J D Davies

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!

After Germany the week before last, my most recent continental trip has been to Vlaardingen in the Netherlands, where I spent a most enjoyable couple of days at the end of last week. This was centred around a symposium at the town’s excellent museum, right at the side of its old harbour, with the symposium’s theme focusing on the new book on naval ideology edited by Alan James, Gijs Rommelse and myself. Completing the team of speakers was Professor Andrew Lambert of King’s College, London, talking about aspects of his recent and prize-winning book Seapower States. The symposium, co-organised by the Netherlands Institute of Military History, went very well – we had a really interested and engaged audience, including a couple of officers of the Royal Dutch Navy, who asked many searching questions and who, of course, all possessed pretty well flawless English. Dinner directly alongside – indeed, effectively above – the constantly busy waterway of Rotterdam harbour as the sun went down was a particularly memorable experience!

There was also a chance to explore Vlaardingen, a historic town which formerly had a particularly notable fishing industry, the central focus of its museum. By chance, I stumbled across a name very familiar to me, one of the members of my semi-serious trope in this blog, the Dead Admirals Society!

To get to Vlaardingen, I decided to take an option I hadn’t used for many years, the ferry from Harwich to Hoek van Holland (Hook of Holland), primarily because the Dutch terminal was only ten miles or so from my destination. This was a delight, and infinitely preferable to the experience of flying these days – the tedious shuffle through security, the wait at the gate, the painful process of getting to and from one’s seat, the rubbish leg room, the possibility of ending up sitting next to ‘the passenger from hell’ (aka, to some, a baby). Yes of course, flying is faster, but ‘faster’, one of the principal obsessions of the modern age, most certainly doesn’t mean ‘better’. (On the exact same topic, don’t get me started on the subject of Google Maps or satnav generally. Just don’t.) Compare all that to the chance to stretch one’s legs, have a nice meal with a sea view, have a snooze in a comfortable cabin, then go on deck to watch shipping going by, then repeat, all for much the same price as a flight. Sadly, the Harwich-Hoek route is one of the last survivors of the truly iconic ferry services that used to cross the North Sea and the English Channel. When I’ve mentioned my mode of travel to others during the last few days, they’ve come up with happy recollections of the ferries that used to run from Harwich to Hamburg and to Esbjerg in Denmark, while when I was in Gothenburg a few years ago to research The Lion of Midnight, locals still spoke fondly of the ferry which once operated between there and Newcastle, but which ended in 2006 (two years before the Newcastle-Bergen service, the last Scandinavian route, also finished). All of these, of course, were ultimately killed off by the godsend / scourge of modern travel (delete according to preference), the low cost airline. However, the ship on which I sailed, Stena Britannica, is one of the two largest superferries in the world, and one of the staff aboard said that in summer, they were often full and carrying some 1200 passengers per sailing. Despite all the disquiet about the environmental credentials of the even larger cruise liners, presumably one voyage for this ferry must be ecologically friendlier than the number of flights that would be required to shift the same number of passengers; so perhaps, as both awareness of and anger about the climate situation increase, the short-sea ferry might make a comeback. One can but hope.

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In addition to getting all my European travel for a while done and dusted before the B-word (cheer, rant, weep profusely or drink copious amounts of vodka, again according to preference), I’ve also been in the recording studio! My chats with Hugh Bicheno about historical fiction, and with Jane Dismore and Patricia O’Sullivan about non-fiction, will be going out on North Herts Radio in the near future, and as soon as I know them, I’ll put the air dates and details in the news section of this site. Don’t worry, because it’s an online station the broadcasts should be accessible anywhere in the world!

In the Chinese calendar, of course, it’s the Year of the Pig. In the Jewish one, this month marks the end of 5779, in the Islamic one it’s 1441. For most people in the west, it’s 2019. But on the Davies calendar, it’s The Year of Finally Going to Huge Countries that I’ve Inexplicably Never Visited Before. After ticking the USA – well, New York and DC – off the bucket list a couple of months ago, it was the turn of Germany last week. My utter failure to get there until now is even more unaccountable than my inability to get across the pond; after all, I’ve spent a lot of time over the years in France and, especially, the Netherlands, had been to most of the countries bordering Germany, and spent a fair chunk of my career teaching German history. The German Reformation? Check.* Thirty Years War? Yep. Bismarck? Indeed. Kaiser Bill? Tick. Weimar, Nazis, Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall? Been there, done it – indeed, back in 1989 I was in the surreal position of notionally teaching the Cold War but instead simply turning on live TV so the students could watch the history-making scenes of people tearing down the wall. So how I’ve never managed to get to Germany until now is a mystery; for goodness sake, my cousin even lived there for several years in the 1990s, and speaks the language fluently.

All this has finally been put to rights, thanks to an invitation to give a paper at a major conference in the University of Rostock (the oldest university in northern Europe, celebrating its 600th anniversary this year). I took the opportunity to tag on a quick sight-seeing day in Berlin, but a bit of due diligence on the internet gave me a cast iron excuse for doing so, namely the discovery that the Technik Museum currently has an exhibition entitled Architectura Navalis: Floating Baroque. This focuses on the political and cultural importance of the decoration of seventeenth century warships, which by happy coincidence was the subject of the panel I was going to be a part of on the following day. The exhibition was something of a disappointment, a small display primarily of original drawings of the bows and sterns of seventeenth and eighteenth century French warships, but there was some interesting commentary which proved useful at the conference. The rest of the museum’s shipping displays, though, were a revelation, notably the superb and extensive collection of ship models, which this German museum, at least, clearly doesn’t think are too boring and non-interactive to be displayed (certain British institutions which shall remain nameless, take note).

And so to Rostock. Standing on the estuary of the River Warnow, the town existed by the twelfth century and joined the Hanseatic League in 1259, when it had a fleet of some one hundred ships trading as far east as Novgorod and as far west as Britain. In 1323 it obtained the village of Warnemunde, at the mouth of the estuary, thus gaining full control of the waterway, and it became the second most important city in the League (after Lubeck). Despite fires, notably a great blaze in 1677, and heavy allied bombing in the Second World War, significant amounts of medieval heritage survive, including extensive stretches of the city walls, four of the original nine gates, the thirteenth century Convent of the Holy Cross (now the culture museum) and three churches, including the greatest, Saint Marien. This somehow survived the heaviest Bomber Command raids of all, a four day blitz in April 1942. Rostock was targeted because it was home to both the Heinkel and Arado aircraft works, and had a relatively safe and easy approach directly over the Baltic; indeed, until 1944 it was the worst damaged city in Germany. Today, Rostock has some brutalist architecture from the Communist era (it was one of the principal bases of the East German navy), but overall, the feel of it is strongly Scandinavian, a connection enhanced by its regular ferry services to Trelleborg (Sweden) and Gedser (Denmark). One bizarre feature is the fountain in the main square, which can best be described as containing sculptures of naked male and female figures performing various contortions; it’s officially called the Fountain of Joy, but the locals nickname it ‘the porno fountain’.

As for the ostensible reason why I was there – my conference session seemed to go down very well, with my paper receiving a number of excellent questions from a keen audience made up principally of young people with absolutely outstanding English. My thanks to Patrick Schmidt of the University of Rostock for inviting me, and to my fellow speaker, Eugen Rickenbacher, who spoke about the significance of the decorative scheme of the French warship Royal Louis of 1668. For me, though (and regular readers of this blog won’t be surprised to hear this), one of the two principal highlights of my stay in Rostock was a harbour cruise from the town quay right up to Warnemunde, where the river spills into the Baltic. Lots of ships, including several units of the German navy, lots of history, the extraordinary sight of a colossal cruise liner under construction – an enjoyable and enlightening experience (and the boat serves damn good coffee, too). And the other principal highlight? Well, if you ever find yourself looking for a really nice bar in Rostock, I can recommend one…

I concluded my blog about the States with a list of first impressions which I found a bit odd, or at least worthy of comment, so it only seems fair to do the same for Germany…

• I’d heard that Germans wait religiously for the green light at pedestrian crossings no matter how empty the road is and how long the wait might be. I was sceptical about this, but it’s absolutely true, and rather than be labelled as a troublemaking Brit (just as our entire country is at the moment…), I found myself complying. When in Rostock…
• Also apropos of being law-abiding, it’s a bit of a shock to discover a subway system with no gates, no electronic payment terminals, and no apparent checks on whether passengers have tickets or not. I suspect the vast majority of people using the trains on these lines are, in fact, incredulous joyriding Brits and Americans.
• OK, Berlin Cathedral, I was very impressed by the crypt containing the Hohenzollern burial vault, i.e. the often stunning tombs and coffins of dozens of seventeenth and eighteenth century Prussian royals, very reminiscent of the Kaisergruft in Vienna. But does the crypt really have to be the tourist route to the shop, the loos and the exit? Just saying.
• Very few beggars. How?
• Roads without potholes. Again, how? (Ah, OK, that whole ‘competent government’ malarkey again.)

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  And finally…Rostock’s a nice town, but it’s not really that big by national or international standards, and it’s off the beaten track in many ways. So imagine my surprise when I looked out of my hotel room window and saw a huge climate change march going past last Friday (20 September, the big climate action day). Probably at least two to three thousand people, by my reckoning, fortified no doubt by the presence of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in the harbour. If those sorts of numbers were turning out in somewhere like Rostock, where there was probably little or no media coverage, then maybe something pretty important is going on.

* Hence the double take moment when my train from Berlin stopped, I looked up, and saw the station’s name was Wittenburg. If I had a fiver for every time I taught about Martin Luther pinning his Ninety-Five s*dding Theses to that r*ddy door…