J D Davies

I’m delighted to welcome a guest blogger this week, namely my old friend Richard Endsor, who has contributed to this site before. Richard will also be a fellow speaker at the event in Southend on 7 March commemorating the London wreck of 1665, which I blogged about on this site last week. Today, though, he introduces his new book – so take it away in your own inimitable style, Richard!

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Some ten years ago I published my first book about shipbuilding, entitled The Restoration Warship. It was the result of many years of study about the process of building a seventeenth century warship based on the considerable written sources for the 30 new ships of 1677. At the Mountbatten Maritime Awards for Best Literary Contribution 2010, held in London at the Institute of Directors, the book was awarded the Certificate of Merit for the best illustrated title. However, the book was not quite the complete story about shipbuilding as I was aware of one or two unpleasantly difficult subjects I had not really addressed. I skipped over them at the time being fairly confident that no one would notice and take me to task. My conscience troubled me, and considering myself a reasonably decent sort of fellow (guffaw! – ed.) I felt obliged to spend countless hours putting things to rights in this new book, The Master Shipwright’s Secrets.  While I used the Third Rate Lenox as the star character for The Restoration Warship, I used the Fourth Rate Tyger of 1681 for The Master Shipwright’s Secrets.

The first difficult subject to address was how the Master Shipwrights obtained their rising and narrowing lines used to control the hull shape. A number of contemporary treatises on the subject exist, such as Anthony Deane’s Doctrine of Naval Architecture. Although incredibly useful, its explanations are in basic form using simple arcs of a circle when they must have been much more complex in reality. One of the great engineers of the Restoration age, Sir Henry Sheers, Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote to Samuel Pepys concerning shipwright’s secrets and their mysterious lines “the rising and narrowing of the breadth, floors, etc are all marked up on moulds and rods which lay up and down among the workmen and marked upon the timbers themselves which marks and measures are the results of those mysterious lines as they are called by which a ship is built.”

The ever-inquisitive Samuel Pepys kept a paper written by the shipwright, John Shish, containing the three-dimensional digital co-ordinates of the mysterious lines for every frame position defining the hull surface of a fourth-rate ship. By working backwards from his calculations, the jealously guarded formulae used by Shish has been revealed for the first time in 340 years. Doing the sums for this would require the mathematical genius of an Isaac Newton or Alan Turing. Without their help I resorted to the modern computer and tested possible formulae in a loop which gave instant results and at the same time comparing the computer-generated test results against the seventeenth century originals. Although of fundamental importance and interest to the Master Shipwrights in building their ships, it is probably a sad fact that books about sums may not be hugely popular. (I don’t know, it worked for Stephen Hawking… – Ed.) Happily, the formulae are based on geometry and I was able to describe them with illustrations. With some ingenuity I managed to use only 11 pages on the subject out of the 304 available.

Almost as elusive is the way moulds were made and used to mark out the frame timbers. These fundamental skills have almost been forgotten and required considerable research along a neglected and almost forgotten path. Contemporary or near contemporary descriptions are almost impossible to follow and reading the works before bedtime is not recommended as they can lead to frightening nightmares. (He gets them from Teletubbies too – ed.) A bit like watching a television programme about quantum mechanics (= Teletubbies) and realising how very simple minded you really are. Once the penny eventually dropped I realised how much easier it is to understand the different types of moulds by illustrating them rather than using the written word alone.

The book follows how King Charles enthusiastically embraced ship development and was interested in fast ships suitable for use in the Mediterranean. He unsuccessfully tried true galleys, then hybrid sailing ships that could be rowed, the galley frigates. (You can read more about all this in a book called Kings of the Sea, by an author whose name now escapes me – ed.) After they were criticised, he developed the concept which was to result in the Tyger. Under mysterious circumstances following the political turmoil caused by the Popish Plot, Charles rebuilt the old Tyger of 1647 which had, in fact, been broken up years earlier. The only person privy to his devious plan was his Master Shipwright at Deptford, John Shish. This beautiful ship is fully reconstructed and illustrated with many large-scale drawings. Charles’s experiments were a path that led to the evolution of the frigates of the eighteenth century.

Similar ships to the Tyger built along the same stretch of Thames during the same period are also described and illustrated in detail. Also examined are other successful and unsuccessful developments of the age and the manner of rebuilds and alterations. The time and expense taken to keep a wooden ship repaired and maintained ready for sea service is also studied. Among the findings in the book is a particular style of ship model making used at Deptford which helps in the identification of surviving models from the period.

A daunting task for the student of seventeenth century shipbuilding is reading and understanding contemporary contracts. The difficulty is due to the obscure words used and barely legible writing.  In order to interpret and make them usable, five important surviving contracts for fourth rate ships have been transcribed with headings while every mentioned ship part is indexed with reference to a visual glossary. They span the years from 1649 till 1692 and expose all the changes and developments that took place during that time.

The large format book has four sections of fold out plans at 1/72 scale of three fourth rate ships built during the 1680’s, the Tyger, Mordaunt and the St Albans. All are in colour as are the hundreds of other illustrations. The book is primarily aimed at ship technology historians, archaeologists and those who delight in the beautiful ships of the seventeenth century. Another community who may be interested are the model makers. I hesitate to mention them as this is primarily a book about ships and not about models. One model maker criticised The Restoration Warship as I used the Dutch artist van de Velde’s drawing of the stern of Lenox rather than use an inferior plan of my own. Having said that, there are scale plans enough to build a model of any one of a number of ships.

I really do have to thank the publisher, Osprey, an offshoot of Bloomsbury Publications for producing such an impressive book at such a modest price. To lay out such a book with so many foldouts and illustrations, many of which had to be in precisely the right place next to the accompanying text, took an awful lot of hard work. One or two minor illustrations had to be dropped to save space while in other places one or two fill in images were added. It is to all our credit that the publisher, author and the poor guy who did the layout, all kept our nerve and patiently toiled away until we got it right. Right up to version 18. I received a pre-order copy recently and announced the happy event to my friends. David Davies (who he? – ed.), himself a much-published author knowingly made the following observations based on long experience:

1/ Joy

2/ Pride

3/ Bragging to other friends

4/ Starts inspecting book in detail

5/ Discovers errors

6/ Denounces gross incompetence of publishers

7/ Sobs quietly in corner

8/ Tries to think up jokey email to friends and make light of it

9/ Fails

10/ Becomes even more bitter and twisted

(I deny all responsibility for this, it was my evil identical twin wot did it – ed.)

For more of the double act once described by Dan Snow as the Laurel and Hardy of naval history (yes, seriously), come to Southend on 7 March!

Here’s a thought: what you’ll really, really need after a long winter is a nice day out by the sea, preferably with lots of seventeenth century naval history thrown in. Well, now you have your chance! On 7 March, in Southend, there’s an entire day of talks about one of the most important shipwrecks in British waters, the mighty Second Rate man-of-war London, originally built for the navy of Oliver Cromwell. The timing is no coincidence – it marks the anniversary in March 1665 of the accidental destruction of the ship, blown up in the Thames estuary on the eve of the second Anglo-Dutch war. But the fate of the London is much more than a footnote in the history of ‘Pepys’s navy’. The rediscovery of the wreck by a hugely enthusiastic and committed diver, Steve Ellis, has revealed it to be an astonishing time capsule of seventeenth century Britain – indeed, it’s no exaggeration to say that it’s very much in the same league as the likes of the Mary Rose or the Vasa. But whereas they could be raised and preserved, the prospects for the London are very different. It lies off Southend, close to the major shipping lanes of the Thames, and the destructive effects of ever larger hulls mean that the remains of the London are fast disappearing. So it’s a real race against time to record what’s there and to bring up as much as possible. A tremendous amount has already been done, and some of the artefacts brought up from the wreck are both remarkable and poignant – take a look at the ‘Finds Gallery’ page on the website of the London Shipwreck Trust, where you’ll find much more information about the wreck and its discovery, as well as Steve’s own compelling account of how he got involved.

I’m delighted to have been invited to be one of the speakers on the day, and to say I’m in very good company is a considerable understatement!

 

 

Of course, I’ve publicised the London and its fate in both my non-fiction and fiction. Readers of the ‘Quinton Journals’ may recall that in the third book in the series, The Blast That Tears the Skies, the colossal explosion that tore the ship apart is the first of the two ‘blasts’ from the title, and I had Matthew Quinton embarking on a desperate mission to try and save any survivors from the wreck. Here’s how I envisaged the scene:

…we veritably raced down Gravesend Reach, and there were still perhaps two hours of daylight remaining when, over toward the Essex shore and the isle of Canvey, an appalling spectacle began to unfold before us. At first I blinked, for in the distance I seemed to see nothing less than an aquatic Calvary: three crosses, protruding above the water. A moment later, I recognised them for the masts of the stricken London, still shrouded in smoke from the vast explosion that had destroyed the great ship.  It was another mile or so before I could make out the remnants of upperworks beneath the farthest cross. The roundhouse and quarterdeck of the London remained above the surface of the Thames, although no such evidence of the forecastle could be seen. The water around the wreck was full of debris: timber and planking, the remnants of flags and sails, the detritus of all those who had lived and died aboard her. The air reeked of gunpowder, burned wood and burned humanity. All around the remains of the London were craft of various sorts, wherries, yawls and the like, as well as a big Levanter. Aboard all of them, men were peering into the waters. Occasionally arms pointed excitedly, and what appeared to be large lumpen shapes were pulled from the Thames.

‘Sweet God,’ said Pepys, ‘the poor, poor creatures. God rest their souls.’

 

All in all, then, 7 March in Southend should be a terrific day, I’m really looking forward to it, and I hope that a few readers of this blog might be inspired to come along, too. Booking and venue details can be found here.

First and foremost, a very happy new year to you all! Secondly, apologies for the lack of blogging of late – a combination of the exigencies of the festive season (which seemed to pull off the unique feat of both creeping up on me unexpectedly and then lasting for far longer than usual) and a concentration of my remaining non-present-hunting, non-wrapping, non-relative-visiting time on making as much progress as possible on the third book in the Stannard trilogy. Still, that’s all done and dusted now, so it’s time to return to the blogosphere!

Inevitably, the last few days and weeks have seen a surfeit of those ‘review of the year’ programmes and newspaper articles, with the added bonus this time of their inevitable ‘review of the decade’ cousins, so I thought I’d jump on the bandwagon – especially because on 1 January 2010, this blog didn’t exist (the first post wasn’t until August 2011) so I haven’t been able to do this before. So, then, it’s time to climb into the Tardis and journey back to a time when there was still a Labour prime minister and a Democratic president, Boris Johnson was Mayor of London and Donald Trump was presenting The Apprentice, Ed Sheeran was an unknown teenager and Sunderland were still in the Premier League.

• On 1 January 2010 I’d published precisely one novel, Gentleman Captain, which had come out in the previous summer, and two non-fiction books: Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, published nearly twenty years earlier, and Pepys’s Navy which had recently won the Samuel Pepys prize. Since then, I’ve somehow published twelve books in ten years – three non-fiction, including another prize-winner in the shape of Kings of the Sea, and nine fiction titles, seven more in the Quinton series and two in the Stannard trilogy, with the third to come some time in 2020. Looking back, I’m not entirely sure how I did all that…
• …especially as in 2010-11 I spent a fair bit of time out in Dubai, where the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed was working at the time. I’d actually been there at the previous new year, when the ruler cancelled the celebrations in solidarity with the Palestinians. We had some terrific times out there, fitting in extended trips to Egypt and most memorably to Syria, just three months before the devastating civil war broke out there. I’m particularly thankful that we were probably among the last westerners to visit Palmyra before ISIS destroyed so much of it.
• Other travel highlights of the last decade included Sweden in 2011 (principally to research The Lion of Midnight), Venice in 2012, Sicily in 2015, Amsterdam, Copenhagen and Karlskrona in 2017, France in 2018 (chiefly to pay my respects at my great-uncle’s grave on the centenary of his death in the First World War), and the USA and Germany in 2019. There were plenty of trips within the UK too, but the standout destination of the decade has to be Orkney (never, ever, ‘the Orkneys’), which we first visited in 2013, instantly fell in love with, and have returned to several times since (this blog, passim).
• And finally, some of my completely biased, subjective and one-eyed* highlights of the decade…
  • Best novel that I’ve read which was written by somebody else – tricky, especially as Wolf Hall is technically disqualified because it was published in 2009…so I’ll just have to cop out and settle on its sequel, Bring Up The Bodies. And yes, like much of the English-speaking reading public I can’t wait for the publication this coming March of the final book in the trilogy. Hmm, March is just in time for my birthday. Just saying.
  • Best non-fiction book that I’ve read – undoubtedly Great Minds and How to Grow Them, by somebody with whom I have no connection whatsoever (ahem).
  • Best film I’ve seen – undoubtedly Adult Life Skills, starring the delightful Jodie Whittaker and produced by somebody else with whom…etc etc. (Seriously, being at the Edinburgh film festival for the European premiere was a highlight and a half.)
  • Best TV – tricky, as there’ve been so many terrific shows, so I’ll pick out an entire genre which didn’t exist ten years ago, when Welsh TV consisted chiefly of programmes about hymn singing, farming and rugby (as indeed it still does on some evenings). Enter Welsh Noir, which makes Scandinavian Noir look like Mamma Mia. If you haven’t yet caught up with the likes of Hinterland, Keeping Faith and Hidden, why on earth not?
  • Most notable arrival – a baby produced by somebody else with whom…etc etc.
  • Most notable departure – my late mother, whose life and loss I blogged about here.

Plans for 2020? Well, I’m contracted to get the third Stannard book to the publisher by the end of April, but after that, there’s nothing firm in the schedule – indeed, it’ll be the first time in over ten years that I’ve not had at least one book contract on the go at any one time. So watch this space for developments!

 

* This metaphor has a particular resonance for me. My grandfather was a rugby referee, so was well used to the insult regularly flung by players and spectators at referees in all sports, along the lines of ‘oi, ref, you’re a one-eyed cheating ****!’ However, he might have been the only referee in the country who had the absolutely perfect response to this – he literally did have only one eye. 

This week, I’ve been living in the Debatable Land.

No, I’m not talking about Britain itself, although some of our European friends may beg to differ. I’m certainly not talking about the televised election debates – as you know, you’ll never get politics on this blog, least of all now. Nor am I talking about ‘somewhere vaguely around the Scottish border’ – the idea that all of it once formed a ‘debatable land’ is one of those stubborn myths perpetuated by bad historians, lazy politicians and meh journalists. Au contraire, the actual ‘Debatable Land’ is a very specific and very small area at the western end of Scotland’s land border with its dearly beloved neighbour. It’s no more than ten miles long and two to three miles wide, so it’s about the size of San Marino, Europe’s third smallest independent state. Its borders are completely anonymous, one of the key reasons why it became ‘debatable’ in the first place;* you can drive through it in a few minutes and never realise you’ve been in it, for there are no signs to tell you you’ve entered or left, and the land all around is pretty identical. For a couple of hundred years in the late middle ages, though, this was quite literally bandit country. Although most of the Anglo-Scottish border had been finalised, this one area hadn’t been. The inevitable lawlessness which ensued led to both governments adopting an extraordinary solution, namely permitting theft and even murder within the boundaries in the hope that it would dissuade people from living there. The issue was finally settled in 1552 when a border was drawn through the debatable land, much of it being marked by a visible boundary called the Scots Dyke, now hidden within a conifer forest.

(* Actually, it’s even debatable whether it was debatable, in the modern sense of the term; it’s also been suggested that the name derived from the old English word ‘battable’, land suitable for fattening livestock.)

Bandit country; or, more specifically, Reiver country. The border reivers, the ‘steel bonnets’ of legend, undoubtedly made the cowboys of the Old West or the Peaky Blinders look like utter snowflakes. Graham Robb, who lives hereabouts – in, of all places, the former home of Margaret Thatcher’s most louche Cabinet minister, Nicholas Ridley – records some of their at once hilarious and terrifying nicknames in his excellent book The Debatable Land: ‘Archie Fire-the-Braes, Buggerback, Davy the Lady, Jok Pott the Bastard, Wynkyng Will…Nebless Clem…Fingerless Will…Dog Pyntle Elliot…the Bastard of Glenvoren, Ill-Drowned Geordie, Ill-Wild Will…Gleyed John and Jock Halflugs’. Billy the Kid (duh?), eat your heart out. The rather less colourful surnames of these reivers still predominate in these parts: Armstrong, Charlton, Graham, Elliot and, umm, Nixon, along with many others. The Clan Armstrong Centre is just up the road, and the most famous Armstrong of all came here in 1972, when a fellow Reiver descendant was still in the White House. The most successful of the Reiver families was undoubtedly the Scotts, who eventually produced one of the most famous authors of all time as well as ending up as the Dukes of Buccleuch and, for good measure, Queensberry too. The current incumbent was until very recently the largest private landowner in Britain, and much of the land I’ve been walking on while staying here is owned by him – ditto much of Dumfriesshire, Midlothian, and, just for variety, Northamptonshire, where his ‘modest’ home (one of three, no less) is nicknamed ‘the English Versailles’. Oh, sorry, I forgot Cumbria too – when a newly built Royal Navy nuclear submarine puts to sea from the building yard in Barrow-in-Furness, it does so between two shores owned by, yes, you’ve guessed it. And that nice bit of western shoreline at the top end of Lake Windermere? Yep, his too. So all in all, some reiver descendants ended up unbelievably rich, famous and powerful. The moral of the story, gentle reader? Your ancestors, and mine too, should have done one heck of a lot more serious violent crime.

History, not just Reiver history, is literally all around me here. Across the field behind me, I can see the site of a Roman fort, one of the outliers of Hadrian’s Wall, which lies a few miles to the south. (Hmm, a wall that actually did its job. Got to be some sort of relevant connection I could make there…) The site of the fort is now occupied by a predominantly 19th century mansion which looks disconcertingly like a small, elegant French chateau, which ought really to be surrounded by its own vineyard and bathed in Mediterranean sun, not obscured by relentless Borders drizzle. Even so, the mansion is floodlit at night – hardly the most sustainable of choices, I’d have thought, as I’m fairly certain I’m the only person who can see it. Across the River Esk, which forms most of the view out of my living room windows, is a sixteenth century tower house and, next to it, an elegant eighteenth century church. Behind those is the still discernible route of the old Waverley railway line, which ran from Edinburgh to Carlisle until Doctor Beeching did his worst; a beautiful and useful route, apparently, and now the subject of a campaign to reinstate it. (Has there ever been a trainspotter named Beeching, I wonder? If so, how long did he live, and just how gruesome was his demise?) The building I’m staying in, now let by the wonderful Landmark Trust, once controlled the salmon traps on the river on behalf of the owners of the estate, but the traps so enraged the Scottish fishermen upstream that they once marched on the mansion, a scene described by Sir Walter Scott in Redgauntlet. (Technically, this side of the river, which marked the border of the debatable land, has always been English, but tell that to an enraged salmon-loving Armstrong who’s had a wee dram or six.) There’s even an unexpected piece of history which resonates with anyone from south Wales. Just five or so miles north of here is a typical little mining village, once at the centre of a small coalfield owned by, yes, you guessed it once again. It even has spoil tips and a replica pithead winding wheel memorial, recalling a man killed underground in the 1920s.

And so on.

Of course, none of this should be relevant to my actual purpose for being here, which is to plan out the story of the final book in my Stannard trilogy of naval historical fiction set in the sixteenth century. This one will be, to plagiarise Friends, the one with the Spanish Armada in it. The good news is it’s currently going really well. The bad news is that it’s going really well apart from the plot hole I’ve just encountered. Thus this post is displacement activity until the muse leaps salmon-like out of the river to slap me about the head and resolve said plot hole.

If the book appears on time next year, you’ll know s/he turned up.

 

[Breaking news – s/he did!]

The large thud which registered on the Richter Scale in south-east England last week wasn’t an earthquake or the last gasp of the fracking industry, but the arrival on my doormat of the sumptuous new book Wales and the Sea: 10,000 Years of Welsh Maritime History. The good news is that this was my free contributor’s copy (in life, surely few things provide more balm to the soul than the words ‘free book’), the bad news is that it’s a very chunky tome indeed, which will require yet more rearrangement of the one and a half shelves containing the books I’ve either written or have contributed to. But these are minor considerations compared to the nature and content of the book. Published under the auspices of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, it was recently launched at a glitzy event in Swansea’s Waterfront Museum attended by the crachach (the older, shorter and much more evocative Welsh term for what’s now often called ‘the liberal metropolitan elite’), including Lord Dafydd Elis Thomas, the Welsh Government’s culture minister, who provided the foreword. Unfortunately I couldn’t be there as I was double-booked, attending and speaking at the Scottish Maritime Conference in Glasgow, but the concurrence of the two events suggests that maritime history in the Celtic nations is relatively flourishing at the moment.

As its title suggests, the book’s scale is ambitious, and fifty-two contributors were brought in provide sweeping coverage of the 10,000 years. It is far more than a straight chronological narrative; each section begins with a ‘macro’ overview followed by ‘micro’ studies in depth. Many of these are innovative and fascinating. I somehow suspect that only the Welsh would begin a study of the maritime history of their nation with a comprehensive survey of representations of the sea and ships in literature, art and music, but it works splendidly. Many of the contributors are drawn from the worlds of archaeology and the museums sector, and the balance of the book reflects this with strong emphases, for example, on coastal sites, intertidal archaeology and conservation issues. Thus there are studies of individual wrecks and ports, of such apparently esoteric topics as ‘A Roman Sailor’s Joke?’ and ‘Newport ship carpenters’ marks’, and the ‘big picture’ studies one would expect of, for instance, lighthouses, lifeboats, floods, the Romans and Normans, major trades and shipping companies, shipbuilding (even that little known sub-species, ferro-concrete shipbuilding), types of ship, and so on. Much of the material is fascinating and little known, supported by outstanding illustrations – both archival and modern, with the latter spanning both photography and specially-produced maps and diagrams, all crystal clear and in spectacular colour. (Hats off here to the Welsh publishers / printers Y Lolfa, who invariably turn out superbly produced books.) However, it could be argued that some of the chosen themes might be of professional concern for the contributors but are probably unlikely to be so for general readers, such as ‘Protection, maritime archaeology and the law in Wales’.

Somewhat unexpectedly, I must admit, I found myself writing the section on maritime Wales under the Tudors rather than anything naval, and if I’m being honest, most of my quibbles about the book’s coverage relate to the latter. OK, there’ll always be omissions in such an ambitious project, and everybody will have gripes about the absence of their own pet subjects (especially if they’ve published a book called Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales…), but even so, I regret the omission of any mention of perhaps Wales’s greatest naval officer, Nelson’s friend Sir Thomas Foley (Nelson’s visit to south Wales is almost completely absent, too) and of such major institutions as HMS Glendower, the WW2 training base at Pwllheli. The emphasis in the naval section is heavily on coastal defence, neglecting the contributions (or even the existence) of the significant numbers of Welshmen who served in the navy over many centuries; in other words, the impression which might be gained from the book is that Wales’s role in naval history was largely passive, not dynamic and outgoing. More seriously still, there’s no mention at all of the critical importance of Welsh steam coal to the Royal Navy and several of the world’s other main navies from the mid-19th century until the end of the First World War. However, I was also slightly taken aback by some non-naval omissions – the famous Swansea ‘Cape Horners’ merit barely a couple of sentences, while there’s no mention at all of the famous voyage of the Mimosa and the founding of the Welsh colony in Patagonia.

But these are relatively minor quibbles. This very big, splendidly produced and sumptuously illustrated book, all 348 pages of it, should make a huge contribution to greater awareness of the huge sweep of Wales’s rich maritime history, especially as it’s remarkably reasonably priced at just £24.99.

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Meanwhile, I’m on the radio! Follow this link and you can hear me talking with Hugh Bicheno about historical fiction (programme 3) and with Jane Dismore and Patricia O’Sullivan about the pleasure and pain of writing non-fiction (programme 5). These programmes should be available everywhere, not just in north Hertfordshire!