government credit in 1709–10 combined to ruin him. The appointment of Harley to the Treasury induced Dummer to send a desperate appeal for help on 19 Aug. 1710:

I have been 12 years to this time contending with misfortunes and the ill-will of some people, who never had more than a groundless jealousy to justify the persecution and malice I have felt from them, which however implacable it hath been, I hope will now have no longer any influence over me . . . I pray you to think of this matter and not to forget as occasion may now offer what I have done and suffered for meaning and doing well according to my circumstances and that this my long suffering may at last (by your protection and favour) become a prevalent argument to redeem me from that prejudice which in some people once offended, admit no appeal to compassion.

Harley was either unable or unwilling to help. On 30 May 1711 Dummer wrote again asking for the treasurer’s support for a petition to the Queen to clear his name from the charges made against him by Fitch and accepted by the Admiralty in 1699:

which hath obscured me (to this time) near 12 years, for no other reason that I know of, but either for refusing to yield up my innocence a voluntary victim to false oaths or becoming myself an accuser of my brethren to please the passions and revenge of some power.

Again Harley did not help. By 1711 Dummer was unable to continue the West Indies packet service and the ships were assigned to John Mead*, deputy-paymaster of the forces in Spain and Portugal, one of his most intractable creditors, who was himself desirous of taking over the service. Dummer was declared a bankrupt in April 1712 and died at the end of April 1713. His wife and daughter successfully petitioned for pensions of £150 p.a. each on account of Dummer’s services and out of charity for the total destitution in which they had been left. Despite his misfortunes and the accusations of incompetence, Dummer had been highly regarded by many as a shipbuilder and naval architect. Charles Sergison*, clerk of the acts on the navy board, had written a letter in 1705 to the effect that no previous surveyor of the navy had achieved anything like so much, and that the docks at Portsmouth and Plymouth would be lasting monuments to his skill.9

Ref Volumes: 1690-1715

Author: Paula Watson

Notes

• 1. IGI, Hants; The Gen. n.s. xiv. 172; Cal. Treas. Bks. xxvii. 429; St. Margaret’s Westminster (Harl. Soc. Reg. lxxxviii), 55; (lxxxix), 91.
• 2. G. F. Duckett, Commrs. of Navy, 4–5; Cat. Pepysian Mss (Navy Recs. Soc. xxvi), i. 77; Sergison Pprs. (Navy Recs. Soc. lxxxix), 12, 147–9.
• 3. Southampton RO, Southampton bor. recs. SC3/1, f. 248.
• 4. Wilks, Hants, 87, 116–17; Duckett, 71–72; Cat. Pepysian Mss, i. 77, 92; J. Ehrman, Navy in War of Wm. III, 207–8, 416–17; Cal. Treas. Bks. vii. 1410; Cal. Treas. Pprs. 1702–7, p. 391; H. Horwitz, Parl. and Pol. Wm. III, 202.
• 5. Add. 70224, Dummer to Harley, 30 Jan., 1 Feb. 1695[–6].
• 6. CSP Dom. 1699–1700, pp. 59–60, 70, 71, 235; 1700–2, p. 73; 1702–3, p. 61; Add. 70224, Dummer to Harley, 30 May 1711; Luttrell, Brief Relation, iv. 576, 645, 658.
• 7. CSP Dom. 1702–3, pp. 90, 146, 213; Cal. Treas. Bks. xviii. 394, 468; HMC Portland, iv. 45, 47; viii. 90, 104–6, 110–11.
• 8. Bull. IHR, xlv. 48–49; Add. 70224, Dummer to Harley, 17 Apr., 19 June 1704, 3 June, 20 Sept. 1707; Cal. Treas. Bks. xx. 744; xxi. 430–2, 455; xxii. 83.
• 9. Cal. Treas. Bks. xxiv. 571; xxv. 102, 395, 487; xxvi. 102; xxvii. 429; xxviii. 98; Cal. Treas. Pprs. 1702–7, p. 391; 1708–14, pp. 202, 319, 452, 529; Add. 70267, Sarah Dummer to Charles Sergison, 2 May 1713; 70224, Dummer to Harley, 19 Aug. 1710, 30 May 1711, 30 Apr. 1712.