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Sir Francis Drake

Drum in a Box

03/06/2019 by J D Davies

There are several legends regarding what might happen if and when Britain comes to the point of its ultimate crisis.

One is that the ravens will abandon the Tower of London, thus causing its walls – and, indeed, the entire country – to collapse. But rejoice, this particular catastrophe has been averted, if only just, by the recent arrival of baby ravens!

(Coming soon to a social media platform near you: baby raven birther conspiracy theories.)

Then there’s the one about the return of King Arthur and his knights, said to be slumbering in a cave until their country calls them in its hour of direst need.

Now, you can call me an old-fashioned fuddy duddy, but somehow I can’t see a possibly mythical sixth century warlord whose entire raison d’etre was slaughtering European immigrants being much use when it comes to sorting out potential technological solutions to the Irish border problem.

And then there’s Drake’s drum, which is meant to beat when, umm, the country recalls the vain, virulently anti-Catholic, slave trading old seadog in its hour of direst need, presumably to compete with King Arthur in the final of Britain’s Got Mythical National Saviours.

At this point, let me state unequivocally that the content of this post up to this point is not connected in any way to the recent European election results in the UK, nor to the fact that the UK is currently due to leave the EU on 31 October, come what may. As you know, you’ll never get politics on this blog, and certainly not the B-word.

However, it may be worth noting that even if Drake’s drum is beating like crazy at the moment, it’s very unlikely that anyone will hear it – least of all old Sir Francis, sleeping ‘in his hammock an’ a thousand mile away / (Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?) / Slung atween the roundshot in Nombre Dios bay / An’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe’. This is because the drum is currently locked away in some storeroom or other, having recently been moved from its home of over half a century, Buckland Abbey, the former monastic estate that Drake purchased. Why? Well, the drum was owned for all that time by Plymouth museum, and they’ve now recalled it for eventual display in their new facility, opening next year, of which more below. (It’s worth pointing out here that the drum in question is a replica – the real one has been in storage for many years in any case, so either way, the country is totally done for.) That’s left a literal and metaphorical hole in the story being presented at Buckland itself; without its most iconic item, what can the house offer to its visitors? It was this thorny question that took me to Buckland last week, to join a workshop containing National Trust staff and volunteers, fellow naval historians, and other interested parties, the whole being co-ordinated by those behind the University of Oxford’s splendid ‘Making Maritime Memories’ project.

Buckland Abbey

(Warning – grumpy old man rant and digression follows; you may wish to skip to the end of the next paragraph.)

The new facility in Plymouth, alluded to above, will contain a museum, the archives, and lots of exciting features, such as a stunning collection of naval figureheads. The city undoubtedly needs such an asset, and clearly always has in the forty-odd years that I’ve known it well – its lack of recognition of its naval heritage, certainly when compared to Portsmouth, has been a much-discussed issue in the area, and in maritime history circles, for many years. Now, you might think that it would make sense to call this new building something like the Plymouth History Centre – but no, in this day and age, you can’t have monikers that actually tell you what a place is and what it contains. Instead, you’ve got to have some right-on name conceived by one of the lesser crew members of the B Ark (see here if you don’t get that analogy), which bears as little resemblance as possible to the actual purpose of the building and the heritage of the area. So the new facility in Plymouth is named The Box. Let me repeat that. The Box. Good people of Plymouth, you know what you have to do: if enough people start calling it The Coffin, they might give it a more sensible name after all.

The drum at Buckland Abbey, before its departure to ‘The Box’

Anyway, regardless of what it’s called, that’s where Buckland’s Drake’s Drum will be housed from now on. So how can the house itself adapt? Moreover, how can it tell the story of both Sir Francis Drake and the estate itself? We spent a very enjoyable day discussing these issues, as well as exploring this astonishingly complex building. (By coincidence, Buckland was one of the two buildings on which I principally modelled Matthew Quinton’s ancestral home, Ravensden Abbey, in my series ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’.) Clearly, aspects of Drake’s career are troubling to modern sensibilities, notably his involvement in slavery and his religious bigotry, so the old ‘hero narrative’ alone won’t serve any more; I’m actually wrestling with all of this myself at the moment, as Drake is quite a central character in the book I’m currently writing, the second in my new Tudor naval trilogy, and he’s not an easy man to portray. There’s also been an overwhelming focus on him and him alone, thus neglecting other family members, several of whom also had fascinating histories (and were invariably also named Francis Drake), not to mention the history of the abbey, its monks and its surrounding estate. Above all, there’s been an almost completion omission of the stories of the women associated with the house, including Drake’s two wives, the second of whom must have effectively run the estate for very long periods while her husband was at sea.

Of course, this isn’t a story unique to Buckland. Many ‘stately homes’ and other institutions are coming to terms with questions of how they can present what might sometimes be quite problematic pasts, and how they can broaden the stories they tell. Indeed, the ‘Making Maritime Memories’ project has addressed an important aspect of this; many National Trust properties, for example, have strong maritime elements within their histories, but these have sometimes not been emphasised, perhaps because their staff and volunteers lack the necessary information, perhaps because someone, at some time, decided that the story presented about a particular property should concentrate on aspects A and B, and neglect or ignore aspects C, D and E. But common sense and our own experience tells us that life isn’t like that. All buildings, all institutions, and indeed all individuals, have multiple narratives, as Rabbie Burns reminds us – ‘to see ourselves as others see us’ simply means that while we might want to tell one story about ourselves, others will be telling very different ones. So I wish the staff and volunteers at Buckland well as they develop their new, drum-less narratives; and while, yes, I’ll definitely go and have a look around Plymouth’s new Box when it opens, I, for one, am never going to grace it with that name!

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Buckland Abbey, Making Maritime Memories, Plymouth, Sir Francis Drake

The Rage is Coming!

08/12/2014 by J D Davies

Cue drum roll…cue trumpets…

Ladies and gentlemen, I’m pleased to announce that the next ‘Journal of Matthew Quinton’, the sixth book in the series, will be entitled The Rage of Fortune.

But this is a ‘Quinton Journal’ with a twist, because the central character is a different Matthew Quinton. Followers of the series will know that one of the biggest influences on the personality of my hero, the Restoration naval captain Matthew Quinton, is the memory of his eponymous grandfather, the eighth Earl of Ravensden, one of Queen Elizabeth I’s ‘sea dogs’. Indeed, Matthew sometimes ‘hears’ asides from what might or might not be the shade of the long-dead swashbuckler, a colleague and rival of the likes of Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. I’d always envisaged a prequel centring on the first Matthew Quinton, and thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller at Old Street Publishing, I’ve now got the opportunity to do it!

The story begins in 1651, just after the Battle of Worcester, the final conflict of the British Civil Wars. The eleven year old Matthew Junior and his twin, Henrietta, are exploring an abandoned corner of their family home when they discover the long-forgotten papers of their grandfather, only to be interrupted by the arrival of Roundhead troops intent on searching for their elder brother, the tenth Earl of Ravensden, who has been seriously wounded in the Cavalier cause. Gradually, though, the papers of the old Earl and of some of those who knew him – including the recollections of his wife, Matt and Herry’s grandmother – start to paint a picture of a very different world: the world of the turn of the seventeenth century, when England was still fighting a seemingly endless war against Spain, when William Shakespeare was writing Henry V and Julius Caesar, and when the whole country was obsessed by the question of who would succeed the ageing Queen Elizabeth.

The Rage of Fortune is set against the backdrop of a series of real historical events. Many still wrongly assume that the Spanish Armada was the only significant naval campaign during Elizabeth I’s war, and that nothing of much note happened after it. This is simply untrue – the war lasted for another 16 years, and Rage places Earl Matthew at the centre of such remarkable, but sadly little known, naval actions as the affairs of the ‘Spinola Galleys’ and the ‘Invisible Armada’, and at the Battles of Castlehaven, Kinsale and Sesimbra Bay. Meanwhile, he and his new French wife are thrust into the heart of the intrigues over the succession to the English throne and of one of the most mysterious incidents in the whole of British history, while being threatened by a mysterious and malevolent enemy who threatens to bring down the entire Quinton family. Rage also provides a startling revelation about the history of one of the principal characters from the Restoration-era books!

I’ve really enjoyed returning to a time period and to themes that I know well. I spent over ten years researching and writing my non-fiction book, Blood of Kings: the Stuarts, the Ruthvens, and the ‘Gowrie Conspiracy’, which provided a lot of inspiration and material for The Rage of Fortune; and I spent many more years teaching Elizabethan and Jacobean England, together with such related European History themes as the French Wars of Religion, Habsburg Spain, and the Revolt of the Netherlands (all touched upon in Rage), to A-level students. So in some ways, writing The Rage of Fortune has marked a return to pastures old! But I’ve also relished the opportunity to learn more about matters that I’d been only dimly aware of until now: for instance, the very brief and somewhat bizarre interlude when both England and the Netherlands became convinced, almost literally overnight, that galleys were the future of naval warfare, even in stormy northern waters, and embarked on programmes of galley-building.

Regular readers of the series will already have come across references in Matthew Junior’s ‘back story’ to some of the other characters who appear in The Rage of Fortune: notably to his grandmother, the ‘imperious termagant’ Louise-Marie, Countess of Ravensden, a distinctly feisty Frenchwoman, twenty years younger than her husband, and to his remarkably long-lived great-great-grandmother Katherine, a former nun. And those regular readers needn’t fear – Matthew Junior will be back in his own right in 2016, the 350th anniversary of both the Four Days Battle (the subject of the most recent published title in the series, The Battle of All The Ages) and of the Great Fire of London, which will play a very significant part in the plot of ‘Quinton 7’, Death’s Bright Angel. 

The Rage of Fortune will be published by Old Street Publishing in the spring or summer of 2015. I really hope that readers enjoy it!

Filed Under: Naval historical fiction, Uncategorized Tagged With: J D Davies, Matthew Quinton, Old Street Publishing, Sir Francis Drake, Spanish Armada, The Rage of Fortune

Drake’s Drum

15/04/2013 by J D Davies

I spent last week in Devon, doing some fieldwork and plot brainstorming for the new Quinton novel – and as I suggested in the previous post, anyone wondering why a book focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666, which was fought in the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, has scenes set in Devon, will have to wait to read it!

Buckland Abbey, Devon
Buckland Abbey, Devon

It was good to revisit many old haunts in the area, especially in Plymouth, but perhaps the most evocative was Buckland Abbey, just to the north of the city. The home successively of two of England’s greatest seamen, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, Buckland was one of the principal inspirations for my fictitious ‘Ravensden Abbey’, the seat of the Quinton family. Many of those who bought former monasteries in the sixteenth century demolished the old buildings or altered them so completely that little trace of monastic origins remains. But at Buckland, many elements of the old fabric were retained, both externally and internally – notably the tower of the church – and this is very much my mental image of Ravensden Abbey. The house was devastated by a fire in 1938 but restored, handed over to the National Trust, and now displays a considerable amount of Drake memorabilia, including some of the flags flown from his ships. Understandably, the house guides were cock-a-hoop about the recent discovery that an often ignored portrait in a comparatively insignificant room is actually a genuine Rembrandt!

Drake's Drum
Drake’s Drum

Rembrandt or no, Buckland Abbey’s greatest treasure remains the legendary Drake’s Drum. This reputedly accompanied him during his circumnavigation of the earth and was also present during his last voyage, when he supposedly ordered that it should be returned to England and beaten to recall him from heaven when the country was in dire danger. It duly returned to Buckland Abbey, and has remained there more or less ever since. It’s been claimed that it was heard when the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth in 1620 (although quite how that would have fulfilled Drake’s original criterion is debatable!), when Nelson was made a Freeman of Plymouth (ditto), on the outbreak of World War I and during the Dunkirk evacuation. Perhaps the best documented instance was that which is supposed to have occurred aboard HMS Royal Oak when the German fleet surrendered in 1918. A victory drum roll was heard aboard the ship, but three searches revealed neither a drum nor a drummer. (There’s a good account of the episode here.) More prosaically, it’s a snare drum, just over two feet high and the same in diameter. The shell is of a thin sheet of walnut, the drum heads probably of calf skin, and the drum is decorated with the Drake coat of arms.

My visit to this evocative location and its mythic relic provides the perfect excuse for some poetry, namely Sir Henry Newbolt’s once-famous Drake’s Drum – now a compulsory part of the new National Curriculum for schools. (Only joking, teachers and pupils everywhere. On the other hand, one can never tell these days, given some of the things that have gone into it…)The poem was set to music by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford as part of his ‘Songs of the Sea’. 

Drake he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand miles away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time O’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancing’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’,
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha’ sleepin’ there below?)
Roving’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
A’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drumm’d them long ago.”

Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’
They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago!

Anyway, time to get back to work. Odd, though – I swear I can hear the sound of distant drumming…

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Filed Under: Naval history, Uncategorized Tagged With: Buckland Abbey, Drake's drum, HMS Royal Oak, Sir Francis Drake

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