Nicholas Rodger's The Price of Victory covers the Royal Navy from 1815 to 1945. The featured passage follows reports of poor long-range gunnery after Navarino into the establishment of HMS Excellent as both a training school and an experimental institution. The scale of the program eventually produced thousands of trained seaman gunners rather than leaving specialist knowledge with a small cadre. Its demanding mathematics-based course helped make technical competence a route to promotion and gave officers a way to demonstrate professional merit. Changes in warrant-officer status reveal the social consequences of that professionalization, because expertise could raise responsibility faster than it erased the service's inherited hierarchy.
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The Price of Victory and Royal Navy professionalization
Nicholas Rodger's history traces how gunnery training, examinations, and professional expertise changed promotion and status inside the nineteenth-century Royal Navy.