Imaobong Umoren A New History of Britain and the Caribbean

 

 

Readers, like me, of popular and semi-popular history currently have a choice of two main genres both to be found on Waterstone tables. One genre creates a gripping narrative set in a slice of history narrowly circumscribed as to time and place and with a cast of characters some of whom remain throughout and offer what we call human interest. Of those I have read recently I single out Patrick Bishop’s Paris The Shame and the Glory , which covers the period 1940 – 44, and Adam Lebor’s The Last Days of Budapest set at the end of World War Two. Both are highly readable and, as far as I can tell, very well researched.

The second genre offers grand narratives spanning long periods of time across wide geographical areas. Such are Zeinab Badawi’s An African History of Africa, previously reviewed here, and the book now under review. A common peril  of the latter genre is that what is offered is  a set of thumbnail sketches which don’t provide narrative drive but become illustrations of some grand theory which is deployed to hold the whole thing together and which may or may not succeed in its aim.

As an A level History student over sixty years ago I was told to read Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931) partly with the intention that it would teach me to eschew all grand narratives to which theories like Marxism might tempt me; a couple of decades later it was Jean Francois Lyotard’s turn in The Postmodern Condition (1979) to warn me off. Plumb had good conservative credentials and Lyotard good leftist ones.

Imaobong Umoren’s book is more nuanced than its packaging but she does try to nail down all her material as illustrative of a grand theory that all of the history which has linked the Caribbean to Britain has been shaped, and is still shaped, by the commitment of the colonial power and local elites, white or sometimes non-white, to maintaining what she calls a racial-caste hierarchy. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Nothing really changes is not a terribly convincing grand narrative, especially if the goal posts – what it actually means - keep being moved. I can imagine that a dedicated Marxist analysis which kept a narrow focus on capital and labour relations might stand up rather better, able to show that through time there is more than one way of creating continuous extractive relationships. But then the Marxist analysis would miss the cultural things on which Umoren has very relevant things to report – I found what she has to tell us about the Caribbean and the First World War, for example, very interesting.

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Until the arrival of the telegraph and the typewriter in the second half of the nineteenth century, contact between the imperial centre and the Caribbean colonial periphery and vice versa was only possible by personal visits or hand-written letters sent by sea and arriving after excruciating delays: the young missionary John Smith, sentenced to death for his alleged part in a slave rebellion (Umoren, pp 134-6), died in an unhealthy Demerara prison in 1824 just before the reprieve from London reached the colony. A small detail which Umoren doesn’t use: the authorities obliged his widow to bury his body at night in an unmarked grave for fear of renewed unrest.  That is why Guyana now has a John Smith Memorial Church rather than a tended grave.

Of the letters sent, very many thousands probably survive and probably most of them not in archives. They were written from Britain by absentee owners, family relatives, bankers sending balance sheets, lawyers, import and export houses reporting arrivals and departures of goods by sea, and by missionary societies. In the other direction, there are letters from resident estate owners and the agents of absentee owners, from family members, from attorneys, from merchant houses, and from missionaries. There are letters from non-white writers, but they are rare. For a historian, these letters count as primary sources.

Over the past couple of years I have been collecting and transcribing unarchived letters on a small scale and am often surprised by things I read and things I discover when I research background on the internet. I also get to understand things which at first are puzzling. For example, if you use UCLs indispensable on-line slavery compensation database you will notice a significant amount of compensation going to trustees rather than simple owners. One reason for this is high mortality rates among those who went out from Britain to the Caribbean. Jane Austen’s father the Reverend George Austen was sought out as a trustee by a man who had been his student at Cambridge and who was going out to  Antigua to the Nibbs family plantation. Having a trustee meant that you had in place someone to manage your post-mortem affairs if you succumbed to disease before you had made your fortune and retired but might, for example, have children below the age of majority.  The Nibbs family is researchable and even before the abolition of slavery their business in Antigua appears to have failed with the Nibbs estate passing to the historically significant Martin family: it was an ameliorist Martin who in the late 18th century published a manual arguing for allocating provision grounds (allotments) to slaves  There is evidence of Nibbs family members still in Antigua in the late Victorian period; one was an auctioneer. They probably thought of Antigua as their home.

My feeling is that a better overall understanding of British-Caribbean relations might be got by taking slices of the entire story: Antigua is a small island which was colonised early and declined economically relatively early. But there is a big tale to be told about it which continues into the 20^th century with plenty of local nuances: the Chairman of the Oxford Committee for Racial Integration in the 1960s was the philosopher Professor Michael Dummett of slave-trade beneficiary All Souls; the vice-chairman was Rolston Williams who worked on the shop floor in the Morris car factory out at Cowley and was a Windrush arrival from Antigua where ( if my recollection is correct) he had been a journalist.

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Umoren doesn’t really evaluate the significance and legacy of the Christianisation of African slaves in the Caribbean and when she moves to the twentieth century she has nothing to say about the role of the many churches catering to both local and diaspora black communities. Any motorist driving through Brixton on a Sunday could not have failed to notice the throngs of black women in their Sunday best heading to church. In contrast, Umoren does give lots of space to thumbnails of the numerous and often ephemeral small groups which proliferated in the 1960s to 1980s with cumbersome names and unmemorable acronyms and which spent a lot of time falling out with each other. But they are easily accessible to historians through archival holdings; the Bodleian Library, for example, has recently created an online index for twenty boxes of stuff I donated to them and which included quite a lot of Black Power and general anti-racist material.

  https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/sites/default/files/bodreader/documents/media/pateman_collection.pdf

But I  kept some photographs for myself, as souvenirs:

The Provost of  University College London, Lord Annan, agreed to suspend normal teaching activities on 17 February 1969 in order to enable a day of seminars and meetings in protest against Enoch Powell's visit to the college's student Conservative club. The Socialist Society held a platform meeting; in the foreground, Althea Jones (later Altheia Jones-Lecointe) and on the platform, left to right, Obi Egbuna, Robin Blackburn, Trevor Pateman chairing the meeting (obscured by Althea's shoulder), Michael Dummett standing and speaking. The embarassing fact is that the person in the foreground was not on the platform. Unknown photographer.

Umoren passes lightly (p 338) over complaints of sexism in the various political groupings. An obvious starting point is the notorious remark of Stokely Carmichael "The only position for women [in the movement] is prone” which dates from 1964. The internet has all that you need to know, but I can’t get a single result for the answering call, “Stoke me, Stokely”. Whether I heard it used or just heard it as an answering joke, I can't recall but suspect it was a line in the 1967 musical Hair which came to London in 1968 and opened immediately after the abolition of government stage censorhip.

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Zeinab Badawi An African History of Africa

 

I bought this book because I know next to nothing of Africa’s history; I guess I am one of many such purchasers. So how can I review it?

Beginning at the beginning, I was reminded of those old histories of England written for school children, me included, giving them the dates of kings and queens, recounting endless dynastic rivalries, marital alliances, and wars; adding in the histories of religious conflicts; and not much else, excepting some peasant revolt which couldn’t be entirely ignored. They were top-down comfortable Establishment histories which blanked a great deal of the past, and much of this book belongs to the same supra-genre. It has been given an enthusiastic Establishment reception. Paucity of evidence is part of the explanation for the emphasis but the tone is enthusiastic, like those school textbooks of old.

I start from the assumption that on the long view of history life for most human beings has been nasty, brutish and short – and not because of the absence of a Leviathan but because in the long view most Leviathans have been predominantly extractive and exploitative, taking the fruits of people’s labour or their labour itself to build palaces for rulers, erect monuments to rulers, pay for the costly imports which rulers and their retinues alone consume, provide subsistence for the skilled labour which produces jewels, garments, works of art, and splendid feasts without which labour there could be no ostentation, no conspicuous consumption. Badawi describes such worlds in detail with few suggestions that it might have been less than satisfactory for the majority of people. Indeed, she presents it as generally positive, as giving peoples their identity and a history they can be proud of, symbolised by individuals who in post-independence African countries now have statues, European style (plinth, upright, gaze to heaven), erected to their memory. 

Here in England, I am supposed to get my identity from Nelson on top of his column and just down the road the murderous Earl Haig on horseback, not to mention decadent King George the Fourth, back in Trafalgar Square, up there on a plinth and on a horse he could not possibly have mounted unaided. All this in prime locations at the very centre of the old Empire. It’s the physical embodiment of those old school textbooks.

If they are lucky in place and date of birth, ordinary people may enjoy relative peace. Without peace no one who lives by tilling the earth, watching their flocks, making clay pots or weaving cloth, is secure against the devastations wreaked by invading armies and marauding bands who can destroy in a few hours not only a year’s crops and all the cattle but years of investment in cultivating fruit trees and olive groves. Just for good measure, they will burn houses to the ground and rape women and children. As I write, the RSF is doing just that in Sudan.

In history, the very fortunate lived under regimes which invested at least something into public works of benefit to everyone: ensuring clean water; creating flood defences; building roads; minting coinage widely accepted; and offering at least some degree of personal safety.  Badawi does provide some examples, notably the Kingdom of Benin. But you were one of the very lucky ones if born into such happy times. The opening chapters of this book did not create, in my reading, any sense of the fraught worlds ordinary people normally experienced, focussed as they are on the names, appearance, and style of kings and queens, and the expansion or contraction of their empires sometimes by marital alliance, more often by bloody and cruel conflict. (There is a note in my head to ask whether some of the pastoralist tribes of southern Africa avoided this  narrative).

The Big Three monotheisms soon appear in this history of Africa working their way down from the north and inwards from the East and West coasts. I guess that Judaism was the most benign influence: religious Jews did not seek to proselytise because the heart of their religion provided no basis for it. If you are a chosen people promised a land there is no need for recruits. The most important thing is to avoid dilution of the tribe; marrying out is a red line. I understand that Sephardic Jews were more relaxed than Ashkenazi Jews, or at least they were when faced with persecutions like those launched in the European middle-ages by Christian Spain and Portugal; marrying out provided a measure of protection. Eventually, you assimilated and, even if not, then you were widely tolerated. Muslims could be more tolerant than Christians: the former recognised Jews as also “People of the Book”, the latter in their main organised Catholic incarnation and until very recently held the Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. Expelled from the Iberian peninsular, many Jews settled in Morocco and stayed there; in the eighteenth century (I read recently) British diplomats were unhappy with the major part in Morocco’s public life played by Jews.

Later in the book, Badawi writes about the slave trade, dominated by Islamic traders in the East and North and Christian traders in the West, and acknowledges local African co-operation with the trade. I don’t think that requires any special explanation or apology: if you live in a tribal society in which neighbouring tribes are always potential enemies, at least to their rulers – and that is a large part of Badawi’s main narrative - then passing members of that next door tribe into slavery is simply self-protective; true, it attracts remuneration but is otherwise little different to selling on captives taken in warfare who would otherwise probably be killed.

Badawi deploys elements of a modern traveller’s journal into her narratives, bravely visiting difficult to get to places and meeting people with titles: academic, political, regal. This does contribute to the top-down feel of the history, at its worst when Charles and Camilla turn up as VIP guests at the Akwasidae "one of the highest profile, most frequent and extravagant manifestations of African regal tradition, a precious example of an ancient, august African institution  that has withstood  the pressures of centuries of social change and the depredations of colonialism" (p 288). What can one say?        #NoMoreKings. 

Rather jarringly with what has gone before, Badawi states bluntly that post-independence “due to corruption and economic mismanagement, Africa’s wealth has so far been used to fill the pockets of its ruling class and their foreign collaborators” (page 386). Independence across the continent was achieved as early as 1957 by Ghana and concluded belatedly by South Africa in 1994; it’s not as if it’s that new. What she calls the ruling class dresses either in military uniforms modelled on the European (gold braid, tassels, epaulettes, medals, suffocatingly hot) or in the suit and tie deemed obligatory by Mr Trump, among others. Badawi is lukewarm about demands for reparations for colonialism; rightly so, they would fill the usual pockets.

The current history of Africa can’t be written without reference to the continuing malign influence in Africa of foreign state actors, China and Russia (partly in the form of freelance mercenaries) now added to the original list of European nations and the CIA-USA. They all want rare earths, the new gold. Badawi does not engage with the (Western) literature on “the resource curse” which I feel makes a lot of sense of the predicament in which many African states find themselves.

My only studious encounter with African history was back in 1968 when the American economist, Sean Gervasi, employed me – newly PPE graduated (Badawi studied for the same degree but a decade later) – as a summer-long research assistant. He had a United Nations grant to research the economy of Rhodesia where the white minority had declared unilateral independence under Ian Smith. He delegated to me the task of writing up a history of Land Apportionment which, progressively over time, produced the result that the best land belonged to Whites and the worst to Blacks. At the same time, a supply of labour to White estates was created by such simple means as the requirement that taxes to the government be paid in cash, not kind; the only way to get cash was through wage labour. It was all there on microfilm in the library of Oxford’s Commonwealth Institute where I sat each day transcribing the details and writing up the narrative.

An African History of Africa is a well-intentioned work with plenty of I Didn’t Know That material in its 500 pages. I found it disappointing; I was hoping for something sharper.

Trevor Pateman, Not In The Archives: Personal Letters 1800 -1840

This is a draft introduction to an anthology of over fifty previously unpublished letters which I have transcribed during the past eighteen months and put into personal and historical contexts, the whole thing now running to about 80 000 words. I have been unable to interest any publisher and I guess that sometime in 2026 I will put everything online here or more likely on a dedicated new blog.

Introduction

Two days after I had despatched the foregoing long letter to Fanny, the little post-woman – for we had no post-man; but a good old soul who used to trot … came down the hill with a lanthorn, the mail-bag coming into Charmouth at ten o’clock at night. Eliza Edmond and I had watched this poor creature every night during a fortnight, from my little window, as the light of her lamp appeared for an instant and was lost again, while she stopped to deliver her letters. At last, she stopped at our door ….

Harriette Wilson Memoirs (1825)

The past is everywhere, often overwhelmingly so. Some is immoveable Heritage, some portable but archived in libraries or vaulted in museums. The immoveable is sometimes demolished; the majority of the portable circulates, passing from parents to children, attic to auction, dealer to collector, and sometimes ends in the bin or bonfire. Even without those terminal fates most things suffer some deterioration or damage.

Paper collectibles, as they are called, are the stock in trade of a worldwide market: bank notes, deeds, letters, manuscripts, maps, newspapers, postcards, posters, stamps. They are readily portable objects and often end up far from their origin or first destination. A small number are taken out of circulation when gifted to or purchased by libraries and museums, though even then they can suffer war-time looting and peace-time theft. Organisations, business and charitable, supposedly archiving their past can be careless or inconsistent: a letter might be taken home by somebody to read and, as with library books, never returned; when moving offices, someone might decide to clear out paperwork taking up far too much space already. A hundred years ago British banks, solicitors, and insurance companies sent vast nineteenth-century correspondences to paper mills for pulping. But on arrival it might be realised that it was collectible material and the mill would sell on to dealers.

The letters transcribed in this book were all written in English in the period 1800 to 1840. None were in archives; I found them browsing dealer boxes at table-top fairs or buying at auction attic accumulations or well-presented collections, sometimes bidding without having viewed but confident I would find something to include in the anthology I was trying to create. It all started with just one letter, now included here: the 1825 extortion demand written by the English courtesan Harriette Wilson. It’s only the third recorded of a couple of hundred letters she is believed to have despatched from exile in Paris. Most were probably burnt by the compromised men who received them. Two are in archives.

But perhaps this book also owes something to a much earlier experience. I spent the academic year 1971-72 in Paris and participated in Michel Foucault’s seminars at the Collège de France. He set us the task of reading an obscure memoir, chanced upon in a provincial archive, written in 1835 by Pierre Rivière who had murdered his mother, sister, and brother. The idea of working from something discovered accidentally was new to me, as was the focus on a text which had been completely forgotten but which astonished Foucault who saw that it could provide an entry into study of then-contemporary ways of thinking about criminal insanity. I made use of the possibilities opened up by this approach in my own research over the next few years and it may be that I am returning to it here in a book which foregrounds the accidental and forgotten.  I don’t have a memoir but do have an 1837 letter from a solicitor later murdered on his own doorstep by an aggrieved client, judged at the Old Bailey to have “a strong predisposition to insanity”. Like Pierre Rivière, he was sent to an asylum instead of being executed.

*

Machinery for making envelopes cheaply was not developed until the 1840s; before then envelopes were hand-made and expensive. Letters were almost always sent through the post as folded and tucked sheets of paper, often closed with a wax or paper seal. Such letters automatically preserve name and address of the recipient, written on the front panel, so that the identity of the Dear Mother or Dear Sir is always present and without which I could not have researched them. But when seals were broken a word or phrase might be lost. Thoughtful correspondents left blank spaces on the unfolded written page roughly where they thought their seal would fall on the folded outside, but not all correspondents were thoughtful or able to perform the origami-like mental feat involved. One could wrap a letter in an outer sheet to avoid the problem and businesses often did; but it doubled the cost of very expensive postage which was charged by the sheet and usually paid, at least in part, by the recipient not the sender. It was to keep down the cost they would impose that family correspondents often resorted to cross-writing, filling the sheet in the normal way and then turning it through ninety degrees and writing across what had already been written.

None of the letters I was buying bore postage stamps, first introduced in May 1840 when over a period of eight months sixty-eight million copies of the Penny Black were distributed to post offices across Britain and Ireland to serve on a small part of the correspondence of a population of twenty-seven million. The Penny Reds which succeeded the Blacks in 1841 were printed in vast quantities. Pre-payment at greatly reduced cost soon became the norm.

Older stampless letters did receive markings indicating post towns of origin and destination, dates, postal charges, and so on. There are collectors for these pre-stamp or pre-philatelic letters. Hobbyists are very focussed in their habits and pre-stamp collectors no different in this respect; very often they do not see the wood for the trees. Surprising as it may seem, when they view and buy a folded letter for its outer postal markings they may not read the inner contents which, it’s true, often enough present themselves in faded ink or seemingly indecipherable cross-written scrawl. But I chose to view them the other way, projecting scans of the elusive characters onto my desktop magic screen.

I thank you if you feel I prove my case, that these letters are interesting and provide insights, sometimes surprising, into both private lives and wider histories: a woman writes to her husband that she has suffered a miscarriage; a medical student from Barbados describes protests in Edinburgh against the Tory threat to the Great Reform Bill of 1832. There is some comedy, including the unintentional as when nine-year old James Forbes, writing to his father the Seventh Baronet Pitlsligo, identifies the excellent family Library as the place - no doubt it had a polished wooden floor - where you practice spinning your top.  There is rather more tragedy; the histories I record are strewn with early deaths: James Forbes lost his mother in early infancy; Mrs Darwin sees all four of her children culled by natural selection; going out to India in the service of the East India Company is quite likely to prove terminal and quickly. Medical science had barely begun to triumph over any of the very many fatal conditions and diseases, remedies for which we now take for granted. People were much more ready to place their faith in God and money into church building than into understanding the human body and its frailties. I find it strange that childbirth should have been so readily accepted as perilous and that when one of the main perils which women faced was eventually identified it was denied and the discoverer (Ignaz Semmelweis, 1847) ridiculed. Doctors did not like to be told to wash their hands.

With perhaps a couple of exceptions, the letters I have selected were not written in hope or expectation of securing a wider readership than the person they addressed and sometimes other family members who would want to hear the latest news. It is this which gave them an immediacy as I read them, even if at the same time I was struggling to decipher a word or make sense of an argument. Some are clearly crafted and not simply spontaneous; Martha Wilmot’s family letter is just a small addition to a large body of skilful constructions, recording her travels in Russia and which in the 1930s were published in a fat volume based on originals now housed in Dublin archives. And one correspondent, Hugh Baird, writing home from Rio de Janeiro in 1828, reflects on the power of the pen: when I sat down to my Desk I never imagined I would have got so far on, one subject drove hard after another, and we often find that there is no way in which one’s mind can be better known than by the good quill.

The letters are not in any sense representative. In early nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, literacy was far from universal; schooling was not compulsory and rarely free. The illiterate do not appear here though their dictated letters can occasionally be found. A handful of writers resort to phonetic spellings, as does Mary Epps in a heartfelt letter which dates from 1801: Now all my famley is goan to bed I am sete Down to Rite to you for I reley can never geat by my Self no other time.

But women are numerically under-represented in this book; the identity politics of the period almost completely excluded them from public life and from professions which generated vast correspondences. They were unlikely to travel either independently or as wives to the main destinations, India and the Caribbean, from where very many letters were written home to recipients who carefully saved them. There were women like Martha Wilmot who did travel independently within Europe; Catharine Rossiter who appears here was another Irish woman who did.

Colonial identity politics classified the Jamaica-born Richard Hill as a free man of Colour and for part of his life (but not all) subject to civil disabilities. He is the only writer here who is clearly not white but I hesitate to declare that everyone else clearly was. It is likely that several of the men living overseas formed enduring relationships with non-white women and had children with them; in the case of James Drummond Campbell I document provisions made in a will for his Persian partner and children. I have no expertise in the matter, but I form the impression that it is only later in the Victorian period that casual racism decked itself out with scientific pretensions; in this earlier period, and perhaps because of the influence of Christian beliefs, the background assumption - despite slavery - is that there is just one race, the human race. As early as 1808 the proto-Darwinian scientist James Cowles Prichard FRS (1786-1848), coming from a Quaker background, sought to combine the idea of a single origin for humanity with some kind of explanation for its subsequent visible differentiation. But in 1813, rather than place human origins in the biblical Middle East, Prichard switched it to Africa, “On the whole there are many reasons which lead us to the conclusion that the primitive stock of men were probably Negroes”, where “primitive” derives from a Latin primitivus meaning original or coming first. I learnt about Cowles Prichard from researching a letter written by his son but not, as it happens, included here.

About sexualities, readers will probably make inferences but I think it would be unwise to infer from bachelor or spinster status same-sex sexual preferences. There were many reasons for not marrying and, for women at least, some pretty good ones.

For the rest, vocabulary and spelling are already fairly standardised; just occasionally an obsolete dialect word appears and even a word about which I cannot retrieve any information. But punctuation is definitely a matter of personal taste though lack of enthusiasm for apostrophes is widely shared. Punctuation is affected by the quill pen: commas and dashes are preferred to full stops because stabbing a stop with the quill risks creating a blot. Effort is reduced by using abbreviations: the ampersand (&) is more frequently used than the word it replaces. These habits persisted when steel pens began to replace the quill in the 1820s because they were not a magic solution to these practical writing difficulties. I learnt to write with a steel pen in a 1950s primary school and have the ink-blotted exercise books to prove it.

In my transcriptions ellipses (….) signify either that I cannot read a word (and nor can anyone else who has peered at it) or that damage to the letter, most often occasioned by breaking the seal, has removed a portion of text. But the letters are not abridged except in the chapter devoted to a connected group of letters from Admiral Crown and Count Vorontsov to the same recipient. Very occasionally, it is only possible to make sense of a passage by assuming that there has been a slip of the pen, Freudian or otherwise. But this is noted, not silently corrected.

Is there an overarching theme? Editorial choices have, of course, been made: I chose letters which appeared to me and several pre-publication readers to have some intrinsic interest and, additionally, invited some contextualisation by way of introduction. But this is an anthology: chapters are loosely grouped by theme but are standalone and not cross-referenced; they can be read in any order and could be used separately in discussion groups. They are found letters and that is important, at least to me, rather like the anthropomorphic stones I scavenge from beaches and downlands.

The personal and historical settings provided are based on both internet sleuthing and commissioned reports from professional researchers in archives. But I hope to open the way to further research and discussion, not prove it unnecessary. There are no footnotes; sources, acknowledgments, and reading suggestions are given, chapter by chapter, in the End Notes.

And should you, after all, want to begin at the beginning then Miss Beeby would like to tell you what she has been up to:

 

Christmas in Bethlehem

December 1995

When in Israel at Christmas the place to go must be Bethlehem, especially in the year when the Israelis are going and the Palestine Authority arriving. So I went, three times.

On Christmas Eve morning, I boarded a dusty Arab bus from outside the Jaffa Gate, Jerusalem, and paid my thirty pence for the eight-mile ride to Manger Street. Bethlehem is not a pretty town, even on a bright sunny day. It is pretty squalid, a mass of litter, untidy precast buildings and - in the absence of traffic lights - honking traffic chaos, controlled or contributed to by the newly deployed Palestinian police and defence forces. A visiting French journalist from one of Bethlehem's twin towns told me that the Israelis had made no effort to develop the town's tourist potential during their twenty-eight year occupation, preferring that tourists like me should stay and pay in Jerusalem.

Manger Square is crammed with people at eleven in the morning and Palestine flags and pictures of Arafat outnumber pictures of Mary and the Infant Jesus. But those are there, as is a giant Christmas Tree outside the old Israeli and new Palestine Police Station, the roof of which is full of armed men. In the past few days, the barbed wire fence surrounding it has been torn down.

We appear to be waiting for the Latin Patriarch, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Jerusalem, whose entry into Bethlehem is preceded by an endlessly long procession of bands, scouts and guides. I spot the Greek Orthodox Patriarch disappearing up a side street in a shiny stretched limo. He is the custodian of the Church of the Nativity, and others worship there as his guests. Orthodox Christmas happens in early January, and Armenian Apostolic even later. Today's celebrations are the first of the trio.

Clinging to municipal street furniture with half a dozen Arab young men, I'm wilting in the heat when several hours later and to cries of The Patriarch, Michel Sabbah, clad in pink, eventually enters Manger Square. I can only take my photos now by holding the camera over my head. The crowd has been relaxed throughout but it occurs to me that the Palestine security forces, three days into their role here, have no experience of crowd control and a sudden surge could easily result in people getting crushed. I'm also not sure that I can last out until the midnight mass which Yasser Arafat is scheduled to attend. I decide to return to Jerusalem by clapped out taxi (five dollars) to rest and to come back later.

But how to get back? Israelis have been told Bethlehem is off limits for Christmas, a closed zone, and what transport will be running is unclear. I discover that the Anglican cathedral of St George in Jerusalem runs a coach to Bethlehem in the evening in order to conduct a carol service at the Church of the Nativity. This sounds attractive: my lack of religious conviction has always had to take second place to the pleasure I take in singing carols. So, leaving my camera behind (I've taken enough photos for today), I head over to St George's, where an assortment of English pilgrims and American tourists (some in Father Christmas hats) fills no less than three modern Israeli coaches at three pounds a head. We've got a police escort, to make it easier, and the Israelis take us down the new and eerily dark Bethlehem by pass road, built to allow travel to Hebron (Israeli) without going through the Palestine Authority enclave. At some point we are invisibly handed over to a Palestinian escort, which pushes aside Bethlehem's packed crowds to allow the coaches to come close to the Church of the Nativity. Inside, we get to see the Star of Bethlehem, which marks the apocryphal place of Jesus's birth, before being escorted up to the roof where we have our carol singing pitch for the evening. A lovely idea!

There to welcome us are the Anglican Bishop of Jerusalem, the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, Her Britannic Majesty's Consul, and Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Authority, who shakes hands with each of us and stays to listen to an hour's ragged English carol singing. We have no choristers or instruments to help us out. Then Arafat makes a prepared speech before the one TV camera on the roof. I forget what he said, and it scarcely matters, but it was brief and modest. His job is to reassure Christians that they will be secure under Palestinian rule, and much has been made of the fact that his wife was born a Greek Orthodox Christian. He is surrounded by a bodyguard shield but for the first time today I cannot see a gun.

Well, to stay in Manger Square for the open-air TV relay of midnight mass inside the Church would be an anti-climax after this strange encounter, so I go back in the coach to Jerusalem with the Anglicans. The Bishop goes in his Mercedes and H. M. Consul in his Land Rover, a path cleared for both by a blaring, flashing Palestinian police jeep.

It occurs to me that as pilgrims and tourists we haven't spent a shekel, dinar or cent in Bethlehem (which has three legal currencies) and I mention this to the Bishop's Chaplain, asking him to pass on the thought. It was clear from the Bishop's address to us that his sympathies are with the Palestinians; he effectively said Today Bethlehem, next year Jerusalem. So he might well take heed. A compulsory snack, drink or knick-knack would have done none of us any harm and the Bethlehem economy a tiny bit of good.

Christmas Day sees me back on the bus to Bethlehem, where it's the morning after the night before. The crowds have gone, and I head to a deserted Post Office to fabricate philatelic souvenirs. They haven't got special Christmas stamps this year, but they have managed a special Palestinian Authority postmark with a candle, holly and what I think we would tend to call wedding bells. I stick regular Palestine Authority stamps on Bethlehem postcards and get them specially cancelled at the post office counter. It's still novel for the post office clerk, who laughs at my eccentricity. We don't have enough language in common for me to explain that with any luck these cards will pay for my holiday.

When you find yourself shaking hands with Yasser Arafat, what do you say?

My knowledge of the situation amounts to this: Rabin is dead. Arafat survives, despite rather more death threats and under pressure from all sides: Israel, on which he is economically dependent and which requires him to clamp down on his extremists; his people, who want an end to poverty and Israeli checkpoints; Hamas, which won't participate in the January elections for what they regard as a Bantustan; Arab states, which have their own agendas.

So I shook hands and said the sort of thing someone intent on open air English carol singing might be moved to say:

"Good Luck!"

*

Written at the time; previously published in Trevor Pateman Silence is So Accurate (2017)

 

 Captain Warner’s Weapon of Mass Destruction: The Invisible Shell

This is not a book review, but an expanded version of an article which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement of 18 July 2025 and records a discovery which contributes substantially to the resolution of a small historical puzzle.

*

Human beings are natural believers and that was once an evolutionary advantage. When out hunting with companions if one cries “Snakes in the grass!” then instant reaction is a better survival strategy than chin-stroking reflection on the probability of its truth. This natural credulity survives; without it we would be unmoved by horror movies, tear-jerk novels, and the promises of politicians. Belief just happens to us; we don’t choose it nor is it ever willingly suspended.

Credulity provides space for both pranksters who seek to amuse and charlatans who seek fame and profit. Pranksters may beam as they tell us to our faces that we have been fooled but charlatans do not want to be unmasked. And how do you unmask them anyway? They are often as convincing as stage magicians and those who have fallen for the trick rarely wish to admit it; credulous at the outset they suddenly become sceptics when evidence is put before them.

Fears of death and illness provide fertile ground for false prophets and medical quacks; scientific frauds have been committed by tenured and respected academics. But pulling the wool over the eyes of those responsible for the defence of the realm risks being counted a rather serious offence, and it seems few dare. But the risk has been taken.

*

On 17 July 1844 a crowd estimated by the Illustrated London News at between thirty and forty thousand people gathered on the seafront at Brighton in anticipation of a spectacular experiment. A 300 ton decommissioned sailing ship, the John o’ Gaunt, was towed into view and for a very long time not much else was seen to happen. But then at a signal given by independent monitors, Captain Samuel Alfred Warner launched his Invisible Shell, there was an explosion (see the illustration), and within minutes the John o’ Gaunt duly fell apart and sunk as if invisibly hit below the waterline by what we would now call a torpedo. The Illustrated London News provided extensive pictorial coverage and a roll-call of the great and good who had come down from London by the new railway to observe the event, among them Lord Brougham and at least a dozen other Lords; a dozen M.P’s and likewise of men with R.N. after their name; the Bishop of Oxford; directors of the East India Company;  and the Chevalier Benkausen, Russia’s Consul in London, representing one of the countries to which Warner intermittently threatened to take his invention.  Many of those who witnessed the event were impressed, but the official History of Parliament currently takes the view that “the ship had been structurally weakened beforehand and rigged with ropes beneath the surface to effect the deception”.

For over a decade, Captain Warner had been seeking to secure official interest and funding for his work on weapons which would defeat all enemies at sea, writing letters and publishing pamphlets full of dire warnings that Britain’s coasts were currently defenceless against invasion.  He secured at least some followers, including Royal Navy officers and members of Parliament, but there had been failed demonstrations and in addition a complete refusal to allow any Invisible Shell to be examined without a very large payment up front. The Brighton spectacular revived Warner’s fortunes and there was debate in the House of Commons in 1846 and the House of Lords in 1852 where as one of his last official acts the Duke of Wellington, a long-time Warner-sceptic, stripped investigative responsibility from a newly-established committee of their Lordships and transferred it to the scientific hands of the Royal Ordnance. Wikipedia wraps up its version of a very long story saying “With this the matter appears to have been dropped” but in fact the Royal Ordnance did constitute a panel on which Michael Faraday took the lead, interviewing Warner in June 1852. It promptly abandoned its enquiries when he persisted in his habitual refusal to describe the composition of the material which filled his shells. Wellington died in September 1852 and Warner in December 1853.

*

But there was an aftermath which offers some kind of resolution. Warner died leaving a woman, apparently his wife, with whom he had been living for many years in Pimlico. There were several children, some now married, no money and quite a lot of debt. A local vicar publicised a fund-raiser for widow and children but had to publish an amended version when he discovered that the woman in Pimlico was not the wife; the legal wife was living in Ashford Kent and now responsible for Warner’s estate, including the very visible and bulky contents of his workshop.

What happened next is recorded in a letter recently picked out of a box at a table top fair in Eastbourne, price three pounds. It is written by one of Warner’s sons-in-law, Thomas Moncas, a watch-maker turned London bookseller in the notorious Holywell Street off the Strand. The recipient is a married daughter of Captain Warner staying with the real Mrs Warner (“Grandma” in the letter) in Ashford. The shells which it describes may still exist.

Transcription

Addressed to: Mrs Viggors care of Mrs Warner Ashford Kent

Datelined: 45 Holywell Street Strand London 13 July 1854; Ashford arrival postmark 14 July

Dear Jane

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has been the result of all the trouble & expense attending the examination of the Shells. There was not anything in a single one, nor could not ever have been in most, as they still contained the “core” from the founders. Nothing could be fairer than the behaviour of Colonel Chalmers & the Gentlemen who assisted & as you now know the worst I will detail all that occurred.

I wrote several notes on the evening that I sent you a short last one. I went from here at 7 the next morg. to Harry & Mr Batten to prevent any mistake. I was back a ½ past 9 & of course had other matters to attend to. At 12 Mr Batten & a Mr Green [the famous balloonist who had assisted Warner at one of his demonstrations] came & also Harry, we had a hurried lunch a glass of ale, took the Steamer down to London Bridge & the Rail at one down to Woolwich raining cats & dogs, & [word unreadable] over by the assistance of Mr Payne to the Laboratory at 5 minutes past 2. The Colonel in the Chair, Mr Abel from the Pharmaceutical Society, Capt. Boxer & another tall Gentleman, after some necessary arrangements &ca we all adjourned to the Shed & there sure enough were the packages containing the Shells. I cannot tell you half the fear hope & care that was taken in moving breaking unlocking the Boxes &ca & handling the contents the Colonel himself warning us “that if those shells contained the explosive material employed by Warner at Brighton, there was enough there to blow up the whole Arsenal”.

For 2 hours & 4o minutes did we examine. Some were broke up with chisel & hammer  & turns out to be an old cannon ball sheathed in copper. Some as proved to be an old Congreve rocket as two long ones this shape one shorter than the other well wedged into 32 pounder Guns & the heads unscrewed they contained nothing. The Balls which were dropped in the Isle of Anglesea [Anglesey] were there …. Some shells this shape this was Gun metal evidently turned on a lathe & was evidently cast in a Mould first: a small copper screw was at one end, & round the middle was a band an inch wide divided into 2 halfs was fastened down with 2 screws, weighed about 18 pounds about the size of a 32 pound shot so this was evidently hollow. The band that encircled it was easily taken off but then there was no passage to the inside hollow part. The band rounds its waste covered a cutting about an inch deep thus evidently solid. The screw at end did not open into the center hollow part as far as we could see, so after a deal of fear & consultation the saw was set to work & after penetrating a good inch through solid metal it was apparent the hollow part was reached, on turning it over some black small grans dropped out which were closely examined. They looked like very fine gunpowder & after a good deal of scrutiny turned out to be mixture used by the Moulder to make the mould & all agreed a very ingenious moulder he must have been; but it is evident nothing had ever been inside them, as the modellers core was still there. In fact there was absolutely nothing not a clue nor a shade of a clue to found even a [word lost when seal was broken; could be guess].

We left the Yard at 5 Mr Payne accompanying us to the entrance gate raining as if all were coming down at once, had dinner of which we had a great need & returned to Town bidding Mr Batten & Mr Green good-bye at the Essex pier. Harry & I joining Emma & Polly telling them the same tale I have told you only a good deal more.

Now Grandma [Mrs Warner] must send wish what is to be done with the Shells &ca, the Colonel will send them up in a few days. Harry [one of Warner’s sons] wants one of those with a hook in, that fell from the Balloon, to suspend from his room ceiling. Any directions you give shall be attended to – whether you wish them sold or kept, or sent to you. We are all pretty well, considering. I intended to have written to you from Woolwich, but the Post Office closes there for country letters at 4 & we did not get clear from the yard ‘till 5 so it was no use to write there. If nothing else results at all events it has not been for want of trying. But this does not prove there is no secret, it only proves that there was no evidence is those particular shells.

 Thomas Moncas

 

 

 

Why No New Book Reviews?

I'm working on a book, an anthology of letters written in the  period 1800 - 1840, and nearly all my reading right now is devoted to background research for the introductions which accompany each letter. I have over fifty, none of them in archives and many written by "ordinary people".  The Word doc is approaching 80 000 words (plus pictures!) and thus long enough to allow me to remove weaker chapters. 

I've had no luck so far in interesting agents or publishers. Below I introduce a letter from an author who had much more success than I am having; he doesn't take up many words  so here he is with my rueful introduction:

  

Reverend John Platts 1825

Eccentric Characters     Impostors           Extraordinary Females

Some readers will be aware of a thriving industry which in articles and books, on-line and in person, advises authors on the procedures to follow and articles of faith to which they must subscribe should they wish to transition from being writers to being published writers. All agree that you should be able to complete an inordinately long one-size-fits-all questionnaire without becoming facetious.

But how was one advised two hundred years ago? Seeking patronage was one recommended route; paying the publisher another. The Reverend John Platts has a different strategy comprising four easy to follow steps:  Step One: Provide a Title and Table of Contents in Your Best Handwriting; Step Two: Puff Your Work (this takes an entire sentence); Step Three: Flatter the Publisher (three words); Step Four: Name Your Price. He makes no reference to his under-represented and marginalised position: he is a Unitarian Minister, not a Trinitarian one, and he preaches in Doncaster.

 

Did it work?  Well, not with the publisher he is addressing, Messrs Harding, Leopard & Co who appear to have had a very small list. But it worked with another London publisher, Sherwood, Jones & Co, which brought out the work in 1825 and thus at most ten months after this letter was written. They must have been keen. It may have been their idea to re-title it; the author imagined it as The Wonders of Human Nature as Exemplified … but it was published as A New Universal Biography, Containing Interesting Accounts ….

The work is a main reason why Platts (1775-1837) has a Wikipedia page. And the book is currently available in a choice of Print on Demand hardback or paperback. Shall I buy and reproduce one of the Interesting Accounts? It’s not necessary; the Reverend Platts’ letter can stand alone as the book’s teaser:

*

Transcription

Addressed to: Messrs Harding Leopard & Co Booksellers Finsbury Square   London

Datelined: Doncaster Feb. 22, 1825

Gentlemen I have a work, nearly completed, to dispose of, of which the above is the table; I think it calculated to be a very popular work. Is it at all suitable for your respectable house? If so, you shall have a sight of it, if you desire it. It will form 2 vols. 8 vo.[octavo], the price £150 Rev J Platts Doncaster

*

Catherine Nixey Heresy

 

It's a long time since I posted a review of a new book but this one is so good that it prompts me to put aside preoccupation with finishing my current project. Nearly everything in this book was new to me. Catherine Nixey has found the right style and tone to write about the early Church of Rome as it established itself as "the greatest organized persecuting force in human history" - a phrase she takes from Geoffrey de Ste. Croix. She does this by narrating the histories and often violent fates, as far as we can know them, of those early versions of Christianity which found themselves defined as "heresies" by that Roman version which focussed itself on alliance with secular power, wealth accumulation, and the pleasures of ostentation, pomp and the flesh - a set of choices far from dead not only in Rome but in Canterbury too. 

Despite a lifelong sideline interest in religion, both as histories and as theologies, I knew almost nothing of what Nixey writes about and that, as she might be the first to point out, is just as my English state schooling intended. Watered down to not much more than prayers, hymns, carols and nativity plays it never suggested alternatives, that there might be other stories. It's true, however, that so successful was the dominant church's  suppression of alternative pasts, including as recorded in books which were burnt,  that it is only in my lifetime that some of those other histories have been at least partially recovered, notably from the 1945 discovery in Egypt of the Gnostic Gospels. But what are traditionally called the Apocrypha, excluded from canonical Bibles, had been around for a very long time before that.

Nixey establishes her case with lively, caustic, and well-crafted short histories and striking examples. Her display of alternative versions of the Nativity scene is perhaps the most striking as is the fact that some of those scenes pre-date the Christian version. Virgins having babies with remarkable powers was not a new idea. There are other things too: the "Three Wise Men" of school nativity plays are the creation of a dubious translation; they are Magi and if you want to translate that, then magicians or sorcerers would be obvious choices. But in this 1840s folk art version of De Tre Wise Man  from Dalarna in Sweden - I bought the postcard there in 1964 -  they are local notables who ride horses not camels; they are the local go-to people for the seal of approval; but the ox and the ass are there, as in the best English versions:

Catherine Nixey is a classicist by training and may wish to stay close to the period she is most  familiar with. But if she ventured into the more recent past, the early history of the Church of England (and of Scotland) is also that of an organised persecuting force busily rooting out heretics and  heresies. The last person to be executed for Blasphemy in Britain was the twenty-year old Edinburgh student Thomas Aikenhead, hanged in 1697. The indictment against him (which can be found at his Wikipedia page) shows he was familiar with early criticisms of Christianity and, in particular, its associations with magic.  

Today it is only continued state support for the Established Church with its Bench of Bishops, accumulated  wealth, and continuing hold on the universities of Oxford, Cambridge and Durham which lifts it above the status of not much more than a middle-class hobby prone to the usual jealousies and in-fighting. The Roman Catholic church is another matter and will remain so until Italy repudiates the Lateran treaty and incorporates the Vatican City State into its national territory. It would then be able to order the archives opened.