J D Davies

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…

A somewhat scary realisation – this week marks the fortieth anniversary of starting my first teaching job! I’m not entirely sure where that time has gone; for one thing, I can still remember my first staff meeting (probably one of the few I stayed awake in over the years, including the ones later in my career that I was actually chairing), and I can also recall quite a few of the pupils I was teaching back then. I wonder what became of them all…worryingly, even the youngest of them would be in their fifties now, while the oldest student I taught in my first year was only three years younger than me… Still, I owe a huge thank you to all the students I taught and colleagues I worked with during those years, both during my first post in Newquay, Cornwall (not a bad place for a maritime nut to be) and above all in the school where I spent most of my career, in Bedford (a pretty terrible place for a maritime nut to be).

The anniversary isn’t the only reason why my thoughts have focused a lot on schools during the last few days. I’ve also been reading a superb new book, Sailing School: Navigating Science and Skill, 1550-1800, by Margaret Schotte, assistant professor of History at York University, Toronto. The author was kind enough to send me a complimentary copy because of my ‘important work in the field’ (much blushing) and with a request to spread about the word about it, which I’m more than happy to do. The book tackles one of the most fundamental questions about seamanship in the age of sail – how, exactly, did sailors learn to navigate? This is one of those issues that most authors and historians, myself included, have largely taken for granted, but it raises all sorts of interesting questions, not the least being the balance between theoretical and practical learning, a debate common to so many other disciplines over many centuries. (One of those, indeed, is teaching itself, where no amount of rose-tinted theory about child-centred learning during the training course can prepare one for the reality of trying to teach bored and hormonal 15 year olds on a wet Friday afternoon.) Schotte’s approach is innovative, breaking away from conventional chronological narrative to focus instead on a specific place at a specific time, using this as the ‘hook’ on which to hang her broader analysis of the subject. Thus her chapters are set in Seville in c.1552, Amsterdam in c.1600, Dieppe in 1675, London in 1683, the Netherlands in c.1710, and aboard HMS Guardian in 1789, where Lieutenant Edward Riou faces the challenges of navigating the southern Indian Ocean.

I’m not going to attempt a full book review here (partly because I’m still a fair way off finishing it, partly because it’s not officially published in the UK for another three weeks!) Suffice to say that Schotte’s book is beautifully written and highly readable, especially in light of the fact that she’s often dealing with some quite complex scientific and mathematical issues. The book has also been superbly produced by Johns Hopkins University Press; there are nine colour plates and many black and white illustrations. Moreover, her research has been remarkably broad, covering original sources in English, French and Dutch, and calling on archives from Quebec to Sydney by way of Plymouth, Kew, Rouen, Vincennes, Amsterdam and others besides. In short, this is a hugely important book about a hugely important topic, and it’s a pleasure and a privilege to have received a copy of it!

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Meanwhile, back in the land of make-believe – in other words, my fiction – I’m delighted to announce that I’ve recently finished the first draft of the second novel in ‘Jack Stannard of the Navy Royal’, my trilogy set in the Tudor period. I’m currently waiting for feedback from my publisher et al, but in the very near future – maybe even in next week’s post – I hope to be able to announce the title, provide a ‘cover reveal’, announce the publication date, and perhaps even provide a ‘teaser trailer’ of the story!

In the shorter term, though, I’ll be in Bristol at the end of the week to take part in the ‘Connecting the Oceans’ conference, which I’ve blogged about here. It’s still not too late to get a ticket, which you can obtain here!

Our recent trip to the US included some great sightseeing opportunities, and one of them was a wander around lower Manhattan, looking for traces of the original New Amsterdam colony. One unexpected but fascinating by-product of this was the discovery of Trinity Church and its graveyard, and virtually the first monument we came across bore a familiar name – that of Captain James Lawrence, USN, commanding officer of USS Chesapeake in its heroic but doomed battle against HMS Shannon in 1813. For the British, of course, this was essentially the one redeeming naval action of the War of 1812 after a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of big, powerful American frigates like USS Constitution, but Lawrence’s defeat at the hands of a bigger ship, manned by perhaps the Royal Navy’s best-trained gunnery crew, was certainly no disgrace, as his large tomb, in what would then have been one of New York’s most prestigious locations, suggests. Moreover, Lawrence’s famous last words, ‘Don’t give up the ship!’, have become mythic in the United States Navy.

Lawrence lies a few feet from the grave of Alexander Hamilton; I’m sure I could hear distinct sounds of spinning below ground over there, presumably the occupant expressing his ongoing displeasure about that musical.

I thought I’d complement the images of Lawrence’s tomb with the memorial at Nacton church, Suffolk, to the victor of the action, the gunnery fanatic Philip Broke. It couldn’t be a more different location, or a more different memorial – a relatively small, understated wall tablet in a quiet, obscure country church, far from London and well off the beaten track. But it was adjacent to Broke’s ancestral home, and another memorial in the same church records his ancestor Packington Brooke, one of those whom I’ve always called ‘my officers’, who was killed in battle in 1665.

The contrast between the nature and location of the two memorials provides an unwitting insight into the different attitudes of the two countries to the War of 1812. In the US, of course, the war is iconic, providing the country with both its most revered historic ship, USS Constitution, and its national anthem (we saw the original ‘Star Spangl’d Banner’ at the Smithsonian, where it has its own large room and is treated with awed veneration). Washington still makes much of the burning of the Capitol and the White House by British forces – and it has to be said that the destruction of the original Library of Congress was hardly Britannia’s finest hour. In Britain, though, I suspect that only a tiny minority of people know that the two countries fought each other in 1812-15, and an even smaller number know what was done to Washington. After all, the war wasn’t against the French and/or the Germans and it didn’t involve Spitfires, so as far as the average Brit is concerned, it’s probably not worth knowing about.

But then, if the current President of the United States is hazy on the difference between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, maybe I won’t judge my fellow countrymen too harshly…