George at them RMA

 

A year or so ago I wrote some articles here about the Greenwich Railway builder, George Landmann, who wrote a very entertaining autobiography of his Woolwich childhood . My articles covered some of  his childhood and later in Canada and his life as a serving Royal Engineer . I also covered a few aspects of the early Greenwich railway. However I thought now I should begin to fill in even more of the gaps in his life and perhaps I should start this week with his education at The Royal Military Academy.

The Woolwich building Involved in George Landmann’s his young life and also his education, is that now described as Building 40 on the Arsenal site and used by the Acosta Dance Centre –‘ international - uniting dance-creative practitioners with industry professionals, and the community’. It was built in 1823 on the site of and to replace Tower Place, the original Tudor  mansion used as offices by the Board of Ordnance. building, its construction is associated with Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor.  The Royal Military Academy was founded here in 1741.By some strange chance it was founded on the day Issac Landman was born – something George would remember a hundred years later when he laid the first stone of an extension to the Greenwich railway viaduct.

The Academy was to train young officers for the Ordnance’s two newly formed ‘scientific’ corps, the artillery and the engineers. This institution had been launched in August 1720 and  funding  arranged through a South Sea Company subscription, secured by Secretary of State, James Craggs, the Younger, with family connections to Charlton.

The Royal Military Academy was formally opened in Woolwich 1741. The curriculum focused on mathematics and scientific principles and teachers were civilians: The rapid industrialisation of warfare forced Woolwich to adapt but the academy's goal was never to train theoretical scientists; rather, it sought to produce efficient, adaptable officers capable of problem-solving in isolated colonial outposts. It was also thought planning was crucial for surveying enemy lines and colonial landscapes and Woolwich hired top civilian minds – and members of the Royal Society-to occupy its academic Chairs. Own to become the leading educational establishment for technological subjects in the country.

It was to this end that Isaac Landman seems to have been head hunted by the Government to a post in Woolwich. He had been teaching at the Ecole Militaire in Paris, but, following reorganisation there was reduced to tutoring 'the art of war’ privately to young French gentlemen. Sir Thomas Page, a cartographer and friend of Landman, was sent to Paris, under Royal Command, with inducements to get Landman to come to England. Once in Woolwich he was given accommodation in or adjacent to the RMA building and moved there with his wife, Catherine Helene and in 1780 George was born into must have been something of an academic hothouse.

Staff members in this period included Thomas Simpson.a mathematicion who had 'revised the elements of Euclid'. and laid foundations for ‘Simpson’s Rule’ in numerical integration. Simpson was self taught and had been a weaver. He had married a woman thirty years older than himself with two children.  After  Simpson’s death she lived in the Tower with her son 'a poor tailor' for twenty years. When Tower Place was demolished the tower itself remained and was 'considered unsafe'. Young George saw it rocking to and fro in a high wind.- Isaac showed him how to carry out tests on what he had seen by 'suspending a plummet to the ceiling' - and, yes, the Tower did rock two inches either way

Teachers at the early RMA include Paul Sandby, the artist, was appointed Drawing Master in 1768, and was a founder member of the Royal Academy. His career had begun as a  military artist working in the Tower. In 1773 Charles Hutton was appointed Professor of Mathematics. He was a mathematician from a humble background in Newcastle, who performed the calculations necessary to work out the mass and density of the earth. John Bonnycastle & Olinthus Gregory were both notable authors of textbooks which standardised mathematical education across the British Empire.

By thev time George was old enough to be a cadet the Lieutenant Governor of the Academy was Lieutenant Colonel Stehelin of the Royal Artillery. He was supported by three military officers and Captain Phipps, a retired officer of the Corps of Engineers was the Inspector of Studies. Staff included Doctor Adair Crawford, an Irish physician and lecturer on chemistry. His assistant, later professor, was William Cruikshank  - both had a series of important discoveries.

Michael Faraday is often mentioned as having an academic appointment at the Royal Military Academy but his tenure was very considerably later,  in 1830 – over 50 years after George Landman’s residence there.

In order to get a place at the Royal Military Academy George was required to pass the examination for admission when he was thirteen. This was easy and he already knew his way round most pf the syllabus,  no doubt tutored by his father.

.......”the first three systems of Vauban with  Cohorns and Cormartagne’s systems ....the attack and defence of fortified places and field fortification  ... mining, counter mining, as also estimating ... construction of various pieces of ordinance both of Iron and  brass ... howitzers,  mortars and carronades ..  and their travelling carriages  ... the whole of practical geometry, solids and conic sections ... the first six books of Euclid, squared cube root, menstruation, logarithms. trigonometry, algebra and quadratic equations ....landscape painting in watercolours  .. map drawing ... some knowledge of the French language  ... chemistry ... dancing ...fencing ... use of the musket ... the management of field guns ...”

George described lectures taking place in what he calls the ‘laboratory in the Warren’ - I assume that that one of the rooms in the Royal Military Academy building - he also says however that behind the speaker were ‘furnaces and forges, tanks and stills’. These were all under thebcare of a of an artillery Sergeant.  The Lieutenant Governor always came and sat at one end of a long table and his son,who was also in the Royal Artillery was at the other end of the table. Specimens were passed around so that all cadets could see them and handle them.

Cadets completing their studies and wishing to leave and get a Commission were examined in public by a board of eminent luminaries  including men like the Master General of the Ordinance, the Chief Royal Engineer and the Astronomer Royal. Sessions were conducting with ‘pomp and ceremony’ and open to ‘all well dressed persons’. Inevitably the cadets themselves were not always respectful  and the eminent Dr Hutton was known as ’Old Crump’ and Isaac Landman, then Professor of Fortification and Artillery, was ‘’Old Snout’.

In 1795 the Royal Military Academy was required to supply to the artillery 30 educated cadets for an additional battalion to be formed.   George was  by then Head of the upper Academy and ‘first in every branch of the studies’ – but destined to enter the Royal Engineers’. So as other cadets went off to join the Artillery   he was left at the Academy virtually alone to pursue the remainder of

the course of instruction. Soon after he was examined alone with very little publicly by the Master General, the Marquis of Cornwallis. Having answererd satisfactorily ‘I received a Commission as a Second Lieutenant in the corps of Royal Engineers’ – but without passing through the Royal Artillery as was required.  He was told however to spend some time with the Artillery to acquire some knowledge of the work of that service.

Soon after and possibly by chance George and his father Isaac crossed the Thames by an unusual method. They were going to see the  Royal Horse Artillery at Warley Common in Essex.  Firstv they went to Gravesend and crossed the river in the same boat  with Captain Bloomfield who was to be the Artillery commander’.

It. is the means by which they crossed the river which is of interest - a ferry which had been set up to convey the Horse Artillery who had been ordered to use it.  George described it “ a rope was made to pass over the bows of the barge on a friction roller ...... by which means the exact position to the barge In regard of direction of the tide could be regulated .  The boat was placed in a slight degree across the tide which acting on the same principle as on the flying bridges The barge was propelled towards the opposite shore. The operation took about 54 minutes”.

George was then told h=rvhad been appointed to Plymouth – and a whole new world as a Royal Engineer.  He was not yetv sixteen.