by Gareth Rubin
Things weren’t much better regarding other types of supplies. One young officer at the Front wrote to his mother: ‘Will you also be kind enough to send me a map of the Crimea with the forts etc well marked out in Sebastopol. I see them advertised at Wylds in The Strand. You can choose which you think best and send it by post.’
It might have intrigued the Russian troops to know that their enemy’s battlefield intelligence was being supplied by the soldiers’ mothers.
ELSEWHERE, AT SEA… – THE CRIMEA ON WATER, 1854
It wasn’t just British soldiers who were having trouble with their officers. The ‘Crimean’ war also took place at sea in the Pacific Ocean and Baltic Sea, and one of the odder experiences for the British sailors took place in the China Sea. Here, Britannia was busy Ruling the Waves with a five-ship battle group under the command of Rear Admiral David Price in the President. With him was a French group of four vessels commanded by the aged and ailing Rear Admiral Febvrier-Despointes in the Forte.
The Russian fleet was represented by Rear Admiral Poutiatin, who felt quite outgunned as they squared up to the Anglo-French force outside the port of Petropavlovsk. Had he known he was up against Price, he might have felt differently. Somewhat elated, in fact.
For Price was not relishing the battle. Price did not relish battles – or so he presumed, having never actually been in a single one in his 64-year life. His naval career had been long, stretching to nothing short of 53 years, but, sadly for the men in his flotilla, he had spent 49 of those years on land, 45 of them on half pay and without a post. This major battle was, in fact, his first command. Appointing him had straddled the fence between blunder and insanity.
Some men rise to the occasion – cometh the hour, cometh the man. In this case, the hour cameth and Price wenteth away: he decided the best naval strategy was to take to his cabin and quietly shoot himself. Yet he couldn’t even achieve that properly, it seems. Aiming for his heart, he missed and instead shot himself in the lung. His death was therefore lingering and agonising – he pleaded with the ship’s surgeon to ‘Kill me at once’ but that act of mercy was not forthcoming, the surgeon perhaps not wishing to be recorded as having killed his own commander. At least this way Price had time to explain that he had chosen suicide because he ‘could not bear the thought of taking so many noble and gallant fellows into action’. You have to conclude that he probably did his men a favour.
Chaplain Holnie, who witnessed the scene, later explained: ‘The poor old man was always weak and vacillating in everything he did. And what all will say at home of an English [Price was actually Welsh] Admiral deserting his post at such a moment we cannot conceive.’
The loss of their commander threw matters into disarray, and, after a brief, disastrous sortie into Petropavlovsk, the Anglo-French battle group gave up and left the port to the Russians.
MAKIN’ BACON – THE PIG WAR OF 1855
For 14 years in the mid-nineteenth century, Britain and America were on the brink of war over a pig that liked to wander.
America and British Canada both laid claim to the Oregon Country, a huge area now encompassing the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and parts of Montana, Wyoming and the Canadian province of British Columbia. A treaty of 1818 had allowed for joint occupation of the land, but by 1845 both sides were unhappy with the deal. Britain was annoyed by the number of Americans hopping over the Rocky Mountains to settle on land they claimed was British. The Americans declared the treaty was outdated and said they wanted the land. To sort things out, another treaty was therefore signed: The Oregon Treaty of 1846.
As so often happens in these situations, though, there was a bit of an error when it came to the document. It gave the US the land south of the 49th parallel, up to ‘the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver’s Island; and thence southerly through the middle of the said channel to the Pacific Ocean’. Britain got the rest.
What no one seems to have noticed is that there are two channels, not one, and in the middle of them was a small island called San Juan. Each country chose the channel it preferred to call the border, meaning both laid claim to this tiny outcrop of rock.
In 1850 Britain’s Hudson Bay Trading Company built a salmon-curing station, and then a sheep farm, Belle Vue Farm, on San Juan. At the same time, around 25 Americans also settled on the island, believing that they owned it and the British were the invaders. On 15 June 1859 the incident that put a spark to this international powder keg of intrigue happened. A British pig owner, Charles Griffin, failed to properly secure his livestock and one of them went exploring on the potato patch owned by his American neighbour, Lyman Cutler. Cutler, apparently a pig-hater, shot the creature dead. This open act of pig-aggression was not taken lying down. Griffin protested to the British government, which threatened Cutler with arrest. In return, the American residents of the island complained to their government, demanding military intervention.
Never one to avoid a battle, the American government happily complied and sent an infantry unit. In a measured, proportional response, Britain sent three full-scale warships to teach the stupid Yanks a lesson. The Yanks, however, refused to leave, even though they were completely outnumbered: the Pig War was up and trotting.
The British officer in charge, Captain Geoffrey Hornby, seemingly a sensible chap, did not want to fight over a pig, so he refrained from ejecting the Americans, and for two months the opposing forces directed nothing more than harsh language at each other. They did, however, continue to enlarge their forces so that, if war did come, by God, they were going to win it. By August, there were 461 American troops supported by 14 cannon, whereas Britain wasn’t messing about, with 2,140 soldiers, 167 cannons and 5 warships. They could have invaded Washington and won.
Speaking of Washington, in the American capital, the government was bemused by the idea that they were about to go to war with the world’s greatest empire over an escaped farm animal. Similarly, Rear Admiral Robert Bayes, commander of the British Navy in the Pacific, told the Governor of British Columbia he did not want to involve ‘two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig’. A peace agreement was finally reached, involving both sides removing most of their belligerent forces and setting out what military presence San Juan needed. The Americans could keep a company of soldiers on the island, while Britain could moor a warship in the harbour to keep an eye on pigs and whatnot.
Thus it stayed until 1872, possibly the oddest cold war in Britain’s history. Even the method of final resolution was strange, with mediation between the two sides conducted by Kaiser Wilhelm I of Germany of all people. This eventually led to a new treaty properly defining the borders between the United States and Canada.
THE WRONG KIND OF OIL – THE INDIAN MUTINY, 1857
When Queen Victoria looked at a map of the world, she must have kept saying: ‘Really, I own that as well? And this one? What about that place? Really, that too?’ But in 1857, when she came to that huge blob known as India, her question became slightly trickier to answer.
The Indian Mutiny of that year, in which many locals rebelled against British rule, sent shockwaves through the Empire. If the Jewel in the Crown, as India was held to be, could go it alone, then so could all the little islands and stuff that Victoria kept saying ‘And this one too?’ about.
Also known as the Sepoy Rebellion, the Mutiny started with the sepoys – regiments of local soldiers employed by the East India Company, who had enabled a colonial governorship backed up by a small number of regular British troops to rule 150 million. The underlying causes of the revolt were complex, to do with identity, religion and culture. But the final spark was to do with the wrong kind of grease.
Giving Muslim soldiers cartridges oiled with pork fat was not a clever move. Presenting Hindu troops with cartridges oiled with beef fat was equally foolish. Doing both at the same time was really asking for trouble. Yet that’s what happened.
In 1857 all troops – British and locals – were i
ssued with the new Enfield rifle. The bullet and the gunpowder that would send it on its way came in paper-wrapped cartridges and, as was the norm of the time, the end of the cartridge had to be bitten off * before powder was poured down the barrel. Then the rest of the cartridge, which was in greased paper to ease its journey, would be pushed down after it.
Already there had been fear on the part of many natives that their British masters wanted to forcibly convert them all to Christianity. This wasn’t an entirely baseless fear – for years the number of Christian missionaries devoted to bringing more lost souls to Anglican salvation had been steadily increasing. As one missionary said at the time: ‘The missionary is truly the regenerator of India. The land is being leavened and Hinduism is everywhere being undermined. Great will some day, in God’s appointed time, be the fall of it.’
There was therefore a lot of discontent among the Indians. The British got wind of something a bit rum with the sepoys, but they had other things on their mind – specifically a series of disasters in the Crimean War. At the same time, professional agitators employed by the Russians and local princes were, in fact, feeding the sepoys hugely exaggerated accounts of British losses in the Crimean conflict, undermining their reputation.
The Indians were also told a few other tall tales. Apparently, there were only 100,000 Britons in the world and they just kept moving about a lot so it seemed there were more of them. And most of them had died in the Crimea. So to anger was added the belief that a revolt might just succeed.
The dum-dum bullet, the type that flattens on impact for increased wounding, is actually named after the Dum Dum factory in India, and this factory plays a central role in our tale. One day in 1857 a low-caste labourer at the factory asked a sepoy for a drink from his water bottle. The sepoy was a high-caste Brahmin, who told him in the strongest terms that there was no chance. The labourer angrily replied: ‘You will soon lose your caste altogether because the Europeans are going to make you bite cartridges soaked in cow and pork fat.’
This was an explosive claim. The Indians hadn’t minded so much when the British were just there to plunder the natural resources but now they were planning to grab everyone they could and sit them in church to listen to four hours of Victorian hellfire and damnation. And secretly poisoning them with meat forbidden under religious edicts was clearly the first step on the path.
Soon rumours were flying about the beef-fat-laced cartridges, and the sepoys at the factory asked their British officers for reassurance that they would never have to bite the forbidden bullets. Unfortunately for the British, the man who gave them the answer was Colonel Mitchell, commander of the 19th Native Infantry, who told them that, unless they did so, he would take them all to Burma ‘where, through hardship, you will all die’.
Naked threats were not the answer the locals were looking for and a quiet rebellion spread as sepoys across northern India refused to bite open the cartridges. Luckily, Lord Canning, one of Britain’s most capable politicians and then Governor-General of India, issued orders that the men could tear them open instead of biting them, if they preferred. Unluckily, this instruction was given to the Military Secretary to the Governor-General, Colonel Richard Birch, who threw it in the bin on the grounds that he didn’t fancy giving in to revolting soldiers. He was aided in his incompetence by General George Anson, the Commander-in-Chief of India, who ordered no compromise be offered, stating: ‘I’ll never give in to their beastly prejudices.’ The first interesting thing about this statement is the indication of how the British saw their role as partly one of modernising and rationalising the beliefs of the locals, pulling them out of the quagmire of religious prejudice and into the nineteenth century, a time of reason. The other thing to note is that he sounds a bit hurt by it all – although not nearly so hurt as the many British officers and men who were about to be killed.
Really putting the boot in was left to Colonel George Carmichael-Smyth of the 3rd Indian Light Cavalry. On 23 April 1857, in Meerut, he decided enough was enough, and just to make the point he ordered his men to parade, telling them beforehand that they would be required to bite their cartridges. When they turned out, of 90 men, 85 refused to bite the bullets and he dismissed them before reporting the outcome to his commander, General Hewitt – a man so fat no horse could carry him so he instead travelled about by buggy. Hewitt wasn’t slim, but he wasn’t stupid either. ‘Oh, why did you have to parade?’ he cried when he heard. ‘If you had only waited another month or so all would have blown over.’ He knew that he now had no choice but to court-martial the refusers.
Courts-martial in nineteenth-century India were not known for their liberal values. It was no surprise, then, when all the sepoys who had refused to bite the cartridges were found guilty and sentenced to between five and ten years’ hard labour. In fact, a number of the tribunal voted for the death sentence, so in a sense the soldiers got off lightly. Those who had voted for execution grumbled a bit afterwards, saying it wouldn’t have hurt to shoot at least one or two of them.
Adding insult to injury, the guilty men were paraded in shackles in front of their compatriot comrades-in-arms before being taken to prison. Still, it must not be thought that all the British officers were unfeeling towards their sepoys – a number of them visited their men in prison and complained about their treatment and conditions. One Lieutenant Hugh Gough wrote: ‘Old soldiers with many medals gained in desperate fought battles for their English masters wept bitterly, lamenting their sad fate and imploring us to save them from their future.’
It was also Gough who, on 10 May, told Carmichael-Smyth that there were fires burning in the natives’ quarter of the town. The fires were not homely bonfires, but widespread arson and the beginning of the revolt. It turned out that the sepoys who had not rebelled had been mocked by the prostitutes in the bazaar for abandoning their colleagues. In response, they had got drunk and stoned on hashish and were up for a fight. When a British colonel rode through their part of the town and told them all to return to their barracks, they responded by shooting him. That was just the warm-up act for a night in which 50 European men, women and children were all hacked to death. Then things really got out of hand.
The British authorities didn’t fancy having the mutinous and apparently astonishingly violent sepoys hanging about Meerut. So, when they got wind that the rebels were leaving town in the direction of Delhi, 40 miles away, they wiped their brows at having not been horribly murdered and simply let them go. This was a mistake, however, because, if you are trying to start a revolution, you need to get the word out. The sepoys were therefore on their way to the ancient Mogul capital to really get things going. Had General Hewitt ordered the 2,000 British soldiers to pursue and apprehend the rebels, the 14 months of terrible violence about to engulf India might have been avoided. Instead, the British officers raised a glass of sherry and thanked their lucky stars that things were about to ‘blow over’.
SLOW MESSAGE – THE BIRTH OF KAISER WILHELM II, 1859
Kaiser Bill was a brutal, bullying man who was always out to prove himself stronger than everyone else, mainly because he was in fact weaker. His arms race with Britain, which resulted in the First World War, was, perhaps ironically, a result of his arm. His left arm, to be precise, which was malformed.
Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albrecht (Fred Bill Victor Bert to his English cousins) was born on 27 January 1859. His father was Crown Prince Friedrich of Prussia, but his mother was English – Vicky, eldest daughter of Queen Victoria. Vicky wanted good English doctors around her for the birth of her child, rather than one of those foreigners, so she sent for Dr James Clark*, Dr Edward Martin and the royal midwife, one Mrs Innocent. But having all these Britishers swanning about the place irritated the Teutonic medical brotherhood and Dr Martin was deliberately given accommodation about as far away as they could find it. The German royal physician, Dr Wegner, was especially determined to keep them away from the future heir to the German throne and if that meant the expectant mother suffe
red, so be it.
And suffer she did. The baby was in breech position in the birth canal and the lack of modern anaesthetics meant the Princess felt every second of it. Labour began in the early hours of 26 January and Wegner, neither a competent doctor nor a competent correspondent, decided to inform Martin – but, instead of sending a note by messenger, he sent it by normal post, meaning it was 36 hours before Martin discovered his patient was in severe difficulties. He arrived to find Wegner had botched the procedure and the child had still not been born, but the mother was utterly exhausted and unable to push any more. In fact, as he entered the room, the German doctor called over in full earshot of Vicky and her husband to say that there was no point in exerting himself because both mother and son were going to die soon.
Unfortunately for European history, Martin didn’t take heed of his advice and first administered chloroform to reduce the Princess’s pain before proceeding to perform an arduous forceps delivery.
Mother and son lived – just. There was great rejoicing in the room, but it ceased when the midwife noticed that the baby was silent and had turned blue. For half an hour, Mrs Innocent smacked the royal buttocks to get the child breathing properly. Eventually, Wilhelm began to scream and joy returned to the room.