J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Heritage preservation

On Tour: A New Angle on HMS Victory

by

Time to resume (fairly) regular blogging! The recent hiatus has been due partly to various commitments, but also to a sense that I had nothing new to blog about. Recently, though, I’ve done a little travelling, the first in six months, and also realised that I have a huge bank of material which is perfect for the present situation, especially as we go into winter. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to visit and photograph many places connected to naval and/or general history, some of them far off the beaten track or usually inaccessible to the public. So over the next few weeks, maybe months, I’ll present a selection of images from these places in the hope that they’ll provide some escapism, and maybe give you a few ideas for places to aim for once travel problems ease.

To kick off, I recently paid a visit to Portsmouth in my capacity as chair of the Society for Nautical Research. The SNR’s first major achievement was to save HMS Victory for future generations, and we still administer the Save the Victory Fund, the first donation to which came from King George V. I was given a personal tour of the new and much more efficient system of props underneath the hull, as well as of the work on the nearby Victory gallery, which will reopen in 2021 after extensive refurbishment, partly funded by SNR. So here are some views of HMS Victory from bow to stern as you’ve never seen her before!

 

A Very Palpable Hit: the State of Maritime Historical Research Conference 2017

by

Greenwich, 0900, Saturday 9 September: will anybody actually come? will the speakers be any good? will the technology work? is this, the first conference that the Society for Nautical Research has ever staged under its own auspices, going to be a success?

Greenwich, 1745, Saturday 9 September: yes, they did; yes, they were; yes, it did (eventually); yes, it was, and resoundingly so; and yes, never has a pint in the Trafalgar Tavern tasted so good.

I need to start with a disclaimer. I have a distinct bias when reviewing Saturday’s event, just as I had a vested interest in its success, as the idea for it had largely emerged out of the SNR’s Research and Programmes Committee, which I chair. Somehow, I found my way into the conference programme as an ‘organiser’, although others did the hard work – a special shout-out here to Cathy Pearce, effectively the liaison between SNR and the conference’s other co-host, the Greenwich Maritime Centre, whose staff did a tremendous job – and, in the unavoidable absence of the SNR’s chairman, Admiral Sir Kenneth Eaton, I had to do quite a bit of ‘compere’ work, e.g. making the opening remarks, chairing the final round table, etc. (Hence the welcome nature of the pint at the Trafalgar.) But don’t take my word for it that the day went well: search Twitter under #MarConf2017, and you’ll get a sense both of the nature and range of the papers, and of the terrific ‘buzz’ in the auditorium.

The first business of the day was the presentation of the Society’s first ever Anderson award for lifetime achievement to Professor John Hattendorf. I don’t intend to recite John’s many achievements and publications here, nor attempt to summarise his colossal contribution to maritime history; suffice to say that I’ve known him for some 30 years now, have worked with him on a number of projects, and was therefore hugely honoured to be able to present him with his Anderson medal. John then presented the day’s first keynote address, which immediately struck an upbeat, positive tone. In his view, the last 20 years or so have seen the discipline become ever broader and more vibrant, with more journals appearing and more dimensions being studied; therefore, it’s time for us to stop worrying about the state of the discipline, and get on with research and writing.

Energised by John’s uplifting assessment, we moved onto the first session proper, with two historians at opposite ends of the career spectrum – Susan Rose, the doyenne of medieval naval historians, and Benjamin Redding of the University of Warwick, who has only recently embarked on his postdoctoral career. Susan provided a broad analysis of university provision for maritime history in the UK, noting its very patchy nature (and its depressing but probably inevitable focus on pirates) and the distinct neglect of her own medieval maritime field. Despite this, a number of major projects, such as the French Oceanides project, several new databases, and ongoing archaeological work on the likes of the Newport Ship, were making a major difference and reaching wide audiences. Ben, in turn, focused on the issues involved in bringing early modern naval history – a subject obviously very close to my heart – before undergraduate audiences, particularly in an inland university, and noted how the study of naval history in general was becoming ever broader, and, perhaps, had less of a ‘stigma’ attached to it than was once the case; the Mary Rose, for instance, is a perfect teaching tool for the social and political histories of the Tudor age.

Moving into the next session, we had a ‘double act’ from Susann Leibich and Laurence Publicover, who were looking at maritime literary cultures. Laurence, a literary scholar, is interested in representations of the sea in literature, travel writing, etc, while Susann is a historian of reading, a sub-discipline which has seen an increasing recent emphasis on the importance of geography and place. They produced some fascinating quotations to show, in Laurence’s case, how complete landlubbers adjusted to their first experiences of sea voyages, and in Susann’s, how voyagers fell back on their reading (for instance, of the classics) to interpret what they saw around them. The two are working on a database of voyage diaries, which should provide some fascinating new evidence. This paper, like several others on the day, demonstrates conclusively how scholars who would never define themselves as ‘maritime historians’ are now interacting with, and providing hugely important new perspectives on, our discipline.

This was emphasised again in the next paper in this session, from Sam Robinson of the University of York, who provided a fascinating survey of the history of ocean science – a discipline which, for much of the 20th century, was hugely important for military reasons (providing the science that underpinned, for example, anti-submarine warfare in World War II, and undersea surveillance during the Cold War), and which is now arguably even more important as a source of evidence of climate change. Sam drew our attention to a number of important books in the field, to the social media hashtag #histocean, and to the website oceansciencehistory.wordpress.com – all of which will be receiving my serious attention from now on!

Last up in this session was Cathy Pearce, one of the conference organisers, who addressed the question ‘is coastal history maritime history?’ Cathy suggested that maritime history needs to engage more directly with the history of coasts, and discussed the sorts of questions that coastal historians are asking, for instance at the hashtag #coastalhistory: the nature and occupations of coastal people, the shape, depth and influence of coastal zones, the extent to which these zones extend inland, ‘coastal squeeze’ (where different uses of the coast conflict with each other), and so forth. All of these questions had particular resonance for me, who grew up on the coast and who still does a fair bit of work on the history of that coast. (Incidentally, Cathy’s talk was also the best illustrated of the conference, with some stunning photographs of coastal scenes, many of them of her own taking.)

And so to lunch, including the inevitable frantic networking, connecting Person A with Person B, etc etc…

Now a tip for conference organisers: you need to ensure that you schedule a post-lunch speaker who will be dynamic, entertaining, and will keep the audience awake, and few people fit that bill better than Professor Eric Grove, our second keynote speaker. As ever, Eric was brilliantly iconoclastic, demolishing the notion that the defeat of the U-boats in World War I was due primarily to convoy, and in World War II to the pace of allied shipbuilding. In the case of the former, he argues that the organisation of food supply was the most important factor, with the quantity of imports of wheat, oats, etc, actually at its highest in what is traditionally regarded as the ‘crisis’ quarter of 1917. In the second war, the hugely improved pace of ship repair was more important than shipbuilding as a factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic (or battles, as would Eric would have it). This talk demonstrated that naval historians have to cast their nets far beyond the study of ships, and even further beyond what are traditionally seen as ‘naval’ sources, in order to get a fuller and more accurate picture.

We then had a session on the changing world of the maritime museum, with Claire Warrior, from the National Maritime Museum, looking at the changing ways in which polar exploration had been presented at the museum – from being completely ignored, to having a presence in a basement (albeit only from 1951 onwards), to the current ‘Death in the Ice’ exhibition about the Franklin expedition (well worth a visit, and it’s nice to see the name of the expedition member who I’ve researched standing alongside Sir John Franklin’s outside the museum!), to the new permanent gallery that will open in 2018. Jo Stanley then provided a fascinating insight into ‘moving minorities from the margins in maritime museums’, focusing in particular on some of the exhibitions to which she’s contributed, and which seek to explore issues of race, gender and sexual orientation in maritime history: for example, the ‘Black Salt’ exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Wrens exhibition at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and the touring exhibition ‘Hello Sailor’. Jo was frank about the ‘political’ difficulties that such exhibitions sometimes face from conservative trustees, outraged letter writers and even tabloid newspapers, but overall, the picture is an increasingly positive one, with an ever greater willingness to address the role of minorities and connect them to more mainstream themes. Above all, Jo came up with one of the day’s most memorable quotes, ‘museums need academics, academics need museums’. This, indeed, was one of the day’s main themes – the breaking down of the artificial, and invariably false, barriers that have often been erected between different disciplines and perspectives.

The final session proper took a regional focus, with Oliver Gates of Cambridge University providing a whistle-stop tour of maritime history in west Africa, which, he argued, is (or should be) much broader than the older literature, which focused overwhelmingly on the slave trade, or the newer sort, which focuses primarily on security. Mark Matthews, chair of Morol, the Institute of Welsh Maritime Historical Studies, then addressed a subject very dear to my heart, namely the state of maritime historical research in Wales. Mark had done some remarkable research on theses under way or completed in UK universities, which demonstrated the tiny number that could be defined as ‘maritime’, and the even tinier number that could be defined as ‘Welsh maritime’. In some respects, the picture in Wales is quite gloomy, with the recent deaths of many of the most eminent practitioners, the loss of university courses, and the lack of a national maritime museum; but the saving graces, as Mark suggested, are some excellent local museums, such as those in Nefyn, Holyhead, Porthmadog and Milford Haven / Pembroke Dock, plus the existence of the splendid journal Cymru a’r Mor / Maritime Wales (to which I’ve contributed several times, and which desperately needs an online presence to raise awareness of it).

So we came to the final keynote, given by Professor Richard Harding of the University of Westminster. Richard valiantly overcame certain unfortunate ‘noises off’ and delivered an excellent overview of the sometimes fraught relationship between historians and social scientists, asking what they could learn from each other and stressing the multi-disciplinary nature of maritime history before ending on what might perhaps be regarded as a slightly controversial note, suggesting that the discipline might be becoming more theoretical. This was followed by the final round table, with yours truly in the chair, which saw some lively contributions from the floor being fielded by our panel of the three keynote speakers. It was the sort of round table where we could easily have gone on for another hour or two at least, and I certainly got the sense that the subject matter could easily have sustained a two day conference. But the draconian chairman ended the session bang on time – after all, the pint at the Trafalgar was beckoning!

Finally, thanks again to Dr Tim Acott, Director of GMC, and to everybody who contributed to make the day a success. Finally, I’ve got a request for those of you who were there: we’d really like your feedback about how you thought the day went, what was good, what not so good, etc. (Use either the ‘contact’ page on this website, or the contact details on the SNR site.) That will help us with addressing the $64,000 question: will we do it again?

Watch this space for the answer!

UPDATE – The Battle of Northampton; or, Are You Carmarthenshire in Disguise?

by

This afternoon, Friday 4 August, Northamptonshire County Council has announced that, in the short term at least, it’s backing down over the woefully misconceived and crassly announced scheme described in my post below. You can find a link to the full statement, and some clarifying remarks, here. While this is clearly welcome, the long term prognosis remains uncertain, but at least the council is finally acknowledging the need to consult with its stakeholders, rather than using the school holidays to cynically try and push through a wholly unacceptable proposal with profound and worrying implications across the entire country. It’s also good to see that, as mentioned below, there’s now an active effort to form a Friends of the Archives group; if you want information on the latter, sign up here. 

Anyway, on with what was apparently ‘social media misinformation’ 48 hours ago, but which is now ‘listening to the views of its regular users and supporters’…

***

An additional post this week, and a long one at that.

Regular readers will know that over the years, I’ve worked in many local archives around Great Britain, so naturally, I’ve developed something of an interest in how they’re run, and in their relative merits. More recently, I’ve taken a particular interest in the near-catastrophic situation that developed in the archives of my home county, Carmarthenshire, where the sheer ineptitude (and probably worse) of successive regimes led to their closure for several years following an outbreak of severe mould in the strongrooms, an eventuality which said regimes had been warned about many, many times (this blog passim, to paraphrase Private Eye). An incidental side-effect of this was that it prevented me from completing a book I’d been working on for many years, and turned me into an unlikely Freedom of Information warrior and crusading blogger in an attempt to get to the distinctly unsavoury truth of the matter. Surely, then, no local council could run its archive service even more ineptly?

Step up to the plate, Northamptonshire County Council, an authority that makes Carmarthenshire’s officials look like the Founding Fathers of the United States.

I’ve worked in the Northampton record office several times over the years, and found it to be an excellent working environment with helpful staff, so what I’m about to say certainly isn’t a criticism of them. However, in their infinite wisdom, their superiors have decided that from 21 August, the office will charge an eye-watering £31.50 an hour – that’s right, an hour – for visits on Tuesday-Thursday afternoons from 2-4pm, and all day on Mondays and Fridays. Yes, there is still free access, but this will now be available only on Tuesday-Thursday mornings, 9am-1pm, and on seven Saturdays in the year.

While I have no idea of the financial situation of Northamptonshire county council, I would respectfully contend that this scheme is wholly and demonstrably wrong, on several interconnected levels.

First, there is the principle of charging for access to archives at all. Many of these are, after all, public records, and thus have exactly the same legal status as the public records preserved at the National Archives in Kew – and imagine the outcry there’d be if it was ever proposed to charge for access to those. Many of those archives that are not public records, held in archives like Northamptonshire’s, are often those of institutions like schools, churches and, indeed, individual families: in other words, the collective history of the people of the county. Moreover, many of the documents will have been deposited, perhaps on loan, by individual contributors over many years. So does Northants CC propose to charge people to come and study what, in some cases, might actually be their own property? I see from the Facebook page of those campaigning against this move, of which more anon, that some who have deposited material in this archive are seriously considering moving their papers to alternatives that have better opening hours and, obviously, no charges; a direct parallel with what happened in Carmarthenshire, although there, the depositors in question were more concerned about the likelihood of their precious archives being destroyed by mould. Ultimately, there is no moral difference whatsoever between charging to access a record office and charging to access a library. But, of course, Northants CC’s policymakers know full well that far more people use the latter, and know what sort of outcry they’d face if they tried that; whereas they’ll presumably think that users of record offices are relatively few, and won’t be able to kick up such a fuss. If the experience in Carmarthenshire is anything to go by, little do they know how wrong they are.

Second, there’s the amount that Northamptonshire proposes to charge, which is simply extortionate. Even if one sets aside the overriding point of principle, which I certainly don’t intend to do, £31.50 a day might possibly be justifiable as a starting position in a negotiation which eventually leads to an agreement on maintaining no charging at all; £31.50 an hour is completely unjustifiable, and is presumably a figure plucked out of the air by a ‘Spreadsheet Phil’ who has probably never set foot in a record office in his life, or hers, if it’s a ‘Spreadsheet Philomena’. From long experience of working in many local record offices, though, I know that many of their regular users are pensioners, many of them on relatively limited means, for whom the proposed amount will be a very significant chunk of their week’s income. Many of the other regular users are students, for whom, of course, exactly the same applies. By applying this policy, therefore, Northamptonshire is effectively forcing entire groups of users, notably two of its largest, into the free slots, which together constitute less than 1.5 working days per week for a conscientious researcher. This means that individuals’ research, including many students’ work for postgraduate degrees in particular, will inevitably take much, much longer. As a result of all of this, the proposed policy means that Northamptonshire record office will essentially become exactly the same as a train company, with First Class for those who can afford it, and everybody else crammed into Cattle Class for a service that might possibly turn up three times a week. Does the county really want to become known as the Southern Rail of British archives?

Third, there is the complete ignorance of how researchers actually need to work, and utter contempt for those visiting the office from further afield than Northampton town itself, that this proposed policy reveals. It’s usually pretty well impossible to predict how long one needs to work in an archive; it’s perfectly possible to arrive at 9am, fully intending to put in only a free shift until 1, and find that for whatever reason – delayed deliveries, say, or following up leads provided by information discovered in the morning – one needs to overrun into the afternoon. (In which case, is the £31.50 for a whole hour or part thereof? If one completes one’s work by, say, 2.37, will the council charge a percentage of the fee, with some poor overworked archivist having to get out a calculator to work out the amount, or would it be free until 2.59, and then £31.50 for working on for just one more minute?) Then again, this policy is clearly discriminatory against those travelling any distance, including those in outlying, rural parts of Northamptonshire itself, who might be trying to get to the office by infrequent public transport and thus, perhaps, might not be physically able to get there until lunchtime, and will thus be hammered for over £60 for only two hours work (not to mention the cost of their transport in the first place). Charging only in the afternoons, and permitting free access only in the mornings, blatantly discriminates against those whose work commitments, childcare arrangements, or place of residence and available travel options, mean that they can only get to the record office during afternoons.

Now, I expect that if Northamptonshire county council deigns to respond to such criticisms at all, be they from myself or from the many others who have expressed outrage at this scheme, they will trot out the usual feeble old platitudes about effects of budget cuts imposed by central government, yada yada, the need to make difficult choices, yada yada, more people accessing digital resources, yada yada. (Oh, I see that they already have. How utterly predictable, apart from the closing statement about hoping that researchers will support them in this ‘bold step’, which is surely both beneath contempt and beyond parody. But oh, all right, since you ask… ‘So, turkey, exactly what is it about the bold step of Christmas that doesn’t appeal to you?’) None of this bears a moment’s scrutiny, partly because Northamptonshire has statutory obligations in relation to its archives, and that statutory role has a regulator, the National Archives, which can, if necessary, withdraw a local authority’s status as an approved place of deposit for public records – a scenario that came very, very close in Carmarthenshire’s case. I don’t know whether Northamptonshire CC has already cleared this outrageous proposal with the regulator; if it has, then shame on the latter, which runs the risk of opening the floodgates for other cash-strapped councils to take similar action. (I suspect that other local authorities will already be watching this situation like hawks to see if Northants manages to get this through.) Just in case nobody has done so already, it might be worth an interested party in the county submitting a FoI request for all correspondence between the regulator and Northamptonshire CC in, say, the last six months; from my own experience, it’s best to submit this to both parties, which should ensure that all elements of the correspondence are put into the public domain, and that one side or the other doesn’t mysteriously ‘mislay’ any items. Again from my own experience, submitting a FoI request to the National Archives is very easy, and they respond efficiently and in good time. You can obtain the details here. It’s also possible to ask for copies of the regular reports (every five years or so) made on the record office by an inspector from the National Archives; those for Carmarthenshire were particularly revealing of the council’s consistently appalling attitude, down to 2011 at any rate, to the record office building and its staff. As an example, here’s a link to the 2011 report.

(Of course, it would also tell us a great deal if such a FoI request demonstrated that there’s actually been no correspondence at all between Northants CC and the regulator over this matter.)

Perhaps the council thinks it can get away with this because it’s still providing a fig leaf of some free access, but its breathtakingly disingenuous claim that it’s actually increasing the office’s opening hours is demolished at once by the fact that it’s halving the free opening hours from 24 hours per week to 12, Saturdays aside (and Saturday hours themselves are being virtually halved). One wonders, though, if anybody, anybody at all, will actually turn up and fork out £31.50 an hour during the ‘charging’ sessions, other than, perhaps, the odd unfortunate pensioner travelling in on a bus from an outlying village that doesn’t reach Northampton until 1. I certainly won’t, and I can afford it; and if all researchers who can afford these extortionate fees boycott the charging slots, then where, exactly, will this policy stand? If people simply don’t go on Mondays, Fridays, and the other afternoons, the searchroom will presumably sometimes be overcrowded during the three free mornings a week when as many researchers as can physically squeeze into the space will be working flat out to complete what they need to do during their four free hours; the staff will be rushed off their feet by the demands from the extra bums on seats (assuming, of course, that there are enough seats for the bums to sit on anyway); the record office will effectively be closed to the public for nearly double the time it is now; and the county council will have raised little or no extra money, while significantly damaging its reputation throughout the UK’s heritage and archives communities. After all, ‘charge an outrageous amount for it and they will come’ is not usually considered to be a viable basis for a business plan, unless you’re the Royal Opera House.

On the whole, then, absolutely outstanding work, whichever Northants CC apparatchik dreamed up this disastrously misconceived policy.

There is hope, though, and minds can be changed, as my own experience with Carmarthenshire demonstrates. (For proof, see here.) There’s an online petition, and although I’m not usually a great fan of these, I’d strongly urge you to sign this one. There’s a new Facebook group to promote the issue, and I’d urge everybody concerned about the potential implications of this policy to join it, regardless of whether or not you’re directly connected to Northamptonshire; solidarity is all, as Bonhoeffer’s famous poem reminds us. There are few things that these sorts of institutions hate more than being ‘named and shamed’ on a national, and indeed an international, stage, and the FB page that I set up to ‘Save Carmarthenshire Archives’ had over 1,000 followers in a week, including comments and pledges of support from the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and beyond. Blitz social media via your own accounts, retweets, etc etc. Perhaps concerned parties might want to form a Friends of Northamptonshire Record Office group, as I can’t find any trace of one online (apologies if there is); the pre-existing Carmarthenshire Friends did absolutely fantastic work as a pressure group over the fate of their county archives, and are now being consulted frequently by the county council on the plans for the new record office. If possible, try to find one or two ‘celebrity supporters’ who’ll come out publicly in your support; we had a certain high-earning BBC newsreader on board, and his intervention was really helpful. The Northants campaigners already seem to be vigorously canvassing local councillors and local MPs – the simple law of averages means that some will have historical interests, and might be sympathetic (as proved to be the case in Carmarthenshire, where some influential councillors started backing us). Getting as much coverage as possible in the local press is a given – we cultivated direct, strong ties with a couple of reporters in particular. Something else that might be a case of grandmothers and eggs, perhaps, but familiarise yourselves with all relevant legislation that applies to archives – there’s a useful link here, although trust me, few things are more tedious than archive regulations! National bodies, like this one and this one, are already getting involved, and making their criticisms known, so if you’re connected with one, make sure it sticks its oar in. More and more excellent, perceptive blogs, such as this one and this one, are appearing online, so if you’re a fellow blogger, no matter where in the UK (or, indeed, the world) you’re based, please consider posting your support, your thoughts about Northants CC’s proposal, and, if applicable, how it will directly and adversely affect your own work. Finally, though, there’s another course of action that several of us took in the case of Carmarthenshire: write directly to the Chief Executive of the National Archives, who also bears the splendid historic title of Keeper of the Public Records. His address is Jeff James, Chief Executive and Keeper of the Public Records, the National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 4DU. When I wrote to him, I got a personally signed reply, and he was very helpful.

Of course, cynics might well wonder if this is all a Cunning Plan by Northamptonshire CC: either pitch something so outrageous that they hope campaigners will tug their forelocks gratefully in return for ‘concessions’ of, say, an extra free afternoon a week and a charge of ‘only’ £20 an hour, or else hope that by boycotting the charging sessions, researchers will provide them with the perfect excuse to give reduced footfall as the reason for slashing the office’s entire access time to just the three mornings a week. Who knows, perhaps they even secretly hope that by behaving so appallingly, the National Archives will, indeed, withdraw their place of deposit status, and thus save them the inconvenience and cost of providing a record office at all. However, the fact that the policy was publicly announced on 24 July (the Monday after Northamptonshire’s schools broke up, which must, of course, be a complete coincidence), with implementation just four weeks later, on 21 August, following no consultation, and at a time when many potential critics of the scheme may well be away on holiday, hardly suggests an organisation confident of its position; rather, and far from being a ‘bold step’, boldly going where no record office has gone before, the whole thing is reminiscent of the sort of dodgy government policy that’s slipped out quietly in a written answer on the day before Parliament’s summer recess, or else on ‘a good day to bury bad news’.

Machiavellian, then? Hardly; as the experience of Carmarthenshire proved, local authorities often have a surfeit of Baldricks and Field Marshal Haigs, but precious few Blackadders.

Whatever the upshot of all this, though, good luck, people of Northamptonshire, and those of us who campaigned – and won – over the Carmarthenshire debacle are with you all the way!

 

 

Carmarthenshire Archives: the End of the Beginning?

by

Last Thursday, I attended a two-hour consultation meeting in Carmarthen on the proposed new record office for the county, following the closure of the previous one after the discovery of mould in the storerooms. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have just a little bit of history with this particular issue; I’m not going to provide links to all of the previous posts, but anyone so inclined can enter ‘Carmarthenshire Archives’ in the search facility and then trace the story in chronological order. (Note: entering ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ or ‘Dante’s Circles of Hell’ will also produce the same search results.) After the sorry saga of the record office throughout the last twenty years or so, to say that Carmarthenshire County Council has rather a lot of trust to rebuild on this issue is a bit like saying that Donald Trump isn’t quite in the Abraham Lincoln league yet. Therefore, some of you might have expected me to go to this meeting armed with the sword of scepticism and the shield of cynicism. Far from it: remember that I was a teacher for the best part of thirty years, so I always believed that even the most feckless little toerag was capable of redemption – unless, obviously, his/her name was ***** or *******. So I went with an open mind, and, indeed, a positively receptive one, because after all, my principal hope all along has been that Carmarthenshire’s nationally and internationally important archive collections should be preserved, and presented to the public, in a safe and appropriate facility that complies fully with national standards.

That being so, I have to say that I was largely impressed by what I saw and heard. The new building will be a three-storey, then two-storey, extension at the back of the current Carmarthen Library building, of which more anon. The two-storey structure will contain a repository capable of accommodating both the current collection and 25 years’ worth of accruals; the three-storey section will contain staff work rooms and facilities of various sorts, plus, on the third floor, the public search room. The building will have exemplary eco credentials, notably a ‘passive house’ system, and should look impressive, both externally and internally. Above all, being on the same site as the library, and on the same floor as the local history reference collection, should permit considerable flexibility for researchers. Inevitably, some of those present had reservations. Would it permit digital photography, always a bugbear at the old office? Would the outsourcing of conservation work be detrimental to the office’s work? How long might it take to tackle the huge cataloguing backlog (a commonplace, alas, at many repositories the length and breadth of Britain)? For my part, I thought the new search room looked on the small side, but the current and former record office staff who were present assured me that it could easily accommodate the sorts of numbers that the old facility used to see, and that increasing use of digital materials was progressively reducing the pressure on physical seating. The new building is due to open in 2019, until which time the county’s collections will still need to be consulted principally in far-distant Cardiff. But at least there finally appears to be light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

It has the potential to be quite an impressive light, too. Many county record offices these days are housed, to paraphrase an earlier post on this site, in anonymous out-of-town sheds that could easily be on industrial estates, and in some cases, actually are on industrial estates. Not so the new office in Carmarthen. Not only is the main facade and structure of Carmarthen library, through which one will have to pass in order to reach the archives, an eighteenth century listed building in its own right, but it stands directly opposite St Peter’s Church, one of the most historic in Wales – so if you feel like a stroll through history during a lunch break, you’ll be able to go and pay your respects at the spectacular Tudor tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, staunch ally of Henry VII and quite probably the man who killed Richard III, or else the memorial to Sir Richard Steele, the ‘father of journalism’, or perhaps that of General Sir William Nott, or maybe even my particular favourite (for obvious reasons), that of John Williams of Edwinsford, who was serving aboard the frigate Kingfisher during its famous fight with seven Algerine corsairs in 1681. If you fancy a slightly longer stroll, a few hundred yards in one direction will bring you, via the remaining fragment of the ancient tree that was long held to be ‘Merlin’s oak‘, to a Roman amphitheatre, no less (and, to boot, the most westerly surviving example in the entire Roman Empire) – while a few hundred yards in the other direction will bring you to the ruins of the huge castle that was once the seat of royal power in south Wales. (Note: do not confuse with Caernarfon, especially if you’re meant to be getting married in one and not the other.)

Thus from having one of the worst archive facilities in Britain, a national scandal that was condemned time after time by the regulator and finally closed after a perfectly foreseeable near-catastrophe (none of it the fault of its hard-pressed staff), Carmarthenshire potentially stands on the threshold of having one of the best. So I hope there’ll be no spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar: no backsliding on this, no penny-pinching on that, no corner-cutting on the other, and above all, no mindset to the effect that the building has cost so much that economies need to be made in the staffing. The ship may not have looked quite so smart without the proverbial ha’porth of tar, but if it had set sail without sufficient sailors to man it, inadequate tarring would swiftly have been the least of its problems – and after all, Carmarthenshire, of all counties, should know a thing or two about shipwrecks.

So if all goes to plan, gentle readers, this will be my penultimate post on the subject of Carmarthenshire Archives. The last one of all, I fervently hope, will be posted some time in 2019, and will report on my first day in the new facility, praising it to the heights, and saying how inspired I now feel to finally complete my book on the Stepney family. But before then, there are some quite important things to do – starting next week, when all the shenanigans surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway kick off. More detail next Monday!

Carmarthenshire Archives (and Museums): a Brave New World?

by

It’s been a while since I posted about the situation with Carmarthenshire Archives, which took up so much space on this blog in the second half of last year, so I thought it was time I provided you with an update. My last post on the subject contained the unexpected but very welcome news that the Council’s executive board had decided to invest in a new facility within the county. Following this, things seems to be moving forward quite rapidly. Here’s the text from a newsletter that’s been sent out by the heritage monitoring group nominated at the end of last year at a well attended meeting of representatives from many of the local history and heritage groups; the next of these meetings takes place this week.

“ARCHIVES – HOME IN CARMARTHEN” – the future for Carmarthenshire Archives looks cautiously promising thanks to the efforts of the Friends of Carmarthenshire Archives and other dedicated historians.  Discussions between concerned parties and CCC have taken place on three occasions in recent months with a shared vision of a successful, modern and sustainable future for the archives prioritising a Carmarthen/Carmarthenshire service. £2M now confirmed in the capital programme (£125k 2016/17 and £1,750K 2017/18) and CCC are currently working with a Consultant to “scope a number of properties in Carmarthen against a set of criteria – economic, practical and access”. A recommendation is anticipated in 6-8 weeks.  CCC has agreed to consult with the Friends on a regular basis to consider developments and to keep in touch with members’ views – including the vision for an archive service remaining within Carmarthenshire rather than a regionalisation model which could result in the loss of the archives from the county, negative consequences for depositors and researchers within West Wales. It has been agreed to improve the archives services on CCC website and the Friends are inputting into this process.

Regardless of what happens over the new building, the thing that particularly pleases me about this is the way in which the council is now actively consulting with the Friends of the Archives – something that was one of my principal objectives when I started to campaign about the issue last year. The timescale is also positive, although there are still plenty of unanswered questions, such as the exact location, size and staffing of the new site. But one of the most important points of all, that the facility should be within Carmarthenshire, now seems to be set in stone. As for the other most important point – that the damaged archives themselves should be cleaned and made available to the public as soon as possible – progress has certainly been made, and one can only assume that the remaining materials will gradually become available again in the coming months.

However, the group has also been trying to raise awareness, and to secure the future, of Carmarthenshire’s museum service, which has suffered from severe underinvestment over many years. Unfortunately, whereas the archives situation is unique to the county, that with the museums is part of a much bigger national issue; virtually every day seems to bring a new report of a fine and much-loved regional museum being threatened with closure, or actually closing. I very nearly blogged last week about the threat to the Lloyd George Museum in Gwynedd, but fortunately that decision has been deferred. However, I intend to produce a substantial blog about the museums crisis some time in the next few weeks, either myself or with a ‘guest blogger’ who’s very experienced and knowledgeable in the sector. In the meantime, here’s what the newsletter says about the specific situation in Carmarthenshire.

MUSEUMS CHANGE LIVES – but throughout the UK they are closing or are under threat because of cuts in council budgets by the government. The Welsh Assembly’s “Expert Review of Local Museum Provision in Wales 2015” and Welsh Heritage Bill – propose ways forward. At our county museum in Abergwili, County Councillor Gravell reports that “plans are moving forward at a pace with the Tywi Gateway scheme” – initiated by the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust to develop the Bishop’s Park with plans being submitted to the Heritage Lottery Fund this summer. Meanwhile, in limbo, in the midst sits the Bishop’s Palace, a Listed building, home to the wonderful treasures given by us, the public, over more than a century. At Llanelli Museum Cllr. Gravell reports that “the Leader and our officers are meeting with user groups there to positively discuss the future viability of the Mansion house”. Plus “exciting plans are also afoot for the Museum of Speed, linked to the wider regeneration masterplan for Pendine”. Even before the recent cuts, our museum service was suffering from twenty years of neglect – BUT there remains huge potential for local regeneration, job creation, social inclusion, tourism, pride – and fun!

In a nutshell, then, watch this space for further updates on all of these important heritage stories (particularly as I guarantee that for the next four months, this blog will be a referendum-free zone…)

 

The End of the Beginning?

by

OK, I admit it, I never saw that coming: Carmarthenshire County Council’s equivalent of Darth Vader’s ‘I am your father’ moment in The Empire Strikes Back. 

(Actually, I did see ‘I am your father’ coming – I was studying basic Dutch when ESB came out, so knew that ‘vader’ meant ‘father’.)

I’m referring to yesterday’s decision by the council’s executive board to spend some £2 million on developing a new archives facility within the county, rather than going with the Welsh Government’s preferred option of a shared facility in Swansea. The webcast of the meeting in question can be found here, with the relevant section starting at 28 minutes and 23 seconds in. There’s a lot to cheer – an admission of previous shortcomings, high praise for the level of popular campaigning, especially kind words for the Friends of the Archives – and it’s gratifying to hear such unanimous and unambiguous opinions from executive board members. So this is no time to carp and nitpick, although there are certainly plenty of important questions that remain to be answered (for example, location, staffing, and above all the timescale, especially the fundamental question of where the documents themselves will be kept until the new facility opens, and the access arrangements to them for researchers). There are also all sorts of political uncertainties lying ahead, e.g. might a different regime at County Hall after next year’s elections take a different view, or what might happen if Carmarthenshire soon disappears altogether into a new, revived Dyfed, before this new scheme properly gets off the ground? I have to admit, too, that I couldn’t resist chuckling at the optimistic vision of a fully digitised archive that seemed to enthuse the board. Even if every single document in Carmarthenshire was to be digitised, the originals would still have to be kept somewhere, and there would still be awkward recidivists like yours truly who’d sometimes want to access those originals in order to check points of detail that wouldn’t be apparent even on the best digital image. Digitisation is also a rather more prolonged, complicated and expensive process than those who spoke in favour of it might assume; having served on the councils of two major nautical history organisations that have undertaken extensive digitisation projects during the last ten years or so, I think I probably have a pretty decent idea of what I’m talking about, in this respect at least.

Ironically, the executive board’s decision came a couple of days after this piece of news, which really rubs in the contrast with the situation in Carmarthenshire:

The Pembrokeshire County Council-run service based at Prendergast, Haverfordwest, has achieved official accredited status. The Archive Service Accreditation provides an archive service with a mark of external recognition and official endorsement. It follows the official seal of approval awarded to Pembrokeshire Archives earlier this year as a place of deposit under the Public Records Act.

In the light of this, I’m reminded of the words of Carmarthenshire’s chief executive, Mark James, in an email sent to the Welsh government in July 2014, released to me under FoI and previously published on this blog:

…the authority’s commitment to retaining an Archive Service as a place of deposit is absolute. In fact, our commitment goes beyond just achieving that aim, it is to achieve accreditation for the service and recognition as a leading small Archive Service within Wales.

The executive board announcement surely means that this now has to be the county’s objective; and if so, all of us who care about Carmarthenshire’s archives – councillors, officers, archivists, Friends, writers of letters and emails, ‘likers’ of and commenters on Facebook posts, even obstreperous bloggers – ought to work together to make it happen. Perhaps, too, one might dare to hope for a similar unity of purpose, and a similar degree of commitment and investment on the part of the council, with regard to other neglected aspects of Carmarthenshire’s heritage, notably its museums?