J D Davies - Historian and Author

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

Warship names

The Return of Ranty McRantface

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[Note: those not interested in naval stuff, or in a good old-fashioned rant, can look away now, watch repeats of The West Wing or Jeremy Kyle on daytime TV, and come back next week instead.

On the other hand, if you’re not interested in naval stuff or good old-fashioned rants, what the heck are you doing here in the first place?]

 

So the first Type 26 frigate, the first major British surface warship to have been named for at least nine years (and has there ever been such a long hiatus in the entire history of the navy?) will be called HMS Glasgow.

We now know its name, but will its canteen serve deep fried Mars bars?

Enter, stage right, the cynics, who inevitably christened the new ship Frigatey McFrigateface; enter, stage left, perhaps the last thalasso-historically literate* journalist in the United Kingdom, who rightly points out the illustrious historical pedigree of the ship name in question.

Now, regular readers of this blog – hope the straitjackets aren’t too tight, folks – will know that I’m distinctly interested in the subject of warship names, and have previously blogged about it here and here. Oh, and an entire chapter of my new book Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy, based partly on three other posts on this site, is devoted to the subject. So I hope you’ll forgive me if I venture into the fray once more, because at the current rate of ordering new warships, I may never get the opportunity to do so again.

So first, the good news. Making the new frigates a ‘City Class’ at least gets us away from the utter insanity of alphabetical naming (so no temptation for our current government to seek private sponsorship for a new E-class, thus giving us HMS Easyjet), and of naming major warships after the descendants of the illegitimate children of King Charles II.

Now, the bad news. Obviously, there’s no political motive whatsoever in giving the name Glasgow to a warship about to be built in, umm, Glasgow, a city which has voted overwhelmingly (and more than once) in the recent past for the SNP, at a time when talk of a second Scottish independence referendum is still floating around in the ether. Equally plainly, there’ll be no political motive whatsoever in naming subsequent ships of the class after cities which have significant numbers of marginal constituencies. Anybody take odds against a new HMS London, HMS Plymouth or HMS Sheffield? No, thought not.

An excellent image of an early HMS Torbay, exactly where you’d expect to find it – on a pub sign in rural west Wales

Actually, though, none of this is very new, because for over 300 years, geographical names have always been a surefire giveaway sign that those responsible for ship naming are playing safe. Although there had been earlier examples, the first great age of geographical naming was the 1690s, when the navy first acquired such ultimately iconic names as Cornwall, Devonshire, Dorsetshire, and the only very recently retired Torbay, although that had specific political connotations at the time. In an age of profound political division, geographical names were largely uncontroversial, and ever since, they have always been the first resort of administrations desperate to prove that the navy is connected with the nation as a whole, particularly in eras of austerity. Witness, for example, the decision to give county names (and almost exclusively rural counties to boot) to the principal class of heavy cruisers built between the two world wars, to name classes of frigates built in the 1950s and 1960s after holiday resorts – off whose beaches they could anchor as obese sunburned tourists floated past them on pedalos – and to allocate geographical names to all but six of twenty-eight destroyers ordered between 1960 and 2017, and all but eight of thirty-one frigates ordered between 1975 and 2017. True, really big surface ships and submarines have always been named to different criteria (and thus have much more interesting names), but as the numbers of both have got smaller and smaller, so the proportion of geographical names in what some still euphemistically refer to as ‘the fleet’ has got larger and larger.

What all this means, of course, is that unless there’s a serious change of heart at some point, many of the great names of the Royal Navy’s history are very unlikely ever to sail again. There’s clearly no desire to name ships after great admirals any more (heroes, after all, only appear in blockbuster movies these days), so farewell Blake, Hawke, Howe, and all the rest. Classical names have evidently gone out of the window now school curricula ensure that most officers, let alone ratings, probably only associate Virgil with Thunderbirds and Homer with The Simpsons, so vale, Leander, Bellerophon and Minotaur. Battles, of course, run the risk of offending pretty much everybody we need to do post-Brexit trade deals with, so don’t even think of mentioning Agincourt, Armada, Matapan, or even Amethyst. (A reminder that we exchanged live fire with Communist China within living memory? What could possibly go wrong?). 

HMS Amethyst: making Liam Fox’s job more difficult since 1949

All of which leaves us with safe, boring, predictable geographical names, or at least, those safe, boring, predictable names that happen to make each successive cut as a new class is named. I doubt if any Ships Names Committee will ever be as bold as that of the 1960s which suddenly introduced brand new names in Glamorgan and Fife, but is it too much to hope for some names to accurately reflect modern Britain, rather than pandering to political agendas and lobbying from old shipmates who served on the last HMS Whatever and are determined to get a new one at all costs? It’s a curious fact, for example, that the most important city outside of the capital in Scotland now has the fourth major warship to be named after it in the last 100 years, whereas the most important city outside of the capital in Wales, Swansea, has never had a British warship named after it, and as for Northern Ireland and the nightmarish implications of reviving the name Londonderry…

(Actually, Northern Ireland demonstrates the flaw in the logic of using ‘City’ names, unless the DUP’s deal with Theresa May included a promise to name a frigate HMS Newry; after all, Belfast can’t be used for obvious reasons, while Antrim isn’t a city. So how, exactly, is the new class going to acknowledge Northern Ireland’s place in the Union?)

Finally, then, with nods to my good friends Drs Steven Gray, Sam McLean and Duncan Redford for ‘borrowing’ some of their ideas in this post, here’s my top ten of Royal Navy ship names that will never, ever, be used again – although we could certainly add Londonderry to it.

10. HMS Stayner (Sir Richard Stayner was a great captain of the period I work on, but even in 1943, how on earth did anybody think it was a good idea to name a ship after him?)

9. HMS Trollope (ditto, with apologies to the heroic Captain Sir Henry Trollope)

8. HMS Cockchafer

7. …and while we’re on the subject…HMS Cockatrice

6. HMS Daisy

5. HMS Grinder

4. HMS Buttercup

3. HMS Pansy

2. HMS Spanker

1. HMS Fubbs Yacht

And before you boggle at, or criticise, the number 1 on my list, let me ask you this one question.

What, exactly, are the circumstances in which you think a present-day Royal Navy Ships’ Names Committee would name a new warship after the reigning monarch’s mistress’s bum?

 

(* And before anybody thinks of pinching it, I’m copyrighting that expression.)

Eggs and Bacon, Belly Squeaks, and Polly Infamous – Revisited!

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Easter holiday mode at the moment, so for the next couple of weeks I’m going to re-blog some posts from the very early days of this site, which were originally seen by the relatively small number of hardy souls who, back then, managed to locate this far-flung recess of the Interweb. This one is on ship naming, and includes some of the astonishing nicknames that British seamen have come up with for the warships in which they serve. I returned to this theme in a subsequent post, when the whole ‘Boaty McBoatface’ fiasco was at its height, and recently came across a fascinating post on The Churchill Project’s site, which casts more light on the spats between Churchill and King George V over battleship naming in the period 1911-13. Obviously, some things have moved on since I wrote the original post: the US Navy has, indeed, named a new carrier Enterprise, the current Ship Names committee of the RN has kept up the improved track record of recent years by naming the first new Trident submarine HMS Dreadnought, and, rather less positively, the current HMS Nelson building, referred to below, is likely to be sold off and may well become a hotel. Be prepared for sounds of spinning emanating from the crypt of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. 

You can find a lot more about warship naming under the Stuarts elsewhere on this website – search for the three posts with the heading ‘the Naming of Stuart Warships’ – and much of this material will soon be appearing, in proper academic form, in my forthcoming book, Kings of the Sea: Charles II, James II and the Royal Navy.

Otherwise, let’s now travel back to those heady days of July 2012…

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I’ve always had something of an interest in warship names, and recently I’ve started to take more of an interest in the rationale (if any) underpinning the names that have been bestowed. (See my recent comments in this blog about the Royal Navy’s remarkable use – not once, but twice – of the name of Welsh rebel prince Owain Glyndwr.) Thus I was interested to pick up a link from Twitter to this new report on ship naming policy in the United States Navy. As I ploughed through all seventy-three pages of it, I was increasingly struck by several things: firstly, how animated some people across the pond get about perceived breaks with naming traditions; and secondly, just how formal and relatively inflexible the American system is. In the UK, such a report wouldn’t take seventy-three pages – it would probably take a couple of sentences at most, along the lines of ‘put a lot of random names in a hat and pull them out’. I jest, and do an injustice to the work of members of Ships’ Names Committees down the years, but one does sometimes wonder. For example, one could legitimately ask who in supposedly egalitarian late-20th century Britain thought it was a good idea to name a large class of major warships after dukes, and who similarly thought it was a good idea to use ‘St Albans’ as one of those names (especially when rather more distinguished ducal names like Devonshire, Suffolk, Sussex and Bedford were available). I’d also like to see how a report similar to the USN’s might explain the fact that the first three of the navy’s new nuclear-powered submarines, effectively the capital ships of today’s navy, were given such bland, largely history-free names as Astute, Ambush and Artful, before presumably a differently composed committee with a rather better grasp of history decided to reflect reality by adopting the glorious traditional capital ship names Audacious, Anson, Agamemnon – soon to be ‘rechristened’ by her crew, if what follows is correct – and Ajax. (Sadly not Agincourt: presumably no longer politically correct, n’est ce pas?) The whole notion of using alphabetical names for ship classes, like D for the Type 45 destroyers, seems fundamentally flawed, too; at current construction rates, and extrapolating the decline in ship numbers into the future, one can confidently predict that the next Z-class will be in service in about 2250 and will consist of a solitary dinghy named HMS Zebra.

On a similar theme, one could ask why the Royal Navy, apparently alone of the major fleets, bestows some of its best names on buildings. Thus a HMS Nelson is unlikely ever to be seen at sea again, given that the name is borne by the barracks at Portsmouth; there will never be another ‘fighting Temeraire’ while the name is borne by a sports centre;  more mundanely, neither will HMS Ferret, the somewhat unlikely alter ego of Chicksands Priory in Bedfordshire, about as far from the sea as one can get. The Dutch always reserve the name of their greatest naval hero, de Ruyter, for their largest and best warship in each generation – so even if their fleet keeps contracting, there will always be a frigate, or a patrol vessel, or whatever, named HNlMS De Ruyter. I see from the USN report that it’s generally believed that once the current USS Enterprise leaves service, a new carrier will be allocated the name almost immediately; it seems inconceivable that anyone would ever suggest the name Enterprise for, say, an office block in downtown Washington DC. It seems to me that the Royal Navy’s tradition of allocating some of its best names to ‘stone frigates’ is a sign of institutional introversion, if such a concept exists. These names are largely known only to members of the service itself, the only people who pass through the doors of the bases concerned, and thus the only ones who are directly exposed to the manifestations of the traditions of this particular ‘ship’. Surely such illustrious names should be projected outwards, at sea, as powerful symbols of a self-confident navy and nation? That thought occurred to me a few months ago when I was dining in the wardroom of HMS Nelson, surrounded by relics of the great man and the spectacular murals portraying British naval victories. It’s something of a ‘no-brainer’, as the young say. Which name is more likely to impress a foreign country about to receive a courtesy visit, more likely to alarm a foreign despot intent on doing harm to British interests, or more likely to fire the imaginations of young people when the ship visits a British port:  Nelson or St Albans?

Arguably, though, it was ever thus. I’ve been working for some time on aspects of ship naming in the later Stuart period, and next week I’ll present some of my findings. In the meantime, during the course of my research for Britannia’s Dragon I came across a wonderful critique of early nineteenth century Royal Navy naming practice from the United Services Magazine for 1830, which also has a nice anecdote about the US Navy during the War of 1812. Some edited highlights follow; the full text can be accessed via Google Books (beginning at p.289). The author seems to have seriously confused the order of First Lords of the Admiralty (indeed, he might even have invented a couple) and got his chronology hopelessly muddled, but the general thrust is amusing and evidently has more than a grain of truth to it.

The method of naming His Majesty’s ships is most capricious; indeed, it may be doubted if there exists any rule at the Admiralty to regulate this particular duty, although the matter is by no means of immaterial consequence. Seamen attach great faith to particular names…some consideration has frequently been accorded to the prejudices of seamen in favour of celebrated ships. The Endeavour, in which Cook circumnavigated the globe, and effected several great discoveries, was preserved till very lately as a hulk at Sheerness; and it is supposed that the Victory, Lord Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar, has now scarcely one of her original planks remaining, yet the government have wisely determined that she shall not be razeed, broken up, or destroyed, so long as a timber remains to awaken recollection of her glorious exploits. The Americans knew so well the importance of exciting enthusiasm by these means during the late war, that they named even the guns of their ships after heroes and battles. Thus, the President had her main-deck battery baptized Washington, Saratoga, Orleans, and even Nelson, Rodney, Duncan, and Napoleon; thus supplying the deficiency in their own warlike nomenclature, by adopting the stirring names contained in the histories of other nations…

…might not the naming of His Majesty’s ships be conducted upon some intelligible principle? Hitherto it appears to have depended entirely on the whim or eccentricity of successive first lords. It may afford amusement to trace the capriciousness of their taste through the ranks of our Navy List. Some years ago the First Lord of the Admiralty, being a mighty fox-hunter, introduced his whole pack into the navy! While this nautical hydrophobia lasted, the seas were covered with the Boxer, Borer, Bruiser, Tickler, Cracker, Pincher, Dasher, Brisk, Hasty, Havock, Pelter, Rover, Rolla, Snapper, Surley, Swinger, Ranger, Hearty, Jasper etc etc, of which many still remain as the canine ornaments of our navy. The administration at length changed, and the new first lord [Lord Sandwich?], fresh from the groves of Alma Mater, determined to neutralize the vulgarity of his predecessor’s nomenclature, by a copious introduction of classical names…[such as] Andromache, Andromeda, Bellerophon, Bucephalus, Cadmus, Calliope, Daedalus, Euryalus, Eurydice, Hebe, Helicon, Hyperion, Iphigenia, Maeander, Melampus, Pelorus, Pegasus, Polyphemus, Prometheus, Semiramis, Terpsichore, Agamemnon, Zenobia, cum multis aliis. One hundred of these academic argosies remain still upon the Navy List as testimonials of his lordship’s literary attainments, and puzzlers for the pronunciation of ‘Poor Jack’. The latter, however, readily metamorphoses any appellation of this description into some humorous term of his own. Thus Bellerophon became Billy Ruffian; Agamemnon, Eggs and Bacon; Andromache, Andrew Mackay; and Polyphemus, the Polly Infamous!

To the scholastic reign a Parisian government succeeded, and the navy became inundated with Gallicisms. L’Oiseau, Le Belliqueux, Le Genereux, L’Impetueux, Le Courageux, L’Espiegle, L’Espoir, Le Foudroyant, Le Sans Pareil, L’Imperieuse, La Dedaigneuse, etc. If ‘Poor Jack’ mangled the classics, he made some sort of atonement by murdering the French. Thus Belliqueux was transformed into Belly Squeaks, Genereux into Jenny Rooks, and Dedaigneuse (being a heavy sailer) into Dead Nose!

A bragadacio next became lord of the ascendant, and our wooden walls were disfigured by such buckram names as Impregnable, Invincible, Implacable, Terrible, Redoubtable, Magnificent, Formidable, Powerful, Dreadnought, Infernal, etc. Fortunately this boasting gentleman ‘died in his youth and beauty’s pride, and a naturalist reigned in his stead’. This was the glorious era of ornithology, conchology, ichthyology, and natural foolery, which introduced Bustards, Buzzards, Crocodiles, Reindeer, Racoons and Rattlesnakes. 

Finally, Lord Melville invented the less objectionable custom of naming most of our ships of war after rivers. His lordship appears to have been born under Aquarius or Pisces, he has such fondness for streams. We have now not only most of the celebrated rivers of antiquity, such as the Tigris, Indus, Euphrates, Ganges, Orontes, etc, but nearly every petty rivulet in the United Kingdom, the Spey, Tay, Dee, Tees, Liffey, Slaney, Tyne, Wye, etc. Nay, so determined appears his lordship’s predilection for fresh water, that he will not permit even a cataract or lake to escape notice, and we have accordingly launched Niagara, Ontario and Huron!

It has been the practice of several administrations to direct that vessels captured from the enemy, and annexed to the British navy, shall retain their original foreign names. This may partly account for the numerous French appellations before mentioned; but however commendable such a custom may be in general, yet its adoption has frequently led to singular misconstruction among uneducated seamen. How frequently must the pious inhabitants of Devonport have been shocked at hearing drunken sailors, in all the innocence of ignorance, cursing the Salvador del Mundo, and the confinement of a guardship, little thinking that by such expressions they were blaspheming the saviour of the world! We remember one of the Trafalgar heroes, in his account of the battle, boasting that a broadside from his ship shivered the stern of St John, while another discharge had nearly sent the Santissima Trinidad (Holy Trinity) to the devil! The Cacafuego, a small vessel captured from the Spaniards, was for many years employed in the British navy under the same name, although it is not possible to make a translation of the term fit for English readers. Suffice it to say that the power of emitting fire is conveyed by that appellation in the grossest manner, and our tars invariably preferred using the corresponding English terms, according to the most literal version of the phrase…

What we desire is, that [ship naming] may be organised as a system, and not left to chance as at present. It is true, we have even now a Rodney, Nelson, Duncan, Howe, Trafalgar, etc, but why are we not to have a St Domingo, Dogger Bank or First of June? Why do we exclude the names of Drake, Collingwood, ‘the gallant good Riou’, the heroic Harvey, the brave Parker, the slain heroes Abercrombie, Moore, Cooke and Duff, or the living heroes Saumarez, Lynedoch, Sydney Smith, Cockburn, Exmouth and Keats? Surely such names as Picton, Maida, Vittoria, Badajoz, Albuera, Navarino, Lissa, Busaco, Toulouse and Salamanca, ought not to be forgotten or displaced by such unmeaning titles as Skipjack, Pickle, Snapper, Monkey and many others which now dignify the British Navy List.

The Return of That Other Guy

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Conference season again. Last week – ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ at the National Museum of the Royal Navy, Portsmouth. This week – Naval Dockyards Society conference at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich. Next week – hitting my head slowly and repetitively against a wall in yet another attempt to remind myself that agreeing to give papers at two conferences just a week apart is a staggeringly stupid idea. Looking further ahead, though, I’ll also be speaking at a ‘conference by any other name’ in Hastings on 4 July, of which more anon, and will also be off to the big conference on the Tudor and Stuart Age at the National Maritime Museum later in July, albeit this time as a common-or-garden delegate.

A couple of years ago, I posted a delegate’s guide to maritime history conferences, so here’s my summary of the ‘Statesmen and Seapower’ conference using the criteria that I set out there.

  1. Purpose – all boxes ticked and principal criterion met, i.e. ‘academic historical conferences exist solely so that delegates can meet up again with people they met at previous conferences, and to bitch about the people who haven’t turned up to this one’.
  2. The Conference Programme – ‘One of the most abiding laws of conferences is that the programme is never, ever, right.’  Well, this time it was, thanks to the excellent organisation by Duncan Redford and Simon Williams, although it was unfortunate and beyond the organisers’ control that several speakers had to withdraw at the last minute for personal reasons.
  3. The Graveyard Shift – Tell me about it; I was speaking in the last session of the day, when delegates were keen to get to HMS Victory for drinks on the quarterdeck. No pressure on timing at all, then.
  4. Sleep – Less of an issue at this conference than at many I’ve been to in the past, except during the one paper that overran. And overran. And overran some more.
  5. Victuals – Dinner on the lower gun deck of Victory, on mess tables slung in between the cannon. Let’s face it, for an experience like that, it wouldn’t matter if you were eating rancid pigeon burgers – not that the caterers’ splendid fare resembled them in any way.
  6. That Guy – You know the one I mean. He’s the one who always asks a question, whatever the topic is. He usually sits at or near the front. The question will be very, very long, and will often bear no relationship to the topic. Or else it won’t be a question at all, and will be an extremely long-winded anecdote based on the individual’s own experience, which, again, usually has no relevance whatsoever to the topic under discussion. Yes, he was there.
  7. That Other Guy – Yes, so was he. (See the original post.)

My own paper was entitled ‘The British Navy under the Later Stuart Monarchs: Royal Plaything or Instrument of State Policy’. It looked at the role of Charles II and James II in naval affairs, and drew in part on some material I’ve previously published in this blog – notably in my three posts (this one, this one, and this one) on the naming of Stuart warships. I was on a panel with Alan James, who was looking at very similar questions in relation to Louis XIV’s France, and Gijs Rommelse, who examined the use of the navy in the ideology and imagery of Dutch republicanism. By coincidence, these papers dovetailed remarkably well with a couple of those in the previous session: Beatrice Heuser’s on the sixteenth century origins of English naval strategy, which covered aspects of the ‘sovereignty of the sea’ and the importance of the ‘myth’ of the Anglo-Saxon king Edgar that I then continued in my talk, and Benjamin Redding’s on aspects of English and French naval policy from the 1510s to the 1640s, which raised the question of the political importance of ship names that I continued to develop in my paper. I’ve never known such completely coincidental dovetailing to work so well at a conference!

Anyway, I’m looking at a completely different theme on Saturday, at a NDS conference focusing on the royal dockyards during the Napoleonic Wars. I’m talking on ‘The Strange Life and Stranger Death of Milford Dockyard’ – an odd tale of xenophobia and political skullduggery during the brief history of the short-lived predecessor of Pembroke Dockyard, featuring such figures as one of the principal characters from The Madness of King George, Sir William Hamilton, and, yes, Horatio Nelson himself. My paper is also a bit of a ‘detective story’, in which our intrepid hero sets out to discover whether anything actually remains of undoubtedly the least known royal dockyard in the British Isles.

Finally, to Hastings on 4 July, and what promises to be a fascinating day entitled ‘All About the Anne‘ – the wreck of an important Third Rate man-of-war of Charles II’s navy, lost during the Battle of Beachy Head in 1690, and the subject of several previous posts (here, here, and here) on this site. This study-day-cum-conference is taking place under the auspices of Hastings’s splendid Shipwreck Museum, and will feature a number of talks about the ship herself and her times. I’ll be speaking on ‘Pepys’ Navy’, and will also be reading Frank Fox’s important study of the ship losses during the battle, which first appeared in this blog and provides an almost certainly definitive identification of the so-called ‘Normans Bay wreck’. So if you fancy a day at the seaside, complete with ice cream, Punch and Judy, and some seventeenth century naval history, then head down to Hastings in July!

 

 

Saints and Soldiers: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 3.

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Time for the third and final part of my discussion of warship naming under the later Stuarts. This topic has generated some interesting discussion, so I hope to return to it one day, particularly as more and more interesting connections keep coming out of the woodwork. For example, and despite the fact that the information is available in Warlow’s book on Royal Navy shore establishments, I’d never really registered the fact that some of the most illustrious Stuart warship names, like Royal Charles, Royal James and Royal Prince, were revived for some of the bases established in liberated France and Germany at the end of World War II, and that the historically aware ships’ names committee of the day even added Royal Rupert. At the National Archives last Friday, I also had a look at the papers relating to the establishment in 1945 of HMS Pepys as the shore base for the Far East Fleet at Manus in the Philippines, plus some evidence suggesting that George V didn’t only reject Oliver Cromwell as a battleship name in 1911 but also vetoed Hero for some reason. Moreover, my statement in last week’s post that the navy never had a second ship called St Michael was very nearly wrong; it seems that the ‘fleet submarines’ contemplated in 1925 were to have been given saints’ names, and St Michael would have been the third of these. (The first two would have been St George and St Andrew, also revivals of great 17th century warship names, although there was also a strong campaign to use the name St Christopher too.)

But back to the seventeenth century and some real ships with real names! First, just to clarify one of the points in last week’s post – Pepys’s letter to the Navy Board on 14 April 1679 makes it clear that Charles II had given the name Sandwich to the Third Rate building at Deptford by mistake, as he had ‘from the first design of building the thirty ships determined upon conferring it upon one of the Second Rates out of the regard he is pleased out of his great goodness he bears to the memory of the late noble lord of that name’, so he ordered the Third to be renamed Hope and the Second building at Harwich to be named Sandwich. So – simultaneous proof that Charles II did have a rough plan for the names of at least some of the thirty ships from the very beginning, and that his memory sometimes failed him!

***

King James II and VII named few ships during his brief reign, but those that he did select are deeply revealing of the king’s thinking and of the personality flaws that cost him his throne. The last of the ‘thirty new ships’, launched on 23 May 1685, was naturally named Coronation after the event that took place exactly thirty days earlier. Three Fourth Rates were launched in 1687; these were named Deptford, Sedgemoor and St Albans. The Sedgemoor harked back to the naming policy of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when many ships were named after parliamentary victories of the civil war; but both then and in 1687, naming ships after battles in which Englishmen killed Englishmen was hardly a gesture of tolerance and reconciliation. Instead, the name Sedgemoor shows James exulting in his military triumph, and by doing so undoubtedly sending out a subliminal message to other potential rebels. (On the other hand, James did not change the name of the Monmouth; this contrasts with the situation in 1715, when the name of the new Fourth Rate Ormonde was swiftly changed to Dragon following the second Duke of Ormonde’s defection to the Jacobites.) The seemingly bland name St Albans, nominally honouring the town in Hertfordshire, is more likely to have been a reference to England’s first Christian martyr, and might have presaged a succession of other ‘saintly’ ship names if James’s Catholic rule had continued (thus corresponding more closely to naming policy in France and especially in Spain); limited confirmation of this might be the renaming of the Charles as the St George in October 1687, when the old Second Rate of that name was discarded.

The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688-9, which saw the overthrow of James and the installation of his daughter Mary and son-in-law William as joint monarchs, was not accompanied by an immediate mass renaming of the fleet as had taken place in 1660. The legal and emotional ambiguities of James’s alleged ‘abdication’ of his thrones, with many of even the new regime’s supporters having doubts about its legitimacy, led to caution and an awareness of sensibilities; even the Royal James retained its name until 3 March 1691, when it was renamed Victory. Moreover, in 1660 the incoming regime took the view that all public acts of its predecessor were not only illegal, but were entirely null and void, as shown by the insistence on counting that year as the twelfth of the reign of King Charles II. There was no equivalent attempt to cancel an entire period of history after 1688; no-one denied that the reigns of Charles and James had happened[i]. The only other significant renamings of William’s reign and the early part of Anne’s took place when ships were rebuilt, and an opportunity was taken to acknowledge the new political realities. Thus in 1692 the Royal Prince became the Royal William, in 1693 the Royal Charles was renamed Queen for Mary II (there was already a Mary and a Mary Galley, so presumably Royal Mary would have caused too much confusion), in 1701 the Duke became the Prince George and in 1703 the St Andrew became the Royal Anne. Finally, the Albemarle was renamed Union on 29 December 1709 to commemorate the new Anglo-Scottish polity. However, the largest single batch of renamings of major warships before the Hanoverian succession occurred on 18 December 1706, when no fewer than three Second Rates were renamed to reflect the triumphs of the Duke of Marlborough: the St Michael became the Marlborough, the Royal Katherine became the Ramillies, while the Windsor Castle, which had already changed its name in short order from Princess Anne and previously from Duchess, became the Blenheim. These changes were undoubtedly part of the shower of rewards heaped upon Marlborough’s head when he returned to Britain on 26 November 1706 after the triumphant Ramillies campaign; his brother George, effective head of the Admiralty under Prince George of Denmark, was in a position to facilitate what must surely rank as the most notable naval tribute ever paid to a soldier[ii].

The great majority of new builds of the post-1689 era were seemingly given neutral geographical names, such as Devonshire, Dorsetshire, Cumberland and Torbay, all names that were repeated time and time again down the years. However, a few of these had a double meaning, for some, like Shrewsbury and Pembroke, also represented the titles of great political figures of the late Stuart regime, while Torbay, of course, was where William had landed on 5 November 1688. A small number of great ships were given names that harked back to the more overtly partisan and triumphalist policies of earlier eras: these included Association, named after the popular movement of 1696 that took oaths of loyalty in response to an assassination attempt on William III, Barfleur after Admiral Russell’s great victory over the French in 1692, and Boyne after William’s victory in Ireland in 1690. The question of who actually decided on the names of ships after the Glorious Revolution is also much less clear. The first warships launched in William’s reign were a group of five fifth rates, launched between December 1689 and March 1691, but it is apparent that the king could not have been personally responsible for naming most of these as he was campaigning in Ireland for much of that time. However, there is evidence to suggest that the Admiralty, too, did not name the larger ships (although it does seem to have named smaller ones), in which case it seems highly likely that at least some of the names were decided upon by William’s wife, and equal co-monarch, Queen Mary II.

(Finally, big ‘thank you’s’ to Rif Winfield, whose tremendous magnum opus on British warships in the age of sail provided much of the information on dates, etc, and to Richard Endsor, Frank Fox and Peter Le Fevre, who contributed much invaluable information and many stimulating ideas during our email exchanges about the subject matter in the three blogs on this topic.)

[i] However, it is interesting to speculate on whether the name Sedgemoor would have been retained; but that ship was lost on 2 January 1689, before the new regime was established. As it was, many names that were essentially personal to Charles and James were retained: these included the Coronation and the yachts named after Charles’s mistresses, such as the Fubbs and Cleveland.

[ii] The Duke of Wellington has had more ships named after himself and his victories (including the present HMS Iron Duke), but certainly not three on the same day.

A Hope and A Sandwich: The Naming of Stuart Warships, c1660-c1714, Part 2

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Back to post-Olympics reality! As promised, today’s post is the second part of my study of post-1660 warship names, originally intended for publication in an academic journal. I originally thought that this would be the concluding part, but I think the remaining material is too long for just one post, so I’ll postpone the conclusion until next week when I’ll actually be in north Wales on another research trip. However, I’ve also just realised that today, 13 August, marks the first anniversary of this Gentleman and Tarpaulins blog! I can’t really believe it’s been a year…just where did the time go? It would be remiss of me to let the occasion pass without thanking you, my readers, for your support over the past year, and for your stimulating and always greatly appreciated comments. As for future plans… Over the autumn and winter I’ll be building up to the publication of my latest books, Britannia’s Dragon: A Naval History of Wales and the fourth title in the Quinton series, The Lion of Midnight, so there’ll be plenty of posts tied in to them. I have a few ideas for the rest of the summer, notably an account of my sometimes surreal experiences as an officer in the RNR (CCF), but please let me know if there are any topics related to my writing or naval history generally that you’d like me to cover. Also, I’ve been wondering about having the occasional guest blogger; would people welcome this or not? I’d love to have your feedback!

Anyway, on with the matter in hand…

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In 1677 Parliament voted for the funds for a huge new construction programme of thirty ships, intended to eliminate the French navy’s perceived superiority in numbers, and the ships began to be named and launched from the spring of 1678 onwards. The first three names were essentially personal to Charles. Lenox was named after Charles, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, his illegitimate son by the Duchess of Portsmouth and thus by extension probably honours the mother as well, as the names Richmond and Portsmouth were already taken. The idiosyncratic spelling seems to have been Charles’s own, as both the ducal patent and all historical precedents spell the name ‘nn’. (A project has been launched to build a replica of Lenox at Deptford, inspired by the outstanding book on the ship by my good friend Richard Endsor.) The second, Restoration, was launched on 28 May 1678, the day before the eighteenth anniversary of the event her name commemorated. The third was named Hampton Court; arguably an unusual choice as Charles spent little time there, although he and Catherine of Braganza had honeymooned there in 1662. The Captain (July 1678) was presumably named in honour of the Duke of Monmouth, who had been appointed captain-general of the English army in April.

Before the next batch of ships was launched, the ‘Popish Plot’ had erupted. It is possible that Charles responded to this by selecting names that pandered more to Protestant and patriotic sentiment: hence Anne in November 1678, to honour a Protestant and legitimate member of the king’s family, Windsor Castle, after one of the monarchy’s most obvious symbols, and three names that recalled the Elizabethan navy, Eagle, Vanguard and Elizabeth itself. The Hope, launched on 3 March 1679, also recalled the triumph against the Spanish Armada (a galleon of that name had fought in the action), but the timing of the launch suggests that the name might have had a double meaning, possibly to reflect the optimism surrounding the meeting of the first new parliament for eighteen years (it opened on the 6th); this was short-lived, as relations between Charles and this parliament rapidly deteriorated. This might also provide an explanation for the suggestion that the Hope was originally intended to be named Sandwich. The new name, reflecting a very brief moment of optimism in national politics and Charles II’s own thinking, could have been assigned to the ship at short notice, with the original name of Sandwich then being reassigned to one of the hulls that would be launched a few weeks later.

No fewer than seven ships were named in May 1679, the month when Charles’s difficult relationship with the ‘first exclusion parliament’ culminated in its prorogation. One, the Sandwich, recalled an architect of the Restoration who had been killed at the same time of year, seven years before. Grafton was named after another of the king’s illegitimate sons; she was followed in June by Northumberland, named after his brother. Duchess might have been named for the Duchess of York, Mary of Modena, so her naming might have been a subtle gesture of defiance against the exclusionists; an alternative candidate would be the Duchess of Portsmouth, which would have been equally provocative. (Of course, it is equally possible that the name simply recognised the generic title.) Kent and Essex seem to be purely geographical names, honouring counties which made particularly substantial contributions to the Royal Navy, and they also revived the names of warships lost earlier in the reign. On the other hand, the name Essex might have had a double meaning which could have been a gesture towards Charles’s opponents – Arthur, Earl of Essex, was a key figure in the newly remodelled Privy Council that was meant to bring about national reconciliation (and his brother was First Lord of the Admiralty at the time), while the navy’s previous Essex had been named after Parliament’s captain-general in the Civil War.

The other ships launched in the summer of 1679 were the Berwick (May) and Stirling Castle (July). These seemingly odd choices, given Charles II’s well-known dislike of Scotland and its environs, might have been a response to the almost exactly contemporary covenanter rebellion that culminated in the battle of Bothwell Brig, i.e. emphasising the strength of the fortresses that faced potential rebels and thus by implication the strength of royal control of Scotland; the name Stirling Castle in particular could be an assertion of royal rule after the defeat of that rebellion, by choosing the name of one of the most obvious symbols of that rule in Scotland.

The two names given in September 1679, Expedition and Bredah, were fairly neutral, although the latter can only be a reference back to the Declaration of Breda in 1660 – a fairly odd name to choose at that point given the suspicion of Charles for failing to implement the terms he had agreed in that document, but with a new parliament due to meet in October (although it was later postponed), one that was again likely to be heavily influenced by urban dissenter opinion, it might have been his way of suggesting that he would now be more inclusive towards dissent, as he had originally promised at Breda.  The Burford, launched in November 1679, reverted to type in the sense that it was named after one of his illegitimate sons – but interestingly, it was not named after the eldest of the brood still not to have a ship named after him, the Duke of Southampton (who actually never received this honour, perhaps suggesting that Charles was never wholly confident of the paternity that he had acknowledged in 1670), but after a mere earl, his son by Nell Gwyn, ‘the Protestant whore’, so perhaps once more this was actually a subtle nod toward Protestant sensibilities. Pendennis was launched on 25 December 1679, shortly after Shaftesbury and the whigs began a campaign of petitioning to demand that the exclusion parliament should be allowed to sit. This name might have been a gesture of defiance by Charles toward his critics – Pendennis Castle was the last garrison in England to hold out for Charles I during the civil war, so the name might reflect a determination to persist against overwhelming odds and regardless of the consequences. When added to Windsor Castle, Stirling Castle and Berwick, there certainly seems to be some sort of running theme of deliberately linking ship names to the great fortresses of the kingdoms, i.e. the strongholds that existed to suppress discontent.

In the spring of 1680 Charles seemed to return to purely geographical names, christening two ships the Exeter and Suffolk. It is difficult to see a political rationale behind these names, but there is less difficulty with the other 1680 launch; in October, the month when parliament was finally due to convene, he named the Albemarle, recollecting another great figure of the restoration. Following the dissolution of the third exclusion parliament in March 1681, Charles could again select ship names that did not pander to or respond to the broader political situation, and which reflected his own aspirations. Thus he named the Ossory after one of his recently deceased close friends, the Duke probably in honour of his brother James, whose place in the succession had now been secured, and the Britannia and Neptune, reflecting the broader concern to assert his sovereignty over the seas that had been apparent since his restoration.

Of course, all of this begs a question – had Charles mapped out a rough, or even a pretty precise, idea of what he was going to call at least some of the thirty ships when the programme commenced, or did he make it up as he went along? Clearly some of the names were responses to events that couldn’t possibly have been envisaged in 1677-8 (Ossory, Coronation) but it’s possible that he decided on others in batches (e.g. a couple of palaces, some fortresses, Sandwich and Albemarle, his children, etc). The problem, of course, is that we are very unlikely ever to turn up any source material to enable us to come up with definitive answers, because the naming process essentially took place in Charles’s head. The lack of evidence in Pepys’s papers suggests that he, and later James II & VII, did not consult Pepys, perhaps the one man whom they might have been expected to consult on such matters.

(To be concluded)

 

Fubbs Yes, Mum No: The Naming of British Warships, c.1660-c.1714, Part 1

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The material in this week’s post (to be continued in a fortnight – I’ll be at the Olympic Stadium in a week’s time!) was originally intended as the basis for an article in an academic journal. Two things changed my mind, and made me decide to publish it here instead: firstly, I didn’t really have the time to do the research on the other themes I wanted to cover to turn it into a full-scale article; secondly, I’ve become increasingly disillusioned with the very narrow, introverted world of academic publishing in naval history, particularly with the editorial policy of certain supposedly eminent journals and also the extortionate prices demanded both by the publishers of academic books and the profit-hungry cartels which control the dissemination of academic journals. The UK government’s recent commitment to make scientific research free of access is welcome, but I see no reason why that principle shouldn’t apply to historical research as well – so in future, I’ll be making some of my research freely available here and on my website.

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The naming of warships has always been an essentially political act; witness King George V’s vetoing the name Cromwell for a battleship, the somewhat cynical reasons underpinning the choice of the names Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales for Britain’s new aircraft carriers, and in the United States, the ongoing spats over choosing the names of predominantly Republican presidents for new aircraft carriers and giving other warships the names of living politicians. (See last week’s post for more on this.) However, perhaps no period demonstrates this truth as clearly as British warship-naming in the half-century or so from 1649 onwards.

For many years, if not centuries, monarchs had taken personal responsibility for naming at least some of their ships, particularly the most prestigious ones. For example, Henry VIII dedicated the Henry Grace a Dieu on 13 June 1514, a lavish ceremony also attended by ‘the Queen, the Princess Mary, the Pope’s ambassadors, several bishops, and a large number of nobles’. In January 1610 James I attended the double launching of two East Indiamen  at Deptford, naming them Trade’s Increase and Peppercorn.  He was also present at Woolwich on 24 September 1610 for the failed first attempt to launch the great ship which became the Prince Royal (she was successfully launched in the night following, with Prince Henry performing the naming ceremony).  In late 1620 James viewed and named the Happy Entrance and Reformation at Deptford, although it isn’t clear whether he was present for the actual launchings.  Charles I was on hand for the failed launching of what became the Sovereign of the Seas on 25 September 1637, but confided the name to Sir Robert Mansell who performed the naming ceremony after they finally got her afloat on the night of 13/14 October.1 The tradition was naturally interrupted under the Commonwealth and Protectorate, when ships were named by the republican regimes and later by Oliver Cromwell himself,2 but returned at the Restoration. Indeed, one of Charles II’s first executive acts was to change those ship names that reflected the triumphs and personalities of the English Republic into rather more politically correct ones for a monarchy. Pepys witnessed the event, on 23 May 1660, and makes it clear that the process was conducted entirely by the king and his brother the Duke of York, who was about to enter into the office of Lord High Admiral for which he had been intended from childhood:

After dinner the King and Duke altered the name of some of the ships, viz. the Naseby into Charles; the Richard, James; the Speaker, Mary; the Dunbar (which was not in company with us), the Henry; Winsby, Happy Return; Wakefield, Richmond; Lamport, the Henrietta; Cheriton, the Speedwell; Bradford, the Success. 

The name changes are all easily explicable – five of them are for the royal siblings and the Richmond for their cousin, the head of the ‘Lennox Stuart’ line, while Speedwell and Success are natural emotions reflecting the family’s mood at the Restoration. On the other hand, Speedwell was also a traditional warship name – there had been two ships of the name in the Elizabethan navy. The displaced names were overtly political: Naseby, Dunbar, Winceby, Wakefield, Langport, Cheriton and Bradford were all Parliamentarian victories, and by replacing Naseby with the name he shared with his father, the king who had been defeated in that battle, Charles could not have made a more potent symbolic statement. Similarly, Richard had been named after Oliver Cromwell’s son and successor, so there was an interesting symmetry in Charles renaming her after his own heir. Two of the new names actually duplicated ones already on the navy list, a James launched in 1634 and a Success acquired in 1660. Whether nobody thought of, or dared to inform the royal brothers about, this inconvenient clash, or whether Charles and James already knew of it and decided simply to disregard it,  will probably never be known; but as a result, the existing ships had to be swiftly rechristened Old James and Old Success.

For the first fifteen years or so of Charles II’s reign, naming policy closely followed the precedent laid down in May 1660: a heavy emphasis on names that honoured members of the Stuart family, the dynasty as a whole, or key players in the Restoration, together with the revival of well-established warship names which particularly revived memories of the ‘glory days’ of Elizabethan England. Charles followed these principles when changing the remaining interregnum names: Marston Moor became York; Bridgwater, Anne; Torrington, Dreadnought; Tredagh (= Drogheda), Resolultion; Newbury, Revenge; Lyme, Montagu; Preston, Antelope; Maidstone, Mary Rose; Taunton, Crown; Nantwich, Bredah (where Charles had signed the declaration promising liberty of conscience which guaranteed his restoration).  Entirely new names included Royal Katherine, after his wife; Royal Oak; Rupert, after his cousin; Cambridge and Edgar, after short-lived nephews; Monmouth, after his eldest illegitimate son. Other revivals of Elizabethan names to set alongside the likes of the newly rebranded Dreadnought and Revenge included Defiance and Warspite. 

There were some idiosyncratic quirks, too. Sweepstakes reflected the court’s love of gambling, while the Fubbs Yacht was named after his mistress, Louise de Keroualle, Duchess of Portsmouth (specifically, after the chubbiness of her naked form!). More significantly, the choice of St Michael in 1669 for a large Second Rate raises some fascinating questions. The name St Michael had never been used for an English warship before, and it would never be used again. (However, a similar name had been used for the greatest of all Scots warships, launched in 1511.) The launching ceremony was planned for Michaelmas Day, 29 September, which was one of the most important feast days in the royal liturgical calendar; in the event, though, unspecified ‘difficulties’ forced the postponement of the launch until the next morning. However, the timing of the launch also coincided with Anglo-French negotiations for a military and naval alliance against the Dutch entering a critical phase, with Charles talking in increasingly belligerent terms of obtaining revenge for the humiliation he had suffered at Chatham in 1667, and with the king expressing to his most intimate confidantes an apparently sincere determination to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Thus there may have been several complex reasons underpinning Charles II’s decision at this particular time to name a great man-of-war after this particular saint, the only one (other than national patrons) that he honoured in this way: Michael, the avenging archangel, the protector of Israel and patron saint of warriors, the bearer of the flaming sword of vengeance and justice; the victorious commander of the armies of the righteous in the final battle against the forces of evil.

Finally, there was one glaring omission from the list of names chosen by the king. Intriguingly, Charles did not name a ship Henrietta Maria after his mother, although there had been a Second Rate of that name before (launched in 1633, she was renamed Paragon in 1650, thereby displaying a delicious irony not always associated with the Rump Parliament; the ship was lost in 1655). Perhaps this omission was a reflection of the famously strained relationship between mother and son.

(Next time, I’ll take a detailed look at the naming of the ‘thirty new ships’ and will make a few points about naming policy after Charles II’s reign.)

1 Ex info Frank Fox

2 For the naming policy of the period 1649-60, see M J Seymour’s article in The Mariner’s Mirror, 1990.