Edmund Dummer (naval engineer)

Edmund Dummer (1651–1713) was an English naval engineer and shipbuilder who, as Surveyor of the Navy, designed and supervised the construction of the Royal Navy dockyard at (Devonport), Plymouth and designed the extension of that at Portsmouth. His survey of the south coast ports is a valuable and well-known historic document. He also served Arundel as Member of Parliament for approximately ten years and founded the first packet service between Falmouth, Cornwall and the West Indies. He died a bankrupt in the Fleet debtors' prison.

In her account of Dummer, Celina Fox sums up his career thus:

Using elements of mathematical calculation and meticulously honed standards of empirical observation, Dummer tried to introduce a more rational, planned approach to the task of building ships and dockyards, with the help of his extraordinary draughting skills. Operating on the margins of what was technically possible, meeting with opposition from vested interests and traditional work patterns, he struggled to succeed. Today he is little recognized outside the circle of naval historians and his grandest building projects were almost wholly destroyed by later dockyard developments or bombing.

Dummer was baptised on 28 August 1651 at St. Nicolas' Church, North Stoneham, Hampshire, the eldest of four sons born to Thomas Dummer (1626–1710), gentleman farmer of Chickenhall, in the parish of North Stoneham near Southampton, and his wife, Joanne Newman.

He joined the Royal Navy in 1668 and served his apprenticeship as a shipwright under Sir John Tippetts at Portsmouth naval dockyard. In his 1686 account of the state of the Navy, Samuel Pepys wrote that when Dummer was apprenticed to Tippetts, he was "mostly employed as his clerk in writing and drawing". By 1678, Dummer was employed as an "extra clerk" in the office of the Surveyor, "my patron and friend from my youth upward". His job was to make designs for a variety of projects – lanthorns, wet docks, lodgings at Sheerness, ships' sterns – as well as to draught ships' lines.

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