J D Davies - Historian and Author

The website and blog of naval historian and bestselling author J D Davies

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Bored Now: or, Captain Blood Plays Another Game of Solitaire

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Maritime history has provided me with many satisfying and pleasurable moments since I started studying it seriously *cough* years ago, but there’s something a bit special about chairing a conference session where [a] all the speakers are running pretty perfectly to time [b] the subject matter is interesting [c] if the chair’s attention does momentarily wander (heaven forfend), he can look out of the patio doors behind the audience and see the port side of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, just a few feet away. While that was a minor personal highlight of last weekend’s Connecting the Oceans conference in Bristol, examining the impact of global steam on the maritime world in the nineteenth century, it was far from being the only one. It would be invidious for me to comment on the quality of the organisation, as I was one of the co-organisers, but everything seemed to run smoothly, nobody got lost, and the ‘buzz’ from the audience was generally very positive indeed. So all in all, it seemed to be a success, and the conference proceedings are likely to be published before the end of this year in the Society for Nautical Research’s online open access newsletter, Topmasts.

One can never tell from a bare conference programme whether a common theme is going to emerge, or whether speakers are going to go off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. From the off, though, it was clear that this conference was going to present a pretty united front. Admiral Sir Ken Eaton, chairman of the co-sponsors the Society for Nautical Research, and Dr Helen Doe of Exeter University, provided broad overviews, with Helen concentrating on the businesses behind the rise of steam. We had two further keynote papers, from Dr Graeme Milne of Liverpool University and Captain Peter King, both looking at different aspects of the impact of steam (particular kudos to Peter for making the triple expansion compound engine interesting!) The panel sessions were varied and lively. James Boyd of the SS Great Britain Trust looked at steam’s aspect on migration, Jonathan Stafford of Nottingham University looked at boredom during long sea voyages (of which more anon) and Tim Carter of the Norwegian Centre for Maritime and Diving Medicine considered the different health hazards on steamships compared with sail. The next panel saw Morten Tinning of the Danish Maritime Museum look at the rise of the rise of the mighty Maersk line from humble beginnings (and opposition from those who thought steam had reached its technological limit), Tim Beattie looked at the impact of steam on the port of Falmouth, and Joanna Mathers of the SSGB Trust presented her preliminary findings about the nature of the labour force on UK steamships. In the primarily naval panel, which I chaired, Benjamin Miertzschke of the University of Potsdam looked at the introduction of steam in the German merchant marine and navy (significantly later than in the UK), Zachary Kopin of the University of Michigan looked at how the transition from sail to steam affected African-Americans (badly, with many of the opportunities previously open to them in the sailing navy being closed off), and Alistair Roach of the SNR and SS Great Britain Trust discussed Brunel’s extraordinary designs for Crimean War ‘stealth gunboats’, some even intended for water jet propulsion, not dissimilar in appearance to modern littoral combat ships or even low-profile drug-smuggling craft.

From my point of view, though, the most surprising theme to emerge from the conference was the serious thought now being given to the subject of boredom at sea, which came up in a couple of papers and was the principal subject of Jonathan Stafford’s. The long steamship passages out to India or Australia could become monotonous, and passengers’ letters and diaries give a good impression of this. (I’ve actually studied some of these myself – Sir Arthur Stepney, a member of the family I’ve been working on for many years, travelled extensively by sea from the 1870s to the 1900s, and his papers would be an excellent source for researching this theme.) By coincidence, not long after I got back from the conference, an email turned up with details of a talk in London on the exact same topic. Clearly boredom at sea is now ‘a thing’, but I think this sort of analysis could be extended well beyond the transition to steam in the nineteenth century; I’ve read countless ships’ logs and descriptions of sea voyages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and let’s be brutally honest, not a lot happened for much of the time. This can pose a bit of a problem when I don my other hat as a writer of nautical fiction, which, by definition, demands constant excitement to keep the reader hooked. To his credit, the ‘daddy’ of our genre, Patrick O’Brian, is pretty good at conveying the tedium of long voyages at sea, but I sometimes wonder whether he would have found a publisher in the present day and age – I know quite a few people who’ve given up on O’Brian chiefly because little seems to happen for chapters at a time. On the other hand, to constantly emphasise the exciting aspects of life at sea, whether it be in fiction or in writing ‘real’ maritime history, is arguably to present the reader with a distorted and unrealistic experience of what it was actually like. That being so, I can exclusively reveal that my next novel will be entitled Matthew Quinton Watches Paint Dry.

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Finally, a plug for another conference! The New Researchers in Maritime History conference is always one of the highlights of the calendar, providing a chance for those just starting out in the field to try out their ideas and to meet both others in the same position and ‘old lags’, including some of the most eminent figures in the field. Next year’s conference will be held in the splendid setting of Chatham Dockyard, and the call for papers is below (NB the website given hasn’t caught up yet, so the online form isn’t yet available). Although I haven’t been a ‘new researcher’ for at least *coughs again* years, I’ll be there!

 

New researchers 2020

 

Back to School

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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!

Dead Admirals Society Goes Stateside

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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.

The tomb of Captain James Lawrence

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…

Navies, States and Ideologies 1500-1815

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About a month ago, Gijs Rommelse’s guest post on this site introduced the book that he, Alan James and I have co-edited. This has now been published, and last week the three of us discussed several of its themes at the Bangor conference on the Restoration period. We will be reuniting at Vlaardingen in the Netherlands in September, and in today’s post, Gijs provides more detail about this, including details of how to come along if you’re interested in doing so.

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Early modern navies were not just real entities, with ships, dockyards, officers, sailors and bureaucracies, but also cultural constructs. Because navies were manifestations of the state, and required the permanent investment of a significant percentage of the nation’s fiscal resources, it was only natural that the composition, financing and organisation of the fleet, and the strategies underlying its operations, were ideologized for political and commercial purposes. Regimes used art, architecture, monuments, printed news and magnificent ships to associate themselves with sea power, emphasizing how a strong fleet served the nation’s interests. Individual politicians, as well as officers, used similar propagandistic tools to underline their own social-political relevance. Painters, engravers, poets and writers eagerly catered for these political agendas, while at the same time feeding the public’s appetite for naval stories. Thus, sea power was constantly ideologized within the overarching context of national identities. These ideologies created a shared sense of purpose, which explains why nations were prepared to sacrifice so much to sustain their naval capacity.

This politico-cultural approach of sea power is new, at least in the Netherlands. For this reason, the Netherlands Institute of Military History and Museum Vlaardingen have decided to jointly organise a symposium. Four distinguished historians will explain how these naval ideologies came to be, what their socio-political functions were, and how they tied in with national identities. Alan James (King’s College London) is a specialist on the fleet of the ‘Sun King’ Louis XIV. David Davies is a leading authority on the Royal Navy in the second half of the seventeenth century (allegedly – ed.). Gijs Rommelse (University of Leicester) focuses on Dutch naval ideology. These three authors are co-editors of the new book Ideologies of Western Naval Power, c.1500-1815 (Routledge). Professor Andrew Lambert (King’s College London) has been called ‘one of the most eminent naval historians of our age’. Drawing from his latest book, he will lecture on his fascinating concept of ‘seapower states’.  

When: 27 September 2019, 13.30-17.30  

Where: Museum Vlaardingen, Westhavenkade 54, 3131 AG Vlaardingen (The Netherlands)

Cost: € 7,50

Program:

13.30: Welcome

14.00: Léanne Selles (director Museum Vlaardingen) – Welcome 

14.10: Professor Michiel van Groesen (Leiden) – Introduction

14.20: Dr. David Davies, ‘Myths and broadsides in the naval ideology of the Later Stuart Age: or, how to make Christopher Columbus an Englishman’

14.55: Dr. Alan James, ‘Imagining a Royal Navy in France: the imperial ambitions of Louis XIV’.

15.30: Dr. Gijs Rommelse, ‘National flags as key components in Dutch naval ideology, 1600-1800’

16.05: Coffee / tea

16.20: Professor Andrew Lambert, ‘Seapower states as culture and identity’

17.00: Discussion

17.30: Drinks (and further discussion)

Registation via the registration form. You will then receive an email requesting payment of € 7,50 into the museum’s bank account. This sum is used to cover coffee, tea and final drinks. Payment secures a place on the guest list.

The symposium is kindly sponsored by the Delta Hotel in Vlaardingen. The hotel offers a special lunch deal, prior to the symposium (from 12.00 o’clock, Maasboulevard 15, 3133 AK Vlaardingen). Registration via the same form.

Questions or comments? Please contact Gijs Rommelse, via gijsrommelse.weebly.com

Build the Lenox

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This week, I’m delighted to welcome a guest blogger – Helena Russell, secretary of the Build the Lenox project. I’ve blogged about this before on this site, but have recently become one of the project’s ‘champions’, and with its prospects currently at a crucial stage, I’m very happy to be able to provide this platform for a really worthy cause. Over to Helena!

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When it comes to the nation’s shipbuilding and sea-going past, few would dispute the significant role played by Greenwich in south-east London, which today is home to the world-renowned National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory and the restored Cutty Sark.

But the contribution of its neighbour Deptford, where Henry VIII established his royal dockyard in 1513, and where more than 400 ships were built and many more refitted, has long been overlooked. Deptford played a significant role in the development of wooden shipbuilding, yet visitors to the area will find little sign of its maritime connections, and most of the slipways and dockyard structures remain buried.

The Lenox Project charity aims to change this, and we have ambitious plans to build a full-size replica of the Lenox, a naval ship which was built and launched from Deptford dockyard in 1678.

The Lenox, by Richard Endsor

The 70-gun Lenox represented the pinnacle of Restoration shipbuilding practice, being the first of Charles II’s thirty-ship programme to be built, under the direction of Samuel Pepys. By 1700, these magnificent and successful vessels were responsible for the Royal Navy becoming the world’s leading maritime power. A detailed record of the construction of the Lenox survives and has been painstakingly researched and compiled by the project’s historian Richard Endsor, as part of a 20-year study of the dockyard at the peak of its powers.

In the 17th century Deptford was second only to Chatham as a major centre for shipbuilding, and it was to Deptford that Tsar Peter the Great came for three months in 1698 to learn shipbuilding techniques. The yard’s proximity to the Navy Board Office in the City of London meant that it was frequently chosen for new or experimental construction.

The Lenox Project was formed in 2011, in response to proposals to redevelop the former dockyard site, now known as Convoys Wharf. We were inspired by the need to preserve and celebrate the heritage and character of Deptford and prevent it being lost.

As part of our ship-building scheme, we want to create apprenticeships and training in traditional and modern crafts, educate people about the area’s rich maritime past, and restore pride among residents in one of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods. We have strong support in the local community and beyond, and having a base will give us the opportunity to build on this and expand our programme of events and outreach.

We are now crowdfunding for the first phase of the project, which will fund the establishment of a Deptford dockyard visitor centre and Lenox Project headquarters, bringing the disused undercroft of an historic riverfront building back to life.

The building where the visitor centre will be housed

The visitor centre will provide public space and workshops where volunteers and apprentices can get involved in building a scale model of the Lenox, alongside an exhibition focussing on the maritime history of Deptford. It will be a venue for a range of events, will host community group and school visits, and will enable people to find out more about the ship-building heritage that shaped this part of London.

It will bring into public use an historic premises which would otherwise be unused, and in a way which links directly to its history. We are working with the building owner to preserve and restore this listed building and its location will enable us to engage directly with local residents as well as those using the Thames Path.

The undercroft

The building owner, Hyde Housing, has agreed to let us have the space at a peppercorn rent for up to ten years. But it has been out of use for more than a decade, so funds are needed to install toilet and kitchen facilities, to set up a model-building workshop and equip it with tools and materials, to create an exhibition space with display facilities, and to make it accessible to everyone.

We want to offer training and apprenticeships, particularly in ‘eye-to-hand’ skills and heritage crafts, offering new routes to employment for those in the local area who may not otherwise have access to such opportunities.

In June we launched our crowdfunding campaign on Spacehive, and have already been successful in attracting a pledge of £50,000 from the Mayor of London’s Crowdfund London initiative, as well as more than a hundred personal pledges from our supporters and contacts.

But we still need to raise a considerable amount of money to create a public visitor centre and attraction for Deptford; support skills training in woodwork and wooden boat building; fit out a new event space and curate a programme of events; create a display space for Deptford dockyard and ship-building artefacts, and put together our Deptford-centric maritime resource library.

We have until 12th August to meet our target – for full details and to pledge, please visit our Spacehive page.

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The project’s website contains more information – D

Connecting the Oceans

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This week, I’m giving a plug to a conference that I’m involved in co-organising. Just over fifty years ago, the future of Brunel’s iconic steamship SS Great Britain was in serious doubt. The ship had been a hulk in the Falkland Islands for many years, and was slowly deteriorating. There was a proposal to take it to the USA and moor it alongside the Queen Mary, but nothing was being done in the UK, the country where the ship was built. In November 1967, though, Ewan Corlett, a prominent member of the Society for Nautical Research, wrote a letter to The Times, suggesting that something should be done to save the ‘SSGB’. This idea went forward, with the inaugural meeting of the ‘SS Great Britain Project’ taking place at Bristol in May 1968. In its early days, this leaned heavily on the SNR, which held its funds and provided substantial moral support, and during 1969, it was Dr Corlett who organised the salvage tugs which brought the ship back to the UK.

To mark the 50th anniversary of the society’s role in securing SSGB’s future, a conference is being held at Bristol on 6-7 September of this year under the joint auspices of the SNR and the SS Great Britain Trust. Entitled Connecting the Oceans: the Impact of Global Steam in the Nineteenth Century, this promises to be a lively and stimulating occasion, with a very wide range of contributions. The keynote speakers are Dr Helen Doe, Dr Graeme Milne and Captain Peter King, and session papers cover such diverse themes as migration, the experience of steamship travel, health at sea, female maritime entrepreneurship in Greece, the impact of steam on the German and US navies, and Brunel’s Crimean War ‘stealth’ gunboats. The conference venue is immediately adjacent to the ship itself, so there’ll be plenty of opportunity to explore this astonishing survival of the Victorian era. Booking is now open at Eventbrite, where further details can be found. (If you’re reblogging or retweeting this post, then please use the conference hashtag, #connectingoceans)

From a personal point of view, this conference sees me come full circle, in one sense. Today, I’m a vice-president of the SNR and chair of its Research and Programmes Committee, which initiates the society’s role in conferences such as this. But back then, I was a schoolboy whose interest in all things maritime was already all-pervasive, and I managed to track down this photo of me aboard SSGB not long after the hull arrived back in Bristol, alongside my grandfather, who was undoubtedly the biggest influence on my younger self. I also have scrapbooks from the time with newspaper cuttings chronicling the saga of the ship’s long tow and its triumphant return to Bristol. So it’s nice to be in a position to do something to mark the anniversary of a remarkable story that so absorbed me at the time!