J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

The Lion of Midnight

Scandinavia or Bust

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A quick post this week, as I’m busy tidying up loose ends and packing before heading off to Scandinavia! I’m speaking at a conference in the Swedish Naval Museum, Karlskrona, and am ‘bookending’ the trip with overnight stays in Copenhagen, which I’ve never actually visited before. (There’s a possibility that I might never visit it this time, either, as I’m flying with a certain blue-liveried Irish airline…) I’m really looking forward to it, principally because of the opportunity to look round the normally closed Karlskrona dockyard, built from 1680 onwards and thus the classic surviving dockyard site from my principal period of study. The conference itself should be fascinating, too, with a wide range of multinational papers on dockyards and dockyard towns; I’m talking on ‘Pembroke Dockyard and the Welsh Nation’, so it’ll be interesting to see how a predominantly Swedish audience handles the smattering of Welsh I intend to throw into my talk.

(Probably rather better than I cope with any Swedish they throw into theirs, I should imagine.)

In any case, it’ll be great just to be back in Sweden again. I was last over there six years ago, when I had an extended stay in Kalmar and Gothenburg as ‘fieldwork’ for the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight; that trip was the first time I’d been outside Stockholm, where the Vasa is, of course, an irresistible draw for someone with my interests. I’ve also long had an interest in the history of Sweden’s ‘golden age’, and that explains why I set Lion there. As I wrote in the blog which ‘launched’ that particular title,

I actually taught it [Swedish history] to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

So next week, and probably in the post after that too, I’ll be blogging about the conference, and my impressions of both Karlskrona and Copenhagen. Until then, though, it’s back to the packing…

Enter the Lion

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Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight
Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website.

Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in the series, both in its setting and its subject matter. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, or the waters off the Atlantic coast of Sweden, during the early months of 1666. The second Anglo-Dutch war war is at a critical stage – France has declared war on the side of the Dutch, the combined kingdom of Denmark-Norway is about to do so. Meanwhile, a fleet of mast ships lies ice-bound in Gothenburg harbour, waiting for a thaw and an escort so it can bring back its vital cargo; for without fresh supplies of masts, the British fleet’s ability to continue the war will be finite. But what Matthew Quinton expects to be a straightforward piece of convoy escort duty becomes something much darker. What is the true mission of his mysterious passenger, Lord Conisbrough? Why does Matthew become involved in a shadowy power struggle within the Swedish government? Above all, how will he respond to the presence in Gothenburg of one of the most notorious of the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I? As he encounters enemies old and new, together with some unexpected allies, Matthew struggles to carry out his duty while confronting some powerful demons from his and his family’s past.

Carving of King Charles X (1654-60) from the wreck of the Kronan: Lansmuseum, Kalmar

So why this particular setting? For one thing, I’d long been interested in Sweden’s ‘Golden Age’, from roughly 1610 to 1721, when the country was one of the greatest powers in Europe. I actually taught it to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

As I write in the historical note to The Lion of Midnight,

The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus, der Löwe von Mitternacht to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resources. Although Gustavus’s intervention in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin…

Large tracts of territory in Scandinavia and northern Germany were conquered, the new city of Gothenburg was established as a ‘window to the west’, and the country also built up a formidable navy. I’d been to Stockholm several times to see the remarkable Vasa, but to research Lion, in February 2011 I spent a week in Kalmar and Gothenburg (aka Göteborg). The former houses the astonishing range of exhibits recovered from the wreck of the Kronan, which sank in 1676; at the time, she was one of the largest warships in the world, the brainchild of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. I was also really impressed by the museums in Gothenburg, notably the Maritime Museum and the City Museum; the latter has a vast model of the city as it was at pretty much exactly the time I’ve written about in Lion!

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum
Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

So I hope readers will enjoy The Lion of Midnight, which explores a relatively little known aspect of naval history, visits a fascinating foreign land at the height of its short-lived greatness, and sees the hero face challenges very different to any he has encountered before.

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When this post goes live, I’ll actually be hacking my way down the M5 to Devon for a few days of research fieldwork connected to the next Quinton book and some ongoing non-fiction projects. (Those of you who know the subject of ‘Quinton 5’ from my previous posts and the website might be wondering why on earth a story focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666 needs fieldwork in Devon, of all places. Watch this space, or better still, read the book in about a year’s time!) So next week, I hope to be blogging about some of the places I’ll have been to.

By Any Other Name…

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I’m back in full writing harness after a few days away in the Weald of Kent, visiting the likes of Hever Castle and Chartwell as well as making the obligatory jaunt over to Calais to pick up some cheese and one of those nice French apple tarts (and, yes, possibly the odd bottle of wine or two as well…). It was the first time I’d been to Chartwell, the home of Sir Winston Churchill from 1922 until his death, and although the house itself wasn’t open, a couple of exhibition areas were. One of them included a copy of a memo written by Churchill in 1945, shortly before he left office, in which he embarks upon a gloriously full-blooded Churchillian rant on the subject of foreign place names:

I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts…Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it. As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora Cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara.

With the surrender of Germany still some days away and the war against Japan still in full swing, the Prime Minister warmed to his theme.

You should note, by the way, the bad luck which always pursues peoples who change the name of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of their past…If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn Livorno, and the BBC will be pronouncing Paris Paree. Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names.

One wonders what Churchill would have made of the recent transformation of Peking into Beijing, Bombay into Mumbai and Calcutta into Kolkata. My attitude to such things is a bit more relaxed than Winston’s (perhaps because when I was only nine my home town changed its name from Llanelly to the Welsh version, Llanelli), but even so, it took me quite some time to realise that Chennai was not some sort of vast Indian version of Milton Keynes that had suddenly sprung up from nowhere but was in fact the city I had always called Madras. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realised just how much this question of ‘political (or historical) correctness’ in the selection of names impinges on my own work. For instance, in the fourth Quinton novel The Lion of Midnight, which I’m writing at the moment, a lot of the action is set in and around the city known to its inhabitants as Göteborg; but Quinton would undoubtedly have called it to Gothenburg, as most Britons still do to this day. (Of course, Churchill was quite prescient about this: the BBC and other media, which take such pains to get the spelling and pronunciation of the ‘new’ PC Asian and African names absolutely spot on, balk at applying the same approach to European names, presumably because they know that their audience would revolt if confronted with the likes of Göteborg and ‘Paree’.) On the other hand, Quinton would undoubtedly have called the Kings of both Sweden and Spain in 1666 ‘King Charles’, but I decided that this might cause confusion with the many references to his own king, Charles II, so the Swedish monarch has been rendered as Karl and the Spanish one as Carlos; but then, what to do about earlier Kings of Spain, as readers accustomed to think of the latter as ‘King Philip’ might be confused by ‘Felipe’?

Ultimately, my solution has been to apply a principle of selective inconsistency – to use the name that I think will be most easily recognisable to the majority of my readers, even if it doesn’t necessarily correspond to either absolutely accurate historical or modern practice. But I have much worse to come later in the year, namely my naval history of Wales, Britannia’s Dragon. Believe me, the minefield that is getting the terminology of the modern Third World correct is as nothing when compared with the dilemmas presented by Welsh placenames. Should it be Swansea or Abertawe (or, in the spirit of Derry/Londonderry, both?). Should the river be spelt Towy – probably still the form most familiar to non-Welsh readers – or Tywi, the correct modern (and ancient) version? Should I place Pontypridd in its current administrative region, the county borough of Rhondda Cynon Taf, or in the historical county of Glamorgan? I have a feeling that the somewhat idiosyncratic solutions I’ll be adopting might enrage a few purists with both Welsh linguistic and English historical sensibilities, and will almost certainly have Winston spinning in his grave, but I guess it’s a risk I’ll have to take!

The Joy of Source

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I’ve encountered some writers who look upon research as a huge and daunting mountain that they have to climb before they can actually start the fun part, the writing itself. I look on it very differently, probably because I spent many years as a ‘proper’ research historian before I started writing fiction and non-fiction aimed at a general, rather than an academic, audience. Research can be huge fun – the thrill of discovering something previously unknown in some musty archive takes some beating, while actually handling the materials left behind by people from previous generations is often both humbling and moving. In that respect, I’m particularly fortunate that the two main projects I’ve got underway at the moment involve some particularly fascinating research and in some cases a revisiting of old friends. For example, the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight, is set in Sweden in 1666. I taught seventeenth-century Swedish history to several generations of sixth formers, and some of them still recall ‘the Swedish question’ with affection. (Choosing such an apparently obscure topic wasn’t just self-indulgence on my part, although it did fit nicely with my ‘must-teach’ topic on the 17th century military and naval revolution; there was a considerable element of cunning strategy involved, as the less frequented topics like Sweden often had ‘easier’ questions set on them, and it was easier for good candidates to stand out in a smaller field.) So delving back into the histories of the Vasa dynasty, of Sweden’s ‘golden age’ and her ‘Gothic fantasy’, of the enigmatic Queen Christina and her successors, has really felt like a happy revisiting of old acquaintances!

 

The same has been true of my parallel work on the new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This has really taken me back to my roots, both geographically and in terms of source material. For example, I’ve been revisiting the medieval Welsh chronicles, which I last looked at seriously 30 years ago; my first ever published piece was actually not naval at all but a piece of early medieval history. But I’ve also been discovering all sorts of previously untouched topics and, for me, unfamiliar sources, ranging from articles in journals about Roman archaeology to nineteenth century newspapers and twentieth century pacifist tracts. Over the weekend I was looking at the 1901 census online. I’d used this when compiling my family history, but had never really worked on it systematically, so some of the results were at once interesting and alarming. The census was transcribed by prisoners, a fact that caused some controversy at the time, and although there’s been much discussion of the sometimes bizarre consequences among genealogists over the last decade, it had never really presented me with an issue. However, looking at the transcriptions of the returns for HM ships (as part of a sampling process to estimate the number of Welshmen in the navy at the time) has turned up some unsettling but also hilarious findings. The prize of the day goes to the hapless convict who transcribed the return for the sloop HMS Racoon, lying at Aden. Like many ships on foreign stations, the Racoon had entered a significant number of crewmen locally – listed on her return as ‘seedies’. The ship had a particularly interesting and eclectic mix, including Somalis, Sudanese and Portuguese Goans, but this evidently caused insuperable difficulties for the incarcerated transcriber. Thus ‘Socotra’ was rendered as ‘Scotland’, ‘Comoro Islands’ as ‘Romania’ (!), and my personal favourite, ‘Sierra Leone’ as ‘Sierra, Lancashire’. Conversely, he managed to transform the old Anglicised spelling of Caernarfon, ‘Carnarvon’, into the far more exotic ‘Carnaroon’. I’ll keep a lookout for any more howlers as I continue to work through the returns, but one wonders just how many unsuspecting individuals researching their family history and relying in the first instance on the online transcriptions have been thrown off track by the incompetence (or simple laziness) of inmates who make Norman Stanley Fletcher look like a Nobel Prize winner.