Letter to the Times, published on 24th February 2017
I wonder if the Rev John Root (letter Feb 23rd), rather than trying to pin the cruelties of the Slave Trade uniquely on his own country, would support the erection of a prominent memorial to the Anti-Slavery Patrols sustained by the Royal Navy in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for a continuous period of 107 years from 1807 to the outbreak of World War in 1914.
While many countries participated in the slave trades, only one, Britain, took effective steps to supress them, starting with the 1807 Act of Parliament making it illegal for any British subject (which then meant the whole of the British Empire) to participate in them. The Anti- Slavery patrols arguably represent the most profound sustained action for the relief of suffering by one country on behalf of all humanity – ever.
A speech was delivered at a Pageant held at St Katherine Cree Church in the City of London on 14th June 2008
Today is the 26th anniversary of the surrender of all Argentine forces on the Falklands to the British Army.
That great victory in which all parts of the United Kingdom were fully represented – the Blues and Royals on Harriet, the Scots Guards on Tumbledown, the Welsh Guards on Sapper Hill, HMS Antrim, HMS Glamorgan, HMS Yarmouth, Glasgow, Sheffield, to name but a few, supporting the Army’s advance, brought near universal joy to all our people – and gratitude to our armed forces who made it happen.
The Regiments of the British Army represent the longest continuing military force on land in (modern) history, starting with the Honourable Artillery Company originating in 1537, the First Regiment of Foot (the Royal Scots) in 1633; the Monmouthshire Trained Bands (1577) precursor of the South Wales Borderers of Rorke’s Drift fame, the Royal Irish Rangers (1700), on the Somme in 1916, serving in Afghanistan today – as always in service and sacrifice for the Crown.
The Royal Navy with its origins in King Alfred’s time (897 – over 1100 years ago) vanquishing the Spanish Armada in 1588, the French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar in 1805, the huge victories over the German submarine menace in two world wars, and the triumph of the Falklands Campaign itself, are only some of the outstanding victories among many other British triumphs (and defeats also let it be said) in which pride is shared by all the peoples of the United Kingdom.
The Royal Air Force, founded in 1918 from the Royal Flying Corps, with its bases throughout the UK and across the world has always been a British and indeed British Empire force, supremely so in those great air battles of the Second World War – the Battle of Britain and the Bomber Offensive over Germany.
The United Kingdom’s achievements are not just military, of course. The historic and world-shaping deeds of the British Empire now being brought to the public by modern historians like Niall Ferguson and Andrew Roberts, (but without the relentless dirge of carping criticism by lefty historians and self-publicists of the 50 years after 1945) are achievements of all our peoples: most notably in North America, Australasia, India, and the spread of the English language itself. The energy for all this came from enterprising spirits and dedicated souls (and some rogues too.) This combination shows up in the Industrial Revolution, the greatest change in human existence since the the beginnings of agriculture and cities, in effect the creation of the modern world. James Watt from Glasgow, partnering Mathew Boulton in Birmingham, John Dunlop in Belfast are among many British iconic names in industry, in steam power and locomotion, which will stand for all time.
But why then, with these huge achievements in the recent as well as the distant past, are some people questioning the very existence of the United Kingdom? Why has a political party in one of our ancient nations garnered about 25% of the vote there on a platform of separation? Why are some people in England – with 85% of the UK’s population – murmuring that the political arrangements in the UK are unfair to them and they would not be so sad if Scotland were to separate?
Are people really aware of what separation would mean – the break-up of the Armed Forces among so many other institutions, our coastal and air security put at risk, families split by conflicts of identity and loyalty?
The answer to these questions is that the present constitutional set-up as brought into being by this present wretched Labour government with only half-hearted opposition from the other main parties – is unfair to England and lackis any sort of symmetry and consistency between the four countries of the Kingdom – and because of this it will fail and be replaced by something else.
It behoves all of us today to do everything we can to see that what replaces this spatchcock mess – created by Labour politicians purely to secure themselves a realistic chance of power at Westminster – is NOT separation but a NEW Constitutional Settlement comparable in importance with that which was constructed between the Glorious Revolution in 1689 and the Union of Parliaments in 1707.
We are told, chiefly by contemporary politicians, that the British “don’t do constitutions” (though we have written at least 100 for all the former territories of the British Empire).
Certainly we are not going to imitate our Continental neighbours with their lust for new constitutions every 3 or 4 years. Someone once asked in the London Library in the 1880s for a copy of the French Constitution to be told, “Sorry Sir, we don’t stock periodicals”.
But a revised Constitutional Settlement ever 300 years is hardly a periodical, but should be a practical reflection of the tremendous changes of those 300 years. Such a settlement would need to be agreed to individually by each of the four countries of the UK and as such be fair to each of them. [I personally believe this can only be on the basis of four parliaments with broadly similar powers over internal affairs, plus a UK parliament drawn from the members of these four parliaments, i.e. NOT an additional bunch of politicians. The UK parliament would be responsible for all external affairs and those internal institutions and systems like major trunk roads and railways which are essentially island-wide.] The United Kingdom would be strengthened thereby.
Away with defeatism; let us as a practical people give ourselves a decent constitution, and go forward together into the future with all its external uncertainties, but with the internal certainty of a truly United Kingdom, having our 1200 year old Monarchy as its symbolic head.
A letter to the Daily Telegraph which was published on 18th August 1999.
Mr Charlton’s observation about the Maritime Museum is only too predictable following the announcement last year that under a new director the collection was to be “reorganised”.
Mr Charlton might also have mentioned the absence of any reference to the Royal Navy’s anti-slavery patrols, maintained for nigh on 100 years in the Indian and Atlantic oceans. History knows no comparable action by one country acting for so long on behalf of all to relieve suffering.
The new displays at the museum are all of a piece with other attempts to deprive the British people of any aspect of their history in which they can take justifiable pride. The suborning of the school history curriculums is a current example of the attempt to deprive our children of their national identity.
Now here is a subject for a doctoral thesis: why has Britain created in so many people educated in the arts since the Sixties a mind-set which by distortion, omission, wrenching out of context and disproportionate emphasis, seeks to belittle and disparage our forebears’ achievements?
What, incidentally, have the events at Amritsar in 1919 got specifically to do with maritime affairs? Like the mythology of Bloody Sunday, it only provides Britain’s enemies with another stick with which to beat us.
A letter to the Times which was published on 1st January 1991.
It is certainly a novel thought from the University of Strathclyde (Sir Graham Hill’s letter, December 26th) that there should be a five-year moratorium on performances of Gilbert and Sullivan on the grounds that they are too nostalgia-inducing and not conducive to our embracing “our future in Europe or elsewhere”.
No people is so constantly told of its own shortcomings as the British (especially the English), as Gilbert remarks in The Mikado – “the idiot who praises with enthusiastic tone . . . every country but his own”. Equally, I wonder if any other imperial power at its apogee would have tolerated in HMS Pinafore, let alone enthused over, the gentle mockery of its most prized instrument, the Royal Navy.
Certainly Gilbert would have had a field day with the pretensions of the European Community, with its nostalgic hankerings for an imaginary past – Charlemagne’s short-lived empire – its absurd passion for regulating everything in sight and the blind faith that this travesty of Europe somehow constitutes Britain’s future.
Far from being an anchor to the past, properly taught our huge achievements as a nation over many centures would be a springboard for the future, an inspiration for our young people, and an antidote to the crippling pessimism – now of epic proportions – infecting so many of our national institutions.
Certainly what is arguably our most successful national institution in the post-war period – the British Army – yields to none in its modern-day professionalism or its pride in its past battle honours.
An article published in an edited version by the Daily Mail around 28th April 1988.
It was written in response to a succession of articles in the Daily Mail from December 1987 to February 1988 by David Thomas and Stephen Bates
“The history of England is one of Mankind’s outstanding successes. It is instructive to prove the secret of a destiny as fortunate and impressive as that of ancient Rome”. So opens the concluding chapter of André Maurois’s Histoire d l’Angleterre [published in translation by Bodley Head in 1956].
Such a tremendous compliment paid by a distinguished writer from one great culture to the people of another would cut no ice however with our schools’ educational establishment, even if they knew of it, to judge from the way our history has been taught – or rather not taught – in our State schools in the last ten to fifteen years. And under the new GCSE it will get worse, because far from it being deemed instructive to probe the secrets of our own history, the examining boards deem it hardly worth studying at all.
Thus for example in World History 1870-1986, out of 38 examination syllabuses, Britain specifically appears only once under British Empire 1919-1939, ranking along with Italy, Spain 1919-1939 and Turkey as subjects for our children to study. Russia on the other hand may be studied in four syllabuses and even Germany is allotted three. It has to be remembered also that in an absurd welter of options, which differ from Board to Board, candidates study only a tiny minority of the syllabuses on offer, so most will emerge knowing no specifically British History at all, though they may be well up on Russia.
I believe the philosophy of the GCSE examination to be educationally wrong, and indeed impractical, for all the key subjects, but in history this is made worse by its conjunction with another perhaps even more pernicious tendency – that of ileanation – the tendency deeply embedded in our largest educational authority, whence the name is derived, to “praise in enthusiastic terms” as W S Gilbert has it in the Mikado, “all countries but their own”. In world History 1870-1986 it is more than simply perverse not to allot Britain and its Empire a syllabus for any but a 20 year span, when in the early part of the period at least it was the greatest power in the world. It is in fact a crime to deny our children a knowledge of their own history and to keep from them as far as possible any reference to Britain’s and specifically England’s tremendous achievements in shaping the modern world.
What history should our children be taught in school? History teaching should as its first duty provide our children with a framework of facts about our long history as a nation, now longer than any other, starting with Bede’s great work – the greatest work of history in any language in the first millenium – and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, initiated by Alfred the Great himself.
In the latter we have a unique, readymade framework, covering the very formation of our country through and beyond the Norman conquest, some six hundred years, with original manuscripts in Old English which all of our children may see for themselves. They can identify where the very word English to describe the Anglo-Saxon peoples is used for the first time and where England, the land of the English, is derived from it.
They can find described in matter of fact tones some of the most inspiring tales which echo throughout our history – the soldiers fighting on at the Battle of Maldon in the words of that great English poem of a thousand years ago “the spirit shall be bolder, the heart the firmer, courage the greater, the more our strength declines”.
As a nation of course in the six centuries of vigorous consolidation following the Norman conquest, our strength did not decline, but grew through ups and downs to reach its tremendous climax in the industrial revolution and the British Empire. Both were made by the industry and energy of countless individuals, but for all the vast changes they wrought, basic themes – above all the spirit of fortitude, captured in the lines above, by which the Empire’s soldiers withstood the terrible losses before their final triumphs in 1918 – remained unchanged.
From this Empire, one third of the countries of the United Nations owe their very existence as English-speaking or English-using nations. For a nation of five and a half million people on the edge of Europe at the beginnings in 1600, this is an unparalleled achievement and should be known by every British child.
Our children need also to know for instance that the slave trade, immemorial custom in Africa and Asia, and in Europe before Christianity, hideously extended to the New World for a period, was put down by the Royal Navy which maintained anti-slavery patrols in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans for most of the nineteenth century. History knows no other example of such immeasurable reduction in suffering by the action of one country on behalf of all.
Our children need to know for instance of the Punjab, where over a period of about 40 years under the Raj, a desert of around 18 million acres (the size of Scotland) was turned into the granary of modern India by the largest irrigation project in history. Well might the Spanish-American philosopher, George Santayana, comment, “Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master”.
Our children need to know these things not to boast of them – after all they were done by our forefathers not by us – but to take heart from them, to have standards as British children to live up to.
Instead of the truth about our history, however, the media, principally TV and films, feed our children an unending diet of unbalanced scorn and denigration. Recent feature films, including some by foreign directors who abuse our country’s hospitality, portray a sick England with decay, riots, police brutality and evil capitalists. Now most normal children will not see themselves and their country in such an abject light, but will react by behaving badly amongst themselves and especially in the presence of foreigners. The appalling hooliganism of football fans on ferries and all too shamefully in Belgium, undoubtedly owes itself to excessive drink, but also to a debased and ignorant football “nationalism”. Belgium, a country established by Britain, in whose defence hundreds of thousands of those fans’ great-grandfathers fought and died, which commemorates that sacrifice in Ypres every night at 8 pm, still, has thus seen the best and worst of our people. But how many of those fans knew anything about Belgium and its place in our history?
In my view the first and most important objective of history teaching in schools is not to teach the pseudo skills and puffed up “concepts” prescribed by the GCSE Examining Boards, which will leave most of our children bored stiff and knowing virtually nothing at all, nor is it to concern itself with other cultures and other parts of the world, except as they interweave with our own, but is to teach the history of our country as the foundation of patriotism and national self-respect. This is something that children of all abilities can learn and enjoy; it is something this country will never be happy without. It should be the coping stone in the National Curriculum – more important than any of the sciences taken individually and I write as a professional engineer. It is now up to all parents who agree, to act together to wrest the history curriculum away from the educationalists and give it back to our children.
