J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

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Relaunched!

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Well, I’ve finally done it – the newly revamped version of my website is now live! If you’ve seen this post via email or social media, please go over to jddavies.com and take a look. There’s a fair bit of new content, including on the ‘News’ page. Above all, the new version should be a lot easier to navigate, and, from my point of view, easier to keep up to date. It’s also much easier for me to highlight individual books, so the homepage currently has Destiny’s Tide, the first in my new Tudor trilogy, my award-winning non-fiction book Kings of the Sea, plus Gentleman Captain, the first in the ‘journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll vary these ‘featured books’ from time to time. Scroll further down, and you’ll find my most recent blog posts, including this one. The very bottom of the homepage now features improved social media links, a search facility, plus a new archive search, which allows you to search the blog by month. Please send me feedback about the new look, and suggestions for new content!

In other news, I had a great time earlier in the week at the Canelo author party (i.e. my digital fiction publisher). It was great to chat to some of the staff and connect faces to the names on incoming emails, but at these sorts of events, it’s always especially nice to have a chat with fellow scribblers. So I had lengthy chinwags with Simon Turney and A J Mackenzie – the latter actually being two people, the husband and wife team of Marilyn Livingstone and Morgen Witzel. My chat with them was particularly enjoyable because I’d recently been reading their ‘Hardcastle and Mrs Chaytor’ series, excellent, atmospheric historical mysteries set on Romney Marsh in the 1790s. I like the strong, interesting central characters and vivid sense of place that characterises these books, so I hope there’ll be more to come. It’s also not often that one can have an informed discussion in a bar about Admiral Duncan’s victory at the battle of Camperdown in 1797!

Anyway, the party’s over in more senses than one, and it’s time once more to get down to hard work on the next book in the ‘Jack Stannard’ Tudor naval trilogy!

Time to Relaunch!

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Over the next few days, I’m going to be working on a refurbishment of this site, updating lots of the pages and information, freshening up the design, and doing whatever else strikes me as a good idea at the time. This is partly because this sort of ‘spring clean’ is long overdue, partly to reflect the publication in a few weeks’ time of Destiny’s Tide, the first book in my new Tudor naval trilogy. As a result, it’s possible that the site will be down for short periods, or will lack access to some of the usual material for others, but I’m going to try and get everything done as quickly as possible.

As part of the process, though, it would be good to know of any ideas you have for improving the site. While free books aren’t an option (!), and I’m already on the case with things like being able to buy my books more directly via this platform, I’ve also been toying with a number of features that I know quite a lot of other authors already employ, such as a monthly newsletter and occasional competitions. But are there any other things you’d like to see, either as permanent features of the site or as topics for future blogposts? Please use the ‘comment’ facility on this page or the ‘contact’ facility elsewhere on the site!

The Tide is Coming In

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I’m delighted to be able to announce that Destiny’s Tide, the first in my new naval historical trilogy set in the sixteenth century, is now available to pre-order on Amazon. I know that some of you prefer your books to have such ‘old school’ elements as paper, ink, and a reassuring bulk that weighs down your bags and fills up your bookshelves – as, in truth, do I – but for the time being, my publisher, Canelo, is digital-only, so please direct any requests for a print version to them, rather than bombarding me!

I recently provided a bit of a ‘teaser trailer’ for Destiny’s Tide, and will be providing more in the run-up to publication day in June. In the meantime, here’s the newly-launched cover, which I think looks pretty splendid!

 

Dead Admirals Society Memorabilia Edition

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My most recent post, a revised version of my elegy for the ‘naval pub’, mentioned the issue of memorabilia and wider heritage which is lost for ever if such a pub is insensitively refurbished or simply closed for good. Over the years on this blog, I’ve also run an occasional series called ‘Dead Admirals Society’, publicising some of the more obscure memorials to seafarers (not just admirals!) that can be found through the length and breadth of the UK. Clearly, both of these themes are connected, just as they are in geography – my village certainly isn’t the only one in Britain where the church and the pub are immediately adjacent to each other – but virtually no study seems to have been carried out on this subject. There’s a database of maritime memorials as an offshoot of the National Maritime Museum website, but this is very far from comprehensive; nor is Barbara Tomlinson’s excellent book Commemorating the Seafarer, which I recently acquired. Above all, no attempt whatsoever seems to have been made to list naval memorabilia that survives in, say, churches (for example, historic ships’ bells, or white ensigns flown by famous ships or in famous battles), non-maritime museums, civic buildings, stately homes, and less likely locations. Few things can probably beat the incongruity of the former clock from Deptford dockyard ending up as the centrepiece of Thamesmead shopping centre, but fascinating and important pieces of naval heritage can be found in all sorts of unlikely places. Clearly, a comprehensive listing of such items would be at best a Herculean task, at worst (and probably more likely) a complete impossibility, but maybe as a first step, those interested in such matters could be a bit more proactive in recording and publicising any items they come across. For my part, I’ll expand my ‘Dead Admirals Society’ posts to include items that aren’t necessarily memorials in the narrow sense of the term. Here are a few to start with!

 

My village’s parish church in the heart of Bedfordshire is a long way from the sea, but has a tompion from HMS Iron Duke, Jellicoe’s flagship at Jutland. Why it’s there is a long story, but so, potentially, is its provenance – it’s a 5.25″ tompion, and although a couple of guns of that calibre were added to the ship in 1939, this tompion is dated 1942, when the ship was beached and serving as an immobile base ship in Scapa Flow. Either way, it’s certainly not from her Jutland armament.

 

Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire: again very far from the sea, with no significant naval connections, yet home inter alia to some of Lord Nelson’s hair

 

Orkney museum, Kirkwall. Plenty of material on the Royal Navy in Scapa Flow in the 20th century, as you’d expect. Not quite so expected – an 18th century naval officer’s sword, hat, epaulettes, and even one of his wine bottles

 

Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff: ships’ bell and white ensign of HMS Llandaff, tucked away in just about the most obscure corner of the cathedral

 

Finally, a more conventional ‘Dead Admirals Society’ offering – a memorial plaque with a charming little image of HMS Pathfinder. Again well inland, and easily overlooked amidst all the more obvious tourist sights in the picture postcard Cotswold town of Chipping Campden

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!)