J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Maritime history

On Tour: A New Angle on HMS Victory

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Time to resume (fairly) regular blogging! The recent hiatus has been due partly to various commitments, but also to a sense that I had nothing new to blog about. Recently, though, I’ve done a little travelling, the first in six months, and also realised that I have a huge bank of material which is perfect for the present situation, especially as we go into winter. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to visit and photograph many places connected to naval and/or general history, some of them far off the beaten track or usually inaccessible to the public. So over the next few weeks, maybe months, I’ll present a selection of images from these places in the hope that they’ll provide some escapism, and maybe give you a few ideas for places to aim for once travel problems ease.

To kick off, I recently paid a visit to Portsmouth in my capacity as chair of the Society for Nautical Research. The SNR’s first major achievement was to save HMS Victory for future generations, and we still administer the Save the Victory Fund, the first donation to which came from King George V. I was given a personal tour of the new and much more efficient system of props underneath the hull, as well as of the work on the nearby Victory gallery, which will reopen in 2021 after extensive refurbishment, partly funded by SNR. So here are some views of HMS Victory from bow to stern as you’ve never seen her before!

 

Bored Now: or, Captain Blood Plays Another Game of Solitaire

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Maritime history has provided me with many satisfying and pleasurable moments since I started studying it seriously *cough* years ago, but there’s something a bit special about chairing a conference session where [a] all the speakers are running pretty perfectly to time [b] the subject matter is interesting [c] if the chair’s attention does momentarily wander (heaven forfend), he can look out of the patio doors behind the audience and see the port side of Brunel’s SS Great Britain, just a few feet away. While that was a minor personal highlight of last weekend’s Connecting the Oceans conference in Bristol, examining the impact of global steam on the maritime world in the nineteenth century, it was far from being the only one. It would be invidious for me to comment on the quality of the organisation, as I was one of the co-organisers, but everything seemed to run smoothly, nobody got lost, and the ‘buzz’ from the audience was generally very positive indeed. So all in all, it seemed to be a success, and the conference proceedings are likely to be published before the end of this year in the Society for Nautical Research’s online open access newsletter, Topmasts.

One can never tell from a bare conference programme whether a common theme is going to emerge, or whether speakers are going to go off in all sorts of weird and wonderful directions. From the off, though, it was clear that this conference was going to present a pretty united front. Admiral Sir Ken Eaton, chairman of the co-sponsors the Society for Nautical Research, and Dr Helen Doe of Exeter University, provided broad overviews, with Helen concentrating on the businesses behind the rise of steam. We had two further keynote papers, from Dr Graeme Milne of Liverpool University and Captain Peter King, both looking at different aspects of the impact of steam (particular kudos to Peter for making the triple expansion compound engine interesting!) The panel sessions were varied and lively. James Boyd of the SS Great Britain Trust looked at steam’s aspect on migration, Jonathan Stafford of Nottingham University looked at boredom during long sea voyages (of which more anon) and Tim Carter of the Norwegian Centre for Maritime and Diving Medicine considered the different health hazards on steamships compared with sail. The next panel saw Morten Tinning of the Danish Maritime Museum look at the rise of the rise of the mighty Maersk line from humble beginnings (and opposition from those who thought steam had reached its technological limit), Tim Beattie looked at the impact of steam on the port of Falmouth, and Joanna Mathers of the SSGB Trust presented her preliminary findings about the nature of the labour force on UK steamships. In the primarily naval panel, which I chaired, Benjamin Miertzschke of the University of Potsdam looked at the introduction of steam in the German merchant marine and navy (significantly later than in the UK), Zachary Kopin of the University of Michigan looked at how the transition from sail to steam affected African-Americans (badly, with many of the opportunities previously open to them in the sailing navy being closed off), and Alistair Roach of the SNR and SS Great Britain Trust discussed Brunel’s extraordinary designs for Crimean War ‘stealth gunboats’, some even intended for water jet propulsion, not dissimilar in appearance to modern littoral combat ships or even low-profile drug-smuggling craft.

From my point of view, though, the most surprising theme to emerge from the conference was the serious thought now being given to the subject of boredom at sea, which came up in a couple of papers and was the principal subject of Jonathan Stafford’s. The long steamship passages out to India or Australia could become monotonous, and passengers’ letters and diaries give a good impression of this. (I’ve actually studied some of these myself – Sir Arthur Stepney, a member of the family I’ve been working on for many years, travelled extensively by sea from the 1870s to the 1900s, and his papers would be an excellent source for researching this theme.) By coincidence, not long after I got back from the conference, an email turned up with details of a talk in London on the exact same topic. Clearly boredom at sea is now ‘a thing’, but I think this sort of analysis could be extended well beyond the transition to steam in the nineteenth century; I’ve read countless ships’ logs and descriptions of sea voyages in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and let’s be brutally honest, not a lot happened for much of the time. This can pose a bit of a problem when I don my other hat as a writer of nautical fiction, which, by definition, demands constant excitement to keep the reader hooked. To his credit, the ‘daddy’ of our genre, Patrick O’Brian, is pretty good at conveying the tedium of long voyages at sea, but I sometimes wonder whether he would have found a publisher in the present day and age – I know quite a few people who’ve given up on O’Brian chiefly because little seems to happen for chapters at a time. On the other hand, to constantly emphasise the exciting aspects of life at sea, whether it be in fiction or in writing ‘real’ maritime history, is arguably to present the reader with a distorted and unrealistic experience of what it was actually like. That being so, I can exclusively reveal that my next novel will be entitled Matthew Quinton Watches Paint Dry.

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Finally, a plug for another conference! The New Researchers in Maritime History conference is always one of the highlights of the calendar, providing a chance for those just starting out in the field to try out their ideas and to meet both others in the same position and ‘old lags’, including some of the most eminent figures in the field. Next year’s conference will be held in the splendid setting of Chatham Dockyard, and the call for papers is below (NB the website given hasn’t caught up yet, so the online form isn’t yet available). Although I haven’t been a ‘new researcher’ for at least *coughs again* years, I’ll be there!

 

New researchers 2020

 

Tidal Wave

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At long last, I’m thrilled to be able to confirm that the first book in my new Tudor naval fiction trilogy will be published by Canelo this summer, currently as an e-book only.

And the title is…

Cue drumroll!

Cue trumpets!!

Cue my hometown male voice choir singing the Welsh national anthem!!!

DESTINY’S TIDE

Followers of this blog will know that this book has had a long and pretty unusual gestation period. Whereas authors invariably have to edit their work down to an acceptable length (unless you’re George R R Martin, obviously), I found myself having to more than double the length of a story that had originally been conceived as a novella. This proved to be quite fraught, and took rather longer than anticipated (with a knock-on effect on other projects), but it’s finally ready to go. And here, for the first time in any medium, is a preview of the book…

England, 1544

It is a dangerous time.

The religious changes enforced by the capricious old king, Henry VIII, have created fear, uncertainty and suspicion, while the king’s pride has led the country into simultaneous wars against France and Scotland. Against this backdrop, Jack Stannard, a young shipmaster, grieves for his dead wife, while hoping that the wars will provide an opportunity to distinguish himself, to provide for his motherless children Meg and Tom, and to restore the fortunes of his hometown of Dunwich. For centuries, though, the sea has eaten away at ‘England’s Atlantis’, while its rising neighbour, Southwold, plots incessantly to supplant it. Jack also has to battle the demons personified by his own father, a man with a dark and violent history, albeit now brought low by a terrible illness.

The beach and cliff at Dunwich, Suffolk. The coast was once more than a mile further out to sea; the remains of the town and its seven churches still lie underwater

As he sails to fight the Scots, Jack is accompanied by his mentor, Thomas Ryman, erstwhile soldier and equally erstwhile friar. Together, they fight ferocious battles in Scottish waters, while also contending with insidious enemies within their own ranks. Meanwhile in London, Jack’s old schoolfriend, Will Halliday, and his master, William Gonson, the effective organiser of the king’s navy, struggle to fit out a fleet for an even greater war against France, even as Gonson is consumed by memories of the terrible, unjust fate that befell his son. Jack and Will once harboured ambitions of singing before the king as members of his elite Chapel Royal, but destiny has now set them upon very different courses, with their futures, loves, and very lives, depending on the success of King Henry’s wars.  

The surviving remains of the Greyfriars at Dunwich – Thomas Ryman’s home until the abrupt and shocking Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII

Fresh from the campaign in Scotland, Jack Stannard sails for France and the great siege of Boulogne. There, he encounters an exotic foreigner whose words have a profound influence on him, challenging his entire view of the world and of his own future. Meanwhile, in Dunwich, Jack’s precocious nine-year-old daughter Meg has dreams and ambitions of her own, dreams and ambitions that have no place for the potential new wife who seems to be being foisted on her father. But Meg’s aspirations, and indeed her very life, are soon threatened by the sea’s relentless assault upon the ancient port.

The story culminates in the dramatic events of 1545, when the French launch a colossal invasion fleet against England. Sailing into battle against it, Jack and Ryman are hamstrung by treachery from closer to home than they could ever have expected. Events move inexorably to a shattering climax aboard the pride of Henry VIII’s navy – the great ship Mary Rose…

The hull of the Mary Rose, raised from the seabed in 1982, now preserved in a superb museum in Portsmouth

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Destiny’s Tide is based closely on the historical record, and upon the true stories of both ‘the lost city’ of Dunwich and the Gonson family. Although the Stannard family is fictitious, the England in which the three generations of it at the centre of the trilogy live and strive is recreated as faithfully as possible – a land torn apart by bitter religious divisions, even as the kingdom takes a dramatic new direction, a ‘turn to the sea’ in which gallant, ambitious merchants, mariners and warriors start to cast their eyes and set their sails far beyond the realm’s traditional boundaries and ambitions. Together, over a period of forty years, the Stannards and the Gonsons will be at the very heart of the astonishing rise of England’s Navy Royal.

The second book, set nearly a quarter of a century after the events of Destiny’s Tide , will take the Stannards to the Caribbean in company with John Hawkins and his young protege, a certain Francis Drake, while the final instalment, another twenty years further on, will centre on the titanic fight for England’s very survival as the ‘invincible’ Spanish Armada approaches its shores…

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I’ve already started work on the second book, which Canelo hope to publish as soon as possible after the first. But I certainly hope to get back to writing further titles in the Quinton series as soon as possible!

In the meantime, I’m trying to work out how I managed to commit myself to giving five talks in the first fortnight of February (I suspect the words ‘yes, I’ll do it’ might be part of the answer). Most of these are to selected audiences, but on 7 February, I’ll be talking at an open event in the wonderfully historic St Nicholas church in Deptford (full details here). This is under the auspices of the Lenox Project, which aims to build a replica of a particularly important Restoration warship, and I’ll be speaking alongside my old friend Richard Endsor, author of the definitive book about the ship. It should be a fun night, with music (not provided by us, have no fear) and refreshments, so if you’re in the general vicinity, please come along – it’s free!

Review: The New Tudor and Stuart Seafarers Gallery at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

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A disclaimer: this post has been written and posted rather more rapidly than usual, as it was only yesterday evening (19 September) that I went with the ‘LadyQJ’ of my Twitter feed (aka Wendy) to the launch event for the four new permanent galleries at the National Maritime Museum. So apologies if there are more typos and glitches than usual…

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Still ghastly after all these years

Launch events are tricky things, to which one sometimes goes with a mixture of anticipation and trepidation. They tend to be full of people in suits who all know each other, are called names like Tristan or Miranda, and who call each other ‘dahling’. Then there’s the object of the launch. Will it actually be any good, or will one be left stranded in a sea of seemingly approving humanity, the only person in the vast space thinking that this particular emperor has no clothes? Such were my feelings as we rolled up to the National Maritime Museum for the official opening of its new permanent Endeavour galleries, which increase the museum’s exhibition space by 40% (and in the process, make it possible to do what had previously been impossible, namely to get around the entire building without using GPS).Obviously, I was particularly keen to see the new Tudor and Stuart Seafarers gallery, having been part of the focus groups that contributed ideas to it during the planning stage, and also being a contributor to the new book which ties in to the themes presented in the gallery. On the other hand, the NMM has quite a bit of form in getting things spectacularly wrong. Some of us have never forgiven it for infilling the lovely old Neptune Hall and inserting a ghastly mezzanine floor which seems to serve little purpose other than to provide sufficient space for corporate junketing, which was what the launch event ultimately was.

‘Blimey, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John have changed a bit’

Anyway, we were fortunate enough (or cunning enough) to position ourselves right in front of the stage on said mezzanine, so had a perfect view of the ‘warm-up’ act, an energetic set of Polynesian dancers – there because the galleries were being launched, and indeed are named, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the beginning of Captain Cook’s first voyage. We then had an equally prime view of the speakers, all of whom were, in their turn, mere warm-up acts for the guest of honour, bona fide national treasure Sir David Attenborough, whose every step to the podium was greeted with ecstatic applause and cheering worthy of any rock star. Inevitably, the great man focused on the new Pacific gallery, on the wonders of Polynesian culture and navigation, and on the current perilous state of the Pacific and all the other oceans. So warm was the reception for this speech that he ended by channelling his late brother Dicky and bowed theatrically to all corners of the room.

The national treasure holds forth

With the speeches over, it was time to explore the galleries – or, in our case, one gallery. Reader, if you came here seeking a review of the Pacific gallery, or the polar one, or, umm, ‘Sea Things’, then I suggest you go elsewhere. Time was tight due to the angst-inducing game of chance that’s otherwise called ‘the Thameslink railway timetable’, so although we passed briefly through Polar Worlds on the way out (looks good, stuff about Franklin and Scott of the Antarctic, wedding dress of the first woman to get married in Antarctica, etc), we spent all our time in the Tudor and Stuart seafaring gallery. Inevitably, too, that’s where the few like-minded souls who actually already knew a bit about sixteenth and seventeenth century maritime history gathered, so there was some chinwagging to do.

And the bit you’ve come here for, namely the verdict? Well, the gallery is quite small, but it’s perfectly formed, and certainly has plenty of interest and impact. As you go in (or go out, depending on your route), there’s a large display case with some of the outstanding 17th century ship models from the NMM’s collection. Old friends, these (regardless of Sir David’s damning recollection that when he first visited the museum as a small boy in the 1930s, it was full of nothing but ‘boring’ ship models), as indeed were quite a few of the exhibits – the most controversial probably being the manuscript journal of the Restoration seafarer Edward Barlow, which had made national headlines on the previous day following the discovery of the author’s previously unseen confession to rape. (Kudos to the NMM press department for placing the story in a way guaranteed to drum up extra interest in the new galleries, although presumably they had little to do with the equally serendipitous news story of the week, the likely discovery of the wreck of Cook’s Endeavour off the American coast.) Pepys is there, together with Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, but the principal focus of the gallery is on navigation and exploration, so the Anglo-Dutch wars, and even the Spanish Armada, are arguably secondary. There are some extraordinary Tudor navigational instruments, which makes one wonder how they actually lifted them, let along took bearings with them, and a profusion of wonderful sea charts. Inevitably, too, there’s a ‘pirates’ display, and interactive fun stuff for the younger visitors. The latter will probably also love the little model of a seventeenth century dockyard, complete with tiny moving holograms – a master shipwright, a sawyer, even a dog – and one suspects that their enthusiasm will outweigh the siren voices of those who protest that the ship on the stocks is being built in completely the wrong way. However, perhaps the most evocative items in the entire gallery are the items recovered from the wreck of the London, which blew up in the Thames estuary in 1665 (and which will also be central to a new exhibition at Southend museum, which I hope to get to see soon).

So yes, the Tudor and Stuart gallery is a well conceived, enjoyable, informative, and thoroughly welcome addition to what modern parlance would term the museum’s ‘offer’. Indeed, when taken together with the newly refurbished Queen’s House, the seventeenth century and its naval history are arguably now front and centre of the National Maritime Museum’s permanent displays, and although I might be just a little biased, I can’t but applaud that state of affairs enthusiastically!

Enough words, though. Here are some pictures to give you a flavour of what it’s like…and I certainly intend to get back to Greenwich soon with my tourist hat on, to take a look in the other new galleries!

We want more models! More!

‘These foreigners, they come over here, they take our ships…’

Respect to all Tudor navigators

‘The pirate bit’

Likely to divide opinion

Exhibits from the wreck of the London

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Next week, this blog returns to one of its core purposes, namely raising awareness about, and providing new information regarding, seventeenth century naval history. Guest blogger Frank Fox, the leading authority on Stuart warships and their deployment, returns with a definitive listing of the British fleet at the Battle of Solebay, 28 May 1672 – a major contribution to the study of the Anglo-Dutch wars. When the post is published, though, I’ll actually be in Trnava, Slovakia, for reasons previously alluded to on this site. Expect to hear more about my trip in the near future!

Sounding the Trumpet

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I don’t often review books to which I’ve contributed, but this week, I’m going to make an exception and do a bit of trumpet blowing. During the last couple of weeks, the post has brought, inter alia, two complimentary copies of titles with which I was associated to varying degrees. The first is of the National Maritime Museum’s new book, Tudor and Stuart Seafarers, produced to tie in with the opening next month of the museum’s new Tudor and Stuart gallery – one of no fewer than four new galleries, which will expand the museum’s exhibition space by a staggering 40%. Needless to say, I can’t wait to see all of that, and hope to blog about it as soon as possible after the launch event. The second is the first volume of Famous Battles and How they Shaped the Modern World, published by Pen and Sword. I’m not actually in this one – my contribution, on the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667, is in volume 2 – but even so, I’m evidently entitled to a freebie, so I’ll throw in a bonus review!

A book

Tudor and Stuart Seafarers is lavishly produced, with wall-to-wall colour illustrations drawn from the NMM’s own collection. It’s clearly aimed at general readers, such as the sort of visitors who’ll go around the gallery and decide they’d like to know more about what they’ve seen, and I suspect it’ll also be an ideal ‘coffee table’ book. So those looking for a detailed academic thesis will undoubtedly be disappointed, although all of the authors have taken to care to ensure that their chapters reflect modern research, in many cases their own. There’s an introductory overview by James Davey, which tackles head on some of the uncomfortable truths about imperialism and slavery, followed by a chapter on ‘New Worlds, 1485-1505’ by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, who provides the European and global contexts of the voyages of exploration by the likes of Columbus, Cabot and da Gama. James Davey returns with Chapter 2, ‘Adventurers: England Turns to the Sea, 1550-80’, which does exactly what it says on the tin (and will undoubtedly get James an acknowledgement in the next instalment of my Tudor naval series). David Scott then provides a clear, insightful synthesis of ‘The Spanish Armada and England’s Conflict with Spain, 1585-1604’, although I’d have liked to have seen a little more coverage of the war after 1589 – a personal bugbear which readers of The Rage of Fortune will know all about!

Chapter 4, ‘Building a Navy’, is, to paraphrase the eminent naval historian Mr Ernest Wise, the one wot I writ, so I’ll leave judgement on it to others, who even now will be sharpening their quills in such remote outposts as High Wycombe and Bolton. Chapter 5, ‘Using the Seas and Skies: Navigation in Early Modern England’, is by Megan Barford and Louise Devoy, and again does what it says on the tin, deploying particularly fascinating illustrations even by the standards of this book (let’s face it, you can’t go wrong with old sea charts, unlike the mariners who were trying to use them). Laura Humphreys contributes Chapter 6 on ‘Encounter and Exploitation: the English Colonization of North America, 1585-1615’: the dates may suggest that the Mayflower has been forgotten, but in fact, the chapter does cover this, and it also provides the beginning of James Davey’s introductory chapter. In Chapter 7, Robert J Blyth looks at ‘Of Profit and Loss: The Trading World of Seventeenth Century England’, while Chapter 8 sees Elaine Murphy examine ‘The British Civil Wars 1638-53’ – the subject of her new book with Richard Blakemore, who provides Chapter 9 on ‘Life at Sea’. In Chapter 10, Rebecca Rideal considers ‘The Seventeenth Century Anglo-Dutch Wars’, while Chapter 11 inevitably brings us to ‘the P word’, with Aaron Jaffer’s study of ‘A Sea of Scoundrels: Pirates of the Stuart Era’. Christine Riding concludes the book with a chapter on ‘Art and the Maritime World, 1550-1714’, and again, the richness of the NMM’s collection, plus the production of the book entirely in colour, means that this is really a feast for the eyes.

So what criticisms might I make, other than the ones suggested above?

Well, that’s obviously a tricky one, given that I have a clear vested interest in the book’s success. But here we go regardless…

First and foremost, the title, Tudor and Stuart Seafarers, is blatantly Anglocentric, as some of my Scottish friends were quick to point out on Twitter. (Yes, Scotland is in there, but probably not as much as it could or should have been.) But with thirteen published books under my belt – fifteen, if you include the Quinton prequel novella and my current work in progress, of which more below – I’m a veteran of that peculiar circle of Hell reserved for those who sometimes have to agonise about the best title for a new book. Indeed, I was once prepared to go to the wire over the title I originally wanted to inflict upon the first Quinton novel, Gentleman Captain. I thought my title was brilliant, my (then) newly-acquired agent thought it was rubbish, and duly suggested GC instead. To cut a long story short, he was right (as he invariably has been ever since), I was wrong…and I suspect similar angst might have accompanied the naming of this particular tome. After all, British Seafarers of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries might have been more ‘politically correct’, but it would be quite a mouthful, and would undoubtedly fail on what it took me a long time to realise is one of the most important criteria of all when deciding on the name for a book: how small a font size would one need to fit the title comfortably on the spine, and yet make it large enough to stand out on the shelf in a bookshop?

Secondly, the choice of themes means that, inevitably, there are gaps. Readers of this blog (and I hope you’re both well) might already have noticed a strange leap from 1505 to 1550 in the chapter coverage, and although this is tackled head on by James Davey, who suggests there was very little focus on the sea in England in the first half of the sixteenth century, and the naval side of that period is touched on in the ubiquitous Chapter 4, I can’t help but feel that we may have done at least a slight injustice to two or three generations of seafarers. The same is true of the French wars of 1689 to 1713, which continue to be a hugely neglected area of naval history…yes, partly because people like me continue to focus on the earlier period, which has the advantage of the colossal amount of source material assembled by naval history’s Marmite man, Samuel Pepys. (For instance, the book makes no mention of the Battle of Barfleur in 1692, one of the biggest British naval victories before Nelson’s time, or the capture of Gibraltar in 1704, or, come to that, that strangest of all colonial interludes, the earlier English occupation of Tangier.)

But these are relatively minor points. If this book gets more people interested in, and knowledgeable about, early modern maritime history, then all of us who were part of ‘the team’ will feel that it’s very much ‘job done’. Moreover, it is truly heartening to see a book on this subject where nearly half the contributors are women, two of whom wrote the chapters specifically about naval warfare.

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Another book.
(Blogger suffering from caption inventiveness fatigue)

And so on to Famous Battles and How They Shaped the Modern World. The title has undoubtedly conscious echoes of one of the great seminal works of military history, J F C Fuller’s Decisive Battles of the Western World and Their Influence Upon History, which was one of the first proper, weighty books of this kind that I read, probably when I was fourteen or fifteen or thereabouts (and yes, you’re right, I really should have been getting out more instead). To betray a little insider secret, this was originally going to be a single volume, but like Topsy, it just growed, and the publisher ultimately decided to split it into two. It grew out of a day school in Reading a couple of years back, where contributors to this and the second volume spoke about their chosen battles, and was really fun to be involved with: from a personal point of view, I’d like to thank the joint editors, Beatrice Heuser and Athena Leoussi of the University of Reading, for their support, input and efficiency.

At this point, I should issue a disclaimer to the effect that I haven’t yet had time to read the book, but knowing the original parameters of the project and the line the editors took, I think it’s important to stress from the outset that this is light years removed from the old histories of battles. (‘At 0907 precisely, General Melchett despatched orders to the 69th Brigade, consisting of the 4th Barsetshire, the 7th Midsomer Murderers, and the Old Hogwartian Rifles, to advance upon the Grand Redoubt de Certain Slaughter. These orders were conveyed by Captain A. M. P. P. Q. Radish, riding a four year old grey stallion called Brian.’) The original focus of the day school, and of the projected book, was on the myths surrounding the chosen battles, and that focus still underpins this volume – it certainly underpins my own essay on the Dutch attack on Chatham. This first volume concentrates on the ancient and medieval eras, going from the siege of Troy, via Marathon and Thermopylai (and no, I didn’t know it was now spelt like that, either) to the wars of the Ancient Israelites, the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest, the Battle of Hastings, Béziers 1209 and Courtrai 1302. There are also two overview chapters, by Athena and Beatrice. I can safely say that, with the exceptions of Troy, Marathon and Hastings, I don’t know that much about most of these, so will look forward to finding out more…and again, the fact that exactly half the contributors are women suggests that the days when military history, like maritime and naval history, was written exclusively by old white men in blazers, are thankfully long behind us.

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Finally, after keeping my head down recently, I’m delighted to announce that I’ve completed the first draft of my new Tudor novel for Canelo. I can’t say much more about it until the publishers decide whether they like it or not, but suffice to say that it developed in some unexpected directions as I expanded it from the original novella, especially when I stumbled across the extraordinary story of a real family who encountered unbelievable tragedy as they struggled to cope with the impact of Henry VIII’s policies, and realised that I had a way of weaving their story seamlessly (I hope!) into my existing narrative. But I’m glad to say that I managed to stick to my principles about writing a Tudor novel, especially when it comes to wives, teen models, and Those Queens; and by coincidence, the line I intend to take through the entire planned trilogy fits neatly with the big themes developed by the other contributors to Tudor and Stuart Seafarers. Great minds, etc.

Anyway, there’s going to be quite a bit of dashing around in the next few weeks, so blogging may continue to be intermittent. But a real highlight should be the Historical Novel Society conference in Scotland in a couple of weeks’ time, where I’m looking forward to catching up with lots of old friends – and if time allows, I’ll try to blog either during it or immediately afterwards!

Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 2

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In this week’s first post, I gave my impressions of the dockyard town of Karlskrona and its terrific naval museum. Now on to the reason why I was there, an international conference on International Approaches to Naval Cities and Dockyards, held in the museum. From the moment it started, it was clear there was a really good buzz in the auditorium, and this was sustained throughout the programme; the very wide ranging papers came from many different perspectives, all had interesting things to say, and, unusually, there were no obvious weak links anywhere. It was also great that the conference was open to the public, and several ‘locals’ came in for one or more of the sessions. This sort of public engagement, reaching out beyond the ivory towers of academia, can only be a good thing, and maybe conferences in the UK could learn a lesson from this!

Ready for the off!

Jakop Seerup of the National Museum of Denmark kicked us off, looking at naval cities in the Baltic, particularly the intertwined histories of Karlskrona, Copenhagen and St Petersburg during the period from about 1680 to 1720. His comparative approach was really thought-provoking, and provided an excellent scene-setter for all that followed. Andreas Linderoth of the Swedish Naval Museum then spoke about Karlskrona in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War raised a very real prospect of the entire dockyard closing; he demonstrated how the town had successfully diversified to become a centre of high tech industries. Ann Coats of the University of Portsmouth then pulled off the not inconsiderable feat of covering the history of Portsmouth from the Romans to the present day in twenty minutes – and although this material was obviously the most familiar to me, Ann still came up with a few nuggets that I’d not known before!

The second session began with Brad Beaven and Mathias Seiter of the University of Portsmouth comparing the sailortowns of Portsmouth and Kiel from c.1860 to 1914, giving a particularly well illustrated talk which demonstrated the key similarities and differences between the two naval towns. At Portsmouth, for example, the sailortown overspilled into the official civic space (some great examples here of prostitutes parading outside the town hall!), whereas at Kiel, there was a more rigid separation. They were followed by some Welsh bloke I’d never heard of rabbiting on about Pembroke Dock and the Welsh nation. OK, yes, it was me, and I attempted to show how the dockyard, an alien institution in what was traditionally a non-Welsh area (‘Little England Beyond Wales’) gradually became a part of the mainstream of Welsh national identity. Harry Svensson of Stockholm University then spoke on the development of centralised control and production at Karlskrona between 1723 and 1780, in his opinion very much a neglected age of Swedish naval history, and he drew my attention to the intriguing figure of Salomon von Otter, whom he described as a ‘Swedish Samuel Pepys’!

Following these sessions, we adjourned to prepare for the conference dinner. This was held in an eighteenth century building which doubles as an officers’ mess and (on the top floor) the home of the Royal Society of Naval Sciences. The librarians provided us with an introduction to the former before dinner. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I’m an absolute sucker for old libraries; give me floor to ceiling oak bookcases full of venerable tomes, plus comfy armchairs in which to study them, plus (ideally) a well stocked bar in the immediate vicinity, and I’m anybody’s. This library ticked these boxes, and then some. Among the treasures laid out before us were original ‘adverts’ for John Ericsson’s monitor designs, a book of drafts by Fredrik af Chapman (see my previous post), a 1772 plan of Portsmouth dockyard drawn up by a Swedish spy visitor, and a plan of the defences of Karlskrona in 1801, when a certain H Nelson was in the vicinity.

After a fine dinner (fish, since you ask), we all adjourned to the splendidly furnished and, yes, well stocked bar. No doubt some might seek to make a topical political comment out of the fact that British, Swedish, Danish, Polish, German, French and Spanish historians were all happily chattering away to each other in English, but you wouldn’t expect such blatant – nay, debatably treasonable – Brexit-related stuff in this blog, so I’ll eschew it completely.

The second day began in a somewhat hazy fashion for some of us, but we were swiftly into a full-on session with no fewer than four papers. Dan Johannson of Stockholm University talked on the development of Stockholm as a naval city between 1522 and 1680; having visited the city several times and thus having a decent grasp of the geography of what Dan was talking about, I found this a really interesting talk. Jorge Aguilera López of the Barcelona Maritime Museum then spoke about the city’s royal arsenal and galleys during the wars against the Ottomans during the sixteenth century – although one would have thought he might have had somewhat more topical issues on his mind at the moment! Marek Twardowski of the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk then talked about the history of the shipyard at Gdynia, providing some fascinating insights into World War II, the Cold War, and the distinctly fraught history of the yard in more recent years. The last speaker in this session was Ida Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen, who spoke on the modernisation of Danish naval shipbuilding in the 18th century, when the so-called Konstruktionskommissionen attempted to reorganise production.

Jim Hansson talking about the Scepter wreck

The second panel began with Marie-Morgane Abiven of the University of Brest talking about the fascinating project under way at her university to digitally reconstruct aspects of the port cities of Brest and Venice; more detail about her research can be found on her website (in French), while the 3D model that her project has produced of a foundry at Brest can be found on Youtube. Jim Hansson of the Swedish National Maritime Museum then delivered a really exciting talk with ‘hot off the presses’ news of the recent archaeological discoveries in Stockholm – and by hot off the presses, I mean the results of a dig that only finished a couple of weeks ago. Dendrochronology demonstrates that the new find is almost certainly the Scepter, launched in 1615, once the flagship of Gustavus Adolphus! Petra Stråkendal of the county administrative board of Blekinge then spoke about the many wrecks (some sixty in all) in Karlskrona harbour itself. The Solen, launched at Lubeck in 1667, lies near the ropery (see my previous blogpost) and demonstrates a combination of both English and Dutch building methods. The harbour also contains the wreck of the Vasa – i.e. the less famous ship of the same name, launched in 1778. (Coverage of wreck finds in and around Karlskrona can be found here and here.)

Part of the newly discovered wreck of the Scepter

After lunch, we kicked off with Steven Gray of the University of Portsmouth talking about coaling stations in the period before World War I – in particular, about what happened when warship crews of different nationalities were at the same station at the same time. (Clue: think random mindless violence.) One of the most interesting themes to emerge from his talk was how most nationalities got on with each other most of the time…unless, that is, the Brits ran into the Russians… AnnaSara Hammer of Stockholm University, who’d already won maximum brownie points from me by revealing that she’s read Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, my first book, then spoke about naval families as a social elite in 18th century Karlskrona, and it was interesting for me to compare and contrast the similar work I’ve done over the years for the Royal Navy in the late 17th century. AnnaSara also drew my attention to the memoirs of an 18th century naval officer, Carl Tersmeden, which sounds like a terrific source, albeit only available in Swedish, alas. The final paper of the conference was given by Asger Nørlund Christensen of the South Danish University, who spoke about Scandinavian sailors on Dutch merchant and naval ships – another topic of considerable interest for me, having previously uncovered evidence about foreign sailors on British warships in the Restoration era.

So all in all, this was a thoroughly enjoyable, five star conference. Huge thanks to Andreas Linderoth and the team at the Marinmuseum for all the hard work that went into organising it, and for such splendid hospitality. There’s going to be a book of the conference, in English and aimed at a general audience, so watch this space for further details!

And finally – with due apologies to my old and new Swedish and Danish friends – why do Swedish and Danish warships have barcodes?

So they can Scandinavian.

(Boom, tsh)