• Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

  • Home
  • News
  • Biography
  • My Books
  • More
    • Awards
    • Future Projects
    • Talks
    • Essays, Articles, and Other Short Non-Fiction
    • Reviews of ‘Pepys’s Navy: Ships, Men and Warfare 1649-89’
    • Reviews of ‘Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales’
    • Reviews of ‘The Journals of Matthew Quinton’
    • Copyright Notice and Privacy Policy
  • Contact

Deptford

Build the Lenox

29/07/2019 by J D Davies

This week, I’m delighted to welcome a guest blogger – Helena Russell, secretary of the Build the Lenox project. I’ve blogged about this before on this site, but have recently become one of the project’s ‘champions’, and with its prospects currently at a crucial stage, I’m very happy to be able to provide this platform for a really worthy cause. Over to Helena!

***

When it comes to the nation’s shipbuilding and sea-going past, few would dispute the significant role played by Greenwich in south-east London, which today is home to the world-renowned National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory and the restored Cutty Sark.

But the contribution of its neighbour Deptford, where Henry VIII established his royal dockyard in 1513, and where more than 400 ships were built and many more refitted, has long been overlooked. Deptford played a significant role in the development of wooden shipbuilding, yet visitors to the area will find little sign of its maritime connections, and most of the slipways and dockyard structures remain buried.

The Lenox Project charity aims to change this, and we have ambitious plans to build a full-size replica of the Lenox, a naval ship which was built and launched from Deptford dockyard in 1678.

The Lenox, by Richard Endsor

The 70-gun Lenox represented the pinnacle of Restoration shipbuilding practice, being the first of Charles II’s thirty-ship programme to be built, under the direction of Samuel Pepys. By 1700, these magnificent and successful vessels were responsible for the Royal Navy becoming the world’s leading maritime power. A detailed record of the construction of the Lenox survives and has been painstakingly researched and compiled by the project’s historian Richard Endsor, as part of a 20-year study of the dockyard at the peak of its powers.

In the 17th century Deptford was second only to Chatham as a major centre for shipbuilding, and it was to Deptford that Tsar Peter the Great came for three months in 1698 to learn shipbuilding techniques. The yard’s proximity to the Navy Board Office in the City of London meant that it was frequently chosen for new or experimental construction.

The Lenox Project was formed in 2011, in response to proposals to redevelop the former dockyard site, now known as Convoys Wharf. We were inspired by the need to preserve and celebrate the heritage and character of Deptford and prevent it being lost.

As part of our ship-building scheme, we want to create apprenticeships and training in traditional and modern crafts, educate people about the area’s rich maritime past, and restore pride among residents in one of the city’s most deprived neighbourhoods. We have strong support in the local community and beyond, and having a base will give us the opportunity to build on this and expand our programme of events and outreach.

We are now crowdfunding for the first phase of the project, which will fund the establishment of a Deptford dockyard visitor centre and Lenox Project headquarters, bringing the disused undercroft of an historic riverfront building back to life.

The building where the visitor centre will be housed

The visitor centre will provide public space and workshops where volunteers and apprentices can get involved in building a scale model of the Lenox, alongside an exhibition focussing on the maritime history of Deptford. It will be a venue for a range of events, will host community group and school visits, and will enable people to find out more about the ship-building heritage that shaped this part of London.

It will bring into public use an historic premises which would otherwise be unused, and in a way which links directly to its history. We are working with the building owner to preserve and restore this listed building and its location will enable us to engage directly with local residents as well as those using the Thames Path.

The undercroft

The building owner, Hyde Housing, has agreed to let us have the space at a peppercorn rent for up to ten years. But it has been out of use for more than a decade, so funds are needed to install toilet and kitchen facilities, to set up a model-building workshop and equip it with tools and materials, to create an exhibition space with display facilities, and to make it accessible to everyone.

We want to offer training and apprenticeships, particularly in ‘eye-to-hand’ skills and heritage crafts, offering new routes to employment for those in the local area who may not otherwise have access to such opportunities.

In June we launched our crowdfunding campaign on Spacehive, and have already been successful in attracting a pledge of £50,000 from the Mayor of London’s Crowdfund London initiative, as well as more than a hundred personal pledges from our supporters and contacts.

But we still need to raise a considerable amount of money to create a public visitor centre and attraction for Deptford; support skills training in woodwork and wooden boat building; fit out a new event space and curate a programme of events; create a display space for Deptford dockyard and ship-building artefacts, and put together our Deptford-centric maritime resource library.

We have until 12th August to meet our target – for full details and to pledge, please visit our Spacehive page.

***

The project’s website contains more information – D

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Build the Lenox, Deptford

Talk About It, and They Will Come

12/02/2019 by J D Davies

268.

Two hundred and sixty eight.

I know football and rugby teams who’d be pleased with that sort of attendance. 268 people would comfortably fill a decent-sized airliner, or man a large destroyer. And, let’s face it, 268 MPs changing their minds would deliver Theresa May’s Brexit deal by a landslide.

Why, then, did this impressive number of people turn out on a cold Tuesday night in winter in south-east London?

To listen to two old buffers rabbiting on about seventeenth century naval history.

Let’s face it, my friends, if that can happen, then there’s still hope for humanity.

The calm before the storm…

Seriously, it was a quite extraordinary evening. My old friend Richard Endsor and I had been asked to speak at an event to raise funds for, and raise awareness of, the project to build a replica of the 1677 Third Rate man-of-war Lenox within the historic dockyard site at Deptford. (Richard, of course, is the author of the book about her, Restoration Warship, which originally inspired the idea.) I’ve blogged about this before on this site, and hope you’ll all go and visit the project’s own website, where you can find out about ways to donate and help the cause. So we duly turned up at the venue, the wonderfully historic Saint Nicholas church in Deptford, close to the site where the Lenox was built and where Drake’s Golden Hind spent her last years. Saint Nicholas contains many historic memorials to local figures, such as those to the Shish family of shipwrights and to one of the most famous local residents of all, seventeenth century diarist John Evelyn (whose famous garden at Sayes Court is the focus on another terrific local project). An ideal venue, then, in which to deliver talks directly connected to the history of the building.

An Evelyn family memorial

I’d spoken to a great audience at the maritime history seminar in Hull a few nights before: probably about fifty people, but an absolutely packed house, with standing room only, and I suppose I was expecting a similar sort of number at Deptford. Then people started arriving. The first arrivals were members of the ‘band’ that was due to be playing seventeenth century and nautical numbers at intervals during the evening. I suppose I’d expected something like a string quartet, or maybe a small chamber group…but still the musicians kept coming. This, it materialised, was the South East London Folk Orchestra, and what a splendid group they are, with a lively repertoire that had people singing along! So we had musicians, and very soon, we had an audience. Richard and I looked on in bemusement as more and more people poured into the church, and more and more seats had to be found. Yes, I’ve been in churches before when it’s a case of standing room only, but generally only for the funerals of popular people. But all these people had turned out to listen to us – and if you don’t believe me, there’s ample evidence on the ‘news’ page of the Lenox website! 

So Richard and I talked, with me providing a general overview of the history of Deptford dockyard in the Tudor and Stuart period, setting it in the context of the ambitions especially of Kings Henry VIII and Charles II, before Richard spoke on the women of Restoration Deptford – a tour through some of the racier episodes (such as Pepys’s successful pursuit of Mrs Bagwell, a shipwright’s wife) as well setting the record straight about the involvement of women in royal dockyards (much more than you might expect, with women in prominent roles as contractors or even serving in such posts as dockyard ratcatcher!). To be truthful, though, the evening passed in something of a blur, such was the buzz from the audience and the terrific atmosphere created by the orchestra. Even better, the event raised a significant amount of cash towards the Lenox project. So all in all, it was undoubtedly ‘a hit, a very palpable hit’, as somebody once said, and huge thanks to Julian, Esther, Reverend Louise, and the rest of the team for making it happen. I look forward to future events in Deptford, and if you’re within any sort of striking distance of south-east London, I’d strongly urge you to get involved. If you’re not within that striking distance, though, then I hope you’ll support the good folk of Deptford in the Lenox and Sayes Court projects in any way you can. These are genuine community efforts, very much ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’, and in a time of austerity, when pretty well anywhere, but especially London, seems to be regarded as fair game for nothing but soulless development, then efforts to steer a different, historically aware, and much more inclusive course should surely be backed to the hilt.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Build the Lenox, Deptford

‘We’ve Got Pepys Bang to Rights This Time,’ said Morse

09/09/2016 by J D Davies

Every now and again, a historian comes across something which is so far from left field that it’s actually from a completely different farm. That’s certainly the case with the discovery made a few years back by my friend and colleague, Richard Endsor, author of The Restoration Warship. As he’s doing a ‘star turn’ next weekend, dressing up as master shipwright John Shish for London Open House at the glorious Master Shipwright’s House in Deptford, on behalf of the project to build a replica of the 1677 Third Rate Lenox on the adjacent site, I thought it would be a suitable opportunity to highlight his remarkable ‘find’. And there’ll be more excitement on this blog next Monday, when I’ll have a guest post from Victoria Yee of the University of St Andrews on the Welsh soldiers and sailors who fought in the Thirty Years War. Vicki has unearthed some fantastic material, so it’ll be a must for all of you interested in seventeenth century and/or Welsh history!

In the meantime, though…

On 5 March 1674, the Navy Board received a letter from Samuel Pepys, Secretary to the Admiralty Commission, a position he had held for only eight months since his promotion from his previous position as Clerk of the Acts to the Navy Board. The letter itself is not remarkable, being a request at the suggestion of Captain Henry Killigrew to appoint one Benjamin Holmes as Master of Killigrew’s ship, the Swan. What is interesting is the signature, for it appears to contain the partial patent index fingerprint from Pepys’s right hand. It seems likely that, when forming the lower curved section of the capital ‘P’, his pen flicked a quantity of ink to the left, part of which landed on his finger. Then, as he finished writing, his wet finger left the impression on the paper. Also noticeable are the tiny reflective particles added to the ink for decoration.

And so, ladies and gentlemen…cue drum roll…we give you the fingerprint of Samuel Pepys!

[National Archives, Kew, ADM106/31]

Filed Under: Naval history Tagged With: Build the Lenox, Deptford, Samuel Pepys

Worthy Causes, Part 1

23/09/2013 by J D Davies

In an age of austerity, the list of worthy causes deserving both moral and financial support seems to get longer by the day. For the next couple of weeks, I’ll take a look at a few lesser known ones: not so much in the extremely optimistic hope that a philanthropic billionaire will stumble across these posts, but simply to raise awareness just a little!

My first pick is ‘Build the Lenox‘, the project to build a replica seventeenth century warship on the site of the historic Royal Dockyard at Deptford (which this year celebrates its 500th anniversary). I have to declare an interest in this one. The genesis of the project was the book The Restoration Warship by my old friend Richard Endsor, a remarkably detailed study of the design, construction and career of the ship based on over twenty years’ research. (Richard also produced the magnificent cover art for the original UK and US editions of Gentleman Captain.) The Lenox was the first of the thirty new ships begun in the 1670s on the initiative of King Charles II and Samuel Pepys, who in 1677 convinced a reluctant House of Commons that the Royal Navy had fallen behind its rivals, France and the Netherlands, and succeeded in winning the funds for the new building programme. Because she was the first ship to be built, a huge amount of detailed information about the construction of Lenox survives, meaning that it would be possible to reconstruct an essentially exact replica of the ship.

Richard Endsor's model of the lines of the Lenox - Master Shipwright's house, Deptford
Richard Endsor’s model of the lines of the Lenox – Master Shipwright’s house, Deptford

I blogged in more detail about the history of the Lenox and the genesis of the replica project a few months ago, so this post is by way of an update on progress. The Lenox project has now become an integral part of the ongoing discussions of the future of Convoys Wharf, the former historic dockyard site at Deptford (see another previous post on this blog for the archaeological excavations that revealed much of the extraordinary history and heritage of this site). Local opposition to the scale and nature of some of the developers’ proposals has led to the development of alternative strategies, and the building of the new Lenox on the site is one of these. It is hoped that the construction of the ship would create opportunities for local youngsters to learn valuable skills, while the tourism potential of the ship (so close to Greenwich, that major tourist trap and ubiquitous film location) should be tremendous. The new Lenox would also have potential as a unique and attractive location for corporate events. If funds permit the construction of a ship that could actually put to sea, then further possibilities open up – for example, potential opportunities for young people to undertake sail training in an ‘original’ tall ship.

The Lenox team are currently developing their plans and trying to raise their profile. As part of this process, both they and ‘Deptford 500’ had a strong presence last weekend at the Master Shipwright’s house in Deptford, the oldest surviving dockyard building in Britain (1708), which was open to the public over the weekend as part of the splendid London Open House. I went along to lend my support, as did none other than Mr Samuel Pepys himself, who gatecrashed the Lenox press conference and was duly filmed by the BBC! It proved to be a very enjoyable event, with a substantial number of people visiting the house and, in many cases, showing a real interest in the project.

Deptford: the Master Shipwright's house
Deptford: the Master Shipwright’s house

It’s clear that many in the Deptford area have really taken the Lenox project to heart – for example, the pub adjacent to the dockyard site is plastered with ‘Build the Lenox‘ posters! Obviously, though, the hard part will be ensuring that the new Lenox becomes an integral part of whatever finally happens on the Convoys Wharf site, while the even harder part will be raising the funds to make it happen. So if you really are a philanthropic billionaire who’s happened to chance on this blog…well, need I say more?

 

The Lenox Project trailer!
The Lenox Project trailer!

Filed Under: Heritage preservation, Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Deptford, Lenox

The Return of the Thirty Ships, Part 2

18/03/2013 by J D Davies

Richard Endsor's painting of the Lenox, used for the cover of the US editions of The Mountain of Gold
Richard Endsor’s painting of the Lenox, used for the cover of the US editions of The Mountain of Gold

Following last week’s post about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne, this week’s concentrates on the first of the ‘thirty ships’ of Charles II’s reign, the Lenox, and especially on the exciting project to build a full-sized replica of her.

The Lenox was launched at Deptford dockyard on Friday 12 April 1678 (not on the 18th, as Wikipedia and other sources wrongly claim). The launch ceremony was a spectacular affair, attended by King Charles and his principal mistress of the time, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth; the ship was named after their young son, Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Lennox. The idiosyncratic spelling of the ship’s name was entirely down to the King, who had previously decreed that his son should be known as ‘Lenox’ (his handwritten letter expressing his intent in this matter was shown on the recent ITV programme on Goodwood House, presented by Julian Fellowes). The name had a particular importance for the House of Stuart: the male line of the dynasty was actually that of the Earls of Lennox, a title to which Lord Darnley, the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, would have succeeded had he lived long enough. Darnley was the father of King James VI and I, and thus the great-grandfather of King Charles II, so the latter’s decision to give the ancestral and highly symbolic Lennox title to his son was a powerful statement of his affection for the boy.

The ship named after the young Duke had a moderately notable service career. She did not enter service until 1690, but was then present at the battles of Beachy Head (1690) and Barfleur/La Hogue (1692); rebuilt at Deptford in 1699-1701, she was then present at the Battle of Toulon (1707) and survived the notorious shipwreck of Sir Cloudesley Shovell’s fleet on the Isles of Scilly later in the same year. After a further rebuild in the 1720s, she survived until 1756, when she was sunk as a breakwater at Sheerness. But there would have been little about her career to mark her out as worthy of special attention in the twenty-first century, were it not for the happy conjunction of two seemingly unrelated developments. The first was the publication in 2009 of Richard Endsor’s seminal book, The Restoration Warship. Based on the extensive contemporary evidence of the methods used to build the Lenox, and lavishly illustrated with Richard’s meticulously researched reconstructions,  the book provides by far the most detailed analysis of the construction of a late seventeenth century warship. As Richard says, ‘Lenox can be re-created from  drawings and the complete contemporary documentation made for and during her construction in 1677-78‘, thus presenting a unique opportunity to raise the profile of seventeenth century naval history – still often something of a forgotten era! The second was the opportunity presented by the proposed redevelopment of the site at Convoys Wharf, Deptford. This large piece of derelict land was formerly the heart of the historic Deptford dockyard, established by King Henry VIII in 1513, and includes the site of the double dock in which Lenox was built.

The blocked up entrance to the double dry dock at Deptford, with the master shipwright's house on the left
The blocked up entrance to the double dry dock at Deptford, with the master shipwright’s house on the left

Plans to build a vast new residential complex on the site were mooted soon after the Millennium, but attracted strong opposition and have been sent back to the drawing board several times. (More detail about the current situation at Convoys Wharf can be found in a number of blogs, notably those of the ‘Deptford Dame’ and the owners of the Master Shipwright’s house immediately adjacent to the double dock, the oldest surviving dockyard building in the UK; the current plans for the site, now going through the planning process, can be found here.)

The excavated remains of the wet dock walls, Deptford Dockyard- location of the 'fire' scene in The Mountain of Gold
The excavated remains of the wet dock walls, Deptford Dockyard- location of the ‘fire’ scene in The Mountain of Gold

Faced with the developers’ apparent disregard for the heritage of the site and insistence upon development of an inappropriate scale and nature, local campaigners began to devise a number of counter-proposals which would involve developing projects on a number of parts of the site. Perhaps the most ambitious of these is a project to use Richard’s pioneering research to build a full-size replica of the Lenox, ideally in the double dry dock itself, which survives despite having been filled in after the closure of the Royal Dockyard in the 1860s. Full details of the ‘Build the Lenox’ project can be found on its website, but essentially it would aim to provide heritage-based regeneration, for instance by employing a young local workforce who would then be able to master traditional skills and learn trades that might give them much better prospects in the workplace. Build the Lenox has attracted widespread interest and the backing of a number of prominent figures, including Dame Joan Ruddock MP and Dan Snow (who are both patrons of the project), and I’m happy to be able to support it through this blog, my website, my social media feeds, and by helping with aspects of research.

The question of where exactly the ship might be built remains open to debate, and inevitably, raising sufficient funds is the key to the project, especially in the current difficult environment; but similar projects abroad show that it can be done, although construction of the French reconstruction of the frigate Hermione, launched at Rochfort in 2012, has taken over twenty years to date, and the Dutch replica of De Ruyter’s flagship De Zeven Provincien, being built at Lelystad, has suffered from false starts and long delays. But let’s hope that one day, a new Lenox is launched into the Thames from what was once Deptford Royal Dockyard!

Below: Richard Endsor’s magnificent painting of the launch of the Lenox at Deptford, 12 April 1678. 

(Next week – the third and final part of this series on the ‘thirty ships’ will concentrate on the relatively little-known Hope .)

Launch of Lenox

Filed Under: Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Deptford, King Charles II, Lenox

Footer

Connect on Social Media

  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter

Search this site

Archives

Copyright © 2023 · Author Pro on Genesis Framework · · Log in

 

Loading Comments...