J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Shipwreck Museum

Other South American Rivers are Available

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I don’t usually plug other people’s books on this site, but occasionally, titles come along that really deserve a bit of a leg-up – especially if they fall within my usual very strict and narrow remits (i.e. seventeenth century, naval, seventeenth century naval, or absolutely anything else whatsoever that interests me), and/or if their publishers are slightly off the beaten track, and/or if I’ve got some sort of personal connection with them. Next week, for example, I’m hoping to have a guest post that fits several of these bills – watch this space – but this week, I thought I’d highlight some titles that can be found in the ‘available for pre-order’ categories of the proverbial tax-lite South American river, plus one that’s just come out.

The first is the intriguingly titled Lawson Lies Still in the Thames, by Gill Blanchard, being published by Amberley in May. This is a biography of one of the most intriguing admirals of the seventeenth century, Sir John Lawson, who moved from being an out-and-out radical under the Commonwealth to become a knight of the realm and staunch supporter of the restored monarchy. I’ve been interested in Lawson since I was working on my doctorate over thirty years ago, and he appears as a character in the third Quinton novel, The Blast That Tears the Skies. He was also the captain of the London, but wasn’t aboard when the ship accidentally blew up in the Thames in March 1665. I’ve blogged before on this site about the wreck of the London, and a lot more work has been done on the wreck since then, so having this book in print will be a big boost to those who are diving on and researching the site. I’ve exchanged emails with the author about aspects of Lawson’s career, and know that Gill has unearthed some previously unknown documents about her subjects, so I’m really intrigued to see what she says about this absolutely fascinating and historically important individual.

My next pick is Resolution: Two Brothers, A Nation in Crisis, A World at War, by David Rutland and Emma Ellis, being published by Head of Zeus in April. If you’re thinking that you’ve never come across Rutland as a surname, you’d probably be right; but the author in question is actually David, Duke of Rutland, and this is the story of one of his family members, an almost exact contemporary of Nelson (and son of the Marquess of Granby, of multiple pub names fame), who died at the age of just twenty-four. If you think Captain Lord Robert Manners sounds a bit insignificant to deserve an entire book, his contemporaries would have begged to differ. These days, one enters Westminster Abbey by the north transept, and pretty much the first thing you see is an unbelievably colossal baroque monument to Manners and the two colleagues who fell with him. I’ve talked to the authors about naval history on several occasions, supplied some research information for the book, and did some critical reading of drafts, so I know that this is going to be a really worthwhile and very readable study, drawing on the superb archives at Belvoir Castle and many other sources.

My final choice in the ‘forthcoming’ category has already been covered on this site, in a guest post from the author himself – so this is a gentle reminder to anyone who hasn’t ordered it yet that Richard Endsor’s book on The Warship Anne is being published in less than a fortnight’s time! The launch party took place at the wonderful Shipwreck Museum in Hastings last weekend; sadly, I couldn’t attend, but there are unconfirmed reports that the author is safe and well, and wasn’t led astray by the ‘usual suspects’ from the nefarious world of nautical archaeology.

And last of all, a book that’s just come out, and which I’ve just finished reading – Jacqueline Reiter’s The Late Lord: The Life of John Pitt, second Earl of Chatham. By coincidence, there’s a connection between this and Resolution, described above: the fourth Duke of Rutland, the second brother covered in that book, was one of Chatham’s closest friends. This is another case where I have to put my hands up and admit that I know the author, but this is a beautifully written, exceptionally well researched, insightful, and very balanced, analysis of the career of a man whose peculiar misfortune was to be the son and brother of far greater men, William Pitt the Elder and Younger. (Note: at this point, do not, under any circumstances, follow this link.) It’s particularly revealing about the controversial Walcheren expedition of 1809, which effectively wrecked Chatham’s career – and for a seventeenth century naval buff, it was fascinating to come across very familiar placenames that are so absolutely central to my own work, such as Vlissingen/Flushing, Middelburg, and Veere (Cornelia Quinton’s home town in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’).

Generally, though, my reading is on the back burner at the moment, which is always the case when I’m writing a new book. But the good news is that the next Quinton novel, The Devil Upon the Wave – set against the backdrop of the Dutch attack on the Medway, 350 years ago this June – is well on course, and should be finished quite soon! More updates as and when available.

 

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!

 

 

Squelching Back in Time

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A few weeks ago, I blogged about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne on the beach at Pett Level near Hastings, the first time it’s been exposed for about fifteen years. Last week, I was able to go down to view her myself, and the experience certainly didn’t disappoint. Having covered the history of the ship in some detail in my previous post, I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves – it was a glorious evening for photography, with some outstanding light. But standing inside the hull, effectively ‘aboard’ the only extant British warship from the period I’ve spent over thirty years researching and writing about, was a pretty moving experience. After all, apart from its surviving papers, artworks, a few salvaged guns and various other artefacts, this is essentially all that’s left of the Restoration navy, and certainly the largest survival of it; the sternpiece of the Royal Charles,  now back at the newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after its temporary visit to Greenwich last year, is obviously much grander, but somehow, the wreck of the Anne is more evocative, probably because it’s still lapped by the sea.

Apparently rather more of the wreck is exposed this year than during the previous period when it was visible, but the ever-shifting sands are already starting to reclaim it. For example, warship expert Richard Endsor, who was with me (and helped to pull me out of the soft sand when I started to sink!), said that when he was last at the wreck a few weeks ago, more of the stern post was exposed, and that sand was already covering some of the other timbers. However, a dig is scheduled for August; I hope to get down for some of it, and if I do, I’ll be reporting back via this blog and social media. In the meantime, a big thank you to Jacqui Stanford of the excellent little Shipwreck Museum in Hastings, which should be a ‘must’ destination for all with an interest in maritime history!

The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!
The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby rocks has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!
The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.
The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.
Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne
Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne
A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.
A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.
The bow of the Anne.
The bow of the Anne.