The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire
Page 34
11 Michael Partridge, Gladstone (Routledge, 2003), p. 109.
12 John O’Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 145.
13 Denis Gwynn, The Life of John Redmond (G. G. Harrap, 1932), p. 55.
14 John Ranelagh, Ireland: An Illustrated History (Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 211.
15 T. M. Kettle, The Open Secret of Ireland (General Books LLC, 2010), see the introduction by Redmond, p. 6.
16 This is a chapter title in Richard Bennett, The Black and Tans: The British Special Police in Ireland (Barnes & Noble Books, 1995), a useful, short (228 pages) history of this period, though the endless violence rather palls.
17 You can see an example of such men in the photo insert between pp. 96 and 97 of ibid.
Chapter 8
1 This was Raleigh’s response when told he should show less courage, while awaiting execution, because his cool-headed fortitude might provoke his enemies. Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Raleigh (Atheneum, 1974) p. 375.
2 The Irish (and the then Spanish ambassador) claimed the Spaniards surrendered on a condition of amnesty; the English at the time denied this. The surrendering Spanish had made a point that they had not come on orders of the king of Spain, but as soldiers fighting for the pope—which might have only deepened the hostility of the English commander, Lord Grey, a Catholic-hating Puritan. “The faith of Grey” is an Irish byword for perfidy.
3 Norman Lloyd Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh (Cassell Biographies, 1988), p. 33.
4 Sir Robert Naunton, quoted in ibid., p. 49.
5 That biographer is Robert Lacey in Sir Walter Ralegh (op. cit.)—note the alternative spelling; Raleigh’s name was spelled many ways in his lifetime—see p. 75.
6 The very fact that Indians were dying mysteriously through disease at the appearance of the white man might have given credence to the godly theory, if the rule between mortals and gods was noli me tangere.
7 Raleigh Trevelyan, Sir Walter Raleigh (Henry Holt, 2002), p. 280.
Chapter 9
1 Christopher Hibbert, Wellington: A Personal History (Addison Wesley, 1997), p. 3.
2 Elizabeth Longford in Wellington: The Years of the Sword (Harper and Row, 1969), p. 34, has him burning his violin, which is the usual account; Christopher Hibbert in op. cit., p. 11, has him giving it away.
3 Hibbert, op. cit., p. 30.
4 Ibid., p. 37.
5 “A disciplined infantry that keeps its order and reserves its fire has little to fear from cavalry.” Quoted in Geoffrey Treasure, Who’s Who in Late Hanoverian Britain (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 245.
6 Longford, op. cit., p. 139.
7 Treasure, op. cit., p. 243.
8 One of his tasks was convincing France to follow Britain’s example in abolishing the colonial slave trade. There was no anti-slavery sentiment in France, such as there was in England, but he did get the French king to at least consider abolishing the trade in five years. J. H. Stocqueller points out that William Wilberforce and other abolitionists wanted an immediate renunciation of the slave traffic; this Wellington could not deliver, and did not himself think reasonable given French public opinion, but he did procure a promise that France’s Navy would join Britain’s in patrolling the African coast against slavers. See J. H. Stocqueller, The Life of Field Marshal the Duke of Wellington (Ingram, Cooke, and Company, 1852), vol. I, pp. 355–57.
9 Robert Eccleshall and Graham Walker, Biographical Dictionary of British Prime Ministers (Routledge, 1998), p. 125.
10 Quoted in virtually every other Wellington biography, but see Gordon Cor-rigan, Wellington: A Military Life (Hambledon Continuum, 2001), p. 371, n. 11.
11 Neville Thompson, Wellington After Waterloo (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 80.
Chapter 10
1 Roger Ellis, Who’s Who in Victorian Britain (Shepheard-Walwyn, 1997), p. 206.
2 Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 77–78.
3 Colonel Sir William F. Butler, Sir Charles Napier (Cornell University Library Digital Collections, no date, reprint of Macmillan’s 1894 edition, originally published 1890), p. 1.
4 It should be added that he disdained clerics.
5 Butler, op. cit., p. 215.
6 Farwell, op. cit., p. 70.
7 Lieutenant-General Sir William Napier, The Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, G.C.B. (John Murray, 1857), vol. II, p. 153.
8 Farwell, op. cit., p. 81.
9 Butler, op. cit., p. 113.
10 Napier, op. cit., vol. II, p. 356.
11 Butler, op. cit., p. 147.
12 Napier, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 343.
13 Farwell, op. cit., p. 94.
14 Butler, op. cit., p. 174.
15 Ibid., p. 186.
16 Ibid., p. 199.
Chapter 11
1 Speech delivered in the House of Commons, 10 July 1833.
2 Some modern historians have made unconvincing attempts to debunk the first-hand testimony of one of the survivors, John Zephaniah Holwell, an upright surgeon, civil servant, and occasional military officer of the East India Company who wrote a thoroughly believable and meticulous account of the incident (including the names of the dead).
3 Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt (1798–1801), was, in part, an attempt to establish a route to supply anti-British Indian rulers.
4 Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (St. Martin’s Press, 1997), p. 98.
5 Francis Yeats-Brown, The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (Blue Ribbon Books, 1933), pp. 34–35.
6 The other ranks were a different and more brutish story entirely, of course.
7 James, op. cit., p. 415.
8 Andrew Roberts, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 (HarperCollins, 2007), p. 150. His is the best, short summary of the events at Amritsar; for a detailed examination of Amritsar, the most authoritative recent book is Nigel Collett’s The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (Hambledon Continuum, 2006).
9 Nigel Collett, The Butcher of Amritsar: General Reginald Dyer (Hambledon Continuum, 2006), p. 424.
10 Speech at Winchester House, 23 February 1931.
Chapter 12
1 Thomas Babington Macaulay, Essay on Clive (Longmans’ English Classics, Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), p. 5.
2 Mark Bence-Jones, Clive of India (Book Club Associates, London, 1974), p. 3.
3 Robert Harvey, Clive: The Life and Death of a British Emperor (Hodder & Stoughton, 1998), p. 43.
4 The Mahrattas fed their horses opium, giving new meaning to the expression, “get off your high horse.”
5 Once, during the final campaign against Chanda Sahib, Clive stumbled behind enemy lines into a gang of six armed Frenchmen, but managed to convince them they were surrounded: three surrendered and three fled. Clive led a charmed life on the battlefield.
6 Macaulay, op. cit., p. 43.
7 Harvey, op. cit., p. 346.
8 Bence-Jones, op. cit., p. 287.
Chapter 13
1 Byron Farwell, Armies of the Raj: From the Great Indian Mutiny to Independence: 1858–1947 (W. W. Norton & Company, 1989) p. 205.
2 This had originally been remarked of another parliamentarian and then adopted to describe Curzon, which it did most perfectly.
3 David Gilmour, Curzon: Imperial Statesman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), p. 5.
4 Ibid., p. 45.
5 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (The Folio Society, 1992), p. 79.
6 Gilmour, op. cit., p. 36. Curzon remarried, but never gained the male heir for which he hoped and never regained the happiness his first wife had given him.
7 Ibid., p. 432.
8 He wanted to decline, but his wife prevailed upon him to accept.
9 Chris Wrigley, Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion (ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2002), p. 150.
Chapter 14
1 Philip Warner, Auchinleck: The Lonely Soldie
r (Cassell & Co., 1981), pp. 211–12.
2 He made a few himself, including an arrow-flight sound simulator to accompany a shipboard showing of the Douglas Fairbanks version of Robin Hood.
3 Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten: The Official Biography (Collins, 1985), p. 104.
4 Unlike the American government, Mountbatten defended French imperialism as well, thinking the French necessary and rightful allies in the fight to get the Japanese out of Indochina.
5 Ziegler, op. cit., p. 328. Mountbatten had supported Aung San.
6 What is astonishing is that the slaughter caught Labour and Indian politicians by surprise. British imperial die-hards, who accurately predicted what would happen, had been dismissed as reactionaries.
7 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Never Despair, 1945–1965 (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988), p. 354.
8 The agreement on India’s and Pakistan’s Commonwealth status helped Churchill give his reluctant consent to their independence.
Chapter 15
1 G. A. Henty, The March to Coomassie (Tinsley Brothers, London, 1874), p. 385.
2 Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, The Story of a Soldier’s Life (Archibald Constable, & Company, 1903), vol. II, p. 370.
3 Thomas Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa: The White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876 to 1912 (Random House, 1991), p. 459.
4 Ibid., p. 669.
5 James Morris, Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (The Folio Society, 1992), p. 443.
6 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (The Folio Society, 1992), pp. 323–24.
7 This is the estimate of Donald R. Morris in his classic study of the Zulu, The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation (Touchstone, 1965), p. 26: “When Van Reibeck landed at the Cape in 1652, the nearest Bantu were 500 miles to the north and 1,000 miles to the west. . . .”
8 Morris, Heaven’s Command, pp. 361–62.
9 Alistair Horne, Macmillan, 1957–1986, Volume II of the Official Biography (Macmillan, 1989), pp. 195–96.
Chapter 16
1 Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, The American Civil War: An English View, The Writings of Field Marshal Viscount Wolseley, introduced and ed. James A. Rawley (Stackpole Books, 2002), p. 69.
2 In this, the witty Strachey, a homosexualist (and sado-masochistic) subversive, did what all liberals do: make virtue look like hypocrisy in order to make one’s own vices appear morally acceptable. Interestingly, Strachey’s father, a general, embodied to some degree the ideal Strachey pilloried. Strachey’s mother was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement, which is perhaps where the rot set in.
3 Gordon’s family had been devoted Bible readers but he had not been noticeably devout until some epiphany struck him in Pembroke.
4 John Pollock, Gordon of Khartoum: An Extraordinary Soldier (Christian Focus, 2005; originally published as Gordon: The Man Behind the Legend, Constable & Company, 1993), p. 51.
5 Ibid., p. 79. Roy MacGregor-Hastie notes in Never to Be Taken Alive: A Biography of General Gordon (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1985), p. 63, that though “Lytton Strachey is bitter about ‘the destruction of the Summer Palace at Peking—the act by which Lord Elgin, in the name of European civilization, took vengeance on the barbarism of the East,’ everything that could be saved had been saved. Elgin had given orders to this effect and what was eventually blown up was the seat of government, as a warning to the Emperor not to misbehave again.... The lesson was salutary.”
6 Charles Chenevix Trench, The Road to Khartoum: A Life of General Charles Gordon (Dorset Press, 1987), p. 28.
7 Pollock, op. cit., p. 139.
8 Gordon was remarkably ecumenical (and idiosyncratic) in his views. He was a friend equally to evangelicals and Catholics; the former claimed him, and Frank Power, The Times correspondent in Khartoum, and a Catholic, thought Gordon was a near-Catholic.
9 Robert Wilkinson-Latham, The Sudan Campaigns, 1881–1898 (Osprey, 1996), p. 24. It is striking that the Sudanese Muslims respected Gordon for his Christian piety.
10 British troops were in the Sudan at Suakin, but their task was to keep Mahdist forces from threatening the Red Sea coast. After defeating the dervishes at the Battle of Tamai on 13 March 1884, the British troops were withdrawn.
11 Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (A Harvest/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Book, no date), p. 344.
12 Such was his faith in the power of redcoats.
13 Trench, op. cit., p. 282.
14 Strachey, op. cit., p. 347. As Strachey notes, this is one of several versions of Gordon’s death.
15 Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 146.
Chapter 17
1 Byron Farwell, Eminent Victorian Soldiers: Seekers of Glory (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), p. 347.
2 His given name was Horatio Herbert Kitchener. His father was Henry Horatio Kitchener. Both Horatios were respectful nods in the direction of Lord Nelson.
3 Philip Warner, Kitchener: The Man Behind the Legend (Atheneum, 1986), p. 20.
4 Gordon sometimes had a high opinion of Kitchener, seeing him as his eventual successor as governor-general of the Sudan, and Kitchener venerated Gordon; during the siege of Khartoum, however, Gordon criticized Kitchener in his diary.
5 Valentine Baker (1827–87) had been a general in Ottoman service before accepting an appointment to the Egyptian police, where Baker’s role was as much military as constabulary as he fought in the dervish wars. He had been cashiered from the British army, in which he reached the rank of colonel, after allegedly assaulting a woman in a railway carriage. As a soldier, he was immensely talented and brave, and Kitchener, a man of strong, Christian moral views, seems to have had no qualms about his character. Baker’s brother was the celebrated explorer Samuel Baker.
6 Warner, op. cit., p. 89.
7 Much is sometimes made of the fact that Kitchener insisted on single men as his staff officers and personally interviewed and selected only single men for the Egyptian campaign. Kitchener justified such discrimination on the grounds that it saved the taxpayers money, because such officers were not entitled (obviously) to marriage allowances, and that single men could give themselves fully to the job at hand. But if the implication is that Kitchener was assembling a collection of toy boys, it should be noted that all but one of his staff officers eventually married and that there was never a recorded instance of scandal between Kitchener and his “cubs” (as his young staff officers were known).
8 Lord Cromer averred that Kitchener lost interest in the college, and his opinion has generally been taken as accurate, but one of Kitchener’s most thorough biographers, John Pollock, says Kitchener remained deeply interested in the college’s development and success; see John Pollock, Kitchener: Architect of Victory, Artisan of Peace (Carroll & Graf, 2001), p. 165.
9 Pollock, op. cit., p. 209.
10 There were several variations on this theme.
11 David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (Avon Books, 1989), p. 126.
Chapter 18
1 Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock,‘Rhodesians Never Die’: The Impact of War and Political Change on White Rhodesia, c. 1970–1980 (Baobab Books, 1999; originally published by Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 67.
2 Smith included in this list cultural facilities, and for all the stereotype of the white Rhodesian being a boozy, outdoorsy philistine, Peter Godwin and Ian Hancock estimate that “probably no other transplanted English-speakers had done more—with similar resources—to reproduce and practise the parent culture.” See Godwin and Hancock’s excellent, comprehensive study, op. cit., p. 38.
3 Robert Edgerton quotes this line and says that “surely Smith knew better”—but it makes more sense of Smith’s character and actions that he did not. See Robert B. Edgerton, Africa’s Armies: From Honor to Infamy, A Hi
story from 1791 to the Present (Basic Books, 2004), p. 91.
4 The British were, however, indirect abettors of violence. For instance, the British government subsidized Radio Zambia, which in its propaganda broadcasts urged black Rhodesians to join the terrorist campaign against white rule.
5 Peter Godwin, Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1996), p. 358.
Chapter 19
1 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (The Folio Society, 1992), p. 201.
2 For readers interested in this aspect there is, among other books, James C. Simmons, Passionate Pilgrims: English Travelers to the World of the Desert Arabs (William Morrow and Company, 1987).
3 Byron Farwell, Queen Victoria’s Little Wars (W. W. Norton & Company, 1985), p. 254.
4 The 1936 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.
5 William J. Durch, ed., The Evolution of UN Peacekeeping: Case Studies and Comparative Analysis (St. Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 108.
6 Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (W. W. Norton & Company, 2009), p. 312.
7 Ibid., p. 338.
8 Perhaps the most famously heinous attack was the Irgun’s bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946, which killed ninety-one people.
9 The British mandate over Palestine was acquired in 1920 and relinquished on 15 May 1948.
10 This was the phrase Mitchell used to describe his methods; it is quoted in The Daily Record (of Scotland), 23 August 2008.