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.