The San Juan Pig War: the silliest war in history?

The San Juan Pig War of 1859 was pretty ridiculous. The only casualty was the pig, which I suppose in some ways makes it less silly than the numerous wars where people got killed, but the fact that the late porker almost caused the USA to go to war with the British Empire is very, very silly.

The issue was the island of San Juan, which lies between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Nobody was sure if it was in the USA or Canada. In 1859 it was home to nineteen Americans and sixteen Brits. Sovereignty was an academic issue until 15 June that year when American farmer Lyman Cutlar shot a pig belonging to an Irishman who worked for the Hudson Bay Company. The British authorities tried to arrest Cutlar, who demanded protection from the US government. America sent in the army and Britain sent in the marines. By the middle of August 450 US troops with 14 cannon faced 5 British warships with 70 cannon and over 2000 crew.

The Americans were under the command of one General William S Harvey, a famous Indian fighter with a notoriously short fuse. This man had previously been court marshalled for invading Mexico without orders. Some said he had political ambitions, others that he was insane. Either way he was hardly the ideal commander for such a sensitive mission.

Sabres were rattled, threats were made, but fortunately no more than insults were exchanged. The situation eventually settled down to a cold war that lasted for thirteen years. The Civil War came and went, Canada gained it’s independence, but the standoff continued. The Americans built themselves a nice stockade, whilst the British constructed something a little more Imperial, with tennis courts and, for the commanding officer, a grand house with a ballroom and a billiard room.

During this time the two sides got quite friendly. There were race meetings and picnics for the officers. In the end the King of Germany was asked to arbitrate, and he decided the island was American. The Royal Navy hauled down the flag and sailed away. The Americans chopped up the flagpole and used it for firewood.

Historically the war is significant only in that the British Empire backed down without a fight and voluntarily gave up territory. That didn’t happen again until the flag was lowered in India in 1947.

Source: Heaven’s Command by Jan Morris

Ten Things The Film Zulu Got Wrong

(And One It Didn't)

The 1964 film Zulu is one of my favourite war films. It is a dramatic story, well acted by both professional British Thespians and amateur Zulu extras, against a backdrop of South African countryside, resplendent in glorious Technirama colour.

It is the story of the defence of Rorke's Drift, a minor skirmish in the history of British colonialism, made famous because it occurred the day after one of the Empire's greatest defeats. The Zulu nation, one of Africa's toughest tribes, had just been invaded from British Natal and in response they launched a surprise attack on a British camp at a place called Isandhlwana, wiping out the 1st Battalion of the 24th Regiment of Foot. A company of the 2nd battalion, guarding a supply depot just over the border in Natal, then found itself under attack.

The film is a convincing tale of British soldiers, far from home, fighting a brave and determined enemy for reasons most of them had little understanding of. It could be any number of minor battles of the Empire. However in some ways this universalism is one of its problems, as the battle of Rorke's Drift had a number of unusual features which, if the film makers had portrayed them accurately, would have made the film rather less believable, starting with the Zulus themselves.

1. The Zulus

The stars of the film are undoubtedly the Zulus. These were the real thing. Most had never even seen a movie, let alone starred in one, and so actor Stanley Baker, a liberal man who would go on to host one of England's first big music festivals, arranged an improvised cinema to show them what it was all about.

Young, lean and fit these men look every inch the fierce African tribal warriors they are. The Zulus that won the Battle of Isandhlwana would have looked very much like these chaps. Unfortunately those who fought at Rorke's Drift didn't.

The Zulu army was effectively a militia. Every few years all the young men were gathered together, formed into regiments and trained in Zulu way of war. They then returned to their homes and went back to being farmers until they were needed. Men served together in their regiments their entire lives.

The regiments that attacked Rorke's Drift, with the wonderfully unpronounceable names of the iNdluyengwe ibutho, the uThulwana, the iNdlondo, and the uDluko amabuthos, had been formed two decades or so before the war. They had last fought a battle together in 1858. The reason they had not fought in the previous day's battle is that they were regarded as too old. These men, probably mostly in their 40s, possibly carrying a few extra pounds and with a few grey hairs, did not want to be left out and so attacked Rorke's Drift on their own volition.

So rather than the 'celibate man-slaying gladiators' depicted we have a bunch of married, middle aged men having a mid-life crisis.

2. The British Soldiers

Their opponents in the film are similarly young and very well turned out, white helmets shining and top buttons fastened. The reality, as you'd expect in war, was somewhat different.

Although not as old as the Zulus they faced, the men of B Company, 2nd Battalion 24th Foot were no boy soldiers. The unit had been in South Africa for several years and hadn't recruited in that time. The men would have been grizzled veterans and no doubt their uniform and equipment reflected that.

Photographs of the Zulu War exist, but they are all posed and so the troops selected would have been looking their best. Contemporary sketches do exist though, and they show soldiers in patched uniforms wearing a variety of headgear. The regulation pith helmets still being worn worn would certainly not have been white either. The soldiers pretty quickly realised having a nice, bright target on the top of your head was not a good idea and so on campaign the brass badge was removed and the helmet staining brown with tea or cow dung.

Scruffy men with shit coloured headgear don't make great cinema, so we can see why this was changed.

3. The Missionary

The film starts with missionary Otto Witt and his daughter being scandalised by the sight of a Zulu mass wedding ceremony, all virile young men in loin cloths and topless young women. Actually this was pretty racy for 1964, and only allowed because the boobs on show were black and not white.

In reality there was a lot about Zulu culture that would have scandalised the real Witt. Joining the army and being assigned a regiment was very important to a young Zulu, as it was the first step to getting laid. Once a regiment had proved itself in battle the men had the right to take wives, which is one of the reason the young men charged so bravely into the British bullets at Isandhlwana. However the young men weren't always willing to wait and a variety of sexual practises went on that I can't really describe in a family blog like this. As well as the sex, they also smoked cannabis regularly.

'Ammunition Smith' in action

In the film Witt makes a rather pathetic speech about pacifism and then gets roaring drunk. In reality it was he who gave Rorke's Drift to the army, and he was 20 miles away at the time of the battle, getting ready to defend his own home.

There was a man of God present at the battle though, army Padre George Smith. He wasn't a pacifist either and earned himself the nickname 'Ammunition Smith'. As he dished out the bullets he encourage the men to keep shooting, but stop swearing.

Smith's morality, approving of shooting Africans, but not of calling them racist names, may seem hypocritical, but it has been rigorously followed by film makers ever since.

4. The Sergeant Major

As the young soldiers start to waver they are reassured by the steady presence of Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne, played to perfection by Nigel Green.

Anyone who has served will recognise this type of no-nonsense senior NCO. Unfortunately, whilst 99% of the Colour Sergeants in the British Army at the time probably did resemble Green, Frank Bourne didn't.

Firstly he was only 5; 6", and secondly he was only 24 years old, the youngest Colour Sergeant in the Army at the time. Far from being solid and unimaginative, he was a bright fellow who today would have gone straight to officer training school. He did eventually become an officer, dying a Colonel in 1945 - the last survivor of Rorke's Drift - but only after he had saved up enough money to live in the snobbish world of the British Officer.

Class isn't really something that usually crops up in films like this, but maybe it should, for Bourne was clearly far more of an Officer and a Gentleman than many of the people who led him into battle.

5. The British Officers

The actual officers in charge of Rorke's Drift were Lieutenants Chard and Bromhead, played by Stanley Baker and Michael Caine, two men who became Victorian heroes and whose names were once known by every Public Schoolboy in England.

In reality though there were reasons these two were left back at base whilst everyone else was off hunting the Zulus.

Chard was an engineer, there to build a bridge whilst Bromhead was the posh one. Both were rather old to still be junior officers. Chard served under Colonel Wood later in the war, who regarded him as a "useless officer...scarcely able to do his regular work" whilst Bromhead was a "capital fellow at everything except soldiering ... brave but hopelessly stupid".

Both men were overweight and General Wolseley, who was the model for the Very Model of a Modern Major General, and who met them both after the war, said "two duller, more stupid, more uninteresting even or less like gentlemen it has not been my luck to meet for a very long time."

So much for Victorian heroes.

6. The Commissary

The question then is how these two hopeless officers actually managed to organise the defence? The view of historians now is that they didn't, and the credit should really go to Acting Assistant Commissary James Dalton, a retired army sergeant living in South Africa at the time who had volunteered to help organise the supply wagons.

Dalton had served under Wolseley in Canada and some of the general's drive appears to have rubbed off on him. He won a Victoria Cross in the battle and has a barracks named after him, but never received the praise he deserved in his lifetime.

7. The Defences

The British started the war so overconfident that they never bothered to fortify any of their camps. The men at Isandhlwana paid the price for this, but under Dalton's direction the force at Rorke's Drift made no such mistake and built their own barricades from what they could find.

The film shows the troops doing this, but in reality they worked even harder than depicted. The result was that by the time the Zulus arrived they found they were attacking fortifications eight feet high. Bear in mind that some of the Zulus were pushing fifty, and that the British soldiers were armed with rifles so powerful that the bullet could pass through five people, and you see the problem the Zulus had.

The remarkable thing about the battle is not so much that the Zulus lost, but that despite having neither eaten nor slept for 24 hours, and having waded a river to get to battle, the Zulu veterans kept up an attack on such a formidable position for ten hours.

8. The Zulu Tactics

The battle begins and the Zulus come forward shoulder to shoulder in a great black horde.

This is the stereotypical image of a colonial battle. It's not too far from the reality either, as the British Army faced enemies using such medieval tactics in the Sudan and Afghanistan. The Zulus though were smarter, as they had been fighting enemies with guns for nearly half a century by the time of Rorke's Drift.

The film correctly talks about the Zulu 'horns of the buffalo' tactics, which they did indeed use at Isandhlwana and Rorke's Drift. When they actually closed with the enemy they used an open formation, the men spaced out to avoid heavy casualties.

In the Sudan and Afghanistan the close formations of swordsmen took heavy casualties whilst charging in, and it would all be over one way or the other in a few minutes. But because of their loose formation the Zulus stuck around a lot longer than the Sudanese and Afghans.  At Isandhlwana the main body pinned down the British line for nearly two hours until the horns could outflank it, whilst at Rorke's Drift successive waves of attacks continued for the best part of a day.

Zulu warriors weren't just brave, they were also smart.

9. The Captured Rifles

As the battle rages, the beleaguered British find themselves being shot at by Zulus armed with Martini-Henry rifles taken from the battlefield of Isandhlwana. "That’s a bitter pill," says Michael Caine. "Our own damn rifles!"

The Zulus really did take a thousand rifles from the fallen soldiers in the British camp at Isandhkwana, and they used them in subsequent battles of the war. The rifles were prized trophies and the Zulu king allowed the men who captured them to keep them. However as the regiments that attacked Rorke's Drift had not been engaged in that battle, none would have had any of Martini-Henries.

The Zulus did have guns though, and quiet a lot of them. Mostly they were old muskets sold to them by white traders. Several of the defenders of the Drift were indeed wounded by these guns. They were poor weapons, especially when compared to the Martini-Henry which could kill a man at half a mile. Most Zulus weren't very good shots, but at least one might have been though, as amongst the soldiers hit were NCOs leading the defence, exactly the people a sniper would be aiming for.

Hitting a target in cover from 300 yards with an old musket would actually be quite a feat, so maybe Bromhead should have been cursing the marksman rather than his weapon.

10. The Malingerer

Probably the biggest liberty the film makers took was with Private Hook, the lovable rogue playing sick in the hospital, who eventually becomes an unlikely hero.

These characters are standard cinema tropes, but they do exist in real life. I remember being told about someone his father had served with in the Second World War. This man was always on a charge, and as a punishment had to lug the platoon's anti-tank weapon around with him. One day the unit was attacked by a German tank and whilst everyone else hid in the hedge he went running across the field to destroy it. His explanation afterwards was that it was either them or him.

Unfortunately the real Private Hook was exactly the opposite, a model soldier who was there doing his job. He wasn't even sick, he was guarding the hospital. Hook's family walked out of the film premier in disgust, which is a pity as the cinema Hook, played by James Booth, seems a much more interesting, and believable, character.

Once again it seems the film is more realistic than reality.

The Men of Harlech

I don't really need to point out that the battle didn't really end with the two sides singing to each other,
because everyone knows real battles don't involve musical contests.

Except that sometimes they do.

In 1824 Britain embarked on the first of what would prove to be three wars against the Asante Kingdom of West Africa.  When the two sides met the British General ordered the band to play God Save The King. The Asante replied with their war drums and the musical duelling continued for a while until the Asante got bored and attacked. They overwhelmed the British force and the General's head ended up as a drinking cup.

Nothing like this happened at Rorke's Drift though. The Zulus retired when a British relief force approached, allegedly too tired to even lift their shields, let alone their voices.

One of the reasons often given for the 24th not singing Men of Harlech though is that only seven Welshmen were present at the battle. This is almost certainly wrong.

It's true the 24th Foot only became the South Wales Borderers after the battle, but it was a regiment with a reputation for being fairly Welsh. No ethnic monitoring records were kept of the Victorian Army, but we do know were most of the men were recruited from. However with Victorian cities containing men driven from the land by Enclosures, or escaping poverty and famine in their home countries, just because a man signed up in London doesn't mean he was English. Even more confusingly two score men of B Company were recruited in Monmouthshire, which is now in Wales, but was in England between 1545 and 1974. 

All told it's certainly probable that less than half of the army as a whole was English, and that at least half of the 24th were Welsh. Certainly enough for a male voice choir. Would they have sung Men of Harlech? Well, the song wasn't adopted as the regimental march until 1881, when the regiment became the South Wales Borderers, and in 1879 the official tune was 'The Warwickshire Lads'. However historians can only pin down two actual 'Warwickshire lads' in the company at the time, so something Welsh would actually be more likely. 

Reference

There are lots of books about the Zulus War, with many of the better ones being written by Ian Knight. However my favourite is Like Lions They Fought by the American author Robert B Edgerton.

Also worth visiting is The Regimental Museum of the Royal Welsh in Brecon which has a lot about the 24th Foot and the Zulu War.

How Britain Made Greece Free

Revolt in the Levant

A revolution breaks out in the eastern Mediterranean. Volunteers from Western Europe rush to join the rebels lured by romantic dreams of a noble cause, but when they arrive they find themselves in the middle of a bloody guerrilla war, fighting alongside religiously inspired fanatics with a taste for beheading their opponents. At first European nations ignore their citizens who go to fight in this far-off war but eventually, fearing trouble at home when these 'freedom fighters' return, they take steps to stop the volunteers leaving. No, this is not the story of the Arab Revolt, but Greek War of Independence nearly 200 years ago.

The Greek Revolt was a curious business. Although it only concerned the fate of a small population on the fringe of Europe, it was always an international affair. The flames of the revolution were fanned not from within Greece, where the Orthodox Church was on friendly terms with the Ottoman Empire, but by Greeks living abroad who wanted the Byzantine Empire back, and by the non-Greeks, the Philhellenes, who dreamed of a return to the glories of the days of Pericles.

Greece and Britain are at opposite ends of the Europe and politically seem to have little in
common. We send them our tourists and in return they send repeated requests for the return of their Marbles.

Yet, it is strangely the case that probably no-one did more to create the modern Greek state than the British. I suppose I should add "except for the Greeks themselves" but, as we shall see, that may not actually be the case. True, the Greeks did most of the fighting and most of the dying, and had they not fought so hard the revolt would have been over in weeks. But it was only with the support of the European powers that the revolt in Greece, alone amongst the many that broke out in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, was able to succeed. Britain produced more Philhellenes than anywhere else and, in one of the many ironies of the situation, it was in no small part because we had the Parthenon Marbles that so many were inspired to help Greece.

This is a part of our history we have largely forgotten for far too long, so here is the story.

British Greece

A ship of the East India Company in Corfu harbour

Britain acquired the Ionian Islands from the shattered Venetian Empire after the Battle of Waterloo. They were the last outpost of Christianity before the Moslem world began.

It was always unfortunate that for the Classically trained Englishmen than ran the show that the British Empire mostly consisted of places they'd never heard of. However, in the Ionian Islands they could visit Ithaca, the legendary home of Odysseus, and Lefkada, from whose cliffs the poet Sappho is supposed to have thrown herself to her death. 

Unfortunately, the reality of a marginal life on a small island meant that the actual Greeks they governed rarely fitted their preconceptions of Homeric heroes and Sapphic beauties. "The constant use of garlic and the rare use of soap, impress an Englishman very disagreeably," wrote one disappointed administrator.

British rule was mildly benevolent despotism. The enlisted men of the garrison seemed to spend most of their time drunk on the local wine, thus setting the trend for the British tourists that would arrive 150 years later, whilst their social superiors promenaded in the sunshine. Enough Greeks tried to copy the latter that new Orders of Chivalry were created to reward them and the rules of cricket were translated into Greek (απο ξυλα means 'bowled' apparently).

Lord Guilford

Some of the Brits who travelled out to the islands did though put some serious effort into improving the lot of the locals. Lord Guilford, a convert to the Orthodox Church and fluent speaker of both ancient and modern Greek, was so shocked that there was no university in Greece that he founded one in Corfu. It opened its doors in 1824 and had a library of 25,000 books.

Guilford, like most of the other Brits in the Ionian Islands, was sympathetic to the Greek cause, but maintained the strict neutrality that his government demanded. His islands, though, provided a haven for thousands of refugees and a vital postal service that allowed the beleaguered Greek rebels to communicate with the outside world, but he could not help the Greeks directly in their fight.

Commodore Gawen Hamilton

HMS Cambrian by Jack Sullivan (1976)

The British government though was not prepared to just follow the action from the sidelines in Corfu. They wanted a man on the spot. That man was the Royal Navy's Commodore Gawen Hamilton. 

Born and educated in France, and wounded in the Egyptian campaign, he would spend five years sailing round the war zone in his frigate HMS Cambrian, turning up when most needed, dispensing sage advice to both sides, and keeping his head when all about him were loosing theirs, sometimes literally. 

In 1823, for example, he arrived in Napflio just as the town had fallen to the rebels and the victorious Greeks were getting ready to slaughter all the Turks. Hamilton persuaded the Greeks that another masscare would just about finish their cause in Western Europe and they agreed to let the Turks leave in chartered ships and on the Cambrian.

Edward Trelawny

Then, in 1824 when Lord Byron's friend Edward Trelawny found himself lying seriously wounded in a cave on Mount Parnassus, having been shot in the back by an insane fellow countryman, his life ended up being saved by a British doctor dispatched from the Cambrian by Hamilton.

The next year Hamilton was back in Nafplio. The revolt had just suffered a major defeat and an Egypt army in Turkish service was closing in on the seat of the revolutionary government, which was paralysed with fear. But when the Egyptians arrived they found three ships bearing the White Ensign moored in the harbour and a rumour sweeping the countryside that the British had orders to fire in the defence of the town. The Egyotians withdrew and the revolution survived.

Finally, he appears again in 1827. Two main factions were each claiming to be the legitimate government of Greece, each with their own base, and the revolt was paralysed with neither party prepared to back down. Once more the Commodore arrived in the nick of time and once again he managed to sort things out, arranging a meeting at a neutral venue where, even though they failed to sort out who ran the country, they at least managed the vital task of agreeing who was to lead the army and the navy.

The Regiment and the Legion

The Battle of Peta

For all the help that Hamilton gave the revolt, he always kept to the letter of the law of strict neutrality. But for many across Europe though this just would not do. The romance of the Greek adventure was too much for many, especially the thousands of demobilised soldiers from the Napoleonic Wars knocking around with nothing to do.

Volunteers from across Europe flocked to the Peloponnese with dreams of fighting alongside a modern Leonidas in a new Battle of Marathon. Along the way they usually promoted themselves a few times, so that a sergeant who left France might be a full colonle when he got to Greece. When they arrived they found themselves in a confusing guerilla war alongside bandits-turned-rebels, who often as not turned back to bandits again, and who cared nothing for chivalrous warfare, and even less for military discipline.In the mountains of Greece these methods worked well, whereas the standing-bravely-shoulder-to-shoulder tactics of the volunteers proved suicidal in the face of superior Turkish numbers and artillery. 

With few Greeks wanting to be trained in an alien way of fighting, the self-appointed officers found themselves back in the ranks in a regiment of Philhellens. They ended up being wiped out gloriously in battle in an insignificant village called Peta on 6 July 1824. Ten days later Greek guerrillas exterminated a Turkish army retreating from Larisa, thus showing the Philhellenes the correct way to fight a war in the moutains. A few disillusioned survivors of the regiment returned to Europe to warn of the futility of it all, but still people volunteered. 

The next unit formed was called the German Legion. It went out six months later and suffered the same fate as the Regiment. When this disaster failed to stop the exodus of hopeful heroes the French authorities took action and shut the port of Marseilles to volunteers.

The Crown and Anchor Committee

The Crown and Anchor

Whilst these naive romantics were fighting and dying in Greece, a far more organised group were meeting in the Crown and Anchor Tavern in The Strand, London. Long since demolished, the pub was then a home to meetings of Radicals and other reformers.

The London Philhellenic Committee meant business. They had access to vast quantities of cash, in the form of loans and bonds, and they would eventually end up sending to Greece both Britain's greatest poet and her most famous sailor, as well as commissioning the most potent fighting ship then afloat.

Lord Byron

Lord Byron lands in Greece

Lord Byron was on the face of it an unlikely choice to send to Greece, but to be fair to the committee they never actually asked him to go there, just to help them distribute its money.

However, nobody who knew him could have believed he would have been happy just to be the banker of the revolution. It was Byron's poems that had inspired many of the Philhellenes to volunteer for Greece, so it would have been a surprise if their author had not followed them. 

Stopping off in the Ionian islands on the way, where he contemplated buying Ithaca, he eventually landed in Missolonghi, where one of those claiming to be leading the revolt had his HQ.

Byron soon acquired an entourage of Albanian bandits who were happy to take his money and strut their stuff, but who all promptly ran away when he tried to use them to attack the Turkish fort at Lepanto. He was contemplating the utter failure of his plans when he fell ill and, after bloodletting failed to make him any better, he caught sepsis and died.

Whilst it was certainly a death in Greece and probably a death because of Greece, it was hardly a death for Greece. Byron had absolutely no desire to pop his clogs in such a depressing manner. But it was a death, and the Hellenic Republic still celebrates Byron as the foreigner who died to free their country; a pity really, because there are many better candidates, the chief one of which we are about to meet.

Frank Abney Hastings

Bouboulina

A quick look at a map shows that anyone who wants to fight in Greece must have a navy. If there's one thing the Greeks can do apart from fall out amongst themselves, it's sail. The sea is part of their heritage and when I started learning the language I quickly realised they have as many words for boat as Inuits allegedly have for snow.

The Greek Revolutionary Navy was a nautical version of the guerrillas of its army; small, lightweight vessels that could run rings around the lumbering Turkish men-o-war. The leaders of the Hellenic Navy were a colourful bunch, the most outlandish of which was a woman called Laskarina Bouboulina, who was supposedly so ugly she had to take her lovers at gunpoint. 

Frank Hastings

Joining her at sea was one Frank Abney Hastings, formerly of the Royal Navy. He had served at Trafalgar whilst just eleven years old and had spent fifteen years in the Senior Service, rising to the rank of Commander, before being sacked for challenging a fellow officer to a duel. He wasn't short of money and went to Greece purely for the adventure.

There he had to get used to the regular beheading of captured Turks on the deck of his ship, and the democratic nature of the Hellenic Navy, where everyone shouted orders but nobody obeyed them, and each ship voted on whether to follow the orders of its admiral. He had some success in a small, borrowed Greek vessel, and when no ship was available he used an island, laying siege to the Turkish forces in Napflio from an off-shore fort.

Hastings had grand plans though. He wanted nothing less than the most powerful warship afloat, and thanks to the money from the Crown and Anchor Committee he intended to get it.

Thomas Cochrane

Thomas Cochrane

A relatively modest man, Hastings never had any ambitions to lead the Hellenic Navy himself, he just wanted his ship. Instead the Greeks, via the London Philhellenic Society, looked to recruit Britain's most flamboyant sailor to that post.

In Nelson's navy of brilliant but eccentric sea captains, Thomas Cochrane, 10th Earl of Dundonald, was the most brilliant and eccentric of them all. As a frigate captain he had made more prize money out of capturing French ships than anyone else. He was the inspiration for the heroic captain in Master and Commander, which  was written by one of his midshipmen.

Buying himself a seat in the House of Commons as a Radical he had made himself unpopular by railing against corruption in the navy. When in 1814 he was the only person to make money out of a hoax that Napoleon had died he was imprisoned for fraud. He was dismissed from the navy, expelled from parliament and lost his knighthood. Still protesting his innocence he served in the wars that freed South America from colonial rule, commanding the navies of Chile and then Brazil. He performed heroic feats of arms for both, and then argued about the money afterwards.

The second siege of the Acropolis

Wild and red-headed, Cochrane was the opposite of the calm Hastings in demeanour and also in motivation. Whilst Hastings went to Greece for the love of adventure, and stayed for the love of Greece, Cochrane fought only for cash. His fee for the job was equal to the total annual tax revenue of the country. Unfortunately, the nation did not get good value for its money.

Cochrane arrived as the crisis was approaching. The rebels had assembled their largest army yet and, under the command of an Irish General called Church, were trying to relive the siege of the Acropolis. They had captured the port of Piraeus from which they could approach the citadel under cover of olive trees, safe from Turkish cavalry and cannon.

Rather confusingly Church, the General, was at sea on a yacht and Cochrane, the Admiral, had come ashore. Not surprisingly this unorthodox command system failed miserably. Church and Cochrane tried an alternative route and the Greek army was mown down in the open. The two leaders escaped by wading out to waiting boats, but most of the soldiers weren't so lucky. The rebellion looked doomed.

SS Karteria

SS Karteria

At sea though things were going a lot better, for Hastings had finally got the ship he wanted. Twenty years after Trafalgar the navies of the world still consisted entirely of wooden ships propelled by sails and firing solid iron shot. But Hastings was looking to the future.

At his direction the London Philhellenic Society had launched the SS Karteria, an iron ship powered by steam engines and equipped with monster 68 pounder cannons firing explosive shells. It's difficult to appreciate how far ahead of its time this ship was. Even getting the vessel to Greece probably broke several records for an iron ship.

The Karteria was soon in action. In a series of hit and run operations Hastings wiped out Turkish forts, transports and warships. His opponents probably had no idea what they were fighting. Belching smoke, steaming straight into the wind and firing shells that reduced wooden warships to splinters it must have seemed like they were being attacked by some malevolent Greek god of old.

Hastings' ambition was to catch the Turkish fleet becalmed at sea, wipe it out and win the war in an afternoon. Had luck been with him he could probably have done it. As it was he did contribute to the end of the war, but not in a way he could have imagined.

Sir Edward Codrington

Sir Edward Codrington

The Great Powers were now starting to take an interest in Greece. Initially they were reluctant to get involved in what they saw as the internal affairs of the Ottomans, and even more reluctant to be seen to be supporting a revolt against an established empire.

However, an Egyptian army marching across Greece laying waste to entire provinces was something they couldn't ignore. Hamilton was still around bringing home tales of Greeks hiding in caves and surviving by boiling grass. Something had to be done. Britain, France and Russia, each worried that either of the others would act alone and thus acquire a bit of valuable strategic real estate, together put forward a peace proposal called the Treaty of London.

The Greeks accepted it, as they were done for if they didn't, but the Turks refused. The three Great Powers then sent fleets to Greece to make the Sultan comply. This called for very delicate diplomacy. Unfortunately for the Turks they gave the command to Sir Edward Codrington. He'd already made a name for himself as the youngest captain to command a ship at the Battle of Trafalgar. The British government expected Codrington to stay neutral, but King George IV took a break from his debauchary to advise the admiral to "go in, Ned, (and) smash those damn Turks."

Codrington found the Turkish fleet holed up in the harbour at Navarino, formed in a defensive horseshoe covering the entrance. The Turkish Admiral was understandably miffed that Codrington was asking him to lay down his arms whilst Cochrane's navy was still attacking him. Codrington explained that the Greeks had accepted the treaty and so weren't his problem.

The allied fleet entering Navarino harbour

Things would probably have remained at an impasse had Hastings hadn't picked that moment to try out some new ammunition in the Karteria. He wiped out nine Ottoman gunboats in a night raid and when the Turks tried to send out a squadron to deal with him, but they were blocked by Codrington. The French and the Russians then arrived, as did Hamilton in the Cambrian.

Codrington now decided that there had been enough diplomacy and tried a tactic that even Nelson might have felt was a bit rash. He sailed into Navarino Bay and moored his ships inside the horseshoe, right under the Turkish guns. He was outnumbered, out-gunned and trapped by an unfavourable wind. It was an amazing bit of chutzpah, as if he was daring the Turks to try something, which he probably was. Sure enough, they did.

The Battle of Navarino

It was the last battle of the Age of Sail, although all the ships were actually at anchor, and Codrington's veterans blew the Turks to pieces. He lost one hundred and eighty men and no ships. The Turks lost over 3000 men and sixty ships.  

He had done what Byron, Hastings, Cochrane and Church had all failed to achieve and won the war for Greece.  To the British public he was a national hero. To his own government though he was an embarrassment. British policy then was to preserve the Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Russia. Now Codrington had just destroyed the fleet of an ally. When the public clamour had died down he was quietly dismissed from the service.

Aftermath

So Greece was free. Ruined, diseased, bankrupt and indebted, but free. Or at least some of it was sort of free. Athens, along with two thirds of the Greek population of the Ottoman Empire, was not part of the new kingdom.

However, there was no denying that for the first time in history a small nation had come into existence based on a unique ethnic mix, a model that was to be followed around the world in the next century as the Age of Empires came to an end.

The Ionian Islands remains British until 1864, when they opted for enosis with the rest of Greece, a decision which their colonial masters couldn't understand. Guilford's Ionian University though is still there. For the first twenty years of the new Greek state almost all the doctors, lawyers, academics and senior civil servants were its alumni.

HMS Cambrian eventually foundered of Crete and, although Hamilton survived.

Statue of Byron in Athens (Jennifer)

The loans organised by the London Philhellenic Society turned out not to be the great investment they had promised. Most weren't repaid until the 1870s and their existence caused many problems for the Hellenic Kingdom.

Lord Byron posthumously became the hero in Greece that he never had been at home, and today there are more statues of him there than there are here.

Hastings, the most useful Philhellene of them all, continued in the service of his adopted nation. In the year after Navarino he fired what may have been the last shot of the war at a Turkish fort near Missolonghi. Following up through the marsh he was shot in the arm and died of blood poisoning, aged 33. It would be another 25 years before the Royal Navy would launch a ship comparable to the Karteria.

Cochrane returned to Britain where he was forgiven and reinstated in the Royal Navy, had his honours restored and was eventually buried in Westminister Abbey.

Codrington spent the rest of his life defending his actions at Navarino and denying he was a secret Philhellene. Like Byron, he is now better remembered in Greece than at home, having several roads named after him.

Greece meanwhile is once again bankrupt and indebted, although still free. Let us raise a glass of Greek wine to them today, or maybe they should raise a glass of English beer to us?

Bibliography

Heaven's Command by Jan Morris (1973)
The Greek Adventure by David Howarth (1976)
Captain of the Karteria by Maurice Abney-Hastings (2001)

Tom Cruise Gets The Drift

I saw a Tom Cruise film where I'd read the book first!

Okay, I know there aren't that many other films where this possible (The Color of Money, Born on the 4th July, Interview With The Vampire errr......), but whilst most people were probably content to point out that the film was Groundhog Day meets Starship Troopers and Saving Private Ryan, I was able to sit in the cinema with my children (it was there idea to go you understand, this isn't my time of film at all....) and think smugly to myself "this is based on The Defence of Duffers Drift".

That's pretty damn smug really as there can't be that many people who have actually read Major General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton's Edwardian book on small unit tactics during the Boer War, and very few of them I imagine go to watch Tom Cruise films.

The good General has a minor place in history as the person who came up with the code word 'tank' for Winston Churchill's Top Secret Landships. Fifteen years earlier he'd been working with a different type of heavy metal, building railways in South Africa. However he took a keen interest in how a few ragged Boer farmers could repeatedly kick the backsides of Queen Victoria's previously all conquering British Army.

The repeated defeat of the army of the globe's most powerful empire, the soldiers who had smited the Sudanese and bested the wily Pathan just two years earlier and who were mowing down scores of sword wielding Chinese Boxers even as the fighting went on in South Africa, was a such a massive shock to the system that the army would probably have been less surprised had it found itself fighting the Martians from War of the Worlds (published 1897).

The reason was that two of the factors that were to make the wars of the twentieth century so bloody, namely nationalism and breech loading rifles, were possessed for the first time by Victoria's enemies. The Boers were not numerous, but they were a nation ready for total war. They were also armed with guns that could kill at 1000 meters and, thanks to the recent invention of smokeless ammunition, the men using them were virtually invisible at that range.

By contrast the British Army still regarded the rifle primarily as something on which to fix a bayonet, whilst its mercenary soldiers, although still happy to massacre people of a different skin colour, found they had no quarrel with the Boers and once they discovered they took prisoners were very happy to surrender whenever they had the chance.

The age of easy imperial victories was over. Spain had been struggling to contain an uprising on Cuba since 1895, the Americans fought an insurgency in the Philippines even as the Boer War raged and in 1904 rebellious Hereros in neighbouring Namibia gave the German Army as much of a headache as the Boers gave the Brits.

In Swinton's book his hero re-fights the same battle over and over again in a dream. As he does so he moves from the toy soldier antics of an earlier age to more savvy modern small unit tactics until he eventually wins. There's a little casual racism thrown in for good measure, but it is a good analysis as far as it goes. In reality though defeating insurgencies involved a lot more than teaching soldiers to shoot straight and take cover properly.

The old imperial strategy of marching into another country with the flag flying, defeating the ruler's army in battle and then expecting his subjects to may homage to the White Man instead no longer worked. Fighting an intransigent population and guerrillas who would run but never surrender called for something different. You could never call imperialism friendly, but it certainly got a lot worse from here on.

In these new colonial wars causalities weren't just in the battlefield. In fact the battlefield could be the safest place to be for the target for the invaders was often not the invisible guerrillas but the civilian population that supported them.

In the Philippines the United States used waterboarding for the first time, whilst in Cuba and then South Africa civilians were rounded up and put into concentration camps where they died of disease and neglect. In Namibia the Germans went one better and drove the population into the waterless desert and wiped out most of the tribe in the first genocide of the twentieth century.

Which brings us to the real comparison between colonial history and this science fiction film; we were the aliens, a destructive race whose behaviour would be no less inexplicable to the victims of our wars of conquest if we had had eight legs and sucked their brains with straws.

H G Wells realised this, that's why he wrote the original alien invasion novel, but what he didn't realise was that, like Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt in this film, the victims would learn to turn the West's own weapons against us and fight back.

England 1913: World War or Class War?

Police attack strikers in Dublin, 1913

One hundred years ago this week Stravinsky's dissonant ballet of human sacrifice, The Rite of Spring, was causing a riot in Paris.

But Igor wasn't the only artist causing a storm. In 1907 Picasso had ripped up the rule book in art with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon; a picture of five carved up prostitutes from Barcelona. In Trieste James Joyce was getting ready to start on Ulysses and in Italy the Futurists, having had a lucky escape when they couldn't buy tickets to be on the Titanic, were moving forward.

Science too was casting out the old. Having twisted everyone's melon with Special Relativity in 1905, Einstein, working in Prague, then revealed that the entire universe was warped with his Theory of General Relativity. Meanwhile the other half of modern physics was taking shape as in Denmark Neils Bohr revealed his quantum model of the atom.

It was as if across the whole of Europe the arts and science had looked into the future and declared

Picasso, 1907

the liberal-bourgeois consensus of hereditary monarchies, global empires, laissez-faire capitalism and partially representative democracry and declared it dead on arrival.

Meanwhile in dear old Blighty we had the 'cowpat' school of pastoral music and Rupert Brooke was asking if there was honey still for tea.

And this is how history usually remembers the Edwardian era; one long Indian summer to round off the Victorian era. This was when Beatrix Potter put animals in frocks, Kenneth Graham placed the Greek god pan by a quiet English river and Rudyard Kipling claimed that England hadn't changed since the Romans had left.

But Albion did not seem nearly so quiet to those who lived through this time. This was a period of social and political revolution that, had the Great War not intervened, may have even tipped the country into civil war.

The reality of England in 1913 was a country where the Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition addressed a review of paramilitaries, the army threatened to mutiny, militant feminists blew up the Chancellor of the Exchequer's house and the army and the police battled striking dockers, miners and transport workers.

Lloyd George, 1909

It all started with the General Election of 1906, when Liberals swept back into power after a decade of Conservative rule. The Tories lost half their seats, but weren't too bothered as their control of the House of Lords would stop the Liberals doing anything too radical. However they reckoned without the new kid on the political block, Lloyd George, who as Chancellor of the Exchequer proposed a People's Budget in 1909 which aimed to tax booze, fags and land to fund welfare benefits. When the Lords opposed it, the Liberals went back to the country. Then they went back again.

Returned to government a third time by the popular vote they offered the Lords an ultimatum; pass the budget, or they'd lean on the new king to make several hundred compliant, new Lords. Faced with the prospect of their hallowed halls being invaded by an army of ennobled Liberals, the Lords gave in.

This left the Conservatives in an unusual position. Not only were they out of government, but for the first time they were also out of power. And judging by their subsequent actions, they were also out of their minds.

Across the 'snot green' in Ireland you see, things were coming to a head. The House of Lords imbroglio had brought on a general cynicism amongst the public, and the Liberals now relied on the Irish Nationalists to give them a majority in the Commons. This led to them returning to the issue that had brought down Gladstone; Home Rule for Ireland.

Edward Carson and the Ulster Volunteer Force, 1913

Tory leader Andrew Bonar Law appears to have seen them as a great way to embarrass the
government, and in April 1912 he attended a review of 100,000 'Ulster Volunteers', who marched past with dummy weapons and cannon. The Leader of Her Majesty's Opposition had attended a paramilitary rally.

Home Rule was really a last chance for democracy to sort out the problem of England's oldest colony. Militants were organising north and south. In January 1913 the Unionists got themselves properly organised as the Ulster Volunteer Force, and started trying to buy weapons from Germany. In November the Nationalists responded by forming the Irish Volunteers. Bonar was playing with fire.

Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, 1910

When everyone else appeared to be loosing their heads, one politician emerged as the surprising face of reason. Winston Churchill was at this time a Liberal, and a surprisingly likeable person. He helped draft the People's Budget, and set up National Insurance and Labour Exchanges. On Ulster he saw clearly that both Home Rule was unstoppable, and that if only the Unionist counties of Ulster would secede from the rest of Ireland, something approaching a compromise could be worked out. His reward for such wisdom was for his car to be attacked by a Protestant crowd and nearly overturned, causing his wife to have a miscarriage.

The Unionists instead continued their battle again the bill. In March 1914 the government decided that something needed to be done about the UVF, and ordered the army north.

When this news reach the Curragh barracks, the main Army base in Ireland, 61 officers said they would resign rather than carry out the orders. For the first time since the Civil War, the Army had decided to intervene in British politics. The implications for the government were clear; they could fight the Nationalists if they wanted to, but not the Unionists. It was the beginning of the end for Home Rule.

Landing the guns at Howth, 1914

The next month the Unionists landed 25000 German rifles and 5 million rounds of ammunition at Larne, in an operation run with military precision, without the authorities raising a finger. The Nationalist responded with a smaller, and rather more shambolic, mission of their own, landing a thousand antiquated rifles from the yacht of the author Erskine Childers at Howth. This time the authorities did act and, although they didn't intercept the weapons, soldiers killed four civilians when confronted by an angry crowd.

But even as Ireland spiralled towards war, the government was facing an insurgency closer to home.

Suffragette in Glossop, Derbyshire

In the middle of the nineteenth century the Chartists had come close to calling for votes for women, but the issue had faded with their cause. It revived in the new century. Led by a trio of Pankhursts, the Suffragettes broke windows, attacked country houses of politicians and then turned their subsequent imprisonment into a headache for the authorities by going on hunger strike.

The movement was strangely fractured. Emmeline, the matriarch of the clan, led from the front; in and out of prison, surviving hunger strikes and the horrors of the feeding tube. Daughter Christabel was in Paris, the figurehead of the movement, whilst her sister Sylvia was in the East End.

But all was not well in the Pankhurst family. Sylvia's dealing with Working Class women, socialist men, and even democrac,y drew her mother's scorn. Emmeline only wanted "picked women" who would "march in step like an army".

The Derby, 1913

At the forefront of that army was Emily Davidson. Census night of 1911 saw her hiding in a broom cupboard in the Palace of Westminster, so that one woman at least could claim to be in Parliament.

However most of her activities were a lot spikier than that. People's Budget not withstanding, Lloyd George was in her sights. She attacked a man in the street who looked like him and blew up a house that was being built for him.

The week after the Rite of Spring debuted, she became the movement's own blood sacrifice, as she died beneath the hooves of the King's horse at the Derby, apparently whilst trying to attach a Suffragette flag to it.

Churchill was once again the unlikely voice of reason, suggesting a referendum on the issue, but he was ignored. Instead the government relied on the police and, ultimately, the feeding tube to try to keep a lid on the issue.

But whilst the Suffragettes were certainly a nuisance to the government, they were not about to bring the country to its knees. The Trade Unions though, might just do so.

An abridged version of socialist history has a steady march to equality and justice, but the truth was that progress was much more uneven. In the first half of the nineteenth century it appeared on several occasions that the country was heading for revolution, with the last great panic being over Chartism in 1848, when future Prime Minister William Gladstone was to be found, next to his fellow Liberals, with a billy club in his hand as a Special Constable, awaiting the marchers who were descending on the Capital.

Since then the Unions had become the moderate wing of socialism, and the Labour Party which they formed, although far too radical for the likes of Emmeline Pankhurst, only advocating a gradual and constitutional move towards liberty.

That changed with the new century as Syndicalist ideas crossed the Channel from France. It was never clear if Syndicalism was seen as an end or just a means. Did these strikers see themselves as vanguards of the socialist revolution, or did they just want a pay rise? For the young radicals who led the movement it was clearly the former, but for the workers who followed them, most either non-unionised or acting in defiance of the union leadership, it was probably the latter, a way of arresting the fall in wages relative to their social superiors.

The Liberals had been good to the Working Class in many ways, introducing pensions, National

Strikers in Liverpool, 1911

Insurance and the Labour Exchange. But Liberalism never went further than providing a safety net for the worker, and would never advocate that he or she should ever aspire to the wealth or lifestyle of the Middle Classes.

So the workers took to Syndicalism and strikes paralysed industry after industry, city after city. Riots started, police reinforcement's were sent in and so was the army.

Churchill again stood out as a voice of sanity, lambasting Welsh mine owners who complained the police weren't cracking enough skulls, and even holding back the army on occasion, but he was now at the Admiralty and too busy building Dreadnoughts to fight the Germans to sort out industrial relations. However, whilst he may have stopped the Welsh mine owners using the Metropolitan police as their own private army, he also switched his battleships from running on Welsh coal and on to Persian oil, in a move the consequences of which we are still living with today.

Rally in Dublin, 1913

The government's main weapon against the Syndicalists was not in the end the army, but a civil servant called George Askwith, who negotiated amicable endings to disputes and prevented regional stoppages becoming General Strikes. The Germans also lent a hand too, racking up the international tension by sending a gunboat to Morocco and thus making striking dockers look unpatriotic.

But for the Syndicalists these strikes were only the preliminary skirmishes. Already they had crossed the Irish sea and made links, via James Connolly, with the Irish Nationalists. Although the workers remained divided, and a strike in Dublin came to an abrupt end when pickets tried to shut down a laundry run by nuns and incurred the wrath of the Catholic Church, the government had realised it faced the nightmare prospect of a Nationalist uprising in Ireland being backed by strike action on the mainland.

For the Syndicalists the next stage was a General Strike, and come 1914 the new and radical leaders of the major Trade Unions were already pencilling in September or October as the date.

Ulster Volunteer Force, 1913

So that was Britain on the eve of war, with the Unionist in Ireland preparing armed conflict against their own government, the army prepared to mutiny rather than fight them, the Suffragettes taking on the establishment wherever they could and the Trade Unions preparing to bring the entire country to a halt.

How it would have ended had not a man called Archie Duke shot and ostrich because he was hungry (as Baldrick said) we don't know.

Instead the war changed everything. The Prime Minister and leader of the Unionists had a quiet word, and Home Rule was shelved. The Suffragettes threw in the towel and Christabel Pankhurst went around handing out white feathers to any man she found out of uniform; including wounded soldiers and troops on leave, whilst calling for all Germans to be interned. Workers solidarity collapsed too. In both Germany and Britain the Trade Unions supported the war and the Working Class of both sides took up arms and massacred each other in industrial quantities. The poets and the composers also went off to war, and mostly didn't return.

General Strike, 1928

There was an eventually General Strike, but it was a lack lustre affair. The workers followed their leaders out on strike with the same loyalty, but no more enthusiasm, than they had followed their social superiors over the top on the Somme and Churchill, now apparently cured of his liberalism, sent out armoured cars to meet them.

The world had entered an Age of Extremes, in which the old enemies of the workers seemed almost like friends compared to the new enemies.

And so the English Establishment limps on. Still running the country, still making a hash of things, but still surviving.