Size Isn't Everything

There’s currently much debate about whether or not to continue with the hugely expensive project to build two new 65,000 ton aircraft carriers. These ships, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, will be by far the largest ships ever built for the Royal Navy. Even if the project isn’t cancelled outright – and if it isn’t, it’ll only be because of prohibitive penalty clauses, not the navy’s blatantly childish attempt to give them names that would make cancellation politically embarrassing – then it’s been suggested that one could be completed as a commando carrier (despite being far too big and hi-spec for that role) or else sold to India, whose navy is expanding almost as rapidly as that of its former imperial overlord is contracting.   


Now, I’m no expert on modern naval matters, although my interest in naval history began as a young ‘warship spotter’ during the 1960s and 1970s. But it seems to me that there are several issues here, and several interesting historical parallels. The very fact that the carriers were ordered at all, or haven’t been cancelled already, can surely be attributed in part to the employment that they’ll provide in Labour strongholds or marginal seats; and, as the saying goes, it’s shurely shome coincidence that final assembly on them is due to take place at Rosyth, immediately adjacent to the constituency of a certain G Brown, MP. No matter how much ministers seek to deny this, there are plenty of precedents – Labour did exactly the same in 1979 when it ordered the Batch 3 Type 42 destroyers in the immediate run-up to a general election, much good that it did former Sub-Lieutenant Jim Callaghan, and many warship orders in the 1920s and 1930s were placed partly to provide employment in desperately depressed shipyard towns.


However, the most senior officers of the Senior Service also seem to be suffering from a very severe case of gigantism. Not only do we have the carrier project, we also have the Type 45 destroyers, so expensive that only six of them will be built, and the Astute-class submarines – only four of which have been ordered so far, primarily because they're ‘more complex than the space shuttle’. Even leaving aside the vexed issues of Trident submarines and the appropriateness or otherwise of the UK’s pretensions to global status, there’s clearly something wrong-headed about the current Royal Navy's priorities, and many others have already commentated on its serious weaknesses vis-a-vis any escalation of the current dispute in the Falklands. Perhaps the explanation is simple enough. Like your present blogger, the most senior officers of the Royal Navy are all children of the 1950s; they entered the service in the 1960s and the 1970s. Therefore it would hardly be surprising if they still retained something of a Cold War mindset – a more charitable interpretation of their enthusiasm for a few huge, expensive warships than suggesting that they might also be driven by inter-service macho posturing. Other former imperial powers, notably France and the Netherlands, have accepted the need for some smaller, less sophisticated vessels that can protect their maritime resources as well as ‘showing the flag’ in their remaining overseas possessions; after all, as many others have said, even the most sophisticated and flexible warship in the world can only be in one place at once. Even the mighty United States Navy, the ultimate repository of naval gigantism, is building smaller, multi-purpose ‘Littoral Combat Ships’. But the Royal Navy still seems to be haunted by the ghost of Jacky Fisher, who scrapped most of the colonial gunboats in the first decade of the twentieth century on the grounds that only big and expensive mattered. Perhaps the other relevant ghost at this particular banquet is the spectre of King Charles I, who launched the Sovereign of the Seas in 1637: a vast, cripplingly expensive warship, completely inappropriate to the actual strategic needs of the country at the time. Sounds familiar? Perhaps some of those responsible for the aircraft carrier project had better hope that history doesn’t repeat itself, because the financial and political ramifications of building such a huge ship ultimately cost Charles his head.

Athos to Aberystwyth

My recent stay in Dubai gave me a chance to enjoy one book that had been on my 'to read' list for months and another that was a chance discovery at the excellent bookshop in Dubai Mall. The former is Malcolm Pryce's 'The Unbearable Lightness of Being in Aberystwyth', the third in his series of surreal novels set in the Cardiganshire town that I know very well of old. I've also read the first two, and must admit that my internal jury is still out. The concept is simply brilliant - this is an Aberystwyth that exists in a slightly unsettling parallel universe, more noir than any Sidney Greenstreet movie, and set in a Wales scarred by a 1960s Vietnam-like war in Patagonia. Some of Pryce's comic touches and plot devices are sheer genius, perhaps especially so if one knows his setting: his description of the difficulties of gaining access to the National Library of Wales will strike a particularly rib-tickling chord with any reader at that august institution. I also loved his play on Rambo / Rimbaud, although I'd advise Stallone to stick to the former and avoid the latter. But I often find Pryce's vision a little too bleak, and the paperback edition of 'Unbearable Lightness' is undermined by his own publisher's provision of one of the most outrageous plot spoilers I've seen in recent times. Number four in the series, 'Don't Cry For Me Aberystwyth', is also on my shelves and rising slowly to the top of the 'to read' list, so perhaps the internal jury will finally return a verdict then.

The chance discovery was Arturo Perez-Reverte's 'The Dumas Club'. I'm a fan of Perez-Reverte's 'Captain Alatriste' series (indeed, it's been a big influence on my own series of 'Quinton Journals') and recently enjoyed the excellent film version, 'Alatriste' starring Viggo Mortensen - a classic case of a seemingly improbable casting that actually works brilliantly. As with Pryce, the plot of 'The Dumas Club' provides a kind of parallel universe, in this case one where the characters of 'The Three Musketeers' seem to take over a group of disparate individuals in a plot that intricately interweaves Richelieu's France with diabolism and the theft of rare books. The loving descriptions of sixteenth and seventeenth century texts that pervade 'The Dumas Club' make the book a bibliophile's delight, although the ending seemed a little flat. Overall, though, it's whetted my appetite for the next Alatriste novel, 'The Man in the Yellow Doublet'; and yes, that's on the 'to read' list too.  

...or, Confessions of a Reluctant Blogger

It wouldn't be entirely accurate to say that I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the blogosphere, but it wouldn't be far short. Until now, I've looked on blogging as a suspiciously self-indulgent activity that also leads to a huge amount of unsourced, prejudiced or simply wrong information getting onto the Internet. BUT...I've finally been persuaded that a blog might be a useful adjunct to my writing, e.g. as a way of promoting my books and, much more importantly, as a means of communicating with my readers and a wider audience. I hope that in a very small way my blog might also give me an opportunity to challenge some of the absurdities about History and related matters that regularly crop up on the Web. I taught History for the best part of 30 years, so in some senses the blog - like my books - will be a natural development from teaching. As far as possible, I always tried to make my lessons interesting, informative and fun (cue comments from ex-students who were bored stiff, no doubt), not always adhering to the strict confines of the curriculum, so I hope to do the same with this blog. The discipline of History - and as I'm fast coming to realise, the writing of fiction as well - seems to be treated too often as a matter of deadly seriousness by many of its practitioners and acolytes, leading to pretentiousness and pomposity on a grand scale. I'll try my best to provide a corrective to those tendencies and to some of the dafter myths that are circulating unchallenged in cyberspace.

Two brief examples to begin with, both of which fall within my alleged area of expertise. Quite a few bloggers seem to want to claim Samuel Pepys as one of their own, in other words as an early proto-blogger - some, indeed, explicitly compare themselves to Pepys. (I won't denigrate them directly by linking to specific examples, but set up a Google Alert for 'Pepys' and you'll find them quickly enough.) Let's leave aside the fact that Pepys was witty, self-aware, perceptive, literate and deeply interested in the world around him, qualities that seem to be absent in many of his would-be successors. More importantly, blogging is all about publishing one's thoughts and deeds to the widest audience possible. What Pepys did was the exact opposite of that. Encoding his diary in shorthand, and then doubly encoding the more intimate passages in an invented hybrid of several European languages, ensured that it would have been almost impossible for any contemporary (particularly his wife) to access his musings. True, he provided a key by which future generations could eventually unlock the code; Pepys had as broad a streak of vanity as many bloggers, but he was determined that only posterity would read his words; and blogs, including this one, by definition aren't written for posterity. So can we please drop the Pepys / blogger comparisons? Secondly, for many months now a story has been doing the rounds of the Internet. It goes something like this: to overcome sailors' superstitions about Fridays, during the 19th century the Royal Navy deliberately build a warship called HMS Friday, launched it on a Friday, sent it to sea on a Friday, etc etc ad nauseam, ending (of course) with the punchline that it set off on its maiden voyage and was never seen again. Sorry, surfers. I've spent far too many days in UK naval archives looking at the original sources that would contain such a story if it was true, and far too many inches of shelf space in my Lair are taken up by the key reference books listing all the ships of the Royal Navy for the last five centuries or so. In a nutshell, then: it didn't happen, it's a complete fiction, it's simply untrue. The person who originally put this story online should be ashamed of themselves; this is probably the most extreme sanction I can advocate for him or her, as in certain quarters hanging people from lampposts or putting them against a wall and shooting them is not necessarily looked upon as politically correct.

Finally, most of the posts in this blog will probably be about matters like these, and hopefully will be considerably shorter. But as an increasingly grumpy fiftysomething, I'm not going to guarantee that I won't occasionally (and, yes, hypocritically) launch into one of the self-indulgent digressions that turned me off blogging for so long. I promise that there won't be much politics (and certainly no overt party politics on one side or any other) and there'll be even less religion. There'll be no crackpot conspiracy theories, unless it's in order to debunk them. There'll be no endless detail about what I did on holiday. But I might sometimes stray into some of life's other important matters, such as the state of Welsh rugby, the decline of the pub and the quest for the perfect toasted cheese sandwich. Who knows?