J D Davies - Historian and Author

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J D Davies

Revisiting The Death of the Naval Pub

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Holiday time, i.e. minimal opportunity to think about blogging, but in any case, I thought it was high time I re-posted one of the most popular posts ever on this site – I can’t quite believe I first published this here almost five years ago! The content stands up pretty well, I think, although alas, that’s not necessarily true of all the pubs mentioned…the most tragic case is that of the iconic Lord Nelson in Burnham Thorpe, mentioned below, which closed a couple of years ago and which is currently on the market. (Beer loving naval history enthusiasts with £350,000 to spare, your time has come.) On the other side of the coin, though, not all refurbishments are bad news for a pub’s heritage. In a previous life, when I lived and worked in Bedford, one of my favourite pubs in the town was The Ship – or rather, the St Cuthbert’s Street Ship, as it’s known, because, unlikely though it might seem in a town so far from the sea, Bedford actually has two pubs called The Ship. With low beams, tiny rooms and quirky corners, the Ship ticked pretty well all my boxes for a pub, so my heart sank when I saw it had been refurbished. Fortunately, though, most of its character has been retained, and better still, they’ve added several pictures of the last HMS Bedford, a cruiser which was wrecked on the Korean coast in 1910, thus allowing it to qualify as a ‘naval pub’ under my entirely objective and scientific criteria, set out below. So, pub owners and landlords, you know what you need to do – put up a picture or two of an old warship, and you’re guaranteed free publicity in this blog. 

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MPs, newspaper columnists and bloggers galore have sounded off on the subject of the reasons for the decline of the British pub. No doubt sociologists aplenty have written, or are writing, weighty doctoral theses on the subject. Even I had my two penn’orth a few years back, in my old blog . (And if you really have too much time on your hands and want to read my thoughts, they’re here and here – although it’s interesting that in the four years or so since I wrote those posts, binge drinking itself, and the violence fuelled by it, have gone into a steep decline in their turn.) But as far as I’m aware – and I’d be delighted if somebody out there proves me wrong – nobody has yet explored the demise of an important, but sorely neglected, sub-species of the British pub: the good, old-fashioned, naval boozer.

First, a definition or two – just what is a ‘naval pub’? For the purposes of this post, I’ll cast the net widely. Obviously, there are the pubs that are, or were, frequented by large numbers of serving sailors. The problem with this category, of course, is that there simply aren’t ‘large numbers of serving sailors’ any more, and if one believes what one reads (and even the navy’s own publicity), many of the current crop are more likely to be listening to their iPods or reading The Guardian‘s fashion pages while sipping cappuccinos than throwing eight pints down their necks in the Admiral Napier. As a result, many of the countless pubs that catered to naval personnel in the dockyard towns have fallen by the wayside. A classic example is the decline of the once-notorious Union Street in Plymouth, which I knew a little in the 1980s, long after its heyday, while following the closure of the dockyard in 1984, Chatham lost such evocative naval names as the Boatswain and Call, the Lord Duncan, and the Shipwrights Arms.

The Lord Nelson, Burnham Thorpe
The Lord Nelson, Burnham Thorpe

The second category consists of pubs with genuine roots in naval history. Perhaps the classic example of this genre would be the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk: the pub where Nelson himself drank (indeed, it now markets itself as ‘Nelson’s local’), in his own home village, and the first one in Britain to be renamed after him following his death. But there are plenty of other pubs with Nelson connections, such as the Royal Hotel in Deal, where he stayed with Emma Hamilton, and the Lord Nelson at Milford Haven, where in 1802 he delivered a speech extolling the virtues of the great Welsh natural harbour. (2019 update – I’d never actually been for a drink in this Lord Nelson, but remedied that last year. Crassly, it contains hardly any references to its namesake and its heritage.) Another great pub steeped in naval history is the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, right next to the Old Royal Naval College (or as it’s better known these days, ‘that place that turns up in pretty much every blockbuster movie’). But since the navy moved out of the college, the pub seems to have become a bit neglectful of its naval heritage; and perhaps the surest sign of its decline is that on one recent occasion when I went in there, another of the customers was Graham Norton.

My third and final category would be pubs with naval names. In the dockyard towns, there’s a considerable overlap with the first category; in Portsmouth until quite recently, for instance, Jack Tar could stagger from the Ship Anson to the Ship Leopard to the Keppel’s Head to the Victory, and then round the corner to the Royal George and the Invincible, all of which were within roughly a 300 yard radius of each other, immediately outside the dockyard gate. There used to be quite a few more in the same vicinity, and the principal street name, The Hard, inadvertently gave a pretty good pointer toward the sort of behaviour to be expected in the area on a Saturday night. But the naval name used to be a common feature of towns throughout the country. My own home town, Llanelli, was a port, but it had hardly any direct connections with the navy. Even so, at one time it had a Britannia Hotel, a Lord Nelson, a British Tar, a Trafalgar Inn and a Neptune Inn, as well as many more pubs with ‘maritime’ names, like the Ship, the Sailors Home, the Steam Packet, the Sloop Aground and The Three Mariners. Pubs called the Lord Nelson were everywhere; until relatively recently, there was even one in Stourport-in-Severn, far inland, which is where my Worcestershire ancestors hailed from. But one of my favourite examples of the naval name popping up in unexpected places is the Torbay at Ffairfach in Carmarthenshire. Ffairfach is a suburb of Llandeilo and is a long way inland, but its pub seems to have been named after an eighteenth century Torbay – perhaps an early landlord had served on her? – and to this day, the pub sign is a remarkably creditable painting of the ship. (2019 update – no longer, alas. The splendid pub sign weathered terribly, and I believe has been replaced by something far blander.)

The Torbay Inn pub sign, Ffairfach
The Torbay Inn pub sign, Ffairfach

The problems with the pubs bearing naval names are that, firstly, there are far fewer of them than there were, and with each one that closes, an entire point of contact between a community and Britain’s naval history disappears. But even in those that survive, the naval connection is often downplayed or ignored entirely: pictures of old ships do not necessarily sit well with wannabe Jamie Olivers trying to create rural gastropub heaven (or, in the humble opinion of the present blogger, hell). Worse, I know pubs where good old solid British oak beams and bars have been painted white ‘to give a friendlier/warmer/more feminine feel’ (most disastrously at my village local, although that doesn’t have a naval name or connection – 2019 update: thankfully, the next refurbishment got rid of much of the white!). A case in point was the Old Custom House in Portsmouth, one of the few old buildings to survive within the ghastly Gunwharf Quays complex that was erected on the site of the old HMS Vernon training establishment. When the pub first opened, in 2001, it had a large number of pictures and other memorabilia of Vernon, but most of that was discarded at the first refurbishment only a few years later. On the other hand, a few ‘pubcos’ have a rather better record, notably the much-maligned Wetherspoons, which does at least provide display boards and photographs which explain the heritage behind a pub’s name. For instance, they’ve named a pub in Newport the John Wallace Linton after the locally-born submariner and VC winner, while one of their outlets in Potters Bar rejoices in the name of the Admiral Byng (who lived at nearby Wrotham Park), although I’ve yet to investigate the amount of information about the ill-fated admiral on display within. But these are just a few isolated examples, and I’d suggest that they in no way compensate for the vast amount of naval pub heritage that we’ve lost. As I suggested above, every closure, every stripping out of ships’ badges or pictures that no longer fit with the desired ‘corporate image’, reduces the visibility of the navy and of naval history in public perception. There are many other causes of the ‘sea blindness’ that many believe to be afflicting modern Britain, but this is surely one of them.

Let’s not end on a negative and depressing note, though. Which are my favourite ‘naval pubs’, in any of the above categories, I hear you cry? (And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you anyway.) Well, there are plenty. Honourable mentions to the minute snug bar in the Admiral MacBride on the Barbican in Plymouth, very much an old stamping ground during my time down west, and to the Lord Nelson at Southwold; back in the day, that mention would have gone to the nearby Solebay Inn, until the otherwise splendid Adnams Brewery wrecked it with a ghastly refurbishment. But pretty much at the top of my tree would have to be the Ship and Shovell, adjacent to Charing Cross station in London. (And no, Tripadvisor, it’s not spelt ‘Shovel’. 0 stars for you.) Not only is this the only pub in London in two halves, one on each side of an alley; not only is it full of naval history pictures and memorabilia, which makes it a real rarity in London; not only does it serve splendid beer; but it’s actually one of the very few pubs anywhere that commemorates a seventeenth century naval hero, i.e. ‘one of the blokes in my books’.

The Pembroke on a foggy night. Just imagine a press gang coming round the corner...
The Pembroke on a foggy night. Just imagine a press gang coming round the corner…

But my award for ‘best naval pub in Britain’ would have to go to the Pembroke in Portsmouth. It’s not in such an obvious and prominent location as the aforementioned pubs on the Hard, or the Still and West a few hundred yards away at the harbour mouth (which was once very nearly rammed by Britain’s last battleship), but it’s fairly adjacent to the Royal Garrison Church where King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, its walls are adorned with the ships’ badges of current and past warships, and most days, you’ll come across a veteran or two propping up the bar, spinning yarns to anyone who’ll listen. But if anyone has alternative candidates for the title, I’d love to hear about them – and, of course, I’d then have to undertake the onerous task of personally researching all of the premises in question. This blogging’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

2019 update – this offer still stands!

 

Money for Nothing; or, Why I Am Not on TV

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A few years ago, I briefly threatened to become a TV historian – say, a cross between a more male and more Welsh version of Lucy Worsley, and a taller and less annoying version of David Starkey. A Dutch TV company was talking to me about a project related to what were then the forthcoming anniversaries of the second Anglo-Dutch war, and the BBC had signed me up to do some filming with, of all people, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, he of the silken cuffs. (I’d also been screentested by a production company a little while before that, but the project never get off the ground.) Roughly within the same timeframe, I was also talking to a major theatre company, who were staging a new production of a play which might or might not have a strong wind in its title, and which might or might not be by an author whose name rhymes with Makesbeer; the company in question were keen to reflect, as far as possible, what conditions were really like aboard a seventeenth century ship in a storm. There were mentions of potentially talking to the cast (headed by a pretty well known actor) and of tickets for a performance.

So what came of these dalliances with fame and fortune?

Absolute sweet FA.

(For followers of this blog who aren’t familiar with that expression, I suggest you explore its origin here – it’s quite a story!)

To be fair to the BBC, I did film with the sartorially splendid LL-B for the best part of a day – much more historically knowledgeable than your preconceptions might suggest, BTW – but my contribution ended up on the cutting room floor. Not all of the information I’d provided did, though: one or two references in the final programme were clearly derived from things I’d said, even though my name didn’t appear in the credits. As for Dutch TV and the theatre, I’d spoken to both at some length, and given them information which may or may not have appeared in their final productions. I don’t know if the programme ever saw the light of day, but the play certainly did, unlike the implied promise of tickets and the like (and by the time I realised they weren’t going to appear and tried to book some myself, the run was sold out). This experience certainly isn’t unique to me, though. Several friends and colleagues have had exactly the same thing happen to them, the most heinous case being that of a friend who effectively provided large amounts of original research for a Channel 4 programme, only for it to be presented by someone else, with no credit whatsoever given to the person who’d actually done the work.

I mention all this because an article in The Guardian over the weekend raised this exact same point. Indeed, it implied that, if anything, the problem of TV and film companies simply lifting historians’ work without crediting them at all may well have got worse in the last couple of years – and the success of films like Darkest Hour, Dunkirk and The Favourite surely guarantees that yet more historical epics will follow, based more or less closely on original work done by people who, for certain, will have made far less money than the producers, directors, actors, and probably the make-up artists, stagehands and runners too. Inevitably, the article triggered frenzied activity in my Twitter feed, with plenty of people I know, like and respect sticking their hands up to say ‘me too’ (to coin a phrase), while wholeheartedly endorsing the article’s demand for proper recognition, and, indeed, payment, for historians whose work forms the basis for productions on TV, film and the stage.

Looking back, of course, I was naive to volunteer as much information as I did to the people I was dealing with without ensuring I’d banked at least some of the quid pro quo in advance. But removing my historian’s hat (an unfashionable, moth-eaten fedora, as long-term readers of this blog will recall), and donning my novelist’s hat (a metaphor, because novelists can’t afford hats), I think it’s clear that this problem is rather more widespread. Yes, on the one hand, making use of an individual’s work without paying for it or, at the very least, without providing some form of credit for it, is plagiarism – or, if you prefer, pure, simple, unadorned theft. But there’s also a larger subtext at play here. I’m a member of the Society of Authors, and attend meetings of its local branch, in company with a great, supportive, good-humoured crowd of fellow scribblers. Within the last couple of years, the society has been particularly animated by the question of payments for author talks, particularly at literary festivals, which now seem to be absolutely everywhere in the UK. (Is there a town left that doesn’t have one?) I’ve had the sob story myself, more than once – ‘oh, we’re a very small festival / we’re just starting up, etc, so we can’t afford to pay you a fee, but would you still be willing to come and talk to three nonagenarians and an arthritic dog in North Auchtermuchty on a cold, wet Thursday night in January?’ Actually, the small festivals aren’t really the problem – over the years, I’ve taken part in a few, and also given one-off talks to audiences not much larger than the apocryphal one I’ve just cited, all on a pro bono basis, usually if it’s a cause that I think deserves support and encouragement,* or if there’s a chance of reaching some new readers and selling some books, or if I just fancy a trip to a nice part of the country. But some pretty large, and undoubtedly well funded, festivals and organisations have tried to pull the same trick, leading the Society of Authors to make it an official policy that its members shouldn’t attend such events, or give talks per se, if they don’t get paid. This impressive demonstration of author power led the mighty Oxford Literary Festival, for one, to change its policy and actually start paying its speakers, but there are still plenty of people out there who seem to think that authors (and, by extension, the historians whose research underpins so much of film and TV) are pitiful, insecure creatures, desperate for anyone at all to notice them, who can therefore be treated essentially as unpaid labour (some may prefer to use a much more historically loaded term instead), and who should be pathetically grateful for any crumbs that are thrown their way – or, more often, not.

Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to fairness, and due recompense being made for work done. That, though, is where I start to get a bit conflicted: after all, this is essentially the same argument used by very large and very rich media organisations to try to get people to sign up for their paywalls, i.e. that readers should be prepared to pay to consume good journalism. Well, yes of course, in principle, but is there any guarantee that if I sign up for The Times paywall, to name but one, my money will go to support some poor overworked hack rather than swelling Rupert Murdoch’s profits? Paying a modest amount directly to a historian whose book has contributed to the success, and, indeed, the very existence of a film or TV programme, or directly to an author who comes along to speak to an audience at a fraction of the cost of a C-list stand-up comedian, seems to me to be a very different case.

But then, I suspect I might be a little biased.

 

 

(* Hence, for example, my talk last Thursday to the wonderful National Trust volunteers at Shugborough Hall, the stately home of Admiral Lord Anson in the eighteenth century and the queen’s photographer cousin, Lord Lichfield, in the twentieth. Yes, the NT could certainly afford to pay a fee – this, after all, is a body that can buy entire islands or mountains – but it was for a good cause, a brilliant joint initiative with my old alma mater Oxford University (another institution not really short of a bob or two) to enhance the connections between some of the NT’s properties and maritime history. As almost all of those in my audience were volunteers who happily give up their time gratis so that the public can enjoy the house and estate, it would have been distinctly Scrooge-like of me to request a fee!)

 

Talk About It, and They Will Come

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268.

Two hundred and sixty eight.

I know football and rugby teams who’d be pleased with that sort of attendance. 268 people would comfortably fill a decent-sized airliner, or man a large destroyer. And, let’s face it, 268 MPs changing their minds would deliver Theresa May’s Brexit deal by a landslide.

Why, then, did this impressive number of people turn out on a cold Tuesday night in winter in south-east London?

To listen to two old buffers rabbiting on about seventeenth century naval history.

Let’s face it, my friends, if that can happen, then there’s still hope for humanity.

The calm before the storm…

Seriously, it was a quite extraordinary evening. My old friend Richard Endsor and I had been asked to speak at an event to raise funds for, and raise awareness of, the project to build a replica of the 1677 Third Rate man-of-war Lenox within the historic dockyard site at Deptford. (Richard, of course, is the author of the book about her, Restoration Warship, which originally inspired the idea.) I’ve blogged about this before on this site, and hope you’ll all go and visit the project’s own website, where you can find out about ways to donate and help the cause. So we duly turned up at the venue, the wonderfully historic Saint Nicholas church in Deptford, close to the site where the Lenox was built and where Drake’s Golden Hind spent her last years. Saint Nicholas contains many historic memorials to local figures, such as those to the Shish family of shipwrights and to one of the most famous local residents of all, seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn (whose famous garden at Sayes Court is the focus on another terrific local project). An ideal venue, then, in which to deliver talks directly connected to the history of the building.

An Evelyn family memorial

I’d spoken to a great audience at the maritime history seminar in Hull a few nights before: probably about fifty people, but an absolutely packed house, with standing room only, and I suppose I was expecting a similar sort of number at Deptford. Then people started arriving. The first arrivals were members of the ‘band’ that was due to be playing seventeenth century and nautical numbers at intervals during the evening. I suppose I’d expected something like a string quartet, or maybe a small chamber group…but still the musicians kept coming. This, it materialised, was the South East London Folk Orchestra, and what a splendid group they are, with a lively repertoire that had people singing along! So we had musicians, and very soon, we had an audience. Richard and I looked on in bemusement as more and more people poured into the church, and more and more seats had to be found. Yes, I’ve been in churches before when it’s a case of standing room only, but generally only for the funerals of popular people. But all these people had turned out to listen to us – and if you don’t believe me, there’s ample evidence on the ‘news’ page of the Lenox website! 

So Richard and I talked, with me providing a general overview of the history of Deptford dockyard in the Tudor and Stuart period, setting it in the context of the ambitions especially of Kings Henry VIII and Charles II, before Richard spoke on the women of Restoration Deptford – a tour through some of the racier episodes (such as Pepys’s successful pursuit of Mrs Bagwell, a shipwright’s wife) as well setting the record straight about the involvement of women in royal dockyards (much more than you might expect, with women in prominent roles as contractors or even serving in such posts as dockyard ratcatcher!). To be truthful, though, the evening passed in something of a blur, such was the buzz from the audience and the terrific atmosphere created by the orchestra. Even better, the event raised a significant amount of cash towards the Lenox project. So all in all, it was undoubtedly ‘a hit, a very palpable hit’, as somebody once said, and huge thanks to Julian, Esther, Reverend Louise, and the rest of the team for making it happen. I look forward to future events in Deptford, and if you’re within any sort of striking distance of south-east London, I’d strongly urge you to get involved. If you’re not within that striking distance, though, then I hope you’ll support the good folk of Deptford in the Lenox and Sayes Court projects in any way you can. These are genuine community efforts, very much ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’, and in a time of austerity, when pretty well anywhere, but especially London, seems to be regarded as fair game for nothing but soulless development, then efforts to steer a different, historically aware, and much more inclusive course should surely be backed to the hilt.

Blogorama

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When this post goes live, I’ll be hacking my way up the A1 ahead of giving a talk this evening to the maritime history seminar of the University of Hull. Then, on Thursday, I’m talking at an open event in aid of the Lenox project at Saint Nicholas church, Deptford – full details can be found here. So it’s a busy week, and I’ve not been able to devote this blog, as planned, to providing some detailed context about the first book of my new Tudor naval trilogy, Destiny’s Tide. But I certainly hope to do that over the coming weeks (and, indeed, to headline the cover, once the design team at Canelo has done the business!), so expect some posts about Henry VIII’s navy, about the political and religious tensions of the 1540s, and above all, about the principal terrestrial setting of the book, the ‘lost city’ of Dunwich, ‘England’s Atlantis’.

In the meantime, I thought I’d highlight a number of the blogs that I follow. Although it’s difficult to keep abreast of all the fantastic sites that are out there, I really rate these, and recommend them warmly to those with similar interests! Some purely maritime ones this time – I’ll flag up some other historical blogs on a future occasion.

First, a new blog, Corsairs and Captives, which seeks to explode the still-abundant myths about the ‘Barbary corsairs’. This has been launched by Professor Adam Nichols, a previous guest blogger on this site, whom I met at his book launch in London’s Icelandic embassy a couple of years ago. The corsairs have impacted on many aspects of my work over the years; not only do they get substantial mentions in my non-fiction books, they’re also central to the plot of the second Quinton novel, The Mountain of Gold. The blog already contains a number of posts that challenge the usual perceptions of the corsairs, as well as providing insights into the long-neglected experiences of those who found themselves prisoners in the likes of Algiers. Well worth your time!

Next, the Dawlish Chronicles blog published by my fellow naval fiction author Antoine Vanner, whom I’ve got to know well in the last few years. Quite apart from writing terrific novels set in the Victorian era, Antoine blogs at least once a week about an extraordinary range of lesser known stories from naval and maritime history. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m incredibly envious of both his workrate and the astonishing range of his naval knowledge!

In terms of what’s going on in the maritime world today, Rick Spilman’s Old Salt Blog is a must. Just as Antoine Vanner digs out little known or completely forgotten nuggets from history, so Rick unearths obscure but fascinating – and often hugely important – news stories. His site is also a portal to Old Salt Press, a cooperative of maritime historical fiction authors (including Antoine and Rick himself), several of whom I’ve got to know well and whose work is well worth seeking out.

Next, the Wreck of the Week site under the auspices of Historic England, with posts written by Serena Cant, another blogger who I’ve been delighted to get to know. This provides detailed accounts of some lesser known but always fascinating shipwrecks; here, for example, is the latest post, about a wreck discovered during the construction of Woolwich power station in 1912. Was it Sir Francis Drake’s Golden Hind, as some optimists claimed? Umm, almost certainly not – but it did have some tantalising sixteenth and seventeenth century connections.

Last but by no means least for this week, the Global Maritime History site run by my friend Sam McLean. This is much, much more than just a blog, with book reviews, conference announcements, and all sorts of other important material too. It also hosts a growing database of ADM8. ‘What’s ADM8?’ you cry. Well, it’s quite simply one of the most invaluable sources for the history of the sailing Royal Navy, consisting principally of monthly disposition lists, showing the exact locations of all warships in commission and the names of their commissioned officers. I’ve spent countless hours working on the early volumes of ADM8 over the last 35+ years, and can therefore attest to the fact that the source is an absolute treasure trove. Having it readily available online, rather than accessible only to those able to visit the National Archives at Kew, is a terrific boon to the maritime history community!

Tidal Wave

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At long last, I’m thrilled to be able to confirm that the first book in my new Tudor naval fiction trilogy will be published by Canelo this summer, currently as an e-book only.

And the title is…

Cue drumroll!

Cue trumpets!!

Cue my hometown male voice choir singing the Welsh national anthem!!!

DESTINY’S TIDE

Followers of this blog will know that this book has had a long and pretty unusual gestation period. Whereas authors invariably have to edit their work down to an acceptable length (unless you’re George R R Martin, obviously), I found myself having to more than double the length of a story that had originally been conceived as a novella. This proved to be quite fraught, and took rather longer than anticipated (with a knock-on effect on other projects), but it’s finally ready to go. And here, for the first time in any medium, is a preview of the book…

England, 1544

It is a dangerous time.

The religious changes enforced by the capricious old king, Henry VIII, have created fear, uncertainty and suspicion, while the king’s pride has led the country into simultaneous wars against France and Scotland. Against this backdrop, Jack Stannard, a young shipmaster, grieves for his dead wife, while hoping that the wars will provide an opportunity to distinguish himself, to provide for his motherless children Meg and Tom, and to restore the fortunes of his hometown of Dunwich. For centuries, though, the sea has eaten away at ‘England’s Atlantis’, while its rising neighbour, Southwold, plots incessantly to supplant it. Jack also has to battle the demons personified by his own father, a man with a dark and violent history, albeit now brought low by a terrible illness.

The beach and cliff at Dunwich, Suffolk. The coast was once more than a mile further out to sea; the remains of the town and its seven churches still lie underwater

As he sails to fight the Scots, Jack is accompanied by his mentor, Thomas Ryman, erstwhile soldier and equally erstwhile friar. Together, they fight ferocious battles in Scottish waters, while also contending with insidious enemies within their own ranks. Meanwhile in London, Jack’s old schoolfriend, Will Halliday, and his master, William Gonson, the effective organiser of the king’s navy, struggle to fit out a fleet for an even greater war against France, even as Gonson is consumed by memories of the terrible, unjust fate that befell his son. Jack and Will once harboured ambitions of singing before the king as members of his elite Chapel Royal, but destiny has now set them upon very different courses, with their futures, loves, and very lives, depending on the success of King Henry’s wars.  

The surviving remains of the Greyfriars at Dunwich – Thomas Ryman’s home until the abrupt and shocking Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII

Fresh from the campaign in Scotland, Jack Stannard sails for France and the great siege of Boulogne. There, he encounters an exotic foreigner whose words have a profound influence on him, challenging his entire view of the world and of his own future. Meanwhile, in Dunwich, Jack’s precocious nine-year-old daughter Meg has dreams and ambitions of her own, dreams and ambitions that have no place for the potential new wife who seems to be being foisted on her father. But Meg’s aspirations, and indeed her very life, are soon threatened by the sea’s relentless assault upon the ancient port.

The story culminates in the dramatic events of 1545, when the French launch a colossal invasion fleet against England. Sailing into battle against it, Jack and Ryman are hamstrung by treachery from closer to home than they could ever have expected. Events move inexorably to a shattering climax aboard the pride of Henry VIII’s navy – the great ship Mary Rose…

The hull of the Mary Rose, raised from the seabed in 1982, now preserved in a superb museum in Portsmouth

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Destiny’s Tide is based closely on the historical record, and upon the true stories of both ‘the lost city’ of Dunwich and the Gonson family. Although the Stannard family is fictitious, the England in which the three generations of it at the centre of the trilogy live and strive is recreated as faithfully as possible – a land torn apart by bitter religious divisions, even as the kingdom takes a dramatic new direction, a ‘turn to the sea’ in which gallant, ambitious merchants, mariners and warriors start to cast their eyes and set their sails far beyond the realm’s traditional boundaries and ambitions. Together, over a period of forty years, the Stannards and the Gonsons will be at the very heart of the astonishing rise of England’s Navy Royal.

The second book, set nearly a quarter of a century after the events of Destiny’s Tide , will take the Stannards to the Caribbean in company with John Hawkins and his young protege, a certain Francis Drake, while the final instalment, another twenty years further on, will centre on the titanic fight for England’s very survival as the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada approaches its shores…

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I’ve already started work on the second book, which Canelo hope to publish as soon as possible after the first. But I certainly hope to get back to writing further titles in the Quinton series as soon as possible!

In the meantime, I’m trying to work out how I managed to commit myself to giving five talks in the first fortnight of February (I suspect the words ‘yes, I’ll do it’ might be part of the answer). Most of these are to selected audiences, but on 7 February, I’ll be talking at an open event in the wonderfully historic St Nicholas church in Deptford (full details here). This is under the auspices of the Lenox Project, which aims to build a replica of a particularly important Restoration warship, and I’ll be speaking alongside my old friend Richard Endsor, author of the definitive book about the ship. It should be a fun night, with music (not provided by us, have no fear) and refreshments, so if you’re in the general vicinity, please come along – it’s free!

The Fastest Duck in the City and the Immaculately Housetrained Rabbits

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I don’t usually have film reviews in this blog, but then, they don’t usually make films about my historical period, i.e. the ‘Stuart age’. But the arrival in cinemas of The Favourite, the much-hyped film of Queen Anne’s relationships with Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, and Sarah’s cousin Abigail Masham, was an opportunity that couldn’t be missed. Starring, in the respective parts, national-treasure-elect Olivia Colman, Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone, The Favourite continues the somewhat unexpected resurgence of interest in the last Stuart monarch, following the West End stage production of 2017 (which I reviewed here). Of course, this by no means redresses a balance tilted overwhelmingly towards the same old stories about the same old monarchs – looking at you, Henry VIII plus the divorced/beheaded/died brigade, Queen Victoria (yawn), the current monarch, gawd bless her (soon, of course, also to be portrayed by Dame Olivia, gawd also bless her), and, above all, Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots. Our screening of The Favourite was preceded by a trailer for the latest film featuring the last two, and it was good to see that the filmmakers had resisted the temptation to include a historically impossible meeting between them –

OK, yes, scratch that, they meet.

I’ll review said film when it comes out, but I think it’s a fair bet to say that in terms of my critical opinion, it’ll have to go quite some distance to recover lost ground (although David Tennant as John Knox is surely a case of Casting from Heaven).

Anyway, The Favourite is certainly no straight take on the reign of Queen Anne. I praised the recent play for the way in which it didn’t compromise over including the complex and (let’s be fair) sometimes quite boring political contexts of the time. The film doesn’t compromise, either, but in precisely the opposite way. Union with Scotland? Sorry, what, exactly, is this ‘Scotland’ of which you speak? Religion? Forget it. Two Houses of Parliament? Hey, guys, that’s a bit inconvenient, let’s merge them into one. The biggest issue of the age, the question of Hanoverian versus Jacobite succession? Not a peep. Yes, we get some politics, but it’s pretty superficial stuff, with such anachronisms as the titles ‘Prime Minister’ and ‘Leader of the Opposition’ thrown into the mix – and you might imagine the reaction of a naval historian of the age to the line about reinforcing Marlborough with an army division to be sent across in ‘a boat’. Having said that, some might detect a subtle political agenda on the part of the film-makers. To a man, for example, the Tories are portrayed as effeminate, preening, powdered fops who make Jacob Rees-Mogg look like the Incredible Hulk; by contrast, the Whigs may have, yes, wigs, but otherwise they’re normal-looking solid chaps who just happen to, umm, race ducks. (Horatio, the ‘fastest duck in the city’, even earns a place in the cast list.) Then again, could there possibly be any hidden political agenda whatsoever in portraying a head of state as a petulant, neurotic child-adult, or in having the central political debate centring on whether or not Britain should unilaterally withdraw from a continental alliance? Nothing to see here, move along now.

No, The Favourite focuses overwhelmingly on the relations between the three central characters, and in this respect, it’s quite outstanding. Colman’s queen may, indeed, be petulant and neurotic, not to mention afflicted with what must be the most gruesome case of gout in history, but she’s also deeply sympathetic, especially when it comes to the seventeen rabbits who wander freely, and remarkably continently, around her bedroom – each representing one of the children she lost. (On this point, at least, the film’s accuracy to the historical record is unflinching.) Weisz’s Sarah is as domineering and serpentine as one suspects the real-life duchess must have been, while Stone’s slow transformation from ingenue – outwardly, at least – into an arch-intriguer capable of outmanoeuvring even Sarah is arguably an even more nuanced and impressive performance than Colman’s, although the latter is bound to scoop all the awards. I praised the play for keeping ambiguous the question of whether or not the women’s relationships were sexual, but the film has no such modesty.

Director Yorgos Lanthimos deliberately shoots the film from unexpected and often disconcerting angles, sometimes employing such devices as fish-eye lenses, which creates an unsettling sense of dislocation. This serves to emphasise one of the film’s biggest departures from historical accuracy, the sheer emptiness of the internal spaces. In reality, the queen’s court would have been full of people, with flunkies and courtiers galore in permanent attendance. Here, vast staterooms are empty for much of the time, with barely a footman or a guard in sight, let alone a lady in waiting other than Sarah or Abigail. Of course, the lack of bodies may simply have been a consequence of the filmmakers’ budget, but it serves to emphasise the strangeness, isolation and emptiness of the queen’s life, bereft of the children who should have been running around the rooms in question instead of the bunnies. (One might also be forgiven for thinking that all seventeen children must have been immaculate conceptions; there is no mention whatsoever of Anne’s husband, Prince George of Denmark, although the chronology is deliberately vague, encompassing the period from 1704 to 1713 within what’s presented as no more than a few months at most.)

Finally, though, it has to be said that the film is very funny indeed, with some brilliant laugh-out-loud lines. The tone is set by one of the first lines in the film, when a servant comments about the state of the highway: ‘They shit in the streets around here,’ she says. ‘Political commentary, they call it’. Some may find The Favourite too rude (c-bombs abound), too strange, or simply too far removed from their preconceived idea of what a historical film should be like – apparently there have been quite a few unhappy punters walking out of showings. Maybe these particular moviegoers will be happier with Mary Queen of Scots, or else with something like Frozen Fast and Furious Avenging Transformers of the Caribbean XXVII. For my part, I reckon that Horatio, the fastest duck in the city, deserves a spin-off franchise of his own, as the role of racing ducks in history has undoubtedly been unfairly neglected.