J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Swedish history

Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 2

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

Ready for the off!

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

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

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

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

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

Jim Hansson talking about the Scepter wreck

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

Part of the newly discovered wreck of the Scepter

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

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

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

So they can Scandinavian.

(Boom, tsh)

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.)

Scandinavia or Bust

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A quick post this week, as I’m busy tidying up loose ends and packing before heading off to Scandinavia! I’m speaking at a conference in the Swedish Naval Museum, Karlskrona, and am ‘bookending’ the trip with overnight stays in Copenhagen, which I’ve never actually visited before. (There’s a possibility that I might never visit it this time, either, as I’m flying with a certain blue-liveried Irish airline…) I’m really looking forward to it, principally because of the opportunity to look round the normally closed Karlskrona dockyard, built from 1680 onwards and thus the classic surviving dockyard site from my principal period of study. The conference itself should be fascinating, too, with a wide range of multinational papers on dockyards and dockyard towns; I’m talking on ‘Pembroke Dockyard and the Welsh Nation’, so it’ll be interesting to see how a predominantly Swedish audience handles the smattering of Welsh I intend to throw into my talk.

(Probably rather better than I cope with any Swedish they throw into theirs, I should imagine.)

In any case, it’ll be great just to be back in Sweden again. I was last over there six years ago, when I had an extended stay in Kalmar and Gothenburg as ‘fieldwork’ for the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight; that trip was the first time I’d been outside Stockholm, where the Vasa is, of course, an irresistible draw for someone with my interests. I’ve also long had an interest in the history of Sweden’s ‘golden age’, and that explains why I set Lion there. As I wrote in the blog which ‘launched’ that particular title,

I actually taught it [Swedish history] to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

So next week, and probably in the post after that too, I’ll be blogging about the conference, and my impressions of both Karlskrona and Copenhagen. Until then, though, it’s back to the packing…

Enter the Lion

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Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight
Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website.

Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in the series, both in its setting and its subject matter. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, or the waters off the Atlantic coast of Sweden, during the early months of 1666. The second Anglo-Dutch war war is at a critical stage – France has declared war on the side of the Dutch, the combined kingdom of Denmark-Norway is about to do so. Meanwhile, a fleet of mast ships lies ice-bound in Gothenburg harbour, waiting for a thaw and an escort so it can bring back its vital cargo; for without fresh supplies of masts, the British fleet’s ability to continue the war will be finite. But what Matthew Quinton expects to be a straightforward piece of convoy escort duty becomes something much darker. What is the true mission of his mysterious passenger, Lord Conisbrough? Why does Matthew become involved in a shadowy power struggle within the Swedish government? Above all, how will he respond to the presence in Gothenburg of one of the most notorious of the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I? As he encounters enemies old and new, together with some unexpected allies, Matthew struggles to carry out his duty while confronting some powerful demons from his and his family’s past.

Carving of King Charles X (1654-60) from the wreck of the Kronan: Lansmuseum, Kalmar

So why this particular setting? For one thing, I’d long been interested in Sweden’s ‘Golden Age’, from roughly 1610 to 1721, when the country was one of the greatest powers in Europe. I actually taught it to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

As I write in the historical note to The Lion of Midnight,

The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus, der Löwe von Mitternacht to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resources. Although Gustavus’s intervention in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin…

Large tracts of territory in Scandinavia and northern Germany were conquered, the new city of Gothenburg was established as a ‘window to the west’, and the country also built up a formidable navy. I’d been to Stockholm several times to see the remarkable Vasa, but to research Lion, in February 2011 I spent a week in Kalmar and Gothenburg (aka Göteborg). The former houses the astonishing range of exhibits recovered from the wreck of the Kronan, which sank in 1676; at the time, she was one of the largest warships in the world, the brainchild of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. I was also really impressed by the museums in Gothenburg, notably the Maritime Museum and the City Museum; the latter has a vast model of the city as it was at pretty much exactly the time I’ve written about in Lion!

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum
Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

So I hope readers will enjoy The Lion of Midnight, which explores a relatively little known aspect of naval history, visits a fascinating foreign land at the height of its short-lived greatness, and sees the hero face challenges very different to any he has encountered before.

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When this post goes live, I’ll actually be hacking my way down the M5 to Devon for a few days of research fieldwork connected to the next Quinton book and some ongoing non-fiction projects. (Those of you who know the subject of ‘Quinton 5’ from my previous posts and the website might be wondering why on earth a story focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666 needs fieldwork in Devon, of all places. Watch this space, or better still, read the book in about a year’s time!) So next week, I hope to be blogging about some of the places I’ll have been to.