J D Davies

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

 

[Breaking news – s/he did!]

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

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

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

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

***

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.

***

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!