J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Wales

The Comfort Zone

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One of the challenges and delights of working on my new non-fiction book, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales, is that it’s taking me into all sorts of uncharted territory and, in some cases, territory I’m revisiting after many years. The book is meant to cover the entire time period from the Romans (AD 60, to be exact, and Suetonius’ attack on Anglesey) to the present day, so large areas are well outside what I’d regard as my comfort zone. I suppose that said zone would extend from the sixteenth century through to about 1815, with the core being my principal specialisation from about 1640 to about 1700. But as I’ve said before in this blog and elsewhere, I originally started out with an interest in twentieth-century warships, so the period from roughly 1939 onwards is also an area I’m very comfortable with. Over the years I’ve also done various bits and pieces of work on aspects of the Victorian period and World War I, so getting up to speed there isn’t a problem at all.

All of which still leaves huge swathes of history that are relatively new to me, and very exciting. The American civil war has always fascinated me – I remember collecting picture card series about it when I was a boy, I recently read Amanda Foreman’s vast and very impressive study of Britain’s relationship with the conflict, and, yes, I own the DVDs of both Gettysburg and Gods and Generals – but I had no real idea of just how many Welshmen served, or of the part that Welsh waters played in the fitting out of some of the Confederate raiders. There were Welshmen aboard the Monitor, the Virginia (aka Merrimac) and the Alabama, and from my point of view, the recent reconstruction of the face of one of the Welsh crewmen on the Monitor has been really timely. I’ve also had to find out more about the various wars between the South American states in the 19th century – Welshmen and other Britons served in pretty well all of their navies and all of their wars, and one of the early heroes of the Chilean navy was an ‘Admiral Bynon’, originally a Beynon from the Gower.

But the really big leap outside the comfort zone has come with what could be termed ‘the early stuff’. My knowledge of the Romans is probably pretty similar to that of most people, i.e. nice walks on Hadrian’s Wall and occasional visits to the likes of Caerleon, watching Gladiator and episodes of Time Team, and Monty Python’s rant about ‘what have the Romans ever done for us?’. I suppose my opinions were jaundiced by my experience of school Latin, which was taught by a formidable gentleman who possessed a truly Roman nose, was inevitably nicknamed ‘Caesar’, and seemed old enough to have actually known his namesake at first-hand. (A corrective – he later became the Headmaster pro tem, very much in ‘Goodbye Mr Chips’ fashion, and I got to both know him very well and to respect him greatly.) Despite Caesar’s best efforts I never became much good at Latin (nor any languages, come to that), although I loved the historical aspects, so getting up to speed on the Saxon shore forts, the Classis Britannica and last year’s exciting archaeological discoveries at Caerleon has been hugely enjoyable.

The same is true of that period which it was still politically correct to term ‘the Dark Ages’ when I first studied it at Oxford. I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed the period from 410 (when, according to the university’s Modern History Faculty, ‘modern history’ began) to 1066 and beyond – I was taught the Venerable Bede by a bouncy ex-nun and the really Dark Ages by James Campbell, a wonderful, inspiring Oxford don of the old school whose rooms were a battleground for domination between books and cats. It always intrigued me how historians of the period could disagree so violently over a tiny number of sources – at the time the great controversy was over James Morris’s Age of Arthur, which built an enormously complex and ambitious interpretation of the period by making some remarkably imaginative assumptions (some of his critics preferred ‘ludicrous guesses’) based on minute fragments of evidence. In getting myself up to speed on such topics as the ‘Strathclyde Welsh’,  King Edgar’s famous rowing ceremony on the Dee in 973, and whether the Vikings were really the horn-helmeted pillagers of my recollection ((but said recollection might be over-dependent on the Kirk Douglas / Tony Curtis film, The Vikings…) or else the nice peaceful cuddly-bunny traders that modern orthodoxy seems to favour, I see that little seems to have changed – historians still seem to be arguing over exactly the same phrases in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, etc, that were causing them so much angst over thirty years ago! And then again, something strange seems to have happened to Norse names; the king I’ve always called Harold Hardrada now seems to be known as Haraldr harðráði, so do I have to adopt the latter? Of course, the added complication with Welsh history is the astonishing proliferation of petty kingdoms and kings with pretty similar names. So remind me again – which was which out of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, Gruffydd ap Cynan and Gruffydd ap Rhydderch, not to mention Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd, when did Deheubarth replace Dyfed, and can I attribute any naval history of any sort to the kingdom of Rhwng Gwy a Hafren? But seriously, getting outside the comfort zone is good. It’s refreshing. It’s exhilarating. Historians and authors everywhere should try it!

Below: the estuary of the River Tywi, site of the naval battle of Abertywi in 1044 between the Dublin-Norse fleet recruited by Hywel ap Edwin, King of Deheubarth, and the native fleet of Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, King of Gwynedd, the only native Welsh ruler in the era of independent kingdoms to establish his own powerful naval force; Gruffydd won a decisive victory and Hywel was killed. On the right-hand headland stands Llansteffan Castle, built in the 12th century to guard both the navigable river leading to Carmarthen, then the largest town in Wales and the seat of royal government in the south, and the important ferry across the Tywi estuary (part of the major pilgrimage route to St David’s cathedral). Behind the left-hand, or southern, headland is the estuary of the Taf, leading to Laugharne of Dylan Thomas fame.  

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!

Stepney 200

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Last Monday, 3 October, marked the 200th anniversary of the death of a lesser known but fascinating figure of the Regency age: Sir John Stepney, Baronet, sometime ambassador to Dresden and Berlin. Stepney died at Trnava in modern-day Slovakia, and in many respects his afterlife proved as memorable as his 68 years of living. He gave instructions that he should receive what was essentially an atheist funeral, but the local authorities seem instead to have given him both a Protestant and a Catholic service. His will was dominated by two principal themes: the construction of a particularly byzantine entail, the implications of which occupied and perplexed his heirs for over a century, and the arrangements for the transportation of his pet pug Carlino back to England, through the heart of war-torn Napoleonic Europe. (The dog died on the journey, but Sir John’s valets claimed the reward specified in the will by dumping the canine corpse on the doorstep of the ex-mistress he had named as the recipient.) A fashionable ‘macaroni’ in his younger days, and eminent enough to have been painted by Reynolds, Stepney was a close friend of Charles James Fox and a part of the Prince of Wales’s circle, connections that led to his appointment as an ambassador. At Berlin he had audiences with Frederick the Great, then nearing the end of his reign, and reported Frederick’s blunt opinion that the new United States of America was far too big to last for very long and was as doomed to failure as any union of European nations would be. Opinions of his ambassadorial service were mixed. Nathaniel Wraxall, who visited him in Dresden in 1778, praised the ‘hospitality and polished manners’ of ‘one of the finest gentlemen to have been employed on missions during the present reign’, but one critic snidely attack both Stepney and his mother: ‘Sir J- S-, who saunters about the assemblies of Dresden in honour of his royal master, is a gay young man, of an elegant taste, and with an estate most heavily encumbered by a dowager, who makes life too agreeable to think of leaving it.’ (The dowager Lady Stepney had a formidable temper and an eccentric personality, perhaps best encapsulated in her decision to name her favourite dog Serpent.)

Sir John’s pleasures were principally the turf (disastrously), the card tables (ditto) and women (with mixed success). He never married, but fathered three acknowledged illegitimate sons and a fourth reputed one. His most passionate liaison was probably that with Lady Almeria Carpenter, one of the great court beauties of the 1770s; unfortunately, though, she was also notoriously dim. They were engaged to be married, but it seems likely that his seduction of her, leading to the birth of the boy who became Lieutenant-Colonel Orlando John Williams of the Newfoundland Regiment, ended the relationship. She soon took up with a far more illustrious lover, the Duke of Gloucester, the most bovine of the brothers of King George III. (Stepney got his own back in due course; he seems to have become the lover of the Duchess of Cumberland, widow of another of the brothers.)

Stepney came from an intriguing and influential family, one which bore a name that remains a byword to a quarter of the world’s population: in the Indian sub-continent and Brazil, a ‘Stepney’ is still the name for a vehicle’s spare tyre. The bloodline also produced George Stepney, diplomat, poet and leading member of the Kit Kat Club during Queen Anne’s reign, as well as close friends of an eclectic range of prominent figures from Gladstone and Tennyson to Karl Marx and Dylan Thomas. John’s younger brother Tom was one of the most recognisable eccentrics in London clubland and also served as a witty Blackadder-like groom of the bedchamber to the Prince Regent’s brother, the ‘grand old Duke of York’. Their parents had inhabited one of the most spectacular Georgian houses in Wales, Llanelly House – now being restored by a dynamic project team, and due to open to the public in 2013. I’ve been working on a book about the family for about 15 years now, and hope that its appearance will coincide roughly with the opening of the great house; I’ll cover other aspects of the history of the Stepneys in subsequent blogs. As part of the ongoing research for the book, I hope to be able to visit Trnava one day fairly soon and to pay my respects properly to that fascinating old rogue, Sir John Stepney.

Dragon’s Den

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Just a quick update this week, because after several weeks of doing other things it’s time to get back down to serious writing with a vengeance!

I thought I’d provide occasional updates on the progress of each of my projects, and will start with my new non-fiction book for The History Press, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. The subject has caused some amusement even among people with a good knowledge of either Welsh or naval history – veiled titters about heavily armed coracles, and so forth. But although I’ve only done a fraction of the research I need to do in the various national repositories in London, the National Library of Wales, and each of the county record offices in the principality, it’s already clear that this is a huge, very rich and wholly neglected theme. I was particularly struck by this last week when working at the British Library and reading an otherwise outstanding collection of essays called Wales and War, covering the interactions between social, political, religious and military history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet even such an impressively wide-ranging work contains precisely one reference to the Royal Navy per se. This ‘amnesia’ runs deep: even people who live immediately adjacent to the battle site, and are very knowledgeable about the history of the area, have never heard of the Battle of Abertywi in 1044, arguably the largest and most important naval action fought in Welsh waters. To be fair, this neglect of the pervasiveness of naval history and heritage isn’t just confined to Wales. I regularly give a talk on ‘Bedfordshire and the Sailing Navy’ to local history societies in the county, and despite Bedfordshire being one of the most land-locked counties in England, it, too, has many fascinating naval connections stretching back many centuries (the most adjacent to where I live being the evocative tomb of Admiral Byng, famously executed pour encourager les autres, as Voltaire put it). But I’m always saddened at how little of this is known to local people.

Therefore ‘sea blindness’ runs deep, especially as one gets further away from the sea, but reminders of the country’s naval past turn up in all sorts of unlikely places. For example, Cilycwm in Carmarthenshire is about as remote as it gets – a tiny and isolated village high in the hills, on the edge of the mid-Wales plateau (as I learned through experience when having to deliver TVs there during a summer job in the 1970s, long before the invention of sat nav!). But even there, the church contains a memorial to local man Admiral David Powell Price, appointed to command the British squadron in the Pacific at the outbreak of the Crimean War. Price had only commanded individual ships during 40 years of peace, and as he prepared his squadron for action, he seems to have realised that he was wholly unqualified to cope with the vast responsibility thrust upon him; and as his flagship approached the Russians, Price took out his gun and shot himself. He will certainly feature in Britannia’s Dragon, along with many other little known or wholly untold stories!