J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Society for Nautical Research

Casting Off

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Happy Trafalgar Day, everybody!

This is, of course, always an auspicious day in the field of maritime history, but it’s especially so today. I’m proud and very happy to announce that the Society for Nautical Research, which I chair, is today launching The Mariner’s Mirror Podcast, which shares the name of our flagship journal, founded in 1910. As far as we can establish, the new podcast is the world’s first to cover all aspects of maritime history – all periods, all themes, all continents and nations, just as the journal itself is truly international in scope. The podcast is presented by award-winning naval historian and well known TV presenter Dr Sam Willis, who has lined up a programme of truly extraordinary variety for the weeks and months ahead. Unfortunately, though, he couldn’t get anybody better for the first programme, so he had to chat to me instead… You can access the podcast on the society’s website or else on your podcast provider of choice (it’s on iTunes and Spotify, for example).

I really hope you’ll enjoy the podcast, and if you listen to the first programme today and the sun is over the yardarm in your part of the world when you finish listening to it, then I hope you’ll join me in raising a toast to the Immortal Memory.

 

‘The Death of Nelson’ by Daniel Maclise

On Tour: A New Angle on HMS Victory

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Time to resume (fairly) regular blogging! The recent hiatus has been due partly to various commitments, but also to a sense that I had nothing new to blog about. Recently, though, I’ve done a little travelling, the first in six months, and also realised that I have a huge bank of material which is perfect for the present situation, especially as we go into winter. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to visit and photograph many places connected to naval and/or general history, some of them far off the beaten track or usually inaccessible to the public. So over the next few weeks, maybe months, I’ll present a selection of images from these places in the hope that they’ll provide some escapism, and maybe give you a few ideas for places to aim for once travel problems ease.

To kick off, I recently paid a visit to Portsmouth in my capacity as chair of the Society for Nautical Research. The SNR’s first major achievement was to save HMS Victory for future generations, and we still administer the Save the Victory Fund, the first donation to which came from King George V. I was given a personal tour of the new and much more efficient system of props underneath the hull, as well as of the work on the nearby Victory gallery, which will reopen in 2021 after extensive refurbishment, partly funded by SNR. So here are some views of HMS Victory from bow to stern as you’ve never seen her before!

 

Gentlemen and Players: Further Thoughts from the State of Maritime Historical Research Conference 2017

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One of the issues floating around at the fringes of the Greenwich conference on 9 September, the thrust of which can be found in my previous blogpost, was that of the perceived division in maritime history between ‘professional’ and ‘amateur’ practitioners. This came up in one form or another in some of the papers, but more so in the chat around Queen Anne Court during the conference breaks. I hesitate to summarise genuinely held beliefs to what may be the point of caricature, but at least some so-called ‘amateurs’ in the maritime history world sometimes regard themselves as marginalised, excluded from peer-reviewed journals and academic conferences, looked down upon by a distant, aloof elite holding university posts, or else with comfortable sinecures in certain national museums. In the Society for Nautical Research, the co-host of the conference, much of this sense of exclusion has focused on the society’s journal, The Mariner’s Mirror, which, since its inception in 1911, has been the UK’s, if not the world’s, most distinguished outlet for maritime historical research. In its early days, and in some respects up until the 1980s, the Mirror published pretty well anything that was submitted to it, and thus contained a fascinating range of material, from the globally important to the unbelievably arcane and obscure – and, it has to be said, to the downright wrong as well. But the arrival of peer review changed the nature of the Mirror, and many regret the passing of its old breadth (and, yes, sometimes wildly variable quality) in favour of much greater, but arguably blander, academic rigour.

Now, of course, this perceived division between amateur and professional practitioners, the ‘gentlemen’ and the ‘players’ in sporting terms, isn’t unique to maritime history, nor even to History per se, but it’s not far off: by definition, it’s not really possible to be an amateur nuclear physicist, nor an amateur brain surgeon, nor an amateur psychiatrist. (Although in the latter case, as we all know, that rarely stops the bloke next to you in the pub, nor your hairdresser, nor your significant other.) But History is a subject which everybody, without exception, can approach, can get something from, and perhaps, in the fullness of time, can become expert in. If I had five pounds for every conversation I’ve ever had which went along the lines of ‘I hated History at school, but now I read nothing else’, I’d be a very rich man indeed; while the person I’ve met in my lifetime who’d read the most History books – and I mean everything, from every period, or so it seemed to me at the time – was not some Regius Professor, but an old guy (i.e. probably the age I now am…) with no formal qualifications whatsoever, who worked in the scrap recycling plant where I earned some spare cash during one of my summer vacations. When he learned that I was an Oxford History undergraduate, he was keen to engage me in debate about the views of Tawney and Hobsbawm, only to be bitterly disappointed to discover that he might have read all of their work, but I hadn’t…

Professionals

Coming back to the present debate, several of the most formidably expert naval historians I know have no doctorates, in some cases no degrees at all, and/or have never held posts at universities. I’m not going to embarrass them by naming them, but they’ve made themselves world authorities in their fields by dint of sheer hard work over a long period of time, and to describe such individuals as ‘amateurs’ is, frankly, a gross insult to them, and an equally gross misuse of the word. Moreover, let’s not forget that on what seems to be the modern definition, several of the greatest practitioners of maritime history who ever lived would now also be classified as ‘amateurs’. Sir Julian Corbett had a degree in law, not History, wrote several novels, worked as a journalist, and never held an academic position at a university; neither did R C Anderson, whose astonishingly wide-ranging work would put any modern scholar to shame. Although some will dismiss such examples as ancient history, not relevant to the modern academic world, it is at least possible that other times had a rather healthier attitude to the definition of a ‘historian’ (and other professions too, come to that), and certainly lacked the modern obsessions with possessing a certain set of qualifications, holding a particular type of day job, and publishing only within a narrow set of journals, or for a narrow range of publishers, thereby ticking boxes for assorted vacuous targets.

***

Now, I could continue to write this post by referring to rather abstract groups, but instead of that, and donning my ‘author of fiction’ hat pro tem, let me introduce you to two characters who are based on absolutely no real people whatsoever. Well, except him, obviously. And, yes, her.

Horatio lives in an idyllic rural cottage in Blimpshire, and is a retired corporate fraudster (undiscovered). Over the course of the last fifty years, he has collected and researched absolutely everything there is to know about the design, construction and voyages of the floating brothels of the Khasi of Kalabar.* Horatio wears a blazer, even in bed, and reads the Daily Telegraph, especially in bed. Horatio is thus an amateur maritime historian.

(* Big wave at this point to all fans of the Carry On films, who I hope will have spotted the reference.)

Agrippina lives in a commune in Islington, and has just started in her first academic post, a junior lectureship in the Cross-Disciplinary Institute of Stuff and Things at the University of Shadwell. She is currently working on a book on gendered space in the floating brothels of the Khasi of Kalabar. Agrippina wears something that appears to be a sack, even in bed, and reads The Guardian, especially in bed. Agripinna is thus a professional maritime historian.

Amateur

Now, common sense dictates that Horatio and Agripinna really ought to talk to each other, as there is clearly a great deal that he could teach her, and, perhaps, even a great deal that she could teach him. Unfortunately, though, it is unlikely that their paths will ever cross. For one thing, Horatio will probably never come across Agrippina’s many articles, all of which are published in peer-reviewed journals that can, from Blimpshire, only be accessed online. This assumes that Blimpshire actually has half-decent broadband, which it doesn’t, and that Horatio is prepared to pay the Sicilian levels of blood money demanded by the Triad-like cartels that hold the rights to academic journals, which he isn’t – even if he knew about the articles at all, which he doesn’t. He also isn’t prepared to pay £95 for Agrippina’s book of 150 pages (with no illustrations), derived from her thesis, even if he knew about it, which – yes, that’s right – he doesn’t. Of course, Horatio could engage with Agrippina on social media, as she’s all over Twitbook, Instachat, Snapgram, and so forth; but he regards all of these, if not quite as the spawn of Satan, then as the deeply questionable pursuits of the young, i.e. anybody under 60 (which is his excuse to cover up the fact that he doesn’t have the first idea of how they work). Horatio could attend the conferences that Agrippina is speaking at, but these are hideously expensive, are a very long way from Blimpshire, and are, in any case, bound to be full of young people who don’t wear blazers and don’t read the Daily Telegraph. Consequently, Horatio stays in his man-cave (i.e. shed) in Blimpshire, quaffing Lidl Merlot and chuntering about out-of-touch academics in their ivory towers, while Agrippina goes to seminars where the apres-ski involves quaffing Lidl Merlot and declaiming about how she’s certain she’s covered absolutely every angle of her subject, little knowing what lurks within the copious folders in Horatio’s shed.

This, then, in a nutshell, is the role that organisations like the Society for Nautical Research should be playing – to bring together the Horatios and Agrippinas of this world in an atmosphere of mutual respect, and with a willingness to learn from each other. As things are at the moment, both ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’ in the field of maritime history are probably right to protest that it’s difficult to engage with each other: but to use another sporting analogy, of course it’s difficult to engage if your teams are actually playing in entirely different stadia. Many ‘amateurs’, like Horatio, are of a generation which, generally speaking, doesn’t blog and isn’t on social media (but, then again, neither are many senior ‘professional’ academics of exactly the same generation); many ‘professionals’ obtain their doctorates and complacently, if not arrogantly, assume that those who don’t have doctorates have nothing to teach them. True, the barriers are breaking down, and it may be, indeed, primarily a generational issue, which will vanish as the barriers between ‘professionals’ and ‘amateurs’, or, if you prefer, ‘historians’ and ‘antiquarians’, finally collapse – as they’re already doing, slowly but surely, as a glance at many maritime and naval history Twitter feeds will demonstrate. There, people from all kinds of backgrounds interact with each other as equals, exchanging ideas and information, while blogs, and websites like academia.edu, are opening up academic research to all, circumventing the outrageous paywalls of the publishing cartels.

Above all, then, let’s start by respecting what each of us does. As Professor Richard Harding rightly stated in his keynote at Greenwich, maritime history, like military history, depends hugely on its amateur practitioners, who, for example, often provide the volunteers who keep local maritime museums open, who restore historic boats, and who research those byways that ‘professionals’ are unlikely to go down, thereby frequently unearthing new information, and developing new perspectives, that are invaluable to the discipline as a whole. More power to your elbow, Horatio.

***

Finally – and I crave your indulgence here – I’ll talk a bit about myself. On one set of criteria, I suppose I’d be classed as a professional: doctorate, couple of fellowships, grand-sounding offices held in august societies, several major books published, ditto articles in major peer-reviewed journals (although never, curiously, in the Mariner’s Mirror, either in its previous incarnation or the present one). But on the other hand, I’ve never worked in a university or a major museum; some might say I’ve sold out any academic credibility I might have possessed by writing fiction (but hey, if it was good enough for Sir Julian Corbett, it’s good enough for me); and I’ve published one book where I most certainly was writing as an amateur, that being Blood of Kings, my rush-of-blood-to-head foray into sixteenth century Scottish history and the outermost fringes of downright esoteric, Knights-Templar-hunt-the-Holy-Grail, territory.

So what, exactly, am I? Professional? Amateur? Fish? Fowl?

Well, then.

If I don’t really know which label/s I should be sticking on myself, should I really worry about which label to stick on others? ‘Professional’, ‘amateur’, whatever, we’re all in this for exactly the same reason, and working towards exactly the same end – to uncover and preserve more and more of the countless past layers of the maritime world, and to trumpet the importance of those layers, and that world, as widely as possible.

So – ‘amateurs’ and ‘professionals’, or, if you prefer, ‘gentlemen’ and ‘players’, in the context of maritime history?

I, for one, no longer recognise those terms.

Time to move on.

 

A Very Palpable Hit: the State of Maritime Historical Research Conference 2017

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Greenwich, 0900, Saturday 9 September: will anybody actually come? will the speakers be any good? will the technology work? is this, the first conference that the Society for Nautical Research has ever staged under its own auspices, going to be a success?

Greenwich, 1745, Saturday 9 September: yes, they did; yes, they were; yes, it did (eventually); yes, it was, and resoundingly so; and yes, never has a pint in the Trafalgar Tavern tasted so good.

I need to start with a disclaimer. I have a distinct bias when reviewing Saturday’s event, just as I had a vested interest in its success, as the idea for it had largely emerged out of the SNR’s Research and Programmes Committee, which I chair. Somehow, I found my way into the conference programme as an ‘organiser’, although others did the hard work – a special shout-out here to Cathy Pearce, effectively the liaison between SNR and the conference’s other co-host, the Greenwich Maritime Centre, whose staff did a tremendous job – and, in the unavoidable absence of the SNR’s chairman, Admiral Sir Kenneth Eaton, I had to do quite a bit of ‘compere’ work, e.g. making the opening remarks, chairing the final round table, etc. (Hence the welcome nature of the pint at the Trafalgar.) But don’t take my word for it that the day went well: search Twitter under #MarConf2017, and you’ll get a sense both of the nature and range of the papers, and of the terrific ‘buzz’ in the auditorium.

The first business of the day was the presentation of the Society’s first ever Anderson award for lifetime achievement to Professor John Hattendorf. I don’t intend to recite John’s many achievements and publications here, nor attempt to summarise his colossal contribution to maritime history; suffice to say that I’ve known him for some 30 years now, have worked with him on a number of projects, and was therefore hugely honoured to be able to present him with his Anderson medal. John then presented the day’s first keynote address, which immediately struck an upbeat, positive tone. In his view, the last 20 years or so have seen the discipline become ever broader and more vibrant, with more journals appearing and more dimensions being studied; therefore, it’s time for us to stop worrying about the state of the discipline, and get on with research and writing.

Energised by John’s uplifting assessment, we moved onto the first session proper, with two historians at opposite ends of the career spectrum – Susan Rose, the doyenne of medieval naval historians, and Benjamin Redding of the University of Warwick, who has only recently embarked on his postdoctoral career. Susan provided a broad analysis of university provision for maritime history in the UK, noting its very patchy nature (and its depressing but probably inevitable focus on pirates) and the distinct neglect of her own medieval maritime field. Despite this, a number of major projects, such as the French Oceanides project, several new databases, and ongoing archaeological work on the likes of the Newport Ship, were making a major difference and reaching wide audiences. Ben, in turn, focused on the issues involved in bringing early modern naval history – a subject obviously very close to my heart – before undergraduate audiences, particularly in an inland university, and noted how the study of naval history in general was becoming ever broader, and, perhaps, had less of a ‘stigma’ attached to it than was once the case; the Mary Rose, for instance, is a perfect teaching tool for the social and political histories of the Tudor age.

Moving into the next session, we had a ‘double act’ from Susann Leibich and Laurence Publicover, who were looking at maritime literary cultures. Laurence, a literary scholar, is interested in representations of the sea in literature, travel writing, etc, while Susann is a historian of reading, a sub-discipline which has seen an increasing recent emphasis on the importance of geography and place. They produced some fascinating quotations to show, in Laurence’s case, how complete landlubbers adjusted to their first experiences of sea voyages, and in Susann’s, how voyagers fell back on their reading (for instance, of the classics) to interpret what they saw around them. The two are working on a database of voyage diaries, which should provide some fascinating new evidence. This paper, like several others on the day, demonstrates conclusively how scholars who would never define themselves as ‘maritime historians’ are now interacting with, and providing hugely important new perspectives on, our discipline.

This was emphasised again in the next paper in this session, from Sam Robinson of the University of York, who provided a fascinating survey of the history of ocean science – a discipline which, for much of the 20th century, was hugely important for military reasons (providing the science that underpinned, for example, anti-submarine warfare in World War II, and undersea surveillance during the Cold War), and which is now arguably even more important as a source of evidence of climate change. Sam drew our attention to a number of important books in the field, to the social media hashtag #histocean, and to the website oceansciencehistory.wordpress.com – all of which will be receiving my serious attention from now on!

Last up in this session was Cathy Pearce, one of the conference organisers, who addressed the question ‘is coastal history maritime history?’ Cathy suggested that maritime history needs to engage more directly with the history of coasts, and discussed the sorts of questions that coastal historians are asking, for instance at the hashtag #coastalhistory: the nature and occupations of coastal people, the shape, depth and influence of coastal zones, the extent to which these zones extend inland, ‘coastal squeeze’ (where different uses of the coast conflict with each other), and so forth. All of these questions had particular resonance for me, who grew up on the coast and who still does a fair bit of work on the history of that coast. (Incidentally, Cathy’s talk was also the best illustrated of the conference, with some stunning photographs of coastal scenes, many of them of her own taking.)

And so to lunch, including the inevitable frantic networking, connecting Person A with Person B, etc etc…

Now a tip for conference organisers: you need to ensure that you schedule a post-lunch speaker who will be dynamic, entertaining, and will keep the audience awake, and few people fit that bill better than Professor Eric Grove, our second keynote speaker. As ever, Eric was brilliantly iconoclastic, demolishing the notion that the defeat of the U-boats in World War I was due primarily to convoy, and in World War II to the pace of allied shipbuilding. In the case of the former, he argues that the organisation of food supply was the most important factor, with the quantity of imports of wheat, oats, etc, actually at its highest in what is traditionally regarded as the ‘crisis’ quarter of 1917. In the second war, the hugely improved pace of ship repair was more important than shipbuilding as a factor in winning the Battle of the Atlantic (or battles, as would Eric would have it). This talk demonstrated that naval historians have to cast their nets far beyond the study of ships, and even further beyond what are traditionally seen as ‘naval’ sources, in order to get a fuller and more accurate picture.

We then had a session on the changing world of the maritime museum, with Claire Warrior, from the National Maritime Museum, looking at the changing ways in which polar exploration had been presented at the museum – from being completely ignored, to having a presence in a basement (albeit only from 1951 onwards), to the current ‘Death in the Ice’ exhibition about the Franklin expedition (well worth a visit, and it’s nice to see the name of the expedition member who I’ve researched standing alongside Sir John Franklin’s outside the museum!), to the new permanent gallery that will open in 2018. Jo Stanley then provided a fascinating insight into ‘moving minorities from the margins in maritime museums’, focusing in particular on some of the exhibitions to which she’s contributed, and which seek to explore issues of race, gender and sexual orientation in maritime history: for example, the ‘Black Salt’ exhibition at the Merseyside Maritime Museum, the Wrens exhibition at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, and the touring exhibition ‘Hello Sailor’. Jo was frank about the ‘political’ difficulties that such exhibitions sometimes face from conservative trustees, outraged letter writers and even tabloid newspapers, but overall, the picture is an increasingly positive one, with an ever greater willingness to address the role of minorities and connect them to more mainstream themes. Above all, Jo came up with one of the day’s most memorable quotes, ‘museums need academics, academics need museums’. This, indeed, was one of the day’s main themes – the breaking down of the artificial, and invariably false, barriers that have often been erected between different disciplines and perspectives.

The final session proper took a regional focus, with Oliver Gates of Cambridge University providing a whistle-stop tour of maritime history in west Africa, which, he argued, is (or should be) much broader than the older literature, which focused overwhelmingly on the slave trade, or the newer sort, which focuses primarily on security. Mark Matthews, chair of Morol, the Institute of Welsh Maritime Historical Studies, then addressed a subject very dear to my heart, namely the state of maritime historical research in Wales. Mark had done some remarkable research on theses under way or completed in UK universities, which demonstrated the tiny number that could be defined as ‘maritime’, and the even tinier number that could be defined as ‘Welsh maritime’. In some respects, the picture in Wales is quite gloomy, with the recent deaths of many of the most eminent practitioners, the loss of university courses, and the lack of a national maritime museum; but the saving graces, as Mark suggested, are some excellent local museums, such as those in Nefyn, Holyhead, Porthmadog and Milford Haven / Pembroke Dock, plus the existence of the splendid journal Cymru a’r Mor / Maritime Wales (to which I’ve contributed several times, and which desperately needs an online presence to raise awareness of it).

So we came to the final keynote, given by Professor Richard Harding of the University of Westminster. Richard valiantly overcame certain unfortunate ‘noises off’ and delivered an excellent overview of the sometimes fraught relationship between historians and social scientists, asking what they could learn from each other and stressing the multi-disciplinary nature of maritime history before ending on what might perhaps be regarded as a slightly controversial note, suggesting that the discipline might be becoming more theoretical. This was followed by the final round table, with yours truly in the chair, which saw some lively contributions from the floor being fielded by our panel of the three keynote speakers. It was the sort of round table where we could easily have gone on for another hour or two at least, and I certainly got the sense that the subject matter could easily have sustained a two day conference. But the draconian chairman ended the session bang on time – after all, the pint at the Trafalgar was beckoning!

Finally, thanks again to Dr Tim Acott, Director of GMC, and to everybody who contributed to make the day a success. Finally, I’ve got a request for those of you who were there: we’d really like your feedback about how you thought the day went, what was good, what not so good, etc. (Use either the ‘contact’ page on this website, or the contact details on the SNR site.) That will help us with addressing the $64,000 question: will we do it again?

Watch this space for the answer!

Sea, the Conference

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This blog has often touched on the subject of ‘sea blindness’ in modern Britain, notably here, and I also took that as the theme of the keynote lecture I delivered to last year’s conference for new researchers in maritime history. One important element of this discussion is the state of maritime history research in the broadest sense of the term: after all, expecting greater public awareness of, and engagement with, ‘the sea’ in all its aspects, is likely to be pie in the sky if those engaged in that research are working on obscure or done-to-death themes, if they are overworked by the demands of the sectors they work in, or simply if their numbers are declining as successive governments put more and more emphasis on training up only scientists, engineers, IT specialists, and other supposedly ‘useful’ disciplines. A recent piece in Topmasts, the excellent online newsletter of the Society for Nautical Research (available to non-members, too), put forward a tongue-in-cheek proposal that the problem of relentless focus on one well-worked theme in particular could be addressed by instituting a seven-year ban on ‘the N word’ (as in ‘N’s Column in T Square’), in order to focus on lesser known and neglected themes. This author concluded with a provocative statement: ‘maritime history is too important to let it die or sink to the tokenism of one essay in an undergraduate course’.

It’s in this context that I’m delighted to join with the organising parties to make a really important announcement. For some time, the Research and Programmes committee of the Society for Nautical Research, which I chair, has been developing the first conference that the society has ever run under its own name, rather than sponsoring other people’s. There are many reasons for doing this: it’s one way of improving the ‘package’ we offer our members, as well as raising the society’s profile, but the society also wanted to offer something rather broader than the many conferences which focus on specific themes, say, or the anniversaries of particular events. Consequently, we’ve partnered with the wonderful Greenwich Maritime Centre, who will be providing the facilities and much of the organisation for the conference to be held on 9 September of this year, under the title ‘The State of Maritime History Research’.

The text of the call for papers (also available on the GMC website) follows, but the key point that I’d like to make here is that we want this to be broad an event as possible, touching on a wide range of themes and disciplines. It’s certainly not all ‘doom and gloom’ in the world of maritime history research, but where are the strong and weak areas? What are the challenges? Above all, what, if anything, can be done to address ‘sea blindness’ – and is that a valid concept in any case? We’re hoping to attract prominent speakers and delegates for what should be a really important event, which we hope will garner considerable publicity. Moreover, if this conference succeeds, we’re looking to make it a regular event, held every few years, because this is an ever-changing scene – for example, university courses disappear, or new ones come into being, with bewildering frequency, while in an age of austerity, it’s a sad truth that the survival of many maritime museums and even historic ships is in doubt. (Witness the current crisis over the survival of HMS President 1918, for example.)

I’m certainly minded to offer a paper myself, but if we get a scrum of outstanding speakers, I’ll happily step aside!

***

Over the past few decades there has been significant debate as to the place and shape of maritime history. In January 2008, the Council of the American Historical Association approved unanimously to add ‘Maritime, including Naval’ to its taxonomy of academic specialties. But since then, it has been suggested that the field has been marginalised.  Or does the growth of new areas of interest – such as the study of port towns, the ‘Atlantic World,’ Coastal History, and the role of gender in maritime history – suggest a flourishing, if more diverse, environment? What is the state of health in other research-orientated maritime activities such as public history and heritage?

The Greenwich Maritime Centre and the Society for Nautical Research are excited to announce a major conference to be held at the University of Greenwich to consider these questions. The conference will bring together key contributors from within the broad field of maritime history, as well as those who write on maritime and coastal topics, but do not consider themselves maritime historians. Papers and key discussion points will be published in hard copy and/or online by the Society of Nautical Research.

Proposals are invited for papers on any of the following aspects, or on other related and relevant themes. The principal criterion for acceptance will be the extent to which a paper provides a broad overview of the current situation in a specific field, and of the prospects for the future, rather than narrow, descriptive accounts of a particular period of history or historic ship (to give two examples).

  • The study of maritime history in the university and school sectors
  • The state of maritime research in particular geographical regions and countries
  • The state of particular sub-disciplines within maritime history and research, e.g. naval history, nautical archaeology, port towns, coastal studies
  • The health of the maritime museums sector, and current and future challenges for it
  • The state of the historic ships and craft sector
  • ‘Sea blindness’: fact or fiction?

Proposals of 500 words, together with a short biography of no more than 150 words, should be submitted by 1 June 2017  to  https://tinyurl.com/SNRConference2017

NB: There will be a nominal fee of £25 for the conference. Please book  at  https://maritimeresearch.eventbrite.co.uk, registration will open on 1 June 2017.

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

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I recently assumed the chairmanship of the Research and Programmes committee of the Society for Nautical Research. I was very proud to do so, and as my colleague Lorna Campbell, who’s just taken up the chair of the society’s Publications Committee, blogged about her new role last week, I thought I’d follow suit!

I’ve been a member of the SNR for over 30 years, so am very conscious indeed of the substantial boots I have to fill. This is true in the immediate sense: my predecessor in the chair, Susan Rose, is undoubtedly the acknowledged authority on England’s Medieval navy, and her book of that title rightly won the 2013 Anderson Medal, arguably the most prestigious book prize in the entire field of maritime history. In fact, the award of the Anderson is one of the main responsibilities of the committee that I now chair, and we’re already working our way through the 2014 long list. (In case you’re wondering about the time lag, the prize is given for books published in a given calendar year, so, given the relatively small size of the committee, the difficulty of getting everyone together in the same place, the length of our longlist, and the length and complexity of many books on maritime history, the winner is decided relatively late in the following year, with the actual presentation being made in the following spring. And no, the person chairing the committee doesn’t automatically win.)

However, it’s also true in a broader, less tangible sense. R C Anderson also made a substantial bequest to the SNR, and this now constitutes the Anderson fund – one of the two funds that the committee which I now chair draws upon to provide assistance to worthy causes in the field of maritime research, such as conferences and individual research assignments (albeit under strictly defined criteria, and within strictly defined timescales – see the SNR’s splendid new website for details). I never met Roger Charles Anderson himself – he died when I was 19 – but when I began my research all those years ago, he was still remembered fondly as one of the colossal figures in the field. The range of his published work was breathtaking, covering such diverse topics as the technical minutiae of ship rigging and sweeping overviews of naval warfare in the Baltic and Levant (books marked by his command of source material in foreign languages, which made him well ahead of his time). He contributed a huge number of articles, notes, queries and answers to the SNR’s journal, The Mariner’s Mirror, first published in 1911 (a year after the SNR was founded), which was my first point of contact with the society: as far as I can remember, I persuaded Llanelli Library to get a few copies on loan for me when I was probably in my early teens, and was struck both by the Mirror‘s unique, determinedly ‘retro’ Elizabethan cover (which it retains to this day) and the extraordinary range of subjects that could be discovered within its pages. It’s had quite a few vicissitudes since then, with the quality varying under different editorial regimes, but it’s now back to its status of unchallenged authority in the field.

As I say, Anderson was one of the ‘Olympian’ names when I first started out. I knew many of the giants of the next generation, who had known Anderson well: when I first joined the Council of the equally august Navy Records Society in 1987, it was dominated by the likes of Tony Ryan, Brian Ranft and Richard Ollard, the first two of whom were always very kind to me (the less said about Ollard the better, though; he and I disagreed fundamentally about Samuel Pepys). Formal business wear was de rigueur for Council meetings in those days, which were held in such exalted surroundings as the Athenaeum; goodness knows what the shades of those eminent scholars would make of today’s meetings in featureless conference rooms, attended by members in open neck shirts. But I’d like to finish this trip down memory lane by mentioning two other giants of that era, one of whom I only ever met once, while the other became a good friend. Robert Latham, editor of the monumental revised edition of The Diary of Samuel Pepys, retired as Pepys Librarian of Magdalene College, Cambridge, shortly before I began my research there, but he once invited me round for his tea in his wonderful house near the college, and we spent a blissful hour or two talking about all things Pepys. And then there was Alan Pearsall, slight, unassuming and modest, whose knowledge of naval and maritime history (and old railway timetables, come to that) was encyclopaedic, but who sadly published far too little. I’ll always remember Alan’s willingness to listen to the over-enthusiastic babbling of the three or four young bucks researching the Restoration navy at the time, and then to make a quiet remark or two that set us back on the right track. So when I’m assessing an Anderson medal nomination, or weighing up the merits of a funding application, in my capacity as chair of the SNR’s R&P committee, I’ll be conscious of my debt to those who have gone before me, and suspect I’ll hear Alan Pearsall’s quiet whisper in my ear: ‘ah, but have you thought of…’

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This is the first blog to be posted to my new combined website at jddavies.com! I’d thought for a while that it was a bit silly for me to have my website in one place and my blog in another, and I’d also been keen for some time to freshen up the former. So this seemed like a good way of killing two birds with one stone! Still a lot of work to do in terms of editing and adding extra content, but I’m reasonably happy with the way it’s looking. Brickbats, bouquets, and suggestions for improvement – above all, suggestions for things you’d like to see on the site – would be very welcome.