July 2011

This month: We speak to Malcolm Scott Hardy author of 'The British and Vis - War in the Adriatic 1805-15'. We ask him about why he wrote the book, the reaction to it and much else

CIL: How did you connection with Croatia and the history of Vis come about?

I first went to Croatia in 1970 as a young man in the service of the British Council and had three very good years based in Zagreb, covering Croatia and Slovenia and with frequent forays into other parts of Yugoslavia. I met my wife and, over the years since then, we have been regular visitors to Croatia and have family and many good friends there. Although my wife had been to Vis many years before, it was only opened to non-Croats after 1989 and my first visit was in 1995.

CIL: Why did you write the book?

I had always been intrigued by references in books to a British naval presence in the Adriatic and on Vis at the time of Napoleon. My early retirement from the British Council gave me the time to follow it up. I found that very little of what had been written had been thoroughly researched using British archives and that many mistakes and distortions had become hallowed by time and repetition.

As I live in London and conveniently close to the library of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I was able to accumulate a lot of material very quickly. Outside of London, I had to go two or three times to the University of Nottingham for the Portland papers and to the Buckinghamshire county archives in Aylesbury for the Fremantle papers. Although I had to return to the various archives to follow up various strands, I had the bulk of the material within the first year.

However, writing it up in publishable form, and the whole process of publication, was very much more problematic. I started to write a book on all aspects of the activity of the British in the Adriatic in the early 1800s. I found that I had written several hundred pages just to get to the point from which I had intended to start! So the only solution was to divide it up into different themes.

The second theme, on the activity of the British in the northern Adriatic in relation to Rijeka, overtook my work on the British and Vis and was published in Croatia and England in 2005. The British and Vis was published in 2005 in Croatia in a bilingual edition and in its final definitive English edition in 2009. I still have enough material left for another couple of books on different themes, including the part played by events in the Adriatic in Napoleon's plans to attack British India, and relations in the Adriatic between the British and the Russians.

CIL: In the forward you note that many historians have repeated the account of the British on Vis by Canon Lissi, in which you found the detail confused. Have these elements of your work - which clarify and shed new light - gone down well? How have Croatians received the book generally?

My Croatian publishers applied for a Croatian state grant to support the publication of the British and Vis. This involved an assessment of my work by two Croatian assessors. One of them, mainly as a result of certain misunderstandings about the completeness of the text (he was given a copy without footnotes and information on my sources), gave it a hard time and was offended that I had used the non-Croatian place names used by the British at the time. But despite this, the state grant was awarded, which meant that copies of the book were bought and placed in all public libraries. The new light my work has shed on the events in question does not seem to have aroused negative reactions in Croatia, although, needless to say, it is virtually impossible to dent long held and cherished traditions, for example Rijeka being saved from bombardment by the British fleet by the intervention of Karolina Rijecka, or that William Hoste was a British admiral in charge of the British fleet throughout the entire period.

CIL: Captain William Hoste is strongly connected with Vis in particular, often referred to as having introduced cricket to the island. His reputation takes a bit of a knock in your book, can you tell us about that?

William Hoste's reputation was problematic. He died quite young and his widow, a member of the Walpole family, dedicated a lot of money and time to glorifying his memory. A careful examination of the evidence reveals a rather unpleasant character. He was ruthless in his pursuit of prize money. He did not like Vis. In one of his letters, he says that he was so bored with life in that wretched place with its almost savage islanders that he and his fellow-officers had founded a cricket club to while away the time. I felt it was necessary, not so much to undermine his reputation as to put some equally or more worthy (and certainly more sympathetic) people back into the picture. But despite this, it is only his name that keeps cropping up!

CIL: Could Vis make more of its many links to Britain, in particular in regards to tourism? It does seem a shame that Fort George in particular is not being made more of - the last time we visited there weren't even signposts to tell people how to get there.

I have heard that the last survivors of the British servicemen who were on Vis during the Second World War have now given up their annual visits to the island. Various monuments from the periods of British occupation have disappeared, are neglected or defaced. The one proposal that I know about for restoring Fort George was to turn it into a casino, but this came to nothing. Interestingly enough, the monuments in the Vis cemetery to commemorate the victory of the Austrian navy in the second battle of Vis have been restored with help from the Austrians, and this makes sense given the number of Dalmatian sailors who served in the Austrian navy. I would certainly hope that my book could contribute to a revival of interest, on both sides, in the links between Croatia and Britain that are covered by it.

The British and Vis War in the Adriatic 1805-15 by Malcolm Scott Hardy.
ISBN 9781905739158. £19.95. viii+152 pages.
Available from Archaeopress www.archaeopress.com