One hundred years ago
THE Committee on the defective cutlasses have reported that 'the con- verted cutlasses and cutlass sword- bayonets, pattern 1871, with which the Navy is now for the most part armed, are absolutely inefficient, untrustwor- thy, and unfit for sevice'. They state also that 'the Committee are unani- mously of opinion that the converted cutlasses and cutlass sword-bayonets now in use in the Navy should be immediately withdrawn, and that the old unaltered cutlasses, of which 30,000 are in store at Weedon, should be issued to the Navy' It is impossible to conceive a Report more discreditable to all concerned with the issue of the cutlass to our sailors, and more humi- liating to the nation at large . . . By a lucky accident, we have found out that the naval bayonets are in such a condi- tion that had our sailors been called on to use them in action, they would have been utterly at the mercy of their opponents; but who knows that some other equally important provision of war supplied to the fighting services is not completely worthless ? There is an irony of the intensest and most terrible kind in the whole story, if we think of it as applied to an actual case. A little less than two years ago, our dockyards were straining every nerve to fit out a great fleet with which to encounter a Russian enemy. We spent some two millions on the preparations. The country looked with pride on the great fleet that was at last got ready, and which was assembled in a great naval pagent. Yet every sailor in that apparently splendidly equipped fleet was, we now know, armed with a weapon 'absolutely inefficient, untrust- worthy, and unfit for service'.
The Spectator, 2 April 1887
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