J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Welsh history

Act of Remembrance

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This post is due to be published on 3 September 2018. (Apologies for the delay – there was a glitch in scheduling it.)

On that date, I’ll actually be in France, and specifically at the Saint-Sever military cemetery, on the outskirts of Rouen. The reason for being there is that it’s the centenary of the death of my great-uncle David, after whom I was named, and I made a promise to myself long ago that I’d go to his grave to pay my respects. The visit will undoubtedly have greater poignancy following the death of my mother at the beginning of the year; her first ever trip abroad, at the age of seventy, also included a visit to the grave, thus fulfilling a promise she had made to her own mother, his sister, whom I remember well. I originally blogged about ‘Uncle Dai’ be in 2014, and what follows is an amended version of the text of that post, with the addition at the end of photographs of two ‘primary sources’: his last letter home, and the letter from his CO, referred to in the post. Next week, I hope to be able to blog some thoughts about, and photographs of, my visit, possibly coupled with material drawn from the larger holiday in France of which this forms a part.

Apropos of commemoration of the First World War, I’m pleased to be able to announce that I’ll be speaking at the conference Commemorating the Welsh Experience of the Great War at Sea, jointly organised by MOROL (the Institute of Welsh Maritime Historical Studies) and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, at Pembroke Dock on 3-4 November. My title will be ‘On “The Wrong Side”?: the Welsh Contribution to Allied Naval Supremacy in the First World War’.

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Uncle Dai, as the family always called him, was born in 1887 in Lakefield Road, Llanelli (in the house where I spent the first three years of my life). He was the fifth of the seven children of my great-grandparents, David Jones and Elizabeth, née Lewis. My grandmother was the next child, less than two years younger, and the two of them were always close. By the time he was fourteen, Dai was apprenticed to a Llanelli ironmonger, but by 1907 he had moved to Aberavon, some twenty miles east, where he found work as the assistant to another ironmonger. Dai was apparently a quiet, religious man, always willing to help people, who loved the children in the wider family and was loved by them in return. On 5 September 1915, at Ebenezer Baptist Chapel, Aberavon, he married Emily Griffiths, a twenty-six year old local girl. Everything seemed set fair for them to have a happy family life together.

But in the summer of 1916, tragedy struck: after barely ten months of marriage, Emily died of tuberculosis. Less than a month later, on 23 August, and perhaps as a way of working through his grief, Dai enlisted in the Royal Garrison Artillery. He embarked at Folkestone on 23 March 1917, arriving at Boulogne on the following day. He was posted to the front as part of 284 Siege Battery, RGA, which took part in the notoriously bloody Battle of Passchendaele. (By coincidence, my grandmother was also making a contribution to the artillery war; she was one of the ‘Canaries’, the female workers drafted into the munitions factories, in her case the Llanelli shell factory).

Dai was home on leave from 8 to 22 July 1918. Just over a month after his return to the front line, on 29 August, his unit was camped at Froidmont, just outside Nesle, a village midway between Amiens and Saint-Quentin. That night, the Germans launched a sudden gas attack on the British positions. Dai was one of the casualties, although he did not die immediately. He was taken to 5 General Hospital at Rouen, one of the many British camps and hospitals in the city, and must have spent several days in agony. He eventually died on 3 September. Dai was buried in the huge military cemetery of Saint Sever, Rouen, covering some 49,885 square metres, where over 8,500 of his comrades-in-arms are commemorated.

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Uncle Dai's grave
Uncle Dai’s grave

Saint Sever cemetery, Rouen
Saint Sever cemetery, Rouen

 

We Have Impact

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Apologies again for the ongoing blogging hiatus in recent weeks – I’m still working hard on finishing off the first book in my new Tudor naval trilogy, and have also been working on the book on naval ideology, 1500-1815, that I’m co-editing with Alan James and Gijs Rommelse. I’ve also been working on the talk on the Stepney family that I’m giving in Parc Howard, Llanelli, this Saturday, the 28th, at 11am – so if you’re in the area, do come along. Plus, if truth be told, the utterly atypical heatwave that the UK’s been experiencing for the last few weeks (and looks set to continue to enjoy, if that’s still the right word) has made me want to keep the time spent slogging away in my office to a minimum, and that spent reading in the garden to the maximum!

Anyway, this post stems from an exchange on Twitter last week. (I’ve been largely avoiding Twitter, too, although as I suggested in my last post, that’s also not unconnected to the current omnipresence of Trexit and Brump – and whatever one’s views on both, I can do without being bombarded with them 24/7, thank you very much.) To cut a long story short, one of the naval history accounts posted a tweet about Lord George Murray, inventor of the Admiralty shutter telegraph system, and I retweeted this with a comment mentioning the biographical article I’d written about him, which led, in turn, to my contributing his entry to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Murray ended up as Bishop of St David’s, so an old friend posed the question of whether he was also in the Welsh equivalent, the Dictionary of Welsh Biography. This got picked up by DWB’s Twitter person, who passed it on to an editor to decide if Murray should be added. The answer, when it came back, was no, on the grounds that his connection with Wales was confined to the last two years of his life.

Lord George Murray’s shutter telegraph (Wikimedia Commons)

Now, with all due respect to the editor in question, this seems to me to be an entirely wrong-headed judgement. For one thing, we can probably all think of examples of individuals who were only in particular positions for a relatively short time, but who had a major impact on our lives. In my case, as I recounted in this blog some years ago, it was the young English teacher who only taught at my school for a couple of years, but who, during that time, set up a student-run school newspaper, which I joined immediately and enthusiastically, thus commencing my writing career. Conversely, many people, even heads of government like Prime Ministers, can remain in office for many years and make hardly any impact at all (looking at you, Lord Liverpool). Besides, with regard to the specific case of George Murray, one would have thought that DWB would make it a matter of policy to include all the bishops of the Welsh dioceses as a matter of course, for the sake of completeness.

This leads me back to George Murray himself. Yes, he was only Bishop of St David’s for the last two years of his life. But during that time, he oversaw a major remodelling of the bishop’s palace at Abergwili, giving it the form it now has as the Carmarthenshire county museum. He was also responsible for redesigning the gardens, which are now regarded as so important that they’re the subject of a well funded restoration project. He was bishop at the time of the ‘great election’ of 1802, a contest regarded as staggeringly corrupt even by the standards of Regency politics (or, indeed, of all politics in all countries, all of the time). He snubbed Nelson and Lady Hamilton when they turned up in the area. Oh, and all that was on top of his invention of said Admiralty shutter telegraph, which, while not being directly relevant to Wales, is now regarded as one of the key developments in the history of data transference, and thus as one of the early steps that led ultimately to the creation of the internet. All of which, I would respectfully suggest, means that he had rather more impact in his short life than some of the worthy but dull individuals who have ended up in DWB simply by virtue of the fact that they never went anywhere much beyond their own little corners of Wales.

But don’t take my word for it – judge for yourselves. I’ve uploaded in PDF form a modified version of my biographical article on Murray, which was published in The Carmarthenshire Antiquary, xxxvii (2001). You can read it here: Lord George Murray

“One Year of the Sea! There’s Only One Year of the Sea!”

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A version of this post would have been my first of the year, and would have been published some weeks ago, had not more pressing matters intervened.

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So it’s 2018, the Wales Year of the Sea. Or so the marketing gurus who came up with the concept tell us. Now, those of us who hold the unfashionable opinion that the sea is actually quite important, and important all the time, might be tempted to respond ‘surely every year should be a year of the sea’, but hey, one Officially Designated Year with Glossy Literature is better than none, and anything that spreads the message is fine in my book. Indeed, only last Saturday, I spoke at an event intended to contribute to that process of message-spreading – a very well attended study day on the maritime history of south Wales, organised by the splendid Carmarthenshire Antiquarian Society. This proved to be unexpectedly dramatic, because half way through the final paper of the day, the ground literally shook, the teacups rattled furiously…and, yes, it proved to be that rarest of occurrences, an earthquake in Wales. Those of you in California, Italy, Chile, or other places that get serious, and seriously deadly, earthquakes, may justifiably scoff, But in 1607, the coast of south Wales was inundated by what may have been a full-scale tsunami, and for one brief fleeting moment, some of us wondered if history was about to repeat itself. It didn’t, although apparently, somebody in Swansea did drop a pint glass.

Talking about things that are ‘fine in my book’, though – see what I did there? – I made my own contribution to Wales’s maritime heritage a little while ago in the shape of Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. However, I realise that there are some of you who still haven’t bought it. This is disappointing, because [a] it means you’re not as enlightened as you could be about, umm, the naval history of Wales, and [b] you haven’t contributed to my royalties, thus enabling me to take a lavish holiday in the sun. To attempt to rectify this situation, I offer the introduction for your delectation, although I’ve omitted the footnotes for the sake of (comparative) brevity. I’ll be returning to the subject of Wales and the sea intermittently during the rest of the year, and then, just to annoy the marketing gurus, I’ll keep on returning to it in 2019, too. And 2020. And …

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‘There is no part of the Kingdom that, in proportion to its population, contributes more to the British Navy than Wales. Although we live in the mountains, our mountains are high enough for us to see the sea from almost any part of our little land, and there is the eternal fascination of the sea. It is with the greatest difficulty in the world that farmers can keep their sons from going to sea. They can see the steamers and the sailing ships passing to and fro, and there is for these men the eternal attraction of what is beyond the horizon.’

David Lloyd George, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1916-22: debate on the closure of Pembroke and Rosyth dockyards, House of Commons, 11 December 1925.

 

Wales is a maritime nation.

Rivers of Wales (from Wikipedia)

It may not seem so, to those at the heads of the valleys or in the market towns of rural Powys; but nowhere in Wales is more than about thirty miles from the sea or a navigable river, and even in early times, a Welshman in the very middle of his country could probably have reached the ocean’s edge rather more quickly than his contemporary at the equivalent point of England, Scotland or Ireland. In that sense Lloyd George, the ‘Welsh wizard’ (or, to some, the original ‘Welsh windbag’), was very nearly correct in his typically flamboyant comments. True, Wales generally has relatively short rivers, few of them navigable for any distance. But there were exceptions, bringing inland areas within reach of the sea. The country’s only true sea-loch, Milford Haven, once permitted shipping to reach Haverfordwest, deep in the heart of Pembrokeshire. The river Dee was navigable all the way to Chester; the Dyfi to Derwenlas, less than two miles from Machynlleth in Montgomeryshire; the Conwy to Llanrwst and the Mawddach almost to Dolgellau. Trefriw, just five miles or so from the heart of Snowdonia, was once the biggest inland port in Wales. Quite large ships sailed up the Tywi to Carmarthen until as recently as 1938 and up the Teifi to Cardigan until 1957. The Usk was navigable to Newbridge-on-Usk, the Wye to Brockweir easily, to Monmouth for barges, and even to Hereford in certain conditions; the maritime trade of tiny Llandogo, above Tintern, still gives its name to the city of Bristol’s most famous pub. Above all, there is the Severn, Afon Hafren, rising on the slopes of Plynlimon near Llanidloes. Although most of its navigable course flows in England, the hinterland of the Severn’s river ports – Lydney, Bewdley, Bridgnorth and the rest – extended deep into Wales, and the river itself was navigable as far as Welshpool, albeit with some difficulty. Thus the Severn gave Welshmen in even some of the remoter areas a highway by which they could escape to new worlds. When William Owen of Glansevern near Welshpool joined the navy in 1750, he rode to Shrewsbury, then took a wherry to Worcester, then continued overland to join his first ship at Sheerness before embarking on a career that ultimately took him to the East Indies and finally to Canada, where he attempted to create a new Montgomeryshire on the shores of Passamaquoddy Bay, New Brunswick.

The rumbustious and remarkably long-lived 17th century Welsh sailor John Worley, immortalised on the ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich

For those in the littoral, then, the natural viewpoint for many centuries was to look outward, toward Somerset, Devon and Cornwall, Ireland, Ellan Vannin (the Isle of Man) and Scotland, with the sea acting as a unifier and a highway, not as a divider or barrier. Seaborne journeys were often much easier than those on the overland routes between the north and south of Wales, or into the upland moors of the interior – and indeed, the difficulties of land travel have continued to shape and bedevil much of the economy, politics and linguistics of Wales to this day. It is possible to catch a train from Swansea to England’s mightiest dockyard city, Portsmouth, about 170 miles away, and get there four and a half hours later; to get from Swansea to Pwllheli, in the same country and roughly the same distance away, takes seven and a half. Consequently, the Welsh have always used the sea. Welsh mariners even have their own patron saint, Cyric, and it is possible that the legend of ‘Davy Jones’ Locker’ had Welsh origins. But Welshmen’s seafaring exploits were never as substantial as those of their Cornish or Breton cousins. The legend that Madog ap Owain, Prince of Gwynedd, discovered America in about 1170, has long been entirely disproved, although as recently as 1953 a memorial commemorating his ‘landing’ was erected on the shores of Mobile Bay by the Daughters of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, the first major westward voyage of exploration from Bristol, in 1480, was captained by a Thomas Lloyd, and Cabot’s historic voyage to the mouth of the St Lawrence in 1497 was skippered by another Welshman, Edward Griffiths; but there seems to be no foundation in the legend that America was named after Richard ap Meryke or Ameryk, a prominent Welsh merchant of Bristol.  Perhaps more prosaic, but rather more significant, was the discovery in 2002 of the ‘Newport ship’, a large craft dating from the 1460s which seems to have traded between Wales and Portugal. Her discovery served as a timely reminder of the long history and profound importance of Welsh maritime trade.

The memorial to Bartholomew Roberts, ‘Barti Ddu’, at his birthplace, Little Newcastle, Pembrokeshire

Many books and articles have been written about the ports and maritime heritage of Wales, many more about the merchant crews and skippers who sailed trading craft in their own waters or much further afield. It has been suggested that in proportion to size of population, there were probably more Welshmen than Englishmen in the Merchant Navy during Queen Victoria’s reign, while in the first half of the twentieth century the Blue Funnel Line, based at Liverpool, employed so many Welshmen that it was nicknamed ‘the Welsh Navy’. In that sense, again, Lloyd George was undoubtedly right: in many of the non-industrialised areas of the country, like the Llŷn peninsula from which he hailed, the Cardigan Bay coast and parts of Pembrokeshire, the sea was the only viable occupation for many men, both young and old. Many writers have also been drawn to the peculiar fact that relative to the size of the country, Wales produced a disproportionate number of ‘pirates of the Caribbean’, including three of the most famous – or infamous – of them all, Sir Henry Morgan, Howell Davis and ‘Black Bart’ Roberts. Yet the activities of those Welshmen who protected the merchant ships upon which their countrymen sailed, or who sought to end the depredations of the pirates (and Barbary Corsairs, Atlantic slave traders, and so forth), have never been properly recounted.

The ‘naval temple’ on the Kymin, Monmouth

Because Wales is a maritime nation, it follows that it has also always been a naval nation; or at least, one upon which naval warfare has always impacted. This, too, is simple fact. For example, few would deny that seapower was undoubtedly one of the most important factors that ended Welsh independence, first in the thirteenth and later in the fifteenth centuries. The Royal Navy has even shaped the geography of Wales: one town (Pembroke Dock) was created directly by and for it, another (Nelson in the Taff Bargoed valley) was named after its greatest hero, and there was a Naval Colliery, actually a complex of four pits, at Penygraig in the Rhondda. Nearly every Welsh town had pubs called the Trafalgar or the Lord Nelson or the British Tar. Monuments to naval heroes constitute prominent landmarks from the Menai Straits and the Tywi valley to Breidden Hill near Welshpool and the Kymin at Monmouth. But such indisputable facts seem to sit awkwardly with the recent history of the country. Nineteenth and twentieth century Wales became overwhelmingly a socialist nation – with both a small and a large ‘s’ – and, moreover, a nation that developed a powerful pacifist tradition. The strong, undeniable military and naval traditions of Wales co-exist uncomfortably with all of this. Thus in 1982 at least some Welshmen felt deeply troubled when – barely weeks after Wales had declared itself a ‘nuclear free zone’ – HMS Glamorgan flew the ddraig goch alongside her battle ensigns during the war against Argentina, whose armed forces included some of Welsh descent, the heirs of the one and only true Welsh colony.

Acknowledging the fact that Wales has a long and proud naval history is certainly not a glorification of war. Nor does it condone decisions taken and policies followed in the past that are now deemed unacceptable to some modern sensibilities. Rather, it is an attempt to tell a story that has simply never been told in its entirety; indeed, much of it has never been told at all. Despite recent worthy attempts by academic historians to dispel Wales’s ‘amnesia’ about its military and imperial history, the neglect of the naval dimension has remained glaring. For example, an authoritative recent book entitled Wales and War contains precisely one mention of the Royal Navy, and that only in passing. Likewise, an otherwise deeply moving literary anthology on ‘Wales and War in the Twentieth Century’ contains not one poem about the navy – other than a brief section in a longer piece, and that entirely disparaging in tone. But then, arguably it was ever thus. In 1919 a book was published entitled Wales: Its Part in the War, but it contained not a single mention of the thousands of Welshmen who had served at sea.

HMS Pembroke berthed at the former Royal Navy dockyard, Pembroke Dock, to mark the bicentenary of the yard in May 2014. In the foreground is the eastern gun tower built to defend the yard.

This book is an attempt to redress the balance. It tells the story of those Welshmen (and, latterly, women) who served selflessly and courageously in naval forces, firstly of their own land, later those of the union with England and the United Kingdom, as well is in those of other lands, including Australia, Brazil, Chile, India, and above all, both the United and the Confederate States of America. It is the story of the Welsh contribution to the naval struggles against the Spanish Armada, Napoleon and Hitler, as well as those against General Galtieri and Saddam Hussein. It is the story of the ships that bore Welsh names, from the Dragon of 1512 to its namesake HMS Dragon five centuries later, and of the Royal Naval Air Stations on Welsh soil. It is the story of the shore facilities in Wales that supported the Royal Navy, and of the thousands of civilians, men and women alike, who worked within them. Finally, it is the story of the part played by Welsh manpower, resources and enterprise in the achievement of British naval supremacy, which – for good or ill – largely shaped the destiny of the world for the best part of two centuries. Welshmen sailed with Drake, Blake and Nelson, as well as with Cook, Franklin and Scott. The strategy proposed by a Welsh naval officer possibly stopped Napoleon Bonaparte conquering Egypt, and perhaps India thereafter. The decisions taken by a Welshman largely determined the outcome of the Battle of Jutland, the single opportunity for a decisive naval victory during World War One. The last invasion of mainland Britain occurred when French sea power briefly eluded the naval defence of the Welsh coast. Without Welsh-smelted copper, it is debatable whether Nelson would have won at Trafalgar; without Welsh-mined coal, it is arguable whether the Victorian Navy could ever have imposed the Pax Britannica.

That is the story told in this book.

HMS Dragon arrives at Portsmouth for the first time, 31 August 2011, rather flaunting her Welsh credentials

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Offpeak Day Return of the King

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A bit of an oddity for this week’s second blog.

(And anybody thinking ‘the blogger’s a bit of an oddity anyway’ is toast.)

Last week’s trip to Galloway – see the previous post – provided me with lots of inspiration of all sorts, and, thanks primarily to Wigtown, also provided me with lots more books which now need to be found space on my groaning shelves. But the area where I was staying also provided me with ideas and material to supplement a post from almost exactly four years ago. So the first half or so of what follows is an edited version of that post, with entirely new material in the second part. I’ll do a similar thing with next Monday’s blog, which will also update another very old post, coincidentally again from pretty much exactly this same time of year, albeit five years ago. This might well be connected to the previous point about bookshops and bookshelves!

Bear with me – and if you know the legends of King Arthur at all, you’ll probably know just how terrible a pun ‘bear with me’ is…

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A confession: I very nearly became an Arthurian.

Before you all run off into the hills, screaming hysterically, bear with me for a few minutes. Remember that I originally come from Carmarthenshire – Caer Myrddin or Caerfyrddin, the fort of Merlin, right? So the Arthurian myths and legends were all around me from pretty much as far back as I can remember. The Sword in the Stone was the first film I ever saw in the cinema, aged about six, and by the time I was eighteen, I’d read Geoffrey of Monmouth and The Once and Future King, been vaguely irritated by the TV series Arthur of the Britons, and wondered why on earth some of my sixth form friends insisted we should go drinking in the King Arthur Hotel on the Gower Peninsula, rather than in the (literally) hundreds of pubs that were nearer.

Kidwelly Castle, my ‘local’ castle when I was growing up, where a big chunk of my love of history was born. Arthurian connection? None- unless you count the fact that it appeared in ‘Monty Python and the Holy Grail’

Then I went off to Oxford, where my first term studying ‘modern’ history included the Venerable Bede (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘modern’) and his ‘back story’ in the writings of Gildas and Nennius. So when it came time for me to choose my options within ‘English One’, the vast English history paper (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘British’) that stretched from the fall of Rome to about 1500, it was a no-brainer – like a shot, I was off to what it was then still politically correct to call ‘the Dark Ages’. I decided I’d really impress my tutor by spending the vacation beforehand reading the new, exciting book about the period, namely John Morris’s Age of Arthur.

I was instantly enthralled. Here was a whole new world, a thrilling combination of dramatic narrative and detective story, full of unfamiliar evidence and thought-provoking analysis. I was vaguely aware of the fact that Morris – coincidentally, an alumnus of my own college – had stirred up some controversy, but no matter. It was the newest, biggest book in the field, and I was still of an age when my assessment of history books began and ended with the questions ‘is it new, and is it big?’. Fortunately, my tutor on this course was the ideal man to put me right: James Campbell of Worcester College (who sadly died last year) was a formidably erudite don of the old school, and he alerted me to the devastating critique of Morris penned by David Dumville of the University of Cambridge (note: Oxford University has always had difficulty with the concept of ‘Cambridge’). So off I went to other tomes, such as Leslie Alcock’s Arthur’s Britain, which gave me a very different, archaeological, perspective on the period, and I emerged from the experience a wiser and distinctly more sceptical person, at least when it came to all things Arthurian.

It was also an object lesson in ‘how to do history’ more generally. For example, endless pages of references impress the credulous and are often intended quite deliberately to intimidate the sceptical into submission, but they don’t mean a thing if the references are to sources from long after the period they’re meant to be describing – a particular fault of The Age of Arthur – or are simply cross-referring from one dubious secondary source to another in a vicious circle of obfuscation. These traits are all too common, for example, in the work of many of the more controversial World War II ‘revisionists’, conspiracy theorists, and many of those writing books about such esoterica as the Holy Grail. (For my sins, I read quite a lot of the latter when researching my own venture into the reasonably esoteric, Blood of Kings, and quite a lot of the former when I was trying to steer impressionable GCSE students away from such things in the relatively early days of the Internet.) All too often, those who think they are historians, or even genuine, qualified historians who should know better, ‘prove’ their cases by citing highly dubious ‘sources’ that actually prove nothing whatsoever.

Arthuret church. Nice place, but no sign of kings slumbering for eternity

Four years ago, when the original version of this part of the blog was posted, I was staying at the Landmark Trust’s gloriously eccentric Coop House. This is in the parish of Arthuret, a pretty suggestive name to begin with, and the location of not one but two important battles – one in 573, not long after the time traditionally regarded as ‘the age of Arthur’, and the battle of Solway Moss in 1542. I always like to research an area before going there, so inevitably, I delved into the history of Arthuret. Pretty soon, I was lost in the darker undergrowth of the Arthurian forest (which, of course, is situated next to the Holy Grail sausage factory and the Templar vomitorium), ploughing through books and blogs which made the most astonishing claims. Some even believe that the legendary king himself lies buried beneath Arthuret parish church, and that perhaps the Holy Grail can be found there too… So I made the church my first port of call when I got there, and found it to be a very pleasant spot. But as a candidate for the last resting place of King Arthur, it is no more or less plausible than, say, Glastonbury, where the bones of the ‘king’ (and of Guinevere to boot) were ‘discovered’ in 1191. In the one case, an entire historical theory has been established on the distinctly shaky foundation that the name ‘Arthuret’ might possibly be derived from ‘Arthur’; in the other, the abbey greatly boosted its visitor numbers, and thus its income stream, as a result of the distinctly convenient find.

Glastonbury Abbey: site of the alleged tomb of Arthur and Guinevere. If English Heritage had a sense of humour, they’d erect a shrubbery around it

And that, in a nutshell, is the problem with a lot of the ‘Arthur industry’. Much of it can be attributed to attempts by one over-enthusiastic local historian after another to twist the miniscule amount of actual hard historical evidence about Arthur and his times to follow in the footsteps of the 12th century monks of Glastonbury by placing the fabled king within their own particular patch. Thus we have Cornish Arthurs, Somerset Arthurs, Welsh Arthurs, Cumbrian Arthurs, a French Arthur (seriously) and a Scottish Arthur – or rather Scottish Arthurs, with a veritable battle royal taking place a few years ago between clans desperate to claim him as one of their own. The odd thing is that these optimists keep pushing their distinctly ingenious claims, despite the fact that a few years ago, Guy Halsall’s book Worlds of Arthur carried out what seemed to me to be a pretty effective demolition job on the whole business of Arthur myth-making. But then, and before legions of Arthur-loving trolls start laying into me, I should deploy the historian’s great catch-all cop-out, namely ‘it’s not my period’; or at least, it hasn’t been since about 1977. And let’s face it, books which claim that Arthur didn’t exist and didn’t inhabit a part of the country with a reasonably large book-buying population are never going to sell as well as books that say he really was a great warlord and that Camelot was that hill just up the road.

Hang on, though. When I was looking for potential walks, I noticed on the map that only a few miles from Arthuret and the Coop House is the site of a Roman fort named Camboglanna. Hmm. Doesn’t that sound to you a bit like Camlann, the name of King Arthur’s last battle? And lo, Google the two names together and you’ll see plenty of websites which make precisely that connection. Then again, though, I’ve driven up and down the M4 many more times than I care to remember, and have always thought that the hill fort just by Junction 15 at Swindon would have been an obvious candidate for the site of the Battle of Mount Badon…and what’s the name of the place nearest to it? Badbury. At the end of the day, the Arthur myths are remarkably seductive, powerful and abiding, and who am I to argue with that?

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So that’s what I wrote four years ago. All of those thoughts and themes came back to me in spades last week, when I was staying in another truly unique Landmark, Glenmalloch Lodge. For one thing, Glenmalloch stands on the Cumloden estate, home to the troubled Earls of Galloway, and was originally built as Cumloden School. (Apparently 25 girls and their teacher used to fit in there – and given that it was cosy for just me, I reckon the teacher must have double stacked the wee lassies.) Mmm, though, ‘Cumloden’…doesn’t that sound a bit like ‘Camlann’ to you? OK, yes, I won’t go there.

Remote and peaceful (indeed, probably the quietest and darkest place I’ve ever stayed in), Glenmalloch is, of course, in North Wales, or as some insist on calling it, ‘Scotland’.

Before all my Scottish friends jump down my throat for the second time this week, I should emphasise that we’re not making a territorial claim on your wonderful country. (Unlike with England, of course, where we still want the flat and dry bits back; fifteen hundred years of hurt, etc…) Nevertheless, it’s indisputably true that what’s now southern Scotland was once ‘Welsh’ territory, the Hen Ogledd (‘Old North’) of the annals. The original name for Edinburgh, Dunedin, is Welsh, as are many place names around it – Tranent, for example, is simply an inverted rendering of ‘Trenant’, about as Welsh as a name as you’ll find. During my drive west along the highway to the sun, otherwise known as the A75, I passed the signs to Caerlaverock Castle, semantic twin to Caernarfon, Caerphilly, and, yes, Caerfyrddin, Carmarthen. The great stone of Clach nam Breatann, ‘the rock of the Britons’, at the northern end of Loch Lomond, is said to mark the northern border of the Welsh kingdom of Strathclyde, which had its capital on the rock of Dumbarton. Thus in the humble opinion of this blogger, adding Scots Gaelic versions of placenames to the usual ones on, say, railway station signs, in this part of Scotland, is historically illiterate: provide an alternative to the Anglo-Scots version by all means, but that alternative should surely be in Welsh, the original language of the area.

All of which brings me to Rheged. In the old Welsh annals, this was a mighty but short-lived kingdom in the north, which had a brief period of greatness under King Urien. But historians and archaeologists can’t agree on whether Rheged existed at all, and if it did, on where it was. It’s usually been assumed to have been on one or both sides of the Solway Firth, perhaps extending as far south as Rochdale, the original name of which was Recedham (Note: on behalf of the Welsh people, I can confirm that we aren’t lodging a territorial claim for Rochdale.) But there were plenty of suggestive pointers not a million miles from Glenmalloch Lodge. Not far west, for example, is Dunragit – surely, some have argued, ‘the fort of Rheged’? Not far east is Trusty’s Hill, brooding over Anwoth kirk, which I mentioned in my last post, and overlooking the town of Gatehouse of Fleet. Recent excavations there have revealed what’s been described as a palace complex from the correct period, i.e. around the sixth century; so was this the principal seat, or capital if you prefer, of Rheged? If so, might Arthur have known it, especially if he was a warlord of the Hen Ogledd, not of ‘south’ Wales, Cornwall or Somerset?

Pendragon Castle. Minus any dragons, but plus red squirrels, allegedly

At which point, off we go once again, charging back into the Arthurian forest. I took a detour on my way to Glenmalloch, and stopped off to see Pendragon Castle, on the border of the north Pennines and the Lake District. Despite being a small and nondescript ruin, this has two things going for it. First, it has surely the most awesome castle name of them all; eat your heart out, George R R Martin. Second, it was reputedly the home of Uther Pendragon, father of King Arthur. In fact, the castle wasn’t built until the twelfth century, half a millennium and more after Uther’s time, but its name demonstrates that, just like the ‘grave’ discovered by the monks of Glastonbury, ‘the Arthur industry’ has pretty well always been with us. A key part of that industry is the myth proclaiming that one day, when the nation is in its direst peril, the Once and Future King will rise from his slumber in a forgotten cave, and ride forth to save –

Hang on, there’s someone at the door.

Ah, OK.

Some guy in a suit of armour, wanting to know Boris Johnson’s address.

 

The Top Ten

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

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

So moving on to the chart of my own posts:

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

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

Carmarthenshire Archives: the End of the Beginning?

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Last Thursday, I attended a two-hour consultation meeting in Carmarthen on the proposed new record office for the county, following the closure of the previous one after the discovery of mould in the storerooms. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I have just a little bit of history with this particular issue; I’m not going to provide links to all of the previous posts, but anyone so inclined can enter ‘Carmarthenshire Archives’ in the search facility and then trace the story in chronological order. (Note: entering ‘Hammer House of Horrors’ or ‘Dante’s Circles of Hell’ will also produce the same search results.) After the sorry saga of the record office throughout the last twenty years or so, to say that Carmarthenshire County Council has rather a lot of trust to rebuild on this issue is a bit like saying that Donald Trump isn’t quite in the Abraham Lincoln league yet. Therefore, some of you might have expected me to go to this meeting armed with the sword of scepticism and the shield of cynicism. Far from it: remember that I was a teacher for the best part of thirty years, so I always believed that even the most feckless little toerag was capable of redemption – unless, obviously, his/her name was ***** or *******. So I went with an open mind, and, indeed, a positively receptive one, because after all, my principal hope all along has been that Carmarthenshire’s nationally and internationally important archive collections should be preserved, and presented to the public, in a safe and appropriate facility that complies fully with national standards.

That being so, I have to say that I was largely impressed by what I saw and heard. The new building will be a three-storey, then two-storey, extension at the back of the current Carmarthen Library building, of which more anon. The two-storey structure will contain a repository capable of accommodating both the current collection and 25 years’ worth of accruals; the three-storey section will contain staff work rooms and facilities of various sorts, plus, on the third floor, the public search room. The building will have exemplary eco credentials, notably a ‘passive house’ system, and should look impressive, both externally and internally. Above all, being on the same site as the library, and on the same floor as the local history reference collection, should permit considerable flexibility for researchers. Inevitably, some of those present had reservations. Would it permit digital photography, always a bugbear at the old office? Would the outsourcing of conservation work be detrimental to the office’s work? How long might it take to tackle the huge cataloguing backlog (a commonplace, alas, at many repositories the length and breadth of Britain)? For my part, I thought the new search room looked on the small side, but the current and former record office staff who were present assured me that it could easily accommodate the sorts of numbers that the old facility used to see, and that increasing use of digital materials was progressively reducing the pressure on physical seating. The new building is due to open in 2019, until which time the county’s collections will still need to be consulted principally in far-distant Cardiff. But at least there finally appears to be light at the end of a very long, very dark tunnel.

It has the potential to be quite an impressive light, too. Many county record offices these days are housed, to paraphrase an earlier post on this site, in anonymous out-of-town sheds that could easily be on industrial estates, and in some cases, actually are on industrial estates. Not so the new office in Carmarthen. Not only is the main facade and structure of Carmarthen library, through which one will have to pass in order to reach the archives, an eighteenth century listed building in its own right, but it stands directly opposite St Peter’s Church, one of the most historic in Wales – so if you feel like a stroll through history during a lunch break, you’ll be able to go and pay your respects at the spectacular Tudor tomb of Sir Rhys ap Thomas, staunch ally of Henry VII and quite probably the man who killed Richard III, or else the memorial to Sir Richard Steele, the ‘father of journalism’, or perhaps that of General Sir William Nott, or maybe even my particular favourite (for obvious reasons), that of John Williams of Edwinsford, who was serving aboard the frigate Kingfisher during its famous fight with seven Algerine corsairs in 1681. If you fancy a slightly longer stroll, a few hundred yards in one direction will bring you, via the remaining fragment of the ancient tree that was long held to be ‘Merlin’s oak‘, to a Roman amphitheatre, no less (and, to boot, the most westerly surviving example in the entire Roman Empire) – while a few hundred yards in the other direction will bring you to the ruins of the huge castle that was once the seat of royal power in south Wales. (Note: do not confuse with Caernarfon, especially if you’re meant to be getting married in one and not the other.)

Thus from having one of the worst archive facilities in Britain, a national scandal that was condemned time after time by the regulator and finally closed after a perfectly foreseeable near-catastrophe (none of it the fault of its hard-pressed staff), Carmarthenshire potentially stands on the threshold of having one of the best. So I hope there’ll be no spoiling the ship for a ha’porth of tar: no backsliding on this, no penny-pinching on that, no corner-cutting on the other, and above all, no mindset to the effect that the building has cost so much that economies need to be made in the staffing. The ship may not have looked quite so smart without the proverbial ha’porth of tar, but if it had set sail without sufficient sailors to man it, inadequate tarring would swiftly have been the least of its problems – and after all, Carmarthenshire, of all counties, should know a thing or two about shipwrecks.

So if all goes to plan, gentle readers, this will be my penultimate post on the subject of Carmarthenshire Archives. The last one of all, I fervently hope, will be posted some time in 2019, and will report on my first day in the new facility, praising it to the heights, and saying how inspired I now feel to finally complete my book on the Stepney family. But before then, there are some quite important things to do – starting next week, when all the shenanigans surrounding the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway kick off. More detail next Monday!