J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Historical sources

Money for Nothing; or, Why I Am Not on TV

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A few years ago, I briefly threatened to become a TV historian – say, a cross between a more male and more Welsh version of Lucy Worsley, and a taller and less annoying version of David Starkey. A Dutch TV company was talking to me about a project related to what were then the forthcoming anniversaries of the second Anglo-Dutch war, and the BBC had signed me up to do some filming with, of all people, Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen, he of the silken cuffs. (I’d also been screentested by a production company a little while before that, but the project never get off the ground.) Roughly within the same timeframe, I was also talking to a major theatre company, who were staging a new production of a play which might or might not have a strong wind in its title, and which might or might not be by an author whose name rhymes with Makesbeer; the company in question were keen to reflect, as far as possible, what conditions were really like aboard a seventeenth century ship in a storm. There were mentions of potentially talking to the cast (headed by a pretty well known actor) and of tickets for a performance.

So what came of these dalliances with fame and fortune?

Absolute sweet FA.

(For followers of this blog who aren’t familiar with that expression, I suggest you explore its origin here – it’s quite a story!)

To be fair to the BBC, I did film with the sartorially splendid LL-B for the best part of a day – much more historically knowledgeable than your preconceptions might suggest, BTW – but my contribution ended up on the cutting room floor. Not all of the information I’d provided did, though: one or two references in the final programme were clearly derived from things I’d said, even though my name didn’t appear in the credits. As for Dutch TV and the theatre, I’d spoken to both at some length, and given them information which may or may not have appeared in their final productions. I don’t know if the programme ever saw the light of day, but the play certainly did, unlike the implied promise of tickets and the like (and by the time I realised they weren’t going to appear and tried to book some myself, the run was sold out). This experience certainly isn’t unique to me, though. Several friends and colleagues have had exactly the same thing happen to them, the most heinous case being that of a friend who effectively provided large amounts of original research for a Channel 4 programme, only for it to be presented by someone else, with no credit whatsoever given to the person who’d actually done the work.

I mention all this because an article in The Guardian over the weekend raised this exact same point. Indeed, it implied that, if anything, the problem of TV and film companies simply lifting historians’ work without crediting them at all may well have got worse in the last couple of years – and the success of films like Darkest Hour, Dunkirk and The Favourite surely guarantees that yet more historical epics will follow, based more or less closely on original work done by people who, for certain, will have made far less money than the producers, directors, actors, and probably the make-up artists, stagehands and runners too. Inevitably, the article triggered frenzied activity in my Twitter feed, with plenty of people I know, like and respect sticking their hands up to say ‘me too’ (to coin a phrase), while wholeheartedly endorsing the article’s demand for proper recognition, and, indeed, payment, for historians whose work forms the basis for productions on TV, film and the stage.

Looking back, of course, I was naive to volunteer as much information as I did to the people I was dealing with without ensuring I’d banked at least some of the quid pro quo in advance. But removing my historian’s hat (an unfashionable, moth-eaten fedora, as long-term readers of this blog will recall), and donning my novelist’s hat (a metaphor, because novelists can’t afford hats), I think it’s clear that this problem is rather more widespread. Yes, on the one hand, making use of an individual’s work without paying for it or, at the very least, without providing some form of credit for it, is plagiarism – or, if you prefer, pure, simple, unadorned theft. But there’s also a larger subtext at play here. I’m a member of the Society of Authors, and attend meetings of its local branch, in company with a great, supportive, good-humoured crowd of fellow scribblers. Within the last couple of years, the society has been particularly animated by the question of payments for author talks, particularly at literary festivals, which now seem to be absolutely everywhere in the UK. (Is there a town left that doesn’t have one?) I’ve had the sob story myself, more than once – ‘oh, we’re a very small festival / we’re just starting up, etc, so we can’t afford to pay you a fee, but would you still be willing to come and talk to three nonagenarians and an arthritic dog in North Auchtermuchty on a cold, wet Thursday night in January?’ Actually, the small festivals aren’t really the problem – over the years, I’ve taken part in a few, and also given one-off talks to audiences not much larger than the apocryphal one I’ve just cited, all on a pro bono basis, usually if it’s a cause that I think deserves support and encouragement,* or if there’s a chance of reaching some new readers and selling some books, or if I just fancy a trip to a nice part of the country. But some pretty large, and undoubtedly well funded, festivals and organisations have tried to pull the same trick, leading the Society of Authors to make it an official policy that its members shouldn’t attend such events, or give talks per se, if they don’t get paid. This impressive demonstration of author power led the mighty Oxford Literary Festival, for one, to change its policy and actually start paying its speakers, but there are still plenty of people out there who seem to think that authors (and, by extension, the historians whose research underpins so much of film and TV) are pitiful, insecure creatures, desperate for anyone at all to notice them, who can therefore be treated essentially as unpaid labour (some may prefer to use a much more historically loaded term instead), and who should be pathetically grateful for any crumbs that are thrown their way – or, more often, not.

Ultimately, of course, it all comes down to fairness, and due recompense being made for work done. That, though, is where I start to get a bit conflicted: after all, this is essentially the same argument used by very large and very rich media organisations to try to get people to sign up for their paywalls, i.e. that readers should be prepared to pay to consume good journalism. Well, yes of course, in principle, but is there any guarantee that if I sign up for The Times paywall, to name but one, my money will go to support some poor overworked hack rather than swelling Rupert Murdoch’s profits? Paying a modest amount directly to a historian whose book has contributed to the success, and, indeed, the very existence of a film or TV programme, or directly to an author who comes along to speak to an audience at a fraction of the cost of a C-list stand-up comedian, seems to me to be a very different case.

But then, I suspect I might be a little biased.

 

 

(* Hence, for example, my talk last Thursday to the wonderful National Trust volunteers at Shugborough Hall, the stately home of Admiral Lord Anson in the eighteenth century and the queen’s photographer cousin, Lord Lichfield, in the twentieth. Yes, the NT could certainly afford to pay a fee – this, after all, is a body that can buy entire islands or mountains – but it was for a good cause, a brilliant joint initiative with my old alma mater Oxford University (another institution not really short of a bob or two) to enhance the connections between some of the NT’s properties and maritime history. As almost all of those in my audience were volunteers who happily give up their time gratis so that the public can enjoy the house and estate, it would have been distinctly Scrooge-like of me to request a fee!)

 

Essential Historical Research Skills, Number 714: Red Wine

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Pukka historians will tell you that the really important research skills are things like objectivity, respect for one’s sources, empathy with the people of the past, a strong command of context, open-mindedness, and the ability to avoid sneezing onto priceless fourteenth century manuscripts.

However, none of these are as important as red wine.

Of course, it is usually impossible to consume red wine in repositories, as they often have some piffling jobsworth regulations about not consuming food and drink in proximity to original documents; so red wine should normally only be used as an aid to historical research when working online, preferably at home.

(I’ve worked in one, and only one, repository that was an exception to this rule, other than private houses. Back in the 1980s, when the Naval Historical Library of the Ministry of Defence was housed on an upper floor of the Empress State Building, with splendid views of Chelsea FC’s ground, there was no problem whatsoever with munching one’s packed lunch immediately adjacent to utterly irreplaceable seventeenth and eighteenth century manuscripts. Maybe I should have tried the red wine test then.)

The advantages – and, yes, disadvantages – of red wine to a historian are manifold:

1/ With the first glass, you make connections you would otherwise have missed.

2/ With the second glass, you miss connections you would otherwise have made.

3/ With the third glass, you find yourself at 9.00 on a Friday evening still hunting for additional material for the talk you’re giving the next morning.

4/ Four. FOUR glashesh. Ooh look, dartsh on TV. Time to find shome cheeshe, too. And peanutsh.

5/ Wiv th’ fiv- fiff- fifth glash, you even love David Shtarkey, man. An’ that David Olushoga. An’ Luchy Worshley. I love you all. You are ALL my beshtesht friendsh. Yesh, even you.

6/ With the sixth glass, you’re probably onto a second bottle, and should seek medical help. Either that or move to France, where you’ll be regarded as a lightweight, and it won’t be a Friday evening but early Tuesday lunchtime.

(Some will say that gin, Scotch, or even white wine are equally good with historical research. However, these are the sort of people who’ll also tell you that Chardonnay is absolutely fine with fillet steak, so they can be safely ignored.)

Anyway, at the end of last week, I found myself at the early third glass stage. This was foolish, as I already had more than enough material for the talk I was giving on the following day – which, as it turned out, was to a gratifyingly large audience, standing room only in fact, graced by no fewer than four chains of office (the Welsh love chains of office…) and one MP, the shadow Secretary of State for Defence, no less. My talk was already eclectic enough, too, ranging from Mary Queen of Scots to Dylan Thomas by way of Karl Marx and an unexpectedly itinerant dead pug. But then, the inevitable and foolish consequences of pouring that third glass kicked in.

‘I know’, thought my red-wine-fuelled historical research superhero alter ego, ‘I’ll Google this combination of names.’

I should have known better. The great advantage of Google is that you stumble across all sorts of unlikely stories that you’d never, ever have come across in the old days of trekking down to the local library and thumbing through the Encyclopedia Britannica or Keesing’s Contemporary Archives (anybody else remember that?)

…and that, of course, is also the great disadvantage of Google, namely that you stumble across all sorts of unlikely stories, etc etc, which then set you off on some lengthy and perhaps pointless digression or other, as all the while the red wine is muttering excitedly that this might make a book, or at least an article.

So here’s the story in question. There was a doctor in Carmarthen in the 1770s and 1780s who originally hailed from Northumberland. He must have known Sir John Stepney, one of the most prominent members of the family I’ve been researching for many years, because he gave two of his sons the subsidiary Christian name of Stepney. Sir John served as the British ambassador to Prussia in the early 1780s, and thus knew King Frederick the Great (who opined to Stepney that he didn’t think the newly-independent United States of America would last very long; good call, Fred). Sir John must have had other contacts at the Prussian court, and would probably have known the Crown Prince, who succeeded as King Frederick William II in 1786 – so this connection might explain the otherwise distinctly bizarre career move which saw a Welsh provincial doctor become personal physician to the King of Prussia, the direct ancestor of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

All of that’s interesting enough. (Or at any rate, it’s interesting enough when you’ve got the third glass in your hand.) But the truly mind-boggling, digression-starting, book-proposal-writing, element of all this is that the doctor in question was said to be – wait for it – an illegitimate son of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

Now, I happen to know a bit about BPC, and not just because I’ve watched Outlander. Jacobitism has always been a not-so-secret subsidiary interest of mine, and one day, I hope to bring out a novel (or a series) with a slightly offbeat Jacobite theme. I also know that no matter how many glasses of wine you’ve had, there are, let’s say, several substantial implausibilities in a story that has a random Scots lass encountering BPC some time during the 1745 rebellion, then going off to Newcastle, changing her name, and having her baby after the Jacobite defeat at Culloden. Given the enduring romantic appeal of BPC, a story like this isn’t particularly surprising – what is surprising, perhaps, is that there aren’t more of them – but, of course, even if it was true, it would almost certainly be impossible to prove it, unless one could maybe arrange a DNA comparison between a descendant of the doctor and someone descended from the Stuarts. So no, the cork can go back into the bottle, because I can’t see there being a book in this. An article might be a different matter, though!

Oddly, though, the town of Carmarthen (NB not to be confused with Caernarfon, especially if you’re getting married) has some serious form when it comes to mysterious royal connections: it has the tomb of the man said to have killed King Richard III, and the graves of the supposed granddaughters of King George III by his secret marriage to the Quaker Hannah Lightfoot. Oh, and Merlin is meant to have hailed from there, too. So a resident doctor who might have been the son of the Bonnie Prince is small beer, really.

Or even a small red wine.

 

Serendipity

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Sometimes – very, very rarely, but sometimes – thinks click together in an unexpected but beautiful, seemingly preordained way. This is the moment called ‘serendipity’, and it’s doubly appropriate in this case, as that was part of the official pedigree name of my first dog.

(‘Peredur Serendipity’, since you ask – a distinctly wilful dachsund whom I christened Perry. And no, Russian hackers, none of those words are in any of my passwords, and I don’t use the ‘name of first pet’ option in security questions. So sucks to you, Vladimir.)

As mentioned previously in this blog, I’m currently in the distinctly unusual situation for an author of having to double the length of a book, rather than going through the usual purgatory of trying to edit something by culling vast amounts of purple prose. This is the first of my planned Tudor naval trilogy, originally intended to be novellas, now growing exponentially into full-length novels to be published by Canelo. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to expand a story so much, and it’s a steep learning curve. Simply tinkering with the existing text isn’t enough; you don’t get from 40,000 words to at least 80,000 by adding more adjectives, and although the extra space for character development is very welcome, an extra 40,000 words (or more) is one heck of a lot of character development…

So I knew I’d need to add some extra chapters, including additional events, new characters, and even an entire sub-plot, something you don’t really have the space to include in a novella. I had the additional events sorted in short order: when you’re talking about the reign of Henry VIII, after all, one thing that no historian or novelist lacks is juicy material. But the new characters and the sub-plot were proving a little trickier. Then I decided that one passage in what I’d already written would permit a flashback scene, in which my central character encounters the holder of a particular office. Now I needed the name of that office holder at that particular time, so went to the dreaded-but-indispensable Wikipedia, and found that the holder of said office was somebody who, to avoid spoilers, I’ll call Han Solo.

(Do you have any idea of how difficult it is to write a blog like this without spoilers?)

Of course, I’d come across the name of Han Solo before (* avoid gratuitous Millennium Falcon joke *), but realised it would be a good idea to know a bit more about him, e.g. to see if there were any portraits of him that I could use as the basis for a physical description. This meant going to the good old Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. No picture, alas, but some interesting detail about his life…and as I read on, it became very, very interesting detail indeed…and then the timing and circumstances of his death couldn’t have been more perfect for my narrative. All I needed now was a supplementary character to provide the link between the hero and Han Solo (* avoid gratuitous Princess Leia joke *), and hey presto, the sub-plot came into being. Hopefully, by the time the finished article is complete, nobody will be able to see the joins! And that, ladies and gentlemen, is very much what you call serendipity.

Seriously, though, it demonstrates a point that’s absolutely critical, in my opinion, for all writers of history, be it fiction or non-fiction, at any level whatsoever. Never be content with a narrow focus on just your specific area; I know plenty of people who’ve spent so long burrowing deep into the research materials for their particular niche that they’ve completely missed huge aspects of the bigger picture. Context is all, and it’s vital to know what else was going on at the same time – e.g. when I was doing my doctorate in naval history, I realised pretty quickly that to do it properly, I needed to be across the latest research in political, economic, religious and social history, and so on and so forth. Even for a novel, looking at such a broad picture is vital. Personally, something I often find useful on the still-dreaded-but-indispensable Wikipedia is its provision of entries for individual years. Type in any date of your choice and take a look at what was going on; the list of deaths often throws up some useful little connections. And let’s all count ourselves fortunate – nay, serendipitous – that we no longer have to research such things by making a special trip to the local library to spend hours ploughing through the Encyclopedia Britannica. 

***

A couple of quick announcements to end with. For those within range, I’ll be talking at Hitchin Library, Hertfordshire, at 11am on Saturday 9 June, my title being ‘The Pleasures and Perils of Writing Nautical Fiction’ (more detail on the library’s Facebook page and Twitter account). Finally, regular readers of this blog will recall that, three years ago or thereabouts, I devoted rather a lot of posts to the calamitous situation at the Carmarthenshire Archives Service, where mould was discovered in the strongrooms, leading to the indefinite closure of the record office and the despatch of the entire collection for cleaning, rendering it inaccessible. This was a huge blow to me, as it denied me access to the principal materials I needed to complete my book on the Stepney family. However, and to be scrupulously fair to all concerned, it’s only right for me to point out that the entire sorry saga is now pretty close to a happy ending. All of the documents are now available again, albeit in Cardiff – or at least, when I sent Glamorgan Archives a list of particularly vital Stepney manuscripts, they were able to confirm that they were all there and all open. Better still, this week work starts on the brand new archive facility in Carmarthen, and having seen the plans, I can only think that maybe, despite all the grief it caused me and all the expense it’s caused the Council Tax payers of Carmarthenshire, this saga has proved to be a blessing in disguise.

Finally, there’ll be no post next week due to the Bank Holiday and general stuff (a little-known Swedish commander of the Thirty Years War).

The Offpeak Day Return of the King

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A bit of an oddity for this week’s second blog.

(And anybody thinking ‘the blogger’s a bit of an oddity anyway’ is toast.)

Last week’s trip to Galloway – see the previous post – provided me with lots of inspiration of all sorts, and, thanks primarily to Wigtown, also provided me with lots more books which now need to be found space on my groaning shelves. But the area where I was staying also provided me with ideas and material to supplement a post from almost exactly four years ago. So the first half or so of what follows is an edited version of that post, with entirely new material in the second part. I’ll do a similar thing with next Monday’s blog, which will also update another very old post, coincidentally again from pretty much exactly this same time of year, albeit five years ago. This might well be connected to the previous point about bookshops and bookshelves!

Bear with me – and if you know the legends of King Arthur at all, you’ll probably know just how terrible a pun ‘bear with me’ is…

***

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 or Caerfyrddin, 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.

Kidwelly Castle, my ‘local’ castle when I was growing up, where a big chunk of my love of history was born. Arthurian connection? None- unless you count the fact that it appeared in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

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 (who sadly died last year) 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.) 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.

Arthuret church. Nice place, but no sign of kings slumbering for eternity

Four years ago, when the original version of this part of the blog was posted, I was staying at the Landmark Trust’s gloriously eccentric Coop House. This 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.

Glastonbury Abbey: site of the alleged tomb of Arthur and Guinevere. If English Heritage had a sense of humour, they’d erect a shrubbery around it

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, a French Arthur (seriously) 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 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, though, 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?

***

So that’s what I wrote four years ago. All of those thoughts and themes came back to me in spades last week, when I was staying in another truly unique Landmark, Glenmalloch Lodge. For one thing, Glenmalloch stands on the Cumloden estate, home to the troubled Earls of Galloway, and was originally built as Cumloden School. (Apparently 25 girls and their teacher used to fit in there – and given that it was cosy for just me, I reckon the teacher must have double stacked the wee lassies.) Mmm, though, ‘Cumloden’…doesn’t that sound a bit like ‘Camlann’ to you? OK, yes, I won’t go there.

Remote and peaceful (indeed, probably the quietest and darkest place I’ve ever stayed in), Glenmalloch is, of course, in North Wales, or as some insist on calling it, ‘Scotland’.

Before all my Scottish friends jump down my throat for the second time this week, I should emphasise that we’re not making a territorial claim on your wonderful country. (Unlike with England, of course, where we still want the flat and dry bits back; fifteen hundred years of hurt, etc…) Nevertheless, it’s indisputably true that what’s now southern Scotland was once ‘Welsh’ territory, the Hen Ogledd (‘Old North’) of the annals. The original name for Edinburgh, Dunedin, is Welsh, as are many place names around it – Tranent, for example, is simply an inverted rendering of ‘Trenant’, about as Welsh as a name as you’ll find. During my drive west along the highway to the sun, otherwise known as the A75, I passed the signs to Caerlaverock Castle, semantic twin to Caernarfon, Caerphilly, and, yes, Caerfyrddin, Carmarthen. The great stone of Clach nam Breatann, ‘the rock of the Britons’, at the northern end of Loch Lomond, is said to mark the northern border of the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, which had its capital on the rock of Dumbarton. Thus in the humble opinion of this blogger, adding Scots Gaelic versions of placenames to the usual ones on, say, railway station signs, in this part of Scotland, is historically illiterate: provide an alternative to the Anglo-Scots version by all means, but that alternative should surely be in Welsh, the original language of the area.

All of which brings me to Rheged. In the old Welsh annals, this was a mighty but short-lived kingdom in the north, which had a brief period of greatness under King Urien. But historians and archaeologists can’t agree on whether Rheged existed at all, and if it did, on where it was. It’s usually been assumed to have been on one or both sides of the Solway Firth, perhaps extending as far south as Rochdale, the original name of which was Recedham (Note: on behalf of the Welsh people, I can confirm that we aren’t lodging a territorial claim for Rochdale.) But there were plenty of suggestive pointers not a million miles from Glenmalloch Lodge. Not far west, for example, is Dunragit – surely, some have argued, ‘the fort of Rheged’? Not far east is Trusty’s Hill, brooding over Anwoth kirk, which I mentioned in my last post, and overlooking the town of Gatehouse of Fleet. Recent excavations there have revealed what’s been described as a palace complex from the correct period, i.e. around the sixth century; so was this the principal seat, or capital if you prefer, of Rheged? If so, might Arthur have known it, especially if he was a warlord of the Hen Ogledd, not of ‘south’ Wales, Cornwall or Somerset?

Pendragon Castle. Minus any dragons, but plus red squirrels, allegedly

At which point, off we go once again, charging back into the Arthurian forest. I took a detour on my way to Glenmalloch, and stopped off to see Pendragon Castle, on the border of the north Pennines and the Lake District. Despite being a small and nondescript ruin, this has two things going for it. First, it has surely the most awesome castle name of them all; eat your heart out, George R R Martin. Second, it was reputedly the home of Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur. In fact, the castle wasn’t built until the twelfth century, half a millennium and more after Uther’s time, but its name demonstrates that, just like the ‘grave’ discovered by the monks of Glastonbury, ‘the Arthur industry’ has pretty well always been with us. A key part of that industry is the myth proclaiming that one day, when the nation is in its direst peril, the Once and Future King will rise from his slumber in a forgotten cave, and ride forth to save –

Hang on, there’s someone at the door.

Ah, OK.

Some guy in a suit of armour, wanting to know Boris Johnson’s address.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch this space for the answer!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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