J D Davies

It’s become something of a cliche to say that 2020 has been a year of tragedies on a global scale. Amid such horrors, it’s perhaps possible for individual losses to be diminished and to have less impact than would usually be the case. Last week, though, I learned the shocking news that my friend, the Dutch naval historian Gijs Rommelse, had died suddenly at the age of forty-three. Such an early death would be tragic in any circumstances, especially as he leaves a widow and a young family, but for the small world of seventeenth century naval history, his death represents an incalculable loss.

I first met Gijs twenty or so years ago when he was studying at the University of London. We hit it off immediately – the ranks of six-foot-something non-English naval historians of the 17th century were and are not large – and we stayed in touch after he went back to the Netherlands. There was also a similarity in our career paths; Gijs, too, forged a career outside the university sector by teaching secondary-age students while researching and writing naval history in his spare time. In that respect, though, I was always astonished (and perhaps a little shamed) by just how productive he was in the time available to him, especially as he had a growing family too. His first book, The Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665–1667). International raison d’état, mercantilism and maritime strife, a modified version of his doctoral thesis, was published in 2006, and he followed it with a biography of Sir George Downing, a history of the Dutch in the early modern world, a book on ideology and foreign policy in the early modern world, and several other titles in Dutch. A number of these books were jointly authored; Gijs loved to collaborate with others, and it was a pleasure to work with him and Alan James as a co-editor of our book on western naval ideologies, c.1500-1815. The planning session that the three of us had in Amsterdam, where we worked out the themes and overall plan for the book, was a particularly memorable time. He always had a new project in the pipeline, the most notable at the time of his untimely death being a history of the Dutch navy from 1400 to 1815. He was also a good friend of this blog and contributed several guest posts, probably the most memorable of which was his review of the film known in the Netherlands as Michiel de Ruyter and elsewhere as Admiral: Command and Conquer. His workrate was phenomenal, as was his ability to juggle several ambitious projects at any one time – not to mention family life and teaching History to teenagers. He was remarkably modest, always self-deprecating about his command of English (which was actually better than that of many native speakers) and profusely apologetic when asking me if I could check references in British sources for him – his sign off line, ‘thanks ever so much’, was more than just a standard courtesy because I knew he absolutely meant it.

Historians should die in the fullness of their years, leaving a substantial body of work behind them. Gijs certainly achieved the latter in the limited time given to him, but it is a tragedy both for his family and for naval history that he was denied the former. He had so much more to contribute, and for my part I shall miss a good friend who has been taken far too soon.

Events rather than places this week. Between 1996 and 2005, five major nautical-themed festivals took place in British ports. These combined the presence of ships and boats of all shapes and sizes with artists’ performances, displays and other entertainments, and were undoubtedly hugely successful in raising awareness of the role of the sea in national life (over 200,000 people apparently attended the 1998 and 2001 festivals). Sadly, none have been held since 2005, although smaller scale events have often taken place – one that I particularly enjoyed was the 2016 Weymouth Leviathan festival, the first and to date only festival of nautical fiction, which I blogged about at the time. I was fortunate enough to attend three of the five incarnations of IFOS, namely those at Portsmouth in 1998 and 2001, as well as the one at Leith in 2003. I can’t now remember why I didn’t go to the first one, in Bristol in 1996, or the last, in Portsmouth, in 2005, and also have no idea why it hasn’t been held since. Here, though, is a selection of photos I took at the three festivals I attended. Those from 1997 and 2001 were taken with a non-digital camera, but I’d acquired a digital one by 2003.

 

 

 

 

And finally, some random pictures from Leith in 2003…

The only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the fact that whenever naval history makes the news, somebody is going to get it calamitously wrong. That’s how it’s been here in the UK for the last week or so, where we’ve had the Prime Minister himself intervening in an argument over whether a song with naval associations should be played with or without words, or at all, during a concert without an audience. Just as well he doesn’t have anything more urgent to occupy him at the moment, really… As if that wasn’t enough, we had the curious phenomenon of a seemingly arcane article on Anglo-Saxon naval history in the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology, not normally a must-read for Fleet Street’s finest, hitting national headlines after gaining considerable traction across the blogosphere.

The cause of all this sound and fury? To take the article first, it had the temerity to suggest that King Alfred the Great, often trumpeted as the founder of the Royal Navy, didn’t, umm, found the Royal Navy. There were naval successes under his predecessors, the authors claim, and a proper naval organisation wasn’t actually set up until the reign of his grandson, Edgar. Now, none of this should really be terribly controversial. I know a reasonable amount about Edgar, having gone into quite a bit of detail about his reign and legacy for my essay on naval ideology, published last year, and a good case can be made for saying that he made impressive and effective use of seapower. Was he the first English monarch to do so? I don’t know, because – to deploy the time-honoured historian’s copout – it’s not my period.

But it seems to me that this little storm in a teacup demonstrates two tedious truisms. One is that historians, and people in general, are obsessed with claiming things as ‘the first’ (often, in the case of historians, in order to make their own reputations and/or rubbish those of their predecessors), and with the idea that The Thing, whatever it might be, had A Founder and began at a precise moment in history. The idea that The Thing came into being gradually, and that many people contributed to its creation, is inherently messier, more difficult, less ‘sexy’, and sells fewer books for historians and writers keen to make their names, than identifying a precise moment when something comes into existence (and if you don’t believe me, compare the first chapter of Genesis with the theory of evolution…)

The other tedious truism is that in this day and age, pretty well any issue, no matter how innocuous, can be weaponised by one side or the other in so-called ‘culture wars’. For example, Alfred the Great has been appropriated as an icon of English nationalism; the boat sent out by Britain First to turn back migrants trying to cross the English Channel has been rechristened to bear his name. The very fact that he is the only English monarch to be awarded the soubriquet of ‘the great’ at once puts him on a pedestal, even though it can be attributed largely to the fact that he had a far superior propaganda machine to most of his predecessors or successors. So any suggestion that Alfred wasn’t, perhaps, quite as great as hazy memories of school history lessons fifty or sixty years ago might suggest is bound to trigger an avalanche of angry messages to newspaper comments sections. It’s depressing, demonstrating yet again that people often prefer myths or downright untruths to actual historical facts, an issue I also encountered with my new novel Armada’s Wake; I talk about this problem in the new issue of the Historical Writers’ Association’s splendid journal Historia.

And so to Rule Britannia, the famous naval anthem traditionally sung at that great British institution the Last Night of the Proms. This year, though, the vastly scaled down, audience-free format of the occasion, together with the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement, led to suggestions that Rule Britannia and that other tub-thumping ditty, Land of Hope and Glory, might be inappropriate and perhaps should be dropped. Cue outrage, including the aforementioned intervention by the Prime Minister, but once again, much of the outrage on both sides consisted of frankly ludicrous posturing based on shaky or non-existent historical foundations. So: yes, Rule Britannia contains the word ‘slaves’ in one of its most famous lines, ‘Britons never will be slaves’. But it’s a racing certainty that not one single person who heard it at its first performance, at Cliveden House in 1740, would have associated the word with African slavery. Written at a time of war with France, the line expresses fear of conquest by Catholic, authoritarian France, and the reduction of the British to slaves after the example of the Roman Empire – a context which would have been entirely familiar to Georgian gentlemen (and, yes, ladies) whose education had been dominated by the Classics.

(Incidentally, I’ll lay odds that I’m probably the only person who’s written about this subject who has heard the whole of Thomas Arne’s Alfred – yes, it’s that man again – from which the song is taken, and indeed has a CD of it. The song immediately preceding ‘Rule Britannia’ goes: ‘See liberty, virtue and honour appearing / with smiles and caresses each other endearing / to keep the dear blessing so hardly obtained / let virtue secure what our valour has gained / We can only boast of our national right / when liberty, virtue and honour unite’ – surely as ‘inclusive’ a lyric as anyone could wish for.)

So Rule Britannia might be jingoistic, but it’s not as jingoistic as people often think it is; for example, many sing along to the chorus with the triumphalist words ‘Britannia rules the waves!’, whereas the line actually reads ‘Britannia rule the waves’, so the sentiment is an aspiration, not a statement of fact. Moreover, it’s never been de rigueur for the singing of the words to be part of the Last Night of the Proms. Sir Henry Wood, who created the famous concert series and conducted the Last Night every year from 1895 to 1944, apparently never performed the piece with the words, while the format of the Last Night has changed frequently, having only become relatively ossified in fairly recent years. For example, in 1973 I obtained my first cassette recorder, and decided to experiment with it by recording the conclusion of the Last Night of the Proms, which involved physically holding the microphone in front of the TV. It worked and I still have the cassette, so I still have a record of the dulcet tones of the late, great Richard Baker introducing the full version of Henry Wood’s Fantasia on British Sea Songs, currently a regular part of the Last Night repertoire, by saying that it was the first time it had been performed for very many years.

Of course, the misappropriation of history to serve particular political agendas is nothing new, and it’s certainly not confined to the UK (hello, America). Sadly, I suspect we’re only going to get a lot more of it, but historians need to continue to stick their heads above the parapet to point out the unhistorical and, yes, often hysterical distortions of the record by those with ideological axes to grind. Of course, the likelihood is that the heads in question will be blasted to smithereens from both sides; but ultimately, that’s what historians are for.

It’s publication day!

My latest novel, Armada’s Wake, is being published today by Canelo. This is the third book in the ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’ trilogy, set in the Tudor period, and completes the forty year saga. As the title suggests, the famous battle against Spain’s vast invasion force forms the centrepiece of the book, but three generations of the Stannard family also have their own personal battles to fight. As with the previous two books, an important thread is provided by the story of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’, and of the people who lived there.

It’s been very satisfying to bring this story to an appropriate conclusion in this, my eleventh published novel, something which I haven’t yet done with my other series, ‘the Journals of Matthew Quinton’. I have to admit that I was initially sceptical about writing something set in the Tudor period, having probably become jaundiced after too many years of teaching it and seeing far too many novels, films and TV series being set in it. But I swiftly converted myself, partly because the lives of the Stannard family took on a momentum of their own, partly because Dunwich provided such a compelling backdrop and a history which cried out to be better known.

I wanted to conclude this post with an extract from the novel as a ‘teaser trailer’. But I swiftly realised that there’s pretty well no single paragraph, let alone any longer body of text, which doesn’t give away some spoiler or other, particularly for those who have read the second book in the trilogy, Battle’s Flood. So here instead is an extract from the historical note which concludes the book. Those of you who prefer your myths to be sacrosanct are best advised to look away now!

The defeat of the Spanish Armada is one of the best-known and most iconic events in British history. Yes, British, although it was a purely English fleet that took on the supposedly invincible maritime juggernaut dispatched by King Philip II: for example, to this day legends of Armada shipwrecks and sunken treasures fire imaginations from Fair Isle and Tobermory in Scotland to the west coast of Ireland, where Irish rocks put paid to far more hulls than did English guns.

In the Shetland detective thrillers by Anne Cleeves and the wildly successful TV series based on them, the central character, Jimmy Perez, supposedly owes his surname to an ancestor who survived the Armada, while the intricate patterns of sweaters from Fair Isle, Perez’s fictional birthplace, are allegedly inspired by Armada survivors – one of the most commonly used motifs resembles a griffin, the emblem of the town of Rostock, home port of the ship wrecked on the island, El Gran Grifón. In Ireland, survivors were reputedly responsible for introducing, inter alia, thoroughbred horses, Gaelic handball, and the surprisingly swarthy strain of Irish folk named by some the ‘Black Irish’. (A similar legend exists on the island of Westray in Orkney, where the ‘Westray Dons’, descendants of Armada survivors, allegedly formed a separate caste for more than two centuries.)

In a nutshell, then, a Spanish Armada shipwreck is vastly sexier than any ordinary common-or-garden shipwreck, while the story itself has always been irresistible to Hollywood and its ilk.

Sir Francis Drake? Check. Sir Francis Drake nonchalantly playing bowls as the enemy approaches? Check. Underdog apparently battling terrible odds? Check. The Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I herself? Check. Queen Elizabeth I delivering one of the most famous speeches of all time? Check. Unlikely victory against aforesaid terrible odds, thanks to either (a) God or (b) climate change, depending on one’s belief system? Check.

All of which presents a humble author attempting to write a fictional story set against the backdrop of the Armada with a number of problems.

In the first place, the central elements of the story are so well known that there is simply no leeway. The fights off Plymouth, Portland and the Isle of Wight, the pursuit up the Channel, the fireship attack at Calais, the subsequent battle off Gravelines, Elizabeth’s visit to the army at Tilbury, and the fate of the Spanish ships, largely shattered on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland, have all been described very much as they happened, as far as it has been possible to do so…

The central elements of the Armada story are certainly very well known, but on the other hand, several elements of the story that everyone thinks they know about it are myths, if not downright whoppers. The famous story of Sir Francis Drake saying he had time to finish his game of bowls and still beat the Spaniards is almost certainly apocryphal – it appears in no contemporary accounts and first emerges in print almost exactly 150 years later, quite probably the invention of the author and herald William Oldys, a man who was said to be ‘rarely sober in the afternoon, and never after supper’, his favourite tipple apparently being porter washed down with gin. Similarly, Queen Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech was not published in any form until 1654, based on a letter written in 1623, thirty-five years after the event, as a polemical argument against better relations with Spain at that time. (Having said that, the letter writer, Leonel Sharp, was present at Tilbury as the Earl of Essex’s chaplain…) Moreover, there are three entirely different versions of what she said, the two less renowned versions being far more contemporary than that containing ‘the heart and stomach of a king’. Having said that, the famous version is exactly the sort of thing Elizabeth undoubtedly did write and say on many occasions…so I hope my treatment of the story will be acceptable to those who still have misty-eyed visions of Flora Robson, Glenda Jackson or Cate Blanchett, depending on one’s vintage, in armour and on horseback.

I hope this whets your appetite for Armada’s Wake! Like the other Stannard books, it’s currently only available in e-formats, but I hope that if you do buy it and read it, you’ll enjoy it.