Search This Blog

Saturday, August 13, 2011

There are Riots, and there are Riots

One hundred years ago next weekend, two innocent men were shot dead by soldiers during rioting in my home town of Llanelli. John John, aged 21, and Leonard Worsell (the latter a Londoner, on a break from his TB sanatorium), had been merely watching the tussle on the main railway line through the town between striking railway workers and their allies on the one hand, and on the other, soldiers of the Worcestershire Regiment commanded by Major Brownlow Stuart. While attempting to escort a train past the strikers, the soldiers were attacked with stones. Stuart evidently panicked, getting a local magistrate to read the Riot Act - the last time this was ever done in Great Britain - before ordering his troops to fire. These tragic events are being commemorated in Llanelli by a three-day long series of events, including a march to the cemetery where the two men are buried; I'll be attending the unveiling of a plaque by John Edwards, the outstanding local historian who has written the definitive history of the riots. The railway shootings remain very much a cause celebre for the left, some of whom look back on the period 1910-14 as something of a golden age of organised socialist militancy.

Obviously, the anniversary has been given even greater relevance by last week's chaotic scenes in English cities. But to call both events 'riots' reveals the problems caused by employing that all-embracing word. The Llanelli 'rioters' were, in most cases, skilled workmen forced into action by nearly intolerable working conditions (such as weeks of 72 hours plus). They were organised, with a strong sense of communal solidarity; many were well educated and genuinely motivated by socialist principles. Contrast that with the scenes in Tottenham, Croydon, Salford etc: forget deep-rooted social causes, this was simply opportunistic criminality by feral pondlife, nothing more, nothing less. But perhaps the example of Llanelli should also give pause to those who called for the army to be sent in, and who no doubt will do so again if and when the next set of similar disturbances take place. Soldiers have guns, and are trained to fire them; the law of averages dictates that some will be more trigger-happy than others; and unfortunately, there is always the risk of a Major Brownlow Stuart and some innocent bystanders being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

***

Today I'm launching a second, and much more regular, blog - Gentlemen and Tarpaulins, which will deal exclusively with my writing and with 17th century naval history. View From the Lair will stay 'live', and I'll post on it from time to time whenever I want to comment on other matters.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Enter the Dragon

I'm delighted to be able to confirm that The History Press has commissioned my latest non-fiction project, Britannia's Dragon: A Naval History of Wales. This will be the first book ever to focus on the long history of connections between Wales and the Royal Navy, as well as on naval warfare in the era of the independent princes. English seapower was one of the most important factors in ending Welsh independence, and during the 16th and 17th centuries the Welsh developed a formidable reputation as pirates and buccaneers. However, the main focus of the book will be the contribution made by Wales and Welshmen to the development of the Royal Navy from the 17th to the 21st centuries, looking at the careers of Welsh sailors and officers, the nature and success of recruitment in the country, the experiences of Welshmen in naval service, and the activities of warships with strong ties to Wales - such as HMS Glamorgan in the Falklands War and HMS Cardiff in the Gulf War. The Battle of the Nile might not have been such a great victory for Nelson without the input of a Welshman; the Battle of Jutland really might have won or lost World War One in an afternoon were it not for the actions of another Welshman. Without Welsh copper, it is doubtful whether 'Nelson's Navy' would have been as successful as it was; without Welsh coal, the Victorian navy probably could not have imposed the 'Pax Britannica'. The book will also look at the history of Wales's only royal dockyard, Pembroke Dock, and at the ships built there (including many royal yachts); and it will also include a study of the naval shipwrecks of the Welsh coast.


I'm really looking forward to working with the team at the History Press on this. I actually began research on Britannia's Dragon some time before its commissioning was confirmed; indeed, in some senses I began work on it when I was eight and saw HMS Seraph, of 'the man who never was' fame, being broken up at Briton Ferry! As part of the research for it, I'll be visiting all of the county record offices in Wales (Carmarthenshire, Flintshire and Denbighshire already 'ticked off') and making use of all the major repositories in London (again, a very large amount of material already examined). But I also want to call on the collective memories of those in or from Wales who served in or otherwise had experience of the Royal Navy, and will be announcing the means of doing this in due course. 


The research and writing for Britannia's Dragon should dovetail neatly with my current writing schedule for the Quinton journals, and also with the entry into service of HMS Dragon, the splendid new Type 45 destroyer which will have strong links with the Principality. Mae'r ddraig yn deffro! 






.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

A Wing and a Bear

A very jolly evening at Greenwich for the reception opening the first exhibition at the Sammy Ofer wing, the National Maritime Museum's new showpiece extension for the 21st century (with not a little focus on the Olympics, as demonstrated by the equestrian test event marquees littering the park opposite). The wing is named after an Israeli shipping magnate, ex-Royal Navy matelot and generous philanthropist who unfortunately died just a month before the opening that his largesse had made possible. A large audience consumed champagne (plenty), canapes (minimal) and listened to some brief and entertaining speeches, notably from Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Media, Olympics, Sport and Dubious Antipodean Media Moguls, who by his own admission was hugely relieved to be doing something so pleasant and non-controversial for a change. There was also confirmation of the new collective name for the Maritime Museum, Royal Observatory and Queen's House, namely the Royal Museums, Greenwich - a story first broken, albeit with a slightly different form of words, on this blog much earlier in the year

We then had ample opportunity to explore the new building, and first things first - as a piece of architecture, it's stunning. A brilliant piece of design has created a part-sunken structure that preserves the integrity of the original buildings behind while also making a bold statement of its own, and yours truly was particularly pleased to see that the statue of King William IV, Britain's most avowedly naval monarch, which spent many years in an obscure locked garden, has been given pride of place in the approach to the new entrance. The interior of the new entrance space is light and spacious, and leads into a fascinating introductory exhibition on the centrality of the maritime element to British life that has a significantly greater proportion of naval material than has sometimes been the case in this museum in the last twenty or so years.

As soon as we were able, certain of us made directly for the new Caird Library on the first floor. I have to declare an interest here: I was on the panel of stakeholders which advised on its design. And it has to be said that it has huge plusses, notably a clear separation (aka a glass wall) between groups of chatty amateur genealogists and serious individual researchers, rather more spaces than were available in the old Caird, and above all, having a much greater amount of important archival research material held actually in the building rather than outhoused. Unfortunately, at the moment it has the appearance (and smell) of a brand new hospital ward; it will need some imaginative deployment of pictures on the ample wall space to liven it up and make it feel more homely. Moreover, the functional long tables and plastic chairs bear a distinctly uncomfortable resemblance to some of the less atmospheric classrooms in which I taught, and there are clearly aspects of the internal layout that will have to be fine-tuned - notably the reservation of all the best desks for Caird fellows and research staff of the museum (thereby suggesting implicitly, or perhaps even explicitly, that what the rest of us are doing is far less important), as well as the selection of open-shelf materials. As a very distinguished naval historian remarked with some horror, The Mariner's Mirror (one of the most essential tools for any maritime researcher) isn't on open shelves, while to this observer, it seemed somewhat perverse that the Navy Records Society volumes should fill up all the space to the end of the top shelf of a bookcase, with the rest of the case occupied by other books - despite the fact that, as the library staff must know full well, the society publishes three volumes in every two years, and that additional shelf space will therefore need to be found on this particular bookcase by October of this year at the latest.

But enough of a researcher's gripes, which will doubtless be resolved by patience and good humour on all sides. The focus of the event was meant to be the exhibition 'High Arctic', which is a piece of installation art. I intend to say very little about this, as I am to modern art what King Herod was to mother-and-toddler groups, and I always thought 'installation' was what one did with kitchen units. Suffice it to say that I'm still trying to work out what the word 'Southamptonbreen', on top of one of hundreds of white columns with similarly cryptic slogans and readable only by means of the little ultra-violet torches handed out on entry to the gallery, actually means. (As an ex-teacher, I can only imagine what fun entire legions of little darlings will have in disobeying the injunctions not to point these torches into people's eyes.)

Let's look on the bright side, though; at least the exhibition has provided an excuse for the museum's splendid new shop to stock some adorable toy polar bears.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

PS

Further to my last blog about the misuse and misreporting of naval history, there's something of an awful inevitability about the fact that the very last issue of The News of the World should contain a classic example of the problem. Presenting HMS Liverpool's activities off Libya as the first time the Royal Navy has been in action since the Falklands is unbelievably crass on many levels. It both ignores the many occasions on which the RN has fired in anger or operated in war zones in the last 29 years (anybody remember two Gulf wars, for instance, or the actions of HMS Ocean and Triumph just a few weeks ago?) and sends out the message that the navy doesn't really do a lot, unlike an army which has its actions and casualties making headline news virtually every day - a message which will presumably be swallowed wholesale by large chunks of a red-top readership incapable of believing anything other than what they're told by such completely incompetent journalism. Maybe the NOTW would have done better by employing rather fewer phone-hacking crooks and defence editors who evidently know nothing about defence and hiring some journalists with sufficient brainpower to carry out a rudimentary Google search for what the navy might or might not have been doing for the last 29 years.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Naval Gazing

First things first. I'm a naval historian, I write naval fiction, I've been a warship-spotter since almost before anoraks were invented. And like many, many others, I think that the government's cuts to the navy are idiotic - although probably unlike many others, I'd put quite a lot of the blame for the navy's woes on several generations of largely mediocre senior officers, determined at all costs to acquire ever more extensive pieces of kit - even if only to spite the RAF, and only in ever decreasing numbers, as with the increasingly farcical aircraft carriers, the Type 45s and the Astute class subs. (These grandiose pretensions and claims to have the most advanced destroyer/submarine/drinks cupboard in the world cause much amusement elsewhere, notably on the other side of the pond.) Some of the admirals in questions might perhaps have made moderately competent middle managers at internationally reputable organisations like, say, News International or Lehman Brothers, but successors of Drake or Nelson? I think not.

That said, some of the 'facts' being pumped out by opponents of the 'Strategic Defence Review' (a title reminiscent of Voltaire's definition of the Holy Roman Empire) are both downright wrong and actually dangerous, because they undermine the very strong and reasoned case that can be made against cuts in the Royal Navy. Sorry to single out just one, @ThinkRoyalNavy on Twitter, but this assertion - Royal Navy's trained numbers dips below 34,000. It's [sic] lowest probably since the Mary Rose Sank - is simply daft. OK, we could probably quibble for several hours about the definition of the word 'trained', but from the 1650s to the 1690s, well over a hundred years after the Mary Rose sank, the active fleet in wartime numbered on average some 25,000 men, only about 3-4,000 in peacetime (the great majority of years), and it would only have gone consistently above 34,000 well into the eighteenth century. Here's another example that appeared in the Twittersphere in the last week - HMS Cornwall & HMS Gloucester both decommissioned today, first time in history of Royal Navy 2 ships decommissioned on same day. And before that, when the Ark Royal left the fleet, we had Sky News and others screaming that never since 1588 had the Royal Navy been without a ship of that name! Well, not unless you conveniently ignore the years 1638 to 1914, I suppose...and as for two ships never being decommissioned on the same day? I haven't undertaken the exercise, but I think I'd be willing to bet good money that any trawl of the Admiralty records for, say, 1919 or 1945-6 would reveal far more than two being decommissioned on very large numbers of days.

So to conclude - yes, let's campaign long and hard against the mindless salami-slicing of the Royal Navy by careerist, here-today-gone-tomorrow, bottom-line-obsessed politicians, but please, please, please, let's not try to do so by deliberately or inadvertently distorting the very proud truths of that navy's history.

Sunday, July 3, 2011

The Lair is a peaceful place, rarely troubled by ruddy-faced explosions of wrath from its occupant. However, that aura of tranquility has been threatened today by Tristram Hunt's bizarre attack on the digitisation of source material. I don't usually come across a piece that seems so utterly and irredeemably crass, and although others - notably Lucy Inglis - have already gone into battle on behalf of common sense and the modern age, I thought I'd join the fray and fire off a passing broadside or two. 

To start with, Dr Hunt seems to be taking issue primarily with the Google Books project by extolling the virtues of physically handling manuscripts. Now, books and manuscripts are two entirely different things, as the pupils of the school where I used to teach learned by the time they were about eight. But bearing with Dr Hunt's confused line of argument for a while, I'd concur that few things beat the sheer unpredictable fun of working with and handling original sources - for instance, the countless discoveries I've made among the filthy and chaotic ADM or HCA collections at the National Archives in Kew, or (perhaps most memorably) crawling on hands and knees on the floor of the Dundee City Archives, pulling a fabulously eclectic cornucopia of documents out of an ancient tin trunk. But this, after all, is the twenty-first century. Digitisation has opened up all sorts of possibilities - yes, the short-cuts so derided by Dr Hunt, despite the fact that such short-cuts enable us to discover sources we would probably either have taken far longer to find or would never have found at all. Take the project to digitise the state papers - how can that possibly be a bad thing, as it permits the preservation of the originals, means historians no longer have to rely on incomplete calendars or frequently unreadable microfilms, and above all permits easy access to the sources to those who live further than an easy day's commute from the National Archives at Kew? Moreover, why, exactly, should history be 'a mystery', accessible only to those of us who have been house-trained in using original documents? If the digitisation of sources means that more people become enthusiastic enough to research a topic in detail and write about it without necessarily going through the Inquisition-like process of proving they are worthy of being granted readers' tickets for the British Library, then where, exactly, is the problem?

It seems particularly perverse, then, that this elitist metrocentric claptrap should have been produced by someone who [a] purports to be the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent, where presumably the working men's clubs debate nothing else but the problems of provenance with the state papers (domestic) of the Interregnum, and [b] was responsible for inflicting upon the world one of the lowest of all low points in the dumbing down of TV history, a right-on series about the English civil war during which the now-MP held up pictures of key figures as he mentioned them. But presumably there were people in the 1850s and 1860s who opposed the revolutionary new access to historical sources conferred by the openings of the Public Record Office and British Library, and the calendaring of sources by the PRO and Historical Manuscripts Commission. Moreover, Dr Hunt is certainly not the first MP to suggest that access to archives should be confined to an elite: 'the general task of supervising the publication of such of the records as possessed an historic interest [should] be committed to the charge of some persons of taste and erudition, and in all respects qualified for the task', said Williams Wynn, MP for Montgomeryshire...on 23 June 1846. And yes, I found that quotation online and within minutes via an indispensable digital source, the online archive of Hansard. And pace Dr Hunt, I didn't even have time to slurp my frappucino.

Monday, June 27, 2011

The Saga Continues!

I'm delighted to be able to confirm that Old Street will be publishing the next three 'journals of Matthew Quinton'! The third book, The Blast That Tears The Skies - set against the twin backdrops of the battle of Lowestoft and the great plague of 1665 - will be published next year; I'm currently revising it, when not distracted by Wimbledon or the urge to read yet more of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I'm only just catching up with. The fourth book, The Lion of Midnight, is set early in 1666. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, then at the height of its power as one of the largest and most feared empires in Europe; as previously mentioned in this blog, I had a very enjoyable time in Sweden earlier in the year,  carrying out some really productive research in Kalmar and Gothenburg. I've already started writing Lion and will be getting back to it full time after completing the revisions of Blast. The fifth book will centre on the Four Days' Battle of 1666, which as its name implies was by some distance the greatest battle of the entire sailing navy era, while the sixth will culminate in one of the most famous events in British history - the Great Fire of London.

Thanks to Ben Yarde-Buller of Old Street for his faith in the series, and to my agent Peter Buckman for all his hard work in bringing about this outcome. I'm really looking forward to taking the series forward, and to placing Matthew and his friends at the heart of some of the most dramatic events of the seventeenth century!  

Friday, June 10, 2011

Lord High Incompetence

Great news about the Duke of Edinburgh being made Lord High Admiral - I'm looking forward to the imminent restoration of various other aspects of the 17th century navy, such as the Navy Board, generals-at-sea and scurvy. However, coverage of the story reveals just how shockingly ignorant much of our media is about naval history; and if the media can't get it right, is there any wonder why the general public is so woefully navy-blind? (See my last post.) Take, for instance, this apparently risible piece of reportage from the Daily Telegraph, surely the one national paper that ought to be able to get this sort of story right. Entirely honorary and delegated to commissioners after 1628? Tell that to the Duke of York, who commanded fleets in battle as Lord High Admiral in 1665 and 1672, to the various other individuals who held the office prior to 1709, and to King William IV, who held it, as Duke of Clarence, in 1827-8. But let's dig a little deeper. Like so much modern reporting, the Telegraph piece is simply a rehash of the Palace's own press release - a bad rehash, too, as it omits the important qualifying comment about powers being passed to and from the Board. But overall, the basic error lies within the press release, which is where the idiocy about the position becoming 'entirely honorary' originates. So if the serried ranks of flunkies and spin doctors around the royal family can't get it right, what chance does an overworked reporter have, and then what chance, in turn, does poor old Joe Public have? 

Monday, June 6, 2011

Dragged kicking and screaming into the Eighteenth Century

After setting it up a couple of years ago but never quite taking the plunge, I've started using my Twitter account. Hopefully it'll be a good way to interact with readers, and my initial intention is to use it as something of a running commentary on the process of writing - especially as I'm about to get under way properly on the fourth Quinton novel, The Lion of Midnight. But it's clearly an interesting time to be getting more au fait with the twitterverse. While I have absolutely no intention of discussing the nocturnal activities of ageing unshaven nonentities with hyperactive libidos who happen to get paid vast amounts for kicking a ball for 90 minutes on Saturdays, it'll be good to get some first hand knowledge of the pros and cons of something which seems capable of bringing down governments and slaughtering some of the sacred cows of the British legal system!

Meanwhile, it's Seafarers Awareness Week, one of the most important campaigns attempting to counteract the rampant 'sea blindness' in modern Britain, and View from the Lair is happy to do its bit for the cause. Their website carries the results of a survey which suggests that a quarter of children think Captain Jack Sparrow is the country's most famous seaman. I'm probably more relaxed about this than some of my colleagues: the fact that 75% of children presumably named a real seaman, despite the best efforts of the National Curriculum in schools to pretend that the country never had a naval and maritime history, actually strikes me as quite encouraging, especially in the light of the many far more dire surveys of the state of historical knowledge among young people. (Here's a particularly cracking example from a few years ago.) Moreover, the sea has probably never had so much exposure on TV (e.g. the new series of Coast following hard on the heels of Britain's Secret Seas), the National Maritime Museum is the country's 6th most visited museum and Portsmouth Historic Dockyard is in the top 15 of most visited historic sites, and if the population really is so 'sea blind', how did Turner's Fighting Temeraire get to be voted the country's favourite painting? I reckon the reality is that the country isn't so much 'sea blind' as 'navy blind'. That's due in part to ignorant politicians - of all persuasions - whose thinking about defence extends no further than having enough soldiers who can be sent out to invade and get killed in assorted deserts; but a lot of it also has to be the fault of the navy itself, thanks to years of complacency, incompetent leadership and utterly crass PR. Come to think of it, those might be themes to return to on Twitter...

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Birth Control

So Barack Obama's released his birth certificate in an attempt to end the ludicrous right-wing claims that he wasn't born in the USA. Well, fine. Whether this actually stops the half-baked 'birther' movement in its tracks remains to be seen - as others are pointing out, this was never really about his birthplace at all, but a pretty ineptly coded and rather nasty example of the sort of just-beneath-the-surface racism so brilliantly satirised in Clybourne Park, which we saw recently in the West End. (In fact, it's a kind of double racism - that directed against the first black President, plus the underlying assumption that Hawaii is some kind of banana republic which must, by definition, be lying repeatedly about the presidential birth certificate. But yes, I confess that my knowledge of Hawaii is derived principally from both the old and new versions of Hawaii Five-O.) Personally, I doubt whether this will end 'birthism', or whatever it's called; the conspiracy theorists who cry out loudest and longest for hard evidence are actually terrified of some turning up, either because it will give the lie to their fantasies or because they'll have to dream up an even more byzantine explanation of why this development doesn't satisfy them. I suspect that even now, pale young men staring at computer screens in bedrooms in West Virginia or wherever are putting together 'proof' that this certificate is some sort of elaborate forgery put together by an unholy alliance of the CIA, the Illuminati and Al Qaeda - just look at the way in which the conspiracy theories about the moon landings, the death of Diana and 9/11 have survived each new piece of 'definitive' evidence contradicting their cases.

My personal favourite was the story circulated after the Falklands War, when Argentina claimed to have badly damaged HMS Invincible,  now being torn apart in a Turkish scrapyard. I came across a suggestion just the other day that some Argentinians still believe this: the 'proof' was that all of the press photos and TV footage of Invincible's return to Portsmouth on 17 September 1982 was shot from the starboard side, thus cunningly concealing the hideous damage to her port side. Ah well, don't cry for me, Argentina (to coin a phrase) - as anybody who has actually been to Portsmouth knows, the best viewing positions to watch ships entering and leaving the harbour are all on the Portsmouth side (i.e. the starboard side of incoming ships). Moreover, I was there that day and have photos of her from the port side about an hour after she docked. But no doubt this will be disbelieved by pale young men staring at computer screens in bedrooms in the Chubut Valley...

***

The new Kindle (see my last post) is still proving to be a revelation. Unfortunately, though, it's altering my reading habits, so that rather than sitting down and reading say three chapters of one book, I'm now skipping between two or three books at a time (of which more anon). Worse, I'm actually finding Peter Mandelson's memoirs pretty compelling - so much so that I've now downloaded Tony Blair's memoirs too. This is troubling. In fact, this is very troubling indeed.   

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Rekindled

OK, I succumbed.

Having chuntered endlessly about how sceptical I was of e-book readers, and of how they'd never beat the comforting feel of 'real' books, I received a Kindle for my birthday. My weakening can be attributed to several causes, including the realisation that at the current rate of acquiring books, there would probably soon be no room for me in the Lair, let alone anything else; but I'm also working on a tentative idea to write some novellas exclusively for Kindle, and with that in mind it seemed sensible to actually experience it from a consumer's viewpoint.

So am I a convert? Yes, emphatically. The size is infinitely more convenient than most overblown modern paperbacks (I'm one of those recidivists who long for the days when one could fit a book comfortably into a coat pocket). The 'electronic ink' is easy to read, and obviously the ability to store many books on one small device has huge advantages - I won't now have to throw myself out, and I should be able to travel more comfortably from A to B without packing enough books to populate a small rural library. The facility to email my own drafts to the Kindle is likely to prove very useful indeed. Doom-mongers, my erstwhile comrades-in-arms, can predict 'the death of the book' all they like, but as far as I'm concerned, a week of the Kindle has already broadened my reading. For example, I've been vaguely interested for some time in reading Peter Mandelson's memoir, The Third Man, but it's probably not something I would ever have gone out and bought - but having it on the Kindle, taking up no space whatsoever, is ideal. Without searching the books available for Kindle, it would probably have taken me far longer to realise that one of my favourite authors, John Biggins (author of the simply brilliant Sailor of Austria series), had a new book out, namely The Surgeon's Apprentice, which is the first book I'm reading on the device. (Biggins is one of the very few authors who consistently writes books that I wish I'd written myself, and The Surgeon's Apprentice certainly fits that bill - set in the Netherlands in the 17th century and with a first chapter that touches on the assassination of Henri IV of France by Francois Ravaillac, a subject explored in the last chapter of my Blood of Kings, it seems eerily close to home!).

But I can foresee one serious flaw in the logic behind having the Kindle. I'm now likely to want a hard copy of The Surgeon's Apprentice, and the same is probably likely to happen with other tomes in the future. So rather than heralding the death of the real book and an end to space management issues, the Kindle might well lead to this reader, at least, ending up with even more books on his shelves. Maybe it's time for me to move into the shed after all... 

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

A Fitting Legacy

I'm putting together quite a substantial blog about History teaching in schools (yes, another one...) but am waiting for an important link to be posted on my alma mater's website. To keep things ticking over in the meantime, I thought I'd comment quickly on my current reading, Buccaneers of the Caribbean by Jon Latimer. This proved to be his last book; he died suddenly in January 2009, aged only 44. He established his reputation with books on the Second World War that made particularly effective use of survivors' accounts, but also wrote a magisterial history of the war of 1812 which was shortlisted for the George Washington Book Prize. To move on from dealing with those themes to write about 17th century maritime history was quite a leap, and Buccaneers of the Caribbean has its errors, but for a non-specialist in the period, Latimer's grasp of the issues and the source material is very impressive indeed. Too many writers of historical books think that they can read the well-trodden published accounts and then churn out what is essentially derivative pap (which, alas, seems too often to garner good reviews and impressive sales...). Not Latimer; his references make it clear that he'd done a great deal of archival work in both Britain and Spain, and he covers a broad range of contexts in a lively but authoritative style. He was clearly an impressive historian and author who could have had a long and successful career. And that's where my regret at his tragically early death becomes personal. I met Jon Latimer several times - he lived near my cousins in West Wales and became very friendly with them. They often socialised together, notably in the amiable surroundings of what must be one of the least pretentious yacht clubs in Britain, and sometimes, if I was in the area, I'd join them. With my own writing career starting to develop, I said to him that he and I ought one day to have a proper conversation to compare methods, problems and experiences. Death put paid to that, but Buccaneers of the Caribbean, published posthumously, is a fine memorial to a man whom I would like to have known much better.   


Monday, February 28, 2011

Not a theory you'll hear on Al Jazeera

It occurs to me that the pattern of revolution in the Arab World reflects the original colonial powers...

Tunisia - manning of barricades, much frenzied political debate, corrupt ruler fades away into obscurity. Former colonial power = France.

Egypt - flagrant theft of priceless historic artefacts, army and political elite rapidly ejects corrupt ruler. Former colonial power = Britain.

Libya - complete chaos, unstable old ruler makes endless incoherent ranting speeches and refuses to give up. Former colonial power = Italy.


(I wonder if Italian media, bloggers etc have spotted the intriguing parallel between Gaddafi and Berlusconi?)

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Crowning Glory?

I was in Sweden the other day, carrying out some fieldwork and preliminary research for the fourth Quinton novel - provisionally named The Lion of Midnight and set in the early months of 1666. This took me for the first time to Kalmar, carpeted in picture-postcard snow, where my main objective was a visit to the exhibition displaying relics brought up from the wreck of the great Swedish warship Kronan (= Crown). Designed by the English shipwright Francis Sheldon, and at the time of her loss the most heavily armed ship in the world (and one of the two or three largest), the Kronan turned over and blew up during a battle against the combined Dutch-Danish fleet in 1676. The Baltic waters, free of teredo navalis, have preserved many remarkable artefacts from the ship, from huge bronze cannon in superficially mint condition to tiny rings, coin hordes and such stunning survivals as Sweden's oldest violin. The Kronan was far larger than the much better-known Vasa, and the locals claim that the finds from Kronan are more extensive and important - having seen both, I won't argue with them. In many respects the Kronan materials also outdo those brought up from the Mary Rose, and provide some superb insights into life as a whole during the early modern age, not just into naval warfare

But therein lies the rub. Vasa and Mary Rose are names known around the world, yet even some very eminent British maritime historians had never heard of Kronan and the exhibition when I mentioned it to them. The exhibition ends with the ambitious future plan to raise the remaining side of the ship, preserved beneath the silt (as the side of Mary Rose was), but I wonder whether such a laudable scheme will ever come to fruition. For one thing, Kalmar is far less accessible than either Stockholm or Portsmouth, an hour's flight from the former (which in my case was a hair-raising switchback, flying through a snowstorm in an ageing turbo-prop plane), and it is in the invidious position of having effectively come second to the Vasa - despite arguably being a more important ship than the latter, and with a wider range of finds, I suspect that the Kronan project will struggle to raise funds simply because the Vasa is already there, an hour away in a highly accessible capital city, and an entirely intact hull rather than just one half of one. However, and with the greatest respect to a project that has clearly worked very hard over a long period of time and has accomplished a vast amount, it must be said that from this writer's perspective, at least, the Kronan team is not doing enough to develop the sort of international profile that would be required if the ambitious plans for her are to get anywhere. For example, when searching via the UK Google site the excellent Kronan website does not feature on the first page of  search results for the single word 'Kronan', while using 'ship Kronan' does not bring up a link to the site within the first ten pages of results. This might be partly because the Kronan does not actually have a discrete website of its own, but is a kind of sub-site of the Kalmar Lansmuseum, in which the exhibition is housed. The approximate equivalent would be for the Mary Rose exhibition to be housed in one room of the Isle of Wight's Museum of Island History. Moreover, the Kronan blog is only in Swedish, despite the fact that most Swedes speak, and write, outstandingly good English, and surely an English translation would immediately provide greater 'reach' (if only by ensuring higher rankings in the search engines); as it is, the blog relies on a Google Translate button, which often produces laughable or indecipherable results.  This is a great shame; the story of the past, and hopefully the future, of the Kronan deserves to be much better known.


Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Roses by any other names

Word reaches me that the National Maritime Museum is to be 'rebranded' as the 'Royal Museum of Greenwich'. Apparently the NMM name will be retained for the present building, but will be subordinate to the new overall name for all the sites at Greenwich. In one sense this simply echoes the recent creation of the National Museum of the Royal Navy, but there are crucial differences. NMRN gives a unified identity to a number of sites scattered across the country; there is no such rationale at Greenwich, where the sites are all within a 15-minute walk of each other. Above all, though, 'National Museum of the Royal Navy' clearly does exactly what it says on the tin; the title directly reflects the main focus and remit of the institution. No such logic can be detected in the new name at Greenwich. Moreover, that name surely implies - or even makes quite explicit - a downgrading of the 'maritime' focus of the institution; while the NMM name might be retained in theory, at a quite explicitly secondary level, the experience of the NMRN and other institutions surely suggests that the 'headline' corporate branding, and so forth, will reflect the new name. Yet 'the National Maritime Museum' is an internationally known and respected 'brand', while 'the Royal Museum of Greenwich' sounds like nothing more than a glorified repository of a few artefacts of local history. Worse, this rebranding might be interpreted by some as a signal that the 'maritime' element is no longer considered significant - this at a time when 'sea blindness' is rampant in Britain and when the NMM should be leading the fight against such widespread ignorance of the nation's maritime heritage, not effectively ditching both the words 'national' and 'maritime'. (In the year of a royal wedding and a government headed by public school alumni, it is surely also an interesting sign of the times that the word 'royal' is evidently still considered to be far superior to the word 'national'.) No doubt the NMM's management consider its 'royal' rebranding to be quite a coup, and probably a greater potential attraction for the sort of American, Japanese and Chinese tourists who flock unthinkingly to anything 'royal'. Perhaps it will be. Unfortunately, though, it is also yet another lamentable  landmark in Britain's relentless retreat from the sea.

(All opinions expressed in this post are entirely my own, and do not necessarily reflect those of any organisation with which I am associated.) 

Monday, January 17, 2011

Kings' Speeches

My first visit to the cinema for far too long, taking in an afternoon showing of The King's Speech. I heartily concur with the almost universal praise that's been lavished on this film - subtly written, well acted (especially Colin Firth's brilliant portrayal of George VI) and very moving. An odd thought occurred to me, though, which doesn't seem to have surfaced in any of the major reviews. In many respects, The King's Speech is simply a modern-dress reworking of The Madness of King George, with cars and fascism replacing horses and American independence. Just unpick the basic plot: fundamentally decent king with a powerful sense of duty and a supportive, loving wife defies his dysfunctional family, overcomes a major impediment with the assistance of an unconventional therapist, and 'recovers' in time to forestall a major political crisis. The script suggests that this might not have been an entirely unconscious similarity, notably when Firth's tortured king wonders whether he would be remembered in the same way as his famous ancestor, as Mad King George the Stammerer. A pity that the scriptwriter and director didn't take the golden opportunity presented to them in the scene when George VI looks up at the daunting portraits of some of his illustrious ancestors: why not have an image of George III upon the wall, and above all why not one of Charles I, the other famous royal stammerer (whose fate must surely have strayed into George VI's mind, given what had happened so relatively recently to his cousin Tsar Nicholas II?). After all, Charles, too, had been Duke of York, growing up in the shadow of a charismatic elder brother who suddenly left the scene unexpectedly; and Charles, too, ultimately lost his stammer to make the speech of his life, albeit only when he already knew that the headsman's axe was about to end that life. Otherwise, my only quibble with The King's Speech is to wish it had been made on a bigger budget: effectively leaving out the coronation, and trying to get away with genuine newsreel footage of the real Cosmo Lang crowning the real George VI, simply doesn't work.

Aside from thoroughly enjoying the film, I was struck by the size and nature of the audience around me. The (quite large) cinema was virtually full - for an afternoon screening - and the average age of the audience must have been in the sixties at least. Which begs a question...if 'oldies' are prepared to come out in such droves to watch a story that appeals to them, thereby presumably making a great deal of money for all those involved in The King's Speech, then perhaps film distributors, studios and movie-makers are barking up the wrong tree by churning out more and more mindless thrillers and potty-mouthed 'comedies' directed exclusively at semi-literate teenaged and twentysomething chavs with the attention spans of hyperactive insects.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Inhumanities

To my old alma mater, Jesus College, Oxford, for a historians' reunion dinner - or, more accurately, a J R Green Society gaudy, the pioneering Victorian social historian being arguably the greatest exponent of the subject to come out of the college, while the society named after him introduced us both to some of the most distinguished historians of our era and to the delights of drinking claret, port or Madeira. Much angst from the dons, and those alumni who are now teaching at other universities, about the swingeing cuts to humanities teaching budgets in higher education (up to 80% in some cases); one of the reasons for the dinner was to promote the ongoing campaign to maintain funds for the second full-time tutorial fellowship at Jesus. I've just come across an interesting take on this by Alain de Botton. His analysis of the humanities' own responsibility for the perceived assault upon them is perceptive, even if his conclusion - effectively to make university courses glorified continuations of the much-derided PSHE and Citizenship courses that clutter the secondary curriculum - is laughable, as is his unfortunate conflation of 'humanities' and 'culture'. It's certainly true that university history departments, and academic historians in general, have often been content to occupy ivory towers, talking only to each other, writing lengthy and impenetrable tomes for a tiny audience, and not seeking to reach out to the public at large. Those who do write 'popular' history and/or become 'TV historians' are often still looked upon with suspicion (tinged, with suspects, with jealousy), as the barbs directed at one particularly well-known historian at the dinner suggested. If the current financial pressures finally force university teachers to justify what they do to a wider audience, to cull some of the more dubious fringe courses and PhD theses, and to write books with a broader appeal, then perhaps all the current pain will eventually prove to have been worthwhile.

Nevertheless, it seems ironic beyond belief that this apparent assault on the humanities should be conducted by a government led by Messrs Cameron (Oxford, Politics, Philosophy & Economics), Clegg (Cambridge, Social Anthropology) and Osborne (Oxford, Modern History). But then, the ability of politicians to bite the hand that fed them never ceases to amaze: witness the tirade against independent school students by the government's new 'access tsar' Simon Hughes (alumnus of Christ College, Brecon - fees currently between £4070 and £7155 per term - and Selwyn College, Cambridge). The same is true of modern government's apparent inability to think in a joined-up way. So here's a heretical thought: getting more and more students from poorer backgrounds and/or state schools into universities is likely to mean increased demand for the 'newer' institutions, i.e. the ones under most threat from the cutbacks (despite their current bleating, the likes of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham etc will essentially be fine), and for humanities or other non-scientific courses at those universities - in part because it's primarily independent schools that are able to provide the specialist teaching in, and thus the potential future students of, the sciences and Mathematics. So we apparently have one arm of government insisting that more and more  bodies are poured into courses that another arm of government is scything away - or even into entire universities that might have no future, already an increasingly imminent prospect in Wales. It's enough to drive a man to his decanter, and to be thankful once again to the J R Green Society for having taught him what to do with it.