J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Naval Dockyards Society

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 2

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Conferences are often opportunities to meet old friends and make new ones, and that was certainly true of last weekend’s conference in Amsterdam to mark the 350th anniversary of the Dutch attack on the Medway. I caught up with several people I hadn’t seen for ages, finally met some of my Dutch Twitter followers in person, and was greatly impressed by the Vrienden van de Witt, who provided much of the organisational groundwork and most of the audience, not to mention a really warm and genuine welcome, epitomised by the outstanding (and outstandingly generous) dinners provided on the two evenings. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve become Vrienden indeed!

The Scheepvaartmuseum (national maritime museum) in Amsterdam, venue for conference drinks; the main proceedings took place in the Marine Etablissement, the naval base behind the museum (i.e. to the left of it in this picture)

Ultimately, though, any conference stands or falls on the strength of its programme, and this one certainly ticked that box. After the opening formalities, David Onnekink of Utrecht University provided an impressive overview of Anglo-Dutch relations through the seventeenth century, showing the progression from uneasy alliance to open hostility, and using a number of sources that were relatively unfamiliar to the Brits in the audience – such as Joost van der Vondel, the ‘Dutch Shakespeare. The first dual-speaker session saw Marc van Alphen, of the Netherlands Institute for Military History, discuss pay and morale among the seamen of the two navies, while Richard Blakemore of Reading University provided a lively overview of the development of the Stuart navy. (Richard was the only British speaker to display any sort of command of Dutch, which was well received by the audience – although all of the Dutch speakers, and the Dutch members of the audience, had no problem with proceedings that were otherwise conducted entirely in English. This remarkable level of easy fluency never ceases to impress me whenever I’m in the Netherlands, and, indeed, in Scandinavia too.) The second keynote came from Professor Henk den Heijer of Leiden University, who talked about the Asiatic and Atlantic dimensions of the second Anglo-Dutch war. This was followed by talks on the respective countries’ dockyards from Alan Lemmers of the NIMH and Ann Coats of Portsmouth University, chair of the Naval Dockyards Society, the other co-organisers of the conference. These talks brought out the important differences between the two systems, with the Dutch yards being much more integrated into their wider communities and mercantile networks.

The second day began with a keynote from Dr Louis Sicking of Leiden University, who provided a broad overview of early modern naval tactics and technology, including the adoption of the line-of-battle tactic by both navies. Erik Odegard of Leiden University then looked at Dutch amphibious tactics and the actual events of the Chatham raid (as well as pointing out just how insignificant most of the ships lost at Chatham actually were, a point that I also covered), while Philip MacDougall from the NDS spoke on the defence responses to the raid, notably the new fortifications built from the late 1660s onwards in the Thames and Medway, at Portsmouth, and at Plymouth. Then came what Ann Coats cheekily described as ‘the terrible two’ – Gijs Rommelse talking about Chatham as Johan de Witt’s finest hour, and yours truly lobbing in a few more revisionist grenades in an assessment of the political and ideological ramifications of the raid for the Stuart monarchy. My contention that in mid-June 1667 the raid was much less important to the Stuarts than the death of the duke of Cambridge, the second in line to the throne, led to a few raised eyebrows, but I escaped relatively lightly during the Q&A, whereas Gijs had to defend against a spirited denunciation of his definition of ‘republicans’ in the Dutch state from no less than Professor Jaap Bruijn, one of the legends of Dutch maritime studies. (Jaap still looks exactly the same as he did when I first met him thirty years ago, so I want some of whatever he’s having.)

One of the images presented by Remmelt Daalder

The absence due to family issues of Chris Ware of the Greenwich Maritime Centre meant that Remmelt Daalder of the Netherlands National Maritime Museum had the next session to himself, and he presented a fascinating overview of how de Ruyter’s legacy had been shaped and often distorted for political ends in the 350 years since the raid – most chillingly, in his adoption by the Nazis as a propaganda symbol to encourage the Dutch to fight alongside the Germans against the British. Finally, the conference was closed by Professor John Hattendorf of the US Naval War College, who provided a characteristically concise but penetrating analysis of the talks and the overall themes of the two days. John suggested that the constant references to the raid as a ‘humiliation’ were a bit too glib, and that the real humiliation for Charles II was the failure to set out a fleet in the first place – a moot point, perhaps, but a suitably thought-provoking way of closing the conference.

A ‘sequel’, with many of the same speakers and delegates, is taking place at the University of Kent’s Chatham campus this weekend, but personal circumstances mean I can no longer go to that – a great pity, as it would be terrific to keep the party going! But the good news is that many of the papers from the two conferences are likely to be combined into a single book, which should be an absolute must for everyone with an interest in seventeenth century naval history and/or Anglo-Dutch relations. For my part, I’ll retain many happy memories of a glorious weekend in Amsterdam. And it’s only five years to the 350th anniversary of the start of the third Anglo-Dutch war…but I’ll definitely be back long before then!!

The Return of That Other Guy

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Conference season again. Last week – ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. This week – Naval Dockyards Society conference at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Next week – hitting my head slowly and repetitively against a wall in yet another attempt to remind myself that agreeing to give papers at two conferences just a week apart is a staggeringly stupid idea. Looking further ahead, though, I’ll also be speaking at a ‘conference by any other name’ in Hastings on 4 July, of which more anon, and will also be off to the big conference on the Tudor and Stuart Age at the National Maritime Museum later in July, albeit this time as a common-or-garden delegate.

A couple of years ago, I posted a delegate’s guide to maritime history conferences, so here’s my summary of the ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ conference using the criteria that I set out there.

  1. Purpose – all boxes ticked and principal criterion met, i.e. ‘academic historical conferences exist solely so that delegates can meet up again with people they met at previous conferences, and to bitch about the people who haven’t turned up to this one’.
  2. The Conference Programme – ‘One of the most abiding laws of conferences is that the programme is never, ever, right.’  Well, this time it was, thanks to the excellent organisation by Duncan Redford and Simon Williams, although it was unfortunate and beyond the organisers’ control that several speakers had to withdraw at the last minute for personal reasons.
  3. The Graveyard Shift – Tell me about it; I was speaking in the last session of the day, when delegates were keen to get to HMS Victory for drinks on the quarterdeck. No pressure on timing at all, then.
  4. Sleep – Less of an issue at this conference than at many I’ve been to in the past, except during the one paper that overran. And overran. And overran some more.
  5. Victuals – Dinner on the lower gun deck of Victory, on mess tables slung in between the cannon. Let’s face it, for an experience like that, it wouldn’t matter if you were eating rancid pigeon burgers – not that the caterers’ splendid fare resembled them in any way.
  6. That Guy – You know the one I mean. He’s the one who always asks a question, whatever the topic is. He usually sits at or near the front. The question will be very, very long, and will often bear no relationship to the topic. Or else it won’t be a question at all, and will be an extremely long-winded anecdote based on the individual’s own experience, which, again, usually has no relevance whatsoever to the topic under discussion. Yes, he was there.
  7. That Other Guy – Yes, so was he. (See the original post.)

My own paper was entitled ‘The British Navy under the Later Stuart Monarchs: Royal Plaything or Instrument of State Policy’. It looked at the role of Charles II and James II in naval affairs, and drew in part on some material I’ve previously published in this blog – notably in my three posts (this one, this one, and this one) on the naming of Stuart warships. I was on a panel with Alan James, who was looking at very similar questions in relation to Louis XIV’s France, and Gijs Rommelse, who examined the use of the navy in the ideology and imagery of Dutch republicanism. By coincidence, these papers dovetailed remarkably well with a couple of those in the previous session: Beatrice Heuser’s on the sixteenth century origins of English naval strategy, which covered aspects of the ‘sovereignty of the sea’ and the importance of the ‘myth’ of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar that I then continued in my talk, and Benjamin Redding’s on aspects of English and French naval policy from the 1510s to the 1640s, which raised the question of the political importance of ship names that I continued to develop in my paper. I’ve never known such completely coincidental dovetailing to work so well at a conference!

Anyway, I’m looking at a completely different theme on Saturday, at a NDS conference focusing on the royal dockyards during the Napoleonic Wars. I’m talking on ‘The Strange Life and Stranger Death of Milford Dockyard’ – an odd tale of xenophobia and political skullduggery during the brief history of the short-lived predecessor of Pembroke Dockyard, featuring such figures as one of the principal characters from The Madness of King George, Sir William Hamilton, and, yes, Horatio Nelson himself. My paper is also a bit of a ‘detective story’, in which our intrepid hero sets out to discover whether anything actually remains of undoubtedly the least known royal dockyard in the British Isles.

Finally, to Hastings on 4 July, and what promises to be a fascinating day entitled ‘All About the Anne‘ – the wreck of an important Third Rate man-of-war of Charles II’s navy, lost during the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, and the subject of several previous posts (here, here, and here) on this site. This study-day-cum-conference is taking place under the auspices of Hastings’s splendid Shipwreck Museum, and will feature a number of talks about the ship herself and her times. I’ll be speaking on ‘Pepys’ Navy’, and will also be reading Frank Fox’s important study of the ship losses during the battle, which first appeared in this blog and provides an almost certainly definitive identification of the so-called ‘Normans Bay wreck’. So if you fancy a day at the seaside, complete with ice cream, Punch and Judy, and some seventeenth century naval history, then head down to Hastings in July!