Category Archives: Britain

by | 25 May 2005 · 10:19 am

British Reporting on the American Civil War

The American Civil War held considerable importance for Britain. In 1861 it was estimated that one-fifth of the entire British population was dependent directly or indirectly on the prosperity of the cotton-manufacturing areas, which in turn depended on the American South for 80 per cent of their supplies. This clear commercial relationship made for sympathy with the South, but after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation it also became an embarrassment, because then the commercial interest had to be reconciled with Britain’s long-preached sentiments of humanity. A country so experienced in moral accommodation would no doubt have had little difficulty in bringing about this reconciliation, but the issue was further complicated by a major political factor. The ruling class in Britain had nurtured a barely concealed hatred of America and her democratic institutions, and now clearly desired their downfall. If the American experiment in democracy could be shown to have failed, demands for greater democracy in Britain could be kept from becoming an issue. Britain’s interests in the war were, then, very strong, and at one stage it appeared highly likely that she would actually intervene–the American general Winfield Scott, in Paris on a propaganda mission for Lincoln, had to return to New York to prepare for its defence against a British invasion….

But The Times began with a heavy disadvantage. Its chief proprietor, its editor, and its foreign manager were all singularly ill-equipped to handle the news from America during this important period of history. The chief proprietor, John Walter III, was openly anti-Unionist. The editor, John Delane, was ignorant of American affairs and had little feeling for American institutions. The foreign manager, Mowbray Morris, had been born in the West Indies and was in sympathy with the South and slavery. Since these were the men who not only engaged the correspondents to cover the war but also presented the news the correspondents sent, it is not surprising that The Times’ coverage of the Civil War caused such a cleavage between the two nations that it required a generation to heal it….

The engagement of [biased] war correspondents like Mackay and [Francis] Lawley and the adoption of a pro-South attitude in its leading articles were bad enough, but The Times went even further to promote the Southern cause. When New Orleans fell it carried black mourning borders; it suppressed the fact that a Liverpool shipyard was building a warship, the famous Alabama, for the South and recorded her sailing to begin a career as a commerce raider in only five words in its “Ship News” column. And it commissioned Spence, the Confederate agent in Liverpool, to write a series of pro-South articles for The Times, under the signature “5,” for which it made him a gift of a specially bound edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. The combination of poor and subjective war correspondents and the attitude at The Times’ office towards America produced a disastrous coverage of the war.

In July 1863, misled by Mackay (who was to be made to pay for it later), The Times confidently predicted that the Southern general Lee was about to capture Washington. In 1864 it reported Sherman’s march to the sea as a folly from which he would find it difficult to extricate himself. When Sherman reached Savannah, Delane was made physically ill by the set-back, but recovered rapidly and was able to write that The Times was doing its best “to attenuate the mischief.” This took the form of a piece in which Sherman was given credit for “one of the ablest, certainly one of the most singular military achievements of the war,” but which then went on to say that the South had little use for Savannah as a port anyway.

At the beginning of the war The Times referred to Lincoln as an uneducated rail-splitter. Half-way through the war he was “a sort of moral American Pope” or “Lincoln the Last.” When he was assassinated, he was suddenly recognised as having been “one of England’s best friends.” Naturally, this recognition that it had been wildly astray in its military and political estimates of the war was not accomplished by The Times without some unpleasant recriminations and extensive scapegoat-hunting. Although it was clear that at least some responsibility lay with the executives, who had allowed their prejudices to interfere with their selection of war correspondents and with the manner in which they were briefed, blame had to be placed farther down the editorial ladder. So Mackay was peremptorily sacked. Morris broke the news to him. “This has been brought about by your blind and unreasonable condemnation of all public men and measures on the Federal side,” he wrote. “You have presented the English public with a distorted view of the Federal cause … Every statement was one-sided and every remark spiteful.”

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 34-40

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by | 24 May 2005 · 12:13 pm

Reporting from the Crimean War

William Howard Russell [was], according to his epigraph in St. Paul’s Cathedral “the first and greatest” war correspondent. The greatest is open to dispute, and he was not the first …. But Russell’s coverage of the Crimean War [1854-1856] marked the beginning of an organised effort to report a war to the civilian population at home using the services of a civilian reporter. This was an immense leap in the history of journalism, so it is appropriate to begin with Russell, because, whether or not “the first and the greatest,” he was certainly, as he put it himself, “the miserable parent of a luckless tribe.”…

Russell returned to London and fame. The Times made the gesture every war correspondent dreams of: it put aside his IOUs for advance expenses and told him he could start again “with what tradesmen call a clean slate.” He was placed on the list of Times foreign correspondents at £600 a year, providing “you will render monthly accounts of your expenditure showing a clean balance so that we may both know how we stand.” He had breakfast with the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, who, mistakenly believing that Russell’s criticisms of the conduct of the war must have been inspired by his having evolved constructive alternatives, disconcerted Russell by asking him what he would do if he were commander-in-chief of the army. After the war Russell’s dispatches were published in book form, and while awaiting new battles to cover he went on a lecture tour.

Clearly, it would have been hard for Russell not to have made a name for himself in the Crimea. This was the first time that a British army in the field had been subjected to any form of independent scrutiny, and it would have been difficult to miss its shortcomings. Russell certainly chronicled them, but he failed to understand and expose the causes. He concentrated his attacks on Raglan rather than on the system, not knowing that Raglan, a humane and sensitive man, had done his best to overcome the results of years of government neglect. Throughout the campaign, Raglan had made repeated requests for all manner of equipment and supplies to overcome deficiencies in the commissariat and the medical departments, but most of his requests had been ignored. When public clamour led to a demand for a scapegoat, Russell’s dispatches helped make Raglan a convenient choice.

Although Russell criticised the lot of the ordinary soldier in the Crimea, he was careful not to hammer too hard at a comparison with that of the officers, to whose social class he himself belonged. He did not write, as he could quite accurately have done: “While the troops, ill-clad to weather a Russian winter, try to ease their hunger with a watery stew made of doubtful horseflesh, tonight in the officers’ mess the menu consists of soup, fresh fish, liver and bacon, a shoulder of mutton, pancakes with quince preserve, cheese, stout, sherry and cigars.” Above all, Russell made the mistake, common to many a war correspondent, of considering himself part of the military establishment. The one thing he never doubted or criticised was the institution of war itself. He realised he had hit the right note in criticising the conduct of the war and that his dispatches suited The Times’ politics of the moment. (Russell tended to toe his paper’s editorial line despite his professional assessments.)…

It is clear that before the war ended the army realised that it had made a mistake in tolerating Russell and his colleagues, but by then it was too late. The war correspondent had arrived, and when the American Civil War broke out, five years later, 500 of them turned out to report the conflict on the Northern side alone.

SOURCE: The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-maker from the Crimea to Kosovo, by Phillip Knightley (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 2000; first published in 1975), pp. 1-17

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by | 14 September 2004 · 1:24 pm

Willie Chandran’s Identity Makeover

Willie Somerset Chandran, a youth from a starkly dysfunctional mixed-caste family in India, manages to attend university in England during the 1950s.

Willie was living in the college as in a daze. The learning he was being given was like the food he was eating, without savour…. He was unanchored, with no idea of what lay ahead….

At the college he had to re-learn everything that he knew. He had to learn how to eat in public. He had to learn how to greet people and how, having greeted them, not to greet them all over again in a public place ten or fifteen minutes later. He had to learn to close doors behind him. He had to learn how to ask for things without being peremptory.

The college was a semi-charitable Victorian foundatioin and it was modelled on Oxford and Cambridge. That was what the students were often told. And because the college was like Oxford and Cambridge it was full of various pieces of “tradition” that the teachers and students were proud of but couldn’t explain. There were rules, for instance, about dress and behaviour in the dining hall; and there were quaint, beer-drinking punishments for misdemeanours. Students had to wear black gowns on formal occasions…. The academic gown probably was copied from the Islamic seminaries of a thousand years before, and that Islamic style would have been copied from something earlier. So it was a piece of make-believe.

Yet something strange was happening. Gradually, learning the quaint rules of his college, with the churchy Victorian buildings pretending to be older than they were, Willie began to see in a new way the rules he had left behind at home. He began to see–and it was upsetting, at first–that the old rules were themselves a kind of make-believe, self-imposed. And one day, towards the end of his second term, he saw with great clarity that the old rules no longer bound him.

His mother’s firebrand uncle had agitated for years for freedom for the backwards [low-caste people]. Willie had always put himself on that side. Now he saw that the freedom the firebrand had been agitating about was his for the asking. No one he met, in the college or outside it, knew the rules of Willie’s own place, and Willie began to understand that he was free to present himself as he wished. He could, as it were, write his own revolution. The possibilities were dizzying. He could, within reason, remake himself and his past and his ancestry.

And just as in the college he had boasted in the beginning in an innocent, lonely way of the friendship of his “family” with the famous old writer and the famous Beaverbrook journalist, so now he began to alter other things about himself, but in small, comfortable ways. He had no big over-riding idea. He took a point here and another there. The newspapers, for instance, were full of news about the trade unions, and it occurred to Willie one day that his mother’s uncle, the firebrand of the backwards, who sometimes at public meetings wore a red scarf (in imitation of his hero, the famous backward revolutionary and atheistic poet Bharatidarsana), it occurred to Willie that this uncle of his mother’s was a kind of trade-union leader, a pioneer of workers’ rights. He let drop the fact in conversation and in tutorials, and he noticed that it cowed people.

It occurred to him at another time that his mother, with her mission-school education, was probably half a Christian. He began to speak of her as a full Christian; but then, to get rid of the mission-school taint and the idea of laughing barefoot backwards (the college supported a Christian mission in Nyasaland in Southern Africa, and there were mission magazines in the common room), he adapted certain things he had read, and he spoke of his mother as belonging to an ancient Christian community of the subcontinent, a community almost as old as Christianity itself. He kept his father as a brahmin. He made his father’s father a “courtier.” So, playing with words, he began to re-make himself. It excited him, and began to give him a feeling of power.

His tutors said, “you seem to be settling in.”

SOURCE: Half a Life: A Novel, by V.S. Naipaul (Vintage, 2001), pp. 56-58.

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by | 8 June 2004 · 6:36 pm

The Venusian Space Race in Asia and the Pacific, 1760s

The Economist ran a feature on earlier attempts to view the “transit of Venus.” Such transits in 1761 and 1769 caused the transit of Mason, Dixon, Cook, Le Gentil, and others through remote sites in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Insignificant though it may seem, this rare celestial event, a “transit of Venus”, was once thought a key to understanding the universe. Two and a half centuries ago, countries dispatched astronomers on risky and expensive expeditions to observe transits from far-flung points across the globe. By doing this, they hoped to make a precise measurement of the distance to the sun and thus acquire an accurate yardstick by which the distance to everything else in the solar system could be measured….

What followed was the 18th-century equivalent of the space race. Wealthy nations took up the challenge and competed for scientific prestige. The rivalry was especially intense between Britain and France, which were engaged in the Seven Years War at the time of the transit of 1761.

Among the British expeditions was that of Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who were sent to Sumatra (and who would later achieve immortality through the name of a line they surveyed between the northern and southern American colonies). Shortly after embarking from Plymouth, eleven of their shipmates were killed during an attack by the French. Mason and Dixon wanted to cancel the voyage, but in a famously nasty note, their Royal Society sponsors warned this would “bring an indelible Scandal upon their Character, and probably end in their utter Ruin”. Faced with this, they carried on. Unfortunately their destination was captured by the French before they arrived. They ended up observing the transit from Cape Town instead.

The French had their share of troubles, too. The most pathetic of these were suffered by Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaisiere. He was aiming for Pondicherry, a French colony in India, but he learned before arriving that it had been captured by the British. When the transit occurred, he was stuck on a pitching ship in an imprecisely known location, rendering his observations worthless. Undeterred, he decided to wait for the 1769 transit. He spent eight years on various Indian Ocean islands before making his way to Pondicherry, which had by then been returned to the French. On the day of the transit, however, it was cloudy. He then contracted dysentery, was shipwrecked, and finally returned home to find his estate looted.

By contrast, the weather was splendid in Tahiti (not then a French territory), where Venus’s path in 1769 was timed by the party of James Cook. The transit had been the main impetus for Cook’s first voyage of discovery. Once this official mission was accomplished, Cook explored the south Pacific, achieving, among other things, the first accurate maps of New Zealand and the first European awareness of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (this was obtained the hard way, by ramming into it and nearly getting wrecked).

via Oxblog, who may have found the site where the Economist reporters did some of their research.

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by | 7 January 2004 · 9:02 pm

The Hikayat Abdullah on the Englishmen in Old Malacca

‘At that time [c. 1810], there were not yet many English in the town of Malacca and to see an Englishman was like seeing a tiger, because they were so mischievous and violent. If one or two English ships called in at Malacca, all the Malacca people would keep the doors of their houses shut, for all round the streets there would be a lot of sailors, some of whom would break in the doors of people’s houses, and some would chase the women on the streets, and others would fight amongst themselves and cut one another’s heads open … Moreover, a great number were killed owing to their falling in the river, owing to their being drunk; and all this made people afraid. At that time, I never met an Englishman who had a white face, for all of them had “mounted the green horse,” that is to say, were drunk. So much so, that when children cried, their mothers would say, “Be quiet, the drunken Englishman is coming,” and the children would be scared and keep quiet.’

SOURCE: The Hikayat Abdullah, as quoted in Nigel Barley, The Duke of Puddledock: Travels in the Footsteps of Stamford Raffles (Henry Holt, 1992).

More extracts from the Hikayat Abdullah are available on the National University of Singapore‘s Resources for Literary Study website.

The author of the Hikayat Abdullah, Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, grew up in Malacca at a time of British Imperial expansion into the Malay world, and was present in Singapore from the time of Raffles’ arrival in the 1820s onwards. A prolific writer and translator, he is also known as the author of Kesah Pelayaran Abdullah (The Story of the Voyage of Abdullah), an account of a voyage up the east coast of the peninsular in 1837. Abdullah finished his autobiography, the Hikayat Abdullah, in 1843.

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