The Painting Cannot Lie? The Sinking of the SS Linda Blanche January 30th 2015 marked the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the merchant ship SS Linda Blanche in the Irish Sea. Among the hundreds of merchant ships sunk by U-boat in the course of World War 1, there would seem to be nothing remarkable about this [...]

The Wreck of HMS Persian, 1813: Skill, courage and leadership in the aftermath In my blog of 12thJanuary we saw the then-Lieutenant Charles Bertram (1777-1854) undertaking a daring shore attack in Northern Spain in 1808 and getting wounded in the process. By 1813 this fine example of what a dashing young naval should be had [...]

20th Century Merchant Navy life – and death Guest Blog by Clare Flynn For me, one of the unexpected pleasures of entering the world of writers has been meeting so many fascinating people whom I would not otherwise have encountered. Many of them specialize in genres significantly different from mine, but all characterized by [...]

Queen Victoria and a Sultan's Salvage It’s hard to imagine a sequence of events that links an Ottoman Sultan, Queen Victoria, the Royal Navy of 1889, an innovative epic of marine salvage and an 1870s warship which served in various capacities until the end of the Second World War. The link is however the ironclad [...]

Captain Philip Browne – a real-life Jack Aubrey Though I write about naval adventure the latter part of the 19th Century I remain fascinated by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars era – the Great Age of Fighting Sail. Like so many, my interest was first aroused by reading Hornblower when I was a boy and [...]

HMS Emerald at Viveiro, 1808: a classic cutting-out Cutting-out involved desperate hand-to-hand fighting Though the term “Naval Special Forces” – as exemplified by the United States’ SEALS and Britain’s SBS – is a relatively recent one, the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars saw large numbers of inshore operations of a [...]

The French Navy’s goodwill visit to Britain in 1891 A passing moment of amity Only in very rare, intermittent and usually short periods in the last nine hundred years have relations between Britain and France been anything but suspicious, if not outright hostile. As recently as World War II Britain was locked with [...]

Covers for the Dawlish Chronicles Series – an Author/Designer partnership Every book needs a cover, and a bad one can ruin the prospects of an otherwise excellent book. I recognised this when I embarked on writing seriously – in my case the Dawlish Chronicles Series of naval adventures set in the Late Victorian era [...]

The sinking of the hospital ship HMHS Rewa on January 4th 1918 We know now that 1918 was the last year of World War 1, and that it would culminate in total defeat of Germany with the “Last Hundred Days”, in which the trench lines were breached and open warfare resumed, representing the greatest single [...]