Britannia's Dragon
The Old Order Changeth
I spent last Saturday afternoon at the new Caird Library in the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, having been invited to a special 'bloggers' preview' at the end of the library's first week with a properly restored full service following a very long hiatus. As I've been using the 'old Caird' for about thirty years, I thought I'd devote this post to a review of the new facility in comparison with the old. Much more information about the library – one of the world's greatest resources for the study of naval and maritime history – and pictures of the new facility can be found in the Caird's own blog.
Aesthetically, there's simply no comparison between old and new. One approached the old Caird by way of a splendid rotunda which contained a bust of Sir James Caird upon a pedestal. One approaches the new by the sort of narrow, functional back stair one would find as the fire escape of a provincial hotel; poor old Sir James is now stuck out of the way on a landing. One entered the old Caird by splendid wooden double doors which opened onto a carpeted aisle with large glass-doored bookcases on either side, leading to a small number of large tables. The new Caird has the look and feel of a small university library, with single rows of double-sided tables down the middle and low bookcases along the sides. The tables of the old library allowed an individual researcher copious amounts of space for handling large manuscripts; the individual spaces in the new one seem to be less generous than many school desks (certainly far less generous than the individual space available at, say, the National Archives and the British Library), and one can easily envisage cases of 'elbow- room rage' as researchers working on large items encroach slightly into their neighbour's precious space.
In a way, though, all of this sums up the crucial difference between the two libraries. The old Caird was clearly designed as, and essentially remained, a reading room for a small elite band of gentlemen-scholars, not too different from the ambience of the West End clubs they frequented. (On one occasion many years ago I was engrossed in study of a particularly interesting manuscript when I became aware of a presence at my shoulder. 'And what are you studying?' asked a familiar voice. It was the Duke of Edinburgh.) The old library simply could not accommodate the increasing numbers of people who wished to use it, particularly after the boom in interest in genealogy. Above all, its lack of storage space meant that large amounts of material had to be outhoused, leading to all sorts of delays and angst. (I remember several occasions when American or other foreign researchers turned up at the issue desk claiming that they only had one day available for study in Greenwich, only to be told that it would take forty-eight hours for the document they dearly wished to see to arrive from storage.) The new Caird is divided into two parts, one area for those who wish to chat as they attempt to unearth Great Uncle Harry's maritime career and one for individual researchers who wish to work quietly, albeit in uncomfortably close proximity to others. Its substantial on-site storage facilities, which we were taken to see and which are truly impressive, mean that many more documents will reach readers much more quickly – 40 minutes is the target time – and will hopefully lead to fewer tearful scenes of woe. Compared with the ancient, rickety self-service photocopier in the old Caird, the new reprographic facilities are state-of-the-art (notably an impressive book scanner), while both the excellent new online catalogue and the ability to take one's own digital photographs would have saved me literally weeks, if not months, of work in the past.
Finally, the new Caird has two distinct advantages over its predecessor. Firstly, it has a splendid view over Greenwich Park; secondly, it ought to be quieter than the old, which in latter years was sandwiched between the entrance used by noisy school parties on the one side and the museum's main public space, Neptune Court, on the other.
So all in all, I'll always look back fondly on the old Caird but I look forward to working in the new one, a far more appropriate working environment for the twenty-first century. Indeed, I shall have to spend quite a bit of time there in the coming months as I complete the research for Britannia's Dragon. But a plea and a warning…the reading room would look far better if its bare antiseptic walls were broken up by a few pictures from the museum's vast collection – and beware of my elbows!
Filed Under: Historical research, Naval history Tagged With: Britannia's Dragon, Caird Library, National Maritime Museum, Naval history
Don't Tell Your Mother
Apologies for missing my usual posting date last week. I've been in Wales for 10 days or so, packing in a lot of research and fieldwork for my new non-fiction book Britannia's Dragon. I've had intermittent internet access and also managed to forget my access codes for the blog…
Anyway, I thought I'd get back on track with a marvellous little source that I found last week in Pembrokeshire's county record office. This is a wonderfully old-fashioned institution housed in a converted Georgian prison, itself located within the walls of a lofty hilltop medieval castle. In this letter, written on 7 June 1743, concerned father John Thomas of Posty, Pembrokeshire, writes to his son Vaughan, who has run away to sea after a family argument and entered himself on the ship's books of HMS Princess Amelia, lying at Plymouth. The letter demonstrates that the cross-currents of angst, guilt and emotional blackmail that underpin many family relationships are as old as the hills –
'we are all glad to hear that you are well, your mother and sister and self lost years at the reading of your letter. We expected to hear that you designed to return homewards, your mother has been ill of the rheumatism ever since you parted…there is not a day or night but that she sheds tears about your going away, pray if possible return home…We are informed that it is like to be very troublesome both at sea and land and that several worthy men have lately lost their lives at the West Indies, we desire you to consider both of the times and of the hot season, as to what your mother and myself proposed to give as the present you may assure yourself of it if you return home and settle with us. Pray let us hear how you were received when you went first on board, and what post you have had, we thought that you had no need of going into a man of war but leave such a place to those that had most need of having a sufficiency provided as we thought for you here. We desire you to consider seriously of it, and as to your having any preferment at sea, I think you are too old and besides one that never used the sea, and as to what [differences] have been between us here, your mother and self desires it might be forgotten…'
Vaughan evidently left the navy but does not appear to have returned home, as a couple of years later he was living in Bristol. One of the things I particularly like about this letter is the way in which the father constantly tries, and fails, to conceal his own feelings about the matter, which are clearly complicated – although he shares his wife's anxieties, his own concern for family dignity also comes through in his request to know what status Vaughan has aboard the ship. But best of all is his attempt to make the young man feel guilty by implying that the mother's attack of rheumatism is all his fault!
I'll compensate for the recent hiatus in the blog before the end of this week by posting a fairly epic analysis of the current debate on changing the royal succession rules, placing them in the context of the little-known succession crisis of 1667-72. More interesting than it sounds. Yes, honestly, it is. Trust me.
Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Naval history, Welsh history Tagged With: books by J D Davies, Britannia's Dragon, Pembrokeshire history, Royal Navy history, Welsh history
The Joy of Source
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.
Filed Under: Historical research, Historical sources, Naval historical fiction, Naval history, Welsh history Tagged With: 1901 census, Britannia's Dragon, J D Davies, Swedish history, The Lion of Midnight
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!
Filed Under: Naval history, Welsh history Tagged With: Bedfordshire history, Britannia's Dragon, Naval history, Wales, Welsh history