J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Second Anglo-Dutch War

Amsterdam Good Time, Part 1

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And so it continued. Not content with fireworks, rowing contests, schoolchildren’s chain-making competitions, and exhibitions galore, it was finally time for the historians to have their four-penn’orth about the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Medway, which was why I spent last weekend in Amsterdam, attending a conference jointly organised by the Naval Dockyards Society and the Vrienden van de Witt.

Marginally too large to smuggle aboard the Eurostar

In truth, I don’t need much persuading if a trip to Amsterdam is in the offing. I’ve loved the place since I first went there, well over thirty years ago, when I was working on my doctorate. I knew I could hardly work on seventeenth century naval history without seeing things from the Dutch side, so I swiftly became well acquainted with the Rijksmuseum, the Scheepvaartmuseum (the Dutch national maritime museum), and the great churches, not to mention many rather less renowned landmarks. One of these was a little bar which floated my boat for some unfathomable reason, and to which I return every time I’m in Amsterdam, including this one. It’s nothing special – indeed, in some respects, it’s a bit insalubrious – and it hasn’t actually changed at all in the thirty plus years since I first went there (possibly one of the reasons why I like it), but it’s very central, never particularly full, and always seems to be playing exactly the music I like, i.e. almost nothing written since The End of Music, which, of course, took place in approximately 1990. And no, I’m not going to tell you what it’s called or where it is, in case you all start going there. But it provides a haven for a breather between my regular destinations, which on this trip, included the likes of the Rijksmuseum, the Oude and Nieuwe Kerks, and the Kok secondhand bookshop, plus a new discovery, the wonderful ‘secret’ Catholic church of Our Lord in the Attic.

Turner Prize? More like the Turnip Prize, IMHO

(The visit to the Oude Kerk was a bit frustrating, largely because it currently contains what has to be one of the daftest ‘modern art’ installations I’ve ever encountered – and there’s a lot of competition for that title, says Mr Grumpy Old Man. This one consists of what are essentially large rectangles of gold wrapping paper laid out over the floor, thus obscuring many of the fascinating grave slabs and forcing visitors to play a game of human chess, i.e. having to move to the right or left if someone else is approaching along the same vertical line.)

I’d not been to the Rijksmuseum since its huge refurbishment some five years ago, and was duly impressed by the new look. But like all great international museums, visiting it is still a slightly frenetic experience, thanks principally to the vast tour parties on their ‘see the Rijksmuseum in five minutes’ excursions – and invariably, that means setting up a colossal siege line in front of The Night Watch. However, that’s only marginally less hectic than the rest of the floor devoted to the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, the seventeenth century, which unfortunately includes the naval displays, my principal target. Still, most tourists are significantly smaller than me, and only relatively few needed to be hospitalised as I manoeuvred myself into poll position in front of the glorious works of art by the van de Veldes et al. However, I’m not sure that the Rijksmuseum refurbishment has been kind to the naval material. The sternpiece of the captured Royal Charles, for example, now hangs above a door, and it’s not possible to get as close to it as it was in the old incarnation, where it was alongside a mezzanine. But otherwise, it’s still possible to wander through huge swathes of the museum, including, for example, the ship models room, and encounter very few people, while of course, I’m not going to complain too much about any national museum that devotes an appropriate amount of space to naval history. (Are you listening, British Museum?)

‘Ninety-nine!’ (This caption is respectfully dedicated to all members of the 1974 British Lions touring party)

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Tomorrow, I’ll blog about the conference programme itself. There was one massive timing glitch during it, though – but it most certainly wasn’t the fault of the organisers. When I sat down after giving my paper, I checked my emails, and came across a piece of information that I wish I’d known about earlier, so I could impart it to the audience. (OK, yes, that’s an euphemism for ‘indulging in shameless self-publicity’.) This was the news that the new Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave, had become available on Amazon that very afternoon. Naturally, the book focuses heavily on the Dutch attack on the Medway, but it also places Matthew among the defenders of Landguard Fort as they try to beat off yet another Dutch onslaught, and also takes him to sea, albeit this time aboard the Dutch fleet, where he confronts a terrible dilemma and a huge personal tragedy. Several real historical characters make ‘cameo appearances’, among them King Charles II, Samuel Pepys, and Admiral Michiel de Ruyter, while fans of the broader Quinton family may welcome the return of the enigmatic Uncle Tris, Matt’s outspoken elder sister Elizabeth, his dour Dutch brother-in-law Cornelis, and, of course, his feisty wife Cornelia. As a special treat and ‘teaser trailer’, next Monday’s post on this site will provide a free preview of Chapter One – and for a book set against the backdrop of the events of 1667, it’s most definitely not what you’re going to expect!

#2ADW350

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Happy New Year to all!

2015 already, though…? I’m increasingly convinced that I fell through a worm hole in the space-time continuum in about 1976 and have largely lost track of things ever since. But then, I have a sneaking feeling that many of my friends, and my ex-students in particular, have suspected that all along!

Anyway, regular readers of this blog will know that I’ve made a number of pleas for the current wave of major anniversaries – notably of World War I, Magna Carta and Waterloo – not to completely overwhelm and obscure other important commemorations. Above all, I’ve made the case for remembering the 350th anniversaries of the events of the second Anglo-Dutch war of 1665-7, a period I’ve studied for over 30 years and which now forms the backdrop to my series of historical fiction, the Journals of Matthew Quinton. Although I’ve no doubt that the ‘headline’ events of that period, notably the Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666, will be given due recognition (indeed, we’ve already endured a pretty dreadful TV dramatisation of the latter), and the English acquisition of New Amsterdam / New York before the war officially began already has been, I wonder if the same will be true of the naval events of the war. Of course, I’m talking here from an exclusively British perspective: it’s a racing certainty that the naval anniversaries will be commemorated amply in the Netherlands, where they’re counted among the great triumphs of the country’s ‘golden age’. If you need further proof, the premiere of the new Dutch blockbuster movie Michiel De Ruyter at the Scheepvaartmuseum in Amsterdam on the 29th of this month should provide it.

(By way of digression, when was the last time Britain made a movie about any naval hero, even Nelson? And no, the fictitious Jack Aubrey in Master and Commander doesn’t count, nor does Clive Owen’s bizarre turn as Sir Walter Raleigh in Elizabeth: the Golden Age!)

It has to be said, the omens aren’t good. For example, English Heritage’s list of the ten most important anniversaries of 2015 omits the war entirely – and, indeed, also consigns to oblivion the Jacobite rising of 1715 (before you try the ‘but it was entirely Scottish’ cop-out excuse, English Heritage, no, it most certainly wasn’t…). However, said list does include, umm, the 700th anniversary of the siege of Carlisle. That being the case, it didn’t take too much thought on my part to realise that my pleas for proper recognition of the forthcoming 350th anniversaries had a logical consequence: namely, “if not me, who”? So as of 1 January, I’ve started tweeting the anniversaries as they happen. I don’t mean just the big events, like the destruction of the London on 7 March or the battle of Lowestoft on 3 June; I’m also tweeting about relatively small occurrences, or examples of bigger themes, to try and give as full a picture of the war as it’s possible to develop in 140 characters at a time. The title of this blog post is the hashtag that I’m using, and that I’ll continue to use until the end of the war in 1667/2017 (failure to drop off perch in the interim permitting). If you’re not on Twitter, you should still be able to follow my tweets in the feed to the right of this post. Naturally, I’ll be giving due attention to the really big anniversaries in this blog as well, and over the course of the next few months I’ll also be providing more information about the forthcoming Quinton novel, The Rage of Fortune, a prequel focusing on Matthew’s eponymous grandfather during the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s titanic naval war against Spain. Oh, and I expect there’ll be the odd rant and complete digression along the way, as I hope you’ve come to expect from these posts. So welcome to 2015, and to #2ADW350!

Remembrance – but of what?

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Another Remembrance Day: the last one before the four years of commemoration of the centenary of the First World War begin. Already, the announcements and the controversies are coming thick and fast. Will it all be too jingoistic / too downbeat? Will it offend the Germans / not mention them enough? Is Jeremy Paxman really the right person to front the BBC’s flagship documentary? And so forth. What is already apparent, though, is that for the next four years, the centenaries of 1914-18 are going to drown out everything else.

There is a great risk with all of this, though: the risk that the ‘everything else’ will not be properly marked. This applies to the First War itself, where much of the coverage to date – and, no doubt, most of it in the four years to come – has focused on the familiar themes, and the even more familiar imagery, of the trenches. Will adequate attention be paid to the war at sea, for example, other than at (perhaps) the centenary of Jutland in 2016 – a battle which proved to be singularly atypical of the nature and importance of the naval campaigns of the war? Will there be sufficient (or any) coverage in Britain of the Eastern Front, or of, say, the campaigns on the Isonzo? One very much doubts it.

But the First World War commemoration threatens to blot out much else, too. True, there is a campaign to commemorate the bicentenary of Waterloo in 2015, but this appears to be sending cold sweats down the backs of politicians and civil servants anxious not to offend the French. And apart from a plan to get a few hundred archers together, there appears to be no significant effort to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, also in 2015; certainly, the anniversary lacks those essential attributes of any modern campaign, a website and a Twitter account. (Sorry for the lack of a link to the ‘archers’ story; this seems to have been covered only by the Daily Mail, and I refuse on principle to link to that!) Much of this myopia can be attributed to political correctness and historical ignorance, but there is more to it than that. I was talking recently with a diplomat from the German embassy, and he was making the point that for Germany, the 1914 centenary is very low down the list of priorities for next year: his country is much more focused on the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War and, above all, on the 25th anniversary of the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. National memories are always very, very selective – a sad truth that has caused (and still causes) a great deal of ill-feeling between nations, and not a few wars.

In her recent guest blog on this site, Louise Berridge put the case for a new memorial to the fallen of the Crimean War, and thus reminded us of the crucial need not to forget those who fought and fell in earlier conflicts. With that in mind, I’d like to make a plea that we don’t forget the forthcoming 350th anniversaries of the second Anglo-Dutch war – a hugely important conflict for all sorts of reasons. The Dutch will certainly be commemorating it, particularly in 2017 when we come to the 350th anniversary of their successful attack on Chatham, but a few in Britain also hope to mark the anniversaries of other key events. For example, 3 June 2016 will mark the 350th anniversary of the Battle of Lowestoft, one of the greatest sea-fights of the Age of Sail. June is not a time of year that one associates with remembrance, and a battle in 1665 is not something that people usually choose to remember. No doubt the anniversary itself will be swamped by the commemoration of the centenary of Jutland, just four days earlier, and that of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, twenty-eight days later, but that does not mean it should be ignored entirely. After all, there is now no ‘living memory’ link to the First World War either; it is just as much a part of ‘the dim and distant past’ as the Battle of Lowestoft, and in that sense, events like the latter – and, dare one say it, the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall – are just as worthy of serious commemoration in Britain too.