Steam Picket Boats

Steam Picket Boats by N. B. J. Stapleton, published by Terence Dalton Limited in 1980, is a wonderfully specialised book about a wonderfully specialised class of naval craft: the small steam-powered picket boats that spent decades doing the sort of useful, unglamorous work without which large warships would have been considerably less impressive.

These were not the great battleships that dominated postcards and recruiting posters. Picket boats were the smaller working craft: carrying officers and men, patrolling harbours, acting as tenders, towing, ferrying, communicating and generally doing all the jobs that become absolutely essential once somebody has built a fleet of enormous ships and then discovered that those ships cannot conveniently pop ashore for milk.

Stapleton traces the development and use of these compact steam vessels, looking at their design, machinery, service and place within the Royal Navy. It is the sort of maritime history that concentrates on the practical hardware rather than admirals staring meaningfully at charts, and is all the better for it.

There is something especially appealing about naval auxiliary craft because they tend to survive in history only at the edges of photographs. A battleship occupies ninety per cent of the picture while, somewhere near the bottom, a small boat is actually carrying everybody to it. Steam Picket Boats gives those small boats their turn in the foreground.

For anyone interested in marine engineering, the book also offers the pleasures of steam machinery on a manageable scale. Boilers, engines, hull forms and working arrangements all mattered enormously when a small vessel might be expected to operate daily in crowded naval waters with no computer diagnostics and very little tolerance for somebody saying, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”

The subject also belongs to an age when navies required astonishing numbers of specialised boats for jobs that today might be performed by launches with diesel engines, radios and considerably fewer polished brass fittings. In the steam era, even a relatively modest harbour craft could contain enough pipes, valves and machinery to keep a mechanically minded person happily occupied for years.

Published by Terence Dalton, a firm well known for serious maritime and local-history titles, this is very much a book for readers who enjoy proper niche history. It does not attempt to pretend that steam picket boats changed civilisation. Instead, it documents them carefully because they existed, they mattered, and somebody sensibly realised that if nobody wrote the details down they would eventually disappear into the great historical category of “small boat visible in background”.

It should appeal to naval historians, steam enthusiasts, ship modellers, marine engineers, Royal Navy collectors and anyone with the admirable habit of becoming fascinated by things most people have never heard of.

Condition: Good. A sound used copy with normal signs of age and handling. Published in 1980, it has now reached the age where it is itself beginning to qualify as maritime history, although fortunately it requires rather less maintenance than an actual steam launch.

ISBN: 0900963638.

A pleasingly obscure and informative title about the workhorses of the naval steam age, ideal for anyone who thinks the smaller boats are often more interesting than the enormous ones getting all the attention.

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