J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Scottish history

Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 5

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On one level, Orkney has more heritage than it knows what to do with. Great monuments that would be major tourist attractions in the south of England sit in remote fields, virtually unknown: ‘oh look, that big mound must be yet another Neolithic tomb / ho hum, yet another virtually intact World War II gun battery’. But nothing quite prepares you for the unexpected. For example, I knew St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall had a memorial to HMS Royal Oak, sunk by U-47 in Scapa Bay in October 1939. Very moving it is, too, the centrepiece being the salvaged ship’s bell, which hangs above a book of remembrance containing the names of those killed. But I hadn’t expected the magnificent Cathedral to contain probably the best collection of seventeenth-century grave slabs I’d ever seen. Brought inside to protect them from the elements, they line the walls of the aisles and choir, many of them bearing elaborate memento mori. Some look as though they could have been sculpted yesterday; by contrast, the tomb of the Arctic explorer John Rae is a typically florid piece of Victoriana.???????????????????????????????

The visit to Kirkwall formed part of our trip down over the Churchill Barriers. The eastern entrances to Scapa Flow formed the main vulnerability of the great anchorage, and during World War I steps were taken to seal these with blockships. The remains of some of these have proved remarkably durable, notably that of the Reginald, a schooner, but by 1939 other wrecks had changed position or deteriorated, leaving the barrier incomplete. This weakness was exploited by Gunther Prien, who conned U-47 through Kirk Sound, found Royal Oak at anchor and eventually managed to torpedo her after several failed attempts before leaving by the same route. The First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, locked the stable door by ordering the construction of barriers between the mainland and the islands on the eastern side of the flow. This was a lengthy and difficult engineering feat; the first barrier was not completed until 1942. Fortunately, a new source of labour became available, namely Italian prisoners of war taken in the North African campaigns. Those who were held at Camp 60 on Lamb Holm, the nearest island to the mainland, were responsible for one of the most remarkable of all Orkney’s historic monuments??????????????????????????????? – the Italian Chapel, an ingenious conversion of a Nissen hut into an enduring tribute to the power of faith. Ironically, though, the chapel was only finished after the Italian prisoners had been moved from Scapa at the end of the war.

Our final day on Orkney was spent at Stromness, a delightful town which has a fascinating, old-fashioned museum (and hats off to it for staying open in the depths of winter!). This contains many artefacts salvaged from the wrecks of the German High Seas Fleet, but also has a great deal of material on the town’s maritime history, on John Rae, and on various other episodes of Orkney history that I’d not come across before. One of the most interesting stories was that of the pirate John Gow, immortalised by Defoe, who came to grief while attacking mansions in Orkney in 1725. The museum has several display cases which contain its newest acquisitions, and one of these contains the ‘Pirate Gow’s’ telescope, seized by one of the men who captured him and recently bequeathed to the museum by one of his descendants.

All in all, our stay on Orkney and excursion to Shetland for Up Helly Aa proved to be a truly memorable break. We certainly hope to go back one day, although I think we’ve both decided against repeating the 620 mile road trip to and from the ferry… And the 64,000 dollar question, i.e. will the trip provide inspiration for future books? It might, although the islands have already provided the setting for crime thrillers – notably the Shetland books of Ann Cleeves, soon to be turned into a TV series starring the excellent Douglas Henshall – and for one of the most famous spy stories of the early twentieth century, The Spy in Black. But as I’ve pointed out in previous posts in this series, there was plenty of naval activity in the islands during the seventeenth century, so perhaps Matthew Quinton will find his way there at some point!

Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 4

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Shetland has less naval heritage than Orkney, but it still has a substantial amount. During the 17th century, the islands were of vital economic importance – but to the Dutch, not the British. Vast Dutch herring fleets regularly sheltered at Bressay Sound, trading with the local people and contributing to the rise of Lerwick at the expense of the old capital, Scalloway. This caused some tension; in 1625 the authorities attempted to stamp out ‘the manifold adultrie and furnicatioun with women venteris of beir and utheris women evill inclined’. In 1703 the French attacked the Dutch herring fleet, destroying the escorting warship Wolfswinkel and pursuing the herring busses into Bressay Sound, where over 150 of them were burned. The islands were also a port of call for Dutch ships outward bound for, or returning from, the East Indies, especially at times of tension or war with Spain, France or England, when the Channel route became problematic. In 1640 three returning East Indiamen and an escorting warship were attacked in Bressay Sound by ten Spanish warships. Another such ship, the Kennemerland, was wrecked on the Skerries in 1664, and a number of artefacts from her are displayed at Lerwick Museum.???????????????????????????????

In the summer of 1652, General-at-Sea Robert Blake was ordered to Shetland with a fleet of over eighty ships to intercept the Dutch East India fleet, bound for home ‘north about’ (achteroom) around Scotland. Admiral Tromp went after him, but both fleets were caught in a storm on 25–27 July. Blake and his fleet managed to shelter in Bressay Sound, but the Dutch were battered on a hostile lee shore. After three days of continuous gales Tromp he had only thirty-four ships in company out of a fleet of over 100. Most of the others found some sort of shelter away from the main settlements but six foundered at sea and ten were wrecked. Even so, seven of the nine East Indiamen successfully made it home. To deny Bressay to the Dutch, a fort was ordered to be built at Lerwick during the first Dutch War (1652-4), but it is not known if this was ever completed. In 1665 work began on a more permanent fortification, built by Charles II’s master builder Robert Mylne. Finished in 1667, this was destroyed by the Dutch in 1673. The depredations of French and American privateers led to its rebuilding in 1781, when it was renamed Fort Charlotte, and it is in this form that it still survives, albeit now hemmed on almost all sides by the buildings of the town. It was used as a Royal Naval Reserve headquarters from 1861 to 1910.???????????????????????????????

Other relics of naval heritage can be found throughout Shetland, although we didn’t have time to investigate any of these in person. During World War I, the navy used the Swarbacks Minn anchorage on the Isle of Vementry as a base for patrols by the 10th Cruiser Squadron; the 6-inch guns of the coastal defence battery erected to protect it are still in situ. Bressay Sound was an important convoy anchorage, and guns were placed at both ends of it. A Royal Naval Air Station was established at Catfirth, operating seaplanes which hunted U-boats in the Atlantic. During World War II, a RN radar station was built on Sumburgh Head to detect U-boats passing between the Atlantic and North Sea via the Fair Isle channel; in 1940, the station provided early warning of a Luftwaffe attempt to bomb the British fleet in Scapa Flow on Orkney. To defend Lerwick, a large new gun battery was erected at Ness of Sound.

???????????????????????????????We did go to Lerwick Museum, which contains very little of naval relevance (other than a propellor blade from HMS Oceanic, the liner turned auxiliary cruiser wrecked on Foula on 8 September 1914), but that certainly isn’t true of the brand new museum at Scalloway, opened only last summer (it doesn’t usually open in winter, but did so for the holiday following Up Helly Aa in Lerwick). Standing in the shadow of brooding Scalloway Castle, another testament to the ambition and extravagance of Patrick, Earl of Orkney – see previous posts in this series – the museum has an interesting display about the sinking of Oceanic. Above all, though, it devotes a substantial amount of its space to the story of the ‘Shetland bus’, the extraordinary covert operation of World War II which saw fishing craft and, later, submarine chasers of the Royal Norwegian Navy smuggling men, equipment and information into or out of their occupied country. It’s an interesting sign of Shetland’s abiding and powerful connection to Norway, which ruled the islands until 1469, that Lerwick Museum was opened by the Queen of Norway and Scalloway’s by its Prime Minister, Jens Stoltenberg; indeed, the latter apparently generated some controversy in his homeland by choosing to spend its national day last year in Scalloway rather than Norway, but by doing so, he emphasised the debt his country owes to the heroes who operated the ‘Shetland Bus’.???????????????????????????????

Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 3

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Transcript of a meeting held at the offices of Blandshire County Council. 

Present: Councillor Gordon Scrote, chairman of Health and Safety committee; Inspector Robert Brent, Blandshire Police public order representative; and a large bearded Viking wearing furs, armour and a winged helmet, wielding a battleaxe, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to Brian Blessed in ‘Flash Gordon’. 

???????????????????????????????Councillor Scrote – Good morning, Mister…umm…

Viking (booming) – I AM THE GUIZER JARL!

Councillor Scrote – Ah, yes, Mister Yarl. Now, we’re here to discuss your application for a public entertainment licence, but there are just one or two minor matters that we’d like to clarify. First of all, you seem to suggest holding what will be a relatively large outdoor event in January. With respect, Mister Yarl, that’s hardly a tourism-friendly time of year.

Jarl – JANUARY! To salute the coming end of winter and honour the ancient Norse gods!

(He waves his battleaxe menacingly. Councillor Scrote surreptitiously ticks the box marked ‘religious diversity’ on the form in front of him.)

Councillor G Scrote – So this festival has ancient origins, then, and reflects genuine Norse cultural heritage????????????????????????????????

Jarl – Of course.

Inspector Brent – So you can assure me that it wasn’t devised by a bunch of Victorians looking for an excuse for an all-night party and won’t include groups of men dressed as ballerinas and giraffes?

Jarl (flustered) – Umm…look, Gordon’s alive!

Councillor Gordon Scrote – Of course I am. (Councillor Scrote begins to cross through large sections of the form in front of him.) Now, Mister Yarl, the crux of the matter seems to be an unfortunate typographical error in your application. When you say ‘Fire Festival’, I presume you’ve omitted ‘works’ from the word ‘fireworks’, and that you really mean a carefully controlled fireworks display, with the public kept several hundred yards away behind barriers to fulfil Health and Safety requirements?

Jarl (booming even more loudly) – NO! FIRE! Nearly a thousand men marching through the town bearing blazing torches! So close to the spectators that their cheeks will be warmed by the flames, and their expensive North Face kagools singed by cinders! AND FINALLY, ALL THE TORCHES SHALL BE THROWN ONTO A VIKING LONGSHIP, WHICH WILL BE CONSUMED BY THE CLEANSING FIRE!

(Councillor Scrote turns bright blue and drops dead.)

Inspector Brent – I’m sorry, could you just run all of that past us again?

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???????????????????????????????No, the Up Helly Aa parade in Lerwick, Shetland – Europe’s largest fire festival – would never, ever get off the ground if someone tried to start it today. Forget the fact that, like so many of Britain’s so-called historical traditions, it’s really an invention of the Victorian era which gradually acquired more and more accretions (the longship, the chief ‘guizer’ or performer known as the Jarl, etc), all of which are now set in stone. Something similar happened in my home village, which stages a spectacular Mayday festival – and despite the fact that May festivities have pagan origins, and that such celebrations in the village were recorded in 1563, the supposedly ‘traditional’ form of the annual event dates from only the 1880s. There’s another glorious example of this invention of ‘cod history’ on Shetland. The archipelago’s finest archaeological site is Jarlshof, which we visited before going to Up Helly Aa, but no inhabitant of any of the different settlements from different eras on the site would ever have known it by that name – which was a complete invention by Sir Walter Scott, who rechristened the real Sumburgh for dramatic effect in his novel The Pirate. 

Anyway, to return to Up Helly Aa (and I’d never realised that the Lerwick event is just the biggest of several that take place in communities around Shetland between January and March). Despite the very high winds – 84 MPH that night in Lerwick – and lashing rain, it proved to be one of the most astonishing things I’ve ever experienced. With the lights of the town extinguished, the procession resembles nothing less than a river of flame, and it’s easy to see why the primal power of fire has been regarded with such awe down the millennia. The camaraderie of the marchers and spectators was particularly marked; there were very few tourists present, hardly surprising given the difficulty of getting to and from Shetland in January and the prevailing weather conditions there at this time of year, and there was no sign of any anti-social behaviour. Whether that was still the case this morning in the dozen or so halls around Lerwick where drinking and dancing were meant to continue until 7 AM is another matter; we were in Lerwick at lunchtime and the place was remarkably quiet (unsurprisingly, the day after Up Helly Aa is a local bank holiday). The climax of the event, the tossing of the blazing torches onto the longship, was a thrilling and unforgettable sight. But no words of mine are really adequate to describe it, so I’ll let the pictures (both mine and the BBC’s) speak for themselves!

(Tomorrow, I’ll blog about some aspects of the naval heritage of Shetland before finishing this series with a final blog about other aspects of Orkney’s naval history, although that might have to wait until after we’re back!)

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Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 2

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A terrific day of naval heritage, stunning scenery and very high winds on the Orkney island of Hoy!

???????????????????????????????The ferry deposited us at Lyness, which from 1917 was the Royal Navy’s principal base for the Scapa Flow anchorage, home to the Grand Fleet in the First World War and the Home Fleet in the Second. Commissioned as HMS Prosperine, the base became familiar to many thousands of officers and men – probably far too familiar to many of them. Although the day started sunny, the cold wind – and, by mid-afternoon, the lashing rain – gave us at least a tiny insight into what many winter days must have been like for those in the base and those aboard the ships anchored out in the Flow. Lyness itself is now a tiny place, but some relics of its naval past survive (much of the base was rapidly demolished after its closure in 1957). One of the sixteen oil storage tanks that once dominated the shoreline still exists, and is now the home of the Scapa Flow visitor centre. Inevitably, this is closed in the winter, but fortunately several large and interesting exhibits are on display outside. These include guns salvaged from the German cruisers Bremse and Karlsruhe, units of the High Seas Fleet that scuttled itself in the Flow on 21 June 1919, and a propellor and shaft from HMS Hampshire, which sank off Marwick Head on 5 June 1916 (see yesterday’s post). Dominating the landscape at Lyness is the vast concrete bulk of the headquarters building erected in 1943; this stands on the hill known as Wee Fea, a terrific viewpoint from which it’s possible to see most of the Flow. The building is a somewhat eerie place which on the British mainland would undoubtedly have been demolished or closed off and plastered with ‘Keep Out’ signs or Health and Safety warnings; as it is, it’s possible to wander through its vast rooms and look out through the windows, imagining the sight of Hood, Nelson or Ark Royal in the waters below.???????????????????????????????

Most people who know anything at all about the naval history of Orkney assume that it’s all to do with Scapa Flow and the two World Wars. In fact, the islands played important parts in naval warfare for many centuries: Haakon IV, King of Norway, returned to Kirkwall to die after his defeat at the Battle of Largs in 1263, and in Britannia’s Dragon, I argue that Largs played an important if indirect part in the loss of Welsh independence, principally because Norse interventions, several of them launched from Orkney, had been important counterbalances for the Welsh princes to deploy against the English. Orkney played relatively little part in the naval history of my principal period, the seventeenth century, although that might have been very different – in 1667 the Danes, who had declared war on the side of the Dutch, began to plan an invasion to reclaim the islands, lost to them in a treaty with James III of Scots in 1469 (which was never meant to become a permanent arrangement). The unexpectedly swift end of the war put an end to the scheme. During the Napoleonic war, though, Orkney became an important assembly point for convoys to the Baltic, which formed up in Longhope Sound. To prevent depredations by French and American privateers, a Martello Tower and battery were erected at Hackness Point in 1813-14, with a second Martello on the opposite shore at Crookness.???????????????????????????????

We also went to Hoy Church, at the opposite end of the island to Longhope, which has an altar formed of wooden panels allegedly taken from a Spanish Armada wreck, although the later carvings and date ‘1624’ suggest that this might be a local myth. However, above the altar hangs a wooden cross made of wood from the wreck of HMS Vanguard, a Dreadnought battleship which was destroyed by an internal explosion off the island of Flotta on 9 July 1917. Incidentally, Hoy Church was a very welcome find: it’s now run as a local community centre and archive, is kept open even at this time of year, and provides tea and coffee on an honesty basis, as well as having some fascinating information about the local area on display! A big thank you to the local people for providing such a delightful facility. It’s sad that more churches elsewhere in Britain don’t do something similar, but alas, other parts of Britain don’t always have the strong sense of community and lack of anti-social behaviour which allows Hoy to open when so many thousands of other churches stay locked.??????????????????????????????? Hoy Church is fairly close to Rackwick, a remarkably beautiful scattered community of tiny cottages on a storm-wracked bay surrounded by towering cliffs. It was founded by Covenanters escaping a shipwreck when on their way into exile in 1679, but now seems to consist principally of empty holiday homes and isolated retreats for hippies, eco-warriors and (up until about 15 years ago) the Master of the Queen’s Music!

Our final port of call before taking the ferry back to the Orcadian mainland was Lyness naval cemetery. This has similarities to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemeteries on the Western Front and elsewhere: the cross of sacrifice, the serried ranks of immaculately maintained gravestones, and so forth. But it also has vast empty spaces, suggesting perhaps that those who originally conceived it in 1915 expected it to contain the many casualties of the several great set-piece battles that they anticipated but which never happened, and that those who maintained it after 1945 perhaps anticipated that Scapa would again come into its own during a Third World War. There are entire rows of graves from some of the Royal Navy’s worst naval disasters – the Vanguard explosion, the loss of the Hampshire, and the sinking of HMS Royal Oak by U-47 in the Flow itself on 14 October 1939, an incident which caused Churchill to order the sealing of the eastern channels into the Flow (of which more later in the week). There are also poignant memorials to those from other lands, including several rows of German graves and the isolated stones marking the last resting places of three Muslims and a Parsee. Perhaps incongruously, though, I was also struck by the adjacent gravestones of two men who perished in the disastrous collision between the destroyers Opal and Narborough on 12 January 1918. One bears the correct spelling of the name of the seventeenth century admiral Sir John Narbrough, whose career I’ve studied in detail (including writing his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography); the one immediately adjacent to it uses the incorrect spelling used by the Admiralty in naming the ship and by the carvers who provided all the other headstones to the dead of her ship’s company.

All in all, our day on Hoy proved to be a memorable one. Tomorrow we’re flying over to Shetland for the ‘Viking’ fire festival of Up Helly Aa, so blogging will resume later in the week!

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Orkney and Shetland Road Trip, Part 1

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As promised, this is the first of a series of short blogs from our week on the Orkney Islands (with a detour to Shetland for the Up Helly Aa festival), concentrating on the naval and 16th/17th century historical aspects.

Stones of StennessDespite the best efforts of the British winter, we both made it to Orkney at just about the same time – yours truly via the ferry across a relatively benign Pentland Firth after a 3-day road trip (including a day’s stopover to do some research), Wendy by plane. We’re staying right in the middle of Orkney’s major Neolithic heritage area, which has World Heritage status: the standing stones of Stenness are literally in the next field, the famous Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe chambered tomb just short walks away. The wonderful house we’ve taken for the week is called Odin, which can be seen in the background of my picture of the Stones of Stenness above). It’s on the site of the so-called Odin Stone, which was destroyed by a local farmer in 1814, and was built in 1936 by a retired master mariner who wanted to see water from all sides of his home. The house contains a number of original fittings of the famous liner RMS Mauretania, which was scrapped at Inverkeithing in 1935 – unsurprisingly, this was one of the features which made us choose it for the holiday!

House at Skara BraeAnyway, today started with a Neolithic-fest at the Ring of Brodgar and the astonishing Skara Brae village, which was occupied some 5,000 years ago, long before Stonehenge or the Pyramids were built. The remarkably intact houses were exposed by a storm in 1850, and subsequent excavations revealed a complex network of homes, linking passageways and workshops. Because so much stone was used in their construction, it’s possible to obtain a real insight into the lives of the Neolithic people who lived there; the ‘frames’ of their beds survive, as do the stone dressers that stood directly opposite the entrance to show off the occupants’ most treasured possessions. Stone-age bling, indeed – plus ça change! Best of all, we had the place virtually to ourselves. Apparently they get something like 2,000 visitors a day at the height of summer, and as it’s a relatively small site, one wonders just how good the experience can be.

Kitchener memorialWe had cold wind and rain at Skara Brae; by the time we got to Marwick Head, a short way up the coast, it was just the wind, with the sea breaking spectacularly onto the rocks below. (See the picture at the end of this post.) A fairly steep cliff path took us up to the memorial tower erected by the people of Orkney to Field Marshal Earl Kitchener, who was killed in these waters on 5 June 1916 when the cruiser HMS Hampshire struck a mine. Interestingly, the memorial plaque eulogises Kitchener but mentions the loss of the ship and 643 of her 655 men almost as an afterthought.

Our final stop for the day was the Earl’s Palace at Birsay, in the north west corner of Orkney’s mainland. This was built in the late 16th century by Robert Stewart, Earl of Orkney, the illegitimate half-brother of Mary, Queen of Scots. His harsh, oppressive rule on the islands (and on Shetland) was merely the prelude to the bizarre record of his son Patrick, who built a vast new palace in Kirkwall, the Orcadian capital. Known as Black Patie and regarded in Orkney’s history as ‘a symbol for evil and misrule’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), Patrick was executed in 1615 after becoming implicated in a revolt by his illegitimate son.Earl's Palace, Birsay My interest in this period of Scottish history runs deep – hence my book, Blood of Kings, about the ‘Gowrie conspiracy’ of 1600 – so when I saw a new book on the Stewarts Earls of Orkney on sale at the Skara Brae visitor centre, I snapped it up! I also bought James Miller’s book on the Royal Navy’s use of Scapa Flow, and all being well, it’s that side of Orkney’s history that we’ll be exploring tomorrow. I hope to post about that tomorrow night, so please check back then!Marwick Head

The Rise of Historyism

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It was a very bad week for politicians and History. Or, to be exact, it was a bad week for History because of politicians’ inability to stop distorting it to serve their own ends. Take David Cameron’s big speech to the Conservative conference, for example. ‘This is the country that … defeated the Nazis…and fought off every invader for a thousand years.’ Great for getting delegates to their feet, but risible as historical analysis. Fought off every invader for a thousand years? As I tweeted shortly afterwards, tell that to Richard III and James II. ‘Defeated the Nazis’? Umm…I think the Russians might have something to say about that, Dave. But when it comes to rewriting History, the PM isn’t in the same league as his great rival, Boris Johnson. ‘Not since 1789 has there been such tyranny in France!’ thundered the mop-topped Mayor of London about the policies of President Hollande, thus simultaneously ignoring the fact that there wasn’t really a ‘tyranny’ in France in 1789 (The Terror, which is presumably what you had in mind, Boris, started in 1793) and the entirety of the German occupation during World War Two, which was debatably just a tad more tyrannical than the raising of a few tax rates by a bespectacled technocrat with a slightly tangled love life. Now, it’s possible to forgive Boris on the grounds that it’s his usual jokey hyperbolic style and, after all, it’s not his period, inter alia, but unsurprisingly his rant didn’t exactly go down too well across the Channel, and it’s symptomatic of the way in which politicians think they can get away with serving up sloppy History to serve their own dubious ends. (Before anyone accuses me of party political bias, I should add that Labour and Lib Dem politicians are just as guilty. Don’t get me started on Ed Miliband and ‘One Nation’, for example…) Of course, we Brits have no monopoly on this – all American presidential candidates, including the current crop, are quick to press their own versions of their national past into the service of getting them elected, no matter how much they have to distort it to do so, and much American political discourse is fundamentally moulded by differing interpretations of a document written in 1787.

I spent the past week in Scotland, working on the plot outline for ‘Quinton 5’ and various other ideas for new books. There, the independence debate is cranking up nicely, despite the referendum date being two years away. Whatever the eventual outcome, this is clearly developing into a classic case study of the manipulation of History by two ferociously antagonistic sides – just read the comments on any political or historical story on any Scottish newspaper’s or TV channel’s website for depths of vitriolic unpleasantness unknown even on the comments pages of the online version of the Daily Mail. The nationalists’ appeal to what might be called the Braveheart version of Scottish history is being countered by the unionists’ appeal to ‘Britishness’, mustering to their cause such events as the Olympics and the forthcoming centenary of World War I. But a potential weakness of the unionist strategy is revealed in the latest blog from the always interesting Eagle Clawed Wolfe. It seems that at Carlisle Castle, the English Heritage guides have been told not to talk about the Border Reivers for fear of offending Scottish visitors. This is a case of ‘don’t mention the war’ writ large, and ludicrously so: the existence of the Reivers has much to do with why Carlisle Castle is there at all, so omitting it from the castle’s story is very much a case of Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. (And history, or elements within it, should offend – just as other elements should move, entertain and inspire.) As the Wolfe rightly points out, there are no such qualms on the other side of Tweed and Solway, where the Reiver history is celebrated – and, it might be added, where the history of conflict with England is part of the national psyche to an extent that is simply inconceivable south of the border, except perhaps in certain quarters of the BNP and English Defence League. One trivial but telling example: many Scots football fans fly flags adorned with the slogan ‘Bannockburn 1314’. When was the last time you saw the flag of St George adorned with ‘Culloden 1746’, or, at England-France fixtures, ‘Agincourt 1415’, ‘Trafalgar 1805’ or ‘Waterloo 1815’?

Of course, one could turn this argument on its head and say that it proves the Scots generally have a stronger sense of their own history than the English, even if it is a distinctly slanted one – and arguably, the Irish have an even stronger sense than either, or rather ‘senses’, given the two rival traditions which both depend for their mythologies upon distinctly myopic views of Irish history. (And yes, I’ve deliberately omitted my own countrymen, the Welsh, from this analysis; a subject for a future blog when Britannia’s Dragon is about to see the light of day. But I might go to the next Wales-England match with a Red Dragon flag adorned with ‘Bryn Glas 1402’ and see if anybody knows what it’s all about…) No doubt historically literate English football fans – and surely there must be some, somewhere? a few?? one??? – could argue with some justification that a flag bearing the names of all their country’s great victories would probably be too big to get into the ground. But surely a sensible, non-triumphalist acknowledgement of past conflict is better than Carlisle Castle’s precious and utterly wrong-headed policy of ignoring it. Ultimately, ignoring leads directly to ignorance, and ignorance breeds the sort of dangerous manipulation of history practised by cynical politicians and those with more dubious agendas. Indeed, with racism and sexism now regarded as increasingly unacceptable, maybe this ‘historyism’ is rising to replace them – that is, the use of shakily-founded throwaway historical references deliberately to offend or to employ a distorted view of the past to promote a prejudiced view of the present.

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Many Scots claim to have learned their history from the novels of Nigel Tranter, and I spent last week staying very close to Aberlady, where Tranter lived in his latter years and where he wrote his books as he walked along the coastal footpath that began at what he called ‘the footbridge to enchantment’. Every time I visit the bridge and the adjacent memorial cairn to him, my mind boggles both at his working method (if I tried it, I’d keep bumping into people or stumbling in rabbit holes) and his sheer productivity – he wrote well over fifty historical novels, all of which I’ve read and still have on my shelves, covering the whole span of Scottish history, as well as twelve children’s books, ten westerns, and about twenty non-fiction books. True, his novels are uneven – the later ones tend to be quite weak and repetitive, his sex scenes are always hilariously bad, and his one attempt at ‘naval’ fiction, The Admiral (about James IV’s naval commander Andrew Wood), had late 15th century cogs and caravels possessing roughly the handling characteristics of modern warships. True, his historical interpretation is invariably old fashioned, distinctly nationalist and often hopelessly romanticised. But Tranter described his vision of Scotland, particularly medieval Scotland, quite brilliantly, and many Scots claim to have learned their history from the man often regarded as ‘Scotland’s storyteller’. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with English history. Historical novelists now tend to stay within their ‘comfort zones’, which they’ve researched to the nth degree (‘I’m Roman’ was heard more than once at the Historical Novel Society conference the other day). Bernard Cornwell is a rare exception, but even he has concentrated on three or four fairly narrow chronological periods, and only on military history. Where is ‘England’s storyteller’, the equivalent of Nigel Tranter, who can produce an attractive, popular narrative across pretty much the whole span of the country’s history, embracing the political and social ‘big pictures’ as well as the battles? Or is that simply too big an ask for any author?