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! 






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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.

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.

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.

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.