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Historical sources

The Real Gentlemen Captains, Redux, Part I

29/02/2016 by J D Davies

In the lead-up to my appearance on 13 March at Weymouth Leviathan, Britain’s first maritime literary festival, I thought I’d reblog some of my very earliest posts on this site, from November 2011, about some of the characters who will be making appearances during my talk. Here’s the first of them!

People often ask me to what extent the characters in the Quinton Journals, especially Matthew himself, are based on real people. I thought I’d use my next few blog posts to introduce some of the real-life individuals whose careers in Charles II’s navy provided the inspiration for Matthew and some of his adventures; and yes, occasionally the lives of these officers provide a few clues to some of the story lines in future books of the series! In future blogs I’ll also go on to detail some of the ‘tarpaulin’ officers who provided the inspiration for the character and career of Kit Farrell.

Captain Francis Digby – Probably born in about 1645, he was the second son of George Digby, second Earl of Bristol, one of Charles I’s most important (if catastrophic) advisors during the Civil War. He went to sea just after the Restoration, aged about fifteen, and fought at the Battle of Lowestoft in 1665 as a volunteer with Sir John Lawson, vice-admiral of the Red Squadron. In March 1666 he became lieutenant of the flagship Royal Charles, and his good service in that role during the Four Days Battle at the beginning of June led to his promotion to captain of the Fourth Rate frigate Jersey. His bravery is indicated by the fact that when the Jersey went in for repair after the St James’s day fight, Digby asked permission to go back to sea on another ship as a volunteer (a request rejected by the admiral, the grumpy old Duke of Albemarle). In 1667 he commanded the frigate Greenwich, which seems to have been given to him by King Charles II principally as a means of trying to restore the Digby family fortune, which had been ruined by the civil war. In 1668-9 he commanded the Third Rate Mountague in the Mediterranean. Digby’s manuscript journal for these commands, preserved at the British Library, reveals that despite his aristocratic background, he gradually became a highly competent seaman; on one occasion only his quick thinking prevented the fleet being wrecked on the North African coast.

Digby spent March and April 1672 in France, ‘fine tuning’ the naval agreement by which a combined Anglo-French fleet would attack the Dutch to fulfil the terms of the secret Treaty of Dover (1670). Digby met Louis XIV at Versailles on 1 March and during the next few days had several meetings with the king’s chief minister, Colbert. Not surprisingly the French rejected out of hand Digby’s suggestion that their captains and ships should have English commissions and colours, on the grounds that ‘his Christian Majesty never could suffer his captains to take commissions but from himself’. Despite this and some other disagreements, Digby’s negotiations were complete by 12 March. After leaving Paris he undertook a tour of inspection to Brest and La Rochelle before returning to England to take command of the Second Rate Henry. Digby was apparently somewhat disappointed by this, believing that he was already qualified to be a flag officer; indeed, if he had lived there is little doubt that he would have been an admiral before the end of the third Anglo-Dutch war, as several men junior to him were promoted to such rank during it. But on 28 May 1672 the Dutch under Michiel De Ruyter launched a surprise pre-emptive attack on the Anglo-French fleet as it lay in Solebay. The Henry was in the admiral’s division of the Blue Squadron, which bore the brunt of the fighting; the flagship Royal James was burned by a fireship and her admiral, the Earl of Sandwich, killed. The Henry had the next highest number of casualties in the squadron, with 49 killed. Francis Digby was one of them. He was buried at Chenies in Buckinghamshire, the mausoleum of the Russell family, Earls and later Dukes of Bedford; his mother was a daughter of the fourth Earl.

Digby was one of the many suitors of Frances Stuart, the model for the original image of ‘Britannia’ and later the Duchess of Richmond. Digby’s pursuit of her, like King Charles’s own, proved to be hopeless. He was said to have been driven to distraction by her ‘cruelty’, and after his death at Solebay Dryden wrote ‘Farewell, Fair Armida’, a poignant epitaph to unrequited love:

Farewell, fair Armida, my joy and my grief!
In vain I have loved you, and hope no relief;
Undone by your virtue, too strict and severe,
Your eyes gave me love, and you gave me despair:
Now called by my honour, I seek with content
The fate which in pity you would not prevent:
To languish in love were to find, by delay,
A death that’s more welcome the speediest way.
On seas and in battles, in bullets and fire,
The danger is less than in hopeless desire;
My death’s wound you give me, though far off I bear
My fall from your sight—not to cost you a tear:
But if the kind flood on a wave should convey,
And under your window my body should lay,
The wound on my breast when you happen to see,
You’ll say with a sigh—it was given by me.

Filed Under: Historical sources, Naval historical fiction, Naval history Tagged With: Battle of Solebay, books by J D Davies, Francis Digby, Gentleman Captain, Historical fiction, King Charles II, Matthew Quinton, Naval historical fiction, Restoration navy, Royal Navy history

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

01/02/2016 by J D Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized Tagged With: King Charles II, Rochester, Transylvania

Samuel Pepys versus The Incredible Hulk

25/01/2016 by J D Davies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Maritime history, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Kings of the Sea, National Maritime Museum, Pepys's Navy, Samuel Pepys, Sir Arthur Bryant

Carmarthenshire Archives – Further Urgent Update

25/11/2015 by J D Davies

The report on the archives that will be discussed by Carmarthenshire County Council’s executive board on Monday 30 November can be read at this link – scroll down to item 12. If you feel moved to action, please follow the advice in the previous post on this site.

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources Tagged With: archives, Carmarthenshire Record Office

Carmarthenshire Archives: Urgent Message

24/11/2015 by J D Davies

There’s a new and very important post by Sara Fox of the Friends of Carmarthenshire Archives in the ‘Visitor Posts’ section on the campaign Facebook page. For those of you who might not be on FB, I’ve copied and pasted the text below. Thanks in advance to all those who feel moved to take the action recommended here!

URGENT! On the 30th November the Executive Board of Carmarthen County Council will meet. There is a POSSIBILITY that the embryos of a future for your archive will be decided. PLEASE pick up a pen NOW and make your feelings known. It doesn’t have to be ‘War and Peace’ – a few focussed lines will do! • Public access to this rich archive has been denied for 2 years • The archive is currently being cleaned but will return to Cardiff in the short term • A long term plan is being considered which will involve the archive being taken to the outskirts of Swansea – forever! • Provision for archives by the Council is MANDATORY! Yet £9m of your money has just been ring fenced for a non-statutory Wellbeing Centre in Llanelli • Trinity St Davids University have offered to jointly build a new archive IN CARMARTHEN but the offer doesn’t seem to be getting recognition • Removal of the archive from Carmarthen will rip the heritage and culture out of Wales’ oldest market town, denying access for research and education of future generations PLEASE act now! Write today to one (or all of):- Mark James, CEO, Carmarthen County Hall, Carmarthen. SA31 1JP. Meryl Gravell, Regeneration & Leisure, County Hall, Carmarthen. SA31 1JP. Your local Councillor, C/O Carmarthen County Hall, Carmarthen. SA31 1JP. Thank you.

Filed Under: Heritage preservation, Historical research, Historical sources Tagged With: archives, Carmarthenshire Record Office

The Joy of Myth

26/10/2015 by J D Davies

It’s a refreshing change to come up for air after the intensity of all the Carmarthenshire Archives posts, and to actually blog about something else: something more like the normal fare of this particular website, in fact! (No doubt many of you will be breathing a similar sigh of relief…)

The Monument in 1753
The Monument in 1753

I’m currently heavily engaged in deconstructing assorted historical myths – the Great Fire of London for my next Quinton novel, Death’s Bright Angel, and the mythic ‘ideology’ underpinning the Stuart navy for both my next non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea, and for an essay in an academic book that I’m co-editing, which should see the light of day in a couple of years time. (Some might say that the Carmarthenshire Archives saga has involved a lot of myths too, most of them promulgated by the County Council, but let’s not go there…) As far as the Great Fire goes, I’m particularly interested in the ‘conspiracy theories’ that grew up to explain its outbreak, notably the notion that it was deliberately started by Catholics; indeed, Sir Christopher Wren’s Monument, which still stands in the City of London, carried a huge inscription stating categorically that this was the case from 1681 until 1830, although it was briefly erased in the reign of the Catholic King James II and VII. As for the navy, the rationale put forward by the Stuart monarchs for a powerful fleet, and for claiming the ‘sovereignty of the seas’ over the waters around Britain, was based heavily on a distinctly dodgy reading of some mythic medieval history, notably the reigns of the Saxon Kings Edgar and Alfred (and the Stuarts, after all, gave us one of the nation’s most potent mythical symbols of all, fair Britannia herself).

King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee by eight Welsh kings. (Not a myth.)
King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee by eight Welsh kings. (Not a myth.)

The great problem with myths, of course, is that they can develop such powerful holds on the popular imagination that they elbow aside the historical realities, and prove impossible to dislodge. Take, for example, the famous story of the Russian troops who were meant to have been seen on British railways in 1914, ‘with snow on their boots’ – completely untrue, yet believed by huge swathes of the population, who either ‘knew a man’ who had seen them or even convinced themselves that they had seen them. Indeed, people positively prefer myths, especially when they pander to a set of political or social preconceptions. In Josephine Tey’s famous novel, The Daughter of Time, the protagonist uses the word ‘Tonypandy’ as shorthand for such myths – referring to the valleys legend that the troops ordered into the town by Winston Churchill in 1910-11 shot dead some of the strikers there. (They didn’t, although they did in my home town of Llanelli.) More contemporary is the crackpot right-wing conviction that the population is some 20 million larger than official records suggest, which follows the classic rule of myths and conspiracy theories: namely, that they should always completely ignore much more plausible, common sense explanations (in this case, that people buy far too much food and then throw lots of it away).

Taking the myth
Taking the myth

Ultimately, myths are often sexier than the truth, and certainly simpler and easier to grasp than what are often very complex realities. If you don’t believe me, take the following quick ‘would you rather?’ test –

  1. Would you rather read about Arthur, Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table, or the messy reality of the patchy archaological and textual evidence about a sixth century minor warlord who might or might not have existed and who might or might not have been any one out of Welsh, Cornish, Scottish or Breton?
  2. When you visualise Nelson and Napoleon, do you see two very short men, one of whom had an eyepatch – or the reality, i.e. two men without eyepatches, one of whom (the Corsican guy) was of normal height?
  3. Would you rather view the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 as a miraculous epic of heroism, or a catastrophic national humiliation? (My American readers may wish to substitute Pearl Harbor here; but then, they have to put up with multiple mythic versions of their national history that make anything we Brits come up with look like small beer. Here’s arguably the biggest.)
  4. The Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets, and were interested principally in trade. Or would you prefer this?
  5. Would you rather accept that most of those who fought in red uniforms at Rorke’s Drift were actually English, or put on the DVD of Zulu yet again and sing along to Men of Harlech?

All of which is a very roundabout introduction to the main subject matter of this week’s post. In Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales,  I wrote this:

Tea? With brandy, please.
Tea? With brandy, please.

Churchill himself came to Wiseman’s Bridge near Saundersfoot in 1943 to watch the largest of Wales’s mock invasions, Exercise Jantzen, reputedly refreshing himself with a pot of tea in the local pub. An area of 130 square miles from Laugharne to Tenby and north to the A40 became a ‘regulated area’, with strict new controls, including a curfew, imposed on the civilian population for the duration. The exercise took place between 21 July and 6 August. Over 16,000 tons of stores were landed, principally from a fleet of coasters that had sailed from Swansea and Port Talbot, together with over 7,000 men and nearly 600 vehicles. But there was much confusion on the beaches, the ferocious tidal range of Carmarthen Bay presented serious difficulties, and it was discovered that the coasters had been loaded poorly, particularly at Port Talbot, because the men who loaded the ships there were ‘by profession coal trimmers and not used to ordinary merchandise’. Nevertheless, important lessons were learned, notably in terms of how to manage the logistics of a hastily established bridgehead, and these undoubtedly later contributed to the success of D-Day.

It's not his period either
It’s not his period either

Perhaps I should have remembered the old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Admittedly, I did cover myself to some extent by throwing in the word ‘reputedly’, but perhaps I should have deployed a few ‘allegedlys’ as well, especially as I was wandering well outside my comfort zone: or, as the ultimate historian’s cop-out goes, ‘it’s not my period’. I’ve recently been taken to task over my statements about Jantzen, and especially about the supposed presence of Winston Churchill, by a correspondent who’d prefer to remain anonymous, but who’s delved into the subject in some detail over the years. To acknowledge the release of the new Bond film, let’s call my correspondent ‘M’. What follows is some judicious copying and pasting of his emails to me.

About thirty years ago I met the lady at Wisemans Bridge who quite sincerely believed that as a young girl at the Inn she had given Churchill a cup of tea. However, soon after I met an elderly local…who reckoned that she was mistaken, and claimed that the landlord of the Inn had promoted the idea of Churchill’s presence with a view to gaining some commercial benefit from the story at a later date. Churchill allegedly signed a visitors’ book at the Inn, but soon after the relevant page was supposedly removed by someone who saw value in the signature.* Some years later I made an effort to establish the facts and could find no reference to Jantzen in Martin Gilbert’s biography, which seemed to indicate that for part of the period of the exercise Churchill was attending a conference in Quebec. I suppose I should have tried to pursue the issue more, but Jantzen was entirely incidental to my research at the time…

On one of my visits to Kew I dug out a War Office file relating to Jantzen, and it included the diary of an officer who had been involved in planning and executing the exercise. It became clear that it was one exercise amongst others looking at the logisitics and practicality of loading and unloading coasters over an open beach, and at least some of the officers involved seemed to think that the whole thing was an entertaining caper. The diary certainly included references to drinking sessions in an hotel in Swansea! Put another way, the event was not presented as being totally essential to the war effort. Although the exercise was the biggest thing to happen in the Saundersfoot area during WW2, and involved an American contingent, the total number involved was probably less than 10,000. In the circumstances it seemed very unlikely that Churchill would have travelled to Wales for the occasion. That said, I cannot claim to have studied Jantzen very thoroughly, and can only offer this as my present perception of the matter.

If my perception is correct, I think this tale is not only a classic example of myth creation, but also of the extreme difficulty of correcting a myth once it has become established. The basic problem is that the locals believe it is true, and it suits them to assert that it is so. The late landlord of the Wisemans Bridge Inn would seem to have been quite astute. By associating his pub with Churchill in WW2 he was giving the place its own USP for later years. I think the young lady who supposedly gave tea to Churchill was his daughter, who would naturally accept whatever she had been told at the time. I have no idea who was mistaken for Churchill, but perhaps some official from the War Office, or a junior minister, appeared wearing a homburg and looking passably like the PM. We will never know. Suffice to say that the story took hold, and before long became further embellished. I have seen versions of the story suggesting that the exercise involved 100.000 men, and was a full-blown rehearsal for D-Day. It does not require a genius to realise that at the height of the war it would have been impossible to spare so many for such an activity, and even if such numbers had been provided they would have almost doubled the population of Pembrokeshire, and of themselves constituted an extraordinary logistical challenge. Other versions of the story include Gen. Eisenhower (and even Mountbatten) in the cast list. In fairness, I think Eisenhower did inspect American troops in Tenby in April, 1944, but that visit had nothing to do with Jantzen. 

I present M’s commentary without any additional analysis or comment from me; as he says, it may be that the family of those originally involved, or local historians of the Saundersfoot area, would have different evidence, a different perspective, and an urge to prove the truth of the story – and if any of them read this, and do so, then you have an open invitation to send me a response, and I’ll happily post it on this site.

Not appropriate kit for hill walking in the Beacons
Not appropriate kit for hill walking in the Beacons

However, it’s worth pointing out that the section I’ve asterisked * bears a startling resemblance to another great Welsh myth, namely that Kaiser Wilhelm II stayed incognito at the Lake Hotel, Llangammarch Wells, in September 1912, signing himself in the visitors’ book under one of his subsidiary titles, ‘Prince Munster’. I once contemplated writing a novel based on this, and did a little preliminary research on the matter – which established that at the time in question, the Kaiser’s movements were being reported daily in the German press, and that all of those movements took place well within the borders of the Reich. For example, he attended a large military parade in Berlin on 31 August, paid a visit of a few days to Switzerland in the following week, attended a review of 60,000 troops on the 9th, reviewed the navy at Wilhelmshaven on the 16th…and so on, with no possible interval during which he could have suddenly decamped to Powys and made it back again without anybody noticing. True, I could have tried to write a novel about a ‘ringer’ being sent to Wales – but unfortunately, Jack Higgins colonised that territory long ago with The Eagle Has Landed. But again, if there’s somebody out there who thinks they can prove that the ‘Kaiser in Wales’ story is true, the floor, i.e. this blog, is yours – and I’d be delighted if you could, because then I could carry on working up that idea for a novel. It was a belter, too.

 

Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized, Welsh history Tagged With: Britannia's Dragon, Exercise Jantzen, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Myth, Winston Churchill

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