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Battening Down The Hatches

20/05/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Last week’s post attracted the most traffic ever to this blog, and certainly generated the biggest response in terms of comments, feedback on Twitter, etc. The moral of the story seems to be that saying vaguely rude things about David Starkey and/or Michael Gove strikes a big chord with perusers of this particular dark recess of the Interweb, and it would have been easy for me to carry on in the same vein this week, just as many of the numbers in Saturday’s Eurovision song contest were basically clones of the previous year’s winner. (As ever, far and away the best music of the night was Charpentier’s Prelude to a Te Deum, aka the Eurovision theme. Maybe next year the UK should enter Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending? Let’s face it, it couldn’t do much worse than Bonnie Tyler, Engelbert Humperdinck or the Romanian castrato vampire…)

So, for example, this week I could have chosen to major on the fact that thanks to the intrepid Freedom of Information requests put in by a retired teacher, some of Mr Gove’s more sweeping assertions about schoolchildren’s alleged ignorance of History are based on rigorous in-depth research by such authoritative organisations as, umm, Premier Inn. But I don’t want to flog a career-dead politician, so then I thought of commenting on the appearance last week of the new seminal literary work by master wordsmith Dan Brown – but Michael Deacon’s brilliant send-up renders superfluous all further comment about said renowned author.

No – this week marks a battening down of the hatches. In the last couple of months, I’ve lost a huge amount of writing time to meetings, trips, filming, transporting elderly mother from Wales to Bedfordshire and entertaining her for a week (she particularly likes my stand-up routine and my rendition of the greatest hits of Max Bygraves), transporting her back again, etc. So it’s time to shut myself away for five or six weeks, during which time I hope to finish off ‘Quinton 5′, The Battle of All The Ages, and work on various other projects too. Embarking on such an intensive period of writing means I need to be fully prepared for all the potential pitfalls lying in the way, which from past experience are:

  • People - They phone you up; some of them even have the audacity not to offer you vast amounts of money for mis-sold PPI. They come to the door wanting you to sign for a package from Amazon that you ordered in advance six months ago and had totally forgotten about. They suggest it’s about time you went for a drink with them in the pub. One of them even lives with you. Solution: Hide. The only viable alternative, namely carrying out limited genocide among your circle of contacts, is not recommended.
  • Grass - It grows. Constantly. From time to time, the person who lives with you will suggest that it’s time you went out and lost an hour’s writing by mowing it. Solution: Let it grow. By the end of the summer you’ll have a small jungle, aka a wild habitat which is much better for the environment.
  • Shopping - In the beginning was the list. And the list had one item on it, and all was good. Then, suddenly, the list expanded until it contained the entire inventory of a small United Nations relief convoy. And the person who lives with you will suggest that it’s time you went out and lost an hour’s writing by getting every item. Solution: Unfortunately, there isn’t one, unless you can survive a six-week writing blitz on one tin of corned beef, a packet of cornflakes and a tea bag. (NB going out shopping also involves the author in contact with People; see above. Generally, such encounters do not end well. You’ll either end up at the checkout manned by the trainee who doesn’t know how to input the discount on Chilean Merlot, or else you’ll be behind the granny who insists on paying for her unfeasible number of tins of cat food with several dozen money-off coupons and a purse full of small denomination coins that were legal tender in the reign of William IV.)
  • The Internet - Get thee behind me, Twitter, for you are far too interesting and I would much rather spend ages staring at you to learn that all my fellow authors and historians are being distracted from their writing by doing exactly the same thing. Then there are everybody else’s blogs and all those hilarious animal videos on YouTube, not to mention the fun that can be had from the reader comment forums on the Guardian and Telegraph websites (oh to lock both sets of contributors in one large room and watch the consequences). Solution: Remember that you are a relic of the PI (= Pre-Internet) era; thus you are one of those fortunate souls who will know just what to do when the whole thing crashes, as it surely will one day, and all the young people start bumping into each other like headless chickens, screaming that they can’t live without their iPhone apps and Angry Birds. When that glorious day dawns, you will smile knowingly, for you will remember how to use a manual typewriter and carbon paper; you will be one of the few who will know how to write a letter longhand – yes, and how to post it too; above all, you will know how to look up information, not on Wikipedia, but in books in libraries. So deploy your secret weapon, ageing author, and disconnect from your wi-fi network. You can do it. You know you can. You really, really can.  
  • The British Summer – Endless sunny days when you can’t concentrate on writing because of all the distractions – the chance to sit in the garden and work on the tan, the opportunity to go out for nice walks, the wall-to-wall Test Match cricket… Solution: This summer? This very marginally warmer reboot of winter? We’re still switching on the central heating in the evenings, for heaven’s sake. Absolutely perfect writing weather. Sorted.

So as part of my focus on writing, I’ll be scaling back the amount of time I put into this blog for the next few weeks, for example by taking the opportunity to publish material that takes a bit less creative thought, namely some pictures and documents of naval and/or seventeenth century and/or general interest. But if the likes of Messrs Starkey or Gove stick their heads above the parapet again, be sure that I’ll return to the fray and will have a trusty demi-culverin or two primed, loaded, and ready to point in their directions.

Posted in Fiction, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Mr Stark and Mr Staring

13/05/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Just when you’re starting to think ‘what shall I blog about this week?’, along comes good old David Starkey and solves the problem. (Actually, in true London bus fashion his intellectual soulmate Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Eton – sorry, Education – then came along too, but more of him anon.) For those who don’t know Dr Starkey, and presumably some of my overseas readers don’t, he’s a self-proclaimed ‘Tudor historian’ (see below) who regularly fronts TV programmes about, yes, the Tudors (and, increasingly, anything else too, such as his recent effort comparing John and Winston Churchill). He frequently comes out with controversial, if not downright inflammatory, right-wing remarks, so if you’re American, just imagine Rush Limbaugh with a doctorate in History. Anyway, this week Dr Starkey has come out and savaged the entirety of historical novelists, claiming that it’s ludicrous to suggest they can possess any authority whatsoever about the Tudor period. Of course, it’s possible that part of his outburst is due to the fact that Hilary Mantel’s and Philippa Gregory’s appearances as ‘talking heads’ in a new series about the Tudors presumably reduced the amount of air time devoted to the talking head of Dr Starkey himself, but let’s leave to one side both that possibility and any thought that he might be secretly jealous of the sales figures enjoyed by Hil and Phil compared to those for his own tomes, all of which, of course, have been written for the disinterested pursuit of academic truth rather than for such sordid commercial considerations as selling absolutely shedloads of copies.

(Before moving on, by the way, could I just say how nice it is to see yet another expensive new BBC series about the Tudors coming our way? After all, they get so little coverage on TV compared to the likes of, say, Chinese history, the eighteenth century, or the history of women; just like the equally neglected Nazis, in fact.)

To return to Dr Starkey and his condemnation of historical novelists. Now, I, too, am a mere scribbler of what a friend of mine describes as ‘pretending books’, and thus have no authority whatsoever when it comes to talking about the past; unlike David Starkey, of course, I don’t have to my name a doctorate in History from Oxbridge and several weighty, critically acclaimed non-fiction history books based on rigorous research and published with full academic apparatus.

Oh, wait I minute, I do, actually.

And there’s perhaps the most important of all the many flaws in Dr Starkey’s analysis: the underlying, intellectually arrogant, assumption that only ‘qualified historians’ should pontificate on the past. This ignores the fact that an increasing number of historical novelists have credentials as academic historians that are every bit as sound as Dr Starkey’s, and many others research their novels with a thoroughness that would not disgrace a PhD candidate. Conversely, I know many ‘qualified historians’ whose grasp of the past is actually remarkably weak, often because they can’t see the trees of past lives for the wood of the sources they work on. Perhaps the most revealing of all Dr Starkey’s comments is ‘they [historical novelists] have no authority when it comes to the handling of historical sources’. Au contraire: they probably have pretty much exactly the same level of authority as a ’Tudor historian’ commenting on, say, the marriage of William and Kate, Scottish independence, the 2011 riots, or, umm, the Churchills.

It’s interesting, too, to see that Dr Starkey claims he can’t read Mantel’s Cromwell novels (and presumably other books set in the same period, like C J Sansom’s Shardlake series), ‘but that’s because I’m a Tudor historian’. And of course, Tudor historians (actually ‘historians of the Tudor age’, Dr S; ‘Tudor historians’ were people alive at the time) would be intellectually consistent in such matters, and would therefore never sully themselves by, say, watching Bette Davis and Errol Flynn hamming it up in The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, or going to the theatre to see Shakespeare’s Richard III, that shamefully inaccurate portrayal of the beginning of the Tudor age by a populist hack author of the sixteenth-century equivalent of Mills and Boon. I’m a ‘Stuart historian’, as Dr S would put it, but I have no problem reading novels set in the Stuart period. Indeed, I have no problem writing them, either. It’s called ‘suspension of disbelief’, Dr Starkey: being able to distinguish fiction and history by flicking a mental switch and moving contentedly from one to the other, treating each on its own merits.

Another digression to conclude: it’s a sign of how far knowledge of history has declined in the population at large that, these days, it would be simply impossible to make a film called The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex. Audiences would probably assume it was some sort of smutty sex-laden epic about a girl called Liz encountering the entire population of the nation’s favourite county.

***

And so to Michael Gove. The Secretary of State is clearly quite a jolly chap – witness his participation in The Guardian‘s splendid April Fools spoof this year – but his proposed new national curriculum for history continues to stir up a hornet’s nest, and this week he responded in vigorous fashion. The headline came from his assault on teachers who got GCSE students to compare the Nazi leadership to Mr Men characters; or so it was reported, despite the fact that as Gove tacitly admitted, this was simply a resource that had been produced, with no evidence that it had actually been used in a classroom. (Having taught GCSE students ever since the examination began, I would never, ever have contemplated trivialising the Nazi regime in such a way, and I know no History teacher who would dream of doing so.)

Inevitably, Gove’s comments led to both satirical counter-attacks and spirited defences of materials that get students interested in history, no matter how left-field they might seem to be. For what it’s worth, I’m on the side of the spirited defenders. I once started teaching the Spanish Inquisition by showing my students the scene from History of the World, Part 1, with Mel Brooks as Torquemada (and, yes, a bit later on we had Monty Python too – ‘nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!’). I often introduced sixth formers to the perils of historiographical debate by showing them some of the Newman and Baddiel ‘History Today’ sketches, which were painfully true to some of the older historians that I knew. Such strategies aren’t trivialisation, Mr Gove; they are ways of engaging students’ interest, from which one can proceed to the rigorous teaching of hard facts that you evidently crave so much. In fact, this is pretty much exactly the same principle as those snappy little videos that political party conferences play to get the audience quiet and attentive before, say, the Secretary of State for Education comes on to speak to it. And if you don’t believe that such strategies are needed with, say, a bunch of unengaged fifteen-year-olds on a wet Friday afternoon, a look at David Starkey’s catastrophic classroom performance in the series Jamie’s Dream School should disabuse you.

Ultimately, the crucial fact that the likes of both Michael Gove and David Starkey entirely ignore is that history can no longer simply be handed down to the ignorant masses from an Olympian height by enlightened pedagogues, whose words said masses should absorb immediately, silently and gratefully. So please, let’s stop obsessing about and rubbishing some of the means by which children, students and readers develop an interest in history; let’s just rejoice in the fact that many still do somehow manage to acquire such an interest, despite all the obstacles that politicians, ‘professional’ historians and, yes, many teachers too, place in their way. And if it takes Disney’s Robin Hood, Mel Brooks or Wolf Hall to get someone to that goal, then so be it.

Posted in Fiction, Historical research, Historical sources, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 12 Comments »

But I Never Read Reviews, Dahling

06/05/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

A confession: I’m really not much good at many aspects of the self-promotional side of being an author. OK, I enjoy blogging as it gives me an opportunity to explore issues I simply can’t cover in the books and, yes, to have a good old-fashioned rant every now and again. Twitter is quite fun and informative, and bizarrely, there now seem to be over 600 people who want to know what I’m up to, which suggests either that I come up with the odd interesting tweet every now and again or they’ve mistaken me for one of the many other J D Davieses out there (a big hello at this point to Jack over at @jddavies, erstwhile owner of an alpaca business in California; the J D Davies roofing and guttering business in Doncaster; and the slightly misspelt Belgian dance music legend J D Davis). Having said that, I guess I could have had many more followers by now, but so far I’ve been averse to automatically following people back, especially if they don’t really fit with my interests – so apologies to Californian life coaches and pizza takeaways in the Rhondda. (Don’t get me wrong, I love pizza, but it would be a bit cold by the time I got it back to Bedfordshire.) As for Facebook…sorry, but although I dutifully post updates every now and again, I really have had it up to here with photos of other people’s babies / dinner / cats / dogs / allegedly amusing posters (delete as applicable) and a privacy policy that’s as transparent as the admission criteria for the Illuminati.

One aspect of this deep-rooted aversion to what some might loosely term ‘the twenty-first century’ has been a reluctance to actually read reviews of my own books. Now, I know this makes me sound like some precious old stage lovey, as per the title of this blog, so I need to qualify the statement straight away. Obviously, I read what one might term the ‘big’ reviews – I was thrilled when Gentleman Captain got rare starred reviews from Kirkus and Booklist, for example, and these naturally appear on my website. I’m very grateful when authors whom I respect hugely, like Angus Donald, Dewey Lambdin, James Nelson and Sam Willis, provide highly complimentary blurb for my books, and few things are nicer than getting emails from readers who’ve enjoyed reading the Quinton Journals. But I’ve never gone in for avidly looking at the reviews of my titles on, say, Amazon, and – whisper it softly – I only signed up for Goodreads last weekend, following a prompt from a fellow author. Consequently, I’ve never actually quoted praise or criticism of my books from emails, Amazon or Goodreads on, say, Twitter, unlike many of my fellow authors, despite the fact that the majority of reviews of my books on Amazon, for example, have been four or five stars. Whether this reticence to blow my own trumpet has been false modesty or downright stupidity on my part is probably for others to judge…

However, going onto Goodreads for the first time proved to be something of a Damascene moment for me. Suddenly, I felt an overwhelming compulsion to see the ratings and reviews for every one of my books, and my initial reaction was one of crushing disappointment. What? Gentleman Captain only has 3.57 out of 5? Oh God, I’m a failure, I shall crawl back underneath a stone, drink a gallon of meths, sob gently and bemoan the injustice of it all. But then I started finding my way around the site, and realised pretty quickly that 3.57 is a perfectly respectable score. Some of my own favourite books from genres similar to my own have very similar ratings – for example, Arturo Perez-Reverte’s brilliant Captain Alatriste has 3.58, Robert Goddard averages between 3.3 and 3.9 for his many titles, while even Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander only just creeps above 4 (slightly below The Blast That Tears The Skies, in fact – although my score is from six reviews and his from 15,544…). Romeo and Juliet has 3.72, only just ahead of The Da Vinci Code, for heaven’s sake! Moreover, I remembered my teaching career and my reluctance to give any sixth form essay, no matter how brilliant, more than 18/25, on the grounds that [a] I didn’t want the young person in question to become over-confident and complacent [b] I’m a grumpy, miserly old Welsh Scrooge (for let’s face it, my fellow Cymry, we’re not a race renowned for our generosity). Similarly, as soon as I started rating books on Goodreads myself I found myself giving out four stars far more often than fives, so if others work on the same eminently sensible principle, it’s obvious that very many books are going to end up with three-point-something, given that some people out there are always going to give anything – even, say, Pride and Prejudice - one or two stars, just to be ornery (or, in the case of P&P, maybe because they’re disappointed that it turned out not to be the version with zombies).

I don’t intend to quote any of the reviews, not even the ones that say things like ‘What a great book! This brings the 17th century to life…perfect for the armchair seadog’, ‘Both more literate and more entertaining than the run of maritime historical fiction. Highly recommended!’, ‘Naval triumph…Probably the best “Hornblower” story I’ve ever read, including Hornblower. Deserves to be much better known and more widely read’ or even ‘Excellent…I’ve been an avid reader of naval fiction for ages and read many different authors. Many of the authors are inevitably compared to Patrick O’Brian, J D Davies is easily his equal in terms of erudition and storytelling. In fact in some ways he is better.’

Oops, sorry, guess I did just quote a few of them. Not quite sure how that happened…

To be balanced, though, I should point out that there are some less complimentary reviews out there too, although I’m still scratching my head over the one that lambasted my writing style (‘stilted’, ‘adverb laden’), my characterisation (‘some of them are simple caricatures, stick figures redrawn time and again’ – ouch) and pretty much everything else about The Mountain of Gold, yet this particular reviewer still gave it four stars and ended by stating how much he was looking forward to book three. I’m perfectly fine with the fundamental truth that no author is going to please all of his or her readers, all of the time, but in this case, I’d like to know just how badly I need to write a book to get five stars from this particular reviewer!

Of course, if any of my readers are inspired by this post to go onto Goodreads or Amazon to post additional five-star reviews of any of my titles, I’ll be eternally in their debt. No names, no pack drill, and above all, no sockpuppets. In the meantime, a very happy May Bank Holiday to my British readers, and a happy Monday to those elsewhere!

Posted in Fiction, Naval historical fiction, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment »

Squelching Back in Time

29/04/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

A few weeks ago, I blogged about the reappearance of the wreck of the 1678 Third Rate Anne on the beach at Pett Level near Hastings, the first time it’s been exposed for about fifteen years. Last week, I was able to go down to view her myself, and the experience certainly didn’t disappoint. Having covered the history of the ship in some detail in my previous post, I’m going to let the pictures speak for themselves – it was a glorious evening for photography, with some outstanding light. But standing inside the hull, effectively ‘aboard’ the only extant British warship from the period I’ve spent over thirty years researching and writing about, was a pretty moving experience. After all, apart from its surviving papers, artworks, a few salvaged guns and various other artefacts, this is essentially all that’s left of the Restoration navy, and certainly the largest survival of it; the sternpiece of the Royal Charles,  now back at the newly reopened Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam after its temporary visit to Greenwich last year, is obviously much grander, but somehow, the wreck of the Anne is more evocative, probably because it’s still lapped by the sea.

Apparently rather more of the wreck is exposed this year than during the previous period when it was visible, but the ever-shifting sands are already starting to reclaim it. For example, warship expert Richard Endsor, who was with me (and helped to pull me out of the soft sand when I started to sink!), said that when he was last at the wreck a few weeks ago, more of the stern post was exposed, and that sand was already covering some of the other timbers. However, a dig is scheduled for August; I hope to get down for some of it, and if I do, I’ll be reporting back via this blog and social media. In the meantime, a big thank you to Jacqui Stanford of the excellent little Shipwreck Museum in Hastings, which should be a ‘must’ destination for all with an interest in maritime history!

The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!

The wreck of the Anne from the sea wall. Its resemblance to the nearby rocks has probably saved it from much unwanted attention over the years!

The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.

The Anne, looking along the port side towards the bow.

Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne

Detail of frames and planking on the port side of the Anne

A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.

A detail on the starboard side of the Anne. Note the wooden treenail or trenel near bottom of photograph.

The bow of the Anne.

The bow of the Anne.

Posted in Naval history, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a Comment »

It’s History, Jim, But Not As We Know It

22/04/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Something of a light digression this week, prompted by watching the first episode of the latest glitzy quasi-historical sword ‘n’ sex epic Da Vinci’s Demons, which appears to be from very much the same mould as the likes of Spartacus, Merlin, The Tudors, The Borgias etc. I’d expected it to be pretty risible, and in that sense it didn’t disappoint, but my main reason for watching it was to see how they’d managed to get my old stamping grounds around Swansea, where it was filmed, to pass for fifteenth century Italy. (‘Ooh look, it’s Margam Park pretending to be a Roman temple! Clever how they avoided getting the steelworks in the shot!’) Actually, of course, CGI means you can transform anywhere into pretty well anywhere else these days, and said stamping grounds are fast becoming the go-to locations for film-makers in the UK; even the cemetery where my grandparents are buried turned up in Dr Who as, of all things, the New York burial ground where the Doctor says goodbye to the Ponds (but if you pause the playback at just the right spot, you can see that the inscriptions on the headstones behind them are in Welsh).

However, all of this got me reflecting on the ways in which writers of screenplays seem to alter history in ways that would be anathema to most of the historical fiction writers I know, who take great pains over their research and attempt to create as authentic a picture of their chosen period as possible. Given the much greater reach of such series, one also wonders about the effect they’re having on popular perceptions of the past: the first couple of series of The Tudors were on when I was still teaching, and the extent to which allegedly intelligent sixth formers in a top independent school were willing to assume that it was a pretty accurate portrayal of Henry VIII’s reign was both alarming and not a little depressing. So with that in mind, here are…

Five things a visiting alien would learn about human history from watching ‘historical’ films and TV:

1/ People in the past were impossibly attractive (apart from the obligatory character played by Derek Jacobi). The historical reality can be summed up in one word. Teeth.

2/ People in the past had truly phenomenal amounts of vigorous sex (except, obviously, in Downton Abbey). OK, maybe they did. Sometimes. Charles II – yes, goes without saying. But Leonardo da Vinci? Please.

3/ People in the past thought and talked exactly like we do. Actually, this gets us on to one of those perennial issues over which historical novelists have duels at dawn, i.e. can we and should we try to be as true as possible to the mindsets and speech patterns of past ages? Realistically, of course, the answer is – mindset, yes, within reason (the risk being that rather a lot of your male characters ought really to be misogynist religious fanatics who are perfectly ok with slavery and burning witches), speech patterns, no. Unless you want to attempt a faithful pastiche of, say, The Canterbury Tales, which will undoubtedly get you a readership of precisely zero, you might just as well have your characters speaking modern estuary English, like, innit. So you want to have a Cesare Borgia who talks and behaves like a Premiership footballer? Bring it on.

4/ All past events were accompanied by an incessant orchestral soundtrack. Historical documentary? Cue soaring strings. TV drama? Wall of sound. Major historical biopic? Hire the LSO or the Chicago Symphony and get ‘em to play for the whole damn duration. Take Lincoln. Now, I love John Williams’ music. Star Wars and Superman were part of the soundtrack to my youth. But let’s face it, John, somebody really needs to take you to one side and tell you that you don’t need to write an earnest minor key theme to accompany every single line of the script. When it comes to incessant music, though, an honourable exception has to be made for the fine recent film about the 1832 Paris Rising, which accurately reflected the fact that one of the principal causes of discontent was a draconian law forcing all French citizens to sing everything they wanted to say. In English. Even when they were dying of broken hearts, gunshot wounds, or horrible wasting diseases that somehow failed to prevent them belting out resounding power ballads.

5/ Battles were usually fought by about the same numbers of people who can be found brawling outside an average British pub on a Saturday night. Yes, I know, there are exceptions, thanks mainly to CGI, but otherwise, battle scenes in many TV shows and quite a few films are rather too obviously constrained by budgets. Take the recent BBC production of Henry V – worthy, well acted, but you might as well have got the English and French rugby teams to recreate Agincourt, because that was roughly the number on either side. (‘Once more unto the lineout, dear friends, once more!’)  One dreads to think how the Beeb will fare with their forthcoming production of War and Peace; but then, no-one could compete with the famous Sergei Bondarchuk version, which was able to call on a large chunk of the Soviet army to recreate the Battle of Borodino. Now that’s what I call authenticity.

At the end of the day, the success of series like Da Vinci’s Demons might suggest that we historical novelists worry too much about ‘accuracy’ and ‘authenticity’. What readers/viewers want above all is a good story, well told – or even a bad story dreadfully told, as long as it has lots of sex, violence and attractive people with unfeasibly perfect teeth. I once suggested tongue in cheek in this blog that I was contemplating ‘a plot that involves teenage wizards battling teenage vampires before engaging in torrid bondage sex with the gladiators who guard the Holy Grail’. Maybe I’ll revisit that and pitch it to TV: Fifty Shades of Da Vinci’s Tudor Vampires surely has ‘hit’ stamped all over it.   

Posted in Fiction, Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

Drake’s Drum

15/04/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

I spent last week in Devon, doing some fieldwork and plot brainstorming for the new Quinton novel – and as I suggested in the previous post, anyone wondering why a book focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666, which was fought in the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, has scenes set in Devon, will have to wait to read it!

Buckland Abbey, Devon

Buckland Abbey, Devon

It was good to revisit many old haunts in the area, especially in Plymouth, but perhaps the most evocative was Buckland Abbey, just to the north of the city. The home successively of two of England’s greatest seamen, Sir Richard Grenville and Sir Francis Drake, Buckland was one of the principal inspirations for my fictitious ‘Ravensden Abbey’, the seat of the Quinton family. Many of those who bought former monasteries in the sixteenth century demolished the old buildings or altered them so completely that little trace of monastic origins remains. But at Buckland, many elements of the old fabric were retained, both externally and internally – notably the tower of the church – and this is very much my mental image of Ravensden Abbey. The house was devastated by a fire in 1938 but restored, handed over to the National Trust, and now displays a considerable amount of Drake memorabilia, including some of the flags flown from his ships. Understandably, the house guides were cock-a-hoop about the recent discovery that an often ignored portrait in a comparatively insignificant room is actually a genuine Rembrandt!

Drake's Drum

Drake’s Drum

Rembrandt or no, Buckland Abbey’s greatest treasure remains the legendary Drake’s Drum. This reputedly accompanied him during his circumnavigation of the earth and was also present during his last voyage, when he supposedly ordered that it should be returned to England and beaten to recall him from heaven when the country was in dire danger. It duly returned to Buckland Abbey, and has remained there more or less ever since. It’s been claimed that it was heard when the Mayflower sailed from Plymouth in 1620 (although quite how that would have fulfilled Drake’s original criterion is debatable!), when Nelson was made a Freeman of Plymouth (ditto), on the outbreak of World War I and during the Dunkirk evacuation. Perhaps the best documented instance was that which is supposed to have occurred aboard HMS Royal Oak when the German fleet surrendered in 1918. A victory drum roll was heard aboard the ship, but three searches revealed neither a drum nor a drummer. (There’s a good account of the episode here.) More prosaically, it’s a snare drum, just over two feet high and the same in diameter. The shell is of a thin sheet of walnut, the drum heads probably of calf skin, and the drum is decorated with the Drake coat of arms.

My visit to this evocative location and its mythic relic provides the perfect excuse for some poetry, namely Sir Henry Newbolt’s once-famous Drake’s Drum - now a compulsory part of the new National Curriculum for schools. (Only joking, teachers and pupils everywhere. On the other hand, one can never tell these days, given some of the things that have gone into it…)The poem was set to music by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford as part of his ‘Songs of the Sea’. 

Drake he’s in his hammock an’ a thousand miles away,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot in Nombre Dios Bay,
An’ dreamin’ arl the time O’ Plymouth Hoe.
Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships,
Wi’ sailor lads a-dancing’ heel-an’-toe,
An’ the shore-lights flashin’, an’ the night-tide dashin’,
He sees et arl so plainly as he saw et long ago.

Drake he was a Devon man, an’ ruled the Devon seas,
(Capten, art tha’ sleepin’ there below?)
Roving’ tho’ his death fell, he went wi’ heart at ease,
A’ dreamin’ arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
“Take my drum to England, hang et by the shore,
Strike et when your powder’s runnin’ low;
If the Dons sight Devon, I’ll quit the port o’ Heaven,
An’ drum them up the Channel as we drumm’d them long ago.”

Drake he’s in his hammock till the great Armadas come,
(Capten, art tha sleepin’ there below?)
Slung atween the round shot, listenin’ for the drum,
An’ dreamin arl the time o’ Plymouth Hoe.
Call him on the deep sea, call him up the Sound,
Call him when ye sail to meet the foe;
Where the old trade’s plyin’ an’ the old flag flyin’
They shall find him ware an’ wakin’, as they found him long ago!

Anyway, time to get back to work. Odd, though – I swear I can hear the sound of distant drumming…

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Posted in Naval history, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a Comment »

Enter the Lion

08/04/2013 by gentlemenandtarpaulins

Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

Cover of the UK edition of The Lion of Midnight

A short blog this week, but one that marks a big event – The Lion of Midnight, fourth of the ‘Journals of Matthew Quinton’, is due to be published in the UK on 23 April! You can read the first chapter on my website.

Lion marks a bit of a departure from the previous books in the series, both in its setting and its subject matter. Most of the action takes place in Sweden, or the waters off the Atlantic coast of Sweden, during the early months of 1666. The second Anglo-Dutch war war is at a critical stage – France has declared war on the side of the Dutch, the combined kingdom of Denmark-Norway is about to do so. Meanwhile, a fleet of mast ships lies ice-bound in Gothenburg harbour, waiting for a thaw and an escort so it can bring back its vital cargo; for without fresh supplies of masts, the British fleet’s ability to continue the war will be finite. But what Matthew Quinton expects to be a straightforward piece of convoy escort duty becomes something much darker. What is the true mission of his mysterious passenger, Lord Conisbrough? Why does Matthew become involved in a shadowy power struggle within the Swedish government? Above all, how will he respond to the presence in Gothenburg of one of the most notorious of the regicides, the men who signed the death warrant of King Charles I? As he encounters enemies old and new, together with some unexpected allies, Matthew struggles to carry out his duty while confronting some powerful demons from his and his family’s past.

Carving of King Charles X (1654-60) from the wreck of the Kronan: Lansmuseum, Kalmar

So why this particular setting? For one thing, I’d long been interested in Sweden’s ‘Golden Age’, from roughly 1610 to 1721, when the country was one of the greatest powers in Europe. I actually taught it to A-level students for many years – an eccentric choice, some might say, but most of them loved it, given the fascinating personalities and themes they were dealing with (not to mention the fact that the questions in the final exam were invariably predictable – either ‘why did Sweden rise?’ or ‘why did it decline?’ – and led to a pretty high percentage of each cohort achieving excellent grades).

As I write in the historical note to The Lion of Midnight,

The campaigns of her warrior king Gustavus II Adolphus, der Löwe von Mitternacht to his German enemies, won her vast new territories, despite her tiny population and limited natural resources. Although Gustavus’s intervention in the Thirty Years War was ended abruptly by his death during the battle of Lutzen in 1632, his generals continued to win triumph after triumph in the name of his daughter Christina, who succeeded to the throne at the age of five, and later under her warrior cousin…

Large tracts of territory in Scandinavia and northern Germany were conquered, the new city of Gothenburg was established as a ‘window to the west’, and the country also built up a formidable navy. I’d been to Stockholm several times to see the remarkable Vasa, but to research Lion, in February 2011 I spent a week in Kalmar and Gothenburg (aka Göteborg). The former houses the astonishing range of exhibits recovered from the wreck of the Kronan, which sank in 1676; at the time, she was one of the largest warships in the world, the brainchild of the English shipwright Francis Sheldon. I was also really impressed by the museums in Gothenburg, notably the Maritime Museum and the City Museum; the latter has a vast model of the city as it was at pretty much exactly the time I’ve written about in Lion!

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

Model of mid-17th century Gothenburg: City Museum

So I hope readers will enjoy The Lion of Midnight, which explores a relatively little known aspect of naval history, visits a fascinating foreign land at the height of its short-lived greatness, and sees the hero face challenges very different to any he has encountered before.

***

When this post goes live, I’ll actually be hacking my way down the M5 to Devon for a few days of research fieldwork connected to the next Quinton book and some ongoing non-fiction projects. (Those of you who know the subject of ‘Quinton 5′ from my previous posts and the website might be wondering why on earth a story focusing on the Four Days Battle of 1666 needs fieldwork in Devon, of all places. Watch this space, or better still, read the book in about a year’s time!) So next week, I hope to be blogging about some of the places I’ll have been to.

Posted in Fiction, Naval historical fiction, Swedish history, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a Comment »

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