J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Maritime history

Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 1

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Last week, I was in Karlskrona, Sweden, attending and speaking at a conference on dockyards and port cities organised by the Swedish Naval Museum. It was my first ever visit to the town, and shamefully, that’s also true of Copenhagen, where I stopped over en route in both directions. So this week, there’s two for the price of one at this website – in this blogpost, I’ll provide my impressions of the town and museum, while in a second post, which I’ll aim to complete by Wednesday or Thursday, I’ll give my take on the conference. Then, next week, I’ll take a slightly left field look at some of the lesser known aspects of the naval and 17th century histories of Copenhagen…possibly with added discussion of beer…

The lovely town square in Karlskrona

So, then, Karlskrona. This is a World Heritage site, a fact of which the locals are clearly, and rightly, very proud. Created from scratch by King Carl XI in 1680, it’s a planned Baroque new town, still adhering to the original grid pattern, and retaining many buildings from its early days, including a wooden Admiralty church, supposedly ‘temporary’ when it was built but still going strong. The same is true of the naval base, which was sited where it is because it lies at the heart of a complex archipelago, with easily defended approaches. (Kungsholm, the principal island at the entrance to the inner archipelago, was also begun in 1680, and claims to be the oldest continuously occupied active fortification in the world.) The archipelago in question achieved global notoriety in 1981, when a Soviet Whisky class submarine suddenly appeared, stranded, on an islet in the outer echelons of it, having – ahem – ‘made a navigational error’. This incident, inevitably christened ‘Whisky on the rocks’ in the media, still resonates in Karlskrona – indeed, a substantial part of the first floor of the museum is given over to an interactive display recording this and other Cold War run-ins between the Swedes and their eastern neighbours.

The minesweeper Sturkö heads into the archipelago, with Kungsholm in the distance. The low platform on the left is the base of one of the original 17th century fortifications.

The consequence of more recent Russian expansionism is that security in Karlskrona has been tightened markedly. The local museum staff bemoan the fact that it’s now not possible to do things that one could do three or four years ago; for example, one has to drive, not walk, from building A to building B in the naval base, even if said buildings are a couple of hundred yards from each other, and the passport check at the gate into the base is of positively Trumpian rigour. However, there seem to be several incongruities in the Swedish navy’s approach to security. For one thing, while one can’t take external photographs within the base, it’s possible to see virtually every corner of it from public vantage points in Karlskrona town (and goodness knows how good a view those living on the top floors of some of the apartment blocks overlooking the base must have) – so a good Putinista with a decent zoom lens could probably snap the lot in half an hour. Let’s face it, s/he probably has, many times, perhaps disguised as a Polish tourist on the very convenient daily ferry from Gdynia – and that’s before one considers Google Earth…

Bizarrely, too, at night the entrance to the naval base is surmounted by a vast blue neon sign proclaiming it to be the Sodom and Gomorrah Nightclub.

OK, yes, I invented that last bit, but personally, I can’t imagine any circumstances in which the Royal Navy would stick a large blue neon sign bearing the legend ‘NAVAL BASE’ (subtitle – ‘Beware: Contains Instruments of Thermonuclear Doom’) above the entrance to HMNB Clyde at Faslane. Let’s face it, you either know something is a naval base or you don’t, and in the latter case, the nice men (and women) with very big guns will set you right soon enough.

The Hajen

Anyway, the conference timings enabled us to explore the naval museum at our own leisure, and also included a guided tour of the naval base. The museum was built twenty years ago on Stumholmen island, formerly an exclusive military site which includes, for example, a wonderful eighteenth century boathouse and some early twentieth century flying boat hangars, plus a bastion which provides an excellent public viewpoint over much of the naval base. (See above.) The museum’s main building has recently been complemented by a brand new submarine hall, which displays Sweden’s first submarine, the Hajen, built in 1904, and the Neptun, commissioned in 1980, which dominates the space. We had a tour of the latter on the first evening of the conference, and it was fascinating to compare it with the RN submarines that I’ve been aboard: above all, the egalitarian Swedish navy had all ranks, including the officers, dining communally in the torpedo compartment, something that might get old British submariners spluttering.

The museum has several other preserved ships: the Bremön, a minesweeper-cum-minelayer of 1940; the Västervik, a 1970s attack craft originally designed as a MTB but subsequently converted to take missiles; and the Jarramas, a splendid sail training ship dating from 1900, for which the museum is fundraising to finance a full restoration.

The older building has some excellent displays chronicling Sweden’s naval history, and devotes a large amount of space to the technical side of ship construction. As mentioned earlier, it also has a large section devoted to the Cold War, although unlike the rest of the museum, where displays are bilingual, this is exclusively Swedish. The museum also has a tunnel below water level, designed to enable viewing of one of the many wrecks that litter the bottom of the harbour (more on this in my next post about the conference itself). Undoubtedly the highlight of the museum, though, is the floor-to-ceiling glass hall that contains figureheads of many of Sweden’s greatest sailing warships.

The shed in which the figureheads were originally carved was the first stop on our tour of the naval base. This was the workshop of the sculptor Johan Törnström, and contains modern examples of the sort of templates from which he and his subordinates would have worked. Several of the other buildings still bear the imprint of the most influential figure in the history of the yard, Fredrik Henrik af Chapman, and if you’re thinking that Chapman doesn’t sound like a very Swedish name, you’d be right – his father was a Yorkshireman who went into the Swedish service in 1716. Chapman was so influential that he was eventually ennobled, and built a substantial villa for himself outside Karlskrona, crowned with a cupola from which he could keep an eye on work in the dockyard even when he was notionally off duty.

Our next port of call was the ropery, below, built in 1690, three hundred metres long and built of wood for most of its length – a remarkable structure where displays of practical rope-making are still staged.

Close to the ropery stands the so-called Vasa Shed, a covered slipway built in the 1760s, and named after the greatest warship built there – no, not that Vasa, a later one. Next to the Vasa Shed is the remarkable Polhem dry dock, constructed despite two obvious difficulties: the ground here is solid rock, and there are no tides, normally essential to filling and flushing dry docks. The Swedes overcame these difficulties in 1724, and although it looks somewhat nondescript now, the pride felt in its creation led to it being described locally at the time as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’.

Model in the Naval Museum showing the Polhem dock and Vasa shed

Now, even though we couldn’t take photographs outside, this didn’t prevent us deploying the Mark One Eyeball to good effect. Thus I can exclusively reveal that the base contained a couple of the Swedish navy’s highly futuristic stealth warships, thus suggesting one final flaw in the draconian security policy: if they’re that stealthy, how come you can actually still see them??

Uncle Vladimir can see you

Seriously, though, Karlskrona should be an absolute must on every serious naval buff’s ‘bucket list’, and it thoroughly deserves its World Heritage status. I certainly hope to return there!

(Later this week, I’ll blog about the conference itself.)

The Top Ten

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I’m not tweeting very much at the moment, as I’m largely keeping my head down and working on my new Tudor project, but the other day, I had a bit of a brainwave, and tweeted a ‘top ten’ of the most popular posts ever (in terms of visitor numbers) on this blog. This seemed to go down very well among the Twitterati, with lots of positive reaction. I realise, though, that a lot of you aren’t on Twitter, and besides, giving the ‘countdown’ here means that I can say a bit more about each of the posts than I could with 140 characters. So, in the spirit of Top of the Pops (unless it was presented by him, obviously, or featured songs by him…), here we go, pop pickers!

I decided to split my top ten into two fives, one for guest bloggers, one for my own posts. So starting with the guest blogger chart –

So moving on to the chart of my own posts:

  • At number 5, and with a major ‘assist’ from Richard Endsor, it’s a pretty astonishing historical find – quite possibly the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!
  • In at number 4, a post from back in 2012, looking forward to the temporary return of the Royal Charles sternpiece from the Rijksmuseum for the National Maritime Museum’s Royal River exhibition.
  • Number 3 is probably my personal favourite among all the blog posts I’ve written over the years – my lament for the death of the ‘naval pub‘, broadly defined. Since I originally posted it, another nail’s been hammered into the coffin of the species with the closure of the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe. Hopefully this will be temporary, but could there be a more potent metaphor for the decline of…well, pretty much everything, really?
  • At number 2, the first post in my long series about the sorry saga of Carmarthenshire Archives – if you’re feeling particularly masochistic, read the three subsequent posts entitled ‘J’Accuse’ too, but for the rather more optimistic current situation, have a look here.
  • And at number 1…cue drumroll…my post from four years ago, ‘A Journalist’s Guide to Writing About the Royal Navy‘, inspired by the consistently dreadful coverage of naval matters in the national media, and which went about as viral as niche naval blogs get. As some of the below-the-line comments proved, though, one should always be careful before sticking one’s head above the parapet in such instances, and I was rightly taken to task for some of my own inexactitudes of terminology!

As I said on Twitter at the weekend, a big thank you to everybody who’s followed this blog since it started back in August 2011. It’s good to know that so many people seem to find things to interest them among my rants and ramblings, so I hope to keep calm and carry on shedding light on some of the more remote corners of naval history and seventeenth century history, and on the process of writing about them, for the foreseeable future!

Come in Number Thirteen, Your Time Has Come

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Last week saw the official publication of my new non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, from the wonderful people at Seaforth Publishing. By my reckoning, this is my thirteenth complete book, and my fifth non-fiction title, to add to eight novels to date. But even I’m losing track of the total number, mainly because there are distinct grey areas. For example, there’s the Quinton prequel Ensign Royal…but that’s only a novella, and only available in e-format, so does that count? OK, maybe I should count that as half a book, which takes me to thirteen and a half. Then there’s the cult bestseller 20th Century Naval Dockyards: Devonport and Portsmouth Characterisation Report, where I’m credited as a co-author. So if I count that as a quarter, I get up to thirteen and three-quarters, and can thus legitimately claim to be the Adrian Mole of authors!

Of course, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the phenomenal Professor Jeremy Black, author of well over one hundred full length, fully referenced historical works (and counting) – so many, indeed, that even he seems to have lost track of his publications since 2015. Sometimes, especially after about the third glass, I’ve speculated that Jeremy must be definitive proof that human cloning is already happening, because surely nothing else can explain his prolific rate of publication.

Seriously, though, I’m delighted to see Kings of the Sea in print. For me, it marks the culmination of 35 years of work on the naval history of the Restoration age: and to both further explain the rationale behind it, and to provide a little ‘teaser trailer’ for it, here’s the first part of my preface, followed by the first part of the introduction.

Warning: these are among the least controversial sections of the book.

***

To the best of my recollection, I first conceived the idea of writing a book rather like this one over thirty years ago, when I was locked in Samuel Pepys’s library.

The Pepys Library. Behind the shuttered windows on the first floor sits a historian, longing to munch on a cheese sandwich and starting to worry about the faint smell of burning.

This was not quite the dire emergency, nor the unexpected proof of the feasibility of time travel, that it might sound. Pepys’s glorious bequest to his old Cambridge college, Magdalene, stands four square alongside the River Cam, and contains many of the great man’s papers, contained within exactly 3,000 of his books, no more, no less – arranged, uniquely, in order of size, from the smallest to the largest. When I was working there extensively in the 1980s, the library opened to the public for an hour in the morning, from 11.30 to 12.30, and another in the afternoon, from 2.30 to 3.30; but by prior arrangement, researchers could continue to work through the two hours in between, when the doors of the library were firmly bolted. This necessitated either a very early lunch or a very late one, not to mention unwavering faith in the fire prevention facilities of Magdalene College, Cambridge, and it is hardly surprising that this delightful laissez faire policy eventually fell foul of the relentless advance of ‘elf ‘n’ safety’. But the two hour lock-in, alone with Samuel Pepys’s books, many of them full of the letters written by him to, or send it to him from, the likes of King Charles II and King James II, gave ample time for one’s thoughts to wander in all kinds of directions. One of them involved contemplation of a paradox. In many periods of history, and in many topics of historical study, the role of monarchs has probably been studied more exhaustively than their actual importance often merits, contributing to an overwhelmingly ‘top down’ view of history (and, yes, an often overwhelmingly male one too, for that is what monarchs usually were). The naval history of late seventeenth century Britain is a marked exception. There, if anything, the monarchs have been placed in the background, and in some books, their contributions appear nearly invisible, overshadowed by an even more dominant figure. That person is regarded almost universally as the driving force behind all that happened in the navy of his day, the individual responsible for all that was good and important, the unimpeachable authority for all that took place in naval affairs. I got to know this person very well: after all, I was often locked in his library.

The feeling that Samuel Pepys was, perhaps, not quite as responsible for all that happened in the navy of the Restoration era as posterity believes (essentially because Pepys told posterity what to believe, and posterity duly complied), and that the contributions to naval history of the Stuart brothers, Charles and James, have been somewhat neglected, stayed with me in the years that followed. Indeed, several of the themes and ideas explored in this book first saw the light of day in a number of essays and articles, most of them published in obscure academic journals and collections of essays: which is a polite way of saying ‘nobody read them’. But during the years that followed, other priorities always intervened to take me away from this book.

Now, though, it’s time to set the record straight…

***

And from the introduction (with the references deleted) –

At some point during the afternoon of 30 June 1675, the King of England disappeared.

In many European states of the period, this would have triggered immediate panic. Kings were still regarded by many as little gods upon Earth; the entire political and social order was based, to some extent, on knowing where they were. Both before and since the seventeenth century, there have been countless instances where the sudden disappearance of a head of state has triggered anything from bouts of religious hysteria, to rioting in the streets, to full scale revolutions. But for at least some of those who knew about it, King Charles II’s disappearance on 30 June probably caused little more than a mild frisson of concern, perhaps no more than a few disapproving shakes of the head.

Because the king had gone sailing.

Yet again.

***

Charles II in his sailing outfit

The royal cruise of 1675 involved seven royal yachts and three small frigates. This flotilla set off from Gravesend on 26 June, with the king aboard the Sixth Rate man-of-war Greyhound. A further eight warships, including the Third Rate Harwich and two fireships, joined them in the Downs. Bad weather delayed progress, causing the ‘disappearance’ of the flotilla not once, but several times; the Katherine Yacht lost touch entirely, and was believed to have been lost, while the yacht carrying the Speaker of the House of Commons had to turn back from the Downs. Progress was so slow that the royal party missed the principal object of the voyage, namely attending the launch of the great new First Rate man-of-war Royal James at Portsmouth Dockyard on 29 June. As it was, the other ships in the royal flotilla lost sight of the Greyhound during the ‘very stormy and dark weather’ on the night of 29-30 June, when they were on the west side of the Isle of Wight – a coast notorious for shipwrecks. The vessels sighted each other again in the morning, and the yachts carrying the king’s brother and heir, the Duke of York, and Charles II’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, went into Portsmouth. But once again, there was no sign of the Greyhound, which the others expected to make for the Isle of Wight. By early evening, none of the fires which would have signalled a sighting of the ship flying the royal standard could be seen anywhere on the island. At eight the next morning, both James and Monmouth set sail to see if they could find the king. Whether either, or both, wondered for even the most fleeting moment whether Charles had drowned in a catastrophic shipwreck, which would have meant that James was already King of England, Scotland, and Ireland, will never be known. In fact, the Greyhound had lain to ‘in very rough weather’ off Dunnose Head until the morning of 1 July, when Charles got ashore in a shallop. He was met by the governor of the island, the outspoken, buccaneering old admiral Sir Robert Holmes, who took him off to a ‘good dinner’ at Yarmouth, where the Duke of York eventually caught up with him. Charles finally came into Portsmouth harbour at one in the morning on 2 July. The Venetian ambassador said of the king’s disappearance that ‘anxiety was universal’, and that his reappearance was greeted by ‘unspeakable relief’. Despite the alarm that had been caused, one courtier reported that ‘this stormy voyage has not at all discouraged his Majesty from the sea, and all he can be persuaded to is only to change his ship and return in the Harwich, a good Third Rate frigate, but he will by no means hearken to any proposition of returning by land, notwithstanding all manner of conveniences and supplications have been proposed to him’.

This dramatic voyage was by no means the only, nor the most ambitious, royal voyage of the reign. In July 1671, the king and Duke of York went overland to Portsmouth, where they viewed the new warships St Michael, Royal James and Edgar. They and their retinues then embarked in seven yachts, which, with six escorting warships, sailed for Plymouth, where they arrived on the seventeenth; the extended voyage also saw the royal flotilla call at Dartmouth. The king’s informality during this expedition startled many, and still ‘shocks historians accustomed to the near scripted progress of most baroque monarchs’; he arrived at Portsmouth unexpectedly early, and left Plymouth so abruptly that the mayor and corporation had to pursue him to Mount Edgecumbe in their own boat in order to take formal leave. Describing this voyage, the chief minister, the Earl of Arlington, said of his king (revealing a little of his nervousness in the process), ‘twenty leagues [by sea] are more pleasing to him than two by land. It is a new exploit for kings, but I hope God will bless him in it…’ 1677 saw another expedition to Plymouth. The royal party arrived at Portsmouth on 10 August, where the king and Duke of York inspected the new fortifications and the ships under construction in the dockyard, before sailing on to Plymouth, where they arrived on the sixteenth. The king inspected the Royal Citadel and dined at Mount Edgecumbe house before sailing for home on the eighteenth. So impressed was he by the experience that he vowed to repeat the trip every other year, and it has been suggested that only the subsequent political crisis of several years’ duration prevented him doing so.

As well as these substantial voyages, the king and his brother regularly sailed down the Thames to Sheerness or the Nore and back, outings so frequent that they rarely attracted any comment or attention at all. Moreover, these were not decadent pleasure cruises where downtrodden mariners worked the yacht while the king dallied with his latest mistress in the stern cabin. Charles and James often took the helms themselves, taking great delight in racing each other. On 1 October 1661, the diarist John Evelyn witnessed a race between the royal siblings:

I sailed this morning with His Majesty in one of his yachts (or pleasure boats), vessels not known among us till the Dutch East India Company [sic] presented that curious piece to the King, being very excellent sailing vessels. It was on a wager between his other new pleasure boat, built frigate-like, and one of the Duke of York’s, the wager £100; the race from Greenwich to Gravesend and back. The King lost it going, the wind being contrary, but saved stakes in returning. There were divers noble persons and lords on board, his Majesty sometimes steering himself. His barge and kitchen boat attended. I brake fast this morning with the King at return in his smaller vessel [the Bezan], he being pleased to take me and only four more, who were noblemen, with him, but dined in his yacht, where we all eat together with His Majesty.

‘Messing about on boats’ was an integral part of the macho, competitive culture of the Restoration court, along with the similarly energetic male pursuits of hunting, horse racing, and fornicating. So when one poet described King Charles in distinctly North Korean terms as Britain’s ‘great pilot’, he was using the term both literally and metaphorically.

Even so, the potentially history-changing implications of the royal passion for the sea were very real, even on the jaunts downriver. In July 1662, the king was caught

in a furious gale at the mouth of the Thames…the mast was broken, the sails torn, the sailors dismayed, and all in disorder he was thrown on the banks of Lie [sic; presumably Leigh-on-Sea in Essex]…and was obliged to stay there for several hours exposed to the fury of the waves, until the tide fell and the wind dropping, he could reach a safer place.

The dangers were illustrated even more dramatically by the loss of the Gloucester, on 6 May 1682. This was not some tiny, fragile royal yacht, but a powerful sixty-gun Third Rate man-of-war. She was carrying the Duke of York and a large party of courtiers back to Leith, where James was to retrieve his wife, left behind when their previous sojourn at Holyrood ended unexpectedly with his summons back to London. The voyage should have been routine, through one of the best known and most frequented seaways in British waters. But somehow, a catastrophic navigational error was made, and the ship struck the Lemon and Oare sandbank off Great Yarmouth. The mistake was largely James’ own fault: he seems to have taken command himself, having lost confidence in the Gloucester’s highly experienced pilot James Aires, and ordered a course change that proved fatal. About 130 passengers and crew were killed, including the Earl of Roxburgh, Lord Hopetoun, and James’ brother-in-law, James Hyde. Those who escaped included the Marquis of Montrose, Samuel Pepys (who was sailing in the escorting Katherine Yacht, not the Gloucester), and John Churchill, the future Duke of Marlborough. Above all, James, Duke of York, survived the shipwreck, albeit only just. He stayed aboard the ship until very nearly too late, and then had to climb out of one of the stern windows, with Churchill having at swordpoint to hold off the press of men trying to clamber into the duke’s boat. The conclusion to be drawn from all this is inescapable: the lives of Charles and James Stuart were threatened more immediately, and much more often, by the vagaries of the sea, than by the bullets and daggers of potential assassins.

Want to read the rest? Then get the book now, and don’t wait for the dodgy illegal Russian ‘free’ PDF that puts a virus on your laptop and destroys your hard drive! 

Gentlemen and Players: Further Thoughts from the State of Maritime Historical Research Conference 2017

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One of the issues floating around at the fringes of the Greenwich conference on 9 September, the thrust of which can be found in my previous blogpost, was that of the perceived division in maritime history between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ practitioners. This came up in one form or another in some of the papers, but more so in the chat around Queen Anne Court during the conference breaks. I hesitate to summarise genuinely held beliefs to what may be the point of caricature, but at least some so-called ‘amateurs’ in the maritime history world sometimes regard themselves as marginalised, excluded from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences, looked down upon by a distant, aloof elite holding university posts, or else with comfortable sinecures in certain national museums. In the Society for Nautical Research, the co-host of the conference, much of this sense of exclusion has focused on the society’s journal, The Mariner’s Mirror, which, since its inception in 1911, has been the UK’s, if not the world’s, most distinguished outlet for maritime historical research. In its early days, and in some respects up until the 1980s, the Mirror published pretty well anything that was submitted to it, and thus contained a fascinating range of material, from the globally important to the unbelievably arcane and obscure – and, it has to be said, to the downright wrong as well. But the arrival of peer review changed the nature of the Mirror, and many regret the passing of its old breadth (and, yes, sometimes wildly variable quality) in favour of much greater, but arguably blander, academic rigour.

Now, of course, this perceived division between amateur and professional practitioners, the ‘gentlemen’ and the ‘players’ in sporting terms, isn’t unique to maritime history, nor even to History per se, but it’s not far off: by definition, it’s not really possible to be an amateur nuclear physicist, nor an amateur brain surgeon, nor an amateur psychiatrist. (Although in the latter case, as we all know, that rarely stops the bloke next to you in the pub, nor your hairdresser, nor your significant other.) But History is a subject which everybody, without exception, can approach, can get something from, and perhaps, in the fullness of time, can become expert in. If I had five pounds for every conversation I’ve ever had which went along the lines of ‘I hated History at school, but now I read nothing else’, I’d be a very rich man indeed; while the person I’ve met in my lifetime who’d read the most History books – and I mean everything, from every period, or so it seemed to me at the time – was not some Regius Professor, but an old guy (i.e. probably the age I now am…) with no formal qualifications whatsoever, who worked in the scrap recycling plant where I earned some spare cash during one of my summer vacations. When he learned that I was an Oxford History undergraduate, he was keen to engage me in debate about the views of Tawney and Hobsbawm, only to be bitterly disappointed to discover that he might have read all of their work, but I hadn’t…

Professionals

Coming back to the present debate, several of the most formidably expert naval historians I know have no doctorates, in some cases no degrees at all, and/or have never held posts at universities. I’m not going to embarrass them by naming them, but they’ve made themselves world authorities in their fields by dint of sheer hard work over a long period of time, and to describe such individuals as ‘amateurs’ is, frankly, a gross insult to them, and an equally gross misuse of the word. Moreover, let’s not forget that on what seems to be the modern definition, several of the greatest practitioners of maritime history who ever lived would now also be classified as ‘amateurs’. Sir Julian Corbett had a degree in law, not History, wrote several novels, worked as a journalist, and never held an academic position at a university; neither did R C Anderson, whose astonishingly wide-ranging work would put any modern scholar to shame. Although some will dismiss such examples as ancient history, not relevant to the modern academic world, it is at least possible that other times had a rather healthier attitude to the definition of a ‘historian’ (and other professions too, come to that), and certainly lacked the modern obsessions with possessing a certain set of qualifications, holding a particular type of day job, and publishing only within a narrow set of journals, or for a narrow range of publishers, thereby ticking boxes for assorted vacuous targets.

***

Now, I could continue to write this post by referring to rather abstract groups, but instead of that, and donning my ‘author of fiction’ hat pro tem, let me introduce you to two characters who are based on absolutely no real people whatsoever. Well, except him, obviously. And, yes, her.

Horatio lives in an idyllic rural cottage in Blimpshire, and is a retired corporate fraudster (undiscovered). Over the course of the last fifty years, he has collected and researched absolutely everything there is to know about the design, construction and voyages of the floating brothels of the Khasi of Kalabar.* Horatio wears a blazer, even in bed, and reads the Daily Telegraph, especially in bed. Horatio is thus an amateur maritime historian.

(* Big wave at this point to all fans of the Carry On films, who I hope will have spotted the reference.)

Agrippina lives in a commune in Islington, and has just started in her first academic post, a junior lectureship in the Cross-Disciplinary Institute of Stuff and Things at the University of Shadwell. She is currently working on a book on gendered space in the floating brothels of the Khasi of Kalabar. Agrippina wears something that appears to be a sack, even in bed, and reads The Guardian, especially in bed. Agripinna is thus a professional maritime historian.

Amateur

Now, common sense dictates that Horatio and Agripinna really ought to talk to each other, as there is clearly a great deal that he could teach her, and, perhaps, even a great deal that she could teach him. Unfortunately, though, it is unlikely that their paths will ever cross. For one thing, Horatio will probably never come across Agrippina’s many articles, all of which are published in peer-reviewed journals that can, from Blimpshire, only be accessed online. This assumes that Blimpshire actually has half-decent broadband, which it doesn’t, and that Horatio is prepared to pay the Sicilian levels of blood money demanded by the Triad-like cartels that hold the rights to academic journals, which he isn’t – even if he knew about the articles at all, which he doesn’t. He also isn’t prepared to pay £95 for Agrippina’s book of 150 pages (with no illustrations), derived from her thesis, even if he knew about it, which – yes, that’s right – he doesn’t. Of course, Horatio could engage with Agrippina on social media, as she’s all over Twitbook, Instachat, Snapgram, and so forth; but he regards all of these, if not quite as the spawn of Satan, then as the deeply questionable pursuits of the young, i.e. anybody under 60 (which is his excuse to cover up the fact that he doesn’t have the first idea of how they work). Horatio could attend the conferences that Agrippina is speaking at, but these are hideously expensive, are a very long way from Blimpshire, and are, in any case, bound to be full of young people who don’t wear blazers and don’t read the Daily Telegraph. Consequently, Horatio stays in his man-cave (i.e. shed) in Blimpshire, quaffing Lidl Merlot and chuntering about out-of-touch academics in their ivory towers, while Agrippina goes to seminars where the apres-ski involves quaffing Lidl Merlot and declaiming about how she’s certain she’s covered absolutely every angle of her subject, little knowing what lurks within the copious folders in Horatio’s shed.

This, then, in a nutshell, is the role that organisations like the Society for Nautical Research should be playing – to bring together the Horatios and Agrippinas of this world in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and with a willingness to learn from each other. As things are at the moment, both ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ in the field of maritime history are probably right to protest that it’s difficult to engage with each other: but to use another sporting analogy, of course it’s difficult to engage if your teams are actually playing in entirely different stadia. Many ‘amateurs’, like Horatio, are of a generation which, generally speaking, doesn’t blog and isn’t on social media (but, then again, neither are many senior ‘professional’ academics of exactly the same generation); many ‘professionals’ obtain their doctorates and complacently, if not arrogantly, assume that those who don’t have doctorates have nothing to teach them. True, the barriers are breaking down, and it may be, indeed, primarily a generational issue, which will vanish as the barriers between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’, or, if you prefer, ‘historians’ and ‘antiquarians’, finally collapse – as they’re already doing, slowly but surely, as a glance at many maritime and naval history Twitter feeds will demonstrate. There, people from all kinds of backgrounds interact with each other as equals, exchanging ideas and information, while blogs, and websites like academia.edu, are opening up academic research to all, circumventing the outrageous paywalls of the publishing cartels.

Above all, then, let’s start by respecting what each of us does. As Professor Richard Harding rightly stated in his keynote at Greenwich, maritime history, like military history, depends hugely on its amateur practitioners, who, for example, often provide the volunteers who keep local maritime museums open, who restore historic boats, and who research those byways that ‘professionals’ are unlikely to go down, thereby frequently unearthing new information, and developing new perspectives, that are invaluable to the discipline as a whole. More power to your elbow, Horatio.

***

Finally – and I crave your indulgence here – I’ll talk a bit about myself. On one set of criteria, I suppose I’d be classed as a professional: doctorate, couple of fellowships, grand-sounding offices held in august societies, several major books published, ditto articles in major peer-reviewed journals (although never, curiously, in the Mariner’s Mirror, either in its previous incarnation or the present one). But on the other hand, I’ve never worked in a university or a major museum; some might say I’ve sold out any academic credibility I might have possessed by writing fiction (but hey, if it was good enough for Sir Julian Corbett, it’s good enough for me); and I’ve published one book where I most certainly was writing as an amateur, that being Blood of Kings, my rush-of-blood-to-head foray into sixteenth century Scottish history and the outermost fringes of downright esoteric, Knights-Templar-hunt-the-Holy-Grail, territory.

So what, exactly, am I? Professional? Amateur? Fish? Fowl?

Well, then.

If I don’t really know which label/s I should be sticking on myself, should I really worry about which label to stick on others? ‘Professional’, ‘amateur’, whatever, we’re all in this for exactly the same reason, and working towards exactly the same end – to uncover and preserve more and more of the countless past layers of the maritime world, and to trumpet the importance of those layers, and that world, as widely as possible.

So – ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’, or, if you prefer, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’, in the context of maritime history?

I, for one, no longer recognise those terms.

Time to move on.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Watch this space for the answer!

The Submarine and the Bus Stop

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Number two in my short series of posts based on last week’s holiday in Shetland…

Unst is an absolute must for visitors. As Britain’s most northerly inhabited island, it racks up the superlatives literally every few hundred yards, the further north you go – the most northerly roads, the most northerly shop (splendidly named ‘The Final Checkout’), the most northerly museums, the most northerly castle (Muness – a real gem), the most northerly brewery, the most northerly public loo…formerly the most northerly defence site, too, but RAF Saxa Vord closed a decade ago, and its buildings have now become the unlikely home of, yes, the most northerly holiday resort. But in World War I, Unst had another claim to fame, as the most northerly naval ‘base’ (of sorts) in the British Isles. During the early months of 1917, the submarines E49 and G13 used Baltasound, in the north-east of Unst, as their base for patrolling the seas off the island. On 12 March, though, the E49 struck a mine as she passed between the islands of Balta and Huney, just after leaving harbour. The mine had been planted by UC76, which had left Heligoland on 3 March. The three officers and twenty eight men of E49 were lost, including her commanding officer, Edinburgh-born Lieutenant Reay Parkinson RN, who, despite being only twenty-four, was a knight of the Order of the Crown of Italy for his part in rescuing the crew of the Italian battleship Benedetto Brin after its destruction by an explosion in Brindisi harbour on 27 September 1915. A new memorial to the crew of E49 was unveiled only in March of this year, and looks out over Baltasound to the site where the wreck lies.

The E49 memorial. The wreck lies off the lighthouse at the southern (right) end of the lighthouse in the distance

In something of a bizarre juxtaposition – or, more likely, an astute piece of placement by those responsible – the E49 memorial sits right next to one of the most famous tourist attractions on Unst, Bobby’s bus shelter, probably the only bus stop in the world to have its own website.

It’s a bus stop, Jim, but not as we know it