Major General William ROY
(1726-1790)

William Roy was born in Carluke, Lanarkshire, on the 4th of May 1726 and was educated in Carluke and Lanark. His extraordinary cartographic skills are thought to be the result of an apprenticeship as a civilian draughtsman in the Board of Ordnance engineer establishment, employed in surveying roads for the Post 0ffice mails.

In 1747, following the Scottish rebellion of 1745, he joined a team led by Lieutenant Colonel David Watson, currently the Deputy Quartermaster General for North Britain, encamped at Fort Augustus, midway between Inverness and Fort William, at the southern end of Loch Ness. Their objective was to survey and map the Scottish Highlands, thus permitting a series of camps to be developed at salient points, with a network of roads and tracks connecting them. At this point, Roy appears to have had no military status whatsoever, but he clearly adapted quickly to this work.

The original field sheets of this map are preserved in the British Museum; the scale is approximately 2" to 1 mile. It is entitled The Duke of Cumberlands map, as it was he who finally defeated the Scots at Culloden in April 1746.

At that time, military engineers did not carry officer rank and were considered inferior to the officers of regiments of the line. Their understandable grievance was put by the Board of Ordnance direct to the Duke of Cumberland, as head of the army. They petitioned him to intercede with the King, but it took seven years before he was able to carry the point and only on the 14th of May 1757 were they given military ranks as well as their engineer titles.

William Roy, who had been appointed a Practitioner Engineer in December 1755, finally became an Ensign in May 1757, as did many of his contemporaries. More senior engineers were given military ranks commensurate with their engineering responsibilities. However, these military ranks were granted in regiments of the line, and Roy was commissioned into the 53rd Foot, despite the fact that he continued as a Practitioner Engineer as before. This split responsibility inevitably led to a conflict of interests and was not a satisfactory situation.

When he later became a Major General, on the general staff of the War Office, he was also a Lieutenant Colonel in the Corps of Engineers and in command of the first military company established specifically for the purpose of military surveying.

In June 1756, with a threat of invasion by the French, Roy and others were appointed to "up-date" the maps covering the southern counties of England, mainly in Kent and Sussex, and the access roads to London. The invasion never came.

In 1765, he was appointed by Royal Warrant to be Surveyor General of Coasts and the Engineer responsible for making and directing military surveys in Britain, in addition to his appointment as a Deputy Quartermaster-General. By now his military rank was Lieutenant Colonel.

In 1783, he commenced the triangulation between London and Dover and in 1784 he undertook the measurement of the base line on Hounslow Heath, not far from where Heathrow Airport stands today. This line was originally marked with two up-ended surplus cannon from Woolwich. One end was at Kings Arbour, just off the M4 motorway and the other at Hampton Poor House, near Bushy Park, by Kingston-on-Thames.

This line was measured in the summer of 1784, three times over, by means of cased glass tubing, seasoned deal rods and a steel chain. The discrepancy between these three methods was less than 3 inches.

The objective of the London-Dover triangulation was to link the triangulation already carried out in France with the one now being undertaken in England, where hitherto the making of maps had been very much a county-by-county exercise, done by individual map makers such as Speed, Ogilby and others. There was no cohesive plan for a national survey of the entire country.

A cross-channel exercise carried out with French engineers sought to establish the relative positions of the British and French meridians. There was an apparent discrepancy of 11 seconds for longitude and 15 seconds for latitude between the principal meridians in the two countries, and this gave William Roy the opportunity which he had sought for so long - to carry out a county-wide survey.

The value of these surveys was not lost on influential people who were subsequently to play a leading role in the establishment of the Ordnance Survey.

And so, the germ of the Ordnance Survey lay in the military map produced by Watson and Roy in 1747. Via a multitude of individual projects, aided by constantly improving survey equipment, the establishment of a paid survey staff, which developed into the Ordnance Survey, took place on 12th July 1791.

Sadly, however, William Roy, who had worked for so long to achieve this organisation, died in July 1790, at the age of 64, and was thus deprived of seeing his lifetimes ambition come to fruition.