J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Naval history

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…

A Hope and A Sandwich: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c1660-c1714, Part 2

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Back to post-Olympics reality! As promised, today’s post is the second part of my study of post-1660 warship names, originally intended for publication in an academic journal. I originally thought that this would be the concluding part, but I think the remaining material is too long for just one post, so I’ll postpone the conclusion until next week when I’ll actually be in north Wales on another research trip. However, I’ve also just realised that today, 13 August, marks the first anniversary of this Gentleman and Tarpaulins blog! I can’t really believe it’s been a year…just where did the time go? It would be remiss of me to let the occasion pass without thanking you, my readers, for your support over the past year, and for your stimulating and always greatly appreciated comments. As for future plans… Over the autumn and winter I’ll be building up to the publication of my latest books, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales and the fourth title in the Quinton series, The Lion of Midnight, so there’ll be plenty of posts tied in to them. I have a few ideas for the rest of the summer, notably an account of my sometimes surreal experiences as an officer in the RNR (CCF), but please let me know if there are any topics related to my writing or naval history generally that you’d like me to cover. Also, I’ve been wondering about having the occasional guest blogger; would people welcome this or not? I’d love to have your feedback!

Anyway, on with the matter in hand…

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In 1677 Parliament voted for the funds for a huge new construction programme of thirty ships, intended to eliminate the French navy’s perceived superiority in numbers, and the ships began to be named and launched from the spring of 1678 onwards. The first three names were essentially personal to Charles. Lenox was named after Charles, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, his illegitimate son by the Duchess of Portsmouth and thus by extension probably honours the mother as well, as the names Richmond and Portsmouth were already taken. The idiosyncratic spelling seems to have been Charles’s own, as both the ducal patent and all historical precedents spell the name ‘nn’. (A project has been launched to build a replica of Lenox at Deptford, inspired by the outstanding book on the ship by my good friend Richard Endsor.) The second, Restoration, was launched on 28 May 1678, the day before the eighteenth anniversary of the event her name commemorated. The third was named Hampton Court; arguably an unusual choice as Charles spent little time there, although he and Catherine of Braganza had honeymooned there in 1662. The Captain (July 1678) was presumably named in honour of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been appointed captain-general of the English army in April.

Before the next batch of ships was launched, the ‘Popish Plot’ had erupted. It is possible that Charles responded to this by selecting names that pandered more to Protestant and patriotic sentiment: hence Anne in November 1678, to honour a Protestant and legitimate member of the king’s family, Windsor Castle, after one of the monarchy’s most obvious symbols, and three names that recalled the Elizabethan navy, Eagle, Vanguard and Elizabeth itself. The Hope, launched on 3 March 1679, also recalled the triumph against the Spanish Armada (a galleon of that name had fought in the action), but the timing of the launch suggests that the name might have had a double meaning, possibly to reflect the optimism surrounding the meeting of the first new parliament for eighteen years (it opened on the 6th); this was short-lived, as relations between Charles and this parliament rapidly deteriorated. This might also provide an explanation for the suggestion that the Hope was originally intended to be named Sandwich. The new name, reflecting a very brief moment of optimism in national politics and Charles II’s own thinking, could have been assigned to the ship at short notice, with the original name of Sandwich then being reassigned to one of the hulls that would be launched a few weeks later.

No fewer than seven ships were named in May 1679, the month when Charles’s difficult relationship with the ‘first exclusion parliament’ culminated in its prorogation. One, the Sandwich, recalled an architect of the Restoration who had been killed at the same time of year, seven years before. Grafton was named after another of the king’s illegitimate sons; she was followed in June by Northumberland, named after his brother. Duchess might have been named for the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, so her naming might have been a subtle gesture of defiance against the exclusionists; an alternative candidate would be the Duchess of Portsmouth, which would have been equally provocative. (Of course, it is equally possible that the name simply recognised the generic title.) Kent and Essex seem to be purely geographical names, honouring counties which made particularly substantial contributions to the Royal Navy, and they also revived the names of warships lost earlier in the reign. On the other hand, the name Essex might have had a double meaning which could have been a gesture towards Charles’s opponents – Arthur, Earl of Essex, was a key figure in the newly remodelled Privy Council that was meant to bring about national reconciliation (and his brother was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time), while the navy’s previous Essex had been named after Parliament’s captain-general in the Civil War.

The other ships launched in the summer of 1679 were the Berwick (May) and Stirling Castle (July). These seemingly odd choices, given Charles II’s well-known dislike of Scotland and its environs, might have been a response to the almost exactly contemporary covenanter rebellion that culminated in the battle of Bothwell Brig, i.e. emphasising the strength of the fortresses that faced potential rebels and thus by implication the strength of royal control of Scotland; the name Stirling Castle in particular could be an assertion of royal rule after the defeat of that rebellion, by choosing the name of one of the most obvious symbols of that rule in Scotland.

The two names given in September 1679, Expedition and Bredah, were fairly neutral, although the latter can only be a reference back to the Declaration of Breda in 1660 – a fairly odd name to choose at that point given the suspicion of Charles for failing to implement the terms he had agreed in that document, but with a new parliament due to meet in October (although it was later postponed), one that was again likely to be heavily influenced by urban dissenter opinion, it might have been his way of suggesting that he would now be more inclusive towards dissent, as he had originally promised at Breda.  The Burford, launched in November 1679, reverted to type in the sense that it was named after one of his illegitimate sons – but interestingly, it was not named after the eldest of the brood still not to have a ship named after him, the Duke of Southampton (who actually never received this honour, perhaps suggesting that Charles was never wholly confident of the paternity that he had acknowledged in 1670), but after a mere earl, his son by Nell Gwyn, ‘the Protestant whore’, so perhaps once more this was actually a subtle nod toward Protestant sensibilities. Pendennis was launched on 25 December 1679, shortly after Shaftesbury and the whigs began a campaign of petitioning to demand that the exclusion parliament should be allowed to sit. This name might have been a gesture of defiance by Charles toward his critics – Pendennis Castle was the last garrison in England to hold out for Charles I during the civil war, so the name might reflect a determination to persist against overwhelming odds and regardless of the consequences. When added to Windsor Castle, Stirling Castle and Berwick, there certainly seems to be some sort of running theme of deliberately linking ship names to the great fortresses of the kingdoms, i.e. the strongholds that existed to suppress discontent.

In the spring of 1680 Charles seemed to return to purely geographical names, christening two ships the Exeter and Suffolk. It is difficult to see a political rationale behind these names, but there is less difficulty with the other 1680 launch; in October, the month when parliament was finally due to convene, he named the Albemarle, recollecting another great figure of the restoration. Following the dissolution of the third exclusion parliament in March 1681, Charles could again select ship names that did not pander to or respond to the broader political situation, and which reflected his own aspirations. Thus he named the Ossory after one of his recently deceased close friends, the Duke probably in honour of his brother James, whose place in the succession had now been secured, and the Britannia and Neptune, reflecting the broader concern to assert his sovereignty over the seas that had been apparent since his restoration.

Of course, all of this begs a question – had Charles mapped out a rough, or even a pretty precise, idea of what he was going to call at least some of the thirty ships when the programme commenced, or did he make it up as he went along? Clearly some of the names were responses to events that couldn’t possibly have been envisaged in 1677-8 (Ossory, Coronation) but it’s possible that he decided on others in batches (e.g. a couple of palaces, some fortresses, Sandwich and Albemarle, his children, etc). The problem, of course, is that we are very unlikely ever to turn up any source material to enable us to come up with definitive answers, because the naming process essentially took place in Charles’s head. The lack of evidence in Pepys’s papers suggests that he, and later James II & VII, did not consult Pepys, perhaps the one man whom they might have been expected to consult on such matters.

(To be concluded)

 

Fubbs Yes, Mum No: The Naming of British Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 1

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The material in this week’s post (to be continued in a fortnight – I’ll be at the Olympic Stadium in a week’s time!) was originally intended as the basis for an article in an academic journal. Two things changed my mind, and made me decide to publish it here instead: firstly, I didn’t really have the time to do the research on the other themes I wanted to cover to turn it into a full-scale article; secondly, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the very narrow, introverted world of academic publishing in naval history, particularly with the editorial policy of certain supposedly eminent journals and also the extortionate prices demanded both by the publishers of academic books and the profit-hungry cartels which control the dissemination of academic journals. The UK government’s recent commitment to make scientific research free of access is welcome, but I see no reason why that principle shouldn’t apply to historical research as well – so in future, I’ll be making some of my research freely available here and on my website.

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The naming of warships has always been an essentially political act; witness King George V’s vetoing the name Cromwell for a battleship, the somewhat cynical reasons underpinning the choice of the names Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales for Britain’s new aircraft carriers, and in the United States, the ongoing spats over choosing the names of predominantly Republican presidents for new aircraft carriers and giving other warships the names of living politicians. (See last week’s post for more on this.) However, perhaps no period demonstrates this truth as clearly as British warship-naming in the half-century or so from 1649 onwards.

For many years, if not centuries, monarchs had taken personal responsibility for naming at least some of their ships, particularly the most prestigious ones. For example, Henry VIII dedicated the Henry Grace a Dieu on 13 June 1514, a lavish ceremony also attended by ‘the Queen, the Princess Mary, the Pope’s ambassadors, several bishops, and a large number of nobles’. In January 1610 James I attended the double launching of two East Indiamen  at Deptford, naming them Trade’s Increase and Peppercorn.  He was also present at Woolwich on 24 September 1610 for the failed first attempt to launch the great ship which became the Prince Royal (she was successfully launched in the night following, with Prince Henry performing the naming ceremony).  In late 1620 James viewed and named the Happy Entrance and Reformation at Deptford, although it isn’t clear whether he was present for the actual launchings.  Charles I was on hand for the failed launching of what became the Sovereign of the Seas on 25 September 1637, but confided the name to Sir Robert Mansell who performed the naming ceremony after they finally got her afloat on the night of 13/14 October.1 The tradition was naturally interrupted under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when ships were named by the republican regimes and later by Oliver Cromwell himself,2 but returned at the Restoration. Indeed, one of Charles II’s first executive acts was to change those ship names that reflected the triumphs and personalities of the English Republic into rather more politically correct ones for a monarchy. Pepys witnessed the event, on 23 May 1660, and makes it clear that the process was conducted entirely by the king and his brother the Duke of York, who was about to enter into the office of Lord High Admiral for which he had been intended from childhood:

After dinner the King and Duke altered the name of some of the ships, viz. the Naseby into Charles; the Richard, James; the Speaker, Mary; the Dunbar (which was not in company with us), the Henry; Winsby, Happy Return; Wakefield, Richmond; Lamport, the Henrietta; Cheriton, the Speedwell; Bradford, the Success. 

The name changes are all easily explicable – five of them are for the royal siblings and the Richmond for their cousin, the head of the ‘Lennox Stuart’ line, while Speedwell and Success are natural emotions reflecting the family’s mood at the Restoration. On the other hand, Speedwell was also a traditional warship name – there had been two ships of the name in the Elizabethan navy. The displaced names were overtly political: Naseby, Dunbar, Winceby, Wakefield, Langport, Cheriton and Bradford were all Parliamentarian victories, and by replacing Naseby with the name he shared with his father, the king who had been defeated in that battle, Charles could not have made a more potent symbolic statement. Similarly, Richard had been named after Oliver Cromwell’s son and successor, so there was an interesting symmetry in Charles renaming her after his own heir. Two of the new names actually duplicated ones already on the navy list, a James launched in 1634 and a Success acquired in 1660. Whether nobody thought of, or dared to inform the royal brothers about, this inconvenient clash, or whether Charles and James already knew of it and decided simply to disregard it,  will probably never be known; but as a result, the existing ships had to be swiftly rechristened Old James and Old Success.

For the first fifteen years or so of Charles II’s reign, naming policy closely followed the precedent laid down in May 1660: a heavy emphasis on names that honoured members of the Stuart family, the dynasty as a whole, or key players in the Restoration, together with the revival of well-established warship names which particularly revived memories of the ‘glory days’ of Elizabethan England. Charles followed these principles when changing the remaining interregnum names: Marston Moor became York; Bridgwater, Anne; Torrington, Dreadnought; Tredagh (= Drogheda), Resolultion; Newbury, Revenge; Lyme, Montagu; Preston, Antelope; Maidstone, Mary Rose; Taunton, Crown; Nantwich, Bredah (where Charles had signed the declaration promising liberty of conscience which guaranteed his restoration).  Entirely new names included Royal Katherine, after his wife; Royal Oak; Rupert, after his cousin; Cambridge and Edgar, after short-lived nephews; Monmouth, after his eldest illegitimate son. Other revivals of Elizabethan names to set alongside the likes of the newly rebranded Dreadnought and Revenge included Defiance and Warspite. 

There were some idiosyncratic quirks, too. Sweepstakes reflected the court’s love of gambling, while the Fubbs Yacht was named after his mistress, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (specifically, after the chubbiness of her naked form!). More significantly, the choice of St Michael in 1669 for a large Second Rate raises some fascinating questions. The name St Michael had never been used for an English warship before, and it would never be used again. (However, a similar name had been used for the greatest of all Scots warships, launched in 1511.) The launching ceremony was planned for Michaelmas Day, 29 September, which was one of the most important feast days in the royal liturgical calendar; in the event, though, unspecified ‘difficulties’ forced the postponement of the launch until the next morning. However, the timing of the launch also coincided with Anglo-French negotiations for a military and naval alliance against the Dutch entering a critical phase, with Charles talking in increasingly belligerent terms of obtaining revenge for the humiliation he had suffered at Chatham in 1667, and with the king expressing to his most intimate confidantes an apparently sincere determination to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Thus there may have been several complex reasons underpinning Charles II’s decision at this particular time to name a great man-of-war after this particular saint, the only one (other than national patrons) that he honoured in this way: Michael, the avenging archangel, the protector of Israel and patron saint of warriors, the bearer of the flaming sword of vengeance and justice; the victorious commander of the armies of the righteous in the final battle against the forces of evil.

Finally, there was one glaring omission from the list of names chosen by the king. Intriguingly, Charles did not name a ship Henrietta Maria after his mother, although there had been a Second Rate of that name before (launched in 1633, she was renamed Paragon in 1650, thereby displaying a delicious irony not always associated with the Rump Parliament; the ship was lost in 1655). Perhaps this omission was a reflection of the famously strained relationship between mother and son.

(Next time, I’ll take a detailed look at the naming of the ‘thirty new ships’ and will make a few points about naming policy after Charles II’s reign.)

1 Ex info Frank Fox

2 For the naming policy of the period 1649-60, see M J Seymour’s article in The Mariner’s Mirror, 1990.

 

 

The Comfort Zone

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One of the challenges and delights of working on my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales, is that it’s taking me into all sorts of uncharted territory and, in some cases, territory I’m revisiting after many years. The book is meant to cover the entire time period from the Romans (AD 60, to be exact, and Suetonius’ attack on Anglesey) to the present day, so large areas are well outside what I’d regard as my comfort zone. I suppose that said zone would extend from the sixteenth century through to about 1815, with the core being my principal specialisation from about 1640 to about 1700. But as I’ve said before in this blog and elsewhere, I originally started out with an interest in twentieth-century warships, so the period from roughly 1939 onwards is also an area I’m very comfortable with. Over the years I’ve also done various bits and pieces of work on aspects of the Victorian period and World War I, so getting up to speed there isn’t a problem at all.

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals – but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

Coast of Ages

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I spent the whole of last week on a Britannia’s Dragon research trip in north-west Wales. Coming originally from the south-west of the country, where it’s far easier and quicker to get to London than to the north, I knew Anglesey and Snowdonia quite well but didn’t really know the Llyn Peninsula, and this proved to be a revelation – in terms of stunning scenery, fascinating history and a sometimes total absence of such alleged requisites of modern living as mobile phone reception and internet access. We were staying in a converted chapel on the old pilgrim route along the peninsula to Bardsey island, and evidence of the importance of pilgrimage was everywhere, nowhere moreso than in the astonishing church of St Beuno at Clynnog Fawr, larger than several cathedrals I’ve visited yet located in a village smaller than the one where we live. The week also involved some walking, notably a strenuous climb up to the Tre’r Ceiri hill fort, and a visit to Sir Clough Williams Ellis’s surreal creation at Portmeirion, best known of course as the setting for the cult TV series The Prisoner. 

But of course I was in the area primarily to work. My days at Anglesey and Caernarfon record offices were very productive, particularly the former (which produced inter alia what must be the most graphic description ever written of the state of the toilets on a World War I battleship). Both proved to be very pleasant working environments, both manned by really helpful and friendly staff and with that at Caernarfon enjoying some of the best views of any repository I’ve ever worked on; the search room looks out directly onto the quayside of the old dock, now filled with yachts and with the waters of the Menai Straits beyond. ‘Fieldwork’ took me to many places with direct or indirect naval connections. By far the most poignant of the former was the huge memorial and mass grave in Holyhead cemetery to those who died aboard the submarine HMS Thetis in 1939, which failed to surface after her first trial dive; the vessel was subsequently recovered, beached in Moelfre Bay and eventually put into service as HMS Thunderbolt. Other locations which will feature in Britannia’s Dragon included the site of HMS Glendower, the wartime training base on the south coast of the Llyn Peninsula, far better known in its later incarnation as Butlin’s Pwllheli. It’s unfortunate that there’s no memorial marking its naval service, in contrast to the situation at Butlin’s Skegness which was the wartime HMS Royal Arthur; both bases were the result of deals struck between the far-sighted but somewhat unscrupulous Billy Butlin and the Admiralty. (The book will include an account of the deliciously fraught meeting in 1945 when the local MPs, including Lloyd George’s daughter Lady Megan, discovered just how comprehensively Butlin had outmanoeuvred them, driving a coach and horses through planning regulations – suspended in wartime – and creating a vast holiday camp in the midst of the heartland of the Welsh language and culture.)

A site which certainly does proclaim its naval heritage is the astonishing Parys Mountain on the north coast of Anglesey, once the largest copper mine in the world. The discovery of this huge resource in 1768 coincided providentially with the Royal Navy’s adoption of copper sheathing and with the outbreak less than a decade later of the American revolutionary war, which hugely increased the demand for that sheathing. The nearby port of Amlwch was transformed into the world’s largest copper port and the second largest town in Wales, about half the size of late C18th century New York. Parys Mountain is remarkable but somewhat unsettling, a vast scar on the landscape literally carved out of the heart of a hill – and, in the early years at least, carved out principally by manual labour and hand tools alone.

So all in all, it was a very good week which contributed a substantial amount of material to the book. Although a considerable amount of additional research still lies ahead, the writing phase starts tomorrow!

Navy and Nation

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Last week I attended the ‘Navy is the Nation’ conference at the National Museum of the Royal Navy in Portsmouth naval base. Despite being held against a backdrop of intermittent storms sweeping in from the Solent, this proved to be a very enjoyable affair, superbly organised by Simon Williams and Matt Chorley. I was one of the speakers, using my talk to try out some of the ideas that’ll be appearing in my next non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This seemed to go down very well – I always attempt to leaven my talks with plenty of humour, and I got a gratifying number of laughs. (‘Whenever I tell people I’m writing a naval history of Wales, I tend to get one of two reactions. One is “there wasn’t any”; the other is that people tell coracle jokes. Stealth coracles. Nuclear powered coracles. That sort of thing.’ There was also a good response to my suggestion that Wales provided arguably the most reviled name in British naval history – not Bligh, not John Byng, but Sub-Lieutenant Christopher Leyland, the man who gave the world that scourge of suburban gardens and source of endless arguments between neighbours, the dreaded Leylandii.)

Of the other speakers, most of the attention inevitably focused on the opening keynote address by the First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope, particularly his throwaway line that decommissioning HMS Ark Royal and doing without aircraft carriers for a decade was ‘taking a punt’ – which, as he half-admitted, had been made to look rather silly by the events in Libya and the re-emergence of what he called ‘the obvious exception’ to the strategic assumption of being able to rely on other nations’ carriers, i.e. tension over the Falkland Islands. However, as one would expect there were also weighty contributions from some very eminent naval historians. The ever-entertaining and provocative Professor Eric Grove weighed in against the media’s lazy conflation of the terms ‘army’ and ‘armed forces’, now effectively seen as synonymous, and emphasised how the navy had a serious PR problem caused by its association with seemingly old-fashioned ways of warfare and with the controversial legacies of the British Empire, not to mention the fact that it had lacked a serious friend in Cabinet since A V Alexander in Attlee’s ministry. Eric rightly pointed out that despite their rhetoric in opposition, Conservative governments have always been far less friendly to the navy than Labour ones – contrast the large number of warship orders placed by the Wilson/Callaghan administration of 1974-9 with the Nott defence review of 1981, let alone the rather more recent precedents. (Wearing my hat as chairman of the Naval Dockyards Society, I might add that all closures of major dockyards and naval bases in the 20th century took place under Conservative governments.) Eric was in a ‘double header’ session with Professor Geoffrey Till, who made an impassioned plea for the UK to invest in its navy or sink into irrelevance; as he emphasised, the future is going to be maritime because of the shift of global power to the east (this decade will be the first time in 400 years that the Far East will spend more on naval defence than Europe). Instead, the last decades and the priorities of the present government could be summed up in Till’s brilliant phrase, ‘Engage the enemy more cheaply’.

Other talks had less immediate political relevance but were nevertheless of great interest to naval historians. It was good to see and talk to Professor John Hattendorf again, having not seen him for some twenty years or so; he delivered a fascinating survey of the complex relationship between the Royal Navy and the United States Navy. There was also an interesting talk about aspects of Tudor seapower from Andrew Lambert, the Laughton Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, whose professorial lecture on the war of 1812 I’d attended a couple of days earlier, in the process getting hold of a signed copy of his new book The Challenge (a title which could refer equally to the US Navy’s challenge to the mighty British fleet in 1812 and to Andrew’s own challenge to the orthodoxy about the naval war that holds sway on the other side of the pond). Andrew also provided a nice ‘trailer’ for one of my themes in Britannia’s Dragon by focusing heavily on John Dee, the Welsh mystic who largely conceived of the concept of the ‘British empire’ in Elizabeth I’s reign; equally useful for me were James Davey‘s material on the importance of popular perceptions of the Matthews-Lestock case in 1744 (Matthews was from Llandaff) and Duncan Redford‘s analysis of geographical warship naming from the late 19th century through to the 1970s, which showed that Welsh names were surprisingly well represented, especially in comparison with Scottish ones.

So all in all, it was a very enjoyable and productive conference, one which was coloured by frequent barbs against a whole range of ‘panto villains’ ranging from our esteemed Prime Minister to President Sarkozy via Sir Winston Churchill (virulently anti-navy in later life, which I hadn’t realised) and of course the RAF. The real highlight, though, was the conference dinner in the wardroom of HMS Nelson. I’d eaten there before, some twenty years ago when serving as a Sub-Lieutenant RNR (CCF), but had forgotten quite how splendid a room it is, adorned with great murals of Trafalgar, the Glorious First of June and so forth, along with the coats-of-arms of British naval heroes from Drake to Nelson. It’s a shame the public hardly ever gets to see it; but if governments continue to cut back the navy and eventually sell the now unfeasibly large wardroom building, perhaps one day it might!