How the Royal Navy's ship-naming committee guarded its authority

Who served on the Royal Navy ship-naming committee, and how much authority did it exercise?

Senior naval officers, often captains near retirement, generated the names and retained enough institutional authority to resist senior admirals, ministers, prime ministers, and monarchs.

The ship-naming committee appears as an unusually independent part of Admiralty administration. Its members were generally senior captains near retirement, selected into a body whose prestige could rival promotion in the humorous account given here. The committee proposed names before they passed through the First Lord and monarch, but rejected suggestions ultimately returned to the same body for replacement. The arrangement helps explain why individual political or royal preferences did not automatically determine Royal Navy names and why a public naming vote would be alien to the institution.