J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

tarpaulins

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 3: Or, Getting It Wrong and Getting It Right

by

My original intention for this week was to do a ‘straight’ factual outline of the careers of the three most famous ‘tarpaulin’ officers of the Restoration period, the closely inter-connected Sir Christopher Myngs, Sir John Narbrough and Sir Cloudesley Shovell. But the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was a more important theme which their careers revealed. And for once, Wikipedia provides perfectly adequate outlines of their lives, which makes any repetition here superfluous: Myngs, the Commonwealth sea-captain who became an almost legendary ‘quasi-pirate’ in the Caribbean before becoming a knight and a flag officer, dying heroically during the Four Days Battle of 1666 (which will be the subject of the fifth Quinton novel); his protege Narbrough, who commanded a Mediterranean fleet against the Barbary corsairs in the 1670s before dying on a wild goose chase after a fabulous sunken Spanish treasure; Shovell, the protege of both, who became one of the most successful admirals of the long war with France after 1689 before perishing in one of history’s worst and most significant shipwrecks, the loss of the Association in 1707, which triggered the concerted campaign to discover a way of accurately determining a ship’s longitude. 

Writing twenty years ago in my first book, Gentlemen and Tarpaulins: The Officers and Men of the Restoration Navy, from which this blog takes its title, I unconsciously perpetuated a myth about these three men. Pepys recorded how Myngs boasted of his father being a shoemaker and his mother a hoyman’s daughter, and at the time I accepted this at face value, noting how Shovell had started out as a captain’s servant – effectively the ‘cabin boy’ of popular fiction and pantomime – to Narbrough, just as Narbrough started in the same way under Myngs.

It was only after writing G&T that I got to know north Norfolk really well, spending a fair amount of time in the once-wealthy ports (albeit decayed even by the 17th century) along the coast: Burnham Overy, where Nelson later learned to sail, Wells, Morston (where I’ve done some of my own sailing), Blakeney, Wiveton, Cley, over to Salthouse and Cromer.  Fieldwork in these places revealed a very different story to that painted by Myngs, Pepys – and myself. Myngs, it transpired, was indeed the son of a shoemaker, but a well-to-do one who was based in the city of London, not the backwoods of Norfolk. His mother was the daughter of a well-off landowner who owned several ships based at Salthouse; she was thus only a ‘hoyman’s daughter’ in the sense that her father owned hoys. Christopher Myngs himself inherited a substantial house in Salthouse which still stands. Narbrough was from the tiny, decayed village of Cockthorpe just down the coast from Salthouse; he was probably related to Myngs as another Narbrough lived at Wiveton, even closer to Salthouse.  This Narbrough was married at Salthouse’s glorious church, where 17th century graffito sailing ships can still be seen, carved into the pews, and where the gravestone of Myngs’ daughter Mary is still extant. Shovell, in turn, was also baptised at Cockthorpe, but his father was from a well-off Norwich family and his mother came from the Cley merchant community. Shovell did indeed go into sea under Narbrough, just as Narbrough went to sea under Myngs, but in many respects this was as clear-cut a case of patronage among the well-to-do as the promotion of many of Charles II’s ‘gentleman captains’.

Therefore, it’s clear that tarpaulins like Myngs (and Sir Richard Munden, the subject of last week’s post) emphasised or exaggerated their humble origins, perhaps partly in order to make themselves more appealing to the wider public and to build personal legends around themselves. With the courtly connections and genteel mannerisms of the ‘gentleman captains’ under attack in Parliament and pamphlet literature from the 1660s through to the 1700s, stressing one’s humble background and unpretentious ways became an important means of giving oneself a distinct and populist character. For example, Sir William Booth, who became a friend of and source of naval information for Pepys in the 1680s, claimed that he spent three years sleeping on deck ‘with nothing over him but a tarpaulin, that his seamen might be the better contented to do as he did’ – an implausible claim (and Booth’s whole career reveals a man prone to exaggeration), but one that was clearly intended to impress Pepys, who was known to be sympathetic to the tarpaulins and antipathetic to Booth’s factional rival, the notoriously immoral gentleman captain Arthur Herbert, the future Earl of Torrington.

Thus the tarpaulins were aware of ‘spin’ and ‘image management’ long before modern marketing coined those terms. In fact, many ‘tarpaulin’ officers, like Myngs and Shovell, came from backgrounds that were arguably as respectable as those of many ‘gentlemen’; as I argued in Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, the key difference between the two groups was not social origins but career pattern. This is particularly apparent when one visits an area like north Norfolk, comparatively isolated from the rest of the country, dominated by a few great houses (Felbrigg, Blickling, Raynham), but otherwise characterised by tightly-knit, interrelated and intermarried mercantile communities in which lesser gentry could be found alongside families of humbler status. These tight networks immediately become apparent when one visits the graveyards of, and studies the monuments within, the superb churches that line the north Norfolk coast.

I suppose the moral of this story for historians and novelists alike is simple – nothing beats actual research ‘on the ground’. It’s possible to glean only so much from ‘mainstream’ books or manuscript sources. A sentence on a monument high on a church wall, or a paragraph in an otherwise dubious local history written a century ago by an enthusiastic amateur, or simply looking out over a landscape and suddenly realising the possible connections between person A in village X with family B over in village Y: all of these things can provide insights that one would never have obtained elsewhere, as well as providing real local colour and depth of description in both fiction and non-fiction. Plus of course this sort of fieldwork has the added advantage of justifying holidays in some lovely parts of the world!!

Finally, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers. This blog will return on 3 January 2012.

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 2

by

This week, a couple more ‘tarpaulin’ officers whose lives provided inspiration for the character of Kit Farrell in ‘the journals of Matthew Quinton’. I’ll conclude the series next week with a look at probably the most famous tarpaulins of the age – the closely interconnected Norfolk admirals Christopher Myngs, John Narbrough and Cloudesley Shovell.

The Munden brothers – The careers of Sir Richard and Sir John Munden were particularly remarkable in two respects. First, they were particularly low-born, even for ‘tarpaulin’ officers; their father was the ferryman at Chelsea, although this was actually quite a lucrative employment, given the absence of bridges on that stretch of the Thames. Secondly, they rose to prominence at a time when opportunities for promotion for their kind were becoming ever more limited because of the increasing dominance of the ‘gentlemen captains’. That they were able to achieve what they did can only be a tribute to their own abilities.

Richard was born in about 1640, which would effectively make him an exact contemporary of both Kit Farrell and Matthew Quinton. He served in merchant ships prior to the second Anglo-Dutch war, entering the navy in 1666 as captain of the Swallow Ketch. He commanded a sloop in 1668 and then became master attendant at Deptford dockyard before commanding the Fourth Rate Princess in 1672. In the following year he took command of the Assistance, tasked with escorting outward bound East Indiamen as far as St Helena. Unknown to Munden, the Dutch had captured the island before he got there. He immediately launched an attack, and in addition to recapturing the island he snapped up three homeward-bound Dutch East Indiamen. His success led to a knighthood  and later to another plum command, the large Fourth Rate St David, employed on convoy work in the Mediterranean. Munden died shortly after the ship returned to England in 1680. He was buried in Bromley church, where his monument states ‘having been (what upon public duty, and what upon merchants’ accounts) successfully engaged in fourteen sea-fights … he died in the prime of his youth and strength, in the 40th year of his age’. The post-mortem inventory of his house in Bromley (where there is still a block of flats called ‘Munden House’) revealed an estate worth almost £6000, including shares in four merchant ships, chairs and carpets from Turkey, other materials from India, and a ‘Japan cabinet’. Munden left five daughters and a son, Richard, who later became a general in the army.

Richard’s prominence in the 1670s meant that he was able to promote the career of his younger brother John, who had been born in about 1645 but whose first thirty years of life are shrouded in obscurity. From 1677-80, though, John was his brother’s lieutenant in the St David, subsequently gaining several more lieutenancies before obtaining the command of a fireship in 1688. In 1689 he became flag captain to Lord Berkeley, Rear-Admiral of the Red squadron, and held the same post under Berkeley’s successor Sir Ralph Delaval aboard the Coronation, in which he fought at the disastrous Battle of Beachy Head (1690). From 1691 to 1693 he commanded the Lenox (the subject of Restoration Warship, a superb book by my good friend Richard Endsor, the cover artist of Gentleman Captain), fighting in her at the Battle of Barfleur in May 1692. He commanded various large ships in the latter stages of the Nine Years War and was promoted Rear-Admiral in 1701, when William III knighted him.

In January 1702 Munden took command of a squadron tasked with intercepting a powerful French force expected to sail from Rochelle to Corunna, then on to the West Indies. He cruised off Corunna but the French evaded him during the night and got safely into port. He considered the harbour too well defended and narrow to contemplate an attack. He was court-martialled for negligence on 13 July but acquitted, and returned to his command. However, public opinion had been highly critical of him for not pursuing the French into Corunna harbour, and the privy council was dissatisfied with his acquittal. Queen Anne and her ministers yielded to the public pressure and dismissed him. This is an excellent example of how public opinion had become an important factor in naval policy by about 1700; it had certainly not been so to the same degree in Charles II’s reign, and its increasing importance during the eighteenth century would ultimately lead to such dramas as the execution of Admiral Byng and the Keppel-Palliser court-martial in 1778. Meanwhile Sir John Munden retired to Chelsea, where he was described in his old age as ‘a very plain man in his conversation and dress, of a fair complexion’. He died on 13 March 1719.

The Real Tarpaulins, Part 1

by

In recent posts, I’ve looked at the lives of some of the real ‘gentleman captains’ who became models for my fictional character, Matthew Quinton. Drawn from the aristocracy and gentry, often possessing very little prior experience of the sea, the ‘gentlemen’ became increasingly dominant in the navy of Charles II and Samuel Pepys. By doing so, they gradually restricted the opportunities for ‘tarpaulins’ to rise to command – men like Matthew’s friend Kit Farrell, professional seamen who had either worked their way up through warrant officer posts or had come in from the merchant service. (These career paths often overlapped; like the seamen themselves, ‘tarpaulins’ frequently moved between naval and merchant ships during the course of their careers.) In this and the next couple of posts, I’ll outline the careers of a few tarpaulin officers who provided inspiration for the character of Kit.

Sir John Berry, c.1636-90 – Berry’s background was respectable; he was the son of a Devon vicar. But his father was removed from his living for Anglican and royalist tendencies, so the family fell into poverty and John and his brothers had to seek a living as best they could. He served in merchant ships before moving into the navy after the Restoration. By 1663 he was boatswain of the Swallow Ketch in the Caribbean, and when the command fell vacant, Berry was appointed to it by the governor of Jamaica, Sir Thomas Modyford, a fellow Devonian who was related to George Monck, Duke of Albemarle, the architect of the Restoration and joint admiral of the fleet in 1666. These connections benefited Berry when he returned to England in the latter year; Albemarle gave him several commands, and in 1667 he went back to the Caribbean as captain of the hired ship Coronation, commanding the squadron which won the Battle of Nevis against the French in May 1667. This success cemented Berry’s reputation. He held several important commands before the outbreak of the third Anglo-Dutch war; when that began he was given command of the Third Rate Resolution, earning his knighthood for his defence of the Duke of York’s flagship during the Battle of Solebay (28 May 1672), and he also served in all three major battles in 1673. In 1676-7 he went to Virginia in command of the Bristol, leading the naval forces assigned to put down ‘Bacon’s rebellion’. So respected was Berry that in 1680-1 King Charles II entrusted him with the naval training of his illegitimate son the Duke of Grafton during a Mediterranean cruise aboard the frigate Leopard.

In 1682 he was given command of the Gloucester, carrying the Duke of York to Scotland, but the ship was wrecked off the Norfolk coast. No blame attached to Berry; quite the opposite, as it was probably only his efforts that saved the heir to the throne’s life. In 1683 he went to Tangier as vice-admiral of the fleet tasked with evacuating the expensive English colony. During the voyage he befriended Samuel Pepys, a relationship that paid dividends in 1686 when Berry was appointed to Pepys’s special commission for rebuilding the navy. In 1688 Berry became rear-admiral of the fleet entrusted with defending against William of Orange’s invasion, but he was staunchly anti-French and anti-Catholic, becoming an active Williamite conspirator and even got involved in a plot to kidnap the admiral, Lord Dartmouth. Berry’s health deteriorated markedly through 1689 and he died on 14 February 1690, being buried at Stepney church.

Berry did very well out of his naval service: at his death he owned a house in Mile End and other property in Middlesex and Kent. Perhaps his greatest failing was a tendency toward immodesty. He was an outstanding seaman, greatly respected by the men, and he lost no opportunity to trumpet his own competence and popularity. Ultimately, though, his career had owed much to those two vital factors for the success of any 17th century naval officer: luck and good connections.