J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical research

Keeping the Past Alive

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As followers of my Twitter feed will know, I spent much of last week at the first Defence Heritage Conference, splendidly organised by Wessex Institute of Technology and held at the Royal Beach Hotel in Portsmouth. This proved to be an excellent event with some great networking and interesting papers, ranging geographically from Taiwan to South Carolina and Australia to Trondheim via detours to Lithuanian forts and the palace of the Deys at Algiers. My own paper, on the first fifteen years of the Naval Dockyards Society, was the first on the conference schedule and seemed to go down well, although I’m not entirely certain whether this was because of my delivery or whether, at just after 9 in the morning, the audience was still half asleep. Several papers got me thinking about some of my own concerns: for example, there were some insights that will be useful to me for Britannia’s Dragon, and many others relevant to me as chairman of the NDS. As far as the latter is concerned, the most important was the question of to what extent can we or should we preserve the larger survivals of our naval heritage, both ashore and afloat.

One paper that really got me thinking about this was given by a Belgian speaker who was talking about the 19th century campaign to preserve some of Antwerp’s historic 16th century fortifications, notably two impressive city gates. Although the campaign had influential support, it struggled against a widespread perception that the fortifications represented a history of foreign occupation and oppression – very similar to the attitude in some former colonies to the military heritage of the British empire. There was even a widely supported petition in favour of the demolition, which duly went ahead. But 19th century Belgians – and Britons, too – also understood ‘heritage preservation’ differently to us. We would probably demand nothing less than the physical preservation of the gates, but in Antwerp the compromise of assembling a detailed photographic record was widely acceptable. We are clearly more sentimental about preserving the actual physical objects than the Victorians were (witness how they ripped out the medieval hearts of so many churches to replace them with frequently ghastly ‘restorations’). But the Victorians, in turn, were less sentimental than some previous eras; the Elizabethans retained Drake’s Golden Hind as a tourist attraction, but so many visitors chipped away pieces of it as souvenirs that the ship slowly disappeared.1So there is no guarantee that future generations will agree with our priorities, or agree with us over what should be preserved. At the moment, for example, the NDS is opposing a planning application within the historic dockyard site at Sheerness which would see a historic and listed early 19th century mast house being demolished to make way for a wind turbine manufacturing facility. Is preserving the mast house intact more important than the jobs that the wind turbines might create? But then again, are those jobs in fact illusory, and will the wind turbine industry prove about as enduring as the Sinclair C5?

A couple of other examples that have been in the news recently. HMS Caroline, the cruiser and last British survivor of Jutland, seems likely to be towed from Belfast to Portsmouth for preservation there, despite a growing campaign to keep her in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile HMS Plymouth, which distinguished herself in the Falklands War, is likely to go for scrap despite repeated attempts to save her. The harsh truth is that many people would consider Caroline more ‘important’ than Plymouth, and it has a major organisation – the National Museum of the Royal Navy – behind the attempt to preserve it, whereas Plymouth is reliant primarily on volunteers, many of whom served on the ship and have an understandable sentimental attachment to it. Preserving a warship is a very expensive business, and rightly or wrongly, World War I and Jutland probably form a better long term ‘business case’ than the Falklands. It is all very well arguing that Plymouth or some other Cold War vessel represents a good example of a warship of a particular era, but that sort of reasoning is likely only to appeal to dedicated ‘warship buffs’; a general public largely ignorant of the sea and of the role of navies (partly because their knowledge is formed to a great extent by a stunningly ignorant media, such as the woeful bunch of incompetents that the BBC deployed for its coverage of the Jubilee river pageant2) needs a very strong ‘back story’ such as those presented by the Mary Rose, the Victory and – debatably – HMS Caroline. Because of the less sentimental attitudes of earlier ages, many of the ships that have survived to be preserved today have done so by pure chance, and that chance has thrown up some bizarre anomalies. Whole categories of warship have vanished entirely, yet we have two ships from the same nineteenth century frigate class, HMS Trincomalee and Unicorn, neither of which had distinguished service careers, which in geographical terms lie relatively close to each other  (Hartlepool and Dundee), and, some might argue, which might well be competing for the same funding.

In British naval heritage terms, the scuttling of Trafalgar survivor HMS Implacable in 1949 was a watershed: the slogan ‘never again’ was adopted, notably by the World Ship Trust, and the imperative to preserve historic warships grew. Admittedly, it was a slow process: as part of my research for Britannia’s Dragon I’ve read Admiralty documents of the 1960s which talk matter-of-factly about scrapping HMS Warrior, Britain’s first ironclad and now a major tourist attraction at Portsmouth, which was then in use as an oil fuel jetty in Milford Haven. Within just five to ten years, though, the attitude to the future of the ship changed markedly. But ultimately, just what are we ‘preserving’? Warrior is really just the bare iron hull – the ferocious looking guns are fibreglass, and most of the other fittings are modern replicas too. Only about 10% of HMS Victory is original; large areas of the ship are post-1922 reconstructions put in place to revert her to her Trafalgar appearance. In that sense Victory and other preserved warships like USS Constitution (of which roughly the same amount of the original structure survives) are at least partly pastiches, modern recreations of what we think (but cannot be entirely certain) the ship looked like at a particular point in its past, and even on the busiest day of the year for visitor numbers, they cannot hope to recreate the most important reality of any warship – that this impossibly small, cramped space was home to a large number of men, their smell, their noise and their belongings.

Of course, most of the same issues apply to heritage preservation ashore too. Should buildings be preserved a la National Trust, as though frozen at a particular moment in time; allowed to fall into ruin; or be restored if already ruinous? For example, we had an interesting discussion at Portsmouth about the iconic dome at the Dounreay nuclear power plant. Is it actually feasible to preserve this at all, given its likely upkeep costs and remoteness? If not, should it be cleared or just allowed to fall down?

Probably only one thing is certain: future generations will look at many of the decisions we have taken over heritage preservation, think ‘why on earth did they keep that but get rid of that?’, and curse us loudly for so doing.

 

 

1 There are different views about what happened to the Golden Hind – see here and here. 

2 An honourable exception was Huw Edwards, who even corrected Simon Schama on a matter of historical fact – but then, Huw went to a good school!

The Comfort Zone

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One of the challenges and delights of working on my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales, is that it’s taking me into all sorts of uncharted territory and, in some cases, territory I’m revisiting after many years. The book is meant to cover the entire time period from the Romans (AD 60, to be exact, and Suetonius’ attack on Anglesey) to the present day, so large areas are well outside what I’d regard as my comfort zone. I suppose that said zone would extend from the sixteenth century through to about 1815, with the core being my principal specialisation from about 1640 to about 1700. But as I’ve said before in this blog and elsewhere, I originally started out with an interest in twentieth-century warships, so the period from roughly 1939 onwards is also an area I’m very comfortable with. Over the years I’ve also done various bits and pieces of work on aspects of the Victorian period and World War I, so getting up to speed there isn’t a problem at all.

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals – but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

Coast of Ages

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I spent the whole of last week on a Britannia’s Dragon research trip in north-west Wales. Coming originally from the south-west of the country, where it’s far easier and quicker to get to London than to the north, I knew Anglesey and Snowdonia quite well but didn’t really know the Llyn Peninsula, and this proved to be a revelation – in terms of stunning scenery, fascinating history and a sometimes total absence of such alleged requisites of modern living as mobile phone reception and internet access. We were staying in a converted chapel on the old pilgrim route along the peninsula to Bardsey island, and evidence of the importance of pilgrimage was everywhere, nowhere moreso than in the astonishing church of St Beuno at Clynnog Fawr, larger than several cathedrals I’ve visited yet located in a village smaller than the one where we live. The week also involved some walking, notably a strenuous climb up to the Tre’r Ceiri hill fort, and a visit to Sir Clough Williams Ellis’s surreal creation at Portmeirion, best known of course as the setting for the cult TV series The Prisoner. 

But of course I was in the area primarily to work. My days at Anglesey and Caernarfon record offices were very productive, particularly the former (which produced inter alia what must be the most graphic description ever written of the state of the toilets on a World War I battleship). Both proved to be very pleasant working environments, both manned by really helpful and friendly staff and with that at Caernarfon enjoying some of the best views of any repository I’ve ever worked on; the search room looks out directly onto the quayside of the old dock, now filled with yachts and with the waters of the Menai Straits beyond. ‘Fieldwork’ took me to many places with direct or indirect naval connections. By far the most poignant of the former was the huge memorial and mass grave in Holyhead cemetery to those who died aboard the submarine HMS Thetis in 1939, which failed to surface after her first trial dive; the vessel was subsequently recovered, beached in Moelfre Bay and eventually put into service as HMS Thunderbolt. Other locations which will feature in Britannia’s Dragon included the site of HMS Glendower, the wartime training base on the south coast of the Llyn Peninsula, far better known in its later incarnation as Butlin’s Pwllheli. It’s unfortunate that there’s no memorial marking its naval service, in contrast to the situation at Butlin’s Skegness which was the wartime HMS Royal Arthur; both bases were the result of deals struck between the far-sighted but somewhat unscrupulous Billy Butlin and the Admiralty. (The book will include an account of the deliciously fraught meeting in 1945 when the local MPs, including Lloyd George’s daughter Lady Megan, discovered just how comprehensively Butlin had outmanoeuvred them, driving a coach and horses through planning regulations – suspended in wartime – and creating a vast holiday camp in the midst of the heartland of the Welsh language and culture.)

A site which certainly does proclaim its naval heritage is the astonishing Parys Mountain on the north coast of Anglesey, once the largest copper mine in the world. The discovery of this huge resource in 1768 coincided providentially with the Royal Navy’s adoption of copper sheathing and with the outbreak less than a decade later of the American revolutionary war, which hugely increased the demand for that sheathing. The nearby port of Amlwch was transformed into the world’s largest copper port and the second largest town in Wales, about half the size of late C18th century New York. Parys Mountain is remarkable but somewhat unsettling, a vast scar on the landscape literally carved out of the heart of a hill – and, in the early years at least, carved out principally by manual labour and hand tools alone.

So all in all, it was a very good week which contributed a substantial amount of material to the book. Although a considerable amount of additional research still lies ahead, the writing phase starts tomorrow!

Flash Pepys, Saviour of the Universe

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Last week saw the anniversary of Samuel Pepys’s birth in 1633, and Twitter was abuzz with the inevitable superlatives – the greatest English diarist! the founder of the modern Royal Navy! One only needed Queen to belt out ‘Pepys, Saviour of the Universe’, with Brian Blessed bellowing ‘Sam’s alive?!’, and the hyperbolic overdose would have been complete. There’s been plenty from this ‘Daily Mail headline’ school of historical analysis of late – witness the hysterical reaction in the Twitterverse to recent defence cuts (‘Navy at its smallest since Henry VIII!’, ‘Army at its smallest since the Zulu war!!/Agincourt!!!/Mount Badon!!!!’ and so forth, as if such comparisons have any validity at all – one might as well come up with such equally astute observations as ‘Fewer novels featuring starving urchins being written now than in Charles Dickens’s day’). No doubt this is all part and parcel of the Anglo-Saxon world’s obsession with rankings. Pepys can’t just be an important diarist or an undoubtedly competent naval administrator – he has to be the best ever, the greatest thing since sliced bread in his particular field. Witness the similarly OTT praise of Dickens during recent weeks (not just a great novelist – the bicentennial boy has to be THE GREATEST!!) and the endless stream of polls in newspapers or programmes on TV, usually produced by bored journalists during slow news days or by TV producers who can’t think of anything more original: the Greatest Briton of All Time, the world’s best bookshops/US presidents/public conveniences, the 50 Greatest TV Meerkats, and so on.

To be fair, of course, this isn’t entirely a failing of glib modern culture. I blame the Victorians and their obsession with classifying and ranking anything and everything – positions in class at school (no longer politically correct, of course, which begs the question of why ranking the schools themselves in exactly the same way is acceptable…), league tables for all sports, and so on. Not long ago I studied the Admiralty lists of those who sat the examinations to become apprentices in the royal dockyards just after World War I, and they were listed in result order, by dockyard, from the very best, who obtained 600/600, down to the very worst, an intellectual titan at Devonport who scored 17. (These days, the results would be anonymised and circulated only internally to spare candidates stress-related conditions, to keep their personal data confidential and to avoid infringing their human rights; then, the candidates were listed by name and the results printed and published. That must have brought joy unbounded to a certain Devon household in the spring of 1919…) Another manifestation of the tendency to classify, rank and affix hyperbolic labels is probably the worst naval history book I’ve ever read – and trust me, there’s a lot of competition for that particular ‘Daily Mail’ title – Evelyn Berckman’s Creators and Destroyers of the English Navy, published in 1974. This took the 17th century rulers of Britain, then rigidly classified them alternately as ‘creators’ and ‘destroyers’. The breathtaking legerdemain required to classify Charles I as a ‘creator’ and Oliver Cromwell as a ‘destroyer’ is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces of historical writing I’ve ever encountered.

Returning to Pepys, it was Sir Arthur Bryant, about as reactionary a historian as one could imagine, who in 1938 coined the term ‘the saviour of the Navy’ to describe him (can one be simultaneously the founder and the saviour of something, I wonder?), and a wonderful Admiralty information film of 1941 took very much the same line. I know plenty of people today who still hold Pepys in this sort of regard. Indeed, I sit on the committee of the Samuel Pepys Club, which exists to revere his memory, and am very proud to have won the Samuel Pepys Award, so I’m certainly not going to knock ‘Pepysians’. Moreover, having spent an unconscionably large percentage of my life working on Pepys’s manuscripts, both in the glorious library he created in Cambridge and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I probably have a better awareness of and respect for what he achieved than a great many people. Let’s not equivocate about it: Samuel Pepys was both an utterly fascinating, if deeply flawed, human being and, professionally, a truly great man. But it’s always seemed to me that the virtual canonisation of Pepys and the consequent exaggeration of his achievements have done a disservice both to him and to those who were just as responsible as he was, and frequently rather more responsible, for those achievements.

An example. Why did Bryant describe Pepys as the ‘saviour of the navy’? Essentially because of the evidence contained in one book*, written by that disinterested author, S. Pepys, based on original documents and statistics largely drawn up by the equally disinterested civil servant, S. Pepys, with the sole purpose of exculpating the record in office of the entirely disinterested politician, S. Pepys. If you imagine that in 300 years time Peter Mandelson’s memoirs have become the sole accepted authority on the record of the Blair/Brown government, then you’re getting pretty close to equivalence; although not even the noble Baron of Hartlepool and Foy had the audacity to cook his own statistics quite as brazenly as Pepys did. Then again, why would anyone – yes, even on Twitter – claim that Pepys might be the founder of the modern Royal Navy, rather than, say, a certain short admiral from Norfolk, whose legacy permeates today’s fighting force in an overt and all-pervasive way that Pepys’s certainly does not? (If you’re in doubt try asking the denizens of any naval mess, even wardrooms, what they know about [a] Pepys as against [b] Nelson. I’ve done it, and the results are both revealing and depressing.) It’s essentially because Pepys is regarded as the creator of systems, of structures, of methods; in other words, of the navy as an institution, rather than as a fighting force. So does he actually deserve that accolade, that particular ‘Daily Mail headline’ – and if not, who does? I’ll return to that question next week!

(* The Memoires of the Royal Navy, 1690: I contributed the introduction to a new edition of this, published in 2010. Certain online bookshops list Pepys and I as co-authors – probably one of the greatest but most bizarre accolades I’ve ever received!)

The Old Order Changeth

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I spent last Saturday afternoon at the new Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, having been invited to a special ‘bloggers’ preview’ at the end of the library’s first week with a properly restored full service following a very long hiatus. As I’ve been using the ‘old Caird’ for about thirty years, I thought I’d devote this post to a review of the new facility in comparison with the old. Much more information about the library – one of the world’s greatest resources for the study of naval and maritime history – and pictures of the new facility can be found in the Caird’s own blog.

Aesthetically, there’s simply no comparison between old and new. One approached the old Caird by way of a splendid rotunda which contained a bust of Sir James Caird upon a pedestal. One approaches the new by the sort of narrow, functional back stair one would find as the fire escape of a provincial hotel; poor old Sir James is now stuck out of the way on a landing. One entered the old Caird by splendid wooden double doors which opened onto a carpeted aisle with large glass-doored bookcases on either side, leading to a small number of large tables. The new Caird has the look and feel of a small university library, with single rows of double-sided tables down the middle and low bookcases along the sides. The tables of the old library allowed an individual researcher copious amounts of space for handling large manuscripts; the individual spaces in the new one seem to be less generous than many school desks (certainly far less generous than the individual space available at, say, the National Archives and the British Library), and one can easily envisage cases of  ‘elbow- room rage’ as researchers working on large items encroach slightly into their neighbour’s precious space.

In a way, though, all of this sums up the crucial difference between the two libraries. The old Caird was clearly designed as, and essentially remained, a reading room for a small elite band of gentlemen-scholars, not too different from the ambience of the West End clubs they frequented. (On one occasion many years ago I was engrossed in study of a particularly interesting manuscript when I became aware of a presence at my shoulder. ‘And what are you studying?’ asked a familiar voice. It was the Duke of Edinburgh.) The old library simply could not accommodate the increasing numbers of people who wished to use it, particularly after the boom in interest in genealogy. Above all, its lack of storage space meant that large amounts of material had to be outhoused, leading to all sorts of delays and angst. (I remember several occasions when American or other foreign researchers turned up at the issue desk claiming that they only had one day available for study in Greenwich, only to be told that it would take forty-eight hours for the document they dearly wished to see to arrive from storage.) The new Caird is divided into two parts, one area for those who wish to chat as they attempt to unearth Great Uncle Harry’s maritime career and one for individual researchers who wish to work quietly, albeit in uncomfortably close proximity to others. Its substantial on-site storage facilities, which we were taken to see and which are truly impressive, mean that many more documents will reach readers much more quickly – 40 minutes is the target time – and will hopefully lead to fewer tearful scenes of woe. Compared with the ancient, rickety self-service photocopier in the old Caird, the new reprographic facilities are state-of-the-art (notably an impressive book scanner), while both the excellent new online catalogue and the ability to take one’s own digital photographs would have saved me literally weeks, if not months, of work in the past.

Finally, the new Caird has two distinct advantages over its predecessor. Firstly, it has a splendid view over Greenwich Park; secondly, it ought to be quieter than the old, which in latter years was sandwiched between the entrance used by noisy school parties on the one side and the museum’s main public space, Neptune Court, on the other.

So all in all, I’ll always look back fondly on the old Caird but I look forward to working in the new one, a far more appropriate working environment for the twenty-first century. Indeed, I shall have to spend quite a bit of time there in the coming months as I complete the research for Britannia’s Dragon. But a plea and a warning…the reading room would look far better if its bare antiseptic walls were broken up by a few pictures from the museum’s vast collection – and beware of my elbows!

Happy New History?

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First, a very Happy New Year to all! The next few months will be particularly exciting, with The Mountain of Gold being published in North America on 31 January followed by The Blast That Tears The Skies in the UK on 13 March (also the publication date of the UK trade paperback of Mountain of Gold). Meanwhile I’ll be hard at work writing ‘Quinton 4’, The Lion of Midnight, and continuing the research for Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. I’ll be using this blog to build up to the two publication dates by providing some new insights into the plots and historical contexts of both books, and there’ll also be some exciting news about the first Quinton ‘prequel’, Ensign Royal. Watch this space, and my Twitter and Facebook accounts, for further information!

Meanwhile, I’ve recently been reading two particularly thought-provoking books, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England and Norman Davies’s Vanished Kingdoms: A History of Half-Forgotten Europe. Both have really struck chords with me, and in my opinion, they express truths that really should be taken into account during the current (and rather fractious) debate over the place of History in the English National Curriculum. Essentially, Mortimer’s thesis is that historians are limited and often deceived by their concentration on the extant sources; that they have become obsessed with the analysis of those sources, rather than with the greater truths that lie beyond them; and that ‘primary sources’ are often just as distorted and partial as secondary ones. (I know one historian, a leading authority in his field despite having no formal training, who simply refuses to read secondary sources, stubbornly insisting on working solely from the original manuscripts alone – thereby missing all the insights and broader contexts that can be gleaned from wide reading and also entirely disregarding the vital point made by Mortimer and others that primary sources themselves mark the end of a process, i.e. they are often a reporting of an event that has taken place and are thus immediately subject to selective memory, skewed perspectives, omission, etc.)

As Mortimer writes in The Time Traveller’s Guide,

Academic historians cannot discuss the past itself; they can only discuss evidence and   the questions arising from that evidence…If Medieval England is treated as dead and buried, what one can say about it is strictly limited by the questions arising from the evidence. However, if treated as a living place, the only limits are the experience of the author and his perception of the requirements, interests and curiosity of his readers.

I’m definitely with Mortimer on this. In fact, being able to recreate a living, vibrant past is one of the liberating things about writing historical fiction after spending so many years within the constraints of academic history; it was also something I tried to do in my most recent non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: The Stuarts, The Ruthvens and The Gowrie Conspiracy, where I took a ‘virtual history’ line which argued that the threat to the life of King James Stuart at Gowrie House, Perth, on 5 August 1600, and the potential consequences of his death on that day, were far more important to British history than those of the over-hyped ‘Gunpowder Plot’ five years later.

Norman Davies, meanwhile, makes a similar and equally important point in Vanished Kingdoms, where he also argues that despite the platitudes trotted out in schools and the press, many of the books on which historians depend are often less reliable than the information available on the Internet, including the much-derided Wikipedia.

Historians and their publishers spend inordinate time and energy retailing the history of everything that they take to be powerful, prominent and impressive…Historians usually focus their attention on the past of countries that still exist…Whether consciously or not, they are seeking the roots of the present, thereby putting themselves in danger of reading history backwards….Our mental maps are thus invariably deformed. Our brains can only form a picture from the data that circulates at any given time; and the available data is created by present-day powers, by prevailing fashions and by accepted wisdom. If we continue to neglect other areas of the past, the blank spaces in our minds are reinforced, and we pile more and more knowledge into those compartments of which we are already aware. Partial knowledge becomes ever more partial, and ignorance becomes self-perpetuating.

Essentially, both writers are making the point that our view of the past is badly skewed by artificial boundaries of our own creation, and these desperately limited mindsets are all too apparent in the debate over History in schools. During my many years as a teacher, I taught hundreds of young people to distinguish the advantages and disadvantages of primary and secondary sources as this was the principal hoop through which they had to jump to achieve success at GCSE, the most utterly pointless set of examinations imposed on young people by any advanced society; yet all the while, I knew deep down that most of the ‘rules’ which students were expected to master ‘because that’s how historians work’ were either grossly over-simplified or just downright wrong. (My feelings upon the subject might have revealed themselves when I devised and taught the mnemonic BADCRAP as a way of remembering the principles of source analysis; ‘B’ stood for ‘bias’, but I forget what the other letters represented. Perhaps surprisingly, I received no complaints from students or parents with delicate sensibilities during the many years in which I used this system – but then, the exam results that BADCRAP consistently obtained probably insulated me against criticism!)

But those who advocate less emphasis on such a skills-based approach to History are in danger of falling into the trap identified by Norman Davies. Why study an overwhelming diet of British history, when the days of ‘Britain’ as we know it might be numbered if the Scots decide in favour of independence? Why the ongoing obsession with the Tudors and the Nazis, when the seventeenth century (OK, I declare an interest) and Chinese history are arguably more interesting and more ‘relevant’, that dreadful killer word which dominates the entire debate about young people’s interest, or lack of it, in History? So it seems to me that both sides of the debate on school History are trapped within indefensible ideological straitjackets – the one advocating a set of ‘skills’ which perpetuate the delusion that historians exist primarily to analyse sources, rather than to recreate a vision of the past as a living, vital place, the other advocating narratives based on the unthinking assumptions that certain countries, individuals and time periods are innately more important and worth studying than others. Come to think of it, BADCRAP seems like a pretty apposite description of the entire state of the debate.