The huge armament demands for the Royal Commission forts were never fully met. Fort Nelson, along with the other land works in this huge ring fortress around Portsmouth, was substantially complete by the late 1860s. Artillery volunteers were especially important and without them the extensive Portsmouth fortress could never have been garrisoned. The third element in strengthening Britain’s defences was to augment the small standing army by the raising of a new volunteer corps.

Supported by Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, the result was the building of the greatest works of fortification yet undertaken in this country in peacetime.Ī start on modernizing the Royal Navy was made with the launch of HMS Warrior, the British answer to Gloire, and Britain’s traditional wooden walls began to be replaced with ironclads. These doubts caused Lord Palmerston to set up a Royal Commission to report on the defences of the United Kingdom, with Portsmouth and its Royal Dockyard as the priority. ‘Gloire’, the first of a new kind of armoured steam-powered warship, raised doubts as to Britain’s ability to repel an invasion. France under Napoleon III was building up her military and naval strength.

In Britain, the end of the Crimean War marked the beginning of a century of military anxieties. Soon the chalk hill would be gouged deeply to form dry moats and ramparts in the case of Fort Widley excavations were sunk where the townsfolk had previously come to admire the view and take tea.įort Nelson was named for the neighbouring column and bust of Horatio, Lord Nelson, a monument which marked England’s greatest naval victory at Trafalgar in 1805, and the death of its greatest admiral.

A vast scheme of mutually supporting forts would girdle Portsmouth by land and sea.

They were marking out on the ground the latest type of European fortification. Their sense of urgency came from the highest level of government. In the summer of 1860 fortification specialists of the Royal engineers beat their way through standing wheat on peaceful Portsdown, making the best compensation deals they could with the tenants of the Southwick estate.

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