J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

History teaching

Sea, the Conference

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This blog has often touched on the subject of ‘sea blindness’ in modern Britain, notably here, and I also took that as the theme of the keynote lecture I delivered to last year’s conference for new researchers in maritime history. One important element of this discussion is the state of maritime history research in the broadest sense of the term: after all, expecting greater public awareness of, and engagement with, ‘the sea’ in all its aspects, is likely to be pie in the sky if those engaged in that research are working on obscure or done-to-death themes, if they are overworked by the demands of the sectors they work in, or simply if their numbers are declining as successive governments put more and more emphasis on training up only scientists, engineers, IT specialists, and other supposedly ‘useful’ disciplines. A recent piece in Topmasts, the excellent online newsletter of the Society for Nautical Research (available to non-members, too), put forward a tongue-in-cheek proposal that the problem of relentless focus on one well-worked theme in particular could be addressed by instituting a seven-year ban on ‘the N word’ (as in ‘N’s Column in T Square’), in order to focus on lesser known and neglected themes. This author concluded with a provocative statement: ‘maritime history is too important to let it die or sink to the tokenism of one essay in an undergraduate course’.

It’s in this context that I’m delighted to join with the organising parties to make a really important announcement. For some time, the Research and Programmes committee of the Society for Nautical Research, which I chair, has been developing the first conference that the society has ever run under its own name, rather than sponsoring other people’s. There are many reasons for doing this: it’s one way of improving the ‘package’ we offer our members, as well as raising the society’s profile, but the society also wanted to offer something rather broader than the many conferences which focus on specific themes, say, or the anniversaries of particular events. Consequently, we’ve partnered with the wonderful Greenwich Maritime Centre, who will be providing the facilities and much of the organisation for the conference to be held on 9 September of this year, under the title ‘The State of Maritime History Research’.

The text of the call for papers (also available on the GMC website) follows, but the key point that I’d like to make here is that we want this to be broad an event as possible, touching on a wide range of themes and disciplines. It’s certainly not all ‘doom and gloom’ in the world of maritime history research, but where are the strong and weak areas? What are the challenges? Above all, what, if anything, can be done to address ‘sea blindness’ – and is that a valid concept in any case? We’re hoping to attract prominent speakers and delegates for what should be a really important event, which we hope will garner considerable publicity. Moreover, if this conference succeeds, we’re looking to make it a regular event, held every few years, because this is an ever-changing scene – for example, university courses disappear, or new ones come into being, with bewildering frequency, while in an age of austerity, it’s a sad truth that the survival of many maritime museums and even historic ships is in doubt. (Witness the current crisis over the survival of HMS President 1918, for example.)

I’m certainly minded to offer a paper myself, but if we get a scrum of outstanding speakers, I’ll happily step aside!

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Over the past few decades there has been significant debate as to the place and shape of maritime history. In January 2008, the Council of the American Historical Association approved unanimously to add ‘Maritime, including Naval’ to its taxonomy of academic specialties. But since then, it has been suggested that the field has been marginalised.  Or does the growth of new areas of interest – such as the study of port towns, the ‘Atlantic World,’ Coastal History, and the role of gender in maritime history – suggest a flourishing, if more diverse, environment? What is the state of health in other research-orientated maritime activities such as public history and heritage?

The Greenwich Maritime Centre and the Society for Nautical Research are excited to announce a major conference to be held at the University of Greenwich to consider these questions. The conference will bring together key contributors from within the broad field of maritime history, as well as those who write on maritime and coastal topics, but do not consider themselves maritime historians. Papers and key discussion points will be published in hard copy and/or online by the Society of Nautical Research.

Proposals are invited for papers on any of the following aspects, or on other related and relevant themes. The principal criterion for acceptance will be the extent to which a paper provides a broad overview of the current situation in a specific field, and of the prospects for the future, rather than narrow, descriptive accounts of a particular period of history or historic ship (to give two examples).

  • The study of maritime history in the university and school sectors
  • The state of maritime research in particular geographical regions and countries
  • The state of particular sub-disciplines within maritime history and research, e.g. naval history, nautical archaeology, port towns, coastal studies
  • The health of the maritime museums sector, and current and future challenges for it
  • The state of the historic ships and craft sector
  • ‘Sea blindness’: fact or fiction?

Proposals of 500 words, together with a short biography of no more than 150 words, should be submitted by 1 June 2017  to  https://tinyurl.com/SNRConference2017

NB: There will be a nominal fee of £25 for the conference. Please book  at  https://maritimeresearch.eventbrite.co.uk, registration will open on 1 June 2017.

Battlefield Bonkers Redux

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Busy, busy, busy – into the home straight with writing my new non-fiction book for Seaforth Publishing, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy! So no time to write a new post this week…which gives me a perfect excuse to re-blog once again one of my most popular posts of all time, originally from June 2013. After all, you can never get enough of Battlefield Bonkers – which I think was their original problem…

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In last week’s post (i.e. June 2013), I described my recent visit to Pepys House at Brampton, Cambridgeshire. Although I’d never been there before, this brought back some slightly surreal memories, principally because our hostess reminded me that the day of our meeting was the anniversary of the Battle of Naseby (14 June 1645). In history, of course, Naseby was the decisive battle of the first (British) civil war: King Charles I’s army was comprehensively defeated by the New Model Army commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell. In fiction, I’ve made it absolutely integral to Matthew Quinton’s back story. Much of his staunch royalism and sense of honour can be attributed to the death of his father during the battle; I’ve placed James Quinton, ninth Earl of Ravensden, in the right-wing of the Royalist cavalry, commanded by Prince Rupert of the Rhine, which successfully drove its opponents off the field but then fatally rode off to seek plunder instead of turning to attack the Parliamentarian infantry and Cromwell’s cavalry on the other wing, which duly rolled up the King’s army. So Matthew, who’s meant to be five at the time of his father’s death, refers to Naseby frequently, and in The Blast That Tears The Skies, an important and (for him) cathartic plot development takes place on the twentieth anniversary of the battle.

The monument at Naseby, looking towards the site of Prince Rupert's charge
The monument at Naseby, looking towards the site of Prince Rupert’s charge

The battlefield of Naseby isn’t too far from where I live, and one year when I was teaching the Civil War to A-level students, I decided to organise a field trip which would visit the site and a couple of other relevant places of interest. The trip started in a fairly low key way at the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon, which I also mentioned last week, with the students duly staring in awe at the Lord Protector’s hat. But then we drove on to Naseby. I’d been there before, several times, so knew the geography well; the site is a shallow valley, now planted with arable crops, and a lane crosses the battlefield roughly in the position where Cromwell’s cavalry charged. There’s a lay-by on the slope where the Parliamentarian army massed, and this was where I intended to park. I was driving the party in a fairly large hired minibus, which had substantial headrests on each of the seats, largely blocking the forward view. This proved fortunate, for as I drove into the lay-by, I noticed that the car already parked in it contained the unmistakeable sight of a nude male head and shoulders bobbing up and down vigorously on top of a nude female head and shoulders.

Naseby, looking from the Parliamentarian position towards the King's on the opposite ridge
Naseby, looking from the Parliamentarian position towards the King’s on the opposite ridge

Fortunately, gentle reader, I was a very experienced teacher by this time, and I thought I could easily deal even with this, the sort of situation for which they certainly don’t prepare you on the training courses. These were the days, too, before rampant Health and Safety struck the classroom – albeit only just – and I’ve often wondered how I’d have filled in a risk assessment form for this particular trip (‘Risk of minibus crashing on A14 – medium; risk of alien invasion – low; risk of encountering rampant naked fornication on seventeenth century battlefield – very high’). Knowing that the students, who had done what all 17 year olds do and decamped towards the back of the bus as soon as they got aboard, couldn’t see what was going on up ahead (or, indeed, what was going up on ahead), I turned around and started to give them a solemn-faced briefing about the importance of respecting this battlefield where so many gallant men had fallen, etc etc, hoping that in the meantime, the couple in the car would realise that they were no longer alone and would make themselves respectable as quickly as possible. Indeed, the man’s face did briefly rise above the level of his partner’s head. He looked at me. I looked at him. He looked horrified. And then he carried on doing what he was already doing.

Looking towards the site of Cromwell's charge - and of the modern day lane where the 'incident' occurred!
Looking towards the site of Cromwell’s charge – and of the modern day lane where the ‘incident’ occurred!

Well, I thought, I’ve given you every chance. Little do you realise what lurks in the seats behind me – for by chance, this particular A-level set contained an unusually high proportion of the school’s first rugby fifteen (which, for my American readers, would be the equivalent of an elite High School senior football squad, albeit without the padding). So I let them out of the bus and started to lead them onto the path towards the Naseby monument, still thinking that if I could only get them far enough from the car as quickly as possible, the situation might still be salvaged. And then the inevitable happened: one of the rugby players pointed and said ‘What are they doing in that car?’ Cue a massed charge toward the vehicle in question, with clods of earth being thrown at the windows. At long last, the amorous couple hastily pulled on some clothes and drove off at great speed. Needless to say, any attempt at serious historical analysis of the battle perished there and then, and by the following day, the story of the Naseby bonk had already entered into the annals of school mythology. And also needless to say, I never tempted fate by organising another field trip to Naseby.

But this sorry episode got me thinking. What if there’s a secret sub-culture out there – a sort of Mile High Club for frisky historians and warfare junkies, who get their kicks by having sex on battlefields? Are there couples who sneak into the undergrowth of Senlac Hill, using ‘shield wall’ as an euphemism for condoms? Do people roll around the lush grass of Bosworth, deploying some imaginative unclothed role play as they recite the ‘my kingdom for a horse’ speech? Are there people for whom the very name of Gettysburg’s Little Round Top is a turn-on? As the old saying goes, I think we should be told.

Going Dark

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This will be the last post for a few weeks, unless [a] I get particularly worked up about some idiocy or other and decide to rant about it, [b] something really interesting emerges from my research, or [c] some of my potential guest bloggers send in contributions. Regular readers will know that I did this last summer, when I was finishing off ‘Quinton 5’, The Battle of All The Ages (now available for pre-order, incidentally), and that I provided a list of the things that I expected to come along and distract me from the task – which, of course, they duly did. For various reasons, I’ve juggled around my work schedule for this year, so that I’ll now aim to finish my next non-fiction book – about the fascinating and distinctly eccentric Stepney baronets of Llanelly House – in the summer and autumn, meaning that it’s time to get started on ‘Quinton 6’, for which both the name and story outline are under Star Wars-like wraps at the moment. Suffice to say that it’s very different to all the books that have gone before, and will be much more complicated to write, so I need to concentrate completely on it, at least in the early stages.

It’s at this sort of time, too, that I need to get back into the habit of writing fiction, which means reminding myself of the basics of how I actually do the job. I know there are all sorts of blogs and websites out there where authors provide their advice to aspiring writers on how to write a book, and I’ve always largely eschewed the temptation to do this – partly because I suppose I think I’m still learning how to do it myself! But for what it’s worth, here are a few things that work for me.

  • Always write something, even if it’s rubbish – This invariably appears high up any ‘how to do it’ advice list, but it took me a long time to take this on board. I would wait for The Elusive Muse to come along, only to realise eventually that muses operate like London buses – it’s a miracle if one turns up at all, but if it does, you can guarantee there’ll be another three close behind. So yes, write something. Even if inspiration is non-existent, if there’s no sign at all of the Number Seven Muse, just put something down. Who knows, somewhere within the turgid 500 words that emerged from the depths of a hangover might lurk the germ of an idea that will make all the difference to your story in the long run. Alternatively, though, if your mind really is a complete blank and not even the turgid rubbish will come, then…
  • Get out – Change the scene. Go for a walk. Have a cup of tea. At some point during the day, do these sorts of things anyway – they keep you normal, and they keep you fit. (Well, as fit as anyone who sits around hitting a keyboard all day can be, at any rate.) It’s amazing how often ideas come to me when I’m out for an afternoon constitutional. And as I’ve mentioned before in this blog, when I first start thinking about a new book, I’ll go away for a few days or a week to brainstorm the major elements of the plot outline: it’s essentially the same principle as corporate awaydays, i.e. that a change of scene is remarkably conducive to ‘blue skies thinking’.
  • To plot or not to plot – Some authors construct incredibly elaborate plot structures in advance; some seem to keep it all in their heads and just let it flow. (I was fascinated by a fairly recent TV documentary about the great Scottish crime writer Ian Rankin, who evidently makes up much of what he does as he goes along.) I’m probably somewhere in the middle: yes, I have a fairly detailed plot outline in advance, but it’s still loose enough to allow the characters to go off in their own directions. The classic example of this was the character of Phineas Musk, the long-serving Quinton family retainer who becomes Matthew Quinton’s nominal captain’s clerk, somewhat erratic moral compass, court jester and guardian angel rolled into one. Musk was originally going to be a very minor character whose principal role was to deliver a letter to Matthew at the start of Gentleman Captain, but from pretty much the first lines I wrote for him, it was as though he was metaphorically slapping me about the head to demand a bigger part. Which he duly got…
  • To target or not to target – Similarly, I know quite a few authors who set themselves a target number of words each day and stick rigidly to that. I don’t, partly because I’ve always been able to write pretty quickly. So 2,000 or thereabouts is usually par for the course, although on days where the muses have all turned up in a row and are queuing to get into the bus stop, I’ve been known to get up to 5,000 or so. The record is 8,000 words in a day, but this had the unfortunate side effect that, on the following morning, I woke up with a swollen and painful hand which took a week to recover. So never again!
  • Show, Don’t Tell? Forget it –  When I first started out as a writer of fiction, I started to hear the mantra ‘Show, don’t tell’ trotted out by editors and the like; it’s also one of the standard dicta in the creative writing courses. On one level, this is perfectly good and sensible advice – of course it’s better to show characters’ feelings and personality traits through word-pictures, dialogue, and so forth. But it quickly seemed to me that ‘Show, don’t tell’ was a blunt instrument which was positively misleading for writers of historical fiction. After all, when did you last hear an author of historical fiction described as a ‘story shower’? History, both fiction and non-fiction, demands that a story be told – and let’s face it, trying to write, say, a book about the Four Days Battle of 1666 primarily by ‘showing’ would lead to a tome so long that it would make Gone With The Wind look like a series of tweets. So I came to the conclusion that the balance between ‘show’ and ‘tell’ varies significantly between genres – for example, a tight psychological drama taking place within a narrow timeframe should certainly ‘show’ far more than ‘tell’, but a historical epic covering anything up to several years should do the opposite. It also took me a little while to realise that I’d experienced the whole ‘show/tell’ business before, during my previous life as a teacher. We were trained to let students find things out for themselves, not to hand down words of wisdom from on high as ‘priest teachers’, as the lecturer on my training course put it (I remember us all sitting in the pub afterwards, confessing one by one that we actually quite liked the sound of being ‘priest teachers’.) Like ‘Show and Tell’, it’s another of those situations where there’s an ideal, and then there’s the real world. Of course students should, ideally, find things out for themselves, with the teacher acting merely as a facilitator. But then there’s the reality of it being a wet Friday afternoon, the students having a vital exam in two weeks, and whether you like it or not, folks, you’re getting dictated notes on Metternich and the Holy Alliance from your friendly neighbourhood ‘priest teacher’. (Remind me one day to do a blog about ‘the most boring topics I’ve ever taught’. The Holy Alliance would be right up there, and it’s definitely best not to get me started on Italian Unification; think The Incredible Hulk grunting ‘Risorgimento! Cavour! Garibaldi!’ as he smashes up New York.)

Anyway, I think I can spot a muse in the distance, chugging its way slowly toward my door. Au revoir for now!

The Good Old Days

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I don’t often produce two blogs in a week, let alone in a day, but I couldn’t let this one pass. Apropos of the current spat about History teaching between Michael Gove and, well, pretty well everybody else, really – principally about World War I, but more generally about whether or not History in schools should be about ‘our national story’ (sic) – I recently came across the following piece which suggests that this sort of debate is as old as the hills. This is the beginning of an article entitled ‘The Vital Importance of Our Naval and Military History’, published in The Navy and Army Illustrated for 15 October 1897. It was written by T Miller Maguire, esq., LL.D., of the Inns of Court Rifle Volunteers, who was a prolific writer on military and strategic matters. But most importantly, it suggests that as far as at least some were concerned, not all was rosy in schools even in the 1890s – surely, one might think, a Goveian golden age of History teaching when pupils learned nothing but lists of dates and tales of British triumph…or as Sir Henry Newbolt called it in his poem ‘Ionicus’, ‘the strength and splendour of England’s War’.

(Hmm, strange that Newbolt doesn’t get much of an outing in schools these days. Wonder why that should be…?)

There might be some excuse for Frenchmen, Russians, or Germans, who, absorbed in business, pleasure, or metaphysics, forgot to study the records of their Fatherland. But they do nothing of the kind; on the contrary, all of them are enthusiastic enquirers into the annals of their past history, which is an obligatory subject in every public school, from the Adour to the Neva. Indifference to national history is synonymous with sordid ignorance, both in continental Europe and in the United States…

Strange to say, the history of our most magnificent Empire is a sealed book to all classes of our peoples, and yet we have no excuses such as might pass among self-contained nations that can live on their own products, if they were stupid enough to be indifferent to the only true guide for statesmen and voters. With Frenchmen and Germans, empire, sea power, a great navy, numerous colonies, subject lands in Asia and Africa, are mere incidents of the national life, things more or less desirable, but not vital. With us, foreign trade, command of the sea, colonial empire, are vital; they are the breath of our nostrils. Without them we perish. We live on the world at large, not on the produce of our little isles. To every Briton, therefore, his national history, how we won his empire, how to retain it, the origin of our naval power, its present requirements, how our soldiers acquired India, how India may be lost, the distinction between our military conditions and those of our neighbours, the nature and needs of combined naval and military expeditions, the cultivation of patriotic sentiments, and a readiness for self-sacrifice among the rising generation, are as absolutely indispensable as our daily bread. Each citizen should feel that the efficiency of our army and navy comes home to his ‘business and bosom’ with as much force as how to secure a comfortable living wage, or how to insure his life, his furniture, and his house.

Schoolmasters who forget to teach British history to their pupils are, beyond doubt, a disgrace to their profession and a danger to their nation, and a civilian who is not fairly ‘well up’ in our modern military records is quite unworthy of a place in any public body, and unfit to vote on any great political issue.

It may be safely laid down that if our so-called educated classes only knew as much modern history as is contained in the French textbook ‘Histoire Contemporaine’, by Maréchal, not one tenth of the folly about Armenia, Crete and the Eastern Question, which has recently rendered political platforms ridiculous, could have been conceived or uttered. If our democracy be not educated – and without history, which ‘makes men wise’, there is no education worthy of the name – the results to our state in any serious crisis may be disastrous. 

So the vitriol currently flying between the various protagonists in the World War One / History teaching debates is distinctly tame compared with the language used over a hundred years ago, when Miller Maguire effectively accused unpatriotic teachers of treason; while the oft-heard lament that most modern voters and politicians are thoroughly ignorant about defence and foreign policy, but still feel qualified to spout vast amounts of rubbish about such matters, has a very long history. Ah, Twitter, if only you’d been around in Miller Maguire’s day! #easternquestion #traitorteachers #businessandbosom

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

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

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

So without further ado, over to Sam!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pepys Show

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I was going to have a week off blogging. After doing five posts in a week for the Orkney and Shetland road trip, then another extra one to mark the rediscovery of King Richard III, I thought I deserved to put my feet up, or at most to do a nice short light-hearted post about hunting for other lost royal corpses (I bags King Offa; he’s rumoured to be somewhere near the bar of Bedford Rowing Club).

Then, of course, Michael Gove produced the new draft National Curriculum for History.

Now, as regular readers of this blog will know, I don’t do politics. After all, I don’t want to lose a huge tranche of followers by nailing my colours to any mast whatsoever. Some of you will think Mr Gove is the greatest thing since sliced bread; others will think he’s Satan’s spokesman on childcare. Those in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland will already be getting ready to surf off elsewhere in search of blogs about rugby, because since devolution, Mr Gove’s remit extends only to England’s green and pleasant land. Those in other continents will be thinking ‘Goddarn (for that, I understand, is how Americans speak; I watched countless episodes of Bonanza), another introverted Brit-orientated post’.

But bear with me.

I don’t want to consider how likely it is that five year olds will be able to obtain a sound understanding of the concepts of civilisation and democracy, as the new curriculum enjoins. I don’t want to get into the whole argument about whether an exclusive concentration on British history alone from the ages of 7 to 14 is a good or a bad thing. However, as someone who taught History in the secondary sector for the best part of 30 years, and even taught 9 and 10 year olds on occasions, I can say with some confidence that anyone who thinks you can cover the whole of British history from the Stone Age to the fall of Thatcher (sorry, read ‘Berlin Wall’ – oh no, just checked the text again, re-insert ‘Thatcher’) in seven years in the amount of time allocated to History is, shall we say, several horses short of a lasagne.

No.

I want to concentrate on just one line of the new curriculum; a line that gladdened my heart at first reading. There it is, my friends, in black and white, as one of the things that pupils are expected to learn at the end of Key Stage Two (so roughly at the age of ten): Samuel Pepys and the Establishment of the Royal Navy. Finally, we have formal recognition of the seventeenth century navy! Finally, everyone will know about the importance of Pepys and the fleet of his day, the very theme I’ve worked on for all these long years, and which now forms the backdrop for the Quinton Journals! (Hmm, think of all those potential new readers…think of the royalties…) Finally, all British schoolchildren will – oh, except for the ones in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, of course. And the English ones in academies, which don’t have to follow the National Curriculum. And the English ones in independent schools, which don’t either.

And that’s just the first of the problems with what should have been a piece of unquestionably good news for this blogger and his readers.

Let’s dig just a little deeper beneath that one line of the new curriculum, hopefully not unearthing any lost monarchs in the process. Now, I’ve actually taught children about Samuel Pepys – many, many times. He was actually in the old National Curriculum, albeit primarily as a source for the Plague and Great Fire of London. I’ve taught him to 9 year olds, to 13 year olds, and to 18 year olds, and for all of them, without exception, the first reaction to hearing his name is one of profound hilarity. Obviously, the sophistication of the humour varies: 9 year olds love the fact that the name sounds like ‘Pee’; 18 year olds love the fact that ‘Pepys’ could hardly be a better name for a voyeur who loved groping women (and yes, OK, they, too, love the fact that the name sounds like ‘Pee’). But once we got past the lavatorial humour, students of all ages loved Pepys for his vivid descriptions of dramatic events, the immediacy of his diary, and the attractiveness of his personality: in other words, all the aspects of Pepys that teachers are now meant to jettison in favour of studying his role in the establishment of the Royal Navy.

Ah, you say, but hang on a minute, you said a little earlier that this was a cause for rejoicing- after all, you’ve spent thirty years working on it!

Well, yes and no. I’ve actually spent thirty years disproving the notion that Samuel Pepys was responsible for the establishment of the Royal Navy. That institution was created – ‘established’, if you prefer – by one or more out of Kings Alfred the Great, Edgar, John, Edward III or Henry VIII, depending on which historians one reads; even in Pepys’s own day, Charles II and his brother James, first as Duke of York and then as Lord High Admiral, were more responsible for conceiving the important reforms that did indeed establish the navy as a permanent, professional fighting service. The notion that the Royal Navy was ‘established’ in this period harks back to Sir Arthur Bryant’s famous three-volume biography of Pepys from the 1930s, and was discredited well before I started working on the period.

But there’s a more significant problem. Let’s bear with the flawed assumption for a moment and have our ten year olds learning about Pepys and the establishment of the Royal Navy. To do that effectively, they have to know what the Royal Navy is. They have to know what any navy is. For goodness sake, you might be thinking, surely every ten year old knows what a navy is! Unfortunately, no, they don’t. About three or four years ago, for example, I gave a presentation to eleven year olds at one of the most eminent and famous public schools in the country – not the one that produces Prime Ministers on a conveyor belt, but very much in the same league. A significant number of the pupils genuinely had no idea what a navy was, and many had never heard of Horatio Nelson; and this was in a city that had once been one of the nation’s leading ports, and had several famous warships named after it. So now we’re no longer talking about one lesson to learn about Pepys and the navy, but at least one background lesson, ideally more, to explain the entire concept of a navy from first principles.

And there’s the rub. The same flawed thinking can be found time and time again throughout the draft National Curriculum. It contains some blatant pushing of outdated, subjective historical theories (e.g. Pepys establishing the navy, or the reference to ‘the Heptarchy’ in Anglo-Saxon England, a concept that’s been discredited for decades). Then there’s the complete failure of what’s meant to be solely the English national curriculum to distinguish clearly between English and British history; its nods towards Scots, Irish and Welsh history are frankly risible and might as well be omitted. All of this is combined with a seemingly total lack of awareness of the amount of time this material will actually take to teach, and that’s even before we consider the fact that the entirely chronological nature of the curriculum, taught in sequence between the ages of seven and fourteen, will mean that Pepys and the navy – indeed, absolutely everything before 1700 – will never be taught by a specialist History teacher.

No, I don’t do politics. But I really, really wish that when it comes to the teaching of History in schools, politicians of all persuasions in all countries would do common sense.