Fifty years ago the Society for Nautical Research played a significant role in helping to salvage Brunel’s Great Britain from the Falkland Islands and to ensure it could return to the UK to be preserved. It is therefore highly appropriate that we have teamed up with the SS Great Britain Trust to celebrate the event with a conference on ‘Connecting The Oceans: The Impact of Global Steam in the Nineteenth Century’. This builds on the success of the Society’s earlier conference in 2017 and promises to be an excellent occasion. Further details can be found on the society’s website or at the back of this issue.
Observant readers will spot that two of the items in this issue were first presented at last year’s Scottish Maritime History Conference in Glasgow. They join an article that appeared in the last issue and at least one more that will feature in the next issue. For any conference that is not a bad haul of papers. This modest annual conference has gained the reputation of being a friendly affair where established authorities share the platform with new researchers. It may be Scottish by name, but it rightly takes a very internationalist approach, with international speakers providing a useful global context to some of the more locally focussed papers. Its inclusive stance stems from the Society’s mission to encourage research into ‘matters relating to seafaring and shipbuilding in all ages among all nations’ and papers have ranged from art and ethnography to politics, religion and nautical science. Last year’s conference may have provided a particularly fruitful crop of papers, but several from previous events have appeared in The Mariner’s Mirror over the years. If anyone wishes to join this year’s conference the call for papers can be found at the back of the journal.
I was fortunate enough to attend another maritime history conference in Scotland earlier this year. The International Postgraduate Port and Maritime Studies Network is supported by the Centre for Port and Maritime History, a collaborative venture between The University of Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores University, and Merseyside Maritime Museum, but its conference is organized by the postgraduates themselves. I had the pleasure of giving a keynote at the inaugural event in Glasgow a few years back and it was great to see it how it has gone from strength to strength at this year’s conference in Dundee. The new organizers, Scott Carballo from Strathclyde University and Christin Simons from St Andrews, have taken on the mantle superbly. Young and dynamic speakers from across the UK and Europe presented a wide variety of papers with great skill and enthusiasm on topics covering polar bears and pirates to tide machines and maritime board games. I would thoroughly recommend seeking out next year’s conference, as this is where the future of maritime history lies.