Nelson was a military genius and fierce patriot, idolised by his men and the British public – and held up to ridicule too, for his affair with Emma and his treatment of Fanny. In his book for children, ‘Nelson, Hero of the Seas’, historian, author and Rest is History podcaster Dominic Sandbrook, brings out his charisma and genius – and his complexity and flaws.  And Dominic also had time to speak to me about the challenges and glories of writing for young people – and about Nelson.

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Transcript

Hello listeners, and today I am very honoured to have a guest here to talk to you about Nelson and other things, and his name is Dominic Sandbrook. Hello Dominic and welcome to the podcast. Hello, and thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be um, It’s good to be on a properly well run, uh podcast for a change.

Oh, it’s all right. Oh dear Anyway, Dominic, I hope you’ll forgive me, but I went to the trouble of preparing a brief biography In the unlikely event there is anyone out there that doesn’t know you. I hope that is okay. Of course For a couple of minutes sure do okay Excellent. So, gentle listeners, Dominic is a good and proper historian, forged in the white educational heat of Oxford, St.

Andrews, and Cambridge, and also the immortal city of Seven Hills. I speak, of course, of Sheffield, where you took up a lecturing post, I think, at the university, Dominic. Yeah, that’s right. Your public career? Excellent. Excellent. Your public career then reached peak early with a gold run on blockbusters, I understand, which I was interested to read, um, and since been a super successful and engaging public historian.

Series of five books about Britain since the war, which has attracted rave reviews, Another fascinating book called The Great British Dream Factory, which I need to get about popular culture. It’s done telly, radio, often see articles in the pappies, and I have to say, I always tend to enjoy and agree with your articles nine times out of ten, which is a bit worrying.

Right. That is disturbing. Yes, I’d like to formally apologize for that. Won’t happen again. Dominic also does a podcast called The Rest is History, which he scores is absolutely brilliant. I genuinely love it and I listen to a lot. Um, although it’s not actually mentioned on your about page on your website, possibly because it’s a collaboration with a Spider Man actor.

Not sure about why you haven’t put it there. Yeah. Exactly. I’m embarrassed about it. It’s the truth. You should be too. Uh, however, the reason Dominic is very kindly agreed to join me is that over the last few years, you’ve also launched, I think, a series of children’s nonfiction books, adventures in history, five books, now done a six on Nelson.

And it was your article, Dominic, about your love of the subject of, uh, Nelson, your absolute enthusiasm for it, which inspired me to ask you on to the podcast and what we’re going to talk about today. That’s really kind of you. Thank you. So Dominic, do you recognize yourself from my summary there? I do indeed.

Yes, I do. Indeed. I will give you a tiny correction, which is that the series of books are actually called adventures in time. And, uh, now you call them adventures in history and that’s. That’s an interesting and kind of Freudian slip because the Lady Bird history books, which I read when I was a boy, were called, um, Adventures in History.

And when I started writing the Adventures in Time series, which you very kindly mentioned just now, um, one of the things I wanted to do was to try to capture for younger readers, like my son, who was then seven, to capture that sense of wonder and excitement about the past that I had when, um, um, When I started, you know, when I started reading history, so actually it’s quite common that when I’m giving talks and things, people say, oh, he’s written a series of books called adventures in history and I never really mind because I think I quite like that kind of nod back to the, back to the past.

And that’s absolutely the sort of the sense of that those ladybird books had this sort of sense of enthusiasm and color that I think is so important for getting young people interested in history. It’s great. I was actually going to ask you which books inspired you and you remember from your youth.

And I actually have this book here. Oh, which is Nelson’s Adventures in Time. I’m holding it up for you. And we get a lot of lady board on my podcast actually, because I absolutely agree with you that some of the pictures, some of the images there are still with me whenever I think about history. Um, you know, these things come back.

Yes, absolutely. So, um, uh, some of your listeners may know the book about Oliver Cromwell and that always stuck in my head because at the very beginning of that Lady Bird book, there’s a wonderful story. There were two stories, one that, uh, Oliver Cromwell and Charles, the young Charles, the first met when they were little boys at a sort of country house party or something and ended up having a fight on the lawn.

And this obviously prefigured what was to come later on. And then the other one, which, um, I’m sure some of your listeners will have heard of is the story that when Cromwell was a baby, a monkey stole him and run out, ran out to the top of the house onto the roof and had to be, you know, Lured downstairs and that had the monkey not been, you know, persuaded then English and indeed British history would have been completely different.

And both of those stories really stuck in my mind when I was a boy and I have to say both of them are completely untrue. I was going to say, presumably you modelled your level of accuracy on those stories. Well, well, this is the funny thing. So when I started writing the series. You know, as you said in your very kind introduction, um, I had been writing for about 20 years as a sort of public historian, having started an academic.

And when you’re a public historian in that way, you, you’re, you’re obviously you’re creating, um, history for adults who know what happens by and large. There’s no sense of ambiguity in this, in that outcome of the story. So the books that I’ve written. Which as you say, we’re about post war Britain. I mean, everybody knows that Margaret Thatcher’s going to win in 1979.

Everybody knows that James Callaghan is going to be consumed by the winter discontent or that the Falklands war will end with Britain recapturing the islands. You try to sort of introduce a sense that the future is uncertain when you’re writing. Narrative history, but of course, everybody knows the whole time was going to happen for me.

Um, writing the children’s stories was a wonderful kind of intellectual literary exercise because it was the first time I’d really written something where I thought to myself, I remember my editor saying to me the very first one, which was about the second world war. Your readers genuinely don’t know that the British get away at Dunkirk Or that d day is a success or any of these kinds of things and what an interesting challenge in a way It is to do that.

And so with nelson, you know nelson’s career. There are so many contingencies There are so many twists and turns. I mean, obviously he loses his eye. He loses his arm Um, he’s he’s ends up semi disgraced after he’s in naples And then the battle of trafalgar, you know, um I thought to myself this, it’s really fun writing an account of the battle of Trafalgar in which not only does the reader not know who will win, but they don’t know that Nelson will be shot.

Um, so it’s just as a, as a, as a, an exercise in writing and kind of literary craftsmanship that makes it really good fun. Um, and I was trying to kind of recapture that. And when you, when you think of, uh, who you’re addressing, do you have somebody in your, an image in your mind? Do you have a, you presumably have an age range that you’re looking at.

So I was really interested by that. So do you have somebody in your mind? Is it your son? Yes. At first it was because I started writing them when he was seven years old and, uh, he was doing a project in school about evacuees. It’s a very common. thing that people do at about that age in, in British schools and primary schools.

And, um, I thought, um, I’d, I’d, I’d love him to know the story of the war, all the drama of it, you know, D Day, Churchill, Stalingrad, the great characters, but also the sort of the sweep. Um, and generally the books that were available were textbooks or books that were kind of the Osborne guide to the second world war.

So lots of pictures, but, but not a story. So he was my idea reader at first. And I started writing during as luck would have it. I started writing at the beginning of 2020. And of course, within a few months, we were all stuck at home. So he was able to read it for me, but now over time. I’ve done, what is it, I think eight books actually in the series, now since the eighth, and I do have regular readers who kind of write to me and things, so I have a sense of, I’ve done a lot of school talks, so I have a pretty good sense of what the age group is, probably between about eight and twelve by and large, with You know, it kind of shades into either end because you have very precocious readers or you have people who want to carry on reading them even though they’ve hit their teens.

I’ve learned kind of, I’m like a dog who’s learned new tricks really, because you realize I think writing for young readers that you’re obviously competing with Children’s fiction. You’re also competing with the devices that they might turn to or their, you know, video games, the phones, whatever. So you need to keep their attention and you need to keep the story motoring along, but that doesn’t make it impossible to then introduce complicated things.

So to give you two examples, in a book I did about the six wives of Henry the eighth, obviously in that I had to explain the reformation. And that’s a really interesting challenge to explain the reformation to children who perhaps probably don’t go to church. You know, who is, who is Jesus? They don’t know they don’t that, that fundamentally.

Yeah. I mean, of course, because of course, you know, lots of people, we only have perhaps a very vague sense. Um, similarly with, uh, the Nelson book, I wanted to, to use Nelson, not just a great, as a great character, but as a window into the world of the world. The 18th century, and one of the things you have to explain there is the industrial revolution and how Britain is changing and Britain is becoming, you know, um, an industrial economic financial Leviathan.

How do you do that for nine year olds? How do you explain why the bank of England matters or why the first machine, the excitement of the first machines and how that affects whether you win or lose a war at sea. So the way. It’s a really interesting intellectual challenge that is very different from writing or doing a podcast or TV series or whatever for other middle aged men like me, where you can assume loads of common ground and common knowledge and familiarity with all the concepts.

So it’s, it’s, it demands a great act of imagination. I think that’s anybody who writes for children will tell you, you know, you have to get into that. You have to. Think what they will know and what will interest them. And then you can kind of take them with you. There’s so many questions about that. I mean, one of the first things I was thinking was that, um, one of the lovely things I think about young readers, or as I remember, I was, is the enthusiasm you have for the story, um, that it’s not just about the complicated things.

So I, my, um. I have a slightly daft conceit, my favorite Ladybug book was Richard I, because he had a cool surcoat, you know, he didn’t get much cooler. And I swear to myself that if I ever lose that fundamental enthusiasm for the story, I will stop doing this podcast, because I will have lost something. And I loved your book, because it reached that bit really, really well.

Your enthusiasm, so I don’t want to overly enthusiastic. No, do that would be quite wrong. Your enthusiasm, you know, really comes across. So, but how do you get, how do you get the tone and the, the level, right? Did you talk to anybody? Did you, you know, how did you go about that? Cause as you said, it’s so different.

Um, well, it was probably without being dismissive about my own work. It’s probably much closer to work that I’ve done for the newspapers than it is. 800 page book with loads of footnotes. So writing for the newspapers or for, um, or indeed the script for a BBC documentary, you’re boiling a lot of stuff down.

So I realized that quite early on, I would have to boil lots of stuff down, but also in the tone, I think. Children want to know that they want it to be interesting. You have to, every paragraph has to have something, you know, they’re not reading for homework. It has to be fun. And I, I remember writing, um, so the six wives is a good example.

I decided to start that book with Catherine of Aragon as a girl coming from Spain. To England for the first time. I think she comes when she’s 1485. So she comes when she’s 13 and, uh, she’s a girl sent on a ship a long way from home. She lands in England. So we don’t get to England till chapter two or so.

Um, and we see England kind of late medieval, early modern England through her eyes. And I wanted to do that because I thought a, a child is very, a child who’s a reader almost by definition be very used to stories of people, children going on journeys and quests, particularly overseas, who was a popular thing and arriving in a kind of slightly alien world, often in a kind of fantasy world, you know.

Um, and getting to know the, the new city and the strange customs of the people who live there. And we’re seeing it all through their eyes. That’s a very common device in children’s fiction. And I thought, I’ll just do that with Catherine of Aragon. And then she can get to know her new world, as it were.

And that’s when I will say, well, this is how many people lived in England. This is what they did. These were the sizes of the towns, you know, Bristol, Norwich, whatever. Um, this was the King, all of that stuff. So, so use her as a way into the story. I sort of, you know, it was this similar thing. Maybe the second world war, which was the very first one that I wrote.

I thought to myself, I can remember saying to my editor, you know, my son knows. All the planets in star wars, he knows the different factions he knows, you know, and his friends know all the details of the spider man stories or whatever, or they can tell you everybody who plays from that, you know, that children are not incapable of keeping a lot of things in their head.

And I thought if I tell the story of the second world war with the same kind of tone, with the same sort of sense of, of drama that I would, if I were writing a story about. Star Wars or about Harry Potter or the Lord of the Rings, you know, the same clash of empires, Hitler brooding in his citadel, that kind of stuff, you know, you can do all that without completely dumbing it down while keeping the degree of nuance, while keeping a degree of kind of complexity and keeping the historical integrity.

I think you can do all that and say to children, this is an amazing story. This is an incredibly exciting and riveting story. Um, so that’s really, that was, that’s my approach. And, and the thing you were just saying, um, about enthusiasm, I think is so. Key to it. So I did used to be an academic and actually one of the reasons, one of the things that slightly put me off was that in academic history, you sometimes get a sort of tone of sort of world weariness, sort of, sort of studied world weariness and almost.

Far from an enthusiasm for history, a sense of slight disdain for history, that people in the past were morally suspect. That they behaved very poorly and we should judge them for it and all of that. And I didn’t really buy that at all. I can remember saying to somebody once that I’d been at the weekend, my then girlfriend and I had been to a castle or something, we trudged around this castle and the academic friend was like, oh really?

Why? It’s not really your period. And I said, yeah, but I mean, I do like castles. Like I like castles, you know, just as a thing to walk around. He said, yeah, but do you ever think about their tools of oppression and surveillance? And I said, I didn’t really think that when I was walking around the car. So no, I was thinking, wouldn’t it be brilliant to be at this window, firing arrows, you know, in that sort of school boys way, as you say, when you lose that, when you lose that sense of excitement and wonder, then I think you lose the listener.

Then people stop listening because they if they think I don’t want history to just I mean, of course you can approach history if you must as a story of moral lessons I mean, I don’t particularly but I know lots of people do um, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that But if you lose that essential sense of of fun Of wonder to it.

Not, I mean, notwithstanding the fact that there are very dark chapters. Then I think you turn off a lot of people. I think that’s the way to keep people interested in history, as you will know from your podcast. Enthusiasm carries you a long way. I think it does. I mean, again, so many questions there to think about.

One of those is that it’s very, it’s very worrying, I would have said, wouldn’t you, that, um, There is a sense of moral judgment in academic history. I mean, for me, I’ve always thought that academics are the keepers of the keys. That shouldn’t happen there. There should be an objectivity there. Popular historians have more latitude, but I suppose without wanting to necessarily comment on that, do you feel a sense of responsibility about.

The way that you present. So, you know, on the serious side, do you think it’s important to make sure you remain to some degree balance amidst all the enthusiasm or not really? I think so, unless I deliberately want to be unbalanced. Right. So, um, with the, so to give you a couple of contrasting examples, the, the book I did before Nelson was about the conquest.

The Spanish conquest of Mexico, the fall of the Aztecs. And with that, I had a lot of conversations with my editors at Penguin about, you know, how do we strike the right balance? How to, between the excitement and this of the story, the high drama of Cortez landing on the Mexican coast, the end of the 1510s marching in land, I mean, one of the most.

Amazing stories in history, marching in lands. I mean, it’s the closest people ever come to landing on an alien world, finding an alien civilization. You know, he’s got no idea what’s ahead. He goes to Tenochtitlan. It ends with the, with the, with him winning his great gamble and conquering. This country, but of course the, the, the counter story to that is the deaths of fast numbers of people by either by the sword or by smallpox.

Um, the collapse of a civilization, you know, the, the downsides of colonization, European expansion, and so on. So how do you strike that balance while also making it an exciting story? And that was again, a very, it was a really enjoyable intellectual exercise to try and pitch that. So that’s one thing where I wanted, where balance was really important and actually there’s a line of the little section at the beginning of that book where I say to the, the sort of the young reader, some people think the Spanish were tremendous heroes, some great villains, you know, blah, blah, blah.

And then I say, there are no right and wrong answers in history. You know, I’m not going to tell you what I think this is for you to make up your mind. Yeah. So there’s that. But then with Nelson. When I started writing that, it became obvious to me quite early on, and it’s obviously talented with my own instincts, that the way to tell that story was really to lean into Nelson’s world view.

So in other words, it’s very much kind of people are on the ships, people are singing rule Britannia and knocking about the grog and thinking about how much they’re looking forward to smiting the French and all of that sort of stuff. And I, you know, we’ve all been there, surely. Yeah. And I thought, come on, if you’re going to write this book.

The only way to do it is to take that seriously and to kind of enjoy it Not to be disapproving about it because if you’re going to be disapproving about people singing god save the king and banging drums and sort of You know, um sailing into battle then there’s actually no point in writing the book at all Yeah, you’d never you’d never get nelson with you.

You’d never get the 18th century No, exactly. So I think it’s part of understanding. There are some subjects. I think you cheat cheat you treat each subject differently You You know when I did the second world war there’s a point at which I had to talk about the holocaust And there you know in the context, how do you write that for 10 year olds?

You you you tell I I thought i’ll just tell the story relatively straight Quite concisely. This is what happened give a couple of examples And then, um, kind of move on. Um, and I always thought what I would Peter, some people say it didn’t belong in a children’s book, of course it does belong. I mean, it’s part of history.

Um, so it’s just, I guess a question of, it’s actually not as complicated as you think, because I think most of us, it comes quite naturally how to talk to. To young, to young people, how to tell them a story. We know what interests them almost in a weird way, not overthinking it. I think is a, is a good way of doing it.

I mean, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t do yourself down Dominic because, um, you know, it’s trick or treat night tonight and I’m in a, in a miasma of fear and terror that someone’s going to knock on my door. Yeah. And the potential for social awkwardness is horrendous. I think it’s actually, it’s more complicated, you know, I think you just do it very well.

Thank you. That’s kind of you. I think it is a bit of a talent to be honest. I did love the way you tried to get inside Nelson’s head. I had a quote here, uh, for example. The Americans were refusing to pay for their own defense. What was worse, thought Horatio, they had then nerve to claim Parliament had no right to tax them at all.

You know, so there’s no Yeah, there’s no, uh, you know, no messing around there. That’s, you know, well, I mean, he, uh, that’s what he thought. And of course he was quite right. Yeah. I mean, nobody listens to that could possibly disagree with him. Surely they’re blindingly obvious,

but that, that patriotism thing, it seemed to me is the big one that, you know, the God dying with God in my country on his lips, I loved it when you said in the article, you know, who couldn’t love that. But I think some people will. Not love it because that 18th century practice is quite alien to us now.

It is. It is. Although I think not probably to smaller children. Right. So I think it’s a, um, my sense is that when you tell that story, so obviously I’ve, I’ve done loads of school talks and things, but Two, two quite young, you know, nine, 10 year olds, 11 year olds. They love all that, right? They, they, um, they love pageantry.

They love, um, they love all the sort of panoply of battle and stuff. Of course, who doesn’t, when you’re eight or nine years old, you know, you’ll remove from the horrible reality of the violence and it’s the sort of technicolor flamboyance of it. Um, and I think it becomes a learned thing in your sort of teens and twenties, Oh, to be very cynical about it and dismissive and to see it as a bit, you know, I think there’s a class element to it.

I think people see it as a bit common to be, you know, to be waving the flag and all that kind of thing. And I think it’s becoming. Yeah. There’s a bit, there’s a sort of self flagellating instinct, but I don’t think 10 year olds have that, right? I think they actually love that and if you say here’s this tremendous hero He died at the moment of his greatest victory and he dies with the words Some of the last words he says, probably the last words he says, are God and my country as he lies on his deathbed.

Their, their attitude is to say, you know, whereas a sort of an adult laughs often, their attitude is to say, Wow! Yeah, that’s a brilliant, that isn’t that amazing. And I think it’s actually gauging what, what they think. And why should you be ashamed of that? You know, the story when I was writing the book, you know, I’m very familiar with Nelson’s story, of course, as everybody is, but writing the book and writing those final chapters as he’s sailing towards Trafalgar and he writes his last prayer, Um, or, you know, he sits, he sits on his, um, his cabin has been cleared on a victory.

The great cabin, which of course you can still see today at Portsmouth, it’s been cleared for action. So the furniture has been put away. So he has to sit on the bare boards scribbling on his lap and he writes this last, um, uh, Prayer and then his, all his stuff about, you know, I, I leave her lady Hamilton to my country and all this kind of stuff, you know, it’s really moving.

I found it, found it really moving, you know, when I was writing those sections and then especially when he’s hit and he’s taken below decks. You have to write with a kind of lump in your throat, if only metaphorically, because you want the reader to have a yes. Absolutely. If you don’t feel it, they’re not going to.

Yeah, if you don’t feel it, they’re not going to. And actually, of course, you do feel it when you’ve been on that journey as a writer or a reader with one character all that time, and then he is shot. And when he is shot, he still behaves in this almost unbelievably patriotic and courageous way. You’d be mad if you didn’t feel it.

Indeed. And he gets beaten up. I mean, one of the things I enjoyed about the book was he gets really beaten up physically, doesn’t he? Yeah. I mean, it’s extraordinary what he goes through and then keeps going. And it’s one of the things, one of the things that makes him, um, a great national hero is he’s physically so courageous.

So Nelson, as many of your listeners will know, is quite a slight and slender man. Um, when people saw him, they often were quite surprised that he wasn’t bigger because they thought of him as a kind of martial hero. But he’s not particularly tall. He looks. Some people do, he looks kind of fragile, he’s quite sickly.

So he, he had malaria as a young man and probably never really ever recovered. Um, he was C he got seasickness, which is the tremendous irony. Uh, he obviously loses his eye in Corsica. or rather loses the sight in his eye. He didn’t actually lose the eye itself. Uh, but he lost the sight in his eye. Then this disastrous attempt to capture the gold of Spain at Tenerife and he has his arm amputated and it takes a long time to heal.

He then has to write and do everything with his left hand, which he finds, he finds very awkward and he finds it demeaning that he can’t, Cut up his food and do all these things. A friend makes him a special fork with the kind of serrated edge. Like I asked the arrival of the cocktail fork. Exactly, exactly.

So he, he’s a very human and in some ways very relatable figure, I think. And the fact that he is. That he’s so courageous on top of all that, that he insists on putting himself in the thick of the action. And that of course is why he’s cut down at Trafalgar. But it also allows him to do things like, you know, his tremendous achievements at the battle of St.

Vince, Cape St. Vincent, where he boards first one Spanish ship and then a second Spanish ship, um, to become the first English. Captain to board and capture an enemy ship for 300 years, 300 years. Is that right? Yeah, and he does it not once, but twice in the same day. Uh, well, because you see the thing was the tactics were different.

Yeah, tactics were different. One of the things I wanted to get across to the young reader. Is our image of sea battles and the session, if you’re a child, you have an image of sea battles is you kind of charge into combat, all guns blazing, cutlass is drawn, leaping onto enemy ships, all that stuff. That really is not what a sea battle was, was like.

I mean, sea battles were both more terrifying with kind of shrapnel and shards of woods and whatnot, flying everywhere, kind of decapitating people and lodging in people’s eyes and all that stuff. And yes, at the same time, you are. On board this floating gun platform that is a tremendously expensive piece of kit and you don’t want to risk it.

So people aren’t actually by and large boarding each other’s ships and fighting kind of hand to hand battles. They’re steering clear of each other and shooting from a distance. And it’s actually what made Nelson remarkable was that he insists on sailing into close action. Straight at the enemy and really going for it is he’s determined to annihilate their fleet and that’s quite new in the 1790s.

So British commanders have been moving towards this new strategy, this kind of all no holds barred full on attack for a decade, decade or so beforehand. Um, but in the standard, by the standards of naval warfare, Nelson’s record of sinking and capturing enemy ships is really, really extraordinary. I mean, that aggression comes across again in the book of the stories, isn’t it?

That, you know, go straight at him as it were. And as a commander of his, I, with a thing I reflect about St. Vincent, but you’d be slightly worried, wouldn’t you, that he’s going to go and do something you hadn’t expected or you hadn’t told him to. Yes, he does. So the battle of Cape St. Vincent, he actually rescues the situation by disobeying orders.

So, um, so John Jervis, who is the, um, the British admiral. Uh, Capes and Vincent, he has developed this, this plan, which involves them tacking, dividing the Spanish and to kind of circling around them. And part of his fleet misunderstand the order and don’t tack at the right time. And that’s basically to cut a long story short, the Spanish are going to get away.

And Nelson changes the dynamic by sailing out of the line against all orders straight for the Spanish flagship, um, and taking them on. And, you know, that’s. That was a risk because to disobey orders, to disobey a a clearly defined plan, um, is, is really, you know, that that is a risky thing to do in the culture of the 18th century Royal Navy.

But of course it works. And JOAs forgives him and says, well, more than forgives him, he says, you are the man who has turned this around. Yeah. Is, aren’t you? You know? Brilliant. Well done. I think the interesting thing with Nelson is of he does ask his men to run risks. Mm-Hmm. But he never asks them to run risks that he doesn’t expect of himself.

So he always puts himself in harm’s way. Um, and he has this magical ability to inspire, which I think a lot of historians, I suspect, find frustrating because historians love to be able to pin things down and tabulate them and explain them. And this is just charisma. It’s one of those things that is very hard to define, you know, even when he sends that signal, England expects that every man will do his duty, you know, the sense of it being a kind of the kind of electric effect on the fleet that only Nelson could have done it.

Um, I think in a way that communicates itself even now, doesn’t it? Even that, that’s a, that’s a great thing. But I think you’re so right that when, so I’m, I’m in Cromwell the things I find almost impossible to communicate about Cromwell is the force of his character on a personal level and the charisma of his character, because.

You know, on paper, you know, why did he actually achieve what he achieved or get to the position he achieved? And that is really difficult. And again, I think, you know, you do very well with, um, communicating that sense of excitement and force and energy and, you know, sheer aggression, aggression. Thank you.

It’s a nice, he’s a good, he’s a good subject though, isn’t he? It is. And whereas Cromwell would be, because I think there are, um, the human element, the human factor really matters in history. Especially when you’re looking at a war or politics, the ability that some people have to inspire and to, to motivate people to do things that they don’t really want to do.

Um, it’s a really remarkable thing. I mean, we’re all conscious of it in our daily lives, aren’t we? We know people who are genuinely charismatic or charming, who can inspire us to do things that we might not otherwise want to do. We know it in, you know, the manager of a football team or something. So, um, it’s no different in history.

It 18th century, Royal Navy. Yeah, it’s difficult to communicate. I was interested by Jervis. I felt some slight sense of fellow feeling in your footnote about Jervis, because of course, you know, he becomes Lord Vincent and you say, I’m sorry, he becomes Lord Vincent. That was the way they’re going to call him from now on.

It’s very confusing. Sorry, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m Cromwell. We’re talking about Edward Hyde in one bit and they’re constantly referring to his future. Book and there’s Lord Clarendon and you know, how are you supposed to deal with that? Yeah, what can you do? And especially with a young reader, you have to really spell that out.

You have to say he’s changed his name now and I could be consistent in the whole book, but that would be wrong. I’m afraid you just have to suck this up. And hopefully they will. Also, Jervis is quite interesting also because he’s, you know, as you say, he’s really positive and he’s very magnanimous at that stage.

Later, he’ll have some quite hard words about Nelson being vain and on all the rest of it. And so that was a big thing. Of course, Nelson is not a simple character and unlike the Ladybird book where they completely duck, Emma Hamilton doesn’t even get a mensch, not even a walk on part. Um, you tackle that and you tackle slavery.

And you tackle the atrocities in Naples, very straightforward. Tell me about your thinking about how you dealt with those and what you wanted to do with that. Well, those are three totally different issues and actually the hardest one of them was Emma Hamilton. Um, so first of all on slavery, Nelson went to the Caribbean, that’s the obvious point to talk about it.

Uh, we know that Nelson was definitely not an abolitionist. Um, almost certainly if he came on your podcast, he would say, uh, you’d be mad to get rid of it. It’s very lucrative. It’s good for Britain. And if you said to him, well, listen, there are all these very obvious moral grounds, he would be puzzled. I think that that, um, abolitionism only really starts.

Really gathering momentum when Nelson is probably a boy and then in his teens. That’s when the movement in Britain really, really started to sort of get underway. His father, who was a church of England vicar, his father doesn’t seem to have been an abolitionist, which is not altogether surprising because abolitionism.

Was really rooted in nonconformism and groups like the Quakers and so on. So the fact that Edmund Nelson, his father is not an abolitionist is not unusual by any means. Um, I think, uh, the controversy about Nelson and slavery, frankly, I think is a little bit overblown and contrived. A great proportion of Royal Navy officers at that time, um, were not abolitionists.

There is one letter. That was publicized after Nelson’s death, almost certainly, well indeed, I think certainly, Doctored by, um, supporters of slavery to, to sort of inflate his rhetoric and to make him sound even more of a foe of abolitionism than he was. I sort of just felt with that, you know, just lay it out.

Rather like I’ve done for you and say, um, we’re not, I’m not really in the business of looking at people in the past and, and basically giving them scores about how much their moral attitudes are called with my own, because I think that’s a mad way to think about people in the past. But as you say that.

Yeah. Quite straightforwardly, I think, in the book, you actually say that, you know, that, yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s great. And I think some child readers might disagree with me. Hmm. They might say, no, no, no, my moral standards, and that’s fine. I mean, that’s their choice, but I just wanted to lay it out, say where I stand, which is, I don’t think, I’m not in the business, really, of morally judging people.

Um, who lived in a different world and, you know, have you thought if you attempted to just, who knows what our successors will say about us, what things about us they will find completely obnoxious and objectionable. Um, so that, so that was slavery. Then, uh, Naples. So Naples is an interesting one. Naples for people who don’t know, Nelson goes to Naples after the battle of the Nile.

So, um, we’re, they’re very, they’re very, Very end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century, and he is, uh, he has been told, you know, Britain is, is embattled in the Mediterranean, you should do whatever you can in your power to keep, um, the, the Neapolitan monarchs. So, um, this is King Ferdinand, who’s a dreadful oaf and his wife, Maria Carolina, who’s a Habsburg, the sister of Mary Antoinette, who hates the French revolution, keep them sweet, keep them pro British.

There’s a revolution in Naples while he’s there and he evacuates the royal family to Sicily. Then to cut a very long and complicated story short, the revolution is defeated and they come back to Naples and effectively. There are two different things. One is somebody else has basically said to the revolutionaries who are hiding, who are holed up in one of the Neapolitan castles.

If you surrender, we’ll give you safe conduct and you can go off to France. But King Ferdinand says to Nelson, well, this business about safe conduct is total tosh and I’m not going to stand for this at all. I want you to administer an exemplary punishment. And so Nelson is torn between honoring the previous commitment given to these guys and And then acting in the spirit of his other orders, which are you have to keep the Neapolitan regime sweet and the people who hold up are not like that.

They haven’t just been sort of writing, you know, left of center poems. I mean, they’ve been leading a revolution. So anyway, he decides, well, they, they’ve, they’re, you know, they’ve got to go. And so he actually holds some of the trials and executions on raw navy ships, which is very shocking to kind of wiggish opinion back at home and historians and commentators ever since have divided about this So even at the time there were lots of kind of progressive more progressively minded kind of weak politicians in britain who said oh This is absolutely terrible.

You know, these people have been given the word a british officer shouldn’t be doing this These executions were totally wrong Blah, blah, blah. On the other hand, there are historians right now. Andrew Lambert is a very good example of a very distinguished naval historian. He says, well, they, they, they had it coming.

They, they, they rebelled against the authorities in Naples. They allied with Britain’s enemies. Um, they had, they, they, they launched a revolution. They failed. They can, I can hardly complain that they were then banned. You know, by the standards of the day that they’re punished, which means they’re basically hanged.

Um, I think again, it’s for the reader to make up their minds. So I laid it out. I said, this is what happened. Some of Nelson’s captains thought he, he had behaved dishonorably. Some people thought, no, no, no, it was absolutely fine. You think what you like. Because I don’t think the writer of a book for young readers should necessarily preach to them.

And I think actually, even an eight or nine year old can quite happily accept that history is complicated. And that there’s not necessarily a right or wrong answer. But what was a more, a greater challenge for me was that when Nelson is in Naples, he obviously starts this relationship with Emma Halton and it ends with him treating his wife, Fanny, who is back home in England, extremely badly.

And it’s worse, isn’t it? Because she behaves really rather well. Yeah. Because Fanny is, is a very sweet person. She has looked after him when he’s been injured. She clearly loves him. Um, they’re not terribly well suited. I think it’s fair to say. And, and that. Friends had thought they weren’t terribly well suited, but Nelson’s friends and fellow captains were all unanimous that Fanny is a lovely person.

She’s very dutiful. She’s very kind of like a Dickensian heroine. You know, she doesn’t have massively strong views of her own and she’s a slightly retiring figure. But she, she really subordinates herself to Horatio and he rewards her for this by basically running off with Emma Hamilton, who I’m not a huge admirer of, um, who, who is very.

Well, she’s not a magnanimous person. So she tried works very hard to turn the rest of nelson’s family against his wife um Now in doing that I thought to myself how am I going to do this because he is the protagonist? He is the character with whom the young reader has to identify and here he is, you know, a lot of Children, I know this will sound terrible to some listeners, children can quite happily live with their hero executing a load of revolutionary supporters.

What they will find more troubling is him treating his wife very badly. Um, and I thought, well, the only way to do this again is to do it quite straight. To tell the story. This is what Fanny wrote. This is what Horatio wrote. This is what Emma wrote. And to sort of say at the end, you know, a lot of people at the time thought that Nelson had behaved very poorly and he had.

And. You know, this is a useful reminder there and there are no saints in history that people have feet of clay and that nobody’s perfect and he wasn’t perfect and the men who served with him and adored him knew that he wasn’t perfect and we shouldn’t be afraid of Of admitting that. Yeah, I mean whether That I’d be interested to know because the book’s only just out.

I don’t know whether there’ll be some readers who would get to that point, which is like chapter 12 or 13 or something. Just say, Oh, he’s obviously a terrible man. Throw the book away and discussed. My instinct is no. My instinct is that children are bright, smart enough to know that people aren’t that they know that they themselves are not perfect.

So I, I suspect it’s not, I mean, although. Working out exactly how to handle it was quite a challenge. I’m hopeful that they will take it in their stride and accept that, you know, there’s no such thing as Everybody has We all have feet of clay and I think they’ll, they’ll recognize that. I think it’s very much the toughest thing in the book.

I totally, you know, from, as a, from a reader’s point of view, uh, I absolutely, it’s a really nasty period where you think this is awful. Um, I did read a BBC summary of Emma Hamilton, which was very quite laudatory. Yes. Very much story about, you know, this is a strong woman in a, in a man’s world. So there are many, many different ways of spinning it.

Yeah, absolutely. There are. Yeah. You know, you, you, you. Being pretty honest about it. I was, um, reflecting that in a protagonist course needs an antagonist. I was thinking that you gave them a Napoleon. Yeah, come out brilliantly. I think it’s fair to say no. Was that a literary device? Or were you channeling Dominic Sandbrook there?

I think a bit of both is the honest answer. So first of all, on the literary device, yes, there’s a literary device, which is you need a good antagonist. And you also want the stakes to feel high. So, for the reader, if Napoleon is sitting in his palace with a cruel smile playing on his lips as he thinks about riding into Britain, as, you know, into London.

I mean, of course he was anyway. Yeah, of course he was. Well, this is the thing, you see. But, but obviously I wanted to slightly, you know, You know, there’s a slight element of, I don’t want to make it sound completely Hollywood because then people think, Oh, it’s like, he’s dumbing it down, which I’m not. I hope I’m not.

Anyway, sometimes you just have to turn up the volume as it were a little bit on these kinds of things. So in other words, to make Napoleon feel like a proper antagonist, so that Nelson’s story will make more sense. So then we’ll understand the way he thought and why he felt the stakes were so high. But all of that said.

I do think actually intellectually putting the kind of children’s book exercise to one side that There’s a really strong case against napoleon so napoleon, uh, it’s a it’s a man driven by ambition He was originally a corsican nationalist Who dropped his corsican nationalism? really when it suited him when he was driven out of corsica because of faction fighting and decided to throw in his lots with the Jacobin the french revolution He famously kind of comes to public attention when he turns his artillery on the Parisian crowd, the so called whiff of grape shot that phrase, the whiff of grape shot actually doesn’t really capture what happened to load your cannons with grape shot and aim them at civilians is a pretty terrifying thing.

I mean, you’re talking about tightly packed kind of. Balls of shrapnel exploding and ripping through a crowd of civilians. I mean, Napoleon is a very bloodthirsty man when he goes to Italy, when he’s the commander of the army of Italy in the late 70s, 90s, his troops, you know, they go through those Italian villages, leaving a trail of destruction and of blood behind them.

And he’s completely open about this, that they want to, you know, people talk about view. I know you mentioned Cromwell about Cromwell’s behavior in Ireland. I mean, this is that with knobs on, uh, Napoleon’s kind of rampage through Italy. And then of course he will repeat that in the Middle East. So when he goes to Egypt, his campaign into Gaza, ironically, um, is a hideous occasion.

I mean, terrible atrocities there, and he then ends up abandoning his army. Not, of course, the last time he’ll do that, because he effectively abandons his army after the disaster of the Russian campaign in 1812. The death toll from Napoleon’s campaigns is in the millions, all in all, including civilian casualties, people who died from starvation and so on in Europe.

Um, it is perfectly true, I think, that You know, it’s true that he didn’t start the wars originally, they started before anyone had ever heard of Napoleon during the French revolution. It’s also true that had somebody else been in charge of France, you know, those wars might have, you know, it would not have been an age of peace in Europe, but Napoleon’s ambition made undoubtedly made them worse.

And I think on top of that, he comes out of the story as a, to me as an extremely unlikable character and any sense of idealism. I mean, this is a man who. His court is more magnificent, is more opulent and luxurious than that of Louis XVI ever was, and he puts his own, I mean, his commitment to republican liberty is such that he puts his own brothers on the thrones of Europe.

I mean, this is a man who, to me, The character that he most resembles actually is Vladimir Putin in his enthusiasm for collecting palaces. He’s kind of a quite a cold eyed, ruthless figure. Now that’s not to say that there’s not another side to Napoleon, which is, you know, the metric system and all of that.

Yes, the Code Napoléon. The Code Napoléon, exactly. So there is a side to him which is he’s a creature of the enlightenment and he represents that. But I think if you lose sight of the The costs of Napoleon’s ambition, then you miss something really important. So actually I think he’s an easy person to make into an antagonist.

Yes. And also you miss the, uh, why, uh, people like Nelson and why the British were so patriotic and so, you know, why it was dangerous. You know, we know now it didn’t happen, but at the time they didn’t, it was dangerous. I must let you go, Dominic, because you’ve been very generous with your time, but a couple, just a couple more questions.

I see in your blurb on the cover, you said your favorite film was Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Um, I, I thought as far as the 18th century, uh, naval world is surely master and commander. I do know. I love master and commander. I, I watch when I’m, when I was right, when I was writing Nelson, I would waste a lot of time in the day watching clips on YouTube in inverted commas, get myself in the mood.

So I’d sort of watch, you know, huge sequences. I basically ended up watching the film because I’d be like, Oh, I’ll just watch, I’ll just watch a short clip just to really get myself under the naval spirit. Yeah. I think it’s brilliant. And I love the, so the books, have you read the book? Yeah. I just read the books.

So I love the books. And obviously the, the, the funny thing is the film is really not like the books, is it? No. Characters are so different. Yeah. And I think the, the extraordinary magic of that film is that they, they didn’t really Yeah. Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany are not Aubrey and Maturin that we know them from the books, but they’re brilliant in their own, in their own right.

And what the director Peter Weir, I think it is, captures so wonderfully is that world, the wooden world with its own rituals and its patterns, its relationships and, and friendship, actually male friendship, which is so rarely captured on film. So I love, you know, I love Mastering. I mean, the detail of it, You can, you can rub it three fingers, can’t you?

It’s just a tapestry. So good. There’s a chap called, a listener called Carson who recommended it. Some podcasts on the lubbers, the lubbers hole. If you ever get a chance to listen to those, they brilliant. And they share your enthusiasm. I didn’t mind. Absolutely brilliant. Yes. Okay. So I’m glad I’m, I’m glad to hear that.

Um, and then, um, the other, one of the other things I loved was you riffed using Burnham Thorpe and North Norfolk as the sort of lodestone of what Horatio goes back to, you know, that, that’s home, that’s England as it were. Yeah. And you know, you know it, you went and visited, do you? I’ve actually never been.

I’ve never been. Oh, come on, Dominic. Well, I invite you. I’m a lad from Loughborough, so. Oh, right. Yeah. Hence the Ladybird books are particularly special. Yes, of course. And so Loughborough sort of went east, you know, factory fortnight. So we had a caravan on the coast. Yeah. And we still go back there on holiday now.

And Burnham Thornton is a lovely place. It’s got a lovely I must start rattling, but it’s got a lovely little museum y type thing, which is great.  The pub there is, is really nice. Anyway. And the pub is the Lord Nelson, right? Isn’t it? The pub is, I mean, it’s very difficult to go into Norfolk without falling over a pub called the Lord Nelson.

I mean, it’s Well, it’s Nelson. They’ve got a choice of Nelson, Delia Smith, and Alan Partridge, so I mean Yeah. It’s got Nelson all the way, isn’t it? Possibly Delia. Anyway. Um. Anyway, so that was, and then my very last question. Okay. So you, you invite Nelson round for supper or you meet him in the, in the Lord Nelson pub.

Uh, what do you say to him? What, what, what do you ask him? Oh, what would I ask him? That’s a, that’s a wonderful question. I suppose I’d ask him if he had any regrets. Right. I would also say to him, please stay off land because when he goes on land. He loses his eye. He loses his eye. I mean, he loses his wife.

Um, he, he, he just lets himself down on land. He’s not at home on land. So I’d say just don’t even bother. I couldn’t, I couldn’t find the reference, but I understand he made an absolutely appalling speech in the House of Lords or something. Yes, so embarrassing that people hit their head and just, you know.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes, that’s absolutely right. He did. He was, he was a terrible politician. Um, I suppose I wouldn’t, I would just like to hear him talk actually. I’d like him to, if I, if I met Nelson, what I would want, I’m sure this wouldn’t happen. I’d probably be disappointed in some way because of course, when the Duke of Wellington met him, the Duke of Wellington was very disappointed at first.

Yeah, at first. Yeah. Um, and then Nelson went out and he found out who the, who Arthur Wellesley, as he then was, was. And then he came back in and was brilliant talking about the geopolitical situation and whatnot. I wouldn’t want the Nelson that in, in Wellington’s words was vain and silly at the start. I would want him to, I would want him to be the Nelson of all of our dreams.

So in other words, I’d want him to be talking about King and country and God and my country and all of that stuff and the blue water strategy. Yeah. And. That’s what I would get him on. I wouldn’t try to catch him out. I would want him on all that kind of stuff. You better not meet him then. Cause they do traditionally say never meet your heroes.

Yeah. He would let me down in some way, although you will remember if you’re like master and commander, there’s a, there’s a, a bit in that when somebody asks Russell Crowe, Jack Aubrey at when they’re having dinner, did you meet Lord Nelson? And he makes a joke about Nelson saying pass the salt, but then he says this famous story, which is that he’s out in a boat and he’s And someone asks him, does he want to coat to keep him, keep him, um, warm because it’s cold and he says, no, he’s zeal for a king and country.

I’d want him to say something like that. That is a great, that is a great bit in a, um, master and commander that do it so beautifully. Yeah. Yeah. And you, you feel that, you know, they communicate really well. Yes. Yes. You don’t feel cheesy. It’s. Russell Crowe says, if it was from any other man, you would think you’d laugh and think it poor stuff.

Absolutely. But coming from Nelson, it made your heart glow. Yes. And that’s kind of the essence of the story, isn’t it? Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. It is. Absolutely. So look, Dominic, um, I should tell for everybody, your book is called Nelson, Hero of the Seas. It’s in the adventures of in time. series by Dominic Sandbrook.

It’s a fantastic book. I really loved reading it. It rattled along. I think you treat your readers with a lot of respect, give them a lot of complexity, which is, you know, I really enjoyed. And I think any key stage two or three book is in a perfect position by the loo. Not because that’s a bad thing, but because it reads so beautifully and it’s just pure entertainment, so it’s great.

So thank you very much for spending your time with me, Dominic. And, uh, I meant to ask you lots of questions about the rest of this history, but maybe, uh, for another day. Anyway. very much. I look forward to it. very much. Thanks for having me. Goodbye, everybody.