Historical research

Of Kings, Car Parks and Bandwagons

07/02/2013 by J D Davies

After the discovery of the remains of King Richard III, it seems to be obligatory for every history blogger, Tweeter and Facebooker to have their say on the matter, so for what it’s worth, here are a few of my thoughts. First, bouquets to Leicester University’s archaeologists for a stunning piece of work; second, brickbats to Channel 4 for producing such a dire documentary about it, analysed in this perceptive and funny account of ‘Richard III day’ . (As one Tweeter noted, though, the C-list status of some of those involved in the programme can probably be explained by the fact that no-one actually expected the dig to find anything, so why deploy the big guns for what was almost certain to be a non-event?) But no sooner has the dust settled on the previous set of big questions – is it really him? was he a hunchback? just how big was his parking fine? – than battle is being joined over the next set, notably where and how should he be buried.

Before I jump on the bandwagon and join the massed ranks of those who’ve been pontificating on these matters, I should issue a few disclaimers. Firstly, I am not and never have been a member of the Richard III Society, to coin a phrase. I think members of the society have done a tremendous job both in funding the successful dig and, in the longer term, in revising historical assessments of many aspects of the fifteenth century. But as the documentary demonstrated, there’s sometimes been a tendency for some of its members to reject the historical record, to twist the facts, and to indulge in unhistorical wishful thinking; maybe there’s already a fundamentalist breakaway group out there who still can’t accept that their hero really did have a curved spine and are convinced that the skeleton must have been planted by a conspiracy of David Starkey, the Illuminati and Barack Obama. On the other hand, and despite sharing Welsh origins with them, I have little time for the Tudors, too. Frankly, I spent far too many years teaching the long haul from Henry VII to Elizabeth I to have much residual affection for any of them (besides, I’ve always preferred the Stuarts anyway). Moreover, the unwillingness of many Tudor historians to even consider new thinking about Richard III is, alas, typical of the complacent arrogance that characterises too many university history departments, whose members are often unwilling even to consider left-field thinking from outside their own ranks. For example, many years ago I used to show my students a televised trial of Richard III. The most convincing witnesses, and the most compelling evidence, came from the prosecution; but the jury acquitted, and as my students invariably said, that had to have been due largely to the unfortunate performance of the selfsame Dr Starkey, whose formidable command of the evidence was offset by his brusque manner, now a little (but only a little) mellowed by age, and unconcealed contempt for the defence case. So with all of that said…

1/ Where should he be buried? Within the last couple of days, the citizens of York have launched an e-petition insisting he should be buried there, and unsurprisingly, Leicester, already designated as the burial place by the Ministry of Justice, has launched a counter-petition. (A shame that Leicester City and York City are in different divisions of the Football League, really: it would be quite jolly to watch their fans arguing over their relative claims to bury a medieval monarch – ‘One Richard of York! There’s only one Richard of York!’ – rather than querying the eyesight and parentage of the referee.) Of course, Leicester and York can deploy formidably big battalions on their sides – large populations, ferocious civic pride, local councils keen to boost tourism, several MPs each, and so on. No such resources are available to another potential candidate for the royal burial, the tiny village of Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, although a very few advocates for its case can be found on Twitter. Arguably, though, Fotheringhay has a better claim than either of the heavyweight cities: it’s where Richard was born, and where his parents are buried. The church was enlarged partly to serve as the mausoleum of the House of York, and although half of it disappeared in the reign of Richard’s great-nephew Henry VIII, it’s still a remarkably impressive and beautiful building. So before it all ends in tears, with enraged Yorkists rampaging through Leicester and vice-versa, might it not be worth at least considering the merits of an attractive and highly appropriate neutral location?

2/ How should he be buried? The debate over whether Richard should be buried according to Anglican or Catholic rites began almost as soon as the press conference at Leicester ended. I have no agenda here – again, I’m not and never have been an Anglican or a Roman Catholic. However, I think it’s worth pointing out that there is a precedent, which so far seems to have been almost entirely ignored or forgotten. In 1982 the remains of the Tudor warship Mary Rose, lost in 1545, were raised from the seabed, and the bones of one sailor were later reburied in Portsmouth Cathedral. I watched the service, and it was remarkably moving. But he was given a Catholic burial, according to the medieval Latin Sarum Rite (thanks to the Portsmouth Cathedral Twitter account via Ian Mortimer for that last piece of information). So if that was felt to be appropriate for an ordinary citizen of pre-Reformation England, why should it not be thought appropriate for an English head of state who was known to be deeply devout and who unquestioningly acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope?

3/ Should it be a state funeral? At the end of the day, this is all a question of semantics, although no doubt many in the Richard III Society won’t regard it as such. After all, if you did a straw poll in any high street in Britain and asked people if they thought Princess Diana had a state funeral, I suspect the vast majority would say yes. But she didn’t: she had a public funeral with royal honours. It’s entirely likely that politically correct and historically illiterate politicians and civil servants will oppose a state funeral, partly on grounds of cost and partly because of negative perceptions of Richard’s reputation. (If you think I’m being too harsh on our leaders, I refer you to the Deputy Prime Minister’s recent display of woeful ignorance about the history and significance of the Duchy of Lancaster.) However, there is no absolutely incontrovertible evidence of Richard’s guilt on any charge – and state, or at least full royal, honours have been accorded many times to more conclusively awful individuals. There is also a long royal tradition of showing respect to the remains of deposed or discredited predecessors: Richard himself had Henry VI reburied in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, while George III paid for a spectacular Canova monument to the Jacobite pretenders in St Peter’s, Rome, and Queen Victoria paid for new tombs for her undistinguished ancestors Robert III and James III of Scots in Paisley and Cambuskenneth Abbeys respectively. (The exceptions to the rule were the Tudors and Charles II, although there were obviously extenuating circumstances for the latter’s violence towards the remains of Oliver Cromwell.) Other countries provide many other potential parallels: the remains of Tsar Nicholas II were buried with full honours in the Peter and Paul Cathedral, St Petersburg, in 1998, while in 2011, and despite the fact that Austria had been a republic for 93 years, the Archduke Otto, last Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian empire, was given the traditional funeral rites of the Imperial Habsburgs in Vienna. Ultimately, too, Richard III was the last King of England to die in battle, so to deny him at least a significant level of royal and military honours would be both an injustice to him and an act of singular disrespect to the history of the country itself. Thus, and regardless of whether one is a Ricardian or a ‘Tudorista’, anyone with a love of history should be supporting a spectacular royal funeral – a Catholic one, with the Latin mass – for King Richard III.

Stasis

10/12/2012 by J D Davies

A strange thing happens to me in secondhand bookshops these days. Time was when I couldn’t go into one without leaving laden down with books. Now, though, I invariably browse the shelves and think ‘got that…got that…don’t need that…got that…’. I used to have a lengthy ‘wants list’ on Abebooks, but now it’s virtually empty. So at some point in the last few years, I clearly attained a bookish version of a state of statis. There are three obvious reasons for this. Firstly, I’ve now finally got all the books I need for my day-to-day research on my own shelves – and plenty more besides. Calendars of State Papers, Domestic? Check – vast green volumes, most of which I bought for a pittance in Hay-on-Wye many years ago. Even the incredibly rare Historical Manuscripts Commission Ormonde Manuscripts, New Series – all eight huge volumes worth? Check – bought from a bookshop in Galway a few years ago, with yours truly getting in just before two other potential purchasers who were slightly less quick off the mark. And so on: the complete Pepys Diary, dozens of Navy Records Society volumes, etcetera, etcetera. Secondly, my switch to becoming primarily a writer of fiction means I don’t need so many really obscure books anyway: at the end of the day, do I really, really need all those volumes of HMC Ormonde? Ah, but then, one of the ideas on the ‘unbelievably long term possible projects list’ is a biography of Thomas, Earl of Ossory, for which the HMC volumes would be essential, so they’d better stay just in case I decide to write that book in 10 years time… Thirdly, of course, there’s the space issue. The Lair has reached a state of stasis by default: it’s full. There’s an Overflow Lair in the house, and that’s almost full too. Not to mention the stuff that’s been relegated to the loft. So there’s the concern that just one more book, even the slimmest paperback, would have an effect similar to that last After Eight mint on Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life; which is one reason why quite a few, but still by no means all, of my purchases in the category ‘mindless fiction to chill out to’ go onto the Kindle. Hang on, though. Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, are now all online…as are the Navy Records Society volumes…so couldn’t I free up a huge amount of shelf space and make a fair bit of money by getting rid of them? Ah, but they look so good on the shelves…and there’s something particularly satisfying about opening an ancient tome to check a reference in it…and they’re like old friends, really…

But there’s another factor that partly explains the drying up of the once-constant flow of books into my tender loving care and onto my straining bookshelves. In the last ten years or so, many of my favourite secondhand bookshops have bitten the dust. There used to be a glorious one in Stourport-on-Severn, the Worcestershire canal town from which one set of my great-grandparents hailed, which for some reason always had a terrific range of naval books and really good fiction first editions in nearly mint condition. There was another in Bridge of Allan near Stirling, where I picked up for a song many of the books upon which I based much of the research for Blood of Kings. Less salubrious, but always worth spending an hour in, was the ramshackle old bookshop in Dillwyn Street, Swansea, which had a vast, dark, damp back room, truly a land that Health and Safety forgot, where I picked up many classic titles, some of which were even free of mould; a few have survived long enough to still find a place on my shelves today, notably the more obscure sequels to The Three Musketeers, such as Louise de la Valliere and The Viscomte de Bragelonne.

But enough nostalgia; not only is the past a foreign country, you can’t obtain an entry visa for love nor money. There are still some amazing secondhand bookshops around the country, though: honourable runner-up mentions to Dunkeld Antiques, Ystwyth Books in Aberystwyth and Eric Moore in Hitchin, but here’s my completely subjective ‘top three’ –

3/ The Brazen Head Bookshop, Burnham Market, Norfolk – So here’s a recipe for a perfect day for anyone who loves the sea and naval history: morning, walking along the vast and frequently empty Holkham Beach; early afternoon and a couple of miles away, browsing in the Brazen Head, a wonderful old building which always has a great stock of naval and historical books as well as an excellent local history section; late afternoon into evening, paying respects to Nelson in the church at nearby Burnham Thorpe, where his father was rector and lies buried along with various other family members, followed by food and drink in the Lord Nelson pub, one of the comparatively few in Britain that still has no bar and where Nelson allegedly entertained his neighbours on his last night before setting out to take command of the Agamemnon in 1794. Bliss.

2/ Pennyfarthing, North Berwick – The words ‘quirky’ and ‘eclectic’ might have been invented for this place. North Berwick in East Lothian is always worth spending time in: it has another of my favourite beaches, one of my favourite whisky shops, and just down the road is my joint favourite castle, Tantallon. (The other, before anyone asks, is Carreg Cennen in Carmarthenshire.) And then there’s Pennyfarthing, barely a stone’s throw from the ruins of the old kirk where the notorious witch trials of 1590 took place. An odd range of antiques rubs shoulders with a weird and wonderful stock of books, with Scottish history shelves that always contain titles of interest, and a top shelf which houses Nigel Tranter first editions, including occasionally some signed ones (he lived just a few miles down the coast). I’m not sure if it’s still the case, but until fairly recently Pennyfarthing also had a strong candidate for the oldest and deafest shop assistant in the country!

1/ Harrowden Books of Finedon – This is how secondhand bookshops should be. Small but densely packed with a wonderful range of books, a highly knowledgeable and friendly owner who’s always looking to try out new ideas (e.g. ghost walks!) and to freshen things up, rather than presiding over the same old stock in the same old places on the shelves from one year to the next, as is the case in so many shops – but before you all rush up there and crush Mike in the stampede, you need to plan your expedition with military precision, for the shop is fiendishly difficult to find in Finedon, which itself is fiendishly difficult to find in Northamptonshire, which in turn is fiendishly difficult to find in the UK if you’re one of my American or Australian readers. But for those wishing to make a day of it, Harrowden Books can be the pinnacle of a glorious ‘golden triangle’ of bookshop touring, taking in the excellent shops in Uppingham and Stamford on the way to the delights of Finedon.

Oh well, enough for today – time to go and figure out how I can try to free up some space for the books that are likely to come my way at Christmas…

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Next week will be my final blog post of 2012, and it’ll be a 17th century naval seasonal special!

The End

03/12/2012 by J D Davies

It’s good to be back after a two week break, although ‘break’ is probably the wrong word – most of that time having been spent frantically finishing off Britannia’s Dragon, which has now gone off to the publisher! This is my fourth non-fiction historical book, so I think I’m now probably qualified to pass on some of my experiences of and reflections about the genre. Having said that, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the very many more prolific authors out there, notably the astonishing Jeremy Black, Professor of History at Exeter University, who’s published more than one hundred full-length books to date (not to mention countless articles). But for what they’re worth, and with apologies to Lawrence of Arabia, here are seven pillars of wisdom that I’ve garnered over the years.

1/ It’s never complete – So you’ve read all the sources, been to all the relevant archives, and covered everything? Oh no you haven’t. Sorry to sound like a panto script, but you really, really haven’t. Sod’s law will dictate that some time after the book goes to press and before it ends up in the obscurity of the ‘remaindered’ list, you’ll come across some gold-plated piece of evidence, or an entire previously unknown archive in an obscure library, that should have gone into your book. So does the inevitability of this happening mean that you should delay finishing it? No, for that way madness lies – or at least, the closest thing to madness for an author of non-fiction, namely not actually finishing the book (or even not writing it in the first place). I know several very distinguished historians who have either been working on their magnum opus for twenty or thirty years, or who never got round to writing it at all. There are considerably more than fifty shades of grey between this extreme and the other one (which is, fortuitously, Black): above all, set a reasonable timescale, cover as much as you can in that time, but then, one day, say ‘that’s it’ and declare the book finished. In reality, no book is ever truly ‘finished’ – it could be expanded, improved, have that annoying new evidence which turned up the day after publication incorporated into it, and so forth. But unless you’re lucky and get the chance of a revised second edition, the author’s equivalent of the director’s cut in film-making, your tome will be your final word on the subject, and the important thing is to get it out there, not worry about what other evidence might be lurking in the dark recesses of some archive or other. To coin a paraphrase, the cemeteries are full of the authors of unwritten books; make sure you’re not one of them.

2/ Be ruthless – Every word you’ve written is precious, every example you’ve cited is essential, every sub-theme you’ve developed is absolutely vital to the book. No, they’re not. Much of the angst that develops between authors of historical non-fiction and their publishers is due to the former’s belief that the publisher should be grateful for every single one of their 500,000 words on peasant life in Upper Silesia from 1848 to 1850 and should thus publish the whole thing with no cuts whatsoever. Remember that this is something you want people to read without losing the will to live, so after you finish the first draft, be brutal with yourself (or do what I did and move in with a veteran Fleet Street journalist and editor to whom the ruthless pruning of purple prose is as natural as breathing). Blood of Kings started out at nearly 180,000 words, but was closer to 110,000 by the time it went to the publisher. It was difficult to lose many of the 70,000 words that got culled, but it ended up as a better book; and taking the metaphorical chainsaw to your own text is much better than having a publisher’s editor do it for you.

3/ Prepare to be criticised – You’ve written the book, it’s been published, you’ve had some nice reviews on Amazon and perhaps, if you’re lucky, in one or two of the historical journals. But then you start getting the letters and emails, or the other kinds of reviews… These come on two levels, the micro and the macro. The micro criticisms tend to come from those who know a huge amount about a very tiny aspect of your subject, and who obtain a sense of delighted fulfilment from pointing out that you’ve left out fact X, or clearly didn’t know about obscure letter Y in archive Z. The macro criticisms will come from more august members of the profession, who will ‘take issue with your methodology’ (the historian’s polite euphemism for ‘you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’) or will shoehorn you into a philosophical straitjacket that you never knew fitted you; one of the more surreal of the (fortunately very few) criticisms of Gentlemen and Tarpaulins came from an exceptionally eminent left-wing maritime historian who accused me explicitly of being a Thatcherite, which was news to me and to every ballot box I’d voted in since 1979. But all of this comes with the territory. Once you publish, you’ve put yourself out there, and simple human nature dictates that not everyone will agree with what you say. Above all, remember that no matter how much criticism you get, yours isn’t the worst book that’s ever been written. It doesn’t even come close to being the worst. As for which is the worst book ever written…now that sounds like a topic for a Twitter thread or a series of blogs.

4/ Prepare to be ripped off – Ah, you want illustrations in your book? You particularly like that picture at, say, the Imperial National Naval Maritime Warfare Archives Museum? (Names have been changed to protect the guilty.) Then you need to licence the reprographic rights. Be prepared to part with a limb or two, because the fees charged by such institutions make Mafia protection rackets or pay-offs to BBC executives look like a bunch of elderly grannies having a little flutter at their local whist drive. Moreover, the entire basis for charging such fees is morally and (probably) legally dubious – after all, in many cases the institutions concerned don’t actually hold the copyright to this material at all. So three cheers for the British Museum, which licences the items in its wonderful collection for free. Let me repeat that: free. So, for example, you could spend between £50 and £100, perhaps even more, licensing an image of a painting of Nelson from the INNMWAM, or you could get the engraving taken from the same painting from the BM website for nothing. Will your readers damn you for this? Don’t be silly, they just want to see what Nelson looks like, they won’t think any more highly of you if they knew you’d spent a lot of money to show them the original instead of a copy.

5/ Write right – History is the most wonderful, lively and exciting of all subjects, but few things depress me more than the sorts of history books which try their hardest to conceal all of that beneath layers of treacle-like prose and deliberately obscure, quasi-scientific jargon. We historians aren’t scientists, economists or sociologists, for heaven’s sake; even if you really are writing about the peasants of Upper Silesia between 1848 and 1850, don’t you owe it to them to write about their lives in the most interesting and lively way you possibly can? All of this applies even if your book is being published by some ‘distinguished’ academic publisher or other, who will pay you no advance, produce no more than three or four hundred copies of your book, and charge anyone tempted to buy it £50 or £60 for the privilege. But that, as they say, is another story…

6/ Be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster – Many writers have described in detail the emotions that surge like the tides during the actual writing process: the flashes of inspiration, the long hours of writer’s block, the sense that it’s no good, the sense that it’s the greatest book since the Bible, the endless coffee (or Scotch, depending on one’s preference), and so forth. But having just finished Britannia’s Dragon, I’d like to focus on one specific moment in the process: the one I’m at now, namely the end. The completion of a book is always a very strange time, simultaneously a cause for celebration and also somehow slightly depressing. After all, this thing that’s had such a powerful hold over your life for so long suddenly isn’t there any more. In one sense, it feels a bit like a death in the family; on the other hand, one would hope that not too many deaths in anybody’s family would be accompanied by the overwhelming sense of relief that also accompanies the completion of a book. Which leads me on to the most important piece of advice of all to anyone who’s made it all the way through and finally typed ‘the end’ on the last page…

7/ So finally – Celebrate! You’ve just written a book, for heaven’s sake. Do you know how few people ever get to do that? At the very least, your mum will be proud of you. Plus think about just how many hours, days, months, even years, you’ve devoted to this. Doesn’t that effort deserve to have a glass or two raised in its honour? Then take a week off – longer, if you can manage it. Recharge your batteries. Reflect. Watch absolutely mindless dross on TV. Concentrate on the other things that have been pushed onto the back burner for the duration of writing the book: real life, for example. Because soon enough, something – at first no more than a germ of a glimmer of a half-formed thought – will start to grow somewhere inside your brain. This will gradually work its way to the front of your consciousness, by which time it will have a name. It will be called ‘the next book’. And so it all begins again…

Repository Bingo, Part 1

10/09/2012 by J D Davies

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the start of my research into the seventeenth century navy – or at least, the formal, funded, full-time student start, as I’d been tentatively examining the subject during the previous couple of years, when I was still teaching in Cornwall. Apart from the fact that realising it’s been thirty years is making me feel really, really old, one of the great pleasures of spending all that time on research has been that it’s enabled me to work in some of Britain’s (and the world’s) greatest repositories and libraries. So I thought one of the things I’d do to celebrate my ‘thirtieth’ is to share my experiences of those institutions – their good points, their quirks, and their sheer infuriating inanities. I’ve also visited very many of the local archives and record offices in Britain, from Perth to Truro and from Haverfordwest to Norwich, so next week I’ll try to produce a highly personal ‘top five’ (or possibly ten). I won’t produce my bottom five on the grounds that I may well want to work in those places again and don’t want to be banned…

So here we go: in alphabetical order, just so that nobody thinks this is in some sort of pecking order, here’s my ‘rough guide’ to ten places where I’ve spent many, many hours during the last thirty years. Just one or two good or bad points about each, but in the case of some of them, I could go on and on about the bad points. And on. And on. (For example, readers will note that I’ve passed no comment on the staff of individual institutions, again on the basis that I really do want to visit them again. But with hand on heart, I can say that nine of these repositories have staff who are unfailingly courteous, helpful and efficient. The tenth seems to have recruited all the finalists from the Britain’s Grumpiest Librarian and Archivist Competition. I leave it to regular users of these institutions to speculate on which that might be; as the old saying goes, ‘no names, no pack drill’.)

The Bodleian Library, Oxford (above right) – Good: You’ve died and gone to Heaven. That’s certainly what working in the medieval Duke Humfrey’s Library feels like; a simply astonishing workplace, and it’s just a privilege to walk in there (where the tourists cannot go!), let alone to sit at desks amid the rows of ancient volumes. If you want to get a sense of what it would have been like to be a monk working on an illuminated manuscript in the Middle Ages, there’s no better place. Bad: If you want to get a sense of what it would have been like to be a monk working on an illuminated manuscript in the Middle Ages, there’s no better place – i.e. the hard seats, the lack of space, the lack of light in winter, the deathly glares from one’s fellow monks/readers when one breaks the vow of silence (Middle Ages: inadvertent audible meditation upon the Lamentations of Jeremiah; today: squeaky shoes).
The British Library – Good: It has everything. Or almost everything, at least when it comes to printed books. And the work surfaces are the way work surfaces should be: spacious, well lit, and comfortably padded. Always has exhibitions that are worth seeing, plus a great shop, plus my favourite chillax space in any repository, the relatively little known roof terrace on the third floor. Bad: The ordering system and manuscripts catalogue seem to have been designed by a malevolent warlock trained at the Lord Voldemort School of Infuriating Pedantry. The maximum of ten items a day is a perpetual source of irritation, as is the overcrowding – a product of typical British forward planning, i.e. build something that was widely perceived as too small even when it first opened, then relax the admissions criteria and admit floods of undergraduates too. The consequence – get there before 10 or else witness examples of Desk Rage, with otherwise mild-mannered academics battling for the last remaining spaces (apart, of course, from the ones in the row which contains the weird old guy who snores and who no-one wants to sit next to. And no, that’s not me.)
Cambridge University Library – Good: There’s just so much on open shelves! OK, the place is vast and rambling – one keeps expecting to come across confused bearded creatures who’ve been roaming the corridors for years, a la the Flying Dutchman, trying to find a particular book or the exit – but CUL treats its readers like grown-ups by actually putting the books where people can read them. Bad: I’ve tried to eliminate my innate Oxford bias here, but it has to be said: sorry, Cambridge, your library really does look like a very, very big crematorium.
The Imperial War Museum (first visit only last week, so I’m very much a newbie there) – Good: A state-of-the-art online catalogue, plus documents delivered to one’s desk, rather than having to queue up behind ten people whose requests have gone missing and/or who have fiendishly obscure queries that the issuing staff can’t answer; this is the way academic study should be. Bad: the air con has clearly been designed to give those studying winter campaigns in Russia a stronger sense of empathy.
The National Archives, Kew (above) – Good: Spacious, modern, well laid-out, rapid document delivery times, plus of course an absolute treasure trove of amazing original documents. I’ve spent many a happy hour ploughing through boxes of filthy seventeenth-century manuscripts, often in the knowledge that probably nobody has looked at the same material for a century or maybe longer. Bad: It looks like a Dr Who location, and it’s in Kew. Now, Kew is a very nice place – gardens, palace, river, etc. But to get to it means either a journey literally to the outer limits of the most obscure branch of the District Line (why are there always far more Ealing Broadway trains than ones to Richmond?) or negotiating the North Circular Road, a prospect far more daunting than any of Dante’s circles of Hell. And why is it that wherever I sit, even in the ‘quiet area’, I always seem to be sitting too close to the grannies who want to chat about their latest discoveries in the family history of their Great Uncle Herbert?
The National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh -Good: Location, location, location. At lunchtime, you can cross the road and go straight into the cafe where J K Rowling originally wrote Harry Potter, which is pretty much directly opposite. A few yards up the road and turn right – St Giles Cathedral and the Royal Mile. A few yards up the road and turn left – Edinburgh Castle. Bad; The manuscript reading room is small and windowless. As for the manuscript catalogue, don’t get me started. (The National Archives of Scotland scores on location, too, with the main building being at the end of Princes Street, right next to Waverley station, and with some of Edinburgh’s best pubs immediately adjacent to it. The bad thing about it – it’s in two buildings almost a mile apart, and invariably half the stuff I want is in one of them, half in the other. And in the last few years, getting from one to the other has involved finding a way through the vast, endless roadworks generated by that masterpiece of civic incompetence and urban carnage known as the new Edinburgh tram system…)
The National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth – Good: OK, cards on the table, this is my favourite repository anywhere, and not just because it’s Welsh. Airy, loads of space, pretty efficient document delivery, and best of all, a stunning view across the town and castle ruins to the sea. Sitting there at dusk in autumn or winter is an experience to die for. Bad: It’s in Aberystwyth.
The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich – Good: Location, location, location again. World Heritage buildings in a stunning setting, plus a vast collection of material of all sorts, plus state-of-the-art digital catalogues and other study aids. Bad: Tourists. School parties. Endless film crews. But above all…the reprographics charges. To be fair, I could have made pretty much the same criticism of the Bodleian, the British Library, and several others on this list, but having dented my bank balance quite significantly when funding the illustrations for Pepys’s Navy, I have a particular gripe about the NMM. Maybe one day the Office of Fair Trading will investigate repositories’ reprographics charges, and their claims to hold the copyright for works of art and manuscripts when they actually don’t…but I won’t hold my breath.
The Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge (left) – Good: Working on Pepys’s original manuscripts, surrounded by his entire library, in the bookcases built to his specification, all still shelved in exactly the order he originally established, in the building specifically built to house them all: let’s face it, it just doesn’t get much better than that. If you don’t feel inspired by the spirit of Pepys and the seventeenth century as a whole when you’re in there, you’re probably dead. Bad: The only repository where the term ‘opening hours’ is literally correct in the strict grammatical sense. When I was working there a lot, it opened to the public from 11 to 12, then from 2 to 3, but researchers could be literally locked in between 12 and 2. Then some health and safety jobsworth came along and decreed that the risk of researchers being burned alive if a fire broke out at lunchtime was clearly too great, so it then became a case of get in at 11, work frantically for an hour (with Japanese tourists and the like looking over one’s shoulder), kill time for a couple of hours, then repeat the experience in the afternoon. But in a way it all added to the glorious uniqueness of the experience!

The Sailors’ (and Soldiers’) Graves

09/07/2012 by J D Davies

Last week’s post about naval and maritime graves in west Wales got a very positive response, so I thought I’d return to a similar theme this time. I spent the second half of last week further north, on the shores of Cardigan Bay, dodging torrential downpours, visiting a few places of naval interest (both expected and unexpected) and doing some research in the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth. As I think I’ve said before in these blogs, the latter must be one of the nicest study environments anywhere in the world – where else can you sit at your desk and look out over a glorious vista of sea, hills and a medieval castle? (My runner up would be the library of the National War Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, where you can get a stunning view over Princes Street, the Scott memorial and the Firth of Forth to the hills of Fife – but only from the gents’ loo…) It turned out to be a really productive session, perhaps the best discovery being the autobiography of a Victorian seaman from Aberdare who provides some fascinating information about naval life in the 1870s and 1880s. He’ll be one of the ‘stars’ of Britannia’s Dragon!

Other ports of call included Barmouth, where I arrived during a near-monsoon; diving out of the car, I got a picture of the new memorial to local man Harold Lowe, fifth officer on the Titanic (played, appropriately, in the film by fellow Welshman Ioan Gruffydd!). Lowe was an officer in the Royal Naval Reserve during World War I and was aboard HMS Suffolk in Vladivostok in 1919, during the Russian Civil War. There’s a good account of this, and of his life as a whole, in Inger Sheil’s new biography of Lowe. The other intriguing naval memorial that I came across was in the somewhat unlikely setting of the church of St Peter ad Vincula (‘St Peter in Chains’) in Pennal, near Machynlleth. Pennal is a tiny village now, but it was once a really important place; the church was a chapel royal for the Kings of Gwynedd and then for the Princes of Wales, including Owain Glyndwr. Indeed, Glyndwr held his second parliament here and signed the ‘Pennal letter’, a document asking for recognition and support from the King of France. But on the wall of the church is a memorial to Commander Edmund Wybergh Thruston, Royal Navy, second-in-command of the cruiser HMAS Sydney when she encountered the German raider Kormoran on 20 November 1941. The Sydney won the engagement but was also lost during it, and for decades her fate was a mystery and a source of considerable debate in Australia. The wreck was finally discovered in 2008, but it was both strange and moving to discover such a poignant reminder of one of Australia’s great national tragedies so many thousands of miles from where it took place. (I was able to do some research on the Thruston family at the National Library: Captain Charles Thruston, RN, of Suffolk, who died in 1858, married the heiress of the Talgarth estate near Pennal, and Edmund was their great-grandson.)

Finally, here’s one of the places I visited on my way home: the tiny, ancient church of Pilleth, near ‘Offa’s Dyke’ and the English border. The hill behind it is Bryn Glas, and it was here, on 22 June 1402, that the Welsh army under Owain Glyndwr fought and defeated that of Edmund Mortimer. The mass grave of those who died is still marked in the churchyard. Mortimer defected to Glyndwr’s side and married his daughter, a story taken up by Shakespeare in Henry IV Part I (which coincidentally I studied for A-level and which has just been given a brilliant new treatment by the BBC, first broadcast last weekend). Shakespeare called him ‘Owen Glendower’, and that name was used twice by the Royal Navy – firstly for a frigate built in 1808, which distinguished itself in anti-slavery operations off the African coast, and secondly, without the ‘Owen’, for the training base established at Pwllheli in the second World War (perhaps better known in its later incarnation as a Butlins’ holiday camp!). Both HMS Glendowers feature prominently in Britannia’s Dragon, but the very fact the name was used at all is surely pretty remarkable, and must partly be due to his appearance as a character in Shakespeare. Maybe one of the readers of this blog can provide evidence to the contrary, but I don’t know of any instance of, say, the French or Spanish navies ever naming warships or important shore establishments after the leaders of failed Breton, Corsican, Basque or Catalan independence movements. Even the United States Navy, which has had no difficulty in naming warships Robert E Lee and Stonewall Jackson (albeit only once in each case, 100 years after their Civil War), has baulked at naming one after Confederate President Jefferson Davis!

The Sailors’ Graves

03/07/2012 by J D Davies

It’s OK, minions of the Carmarthenshire County Council damage limitation department, you can stand down – this one isn’t about you.

A reblog of one of my old posts (from July 2012) this week because of pressure of work, but I hope it’s one that will appeal to both my followers who are into maritime history and those who have started following this blog recently because of the Carmarthenshire archives situation. Since I originally posted this, I’ve received more information about Lieutenant William Williams from Brian Vale, the acknowledged authority on Britons serving in early 19th century South American navies, and this appears as an additional section at the end of the post.

Later this week, I’m going to be attending the big conference on 16th/17th century maritime history at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and hope to report on that next week. (There’s a bit of a hiatus on the archives front at the moment while I wait for replies to correspondence and Freedom of Information requests.)

I’m currently in west Wales, and over the weekend I revisited the glorious old St Ishmael’s church (above), overlooking the Tywi estuary. This is a very special place. The church overlooks the site of a lost village now largely swept away by the sea (perhaps in the great flood of 1607). More personally, ancestors on my mother’s side were being christened, married and buried there from at least the middle of the sixteenth century (probably long before, as this branch of the family was in the area from the fourteenth), and my cousin’s family, who live a few hundred yards down the road from it, still worship there. But St Ishmael’s also has one particularly interesting grave. This is that of Hugh Williams, a prominent Carmarthen lawyer who supported the Chartists and was rumoured to have been the secret leader of the ‘Rebecca Riots’ in west Wales in the 1840s. Williams, a close ally of the radical leaders Cobden and Bright, also went to America in the 1850s and was involved in some business transactions with an obscure lawyer who became a friend: the lawyer’s name was Abraham Lincoln.

Williams’ grave also contains the remains of his brother, William Williams, ‘a lieutenant in the Brazilian navy’. who died on 11 February 1832, aged 37. His body was carried down the River Tywi in a waterborne procession and then buried in the graveyard of St Ishmael’s; his passing was also marked by the poet Thomas Jenkins, who penned ‘The Sailor’s Grave’ in his honour:

The Sailor’s Grave

Lieutenant Wm. Williams, of the Brazilian Naval Service, died at Carmarthen, and was interred at St. Ishmael’s, on Carmarthen Bay, being the most convenient spot for carrying into effect his dying request, to be buried as near as possible to that element to which he had from early life devoted his existence.

I reach’d the spot – I saw the mound
‘Neath which the sailor lay;
And as the freshly-heaped-up ground,
Soft whispering, bade me stay:
Is this, I said,
The brave one’s bed –
The kind – the faithful friend?
“‘Tis here he lies,”
A voice replies,
“Here all his wanderings end.”

The heartfelt sigh – the silent tear,
Have sacred made the spot;
And, long as worth to man is dear,
‘Twill never be forgot.
The sea ne’er bore,
From shore to shore,
A soul more kind or brave;
And with a sigh
Each passer by
Beholds the sailor’s grave.

In every hue – in every form,
Did death to him appear;
He rode the whirlwind – rode the storm –
The ball – the pointed spear:
He steered his way,
By night – by day,
No superstitious slave; –
When ebb’d life’s tide,
He calmly died –
As die the good and brave.

The brave and good, as they pass by,
Where rests this seaman true,
Will drop the tear – will heave the sigh,
When his green grave they view:
And each will say,
While on his way,
He was as kind as brave:
On each return
They still will mourn
Above the sailor’s grave.

Though countless throngs may pass that way,
Morn – noon – and ev’ning late;
None more than he who writes this lay,
Laments his early fate.
Though wave on wave
The churchyard lave,
Where rests the sailor’s head,
Old ocean’s roar
Shall rouse no more
The brave one from his bed.

This is a treacherous, storm-wracked coast (it’s certainly lived up to that reputation during the last few days!), and just across the estuary from St Ishmael’s lies the village of Llansteffan, nestling in the hollow beneath the walls of a Norman castle built to protect the estuary that led to Carmarthen, the seat of royal power in south Wales. In the churchyard, almost hidden behind the gravestone of ‘Richard Moris, mariner’ of St Ishmael (who died in 1728, aged 82), is a small memorial to two men lost in 1886 when the Teviotdale was wrecked on Cefn Sidan beach, which has clearly been moved from its original position and is now sadly neglected. For centuries, Cefn Sidan (pronounced Kev’n Sheedan) was a notorious graveyard of shipping; the young niece of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine perished there in 1828, and there were persistent local legends to the effect that at least some of the wrecks were induced by gangs of ‘wreckers’ setting false lights. Several of the wrecks, including that of the Teviotdale, are still clearly visible. The dangers of these waters led to the establishment of a lifeboat station at Ferryside in 1835, and at the weekend I was privileged to be given a tour of the new station and a close-up look at the crew’s wonderful new boat. Many thanks to Terry and Matt, and it’s good to know that old Lieutenant William Williams can rest easy knowing that the coast which his grave overlooks is looked after so well!

As part of the research for Britannia’s Dragon, I received more information on William Williams from Brian Vale, a colleague on the Council of the Navy Records Society, to whom I’m very grateful for sharing his research so generously:

‘…there was no Lieutenant William Williams in the Brazilian Navy. However there was a Lieutenant who called himself John (ie Joao) Williams, and I have no doubt from one thing and another that it is the same man. Changing names was not unusual and he may have felt that the Brazilians would have been bamboozled by a man whose first name was the same as his second! On the other hand further research may establish that he bore both names, William and John.’

His career went as follows:

Williams, John

Recruited in London. Appointed as Volunteer on arrival in Rio 26 May 1823. Served on Cochrane’s flagship Pedro I (74) at the Blockade of Bahia and the capture of S Luis of Maranhão June-Aug 1823. Prize master of the Ventura Feliz. Sub-lieut 22 Jan 1824; appointed to the frigate Paraguassú during the suppression of the rebellion in Pernambuco. Served on the frigate Niterói and Pedro I 1825. To River Plate on the outbreak of war with Buenos Aires. Lieutenant on brig Caboclo under Commander John Pasco Grenfell 1826. Commander 12 Oct 1827. O/c Constança schooner at the Plate 1828 enforcing the blockade. Assisted in the capture of the Argentine privateer General Branzden. Not on 1832 List.

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