J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

J D Davies

Authentic Headless Women Revisited, Now With Extra Tortured Cats

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The middle of August, so lots going on, almost none of it seriously work-related – lawns to mow, places to visit, etc. As an ex-teacher of many years’ drudgery service, I still have the mindset that August is pretty sacrosanct, even though that imperative doesn’t really work for writers. Even so, I suspect that many readers of this blog will already be ensconced on beaches or at poolsides, and my ramblings about naval history or the seventeenth century are, quite rightly, unlikely to be high on their list of priorities. Which is all a roundabout way of saying that this week, I’m reblogging a post from the very early days of this blog, albeit one that explains my throwaway remark in last week’s post about ‘headless women’ on book covers. Now, given that we seem to live in an age when many people believe that references to ‘cats’ eyes’ being removed mean – wait for it – that real cats are being tortured, with the result that one council has decided to rename them ‘road studs’ rather than telling the poor little snowflakes in question to grow up and get over it, I suppose it’s incumbent on me to clarify that I didn’t mean that book covers show graphic images of real decapitated women. 

(Oh God, that I’ve lived to have to type that sentence…)

So let’s return to those innocent days in September 2012…

***

I spent last weekend at the Historical Novel Society conference in London. This was a marvellous, invigorating occasion, with lots of great networking; it was particularly good to meet my fellow panellists in the ‘Ships Ahoy’ forum on nautical fiction, namely Linda Collison, Helen Hollick, Margaret Muir and Rick Spilman. The fact that the majority of speakers – and attendees – were women speaks volumes for the extent to which the genre has been transformed in recent years. Our five mini-talks covered a variety of issues; mine was on the vexed question of accuracy (see below) and about the need to show respect in one’s writing for the sea and those who sailed on it, a theme that others echoed. We received some stimulating questions, notably of the ‘where do I find information about…’ variety, and also had plenty of opportunity to bounce ideas around among ourselves. In a way, though, we thought that nautical historical fiction was a little bit on the margins of the conference; but then, pretty much everybody who isn’t writing about the Romans or the Tudors was saying pretty much exactly the same thing.

I don’t propose to go through who said what in each session. Instead, I thought I’d highlight just one or two of the main themes that emerged, and perhaps the biggest of them was the perennial debate about accuracy and authenticity in writing historical fiction. In a nutshell – to what extent should a historical novelist aim for accuracy? Is it possible not to be entirely accurate but to remain ‘authentic’ to a period? Can accuracy and authenticity actually be counter-productive if taken too far, and besides, how do we define them? After all, Wolf Hall has been praised to the heights for its ‘authenticity’ – but a generation is now growing up that thinks Thomas Cromwell was a nice guy. I liked Ian Mortimer’s concept called ‘Celia Brayfield’s Barbed Wire’: she was reviewing a Catherine Cookson book in which the principal characters had to negotiate a barbed wire fence in 1896, couldn’t believe it was in use at the time, and by the time she’d checked and found that it was, the spell had been broken. As Ian says, ‘in historical fiction, accuracy and authenticity are not necessarily desirable’. Several of the speakers also adopted this line, which agrees with my own thinking, namely that altering facts to fit a narrative is fine; after all, in Gentleman Captain I moved the date of Easter 1662  and wasn’t subsequently inundated by protest letters from outraged theologians and chronologists. (As I said in my talk, though, I draw the line at altering the sequence of events during real battles, although obviously I’ll insert Matthew Quinton and a fictional ship in place of a real one; those who fought, suffered and died in those battles deserve that respect.) As several panellists said, historians can be sniffy about historical novelists’ willingness to change things around, but as a historian myself, I think this ‘holier than thou’ attitude rests on very weak foundations. Historians interpret the past and ‘change things’ by deciding to include or omit particular facts from their accounts; the idea that they are objective, detached analysts of the past is frankly risible, as historians usually have their own personal or political agendas. If anything, historical novelists are simply much more up front about what they do: as Emma Darwin put it, ‘We make things up. Get over it’.

There was also much discussion of the stunning lack of imagination in cover designs for historical fiction. This can be summed up pretty succinctly: if it’s for a male audience, stick a sword on it; if it’s for a female audience, give it a headless woman in a nice dress. Now I don’t know a lot about art, and I know even less about marketing, but it seems to me that the acronym ‘USP’ is rendered pretty meaningless if every book ends up looking pretty much the same as every other one. (I’m just glad that my own publishers have been much more imaginative with the covers of the Quinton series, which has always been intended for both male and female readers.) Having said that, I suppose nautical fiction falls into the same trap to some extent. After all, when was the last time you saw a naval historical novel without a ship on the cover?

Anyway, the net effect of my attendance at the conference is that I’m now brimming with ideas for future books galore: I particularly like the potential of a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail. (Still working on that one – 2017 ed.) Before I move on to develop that, though, I need to start the detailed plot construction for ‘Quinton 5’, provisionally titled The Battle of All the Ages and based around the remarkable Four Days’ Battle of 1666. This means that next week, I’ll be going through my usual process at the outset of a new book, namely locking myself away in a cottage for a week so that I don’t drive Wendy nuts as I bounce ideas (and, possibly, myself) off the walls. So I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to blog next Monday – much will depend on whether or not I have a mobile broadband signal, on whether I have any time to spare from ‘blue skies thinking’ if I do, and on whether or not my brain will have been fried by spending too much time in May and June 1666. In case I don’t make it, though, you can find another helping of me on the wonderful Hoyden and Firebrands blog, where I’m this week’s guest blogger!

You Can Fool Some of the People Some of the Time (Redux)

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The current media storm about ‘alternative facts’ put me in mind of a post I first published on 1 November 2011, when this blog was read by two men, a dog, and a vole called Kevin. So I thought I’d re-post it now for a rather wider audience, especially as it chimes neatly with some of the themes I’m exploring in my new book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy. In that, I deal with some of the instances where Samuel Pepys peddled his own ‘alternative facts’, many of which have been accepted uncritically by pretty much all writers. But as I’ll be demonstrating in Kings of the Sea, several important measures for which Pepys claimed the credit, and which historians and biographers have invariably been prepared to accept as being his responsibility, were not actually his doing at all, or not entirely so – and one entire source which he produced, and which has always been treated by historians as ‘gospel’ evidence for what happened in the navy, is, in fact, seriously flawed and misleading. So the book is likely to get quite a few people’s backs up…

However, back in 2011, I raised some questions about the veracity of the other great diarist of the Restoration period, John Evelyn, after first talking about a book I was then reading as part of my research for Britannia’s Dragon. Time to fire up the DeLorean, Marty!

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Just finished two books on my Kindle – Roy Hattersley’s biography of Lloyd George (which showed the old goat to be even more randy and devious than I’d ever realised) and Anthony Dalton’s Wayward Sailor, an exposé of another brazen old rogue, the bestselling sailing guru Tristan Jones. Despite a schmaltzy and overblown prose style, Dalton does a meticulous job of dissecting Jones’s wildly exaggerated claims, proving that many of the experiences he recorded in his wildly successful ‘non-fiction’ books were either partly or wholly invented. I’m particularly interested in Jones because he claimed to be Welsh (although the ‘Llangareth’ where he claimed he grew up doesn’t exist) and to have served in the Royal Navy throughout World War II, being torpedoed three times and being present at the sinking of the Bismarck, among many other adventures recounted in his wartime ‘memoir’ Heart of Oak. Unfortunately, as Dalton shows Jones was actually born in 1929, not 1924 as he claimed, and thus could not possibly have served in the war; in fact, he did not join the navy until 1946. Heart of Oak is thus a complete invention, unlike some of the books about his sailing exploits which are at least vaguely grounded on truth. Yet remarkably, it continues to fool some. By coincidence, I was recently sent a review copy of a new book on the Royal Navy in World War II by an eminent authority in the field, and was amazed to discover that the author was citing Heart of Oak as a valid historical source. (I’ll save the author’s blushes, at least until my review appears in print!) We all make mistakes in our research, and I’ve sometimes been as guilty as anyone of not checking sufficiently on the provenance of a source, but even a simple check of Wikipedia would have revealed the extent of Jones’s invention.

This put me in mind of an unsettling discovery I made a few years ago. As far as I know no-one has ever queried the authenticity of John Evelyn’s diary,  but among the seventy-odd entries I wrote for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography were those on two men whom Evelyn knew well, Edward, Earl of Sandwich (the patron of Evelyn’s friend Pepys) and Thomas, Earl of Ossory, one of the most charismatic figures at the Restoration court (and one of the nicest, although he’s sadly little known these days). In both cases, Evelyn recounted stories about the end of the men’s lives that were simply not true. The diarist describes a meeting with Sandwich shortly before the latter joined his flagship, the Royal James, which was destroyed by a fireship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672). He told Evelyn that he ‘was utterly against this war from the beginning’, and  regarded his own prospects fatalistically: when he parted from Evelyn, ‘shaking me by the hand he bid me good-bye, and said he thought he should see me no more … “No”, says he, “they will not have me live … I must do something, I know not what, to save my reputation”’. It’s perfectly possible that Sandwich spoke to Evelyn in those terms, but if he made the statement that he was against the war from the beginning, he was either lying outright or cleverly concealing one very important fact. Unknown to Evelyn or the earl’s subsequent biographers, Sandwich was the principal English signatory of the secret Anglo-French naval treaty of January 1672, which set out the arrangements for the conduct of the joint naval campaign against the Dutch. He was a principal architect of the war that killed him, not an opponent of it.

Of course, Sandwich might have dissembled deliberately by telling Evelyn he was against the war; the conflict was unpopular, and Sandwich might have been covering himself in the event of a future parliamentary enquiry, such as that which had followed the previous war. But my inner alarm bell really started to ring when I moved on to research Ossory. In 1680 he was appointed Governor of Tangier, a posting widely regarded as a death sentence. According to Evelyn, Ossory spoke to him privately of his doubts on 26 July, bemoaning the fact that he believed he was being sent out solely so that Charles II could prove to the next Parliament that he, the king, had done all he could to save Tangier by sending out his best and most popular general; in other words, Ossory’s reputation would be destroyed in a mission that could not succeed simply to serve the king’s own cynical political agenda. Still according to Evelyn, it was at a dinner in Fishmongers’ Hall on the same evening that Ossory fell ill with the severe fever, probably typhus, that was to kill him. Although Ossory and Evelyn might well have had the sort of conversation described by the diarist, Evelyn’s recollection of the sequence of events is seriously faulty. The earl had been stricken by the fever on about 18 July, and on the 26th he was in the second day of a delirium that lasted until his death.

So what explains Evelyn’s apparent inventions? Of course, he might simply have got the dates wrong, especially if he was writing up several days of his diary at once; but this seems unlikely in Ossory’s case at least, given the nature of Evelyn’s entries on the days before and after the 26th. But it seems curious that Evelyn should have claimed sole privy knowledge of the last thoughts of two of the most eminent warriors of the age. Throughout history, there are those who have claimed to be the last witnesses to the final hours and thoughts of a great figure, often as a way of emphasising their own importance in the history of their age. (Witness the weight given to the reminiscences of Hitler’s last secretary/bodyguard/etc, and more recently to those of Colonel Gaddafi’s driver.) If Evelyn did invent or exaggerate Sandwich’s and Ossory’s statements, he must surely have done so in the belief that his diary would eventually be published, and that such publication would present him as an important figure who was privy to the innermost thoughts of the great. Which begs an unsettling question – what else in Evelyn, or in many other sources that historians have always accepted as gospel, might be at least ‘economical with the truth’? At least we now know where we stand with Tristan Jones, who brazenly invented vast tracts of his life; or at least, we should do!

The Rage is Coming!

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Cue drum roll…cue trumpets…

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that the next ‘Journal of Matthew Quinton’, the sixth book in the series, will be entitled The Rage of Fortune.

But this is a ‘Quinton Journal’ with a twist, because the central character is a different Matthew Quinton. Followers of the series will know that one of the biggest influences on the personality of my hero, the Restoration naval captain Matthew Quinton, is the memory of his eponymous grandfather, the eighth Earl of Ravensden, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘sea dogs’. Indeed, Matthew sometimes ‘hears’ asides from what might or might not be the shade of the long-dead swashbuckler, a colleague and rival of the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. I’d always envisaged a prequel centring on the first Matthew Quinton, and thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller at Old Street Publishing, I’ve now got the opportunity to do it!

The story begins in 1651, just after the Battle of Worcester, the final conflict of the British Civil Wars. The eleven year old Matthew Junior and his twin, Henrietta, are exploring an abandoned corner of their family home when they discover the long-forgotten papers of their grandfather, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Roundhead troops intent on searching for their elder brother, the tenth Earl of Ravensden, who has been seriously wounded in the Cavalier cause. Gradually, though, the papers of the old Earl and of some of those who knew him – including the recollections of his wife, Matt and Herry’s grandmother – start to paint a picture of a very different world: the world of the turn of the seventeenth century, when England was still fighting a seemingly endless war against Spain, when William Shakespeare was writing Henry V and Julius Caesar, and when the whole country was obsessed by the question of who would succeed the ageing Queen Elizabeth.

The Rage of Fortune is set against the backdrop of a series of real historical events. Many still wrongly assume that the Spanish Armada was the only significant naval campaign during Elizabeth I’s war, and that nothing of much note happened after it. This is simply untrue – the war lasted for another 16 years, and Rage places Earl Matthew at the centre of such remarkable, but sadly little known, naval actions as the affairs of the ‘Spinola Galleys’ and the ‘Invisible Armada’, and at the Battles of Castlehaven, Kinsale and Sesimbra Bay. Meanwhile, he and his new French wife are thrust into the heart of the intrigues over the succession to the English throne and of one of the most mysterious incidents in the whole of British history, while being threatened by a mysterious and malevolent enemy who threatens to bring down the entire Quinton family. Rage also provides a startling revelation about the history of one of the principal characters from the Restoration-era books!

I’ve really enjoyed returning to a time period and to themes that I know well. I spent over ten years researching and writing my non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens, and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’, which provided a lot of inspiration and material for The Rage of Fortune; and I spent many more years teaching Elizabethan and Jacobean England, together with such related European History themes as the French Wars of Religion, Habsburg Spain, and the Revolt of the Netherlands (all touched upon in Rage), to A-level students. So in some ways, writing The Rage of Fortune has marked a return to pastures old! But I’ve also relished the opportunity to learn more about matters that I’d been only dimly aware of until now: for instance, the very brief and somewhat bizarre interlude when both England and the Netherlands became convinced, almost literally overnight, that galleys were the future of naval warfare, even in stormy northern waters, and embarked on programmes of galley-building.

Regular readers of the series will already have come across references in Matthew Junior’s ‘back story’ to some of the other characters who appear in The Rage of Fortune: notably to his grandmother, the ‘imperious termagant’ Louise-Marie, Countess of Ravensden, a distinctly feisty Frenchwoman, twenty years younger than her husband, and to his remarkably long-lived great-great-grandmother Katherine, a former nun. And those regular readers needn’t fear – Matthew Junior will be back in his own right in 2016, the 350th anniversary of both the Four Days Battle (the subject of the most recent published title in the series, The Battle of All The Ages) and of the Great Fire of London, which will play a very significant part in the plot of ‘Quinton 7’, Death’s Bright Angel. 

The Rage of Fortune will be published by Old Street Publishing in the spring or summer of 2015. I really hope that readers enjoy it!

The Rise of Historyism

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

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

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

***

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

The Sailors’ Graves

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It’s OK, minions of the Carmarthenshire County Council damage limitation department, you can stand down – this one isn’t about you.

A reblog of one of my old posts (from July 2012) this week because of pressure of work, but I hope it’s one that will appeal to both my followers who are into maritime history and those who have started following this blog recently because of the Carmarthenshire archives situation. Since I originally posted this, I’ve received more information about Lieutenant William Williams from Brian Vale, the acknowledged authority on Britons serving in early 19th century South American navies, and this appears as an additional section at the end of the post.

Later this week, I’m going to be attending the big conference on 16th/17th century maritime history at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, and hope to report on that next week. (There’s a bit of a hiatus on the archives front at the moment while I wait for replies to correspondence and Freedom of Information requests.)

I’m currently in west Wales, and over the weekend I revisited the glorious old St Ishmael’s church (above), overlooking the Tywi estuary. This is a very special place. The church overlooks the site of a lost village now largely swept away by the sea (perhaps in the great flood of 1607). More personally, ancestors on my mother’s side were being christened, married and buried there from at least the middle of the sixteenth century (probably long before, as this branch of the family was in the area from the fourteenth), and my cousin’s family, who live a few hundred yards down the road from it, still worship there. But St Ishmael’s also has one particularly interesting grave. This is that of Hugh Williams, a prominent Carmarthen lawyer who supported the Chartists and was rumoured to have been the secret leader of the ‘Rebecca Riots’ in west Wales in the 1840s. Williams, a close ally of the radical leaders Cobden and Bright, also went to America in the 1850s and was involved in some business transactions with an obscure lawyer who became a friend: the lawyer’s name was Abraham Lincoln.

Williams’ grave also contains the remains of his brother, William Williams, ‘a lieutenant in the Brazilian navy’. who died on 11 February 1832, aged 37. His body was carried down the River Tywi in a waterborne procession and then buried in the graveyard of St Ishmael’s; his passing was also marked by the poet Thomas Jenkins, who penned ‘The Sailor’s Grave’ in his honour:

The Sailor’s Grave

Lieutenant Wm. Williams, of the Brazilian Naval Service, died at Carmarthen, and was interred at St. Ishmael’s, on Carmarthen Bay, being the most convenient spot for carrying into effect his dying request, to be buried as near as possible to that element to which he had from early life devoted his existence.

I reach’d the spot – I saw the mound
‘Neath which the sailor lay;
And as the freshly-heaped-up ground,
Soft whispering, bade me stay:
Is this, I said,
The brave one’s bed –
The kind – the faithful friend?
“‘Tis here he lies,”
A voice replies,
“Here all his wanderings end.”

The heartfelt sigh – the silent tear,
Have sacred made the spot;
And, long as worth to man is dear,
‘Twill never be forgot.
The sea ne’er bore,
From shore to shore,
A soul more kind or brave;
And with a sigh
Each passer by
Beholds the sailor’s grave.

In every hue – in every form,
Did death to him appear;
He rode the whirlwind – rode the storm –
The ball – the pointed spear:
He steered his way,
By night – by day,
No superstitious slave; –
When ebb’d life’s tide,
He calmly died –
As die the good and brave.

The brave and good, as they pass by,
Where rests this seaman true,
Will drop the tear – will heave the sigh,
When his green grave they view:
And each will say,
While on his way,
He was as kind as brave:
On each return
They still will mourn
Above the sailor’s grave.

Though countless throngs may pass that way,
Morn – noon – and ev’ning late;
None more than he who writes this lay,
Laments his early fate.
Though wave on wave
The churchyard lave,
Where rests the sailor’s head,
Old ocean’s roar
Shall rouse no more
The brave one from his bed.

This is a treacherous, storm-wracked coast (it’s certainly lived up to that reputation during the last few days!), and just across the estuary from St Ishmael’s lies the village of Llansteffan, nestling in the hollow beneath the walls of a Norman castle built to protect the estuary that led to Carmarthen, the seat of royal power in south Wales. In the churchyard, almost hidden behind the gravestone of ‘Richard Moris, mariner’ of St Ishmael (who died in 1728, aged 82), is a small memorial to two men lost in 1886 when the Teviotdale was wrecked on Cefn Sidan beach, which has clearly been moved from its original position and is now sadly neglected. For centuries, Cefn Sidan (pronounced Kev’n Sheedan) was a notorious graveyard of shipping; the young niece of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine perished there in 1828, and there were persistent local legends to the effect that at least some of the wrecks were induced by gangs of ‘wreckers’ setting false lights. Several of the wrecks, including that of the Teviotdale, are still clearly visible. The dangers of these waters led to the establishment of a lifeboat station at Ferryside in 1835, and at the weekend I was privileged to be given a tour of the new station and a close-up look at the crew’s wonderful new boat. Many thanks to Terry and Matt, and it’s good to know that old Lieutenant William Williams can rest easy knowing that the coast which his grave overlooks is looked after so well!

 

As part of the research for Britannia’s Dragon, I received more information on William Williams from Brian Vale, a colleague on the Council of the Navy Records Society, to whom I’m very grateful for sharing his research so generously:

‘…there was no Lieutenant William Williams in the Brazilian Navy.  However there was a Lieutenant who called himself John (ie Joao) Williams, and I have no doubt from one thing and another that it is the same man. Changing names was not unusual and he may have felt that the Brazilians would have been bamboozled by a man whose first name was the same as his second!  On the other hand further research may establish that he bore both names, William and John.’

His career went as follows:

Williams, John

Recruited in London.  Appointed as Volunteer on arrival in Rio 26 May 1823.  Served on Cochrane’s flagship  Pedro I (74) at the Blockade of Bahia and the capture of S Luis of Maranhão June-Aug 1823. Prize master of the Ventura Feliz. Sub-lieut 22 Jan 1824; appointed to the frigate Paraguassú during the suppression of the rebellion in Pernambuco. Served on the frigate  Niterói and Pedro I 1825.   To River Plate on the outbreak of war with Buenos Aires.  Lieutenant on brig Caboclo under Commander John Pasco Grenfell 1826.  Commander 12 Oct 1827. O/c Constança schooner at the Plate 1828 enforcing the blockade. Assisted in the capture of the Argentine privateer General Branzden.  Not on 1832 List.

Brazilian warship Pedro I in the 1820s
Brazilian warship Pedro I in the 1820s

Flash Pepys, Saviour of the Universe

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Last week saw the anniversary of Samuel Pepys’s birth in 1633, and Twitter was abuzz with the inevitable superlatives – the greatest English diarist! the founder of the modern Royal Navy! One only needed Queen to belt out ‘Pepys, Saviour of the Universe’, with Brian Blessed bellowing ‘Sam’s alive?!’, and the hyperbolic overdose would have been complete. There’s been plenty from this ‘Daily Mail headline’ school of historical analysis of late – witness the hysterical reaction in the Twitterverse to recent defence cuts (‘Navy at its smallest since Henry VIII!’, ‘Army at its smallest since the Zulu war!!/Agincourt!!!/Mount Badon!!!!’ and so forth, as if such comparisons have any validity at all – one might as well come up with such equally astute observations as ‘Fewer novels featuring starving urchins being written now than in Charles Dickens’s day’). No doubt this is all part and parcel of the Anglo-Saxon world’s obsession with rankings. Pepys can’t just be an important diarist or an undoubtedly competent naval administrator – he has to be the best ever, the greatest thing since sliced bread in his particular field. Witness the similarly OTT praise of Dickens during recent weeks (not just a great novelist – the bicentennial boy has to be THE GREATEST!!) and the endless stream of polls in newspapers or programmes on TV, usually produced by bored journalists during slow news days or by TV producers who can’t think of anything more original: the Greatest Briton of All Time, the world’s best bookshops/US presidents/public conveniences, the 50 Greatest TV Meerkats, and so on.

To be fair, of course, this isn’t entirely a failing of glib modern culture. I blame the Victorians and their obsession with classifying and ranking anything and everything – positions in class at school (no longer politically correct, of course, which begs the question of why ranking the schools themselves in exactly the same way is acceptable…), league tables for all sports, and so on. Not long ago I studied the Admiralty lists of those who sat the examinations to become apprentices in the royal dockyards just after World War I, and they were listed in result order, by dockyard, from the very best, who obtained 600/600, down to the very worst, an intellectual titan at Devonport who scored 17. (These days, the results would be anonymised and circulated only internally to spare candidates stress-related conditions, to keep their personal data confidential and to avoid infringing their human rights; then, the candidates were listed by name and the results printed and published. That must have brought joy unbounded to a certain Devon household in the spring of 1919…) Another manifestation of the tendency to classify, rank and affix hyperbolic labels is probably the worst naval history book I’ve ever read – and trust me, there’s a lot of competition for that particular ‘Daily Mail’ title – Evelyn Berckman’s Creators and Destroyers of the English Navy, published in 1974. This took the 17th century rulers of Britain, then rigidly classified them alternately as ‘creators’ and ‘destroyers’. The breathtaking legerdemain required to classify Charles I as a ‘creator’ and Oliver Cromwell as a ‘destroyer’ is still one of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces of historical writing I’ve ever encountered.

Returning to Pepys, it was Sir Arthur Bryant, about as reactionary a historian as one could imagine, who in 1938 coined the term ‘the saviour of the Navy’ to describe him (can one be simultaneously the founder and the saviour of something, I wonder?), and a wonderful Admiralty information film of 1941 took very much the same line. I know plenty of people today who still hold Pepys in this sort of regard. Indeed, I sit on the committee of the Samuel Pepys Club, which exists to revere his memory, and am very proud to have won the Samuel Pepys Award, so I’m certainly not going to knock ‘Pepysians’. Moreover, having spent an unconscionably large percentage of my life working on Pepys’s manuscripts, both in the glorious library he created in Cambridge and in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, I probably have a better awareness of and respect for what he achieved than a great many people. Let’s not equivocate about it: Samuel Pepys was both an utterly fascinating, if deeply flawed, human being and, professionally, a truly great man. But it’s always seemed to me that the virtual canonisation of Pepys and the consequent exaggeration of his achievements have done a disservice both to him and to those who were just as responsible as he was, and frequently rather more responsible, for those achievements.

An example. Why did Bryant describe Pepys as the ‘saviour of the navy’? Essentially because of the evidence contained in one book*, written by that disinterested author, S. Pepys, based on original documents and statistics largely drawn up by the equally disinterested civil servant, S. Pepys, with the sole purpose of exculpating the record in office of the entirely disinterested politician, S. Pepys. If you imagine that in 300 years time Peter Mandelson’s memoirs have become the sole accepted authority on the record of the Blair/Brown government, then you’re getting pretty close to equivalence; although not even the noble Baron of Hartlepool and Foy had the audacity to cook his own statistics quite as brazenly as Pepys did. Then again, why would anyone – yes, even on Twitter – claim that Pepys might be the founder of the modern Royal Navy, rather than, say, a certain short admiral from Norfolk, whose legacy permeates today’s fighting force in an overt and all-pervasive way that Pepys’s certainly does not? (If you’re in doubt try asking the denizens of any naval mess, even wardrooms, what they know about [a] Pepys as against [b] Nelson. I’ve done it, and the results are both revealing and depressing.) It’s essentially because Pepys is regarded as the creator of systems, of structures, of methods; in other words, of the navy as an institution, rather than as a fighting force. So does he actually deserve that accolade, that particular ‘Daily Mail headline’ – and if not, who does? I’ll return to that question next week!

(* The Memoires of the Royal Navy, 1690: I contributed the introduction to a new edition of this, published in 2010. Certain online bookshops list Pepys and I as co-authors – probably one of the greatest but most bizarre accolades I’ve ever received!)