(I) Commander, Full Dress
(II) Lieutenant, Undress Uniform

Description

I. Commander, Full Dress, 1795-1812: Drawn from sketches at Welch & Stalker, naval tailors. The new full-dress uniform for commanders was to be ‘the same as post captains, with a plain gold epaulette on the left shoulder’. The new undress uniform was to be ‘the same as post captains, with a plain gold epaulette, as in the full dress, to take off and put on occasionally’. The commander in the accompanying plate is wearing his hair in a queue, and he has a coat of the old style with the fronts sloping away as worn up to the end of the eighteenth century. He strikes one note of modernity, however, by wearing his laced cocked hat ‘fore and aft’.

II. Lieutenant, Undress Uniform, 1787-1812: The details for this plate have been drawn from from the orders and tailors’ notes of Welch and Stalker, naval tailors, a drawing of Lieutenant Francis Loch by Henry Edridge ARA in 1806 and an engraving in the Naval Magazine of March 1800. The style of hair shown in the accompanying plate, the cut of the coat, and the fact that the hat is being worn ‘fore and aft’, all indicate a date after 1800. The basic design of the uniforms for lieutenants, however, remained the same from their introduction in 1787. In this drawing the sitter has short hair, the unofficial sword with the lion’s head pommel, and white trousers instead of breeches.