J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical research

Game of Hats

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Back after a terrific weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in Oxford. Yes, there were big guns – Melvyn Bragg, Fay Weldon et al – but as always at such events, the information and ideas coming out of the panel sessions were more important, and the networking was more important still. In the latter sense, it was great to meet lots of old friends again, including some from far afield (special nods to Gillian Bagwell and Margaret Muir, the third member of the ‘naval novelists’ splinter group with myself and Antoine Vanner!), and to meet plenty of new ones, too. I won’t launch into a self-indulgent bout of name-checking, but hello and thank you to all! I had the proverbial one job, and that was to chair the panel on the Great Fire of London, which I shared with Chris Humphreys and Andrew Taylor. The three of us had all taken very different approaches to the Fire in our books, and our really receptive and engaged audience asked some thought-provoking questions, for example on the comparisons between this event and other great historical fires, such as the notorious ‘Nero’s fire’ in Rome – and we were fortunate to have Margaret George, author of the hugely successful ‘psycho-biography’ biographies of Nero, Henry VIII et al, in the room with us to contribute to the discussion.

There’s always one dominant theme that seems to emerge out of these conferences, and as far as I was concerned, the theme that came out of this one was that hardy perennial, the relationship between historical fiction and writing ‘proper’ history. As regular readers of this blog know, this is a subject of ongoing interest to me, but it occurred to me that it tied into the recent social media ‘storm in a teacup’ about Rebecca Rideal’s excellent new book, 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire, and the subsequent interview she gave to The Guardian, which seemed to upset a small number of grumpy academic historians. As I was driving back to Oxford, it also occurred to me that these debates could be summarised very nicely by doing a riff on the famous Barker, Corbett and Cleese sketch about class: imagine Cleese’s bowler hatted character as a tenured university academic with a PhD, Barker as a ‘popular’ historian writing for general readers, and the cloth-capped Corbett as a historical novelist. I invite you to make your own reimaginings of the script.

In real life, of course, some historical novelists, and quite a few popular historians, will be making a lot more money than the academic historians – which, one suspects, might have something to do with the slight but still visible green-eyed tinge to some of their grumpiness. One thing that was really striking at the conference, though, was the number of people who are both ‘proper’ historians (yep, PhDs and all) and yet also write historical fiction. In my own case, of course, I’ve worn all three hats in my time, and am currently wearing them simultaneously – novelist promoting latest title, popular historian completing new book for a general audience, and academic historian co-editing a weighty tome for a small audience. So all of this is distinctly tongue-in-cheek, but as I might be one of very few people who can look at it from all three perspectives, I thought I’d try to summarise them in table form.

Apology 1 – as creating tables in WordPress appears to be a task which makes negotiating Brexit look simple, I’ve had to set this up as best I could, so it might not look quite right on all platforms.

Apology 2 – I have good friends in all three of these lines of work, and none of what follows is based on any of you. Honest. (Note: this does not apply if you are Sir Arthur Bryant.)

 

 

ACADEMIC HISTORIAN

 

 POPULAR HISTORIAN HISTORICAL NOVELIST
Purpose: the theory Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 

 Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 

 Make as many people as possible interested in your subject; tell an important story; be as true as possible to the past

 
Purpose: the reality 1/ Tick boxes on CV, with institution, government, etc

2/ Because of [1], keep job

 Make lots of lovely money Become the new Dan Brown or J K Rowling. Failing that, claim to be ‘following one’s dream’, even if the dream involves pot noodles and buying your clothes at Asda

 
Previous career Child. Generally speaking – journalist, peer of realm, or spouse of publisher You name it. However, in most cases, ‘previous career’ is also still ‘current career’.

 
Publisher Pays no advance and minimal royalties, produces book of 200 pages, charges £90 per copy, does almost no marketing. Book never remaindered; secondhand copies become so rare that wars are fought over them Pays an advance and royalties (be still my beating heart), produces book of 200 pages with lots of nice pictures, charges £20 per copy, does lots of marketing. Book still gets remaindered after 6 months, copies in Oxfam for 20p within a year.

 

 A ‘publisher’…please…oh God, please…
Articles Writes articles solely for like-minded colleagues in obscure peer-reviewed journals behind paywalls run by companies (founders: A Capone, V Corleone) which charge £50 to download a PDF of a 15-page article that was published 40 years ago

 

 ‘Country Life, dahling.’ YOU THINK I’VE GOT TIME TO WRITE ARTICLES??
Prose style ‘What is this term “prose style” of which you speak?’ Short sentences. Colourful adjectives and adverbs. Find as many gruesome or sexy anecdotes as possible and shovel them in on an industrial scale

 

 Whatever a potential publisher wants it to be
References Has vast footnotes name-checking as many other historians as possible, ostensibly because it’s ‘engaging with the debate’, in reality so they’ll give you nice reviews

 

 Has short endnotes to prove that this is a REAL HISTORY BOOK and that I’VE READ MORE STUFF THAN YOU Agonising about whether or not to include a historical note at the end of the book. Will it shatter the illusion for my readers? Oh God, do I have any readers??
Research method Does a lot of research in original sources Does a lot of research in original sources* Does a lot of research in original sources

 
Writing method Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘interpretation’ Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘empathy’

 

 Fills in gaps between the sources by using own imagination, but calls process ‘imagination’

* Yes, I know plenty of popular history books that are just potboilers based on other potboilers. But goodness knows how I’d have fitted in a fourth column to cover the rubbish that should never have been penned by any writer of any description, ever. 

***

A couple of mystery guest posts coming next on this blog – an extra one at the end of this week, which puts a pretty remarkable historical ‘find’ online for the first time ever, and a really special and important one next week, which will be of particular interest to my Welsh followers. Watch this space!

And finally, a late correction – it now seems that I had good friends in all three lines of work…

 

A Darker Angel

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Last week, I posted the first few pages of the fictional plot of Death’s Bright Angel as a ‘teaser trailer’ for the book’s forthcoming publication. But as I’ve mentioned before, this title is actually ‘two books in one’, with the second part being a detailed historical analysis of the evidence surrounding the outbreak of the Great Fire. This standalone essay, as long as many an e-book, publishes for the first time much previously unknown evidence about the outbreak, and raises some uncomfortable and provocative questions about the accepted story of how the Great Fire began.

So am I saying that the Great Fire of London was, or could have been, started deliberately?

You’ll have to get your own copy of Death’s Bright Angel in order to find out! But in the meantime, here are the first few pages of the historical investigation.

 

THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON:

THE CURIOUS CASE OF THE FIRE-RAISING WATCHMAKER, THE ELUSIVE SEA CAPTAIN, AND THE QUEEN OF SWEDEN’S TAILOR

A Historical Investigation

 

Until I started researching and writing Death’s Bright Angel, my knowledge of the Great Fire of London came from a combination of general knowledge, facts learned at school, TV programmes, Pepys’ diary, and a couple of books on the matter, read more than a decade ago. I suspect, if pushed, most people would admit similar. However, I’d also taught the subject quite often, usually to twelve year olds (Year 8, in British education parlance), frequently employing ancient BBC educational programmes with shockingly cheap special effects. It’s a subject that goes down well with schoolchildren – lots of drama and destruction, vivid first-hand accounts, even some humour (‘he buried a cheese?’), and best of all, nobody dies; well, hardly anybody. Unsurprisingly, the Great Fire is a mainstay of the National Curriculum in History for schools in England and Wales, and some ten children’s books about it have been published since 1995 alone. Within the same period, three full-length, fully referenced adult studies of the Fire have also gone into print.

I duly read or re-read all three of these books, and several earlier ones, as research for Death’s Bright Angel, and as I did so, felt a mounting disquiet. All described mid-seventeenth century London, the actual course of the Fire, and its various aftermaths, competently enough – sometimes quite brilliantly. But when it came to the aspect in which I was most interested, the different theories circulating at the time to explain why the Fire began, and especially the confessions, trial, and execution, of the supposedly simple-minded French watchmaker Robert Hubert, alarm bells rang.

All recent books on the Fire explicitly derive large parts of their accounts – of the theories of the Fire’s outbreak in Farriner’s bakery in Pudding Lane – from a single earlier secondary source, The Great Fire of London by Walter George Bell. This was originally published in 1923 and republished several times since, and the principal primary source upon it relied, William Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials, was published between 1809 and 1826, incorporating earlier material from editions dating back to 1719. All the modern books accept without question Bell’s judgement that ‘this fact (the accidental outbreak in the bakery) does not admit of doubt… the judgment that must result from a calm consideration of the evidence, [is] that the Fire in its origin was due to carelessness, and was not criminal’.

What of it? Surely all that Bell (a journalist and astronomer, incidentally, not a historian) did was follow the orthodoxy rapidly accepted by enlightened contemporaries like Samuel Pepys, the orthodoxy allegedly followed by the Lord Chief Justice who had actually sentenced Hubert and which, when partisan fervour and religious bigotry eventually died down, became accepted by most of the general public, too? The Great Fire began by accident; as I indicated in the note at the beginning of this book, Robert Hubert’s confession to having started it was written off almost immediately, as it has been ever since, as the rambling of a madman who did not even arrive in London until after the Fire began.

Even so, I wanted to see exactly how Bell reached the conclusions upon which all recent books about the Fire depend. I also wanted to examine the source material about Robert Hubert in a more forensic way than has been attempted before, and to see if there were any sources that had been completely ignored in previous studies. This might seem a curiously intensive research strategy for a work of fiction, but I knew from the outset that the storyline for Death’s Bright Angel would only have sufficient drama if it posited arson, or strong suspicions of arson, as the cause of the Great Fire. To make the book as convincing as possible, I knew I had to investigate that possibility as rigorously as I could.

In other words: once a historian, always a historian.

 

Want to read more? Death’s Bright Angel is available for pre-order through all the usual channels!

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: The McEnroe Moment

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Busy, busy, busy! So a slightly modified reblog of an older post this week, this one from pretty much exactly four years ago, in April 2012. 

Every now and again, a historian comes across a snippet of information so bizarre that he or she reacts by silently quoting a certain illustrious tennis player – ‘you cannot be serious!’. (Or at least, that would be the case for historians of my generation; those born after, say, 1980, might prefer the current de rigueur exclamation of choice in tweets and text messages, ‘WTF?’) It’s often said that there’s a considerable similarity between the instincts and working methods of historians and policeman, and the discovery of such a snippet at once transforms even the most mild-mannered historian into Inspector Morse, relentlessly pursuing the solution to the mystery at the expense of all else – perhaps abandoning rather more pressing assignments in the process.

I have to confess that I’m particularly prone to this tendency. It was a ‘McEnroe moment’ that set me off on the ten year odyssey to explore the mysterious ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’ of 1600, which eventually culminated in my book Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens and the Gowrie Conspiracy, in the process putting other projects on the back burner, acquiring a couple of bookcases’ worth of Scottish history, and fearlessly conducting research in archives, castles and pubs from Perth to Carmarthen via Maidstone and North Berwick to the Loire valley. (OK, perhaps the pubs weren’t strictly essential to the parameters of the project, but I always seemed to obtain some of my best insights in them.) I’ve been intrigued for a couple of years now by such oddities as why the Earl of Southesk killed the Master of Gray in the distinctly unlikely surroundings of Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, in 1660 – the subject of a talk I give to local history societies – and whether or not Joanna Bridges, who lived at Mandinam, Carmarthenshire, in the 1640s and 1650s and married the famous Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor, was really the illegitimate daughter of King Charles I and the Duchess of Lennox. So yes, when it comes to being intrigued and distracted by a historical fact that comes from a fair way across left field, I’m your man.

On Easter Saturday, I had another McEnroe moment. We were exploring Ely Cathedral – one of my favourites – when I came across a plaque next to a floor brass. I hadn’t seen this on previous visits, so presumably it’s fairly new. The plaque proclaimed that the subject commemorated in the brass, Humphrey Tyndall, an Elizabethan Dean of Ely, had been – wait for it – heir to the throne of Bohemia. Now, the idea of a middle-ranking Anglican cleric being next in line to a central European kingdom has pleasing echoes of The Prisoner of Zenda (one of my favourite books) and of the (probably apocryphal) offer of the throne of Albania to the cricketer C B Fry, but it seemed a distinctly implausible one. For one thing, I’d taught the Thirty Years War for long enough to know that by 1619, at least, the throne of Bohemia was elective, that the King thereof was in turn one of the seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor, and that the Habsburgs, the Emperors from 1440, always ensured that they occupied the Bohemian throne themselves to ensure their next heir was elected to the imperial crown. (By coincidence, the last Habsburg heir to the Kingdom of Bohemia, the Archduke Otto, last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, died only last year (i.e. 2011), becoming the last Habsburg to have a state funeral in St Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna, followed by interment in the Capuchin Crypt, one of the spookiest places I’ve ever visited.) When I started doing serious historical research in the early 1980s, exploring a mystery one stumbled across on an Easter weekend would have had to wait until the opening of the library the following Tuesday, but nowadays, of course, I have but to emulate my lazier ex-students and make straight for Google and Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia entry on the Tyndall family states:

When King Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, she brought with her first cousin, Margaret of Treschen, daughter of Litvaticus, Duke of Tescen in modern Silesia by his wife Elizabeth, sister of Charles IV and daughter of John the Blind, King of Bohemia. This lady married Sir Roger de Felstead (or Bigod), of Felstead in Essex, a standard bearer at the coronation of Richard II and their daughter, Margaret, married Sir Thomas de Tyndall of Talsover and Deane…when the House of Luxemburg died out with the death of Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1368–1437)…Sir William Tyndall became one of the heirs to the elective throne of Bohemia. John Nichols (an 18th century antiquary) relates that a delegation of Bohemian boyars were sent to England to offer him the throne but that he refused, the Habsburgs succeeding to a throne they held (with one interruption) until 1918. There was an oral tradition at the University of Cambridge that Humphrey Tyndall, brother of Sir John Tyndall of Mapplestead and uncle (or great uncle) of the eminent deist Dr Matthew Tindal, was again offered the throne by the Protestant party in Bohemia in 1620. This Humphrey was Dean of Ely and President of Queens’ College, Cambridge and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. Humphrey refused, saying that “he had rather be Queen Elizabeth’s subject than a foreign Prince”, leading to the ill-fated Frederick V, Elector Palatine (married to Elizabeth, daughter of James I and ancestor of the present Queen) becoming King for a year – a development that was a principal cause of the thirty years war.

This account set various alarm bells ringing. ‘Oral tradition at the University of Cambridge’ sounded distinctly dubious – even leaving aside my Oxford bias and any bitterness about the Boat Race (still as true in 2016 as it was in 2012 – ed.)  – while Tyndall was hardly going to turn down a throne in 1620 (actually 1619) on the grounds that he wanted to remain Queen Elizabeth’s subject when she’d been dead for seventeen years…and Tyndall himself had been dead for five. Another online source says that the offer was made in 1591, which is equally implausible as it was half way through the reign of the King-Emperor Rudolf II – and the idea of the Bohemian Protestants preferring an obscure Fenland cleric like Tyndall to a well-connected prince like Frederick V simply beggars belief. A little more Googling and Wiki-ing casts further doubt on the story. It took me a while to track down ‘Litvaticus, Duke of Teschen’, but this must be Przemyslaus I Noszak, Duke of Cieszyn, duke from 1358 to 1410. He was an important figure at the Imperial court and brokered the marriage between Richard II of England and Anne of Bohemia. So far so good for the Tyndall story. But the duke’s wife (sorry, I’m not typing that name again…) was not the sister of the Emperor Charles IV and daughter to John the Blind, King of Bohemia; although she was named Elizabeth, she was the daughter of  Bolesław, Duke of Koźle-Bytom. Charles did have a sister Elizabeth, but she died when only a few months old.

So it seems as though Humphrey Tyndall wasn’t descended from Bohemian royalty; but this begs the question of why so many people, perhaps including himself, believed that he was. It might have been a simple confusion of one fourteenth-century Elizabeth with another, part of a mangled family legend that had been passed down for two hundred years and then mangled again by a couple of eighteenth century antiquarians. But the much-derided antiquarians of the Georgian and Victorian ages sometimes had access to sources that are now lost, and I’ve learned many times not to dismiss their statements out of hand simply because I can’t find anything else to corroborate them. Will the story of Dean Tyndall and the throne of Bohemia be worth a more thorough investigation? Possibly; but probably not. For one thing, I don’t think I can cope with the spellings!

Highways and Byways of the Seventeenth Century: the Prince of Transylvania

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Time for another in my (very) occasional series of oddities and little-known tales that I’ve stumbled across during the course of my research. Actually, though, this was one that I came across during my teaching career, my ‘day job’ for thirty or so years. Back in 1987, I took up a new post at Bedford Modern School, and was casting around for a quick way of teaching some very bright sixth formers about the perils and pitfalls of primary sources. Fortuitously, the History department possessed a new-fangled piece of high technology called a ‘VHS recorder’, and just a few months after I started at the school, the BBC broadcast a programme which fitted my bill perfectly, so I recorded it and then used it at the beginning of the A-level course for many years. In those days, the historical documentary series Timewatch didn’t present hour long programmes on a single theme, as it does today. Instead, it covered three different stories within its hour, a format that made it much easier for it to present quirky and lesser-known recesses of history; arguably, the tendency towards ‘big’ stories suitable for the longer slot (and, indeed, for the themed series of three one-hour documentaries that now seem to be in vogue) means that the history which makes it onto our TV screens these days is much narrower in focus, and tends to recycle the same old supposedly ‘important’ themes. For example, even leaving aside such obvious, hackneyed old staples as the Tudors and the Nazis, Lucy Worsley’s recent series on the Romanovs was, by my reckoning, at least the third major series on the history of Russia on mainstream British TV during the last fifteen years or so. Within that same period, how many series have there been on the histories of, say, China, Japan, Brazil, and even India?

But enough of the rant, as that’s not the point I’m making here. The particular programme that I’m talking about included a twenty-minute tale narrated by Gabriel Ronay, a journalist and freelance historian. This began in October 1661, with the burial in Rochester Cathedral of one ‘Cossuma Albertus’, a ‘Prince of Transylvania’, who had been brutally murdered on the main coast road at Gad’s Hill, of Shakespearean fame, a notorious haunt of highwaymen and brigands. The Prince, it seemed, had been received at the court of the recently restored Charles II, where he was treated with honour. A contemporary account of the murder told a shocking tale:

Cossuma Albertus, a Prince of Transylvania, in the dominions of the King of Poland, being worsted by the German forces, and compelled to seek for relief came to our gracious King Charles II. for succour, from whom it is said he found a kind reception and a sufficient maintenance.

On the evening of Tuesday, Oct. 15, 1661, this Prince Cossuma was approaching Rochester in his chariot, attended by his coachman and footboy, when within a mile of Strood…the vehicle stuck fast in the mire; whereupon the Prince resolved to sleep in the coach, pulling off his coat and wrapping it about him to keep himself warm. Being fast asleep, his coachman, Isaac Jacob, a Jew, about midnight takes the Prince’s hanger from under his head, and stabs him to the heart; and calling to his aid his companion, whose name was Casimirus Karsagi, they both completed the tragedy by dragging him out of the carriage, cutting off his head and throwing the mutilated remains into a ditch near at hand. The Prince was dressed in scarlet breeches, his stockings were laced with gold lace, with pearl-colour silk hose under them. The two men having possessed themselves of a large sum of money which the Prince had about with me, drawing a piece of timber, that I am confident one man could easily have carried upon his back. I made the horses be taken away, and a man or two to take the lumber away with their hands.

The burial entry for the 'Prince' in the Rochester Cathedral register
The burial entry for the ‘Prince’ in the Rochester Cathedral register

But Ronay then began to unpick the story in a way that brought home to my students (I hope!) the dangers of relying on single interpretations of events, and the need constantly to interrogate one’s sources. For instance, a copy of one of the pamphlets giving a sensationalist account of the murder contained a contemporary, handwritten marginal note, to the effect ”tis said he was a cheat, and no prince’. Other sources, filmed in such varied locations as the round reading room of the old Public Record Office in Chancery Lane and the George in Southwark, the most authentic surviving seventeenth-century hostelry in London, began to build up a very different story. In Charles II’s day, of course, Transylvania didn’t have the vampiric connotations it would later acquire, thanks to the likes of Bram Stoker and Christopher Lee. Instead, it had an overwhelmingly positive image: the Transylvanians were Protestants, holding the borders against both the Ottomans and the Catholic Habsburgs, and their ruler Bethlen Gabor had been one of the great Protestant heroes of the Thirty Years War. But the Transylvanians had been defeated, and many of them had been forced into exile, where they had become objects of sympathy – and of charity, too.

Rochester Cathedral
Rochester Cathedral, with the River Medway and Chatham Dockyard beyond

And there was the rub. ‘Cossuma Albertus’ wasn’t a prince at all, and wasn’t Transylvanian. His first name is probably a phonetic misspelling of ‘Casimir’, and he was almost certainly an impoverished Polish minor nobleman, who had adopted his cover story in order to con the gullible at Charles II’s court – including the King himself. There were also suggestions that he had another income stream as a French spy, no less, and was in the Rochester area to gather intelligence about the warships at Chatham dockyard. The story that he had been slaughtered at Gad’s Hill by his own coachmen unravelled, too; the ‘coachmen’ were his accomplices in the scam, and the murder seems to have been the result of a falling out over the proceeds. The killers were subsequently hanged at Maidstone. Ronay’s account ended with film of Rochester Cathedral, and the words of the published account of ‘the Prince’s’ burial:

His body being brought to the parish of Strood, was accompanied from thence to the West door of the Cathedral Church of Rochester by the Prebendaries of the said church in their formalities, with the gentry and commonality of the said city and places adjacent, with torches before them. Near the cathedral they were met by the choir, who sung Te Deum before them; when divine service was ended, the choir went before the body to the grave (which was made in the body of the church) singing Nunc Dimittis. Thousands of people flockt to this cathedral, amongst whom many gave large commendations of the Dean and Chapter, who bestowed so honorable an interment on a stranger at their own proper costs and charges.

And there he lies to this day: a conman who gulled the King of England, the Dean and Chapter of Rochester Cathedral, and, very nearly, the historical record. But not quite.

Samuel Pepys versus The Incredible Hulk

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Don’t make me angry; you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

Or, alternatively, it is a truth universally acknowledged that those who get outraged by things on Twitter are in need of a life.

Having said that, occasionally one sees something on Twitter which is so staggeringly crass that the metaphorical shirt-ripping (but, of course, never trouser-ripping) green transformation takes place, and any pretence at possessing a life has to be laid aside. Thus it was with something that emerged at the weekend from the normally uncontentious – indeed, generally very useful and informative – Twitter feed of the National Maritime Museum, referring to Samuel Pepys. I quote: ‘How did a a tailor’s son turn a corrupt & inefficient Navy into a powerful fighting force?‘

Now, to be fair to the person who runs the NMM Twitter feed, this is a direct quote from a page on the museum’s achingly politically correct new website, which itself links to the current exhibition on Pepys and his times – reviewed previously, and generally positively, in this blog. So I’m certainly not shooting the messenger here. But whoever came up with the original message needs to be gently taken down to the shop at the entrance to the exhibition, and shown what’s on the top shelf of the very first case that one sees. It’s quite a big book with a nice colourful cover. It’s called Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89, and it’s by a shy, retiring historian and author whose name currently escapes me. It also contains several hundred pages, based on said author’s thirty years of research and many previous writings on the subject (including an earlier academic book), and on the writings of others who have come independently to exactly the same conclusion, that – as my remarkably un-green reply to the tweet in question put it – ‘He didn’t, and it wasn’t corrupt and inefficient to begin with’.

I certainly don’t intend to prove those points here. For one thing, it would take far too long. I’ve already written a couple of books to prove it (a shiny new paperback edition of Pepys’s Navy will be out this summer) and am currently working on a third, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Navy, due out from Seaforth Publishing in the summer of 2017, which will produce even more evidence to the same effect. Besides, even these days, criticising Samuel Pepys to any degree whatsoever is a bit like shooting Bambi’s mother: there are still plenty of people out there who were brought up on Sir Arthur Bryant, or the various books and websites that essentially maintain the same tired old line, and I’m not going to convert them with one blog post. Come to that, I’m probably not going to convert them with three books, umpteen articles, and goodness knows what else, but one has to try…

No, my point is this. The notion that Pepys ‘saved the navy’, to paraphrase Bryant, is based on books that were published between 40 and 120 years ago, drawing on a narrow range of sources, and shaped by schools of historical interpretation that have long fallen by the wayside. To describe the navy of his time as ‘corrupt and inefficient’ is simply wrong, but it is also attempting to measure an earlier age by modern standards, always a very dangerous thing to do (albeit a very common one, as the various attempts to get apologies for all sorts of actual or alleged historical wrongdoings demonstrate). These days, I’d argue, organisations, media outlets, and so forth, that have a very wide reach – like the BBC, newspapers, national museums, and, yes, schools too – surely have a responsibility to present stories about history that either reflect the best possible consensus of modern scholarship, or, at the very least, don’t recycle dated and discredited myths and theories to new audiences. I recently blogged here about the prevalence and attractiveness of myth in what we might call ‘popular history’, and nowadays, of course, it’s easier than ever to keep such myths alive, to give them a wider audience than ever before, and, indeed, to create entirely new ones, thanks to the seductive openness and seeming credibility of the internet, not to mention the gullibility of some of those who access it. Indeed, one of the most popular sites on the entire Net, Wikipedia, has a deliberate policy of not allowing articles to be based on original, primary research – and while one can see why rigorous failsafes would need to be in place to prevent abuse, the alternative, and thus the current policy, as Wikipedia’s own page explaining it makes explicitly clear, is that articles can only refer to published works, the implication being even if they are known to be wrong, and to other unimpeachably reliable sources such as – wait for it… – ‘mainstream newspapers’.

That’s right, ‘mainstream newspapers’. Like, presumably, the Daily Mail and The Sun.

Sorry, got to go, my shirt seems to be starting to stretch a bit…

The End of the Beginning?

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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?