J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Britannia's Dragon

“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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Maritime Nation(s)?

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Just over a week ago, I attended the annual conference of MOROL, the Institute of Welsh Maritime Historical Studies. This took place in the somewhat unlikely setting of Trinity St David’s University College at Lampeter. Now, Lampeter is a very nice town, but one thing it most certainly isn’t is ‘maritime’ – it’s not quite as far from the sea as it’s possible to get in Wales, but not far off. But there was method in this apparent madness. TSD Lampeter is home to a flourishing and very proactive nautical archaeology department, so not surprisingly, much of the focus of the conference was on matters archaeological. I was particularly impressed by the presentations from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales and the four Welsh archaeological trusts, but perhaps the highlight was an excellent account of the work being carried out on the Newport ship, an astonishing discovery which deserves to be much better known nationally and internationally.

While much of the conference was very positive and upbeat, there was considerable concern about the place and future of maritime heritage in Wales. Unlike Scotland and, of course, England, Wales has no national maritime museum – the Waterfront Museum in Swansea certainly doesn’t qualify as one. While there is tremendous enthusiasm and commitment among the volunteers who run the local maritime history groups and maritime museums, many of these are run on a shoestring, their futures sometimes precarious (as in the case of the West Wales Maritime Heritage Society’s museum at Pembroke Dock, which I blogged about recently). Above all, there is no maritime history course at any Welsh university. There were various suggestions as to why this might be the case: maritime history doesn’t really fit into the standard narratives of Welsh history, which tend to focus on such themes as the medieval age of the princes, industrialisation, religion, the struggles of the working class, and the fight to preserve the language. Welsh seafarers always worked in environments that were multi-ethnic and multi-lingual; their perspectives and connections were often global; and, of course, ‘landlubber’ historians often think that the sources for maritime history are ‘difficult’, full of complex technical language and unfamiliar concepts (‘the sea’, for instance…).

Yet, as I wrote in the introduction and conclusion to Britannia’s Dragon:

Wales is a maritime nation.

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…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…

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…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 many of the non-industrialised areas of the country, like the Llŷn peninsula, the Cardigan Bay coast and parts of Pembrokeshire, the sea was the only viable occupation for many men, both young and old…

Wales is a maritime nation. It is, or has been, a naval nation. But it is a nation that needs to reconnect with the sea that did so much to shape it. 

However, one ray of light on the horizon might be the Welsh government’s recent announcement that it is launching themed tourism years, with 2018 being the ‘Wales Year of the Sea’. (In an ideal world, of course, every year would be regarded, rightly, as a ‘year of the sea’; but let’s be thankful for small mercies.) This surely presents a tremendous opportunity for MOROL and all the various maritime history groups in Wales; such a year should surely have a really strong heritage focus, not just a few more bouncy castles than usual littering Welsh beaches. Which brings me to the other interesting development of the last week, namely the arrival of an invitation for me to speak at Weymouth Leviathan in March, which I’ve accepted. This describes itself as the UK’s first maritime literary festival, and should be a terrific event – especially as the ‘cast list’ includes several authors whose work I admire but have never met, such as Julian Stockwin and Antoine Vanner, as well as some of the curators from the National Maritime Museum. But the more I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to realise that there’s more of a connection between this event and the questions raised at the MOROL conference than there might seem to be. For instance, why is this the first and the only maritime literary festival? Surely Britain should have several of these? Surely once-great ports like Liverpool and Newcastle should have them, especially if they interpreted the word ‘literary’ broadly and embraced, say, the music and art of seafaring too? Why is there no Scottish maritime literary festival? And, of course – why isn’t there a Welsh one? Wouldn’t 2018, ‘the year of the sea’ in Wales, provide an obvious and ideal opportunity for one?

I’ll end on that note, with this possibly wildly ambitious idea thrown out there!

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Unless something unexpected occurs, I intend this to be my last new blog post before Christmas. Nothing to do with unduly intensive festive preparations; it’s just that I need to finish the new Quinton novel within that time, so I need to eliminate as many distractions as possible! However, I’ll take the opportunity to reblog some of my favourite older posts, especially as many of the new readers who’ve signed up to this blog in recent months probably won’t have seen them.

The Joy of Myth

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It’s a refreshing change to come up for air after the intensity of all the Carmarthenshire Archives posts, and to actually blog about something else: something more like the normal fare of this particular website, in fact! (No doubt many of you will be breathing a similar sigh of relief…)

The Monument in 1753
The Monument in 1753

I’m currently heavily engaged in deconstructing assorted historical myths – the Great Fire of London for my next Quinton novel, Death’s Bright Angel, and the mythic ‘ideology’ underpinning the Stuart navy for both my next non-fiction book, Kings of the Sea, and for an essay in an academic book that I’m co-editing, which should see the light of day in a couple of years time. (Some might say that the Carmarthenshire Archives saga has involved a lot of myths too, most of them promulgated by the County Council, but let’s not go there…) As far as the Great Fire goes, I’m particularly interested in the ‘conspiracy theories’ that grew up to explain its outbreak, notably the notion that it was deliberately started by Catholics; indeed, Sir Christopher Wren’s Monument, which still stands in the City of London, carried a huge inscription stating categorically that this was the case from 1681 until 1830, although it was briefly erased in the reign of the Catholic King James II and VII. As for the navy, the rationale put forward by the Stuart monarchs for a powerful fleet, and for claiming the ‘sovereignty of the seas’ over the waters around Britain, was based heavily on a distinctly dodgy reading of some mythic medieval history, notably the reigns of the Saxon Kings Edgar and Alfred (and the Stuarts, after all, gave us one of the nation’s most potent mythical symbols of all, fair Britannia herself).

King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee by eight Welsh kings. (Not a myth.)
King Edgar being rowed on the River Dee by eight Welsh kings. (Not a myth.)

The great problem with myths, of course, is that they can develop such powerful holds on the popular imagination that they elbow aside the historical realities, and prove impossible to dislodge. Take, for example, the famous story of the Russian troops who were meant to have been seen on British railways in 1914, ‘with snow on their boots’ – completely untrue, yet believed by huge swathes of the population, who either ‘knew a man’ who had seen them or even convinced themselves that they had seen them. Indeed, people positively prefer myths, especially when they pander to a set of political or social preconceptions. In Josephine Tey’s famous novel, The Daughter of Time, the protagonist uses the word ‘Tonypandy’ as shorthand for such myths – referring to the valleys legend that the troops ordered into the town by Winston Churchill in 1910-11 shot dead some of the strikers there. (They didn’t, although they did in my home town of Llanelli.) More contemporary is the crackpot right-wing conviction that the population is some 20 million larger than official records suggest, which follows the classic rule of myths and conspiracy theories: namely, that they should always completely ignore much more plausible, common sense explanations (in this case, that people buy far too much food and then throw lots of it away).

Taking the myth
Taking the myth

Ultimately, myths are often sexier than the truth, and certainly simpler and easier to grasp than what are often very complex realities. If you don’t believe me, take the following quick ‘would you rather?’ test –

  1. Would you rather read about Arthur, Guinevere, and the Knights of the Round Table, or the messy reality of the patchy archaological and textual evidence about a sixth century minor warlord who might or might not have existed and who might or might not have been any one out of Welsh, Cornish, Scottish or Breton?
  2. When you visualise Nelson and Napoleon, do you see two very short men, one of whom had an eyepatch – or the reality, i.e. two men without eyepatches, one of whom (the Corsican guy) was of normal height?
  3. Would you rather view the evacuation from Dunkirk in 1940 as a miraculous epic of heroism, or a catastrophic national humiliation? (My American readers may wish to substitute Pearl Harbor here; but then, they have to put up with multiple mythic versions of their national history that make anything we Brits come up with look like small beer. Here’s arguably the biggest.)
  4. The Vikings didn’t have horns on their helmets, and were interested principally in trade. Or would you prefer this?
  5. Would you rather accept that most of those who fought in red uniforms at Rorke’s Drift were actually English, or put on the DVD of Zulu yet again and sing along to Men of Harlech?

All of which is a very roundabout introduction to the main subject matter of this week’s post. In Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales,  I wrote this:

Tea? With brandy, please.
Tea? With brandy, please.

Churchill himself came to Wiseman’s Bridge near Saundersfoot in 1943 to watch the largest of Wales’s mock invasions, Exercise Jantzen, reputedly refreshing himself with a pot of tea in the local pub. An area of 130 square miles from Laugharne to Tenby and north to the A40 became a ‘regulated area’, with strict new controls, including a curfew, imposed on the civilian population for the duration. The exercise took place between 21 July and 6 August. Over 16,000 tons of stores were landed, principally from a fleet of coasters that had sailed from Swansea and Port Talbot, together with over 7,000 men and nearly 600 vehicles. But there was much confusion on the beaches, the ferocious tidal range of Carmarthen Bay presented serious difficulties, and it was discovered that the coasters had been loaded poorly, particularly at Port Talbot, because the men who loaded the ships there were ‘by profession coal trimmers and not used to ordinary merchandise’. Nevertheless, important lessons were learned, notably in terms of how to manage the logistics of a hastily established bridgehead, and these undoubtedly later contributed to the success of D-Day.

It's not his period either
It’s not his period either

Perhaps I should have remembered the old adage that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Admittedly, I did cover myself to some extent by throwing in the word ‘reputedly’, but perhaps I should have deployed a few ‘allegedlys’ as well, especially as I was wandering well outside my comfort zone: or, as the ultimate historian’s cop-out goes, ‘it’s not my period’. I’ve recently been taken to task over my statements about Jantzen, and especially about the supposed presence of Winston Churchill, by a correspondent who’d prefer to remain anonymous, but who’s delved into the subject in some detail over the years. To acknowledge the release of the new Bond film, let’s call my correspondent ‘M’. What follows is some judicious copying and pasting of his emails to me.

About thirty years ago I met the lady at Wisemans Bridge who quite sincerely believed that as a young girl at the Inn she had given Churchill a cup of tea. However, soon after I met an elderly local…who reckoned that she was mistaken, and claimed that the landlord of the Inn had promoted the idea of Churchill’s presence with a view to gaining some commercial benefit from the story at a later date. Churchill allegedly signed a visitors’ book at the Inn, but soon after the relevant page was supposedly removed by someone who saw value in the signature.* Some years later I made an effort to establish the facts and could find no reference to Jantzen in Martin Gilbert’s biography, which seemed to indicate that for part of the period of the exercise Churchill was attending a conference in Quebec. I suppose I should have tried to pursue the issue more, but Jantzen was entirely incidental to my research at the time…

On one of my visits to Kew I dug out a War Office file relating to Jantzen, and it included the diary of an officer who had been involved in planning and executing the exercise. It became clear that it was one exercise amongst others looking at the logisitics and practicality of loading and unloading coasters over an open beach, and at least some of the officers involved seemed to think that the whole thing was an entertaining caper. The diary certainly included references to drinking sessions in an hotel in Swansea! Put another way, the event was not presented as being totally essential to the war effort. Although the exercise was the biggest thing to happen in the Saundersfoot area during WW2, and involved an American contingent, the total number involved was probably less than 10,000. In the circumstances it seemed very unlikely that Churchill would have travelled to Wales for the occasion. That said, I cannot claim to have studied Jantzen very thoroughly, and can only offer this as my present perception of the matter.

If my perception is correct, I think this tale is not only a classic example of myth creation, but also of the extreme difficulty of correcting a myth once it has become established. The basic problem is that the locals believe it is true, and it suits them to assert that it is so. The late landlord of the Wisemans Bridge Inn would seem to have been quite astute. By associating his pub with Churchill in WW2 he was giving the place its own USP for later years. I think the young lady who supposedly gave tea to Churchill was his daughter, who would naturally accept whatever she had been told at the time. I have no idea who was mistaken for Churchill, but perhaps some official from the War Office, or a junior minister, appeared wearing a homburg and looking passably like the PM. We will never know. Suffice to say that the story took hold, and before long became further embellished. I have seen versions of the story suggesting that the exercise involved 100.000 men, and was a full-blown rehearsal for D-Day. It does not require a genius to realise that at the height of the war it would have been impossible to spare so many for such an activity, and even if such numbers had been provided they would have almost doubled the population of Pembrokeshire, and of themselves constituted an extraordinary logistical challenge. Other versions of the story include Gen. Eisenhower (and even Mountbatten) in the cast list. In fairness, I think Eisenhower did inspect American troops in Tenby in April, 1944, but that visit had nothing to do with Jantzen. 

I present M’s commentary without any additional analysis or comment from me; as he says, it may be that the family of those originally involved, or local historians of the Saundersfoot area, would have different evidence, a different perspective, and an urge to prove the truth of the story – and if any of them read this, and do so, then you have an open invitation to send me a response, and I’ll happily post it on this site.

Not appropriate kit for hill walking in the Beacons
Not appropriate kit for hill walking in the Beacons

However, it’s worth pointing out that the section I’ve asterisked * bears a startling resemblance to another great Welsh myth, namely that Kaiser Wilhelm II stayed incognito at the Lake Hotel, Llangammarch Wells, in September 1912, signing himself in the visitors’ book under one of his subsidiary titles, ‘Prince Munster’. I once contemplated writing a novel based on this, and did a little preliminary research on the matter – which established that at the time in question, the Kaiser’s movements were being reported daily in the German press, and that all of those movements took place well within the borders of the Reich. For example, he attended a large military parade in Berlin on 31 August, paid a visit of a few days to Switzerland in the following week, attended a review of 60,000 troops on the 9th, reviewed the navy at Wilhelmshaven on the 16th…and so on, with no possible interval during which he could have suddenly decamped to Powys and made it back again without anybody noticing. True, I could have tried to write a novel about a ‘ringer’ being sent to Wales – but unfortunately, Jack Higgins colonised that territory long ago with The Eagle Has Landed. But again, if there’s somebody out there who thinks they can prove that the ‘Kaiser in Wales’ story is true, the floor, i.e. this blog, is yours – and I’d be delighted if you could, because then I could carry on working up that idea for a novel. It was a belter, too.

 

Launching the Dragon

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You are in an oak-panelled library, or, perhaps, a fine old bookshop, full of musty antiquarian tomes. All around you is a hubbub of lively, erudite conversation. You’ve tried to play ‘spot the celebrity’, but there are just too many – Huw over there, Jeremy in the corner talking to Melvyn and Polly. You sip your wine – an excellent choice, displaying the host’s good taste and refinement – and nibble some of those little sausages on sticks. The host rises to speak. You and the assembled guests chuckle at his fascinating anecdotes and witty asides. And then the moment that you’ve been waiting for finally arrives: the host raises a copy of his book and officially launches Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales.

BDSo yes, OK, you’ve got me bang to rights – I didn’t get round to organising a launch party, so you’ll have to make do with this virtual one. But the important point is that the book is now out there, available (as they say) from all good bookshops and from online outlets whose tax affairs have sometimes been called into question. And I have to say, with quite stunning immodesty, that I’m delighted with it: the History Press did a terrific job on its design, and the cover in particular has already won high praise. I just hope the same proves to be true of the contents!

Seriously, though, the publication of a book is usually the end of a process. The author has put this particular project to bed, and has already moved on to his next one. But I don’t want that to be the case with Britannia’s Dragon. The whole point about this book is that it’s meant to be a beginning – the beginning of a much fuller exploration of a theme that’s been woefully neglected, namely the naval history of Wales. I know that there are things that I’ve left out, either because I didn’t become aware of them in time, or because I’ve still to become aware of them. There are already certain statements in the book that need to be amended or expanded in the light of new information that’s come to light since I completed it. So what I’ve decided to do is to launch a new blog-cum-website to build on the book, and to try and continue the process of raising awareness. The site is called, yes, Britannia’s Dragon, and it’s just gone live. So please head on over there, too, and if any of you have any material that might be relevant for it – guest blogs, original documents, photographs, anything within reason – I’d be delighted to hear from you! And in case you’re wondering, I’ll continue to blog regularly about other writing-related or historical themes on this site, although I might take the odd week out here or there if there’s a particularly large amount of material to put up on the new one.

So I declare both manifestations of Britannia’s Dragon, both the book and its online ‘extension’, well and truly launched! And yes, you can now get back to sipping that very nice virtual wine and nibbling the virtual sausages on sticks. Enjoy.

The Proof of Sod’s Law; or, the Curse of the Killer VIPI

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People sometimes ask me which I prefer writing, fiction or non-fiction. I love doing both, and both have their pros and cons, but one of the biggest differences between the two genres is that with fiction, of course, you don’t usually forget to put things into the book. Sure, you might deliberately cut a sub-plot or decide to edit out some extraneous character or other, but ultimately, a work of fiction is a totality: you don’t just somehow omit a crucial fact or plot twist by accident. (‘OMG, I forgot to put the dramatic first appearance of the Seigneur de Montnoir into The Mountain of Gold! Pulp the entire print run!’ This does not happen.) In non-fiction, however, the opposite is the case. No matter how comprehensive you think you’ve been, no matter how rigorous your research, you’re going to leave something out and/or make mistakes. The greater the scope of the book, the more omissions, the more mistakes.

Of course, sod’s law dictates that you only discover the omissions and mistakes when it’s too late to do anything about them. I recently received a letter questioning a couple of things I wrote about Sir Cloudesley Shovell in Pepys’s Navy, which was published five years ago, and pointing out that a picture that I’d claimed to be of Sir John Narbrough (whose memorial appeared in last week’s post) was actually of his patron, Sir Christopher Myngs. I knew I’d made a mistake with the picture pretty much as soon as the book was published (to be fair to myself, I was simply repeating a mistake originally made by Narbrough’s biographer), but the two points about Shovell provide an object lesson for authors of non-fiction. Firstly, never generalise about someone’s social status without double-checking it first; in the 17th century, about the only things that a landowner and a labourer had in common were several letters of the alphabet. Secondly, just because Sir Cloudesley Shovell calls someone ‘my brother John Shovell’ doesn’t necessarily mean that the person in question was literally his brother. Mark my words, getting this History business right is pretty damn tough.

These considerations are weighing heavily on me at the moment. When this post goes ‘live’, I’ll actually be plodding my way through the proofs of Britannia’s Dragon, and I’m already wondering what I’ve got wrong. The book deals with 2,000 years of one entire aspect of the history of an entire country, so I know there are bound to be mistakes in it – and as a large part of my readership is likely to be Welsh, I know that from St David’s to St Asaph and from Newport to Nefyn, my countrymen won’t be backward in coming forward to tell me what I’ve got wrong! And then there’s the other great concern with a non-fiction book: what have I left out, either because I only found out about it after the book went to press or because I never knew about it at all? Moreover, precisely how many people will be mortally offended by the omission?

Fortunately, I came across a couple of important facts or stories that demanded inclusion in the book when it was still just about possible to amend the ‘final’ text I’d already sent off to the publisher, so I managed to shoehorn in the odd extra sentence or paragraph here and there. Rather more significant was the Vitally Important Piece of Information (hereafter VIPI) that I only learned about after the book had already gone to design. Now, I’m not going to tell you what this VIPI is, just in case those people (and there will be some out there) who think that this particular VIPI is the most important VIPI in the whole of Welsh naval history start sticking pins in voodoo dolls of me. But fortunately, it’s usually still possible to work in some additional text at the proof stage, so hopefully nobody will ever know that the VIPI in question very nearly didn’t make it. But there’s still this horrible feeling lurking in my bones: the feeling that somewhere out there lurks the killer VIPI, the holy grail of Welsh naval VIPIs, about which someone, somewhere, will soon be writing a very polite but very aggrieved letter or email to me…

Still, maybe there’ll be a second edition. And even if there isn’t, at least it’s possible to post additions, amendments and grovelling apologies on my website or in this blog. In this day and age, the printed book is no longer necessarily an author’s final, definitive statement on a subject, and having enjoyed writing Britannia’s Dragon so much, I’m actually looking forward to the chance to revisit it and perhaps expand on some of the themes in it – just as long as there aren’t too many VIPIs lurking out there, ready to ambush me!

The End

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It’s good to be back after a two week break, although ‘break’ is probably the wrong word – most of that time having been spent frantically finishing off Britannia’s Dragon, which has now gone off to the publisher! This is my fourth non-fiction historical book, so I think I’m now probably qualified to pass on some of my experiences of and reflections about the genre. Having said that, I’ve got a long way to go to catch up with the very many more prolific authors out there, notably the astonishing Jeremy Black, Professor of History at Exeter University, who’s published more than one hundred full-length books to date (not to mention countless articles). But for what they’re worth, and with apologies to Lawrence of Arabia, here are seven pillars of wisdom that I’ve garnered over the years.

1/ It’s never complete – So you’ve read all the sources, been to all the relevant archives, and covered everything? Oh no you haven’t. Sorry to sound like a panto script, but you really, really haven’t. Sod’s law will dictate that some time after the book goes to press and before it ends up in the obscurity of the ‘remaindered’ list, you’ll come across some gold-plated piece of evidence, or an entire previously unknown archive in an obscure library, that should have gone into your book. So does the inevitability of this happening mean that you should delay finishing it? No, for that way madness lies – or at least, the closest thing to madness for an author of non-fiction, namely not actually finishing the book (or even not writing it in the first place). I know several very distinguished historians who have either been working on their magnum opus for twenty or thirty years, or who never got round to writing it at all. There are considerably more than fifty shades of grey between this extreme and the other one (which is, fortuitously, Black): above all, set a reasonable timescale, cover as much as you can in that time, but then, one day, say ‘that’s it’ and declare the book finished. In reality, no book is ever truly ‘finished’ – it could be expanded, improved, have that annoying new evidence which turned up the day after publication incorporated into it, and so forth. But unless you’re lucky and get the chance of a revised second edition, the author’s equivalent of the director’s cut in film-making, your tome will be your final word on the subject, and the important thing is to get it out there, not worry about what other evidence might be lurking in the dark recesses of some archive or other. To coin a paraphrase, the cemeteries are full of the authors of unwritten books; make sure you’re not one of them.

2/ Be ruthless – Every word you’ve written is precious, every example you’ve cited is essential, every sub-theme you’ve developed is absolutely vital to the book. No, they’re not. Much of the angst that develops between authors of historical non-fiction and their publishers is due to the former’s belief that the publisher should be grateful for every single one of their 500,000 words on peasant life in Upper Silesia from 1848 to 1850 and should thus publish the whole thing with no cuts whatsoever. Remember that this is something you want people to read without losing the will to live, so after you finish the first draft, be brutal with yourself (or do what I did and move in with a veteran Fleet Street journalist and editor to whom the ruthless pruning of purple prose is as natural as breathing). Blood of Kings started out at nearly 180,000 words, but was closer to 110,000 by the time it went to the publisher. It was difficult to lose many of the 70,000 words that got culled, but it ended up as a better book; and taking the metaphorical chainsaw to your own text is much better than having a publisher’s editor do it for you.

3/ Prepare to be criticised – You’ve written the book, it’s been published, you’ve had some nice reviews on Amazon and perhaps, if you’re lucky, in one or two of the historical journals. But then you start getting the letters and emails, or the other kinds of reviews… These come on two levels, the micro and the macro. The micro criticisms tend to come from those who know a huge amount about a very tiny aspect of your subject, and who obtain a sense of delighted fulfilment from pointing out that you’ve left out fact X, or clearly didn’t know about obscure letter Y in archive Z. The macro criticisms will come from more august members of the profession, who will ‘take issue with your methodology’ (the historian’s polite euphemism for ‘you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about’) or will shoehorn you into a philosophical straitjacket that you never knew fitted you; one of the more surreal of the (fortunately very few) criticisms of Gentlemen and Tarpaulins came from an exceptionally eminent left-wing maritime historian who accused me explicitly of being a Thatcherite, which was news to me and to every ballot box I’d voted in since 1979. But all of this comes with the territory. Once you publish, you’ve put yourself out there, and simple human nature dictates that not everyone will agree with what you say. Above all, remember that no matter how much criticism you get, yours isn’t the worst book that’s ever been written. It doesn’t even come close to being the worst. As for which is the worst book ever written…now that sounds like a topic for a Twitter thread or a series of blogs.

4/ Prepare to be ripped off – Ah, you want illustrations in your book? You particularly like that picture at, say, the Imperial National Naval Maritime Warfare Archives Museum? (Names have been changed to protect the guilty.) Then you need to licence the reprographic rights. Be prepared to part with a limb or two, because the fees charged by such institutions make Mafia protection rackets or pay-offs to BBC executives look like a bunch of elderly grannies having a little flutter at their local whist drive. Moreover, the entire basis for charging such fees is morally and (probably) legally dubious – after all, in many cases the institutions concerned don’t actually hold the copyright to this material at all. So three cheers for the British Museum, which licences the items in its wonderful collection for free. Let me repeat that: free. So, for example, you could spend between £50 and £100, perhaps even more, licensing an image of a painting of Nelson from the INNMWAM, or you could get the engraving taken from the same painting from the BM website for nothing. Will your readers damn you for this? Don’t be silly, they just want to see what Nelson looks like, they won’t think any more highly of you if they knew you’d spent a lot of money to show them the original instead of a copy.

5/ Write right – History is the most wonderful, lively and exciting of all subjects, but few things depress me more than the sorts of history books which try their hardest to conceal all of that beneath layers of treacle-like prose and deliberately obscure, quasi-scientific jargon. We historians aren’t scientists, economists or sociologists, for heaven’s sake; even if you really are writing about the peasants of Upper Silesia between 1848 and 1850, don’t you owe it to them to write about their lives in the most interesting and lively way you possibly can? All of this applies even if your book is being published by some ‘distinguished’ academic publisher or other, who will pay you no advance, produce no more than three or four hundred copies of your book, and charge anyone tempted to buy it £50 or £60 for the privilege. But that, as they say, is another story…

6/ Be prepared for an emotional rollercoaster –  Many writers have described in detail the emotions that surge like the tides during the actual writing process: the flashes of inspiration, the long hours of writer’s block, the sense that it’s no good, the sense that it’s the greatest book since the Bible, the endless coffee (or Scotch, depending on one’s preference), and so forth. But having just finished Britannia’s Dragon, I’d like to focus on one specific moment in the process: the one I’m at now, namely the end. The completion of a book is always a very strange time, simultaneously a cause for celebration and also somehow slightly depressing. After all, this thing that’s had such a powerful hold over your life for so long suddenly isn’t there any more. In one sense, it feels a bit like a death in the family; on the other hand, one would hope that not too many deaths in anybody’s family would be accompanied by the overwhelming sense of relief that also accompanies the completion of a book. Which leads me on to the most important piece of advice of all to anyone who’s made it all the way through and finally typed ‘the end’ on the last page…

7/ So finally – Celebrate! You’ve just written a book, for heaven’s sake. Do you know how few people ever get to do that? At the very least, your mum will be proud of you. Plus think about just how many hours, days, months, even years, you’ve devoted to this. Doesn’t that effort deserve to have a glass or two raised in its honour? Then take a week off – longer, if you can manage it. Recharge your batteries. Reflect. Watch absolutely mindless dross on TV. Concentrate on the other things that have been pushed onto the back burner for the duration of writing the book: real life, for example. Because soon enough, something – at first no more than a germ of a glimmer of a half-formed thought – will start to grow somewhere inside your brain. This will gradually work its way to the front of your consciousness, by which time it will have a name. It will be called ‘the next book’. And so it all begins again…