J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical research

The Turn of the Cards

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You know the scene.

Perhaps it’s in a 1930s cop movie, or maybe it’s a 1970s Cold War thriller. In either case, there might well be a moment where a bespectacled drone leads our hero into a huge, dark basement. The lights flicker on, illuminating the cobwebs in the corners. Rats scurry across the floor. Ahead of the hero: a vast bank of wooden drawers. His heart sinks, for he knows that somewhere within the interminable contents of those drawers will be the single, minute, piece of evidence which will prove the guilt of the gang boss or the identity of the traitor. Or maybe it’s a 1960s private detective thriller, where our hero arrives to see a blood-spattered body on the floor, surrounded by hundreds of scattered pieces of card, and knows at once that the one bearing the crucial clue has been stolen by the killer.

…and that, dear reader, was how we used to do historical research in the days before databases and Google. Yes, welcome to the world of the card index. The world that was once mine, and in one sense, still is.

The Way We Were
The Way We Were

It’s difficult now to conceive of just how ubiquitous the card index was. In a nutshell, pretty much everything that would now be stored on a database had to be fitted onto small pieces of blank card and stored in a suitable receptacle. Such an index was only as good as the people who conceived it, the system they devised, and the durability of said receptacle. I once proved the latter in spectacular fashion at the John Rylands University Library, Manchester, where the catalogue was on a card index in very large, sturdy looking wooden drawers. But they were not quite as sturdy as they seemed to be; pulling on one (‘C’, if you must know) with what I thought was only modest force, the whole thing jumped at me like a ravenous lion, with cards scattering to all corners and the drawer itself falling to the floor with a crash that probably did for several of the older and more somnolent readers.

Undeterred by this calamity, I created my own miniature version. When I began my doctoral research on the officers and men of the Restoration Navy in 1982, I realised pretty quickly that I needed a detailed index of all the captains and lieutenants of the period, which as much biographical information as I could muster on them, to enable me to carry out comparisons of, say, social origin and career structure. My starting point was Pepys’ register of sea officers, evidently compiled around the time he left office in 1689 and printed in volume 1 of the Calendar of the Pepysian Manuscripts at Magdalene College, Cambridge. So I produced cards for every officer on the list, about 1,500 men in all: two to a card in the cases of officers with very brief careers, one per card for those with many commissions and/or relatively famous careers. Onto each, I wrote in longhand the details from the Pepys list, usually just the post held (name of ship, lieutenant or captain), the year of each commission, and the name of the person who signed the commission; for the years 1660-73, for example, this was invariably James, Duke of York, the Lord High Admiral. Then, as I went through other sources over the years, I added extra information to the cards.

It quickly became clear that Pepys’ list had many inadequacies. Dates were sometimes simply wrong, or else confused; so, too, was the identification of people, particularly those with similar names. So gradually, my own index began to become much more accurate than any single source on which it was based. A few examples, chosen from many:

  • Pepys listed one officer called Peter Belbin, and allocated him lieutenants’ berths on the Rupert in 1672, the Gloucester in 1673, the command of the Sweepstakes in 1673, and then the post of first lieutenant of the Mountague in 1677. But according to ADM10/15 at the National Archives – a very similar source to the Pepys list, but which gives exact dates of service evidently drawn from information in the original ships’ pay books (long since lost), and every single entry and date in which I again added longhand to the card index (!) – there were actually two Peter Belbins, father and son, with the father holding the first three posts (albeit in the order Gloucester first, then Rupert) and the son having the commission on the Mountague. From other sources, I discovered that Peter senior was 63 in 1678, when he was superannuated on the grounds that he was too old to hold further office at sea; a Portsmouth man, he had also been the master of a number of important warships for at least twenty years, including the First Rate St Michael.
  • Pepys listed three John Hubbards, two of whom were commanding ships at exactly the same time. He gave ‘John I’ seven commands, ending with the Falcon in 1670, and ‘John II’ eight, ending with the Assistance in 1668, and noting of ‘John II’ that he was ‘slain in fight with some Algier men-of-war in the Streights, 1668’. But it was actually ‘John I’ who was killed in battle, when in command of the Falcon, in November 1669; ‘John II’s command of the Assistance actually began on 1 January 1671, and he died in command of her in the West Indies in July 1671. So ‘John II’ had the longer career, the opposite of what the Pepys list suggests.
  • Pepys shows one John Wood, captain of four small ships from 1660 to 1667, second lieutenant of the St Andrew in 1672, captain of the Kent in the same year, then lieutenant of five ships in 1673-4 and of three more in 1676-81. But again, these were two different men: ‘John I’ was dismissed the service after being held responsible for the wrecking of the Kent in October 1672, while ‘John II’s last four commissions were actually as captain, with three of them being large and prestigious frigate commands. So relying on Pepys alone would give a completely inaccurate picture of the careers of these men.

But it wasn’t just a case of sorting out cases of mistaken identity in the Pepys list, or rectifying the significant number of omissions. Often, I was able to add detail that made the men in question real, living people, rather than just names on a page. For example, a quick skim of the Pepys list would suggest that Captain Argenton Alington had a brief and unremarkable career, serving only as lieutenant of the Charles in 1668 and captain of the Guernsey in 1669 before being ‘slain in fight with Algier men-of-war off — in the Streights 166-‘. In fact, Alington was killed on 3 July 1670, and his death was greatly mourned. He was the brother of the third Baron Alington, MP for Cambridge, and it was said of him that he was ‘a gentleman greatly to be lamented, as being a person of exceeding promising hopes’; Lord Alington was immensely proud of his brother’s career and his heroic death, even though he knew that it might well mean the end of his family’s male line and with it, the title. Then there was Thomas Penrose, recorded in the Pepys list with a bare entry showing his command of the Monck during the Second Anglo-Dutch war. But from other evidence, Penrose was clearly a colourful character – a client of the ship’s namesake, General George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, he was a Cornishman who kept his wife aboard his ship during the winter of 1665-6, by which time it was said that he ‘grows debauched’ and was much addicted to drink. (Hmm, now there’s a thought: I think Thomas Penrose really ought to put in an appearance somewhere in the Quinton Journals!)

I might well try and track down some other interesting information from the card index for future posts. In the meantime, though, I really must see about getting the material transferred into a database…after all, the world is full of criminal gangs desperate to get their hands on the exact dates of each commission held by, say, Lieutenant Endimion Drake (no relation – or was he?), or to sort out which Captain John Johnson was actually which. You can’t be too careful, after all.

Arfur Minute

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A confession: I very nearly became an Arthurian.

Before you all run off into the hills, screaming hysterically, bear with me for a few minutes. Remember that I originally come from Carmarthenshire – Caer Myrddin, the fort of Merlin, right? So the Arthurian myths and legends were all around me from pretty much as far back as I can remember. The Sword in the Stone was the first film I ever saw in the cinema, aged about six, and by the time I was eighteen, I’d read Geoffrey of Monmouth and The Once and Future King, been vaguely irritated by the TV series Arthur of the Britons, and wondered why on earth some of my sixth form friends insisted we should go drinking in the King Arthur Hotel on the Gower Peninsula, rather than in the (literally) hundreds of pubs that were nearer.  

Then I went off to Oxford, where my first term studying ‘modern’ history included the Venerable Bede (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘modern’) and his ‘back story’ in the writings of Gildas and Nennius. So when it came time for me to choose my options within ‘English One’, the vast English history paper (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘British’) that stretched from the fall of Rome to about 1500, it was a no-brainer – like a shot, I was off to what it was then still politically correct to call ‘the Dark Ages’. I decided I’d really impress my tutor by spending the vacation beforehand reading the new, exciting book about the period, namely John Morris’s Age of Arthur.

I was instantly enthralled. Here was a whole new world, a thrilling combination of dramatic narrative and detective story, full of unfamiliar evidence and thought-provoking analysis. I was vaguely aware of the fact that Morris – coincidentally, an alumnus of my own college – had stirred up some controversy, but no matter. It was the newest, biggest book in the field, and I was still of an age when my assessment of history books began and ended with the questions ‘is it new, and is it big?’. Fortunately, my tutor on this course was the ideal man to put me right: James Campbell of Worcester College was a formidably erudite don of the old school, and he alerted me to the devastating critique of Morris penned by David Dumville of the University of Cambridge (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘Cambridge’). So off I went to other tomes, such as Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, which gave me a very different, archaeological, perspective on the period, and I emerged from the experience a wiser and distinctly more sceptical person, at least when it came to all things Arthurian.

It was also an object lesson in ‘how to do history’ more generally. For example, endless pages of references impress the credulous and are often intended quite deliberately to intimidate the sceptical into submission, but they don’t mean a thing if the references are to sources from long after the period they’re meant to be describing – a particular fault of The Age of Arthur – or are simply cross-referring from one dubious secondary source to another in a vicious circle of obfuscation. These traits are all too common, for example, in the work of many of the more controversial World War II ‘revisionists’, conspiracy theorists, and many of those writing books about such esoterica as the Holy Grail. (For my sins, I read quite a lot of the latter when researching my own venture into the reasonably esoteric, Blood of Kings, and quite a lot of the former when I was trying to steer impressionable GCSE students away from such things in the relatively early days of the Internet.) As Sam McLean said in his thought-provoking guest post here last week, historians don’t end their arguments with QED, but that can be part of the problem: all too often, those who think they are historians, or even genuine, qualified historians who should know better, ‘prove’ their cases by citing highly dubious ‘sources’ that actually prove nothing whatsoever.

At right, the Coop House, which should be exactly where it is. At left, a large fallen tree, which shouldn't.
At right, the Coop House, which is exactly where it should be. At left, a large fallen tree, which isn’t.

All of this came back to me in spades the week before last, when I was staying at the Landmark Trust’s gloriously eccentric property, the Coop House, near Carlisle, to brainstorm the plot of the next Quinton novel – which will be a radical departure from the series so far, but more of that anon. This proved to be a memorable week in more senses than one. Yes, I made terrific progress with the plot, although the details need to stay under wraps for quite a while. But some of that progress was made by candlelight: the storms that swept across northern Britain on the Thursday of that week brought a huge tree crashing down onto the power line to Coop House, blowing the transformer and plunging me temporarily back into the 17th century.

To get back to King Arthur, though: the Coop House is in the parish of Arthuret, a pretty suggestive name to begin with, and the location of not one but two important battles – one in 573, not long after the time traditionally regarded as ‘the age of Arthur’, and the battle of Solway Moss in 1542. I always like to research an area before going there, so inevitably, I delved into the history of Arthuret. Pretty soon, I was lost in the darker undergrowth of the Arthurian forest (which, of course, is situated next to the Holy Grail sausage factory and the Templar vomitorium), ploughing through books and blogs which made the most astonishing claims. Some even believe that the legendary king himself lies buried beneath Arthuret parish church, and that perhaps the Holy Grail can be found there too… So I made the church my first port of call when I got there, and found it to be a very pleasant spot. But as a candidate for the last resting place of King Arthur, it is no more or less plausible than, say, Glastonbury, where the bones of the ‘king’ (and of Guinevere to boot) were ‘discovered’  in 1191. In the one case, an entire historical theory has been established on the distinctly shaky foundation that the name ‘Arthuret’ might possibly be derived from ‘Arthur’; in the other, the abbey greatly boosted its visitor numbers, and thus its income stream, as a result of the distinctly convenient find.

Arthuret church: probably not the burial place of King Arthur. Probably. (But the hill on the right was the English army's position during the Battle of Solway Moss.)
Arthuret church: probably not the burial place of King Arthur. Probably.
(But the hill on the right was the English army’s position during the Battle of Solway Moss.)

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a lot of the ‘Arthur industry’. Much of it can be attributed to attempts by one over-enthusiastic local historian after another to twist the miniscule amount of actual hard historical evidence about Arthur and his times to follow in the footsteps of the 12th century monks of Glastonbury by placing the fabled king within their own particular patch. Thus we have Cornish Arthurs, Somerset Arthurs, Welsh Arthurs, Cumbrian Arthurs, and a Scottish Arthur – or rather Scottish Arthurs, with a veritable battle royal taking place a few years ago between clans desperate to claim him as one of their own. The odd thing is that these optimists keep pushing their distinctly ingenious claims, despite the fact that a few years ago, Guy Halsall’s book Worlds of Arthur – which I read some months back – carried out what seemed to me to be a pretty effective demolition job on the whole business of Arthur myth-making. But then, and before legions of Arthur-loving trolls start laying into me, I should deploy the historian’s great catch-all cop-out, namely ‘it’s not my period’; or at least, it hasn’t been since about 1977. And let’s face it, books which claim that Arthur didn’t exist and didn’t inhabit a part of the country with a reasonably large book-buying population are never going to sell as well as books that say he really was a great warlord and that Camelot was that hill just up the road.

Hang on, though. When I was looking for potential walks, I noticed on the map that only a few miles from Arthuret and the Coop House is the site of a Roman fort named Camboglanna. Hmm. Doesn’t that sound to you a bit like Camlann, the name of King Arthur’s last battle? And lo, Google the two names together and you’ll see plenty of websites which make precisely that connection. Then again, I’ve driven up and down the M4 many more times than I care to remember, and have always thought that the hill fort just by Junction 15 at Swindon would have been an obvious candidate for the site of the Battle of Mount Badon…and what’s the name of the place nearest to it? Badbury. At the end of the day, the Arthur myths are remarkably seductive, powerful and abiding, and who am I to argue with that?

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This will be the last post for this year; the blog will return on Monday 6 January. Next year, I hope to be posting about the fifth Quinton book, The Battle of All the Ages, which is due out in the spring or summer; revealing some exciting news about additional Quinton stories; and welcoming some more guest bloggers, including some very eminent naval historians who have never blogged before! Also, I’m giving a number of talks during the course of 2014, and it would be great to meet readers of this blog if you can come along. Confirmed dates early in the year are the Nelson Museum, Monmouth, on 11 February, and delivering the Captain Pack Memorial Lecture to the Society for Nautical Research (South) in Portsmouth on 15 March, in both cases talking about aspects of my latest non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon.

In the meantime, I hope you all have a very happy Christmas and a wonderful New Year!

Labels in History, or Why Historians don’t Complete Arguments with ‘QED’

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When this post goes ‘live’, I’ll be heading north to spend a week shut away on my own, brainstorming the plot of ‘Quinton 6’. (The first draft of book 5, The Battle of All The Ages, is currently out with its critical readers, and after I’ve made the inevitable revisions and redrafts, it should be on course for publication by Old Street Publishing on schedule in the spring / early summer.) For a variety of reasons, the sixth book is going to be very, very different to everything that’s gone before in the series, so watch this space for further information!

In the meantime, I’m delighted to welcome another guest blogger this week. Samuel McLean is a PhD student in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. His doctoral research is supervised by Dr Alan James, and examines the professionalization of the Royal Navy from its creation in 1660 to 1749. Samuel is also the Social Media Editor for the newly launched online naval and maritime history website www.BritishNavalHistory.com. He is active in the promotion of the academic uses of social media, and can be found on Twitter @Canadian_Errant. Current projects also include the podcast series “Making History” which will be available through the website.

So without further ado, over to Sam!

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First, I need to thank David for providing me with this opportunity. I would not be at Kings, asking these questions, or able to make these arguments, without his encouragement and honest criticism.

Lately, I have often proclaimed, in the course of teaching or talking to my friends, that history is a performance art. The gist of my argument is that the study of history is not just about the accumulation of knowledge; it should also be about analysis, and the creation and communication of an argument. I have also realized that I don’t think that this original sentiment goes far enough to emphasize process over result. Clearly, I don’t have to tell anybody that historical education is not receiving anywhere near the level of funding or the priority that I and many of my historian colleagues feel it should be getting, at any level of education including universities. Part of the problem is that although I’m a historian by practice, I’m not part of a history department at King’s College London, but rather the Department of War Studies. Although the department originated from History, it has in the subsequent decades incorporated other disciplines such as social sciences, and fields of study like International Relations that lack a specific discipline. As a result, the War Studies BA (undergraduate) students are faced with a series of conflicting requirements and disciplines. This has created very specific reactions in the classroom. I am a Teaching Assistant for a 1st year basic survey course, “Conduct of War”, as well as for a 2nd year course on naval history. In both cases my primary tasks are to lead seminars (which are discussions) and to mark essays and provide feedback for students (formative, not substantive assessments). With my recent experiences teaching as well as experiences talking to senior academics and education researchers I have developed concerns about how history seems to be taught as a science, rather than an art.

I realize that sounds ridiculous, and inflammatory, but considering the way that history is structured, and way certain topics are taught give some credence to my concerns. Maths and sciences are taught in a very specific way. Students are taught the rules, formulas, provided the values of variables. Then they are handed a series of problems that they are expected solve using the formulas. Essentially, they are taught how to analyze a situation, and then to use the provided rules to find an absolute answer. It is clear to me that in many ways, students are being taught history in the same manner. I think that a major part of the modern approach to education is the creation of the correct, final answers; this is an approach that is anathema to the study of history. However, it is an approach that has taken hold. Consider the way that historians use labels and descriptions. One particularly vivid example from my past was one element of Ontario’s high school history curriculum “what were the four causes of the First World War.” The curriculum was looking for specific answers, and not arguments. Recently, my first year students have spent five weeks and several seminars discussing Michael Robert’s “Military Revolution” thesis. Much time was spent by the lecturer demolishing the thesis and its underpinning assumptions. Whether Roberts intended the “Military Revolution” to be the final answer or not, historians should not treat it as an attempt at such. The goal should not be to develop descriptions and labels that solve a particular historical problem, but rather to find precise, and as my colleague Katie Parker said “elegant” ways to communicate history arguments clearly and to also invite questions to propagate future analyses and arguments.

Some people I have discussed my concerns with have argued that is incumbent on the teachers and teaching assistants to ensure their students look beyond the explanations that they are given. While I agree, and do so in my seminars, it is clear that many undergraduate students feel that my approach to history implies extra work that cannot be accommodated given their course loads. As a result, often students won’t go beyond the simple answer presented by the label, or the framework to study the complexity. This raises my aspect of my concerns. After a recent academic event, a very senior historian and former naval officer opined much of the work produced by history students was essentially plagiarism due to the lack of original analysis and the reproduction of other historians arguments. Setting aside the implied academic misconduct, my colleague’s point was embodied by an encounter I recently had with one of my students, who handed me an essay for which they had clearly read many historical monographs and articles. However, the student neither used those sources to provide references for their personal analysis, nor provided a historiographical analysis. When I spoke to them in my office hours, they told me that they had been taught that history essays did were not supposed to include arguments from the student. On the same day, I was told that in the English academic tradition, the role of the lecture is not the transmission of information but rather the expression of the lecturer’s opinion. That practice can only contribute to a problem-solving approach to history.

I’m not arguing that historians shouldn’t create frameworks like The Military Revolution, just that the frameworks or labels should be a means, not an end. Instead, historians should create frameworks as a mechanism to organize their study and facilitate the creation of their arguments. The development of just such is the encapsulation of the experience of my PhD so far and my practice as a historian over the past several years. The difference between what I was attempting to do during my Masters research and my current Doctoral research is the link between my comprehension, practice and expression of the interdisciplinary aspects of my work. I was previously unsuccessful because although I had an innate understanding of the questions I was trying to ask I was not able to communicate to my professors, or the readers of my work what I was trying to do and their inability to understand my methodology rendered them unable to evaluate the arguments. In a very similar way, the most important changes that I’ve made within my PhD project was the movement from the use of a label to a description at the centre of my analytical framework.

Whether we recognize it or not, historians always create artificial frameworks to organize their arguments whether they be the sections of an essay, chapters of a thesis or a rubric. For my current study of the professionalization of the Royal Navy, I’ve created a number of these that describe, and break down the development processes. Unintentionally, this resulted in a loss of focus on the history itself Instead of describing the frameworks I use in my methodology, I placed them at the centre of my thesis statement. This affected the way that my chapters were being written, as well as the way that others understood my work. It became clear that this was an issue when I began receiving comments about concerns that my PhD was not “history” enough to defend successfully. I also struggled with the use of a label at the centre of my thesis. For months, I had argued that the Royal Navy was a corporate entity. I had needed to select a label because when I used the term ‘Royal Navy’ in my arguments I needed to communicate that I was not talking about men, or the materiel but something rather less tangible. Although this label did provide the required function, it did not accurately describe what the Royal Navy actually was. A colleague pointed out that the Royal Navy was never incorporated, cannot be attributed the same legal agency as a corporation. I needed to consider why I was actually using the term ‘corporate entity’, and as a result I decided that I didn’t need a label, I needed a description. By providing a description of the compound existence of Royal Navy instead, I found that I no longer needed to continually clarify what I meant when I used the label “Royal Navy” and my arguments because much easier to understand.

In both cases, the artificial frameworks that I created proved to be a distraction. Instead of simply being tools to help understand the analysis and arguments, they became arguments themselves. Their removal allowed me to refocus my work and clearly outline its place within the established historiography which in turn has resulted in the most recent responses to my work actually being on my arguments, where they should be.

Historians should be like the Borg; we should strive for perfection despite the knowledge that we’ll never read every single document or achieve the perfect turn of phrase to encapsulate a complex phenomenon. As we (historians) get better at describing what we are doing, the better we (historians) are able to analyze what we are seeing, and better able to communicate that analysis. But historians cannot forget that the result of historical study is not a final solution to a historical problem, but rather contributions to an ongoing discussion.

The Proof of Sod’s Law; or, the Curse of the Killer VIPI

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People sometimes ask me which I prefer writing, fiction or non-fiction. I love doing both, and both have their pros and cons, but one of the biggest differences between the two genres is that with fiction, of course, you don’t usually forget to put things into the book. Sure, you might deliberately cut a sub-plot or decide to edit out some extraneous character or other, but ultimately, a work of fiction is a totality: you don’t just somehow omit a crucial fact or plot twist by accident. (‘OMG, I forgot to put the dramatic first appearance of the Seigneur de Montnoir into The Mountain of Gold! Pulp the entire print run!’ This does not happen.) In non-fiction, however, the opposite is the case. No matter how comprehensive you think you’ve been, no matter how rigorous your research, you’re going to leave something out and/or make mistakes. The greater the scope of the book, the more omissions, the more mistakes.

Of course, sod’s law dictates that you only discover the omissions and mistakes when it’s too late to do anything about them. I recently received a letter questioning a couple of things I wrote about Sir Cloudesley Shovell in Pepys’s Navy, which was published five years ago, and pointing out that a picture that I’d claimed to be of Sir John Narbrough (whose memorial appeared in last week’s post) was actually of his patron, Sir Christopher Myngs. I knew I’d made a mistake with the picture pretty much as soon as the book was published (to be fair to myself, I was simply repeating a mistake originally made by Narbrough’s biographer), but the two points about Shovell provide an object lesson for authors of non-fiction. Firstly, never generalise about someone’s social status without double-checking it first; in the 17th century, about the only things that a landowner and a labourer had in common were several letters of the alphabet. Secondly, just because Sir Cloudesley Shovell calls someone ‘my brother John Shovell’ doesn’t necessarily mean that the person in question was literally his brother. Mark my words, getting this History business right is pretty damn tough.

These considerations are weighing heavily on me at the moment. When this post goes ‘live’, I’ll actually be plodding my way through the proofs of Britannia’s Dragon, and I’m already wondering what I’ve got wrong. The book deals with 2,000 years of one entire aspect of the history of an entire country, so I know there are bound to be mistakes in it – and as a large part of my readership is likely to be Welsh, I know that from St David’s to St Asaph and from Newport to Nefyn, my countrymen won’t be backward in coming forward to tell me what I’ve got wrong! And then there’s the other great concern with a non-fiction book: what have I left out, either because I only found out about it after the book went to press or because I never knew about it at all? Moreover, precisely how many people will be mortally offended by the omission?

Fortunately, I came across a couple of important facts or stories that demanded inclusion in the book when it was still just about possible to amend the ‘final’ text I’d already sent off to the publisher, so I managed to shoehorn in the odd extra sentence or paragraph here and there. Rather more significant was the Vitally Important Piece of Information (hereafter VIPI) that I only learned about after the book had already gone to design. Now, I’m not going to tell you what this VIPI is, just in case those people (and there will be some out there) who think that this particular VIPI is the most important VIPI in the whole of Welsh naval history start sticking pins in voodoo dolls of me. But fortunately, it’s usually still possible to work in some additional text at the proof stage, so hopefully nobody will ever know that the VIPI in question very nearly didn’t make it. But there’s still this horrible feeling lurking in my bones: the feeling that somewhere out there lurks the killer VIPI, the holy grail of Welsh naval VIPIs, about which someone, somewhere, will soon be writing a very polite but very aggrieved letter or email to me…

Still, maybe there’ll be a second edition. And even if there isn’t, at least it’s possible to post additions, amendments and grovelling apologies on my website or in this blog. In this day and age, the printed book is no longer necessarily an author’s final, definitive statement on a subject, and having enjoyed writing Britannia’s Dragon so much, I’m actually looking forward to the chance to revisit it and perhaps expand on some of the themes in it – just as long as there aren’t too many VIPIs lurking out there, ready to ambush me!

Mr Stark and Mr Staring

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Just when you’re starting to think ‘what shall I blog about this week?’, along comes good old David Starkey and solves the problem. (Actually, in true London bus fashion his intellectual soulmate Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Eton – sorry, Education – then came along too, but more of him anon.) For those who don’t know Dr Starkey, and presumably some of my overseas readers don’t, he’s a self-proclaimed ‘Tudor historian’ (see below) who regularly fronts TV programmes about, yes, the Tudors (and, increasingly, anything else too, such as his recent effort comparing John and Winston Churchill). He frequently comes out with controversial, if not downright inflammatory, right-wing remarks, so if you’re American, just imagine Rush Limbaugh with a doctorate in History. Anyway, this week Dr Starkey has come out and savaged the entirety of historical novelists, claiming that it’s ludicrous to suggest they can possess any authority whatsoever about the Tudor period. Of course, it’s possible that part of his outburst is due to the fact that Hilary Mantel’s and Philippa Gregory’s appearances as ‘talking heads’ in a new series about the Tudors presumably reduced the amount of air time devoted to the talking head of Dr Starkey himself, but let’s leave to one side both that possibility and any thought that he might be secretly jealous of the sales figures enjoyed by Hil and Phil compared to those for his own tomes, all of which, of course, have been written for the disinterested pursuit of academic truth rather than for such sordid commercial considerations as selling absolutely shedloads of copies.

(Before moving on, by the way, could I just say how nice it is to see yet another expensive new BBC series about the Tudors coming our way? After all, they get so little coverage on TV compared to the likes of, say, Chinese history, the eighteenth century, or the history of women; just like the equally neglected Nazis, in fact.)

To return to Dr Starkey and his condemnation of historical novelists. Now, I, too, am a mere scribbler of what a friend of mine describes as ‘pretending books’, and thus have no authority whatsoever when it comes to talking about the past; unlike David Starkey, of course, I don’t have to my name a doctorate in History from Oxbridge and several weighty, critically acclaimed non-fiction history books based on rigorous research and published with full academic apparatus.

Oh, wait I minute, I do, actually.

And there’s perhaps the most important of all the many flaws in Dr Starkey’s analysis: the underlying, intellectually arrogant, assumption that only ‘qualified historians’ should pontificate on the past. This ignores the fact that an increasing number of historical novelists have credentials as academic historians that are every bit as sound as Dr Starkey’s, and many others research their novels with a thoroughness that would not disgrace a PhD candidate. Conversely, I know many ‘qualified historians’ whose grasp of the past is actually remarkably weak, often because they can’t see the trees of past lives for the wood of the sources they work on. Perhaps the most revealing of all Dr Starkey’s comments is ‘they [historical novelists] have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources’. Au contraire: they probably have pretty much exactly the same level of authority as a ‘Tudor historian’ commenting on, say, the marriage of William and Kate, Scottish independence, the 2011 riots, or, umm, the Churchills.

It’s interesting, too, to see that Dr Starkey claims he can’t read Mantel’s Cromwell novels (and presumably other books set in the same period, like C J Sansom’s Shardlake series), ‘but that’s because I’m a Tudor historian’. And of course, Tudor historians (actually ‘historians of the Tudor age’, Dr S; ‘Tudor historians’ were people alive at the time) would be intellectually consistent in such matters, and would therefore never sully themselves by, say, watching Bette Davis and Errol Flynn hamming it up in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, or going to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s Richard III, that shamefully inaccurate portrayal of the beginning of the Tudor age by a populist hack author of the sixteenth-century equivalent of Mills and Boon. I’m a ‘Stuart historian’, as Dr S would put it, but I have no problem reading novels set in the Stuart period. Indeed, I have no problem writing them, either. It’s called ‘suspension of disbelief’, Dr Starkey: being able to distinguish fiction and history by flicking a mental switch and moving contentedly from one to the other, treating each on its own merits.

Another digression to conclude: it’s a sign of how far knowledge of history has declined in the population at large that, these days, it would be simply impossible to make a film called The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Audiences would probably assume it was some sort of smutty sex-laden epic about a girl called Liz encountering the entire population of the nation’s favourite county.

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And so to Michael Gove. The Secretary of State is clearly quite a jolly chap – witness his participation in The Guardian‘s splendid April Fools spoof this year – but his proposed new national curriculum for history continues to stir up a hornet’s nest, and this week he responded in vigorous fashion. The headline came from his assault on teachers who got GCSE students to compare the Nazi leadership to Mr Men characters; or so it was reported, despite the fact that as Gove tacitly admitted, this was simply a resource that had been produced, with no evidence that it had actually been used in a classroom. (Having taught GCSE students ever since the examination began, I would never, ever have contemplated trivialising the Nazi regime in such a way, and I know no History teacher who would dream of doing so.)

Inevitably, Gove’s comments led to both satirical counter-attacks and spirited defences of materials that get students interested in history, no matter how left-field they might seem to be. For what it’s worth, I’m on the side of the spirited defenders. I once started teaching the Spanish Inquisition by showing my students the scene from History of the World, Part 1, with Mel Brooks as Torquemada (and, yes, a bit later on we had Monty Python too – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’). I often introduced sixth formers to the perils of historiographical debate by showing them some of the Newman and Baddiel ‘History Today’ sketches, which were painfully true to some of the older historians that I knew. Such strategies aren’t trivialisation, Mr Gove; they are ways of engaging students’ interest, from which one can proceed to the rigorous teaching of hard facts that you evidently crave so much. In fact, this is pretty much exactly the same principle as those snappy little videos that political party conferences play to get the audience quiet and attentive before, say, the Secretary of State for Education comes on to speak to it. And if you don’t believe that such strategies are needed with, say, a bunch of unengaged fifteen-year-olds on a wet Friday afternoon, a look at David Starkey’s catastrophic classroom performance in the series Jamie’s Dream School should disabuse you.

Ultimately, the crucial fact that the likes of both Michael Gove and David Starkey entirely ignore is that history can no longer simply be handed down to the ignorant masses from an Olympian height by enlightened pedagogues, whose words said masses should absorb immediately, silently and gratefully. So please, let’s stop obsessing about and rubbishing some of the means by which children, students and readers develop an interest in history; let’s just rejoice in the fact that many still do somehow manage to acquire such an interest, despite all the obstacles that politicians, ‘professional’ historians and, yes, many teachers too, place in their way. And if it takes Disney’s Robin Hood, Mel Brooks or Wolf Hall to get someone to that goal, then so be it.

The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 1

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In the mid-1670s, [Samuel] Pepys and other members of the administration became increasingly alarmed at the navy’s numerical inferiority to the French and Dutch. In 1665, Charles II’s fleet had contained 102 major ships, compared to 81 Dutch and 36 French; ten years later, the picture had changed alarmingly…[Figures that Pepys presented to Parliament in April 1675 demonstrated that Britain now had 77 ships of 40 guns and upwards, compared with 85 French and 108 Dutch.]…At least twenty new ships of the first to third rates were required, and the number soon rose to thirty. 

At first, it proved impossible to convince Parliament of the extent of the problem and of the need to vote huge sums of money for the building programme necessary to remedy it. MPs were deeply suspicious of what they saw as a crypto-Catholic, Francophile court, and Pepys was shouted down in the parliamentary sessions of 1675. One backbencher protested that ‘ships must have been built of gold at these rates’, and like many critics of defence spending in later years, he grumbled that much of the naval budget was actually being spent on the salaries of bureaucrats. Another warned that they should ‘not provide here such a number of ships, as not to come here again’. However, the year 1676, when Parliament did not sit, saw a series of stunning French naval successes in the Mediterranean, which proved conclusively that Louis’ fleet was not the paper tiger that some MPs had complacently assumed it to be. When Parliament reconvened in February 1677, the mood was decisively different. ‘The king of France’s great fleet is not built to take Vienna’, one MP observed presciently, and on 5 March Parliament voted £600,000 to build one first rate of 1,400 tons, nine second rates of 1,100, and twenty thirds of 900.

That was how, in Pepys’s Navy, I described the genesis of the ‘thirty new ships’ building programme of the 1670s and 1680s. The ships that emerged were iconic in many ways. They included the first British warships to bear the names Britannia and Neptune. Some of them survived for many years: making allowance for the nature of the eighteenth century practice of ‘rebuilding’ ships, which often produced essentially new ships, the Neptune of 1683 was nominally the same ship as the Torbay that fought in Admiral Rodney’s fleet at the battle of the Saintes ninety-nine years later. Several of the ‘thirty ships’ were wrecked in dramatic circumstances, and their wrecks provide some of the most exciting and important dives around the British coast: the Coronation, wrecked off Plymouth in 1691, is the subject of ongoing study, while the Stirling Castle, Restoration and Northumberland, lost on the Goodwin Sands during the Great Storm of 1703, have produced a large number of fascinating artefacts that have enhanced our understanding of the seventeenth century navy.

However, my choice of theme for this blog was determined by the recent ‘reappearance’ of another of the thirty ships, the Anne, built at Chatham by Phineas Pett the younger and launched in 1678. She was a prestigious ship, and in 1687 she was the flagship of Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, Vice-Admiral of England and an illegitimate son of King Charles II, during a cruise in the Mediterranean which included a visit to Malta; Grafton’s flag captain was Cloudesley Shovell, and also aboard the ship was Henry Fitzjames, illegitimate son of King James II and Arabella Churchill (the sister of the future Duke of Marlborough). I described this event in an essay for the Transactions of the Naval Dockyards Society, v (2009), a description which inspired Richard Endsor, the leading authority on the design and construction of late-17th century British warships, to paint the Anne lying in Malta’s Grand Harbour:

Grafton’s fleet, comprising the Anne, the brand new fourth rate Sedgemoor, and the ancient 32-gun fifth rate Pearl, had been substantially reinforced for the occasion. The ageing 48-gun fourth rate Hampshire, the Crown, and the Mermaid from the Sallee squadron had arrived in Malta a few days earlier, as had the Isabella Yacht, the duke’s personal despatch- and pleasure boat…Grafton’s arrival in the Grand Harbour was greeted by a salute of at least sixty-one guns, [and] the fleet proceeded to stay at Malta for ten days [which included an interview with the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta]…

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On 30 June 1690 the Anne was part of the combined Anglo-Dutch fleet that fought the French in the Battle of Beachy Head, a controversial action during which the French gained the upper hand. The Anne, commanded by John Tyrrell, was driven ashore at Pett Level near Hastings and burned. However, the lower part of the hull survived in the sand, and parts of it are exposed from time to time. This year, the timbers of the Anne have reappeared for the first time in sixteen years, as this video demonstrates. As Richard Endsor has written,Anne

This year the warship Anne near Pett Level is exposed to a greater extent than has ever been known in living memory. All the sand is removed from the beach leaving the remains some 70cm above clay ground level. At the time of sighting the tide was not particularly deep and the gully in which she lies did not have time to drain properly so that only about half the ship above ground level was visible…The Anne is very exposed and vulnerable and we can only expect her rapid deterioration. It is therefore essential on this once in a lifetime opportunity that the remains be accurately recorded as soon as possible before their destruction. The whole of the bottom of the Anne survives undamaged and because she is in her original, as built condition, probably represents the only [British] seventeenth century warship that can be recorded to demonstrate how they were built. 

Richard’s reconstruction drawing indicates the extent of the surviving remains in relation to the original appearance of the ship.

Anne

A team based at the Shipwreck Museum, Hastings, and led by Jacqui Stanford and Kimberley Monk, is working to record the wreck as thoroughly as possible; updates on progress will be posted in this blog and in my Twitter feed, and I hope to get down to Pett Level myself some time during the next few months to see the Anne for myself. However, a word of caution to anyone thinking of doing the same – the Anne is protected by law, and whilst visitors may view the ship, they may not touch or remove anything from it.

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Next week I’ll be blogging about the exciting project to build a full-sized replica of the first of the ‘thirty ships’, the Lenox. That post, like this one, will have significant input from Richard Endsor – I’m very grateful to Richard for allowing me to quote him at length and to reproduce several of his stunning illustrations.