J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Portsmouth

Don’t Mention the Cold War, Part 2

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In this week’s first post, I gave my impressions of the dockyard town of Karlskrona and its terrific naval museum. Now on to the reason why I was there, an international conference on International Approaches to Naval Cities and Dockyards, held in the museum. From the moment it started, it was clear there was a really good buzz in the auditorium, and this was sustained throughout the programme; the very wide ranging papers came from many different perspectives, all had interesting things to say, and, unusually, there were no obvious weak links anywhere. It was also great that the conference was open to the public, and several ‘locals’ came in for one or more of the sessions. This sort of public engagement, reaching out beyond the ivory towers of academia, can only be a good thing, and maybe conferences in the UK could learn a lesson from this!

Ready for the off!

Jakop Seerup of the National Museum of Denmark kicked us off, looking at naval cities in the Baltic, particularly the intertwined histories of Karlskrona, Copenhagen and St Petersburg during the period from about 1680 to 1720. His comparative approach was really thought-provoking, and provided an excellent scene-setter for all that followed. Andreas Linderoth of the Swedish Naval Museum then spoke about Karlskrona in the 1990s, when the end of the Cold War raised a very real prospect of the entire dockyard closing; he demonstrated how the town had successfully diversified to become a centre of high tech industries. Ann Coats of the University of Portsmouth then pulled off the not inconsiderable feat of covering the history of Portsmouth from the Romans to the present day in twenty minutes – and although this material was obviously the most familiar to me, Ann still came up with a few nuggets that I’d not known before!

The second session began with Brad Beaven and Mathias Seiter of the University of Portsmouth comparing the sailortowns of Portsmouth and Kiel from c.1860 to 1914, giving a particularly well illustrated talk which demonstrated the key similarities and differences between the two naval towns. At Portsmouth, for example, the sailortown overspilled into the official civic space (some great examples here of prostitutes parading outside the town hall!), whereas at Kiel, there was a more rigid separation. They were followed by some Welsh bloke I’d never heard of rabbiting on about Pembroke Dock and the Welsh nation. OK, yes, it was me, and I attempted to show how the dockyard, an alien institution in what was traditionally a non-Welsh area (‘Little England Beyond Wales’) gradually became a part of the mainstream of Welsh national identity. Harry Svensson of Stockholm University then spoke on the development of centralised control and production at Karlskrona between 1723 and 1780, in his opinion very much a neglected age of Swedish naval history, and he drew my attention to the intriguing figure of Salomon von Otter, whom he described as a ‘Swedish Samuel Pepys’!

Following these sessions, we adjourned to prepare for the conference dinner. This was held in an eighteenth century building which doubles as an officers’ mess and (on the top floor) the home of the Royal Society of Naval Sciences. The librarians provided us with an introduction to the former before dinner. Now, regular readers of this blog will know that I’m an absolute sucker for old libraries; give me floor to ceiling oak bookcases full of venerable tomes, plus comfy armchairs in which to study them, plus (ideally) a well stocked bar in the immediate vicinity, and I’m anybody’s. This library ticked these boxes, and then some. Among the treasures laid out before us were original ‘adverts’ for John Ericsson’s monitor designs, a book of drafts by Fredrik af Chapman (see my previous post), a 1772 plan of Portsmouth dockyard drawn up by a Swedish spy visitor, and a plan of the defences of Karlskrona in 1801, when a certain H Nelson was in the vicinity.

After a fine dinner (fish, since you ask), we all adjourned to the splendidly furnished and, yes, well stocked bar. No doubt some might seek to make a topical political comment out of the fact that British, Swedish, Danish, Polish, German, French and Spanish historians were all happily chattering away to each other in English, but you wouldn’t expect such blatant – nay, debatably treasonable – Brexit-related stuff in this blog, so I’ll eschew it completely.

The second day began in a somewhat hazy fashion for some of us, but we were swiftly into a full-on session with no fewer than four papers. Dan Johannson of Stockholm University talked on the development of Stockholm as a naval city between 1522 and 1680; having visited the city several times and thus having a decent grasp of the geography of what Dan was talking about, I found this a really interesting talk. Jorge Aguilera López of the Barcelona Maritime Museum then spoke about the city’s royal arsenal and galleys during the wars against the Ottomans during the sixteenth century – although one would have thought he might have had somewhat more topical issues on his mind at the moment! Marek Twardowski of the National Maritime Museum in Gdansk then talked about the history of the shipyard at Gdynia, providing some fascinating insights into World War II, the Cold War, and the distinctly fraught history of the yard in more recent years. The last speaker in this session was Ida Jørgensen of the University of Copenhagen, who spoke on the modernisation of Danish naval shipbuilding in the 18th century, when the so-called Konstruktionskommissionen attempted to reorganise production.

Jim Hansson talking about the Scepter wreck

The second panel began with Marie-Morgane Abiven of the University of Brest talking about the fascinating project under way at her university to digitally reconstruct aspects of the port cities of Brest and Venice; more detail about her research can be found on her website (in French), while the 3D model that her project has produced of a foundry at Brest can be found on Youtube. Jim Hansson of the Swedish National Maritime Museum then delivered a really exciting talk with ‘hot off the presses’ news of the recent archaeological discoveries in Stockholm – and by hot off the presses, I mean the results of a dig that only finished a couple of weeks ago. Dendrochronology demonstrates that the new find is almost certainly the Scepter, launched in 1615, once the flagship of Gustavus Adolphus! Petra Stråkendal of the county administrative board of Blekinge then spoke about the many wrecks (some sixty in all) in Karlskrona harbour itself. The Solen, launched at Lubeck in 1667, lies near the ropery (see my previous blogpost) and demonstrates a combination of both English and Dutch building methods. The harbour also contains the wreck of the Vasa – i.e. the less famous ship of the same name, launched in 1778. (Coverage of wreck finds in and around Karlskrona can be found here and here.)

Part of the newly discovered wreck of the Scepter

After lunch, we kicked off with Steven Gray of the University of Portsmouth talking about coaling stations in the period before World War I – in particular, about what happened when warship crews of different nationalities were at the same station at the same time. (Clue: think random mindless violence.) One of the most interesting themes to emerge from his talk was how most nationalities got on with each other most of the time…unless, that is, the Brits ran into the Russians… AnnaSara Hammer of Stockholm University, who’d already won maximum brownie points from me by revealing that she’s read Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, my first book, then spoke about naval families as a social elite in 18th century Karlskrona, and it was interesting for me to compare and contrast the similar work I’ve done over the years for the Royal Navy in the late 17th century. AnnaSara also drew my attention to the memoirs of an 18th century naval officer, Carl Tersmeden, which sounds like a terrific source, albeit only available in Swedish, alas. The final paper of the conference was given by Asger Nørlund Christensen of the South Danish University, who spoke about Scandinavian sailors on Dutch merchant and naval ships – another topic of considerable interest for me, having previously uncovered evidence about foreign sailors on British warships in the Restoration era.

So all in all, this was a thoroughly enjoyable, five star conference. Huge thanks to Andreas Linderoth and the team at the Marinmuseum for all the hard work that went into organising it, and for such splendid hospitality. There’s going to be a book of the conference, in English and aimed at a general audience, so watch this space for further details!

And finally – with due apologies to my old and new Swedish and Danish friends – why do Swedish and Danish warships have barcodes?

So they can Scandinavian.

(Boom, tsh)

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!