J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Naval history

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

 

Revisiting The Death of the Naval Pub

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Holiday time, i.e. minimal opportunity to think about blogging, but in any case, I thought it was high time I re-posted one of the most popular posts ever on this site – I can’t quite believe I first published this here almost five years ago! The content stands up pretty well, I think, although alas, that’s not necessarily true of all the pubs mentioned…the most tragic case is that of the iconic Lord Nelson in Burnham Thorpe, mentioned below, which closed a couple of years ago and which is currently on the market. (Beer loving naval history enthusiasts with £350,000 to spare, your time has come.) On the other side of the coin, though, not all refurbishments are bad news for a pub’s heritage. In a previous life, when I lived and worked in Bedford, one of my favourite pubs in the town was The Ship – or rather, the St Cuthbert’s Street Ship, as it’s known, because, unlikely though it might seem in a town so far from the sea, Bedford actually has two pubs called The Ship. With low beams, tiny rooms and quirky corners, the Ship ticked pretty well all my boxes for a pub, so my heart sank when I saw it had been refurbished. Fortunately, though, most of its character has been retained, and better still, they’ve added several pictures of the last HMS Bedford, a cruiser which was wrecked on the Korean coast in 1910, thus allowing it to qualify as a ‘naval pub’ under my entirely objective and scientific criteria, set out below. So, pub owners and landlords, you know what you need to do – put up a picture or two of an old warship, and you’re guaranteed free publicity in this blog. 

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MPs, newspaper columnists and bloggers galore have sounded off on the subject of the reasons for the decline of the British pub. No doubt sociologists aplenty have written, or are writing, weighty doctoral theses on the subject. Even I had my two penn’orth a few years back, in my old blog . (And if you really have too much time on your hands and want to read my thoughts, they’re here and here – although it’s interesting that in the four years or so since I wrote those posts, binge drinking itself, and the violence fuelled by it, have gone into a steep decline in their turn.) But as far as I’m aware – and I’d be delighted if somebody out there proves me wrong – nobody has yet explored the demise of an important, but sorely neglected, sub-species of the British pub: the good, old-fashioned, naval boozer.

First, a definition or two – just what is a ‘naval pub’? For the purposes of this post, I’ll cast the net widely. Obviously, there are the pubs that are, or were, frequented by large numbers of serving sailors. The problem with this category, of course, is that there simply aren’t ‘large numbers of serving sailors’ any more, and if one believes what one reads (and even the navy’s own publicity), many of the current crop are more likely to be listening to their iPods or reading The Guardian‘s fashion pages while sipping cappuccinos than throwing eight pints down their necks in the Admiral Napier. As a result, many of the countless pubs that catered to naval personnel in the dockyard towns have fallen by the wayside. A classic example is the decline of the once-notorious Union Street in Plymouth, which I knew a little in the 1980s, long after its heyday, while following the closure of the dockyard in 1984, Chatham lost such evocative naval names as the Boatswain and Call, the Lord Duncan, and the Shipwrights Arms.

The Lord Nelson, Burnham Thorpe
The Lord Nelson, Burnham Thorpe

The second category consists of pubs with genuine roots in naval history. Perhaps the classic example of this genre would be the Lord Nelson at Burnham Thorpe in Norfolk: the pub where Nelson himself drank (indeed, it now markets itself as ‘Nelson’s local’), in his own home village, and the first one in Britain to be renamed after him following his death. But there are plenty of other pubs with Nelson connections, such as the Royal Hotel in Deal, where he stayed with Emma Hamilton, and the Lord Nelson at Milford Haven, where in 1802 he delivered a speech extolling the virtues of the great Welsh natural harbour. (2019 update – I’d never actually been for a drink in this Lord Nelson, but remedied that last year. Crassly, it contains hardly any references to its namesake and its heritage.) Another great pub steeped in naval history is the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, right next to the Old Royal Naval College (or as it’s better known these days, ‘that place that turns up in pretty much every blockbuster movie’). But since the navy moved out of the college, the pub seems to have become a bit neglectful of its naval heritage; and perhaps the surest sign of its decline is that on one recent occasion when I went in there, another of the customers was Graham Norton.

My third and final category would be pubs with naval names. In the dockyard towns, there’s a considerable overlap with the first category; in Portsmouth until quite recently, for instance, Jack Tar could stagger from the Ship Anson to the Ship Leopard to the Keppel’s Head to the Victory, and then round the corner to the Royal George and the Invincible, all of which were within roughly a 300 yard radius of each other, immediately outside the dockyard gate. There used to be quite a few more in the same vicinity, and the principal street name, The Hard, inadvertently gave a pretty good pointer toward the sort of behaviour to be expected in the area on a Saturday night. But the naval name used to be a common feature of towns throughout the country. My own home town, Llanelli, was a port, but it had hardly any direct connections with the navy. Even so, at one time it had a Britannia Hotel, a Lord Nelson, a British Tar, a Trafalgar Inn and a Neptune Inn, as well as many more pubs with ‘maritime’ names, like the Ship, the Sailors Home, the Steam Packet, the Sloop Aground and The Three Mariners. Pubs called the Lord Nelson were everywhere; until relatively recently, there was even one in Stourport-in-Severn, far inland, which is where my Worcestershire ancestors hailed from. But one of my favourite examples of the naval name popping up in unexpected places is the Torbay at Ffairfach in Carmarthenshire. Ffairfach is a suburb of Llandeilo and is a long way inland, but its pub seems to have been named after an eighteenth century Torbay – perhaps an early landlord had served on her? – and to this day, the pub sign is a remarkably creditable painting of the ship. (2019 update – no longer, alas. The splendid pub sign weathered terribly, and I believe has been replaced by something far blander.)

The Torbay Inn pub sign, Ffairfach
The Torbay Inn pub sign, Ffairfach

The problems with the pubs bearing naval names are that, firstly, there are far fewer of them than there were, and with each one that closes, an entire point of contact between a community and Britain’s naval history disappears. But even in those that survive, the naval connection is often downplayed or ignored entirely: pictures of old ships do not necessarily sit well with wannabe Jamie Olivers trying to create rural gastropub heaven (or, in the humble opinion of the present blogger, hell). Worse, I know pubs where good old solid British oak beams and bars have been painted white ‘to give a friendlier/warmer/more feminine feel’ (most disastrously at my village local, although that doesn’t have a naval name or connection – 2019 update: thankfully, the next refurbishment got rid of much of the white!). A case in point was the Old Custom House in Portsmouth, one of the few old buildings to survive within the ghastly Gunwharf Quays complex that was erected on the site of the old HMS Vernon training establishment. When the pub first opened, in 2001, it had a large number of pictures and other memorabilia of Vernon, but most of that was discarded at the first refurbishment only a few years later. On the other hand, a few ‘pubcos’ have a rather better record, notably the much-maligned Wetherspoons, which does at least provide display boards and photographs which explain the heritage behind a pub’s name. For instance, they’ve named a pub in Newport the John Wallace Linton after the locally-born submariner and VC winner, while one of their outlets in Potters Bar rejoices in the name of the Admiral Byng (who lived at nearby Wrotham Park), although I’ve yet to investigate the amount of information about the ill-fated admiral on display within. But these are just a few isolated examples, and I’d suggest that they in no way compensate for the vast amount of naval pub heritage that we’ve lost. As I suggested above, every closure, every stripping out of ships’ badges or pictures that no longer fit with the desired ‘corporate image’, reduces the visibility of the navy and of naval history in public perception. There are many other causes of the ‘sea blindness’ that many believe to be afflicting modern Britain, but this is surely one of them.

Let’s not end on a negative and depressing note, though. Which are my favourite ‘naval pubs’, in any of the above categories, I hear you cry? (And even if you don’t, I’m going to tell you anyway.) Well, there are plenty. Honourable mentions to the minute snug bar in the Admiral MacBride on the Barbican in Plymouth, very much an old stamping ground during my time down west, and to the Lord Nelson at Southwold; back in the day, that mention would have gone to the nearby Solebay Inn, until the otherwise splendid Adnams Brewery wrecked it with a ghastly refurbishment. But pretty much at the top of my tree would have to be the Ship and Shovell, adjacent to Charing Cross station in London. (And no, Tripadvisor, it’s not spelt ‘Shovel’. 0 stars for you.) Not only is this the only pub in London in two halves, one on each side of an alley; not only is it full of naval history pictures and memorabilia, which makes it a real rarity in London; not only does it serve splendid beer; but it’s actually one of the very few pubs anywhere that commemorates a seventeenth century naval hero, i.e. ‘one of the blokes in my books’.

The Pembroke on a foggy night. Just imagine a press gang coming round the corner...
The Pembroke on a foggy night. Just imagine a press gang coming round the corner…

But my award for ‘best naval pub in Britain’ would have to go to the Pembroke in Portsmouth. It’s not in such an obvious and prominent location as the aforementioned pubs on the Hard, or the Still and West a few hundred yards away at the harbour mouth (which was once very nearly rammed by Britain’s last battleship), but it’s fairly adjacent to the Royal Garrison Church where King Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, its walls are adorned with the ships’ badges of current and past warships, and most days, you’ll come across a veteran or two propping up the bar, spinning yarns to anyone who’ll listen. But if anyone has alternative candidates for the title, I’d love to hear about them – and, of course, I’d then have to undertake the onerous task of personally researching all of the premises in question. This blogging’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

2019 update – this offer still stands!

 

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.

***

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.

***

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!

Soldier No More

by

I’ve been largely maintaining ‘radio silence’ on both the blogging and social media fronts for the last few weeks. This is due to a combination of factors: wanting to concentrate on finishing my new Tudor naval novel (hunky dory, since you ask); what Harold Macmillan might have termed ‘domestics, dear boy, domestics’ (although in his case, of course, he’d have been referring to the servants); and partly a growing sense of disillusionment with Facetwit et al. In the case of the latter, I’m particularly fed up with the endless…

selfpromotionBREXITnarcissismfootballintoleranceTRUMPshamingcelebsegotismcorbynBREXIT

sexismpoliticsfootballTRUMPtriviafakeoutrageloveislandBREXITfootballkittenscorbynTRUMP

edsheeranblinkeredpartisanshipTREXIT*politicsintolerancelovebloodyislandBRUMP

(* which, now I come to think of it, could be a neat shorthand for the extinction of the dinosaurs)

But last week, I made the mistake of thinking ‘I really ought to check what’s happening on Twitter’. This was a triumph of hope over experience if ever there was one – I thought maybe, just maybe, there was some jolly exchange I could engage with, or one of my friends had got married to minor European royalty, or there was information about some really interesting event that I absolutely had to go to, preferably somewhere like Monte Carlo.

Fat chance.

Instead there was… selfpromotionBREXITnarc – yes, you get the idea.

But my folly in even looking at said thief of time for more than 30 seconds is demonstrated by the fact that I came across one tweet which struck me as so utterly bonkers that I knew I had to take up the blogging equivalent of my quill pen once again, thus wasting countless hours when I could be writing the finest passage of purple prose about Tudor England since Hilary Wotsit (and now, of course, I’ve forgotten what it was).

Said tweet was from, of all places, the eminent Royal United Services Institute, quoting a speaker at one of its conferences, Allan Mallinson, historical novelist and former soldier, some of whose work I’ve read and liked. The text was, simply, ‘military history has been colonised by young academics with no experience of soldiering’.

Cue mass outrage on Twitter, generally from young academics with no experience of, well, anything much, apart from being young academics. Being young academics, though, and thus quite good with words, these were swiftly deploying bitingly witty replies – my favourite was the one about how historians of the Spanish Inquisition no longer had experience of torturing and burning – and even I jumped on the bandwagon, despite being neither [a] young [b] an out and out academic. (My effort, for what it’s worth, pointed out that in the UK, naval history had been colonised by young academics with no experience of the navy because there’s almost nobody left in the navy.)

But when I decided to blog about the subject, ready to vent my spleen against a fellow scribbler, I thought I’d better dig a little deeper – and lo and behold, Allan Mallinson’s own Twitter feed makes it clear that he wasn’t actually making the statement in a disparaging way, and that he amply recognises the perspective academics bring to the study of military history. So on one level, the story demonstrates one of the innate dangers of Twitter, namely its almost complete elimination of that most invaluable of concepts and most endangered of words, ‘context’ (not to mention the perils of trying to live tweet from a conference, as I know from my own experience). Hence a very large part of all the selfpromotionBREXITnarc –  No, let’s not start that again.

Unlikely to write a book about Trafalgar

Still, the premise behind the original tweet, no matter how far removed from its proper context, got me thinking. It’s certainly true that naval personnel, or former naval personnel, hardly ever write naval history any more. (Having said that, there are some absolutely terrific exceptions, and I’m not denigrating their work in any way.) There are many reasons for this, and my pretty feeble tweet hints at perhaps the most important of them. In October 2017, the Royal Navy and Royal Marines combined had a total strength of 28,930 personnel, a figure that would be well below half the capacity of most major football stadia, and just about enough to man the fleet that fought in the Four Days’ Battle of 1666. Compare this with, say, a total of about 115,000 in 1900, 139,000 in 1950, or 71,900 in 1980. Even in 1997, the navy had a strength of 41,700. Yes, modern warships require fewer people to man them, and so on and so forth, but the fact remains that there are simply far fewer people with direct experience of naval service than there used to be; far fewer people who are related to, or know somebody who serves in, or has served in, the navy (see my previous blog about the implications of this); and in consequence, of course, far fewer people with direct experience of naval service to actually write about it.

(Slight digression – an eminent colleague of mine, a distinguished professor of naval history well known as a ‘talking head’ on TV, recently recounted a story of his being accosted in the street by a young man of indeterminate ferality, who demanded to know what the anchor badge in my colleague’s lapel signified. On being told its naval associations, the youth in question replied, ‘what’s a navy?’)

Even less likely to write a book about Trafalgar

Contrast that with the situation among ‘young’ (or even not so young) academics. The number of these has mushroomed, particularly within the last thirty years, despite the odd reverse when a university has occasionally pulled its naval history courses. When I was working for my doctorate in the early 1980s, I was one of only one naval historians at the University of Oxford – and no, that’s not a typo. I don’t know exactly how many there are now, but it’s certainly rather more than that, and the numbers in such institutions as the universities of Exeter and Portsmouth, and at King’s College, London, are encouragingly high. So with far fewer actual sailors to man the navy, let alone to write about it, there’s no surprise that naval history is being written in many cases by those whose seagoing experience might not extend very far beyond the odd trip on a cross-channel ferry.

(I don’t want to stir up a hornet’s nest here – oh, alright then – but there’s also the inescapable fact that a fair amount of naval history written by those who’ve served simply isn’t very good. Lower deck memoirs of the Second World War are still being published, but often they’re being self-published or ‘vanity published’, perhaps because of rejections by mainstream publishers; by definition, such books may be excellent at giving the ‘feel’ of what it was like for the individual author – although quite a few, unfortunately, turn what could and should be exciting narratives into turgid yomps through treacle – but they may well struggle with the bigger picture, even the not-much-bigger picture that was happening on the bridge of their own ship. Among higher ranks, of course, memoirs have often suffered from the great shortcoming of the entire genre, from Julius Caesar to Julian Clary: the inevitable, even if partly subconscious, imperative for self-justification. In that respect, let’s face it, Beatty and Jellicoe weren’t necessarily the best people to attempt to write definitive accounts of the Battle of Jutland.)

Very likely to write a book about Trafalgar (or Waterloo, come to that), but still to get the hang of broadcasting self on social media

So yes, things have changed. I have in front of me a list of the Council of that august body, the Navy Records Society, for 1895-6. Leaving aside the two patrons – a reigning monarch and a future reigning monarch, no less – there are a total of 31 names. Of these, eight were naval officers (six of them being of flag rank, none being below the rank of Commander); two were aristocrats; one was a cleric; and only two were listed as professors, although a third would soon be the Regius Professor of History at Oxford. Most strikingly, though, there were also three army officers, including a general. Compare that with the most recent listing I have on my shelves, for 2016-17. This has 34 names in the equivalent positions: of these, no fewer than 25 are shown with doctorates, of whom seven are listed as professors. There are only two former naval officers, and two former army officers. Perhaps ten or eleven of those listed could be classed as ‘young academics’. So yes, things have indeed changed, but as I’ve suggested above, that was entirely inevitable – and it’s surely only a good thing that so many heavyweight academics (and, yes, so many young ones too) are studying naval history.

The interesting thing about both sets of numbers, though, is the existence of that small and previously ignored sub-set, the serving or former army officer with a real interest in naval history. I know perhaps half a dozen of the kind, and while their fellow pongos might shun them at mess dinners, they surely provide an example to us all; because the real problem, I’d suggest, isn’t so much who studies, and writes about, military or naval history, but that military and naval historians don’t sufficiently study, write about, and, in a nutshell, simply have a half-decent awareness of, each other’s disciplines. If I had a fiver for every book or article (and, come to that, novel) about military history I’ve read which displayed a woeful or non-existent grasp of naval matters, and vice-versa, I certainly wouldn’t be typing this blog at this moment. (I refer my honourable friends to my earlier point about Monte Carlo.)

Finally, though, I ought to point out that a similar sense of quasi-snobbery about who should be writing what (‘authorial correctness’, perhaps, or ‘genre privilege’?) also pervades the small, genteel, self-contained world of writers of naval historical fiction. When people come up to me after I’ve given a talk about my work, I’m often asked the question, ‘do you sail?’ I’m always tempted to reply that if one extended that thought process to its logical conclusion, crime fiction should only be written by police officers or serial killers.