Who were the first Americans?

The theory that has been accepted for many years is that the first people to inhabit the continents of North and South America reached their destination by travelling over the land bridge that existed, at the time of the last Ice Age some 13,000 years ago, between what is now Alaska and Siberia.

These people have been given the name “Clovis people” by virtue of the evidence found near the town of Clovis in New Mexico in the 1930s. A feature of Clovis culture was a particular design of spear point that has been found at a number of sites. 

However, this evidence has since been disputed and it is now believed that there were humans in the Americas some 2,500 years before the Clovis people arrived. Evidence of earlier populations has been found in Texas in the form of tools that date from about 15,500 years ago. 

The theory is that these people could have arrived by sea from islands in the Pacific Ocean. They may have originally colonised South America and then moved north.

Whatever the truth of the matter, it is evident that humans were living in the Americas many thousands of years before Europeans “discovered” the continents in the 15^th and 16th centuries and proceeded to claim divine sanction for their subsequent conquests.

© John Welford

What was a slave worth in 18th century America?

Debates about slavery in the United States went back many years before the American Civil War brought “slave” and “free” states into bloody conflict in the 1860s. A debate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, for example, led to a strange compromise over slavery that had more to do with mathematics than the morality of slave ownership.

The issue was over the decision to establish a House of Representatives, of which each state’s membership would be decided by its population. The greater the population of a state, the more representatives it would have in the lower house of Congress.

Slavery in the Late 18^th Century

Slavery was not a particularly burning or divisive issue in the 1780s. Indeed, as an institution it had been in decline for some time. The northern states did not need huge numbers of slaves, although there were still as many as 10,000 slaves in New York State in 1820. Even in the states of Maryland and Virginia, tobacco production had exhausted the soils and large gangs of slave labour were impractical on the cereal farms that took the place of tobacco plantations. However, the production of rice and indigo in the swamps of Georgia and the Carolinas did require the use of slaves, and this was where the largest numbers were employed.

It was only when Eli Whitney’s cotton gin made production possible across a much wider sweep of territory, from the 1790s onward, that the plantation system really took hold in the South, and with it the development of slave labour on a much larger scale.

Slavery and Representation of the States

Of the 13 ex-colonies that were to become the first “United States”, only five regarded the institution of slavery to be essential to their economies (although this was a dubious claim in the cases of Virginia and Maryland, as noted above). With membership of the upper house of Congress, the Senate, being fixed at two members per state, these five states would always be in a minority. However, could they work out a way of achieving something like parity in the lower house?

On the face of it, this was also unlikely. Although industrialization had yet to take off in the northern states, that was where the larger cities were, such as Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Despite the larger geographical areas of states like Georgia as against Rhode Island and Connecticut, their populations were either smaller or disproportionate to their relative sizes.

Unless, that is, you counted the slaves.

The Constitutional Compromise over Slavery

There was no disagreement about the status of Native Americans. They did not count for purposes of representation, but then they were distributed across all the colonies at this time. However, if the southern states could count their slaves, they would quite easily be able to overcome their disadvantage in Congress.

The northern delegates at the Convention pointed out, with some justification, that it was strange that southern slave owners should regard their slaves as being mere items of property when it suited them to do so, but equal with them as human beings when the occasion so demanded.

However, it became clear that, for the Convention to succeed, a compromise would be needed, and this was that each slave would count as three-fifths of a free person. This allowed, for example, the Carolinas to have ten representatives between them, as against the eight from Massachusetts. Although the balance of representation was still tipped in favour of the free states against the slave states, at 33 to 29, it was much closer than it would have been otherwise.

The Illogical Nature of the Compromise

Many northerners were distinctly unhappy with this state of affairs. One wit even proposed that horses, being as useful as slaves, should surely count as being two-fifths of a person, and man’s best friend, the dog, had a good claim to count as one-fifth of his master, for purposes of representation.

This was just one example from history of how expediency can take precedence over justice and logic. It was not until the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1868 that this nonsense ceased to be part of the American Constitution.

© John Welford

Tulip mania in 17th century Europe

Human beings seem to have a penchant for throwing their money away by speculating on something that looks to be a “dead cert” to make them a fortune but turns out to be precisely the opposite. The world’s current economic ills (as of 2013) can be traced to speculation over house prices in the United States, just as the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was based on the mistaken belief that share prices would continue to rise for ever. Such “bubbles”, which burst with disastrous consequences, can be traced back to the early 17^th century, where the object that excited the mania was the humble tulip bulb.

Tulips were unknown in Europe before the 16^th century, when merchants and travellers began to bring bulbs back from central Asia. In the Netherlands, tulips became sought after not only for their attractiveness as Spring flowers but also because of their rarity. Having these exotic plants growing outside one’s house was clearly a status symbol that indicated not only good taste but considerable wealth. Anything that is rare and desirable is always going to be expensive, in any age.

It was soon discovered that the tulip was capable of being cross bred to produce a variety of colours, shapes and other characteristics. As early as the 1590s work was being done at the University of Leiden (by the botanist Charles l’Ecluse) to develop new varieties that would lead eventually to a major Dutch industry that continues to the present day. The most exotic varieties became even more highly prized than “ordinary” tulips and wealthy people became desperate to acquire tulips that their neighbours did not possess, even though individual tulips come into flower for a only a couple of weeks at most.

The next stage was for people to start investing money in advance so that they would be the first to own tulip varieties that had not yet been developed. Contracts were signed for the purchase of next year’s bulbs while they were still in the ground and not yet harvested. This was therefore the first example of a “futures” market that has been a staple ingredient of financial trading ever since.

Nothing could stop the growth of speculation in the tulip market, especially when money started coming in from foreign investors, and prices inevitably started to rise steeply. Before long the money changing hands as people gambled on the future value of tulip bulbs that did not yet exist was out of all proportion to what the bulbs were really worth.

As the bubble expanded in the early 1630s, more and more people, most of whom had absolutely no interest in owning tulips, put increasing sums of money into the market, buying and selling futures contracts in the expectation of always making a profit. Even people with relatively modest means sold possessions in order to have money to invest in tulips.

It paid the people who actually owned the tulip bulbs not to sell them, because they knew that they would be able to charge a much higher price for them at some future date. At the height of the market, in 1636, one bulb was traded for the equivalent of $35,000 dollars, a sum that the average Dutch worker would take more than 16 years to earn.

The bubble had to burst, and it did so in February 1637 when the price of tulips collapsed as nobody could afford to buy them. Some people who saw the end coming, and traded in their investments at the right time, made huge fortunes, but for most investors it was a disaster as they lost virtually all their money. Those people who had foolishly put more into tulip futures than they could afford to lose were the biggest losers and many became destitute as a result.

It would be encouraging to be able to say that this experience taught people across Europe and the world a salutary lesson in why one should never invest money in schemes that are not founded on real and substantial assets. However, human greed and the chance of making a quick buck for relatively little effort are factors that are guaranteed to lead people astray. Whether it is the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Land Bubble of the 1720s, or the dot-com bubble of the 1990s, people with more money than sense will always, it seems, find innovative ways of losing it. Unfortunately, as the more recent Subprime Mortgage Bubble has shown, the consequences of such disasters do not just affect those people who make the mistakes.

© John Welford

The South Sea Bubble: an 18th-century scam

There is nothing new about financial schemes that trap the unwary and unwise into investing money that they are destined to lose. One such notorious affair that led to the ruin of many and had huge political consequences occurred in early 18^th century Britain and has been known ever since as the “South Sea Bubble”.

A legitimate start

The South Sea Company began as a perfectly legitimate business concern in 1711, its aim being to secure trade monopolies with Spanish colonies in South America, in anticipation of a successful outcome to the War of the Spanish Succession which had been going on since 1701. It would therefore act in a similar way to the highly successful East India Company which dominated trade with India and China.

In practice, trading with Spain’s colonies proved difficult, especially as relations between Britain and Spain were never easy, even after peace was declared in 1714. However, the “asiento” (or “trading agreement”) signed in 1713 by the two countries did give Britain a monopoly of the trade in slaves, and this was to prove the most profitable of the South Sea Company’s enterprises. Despite this boost, however, the Company looked destined to prosper only very slowly.

However, the directors of the South Sea Company wanted it to be more than just a trading company. They also sought to provide an alternative investment opportunity to that provided by the Bank of England, which had been established in 1694. This was a time when political parties were starting to emerge, and the South Sea Company was seen as the Tory alternative to the Whig Bank of England, which had done well from the War and provided its investors with very good returns.

Things go awry

The real problems only arose a few years later, around 1719-20, when the Company directors sought to take over part of the National Debt and invited investment by the buying of company shares. In order to make this move, and in the hope of making quick profits, the Company needed to take steps that were both illegal and financially unsound. Bribes were offered to some of the highest people in the country, including the two mistresses of King George I. The bribes were paid for in South Sea Company shares.

In order to attract large investments, claims were made about the Company’s profitability that were simply untrue, and high dividends were promised that could never be justified.

The promises were believed, and South Sea shares suddenly became the hottest thing in town. As the share price rose, from around March 1720, and some investors were seen to be making substantial short-term profits, everybody wanted a piece of the action. People with money bought large numbers of shares, and people without money borrowed what they could in order not to be left behind. The frenzy affected the whole of society from top to bottom.

New share issues were made, promising even higher rewards, and supplying even more generous pay-offs to the politicians who smoothed the way for the Company’s directors. The share price doubled, then tripled, and shares eventually traded at 1000% of their original price.

Other schemes sprang up in the wake of the investment frenzy, many of them being entirely bogus. One company was even set up with the prospectus of “carrying on an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is”. Needless to say, many fools were permanently parted from their money.

Pop goes the Bubble

Bubbles have a tendency to burst, and of course this one did. Some wiser heads realised that the speculation was unsustainable and cashed in their shares, encouraging others to do the same. The price began to fall, leading those who had bought at the peak to suffer disastrous losses. Hundreds of thousands of people lost money, and many were ruined as they were unable to pay back the money they had borrowed to buy their shares. Bankruptcies soared and cases of suicide were reported. By September 1720 the Bubble had well and truly burst.

Towards the end of August, a Member of Parliament from Norfolk (and Paymaster General), Robert Walpole, wondered whether he should renew his portfolio of South Sea Company shares. He had already made a decent profit when the price reached 300% and he had sold his shares at that point, but now he decided to re-invest, in a big way, as the price was at 1000% and showed every sign of going higher. However, his application got lost in the post and so was never actioned.

But for that accident, Walpole would probably have been ruined. As it was, he now found himself being called upon to sort out the mess that everyone else had got themselves into. He passed legislation in Parliament that restricted the activities of joint-stock companies, pursued the wrongdoers, and turned a diplomatic blind eye to those in high places (such as the King himself) who had been party to shady dealings but whose support was worth cultivating.

Consequences of the scandal

The affair of the South Sea Bubble therefore discredited the Tories and boosted the reputation for prudence of Walpole, although the consequences of his personal greed were only avoided by the merest chance of a lost letter.

The Whigs, under Walpole, stayed in office for many years to come, with the Tories only reviving when George III became King in 1760. Walpole was now Britain’s first “Prime Minister”, although this title was unofficial, and his “reign” of 21 years was longer than that of any of his successors.

The lesson of the South Sea Bubble should have been clear to everyone, namely that if a thing looks too good to be true, it almost certainly is. However, the prospect of a “dead cert” quick profit is always tempting, and many people have been caught out in similar ventures ever since.

© John Welford

The Sicilian Vespers, 1282

This is the name given to a massacre of French soldiers and civilians on the Italian island of Sicily that took place in 1282. It was a rebellion against the oppressive and tyrannical rule of Charles of Anjou, the King of Italy and Sicily, who was very different from his brother, King Louis IX of France, who would later be declared a saint.

On 30^th March, which was Easter Monday, the people of Palermo had gathered at Santo Spirito Church for the service of Vespers. A pretty young woman received unwanted attentions from a French soldier and her fiancé came to her defence. In the argument that followed the man drew a knife and stabbed the French solder in the heart.

This was the trigger for a much larger outbreak of violence as the Sicilians turned on the soldiers, more than 200 of whom were killed before the day was over.

On the following day the rebellion spread across the island and within the next six weeks more than 3,000 French people, civilians as well as soldiers, were killed.

The uprising led to a much longer struggle for the control of Sicily and the eventual overthrow of Charles of Anjou. The royal houses of Naples and Aragon fought it out for twenty years, with the net result that Sicily enjoyed virtual independence that lasted for almost a century.

The original dispute beyond a soldier and an enraged fiancé was not forgotten, and the event is known to history as “The Sicilian Vespers”. The Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi wrote a celebrated opera with that title in 1855.

© John Welford

The shameful story of the founding of Liberia

The story of how Liberia came to be is a shameful one that comes high up the list of history’s tragedies of social engineering.

The creation of Liberia

At first sight, the idea of creating a new country in Africa, to which freed American slaves could return and live in peace and harmony, free from the hardships and indignities to which they had been subjected all their lives, might seem to be a noble cause that would attract nothing but praise from all liberal-minded persons.

However, the motivation behind the creation of Liberia, and the reality of the situation in which the first Liberians found themselves, had little to do with noble thoughts or humanitarian deeds.

Abolitionist movements in the early 19^th century

Slavery was endemic in all the states of the American Union in its early years. However, abolitionists were very active, especially in the northern states, during the first quarter of the 19^th century. Even in the south, many emancipation societies were agitating for an end to slavery.

One particularly active abolitionist was Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker from Ohio, who in 1825 took eleven ex-slaves to Haiti where they were resettled. His efforts did not always meet with approval, although he urged only a gradual winding down of the institution of slavery.

On the other hand, some abolitionists wanted to go further and faster, and they coupled this with a desire to remove all black people from the United States, based on nothing less than naked racial prejudice. The slaves had to be freed so that they could be removed from the country, leaving the United States as a “white” country.

The motives of the American Colonization Society

In 1816 the American Colonization Society (ACS) was formed with a view to petitioning Congress to establish a colony in Africa to which freed slaves could be sent. A prominent member of this Society was Francis Scott Key, who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner”.

Congress liked the idea but did not offer any funds to make it happen. By 1820, private fundraising efforts had produced enough to send 88 former slaves to the British colony of Sierra Leone. However, no preparations were made to receive them and most of the emigrants died in what was, for them, a very hostile environment.

However, this did not stop the ACS from trying again, with other shiploads of emigrants being sent to the uncolonized stretch of coast next door to Sierra Leone, which was named Liberia (based on the Latin word for “free”). A settlement was established in 1822 which was named Monrovia in honour of President James Monroe. Despite fierce opposition from local tribes many of the newcomers survived, and the ACS continued to export black people from the United States, sending around 3,000 emigrants over a 30-year period.

In 1847 Liberia became an independent state, and in later years was notable for being the only part of Africa not to be colonized by a European power. However, the United States was not particularly proud of its offspring and only established diplomatic relations with the country in 1862.

Attitudes towards emigration to Liberia

The attitude of black people to emigration was mixed. Some clearly welcomed the opportunity to make a fresh start in the continent of their ancestors, and volunteered to go. However, a more common attitude was that this “repatriation” was unwelcome. As stated in a resolution passed by a convention of freed slaves in New York in 1831:

“This is our home, and this is our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers; for it some of them fought, bled and died. Here we were born and here we will die”.

There is little doubt that many of the emigrants were pressured into going, with freedom from slavery being offered on condition that the ex-slaves joined to exodus to Liberia. The experience must have been similar to that of British convicts being transported to Australia or Russian dissidents being exiled to Siberia.

Looking back at the foundation of Liberia

The aims of the American Colonization Society could never have been realised. As was pointed out in 1827, for the entire black population of the United States to be removed, more than 50,000 people would have had to be shipped over a period of 30 years, at an annual cost of around a million dollars, a sum which the Society was never remotely close to raising.

The ACS continued to operate right up to the Civil War, with one of its later supporters being Abraham Lincoln. However, by that time it was virtually bankrupt, having never received the state funding that it sought.

The founding of Liberia was therefore made on the basis of a desire to rid the United States of an unwanted sector of its population, with little thought given to the welfare of the people involved. It is not something to be looked back on with any degree of national pride.

© John Welford

The Seven Cities of Cibola

The Spaniards who explored the Americas in the 16^th century had one basic aim in mind, which was to become enormously wealthy by discovering and claiming the vast hordes of gold that they were quite convinced lay in the lands across the sea.

The legend of Antillia

One legend that was widely believed was that when the Moors invaded Spain in the 12^th century seven bishops and their followers had escaped and sailed to the west. They had found a new land to settle and each bishop had established a city-state that had grown rich and magnificent. The land was supposed to be an island called Antillia.

The belief in Antillia was so ingrained that maps of the time actually depicted it, and this was somewhere that Christopher Columbus expected to visit as a stopover en route to the Indies. There was even a legend that a ship had landed there and found that the beaches comprised only one-third sand, the rest being gold dust!

Further west?

Needless to say, the early explorers did not discover the Seven Cities of Gold on Antillia, although the islands of the Caribbean were named the Antilles. However, this did not kill the legend. The cities must therefore be somewhere else.

In 1528 an expedition into the interior of North America brought back stories that the natives lived in fabulously wealthy cities, seven in number, of which the greatest was called Cibola. This was all that was needed to get the Spaniards excited and a new expedition was organized with a view to finding the Seven Cities of Cibola and plundering their riches.

This was led by Don Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who failed in his aim but did achieve something that no European had done before, which was to view the Grand Canyon.

So what were the seven cities?

It has to be assumed that what the early explorers had discovered were the pueblos of the Zunis and other tribes in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. These were structures built largely from adobe mud. Many of these buildings were multi-roomed and on more than one storey. A notable feature was the method of entering buildings from the roof via a ladder. Many such structures were grouped around courtyards and were home to hundreds of people.

The pueblos certainly counted as cities, but why golden? That might well be explained by the fact that straw was often mixed with the mud to help to bind it, and sunlight glinting on straw might look like gold from a distance.

So did the explorers leave well alone and go home disappointed? Not exactly. The Pueblo Peoples, like the rest of the Native American population, would soon find to their cost that Europeans sought only conquest, not cooperation.

© John Welford

The role of the Isle of Sheppey in the story of British aviation

The Isle of Sheppey is an area of North Kent that is separated from the mainland by a narrow inlet of the sea known as The Swale. The chief settlement is the town of Sheerness, but much of its 36 square miles consists of farmland and salt marsh. The land is almost entirely flat, which, together with its easy access to London, is why it became an important place in the history of British aviation.

Horace, Eustace and Oswald Short were brothers who, in 1897, had started a business manufacturing and selling gas-filled balloons. In 1908 they expanded their business by gaining a licence from the American Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur) to build aircraft. This was not possible at their factory in London, hence the move to Sheppey. They built the world’s first aircraft factory at Shellness Beach, at the eastern end of the island, near Leysdown. The headquarters of the company was at Mussel Manor, a 16^th-century house that has since been renamed Muswell Manor.

On 2^nd May 1909 John Brabazon made the first flight in Britain when he flew his Voisin biplane aircraft - which he kept in the Shorts’ factory hangar – for 500 yards at a height of 35 feet. As the first Englishman to fly, he was granted Pilot’s Licence number 1.

The Wright Brothers visited the factory two days after Brabazon’s flight. They were driven down from London in the first Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, their chauffeur being C S Rolls. Rolls had ordered the first Shorts’ plane to emerge from the factory, which was Shorts Number 1. John Brabazon was the customer for Shorts Number 2, and he flew it on 30^th October in a circular two-mile course, at a height of 20 feet.

The early successes of the Short Brothers were well timed, because international tensions meant that there was a ready market for innovative new weapons. Shorts were quick to exploit these opportunities and were soon designing and building seaplanes for the Royal Navy. In 1912, at Sheerness, a Shorts seaplane became the first in the world to take off from a warship. After World War One broke out Shorts planes were soon on active service, and in 1915 a Shorts seaplane became the first aircraft to sink an enemy ship at sea using a torpedo.

C S Rolls and John (later Lord) Brabazon had very different flying careers. Rolls was killed in a flying accident in 1910, but Brabazon carried out a number of aviation feats, including flying through London’s Tower Bridge, and he served with distinction in the Royal Flying Corps (which became the Royal Air Force) throughout World War One. He later became a Member of Parliament and Government Minister.

It is possible to visit Muswell Manor and see a photograph that was taken during the visit of the Wright Brothers in 1908. The photograph, entitled “The Founding Fathers of Aviation” is of the Wright and Short Brothers plus Rolls and Brabazon.

© John Welford

The rebellion of the Fifth Monarchists, 1661

The Fifth Monarchists were a group of radical dissenters who had initially been supporters of the Republican regime of Oliver Cromwell (but later severe critics) and who launched an armed rebellion against the restoration of King Charles II in January 1661.

The name came from their belief that only Jesus Christ was entitled to be the King of England, along of course with the rest of the world. According to the Old Testament Book of Daniel, Nebuchadnezzar had dreamed that four great empires would arise, and the Fifth Monarchists believed that these had already come and gone, the final one being that of the Romans. That meant that the fifth monarchy, that of Christ, was overdue.

The Fifth Monarchists were led by a former cooper (barrel-maker) named Thomas Venner, who launched his intended revolution on Christ’s behalf on Sunday 6^th January 1661. His small band of men burst into St Paul’s Cathedral and announced that Christ, and not Charles II, was king. The reaction of the congregation was not to immediately join their ranks but to chase them off, aided by the Lord Mayor who had called out the local militia.

The Monarchists retreated to North London for the next few days, but they returned on 9^th January and caused mayhem in the streets of London. Venner and his men were perfectly prepared to use force to get their way, and Venner himself killed three men before being cornered in a London pub and captured, suffering 19 injuries in the process.

The end of the rebellion was as might have been expected. Venner and the other ringleaders were swiftly tried and condemned to death. Thomas Venner was hanged, drawn and quartered (the usual punishment for traitors) on 19^th January. The reign of Jesus Christ as the fifth monarch would have to wait a bit longer.

© John Welford

The Palomares hydrogen bombs, 1966

Not many people know that hydrogen bombs have fallen on to European soil, but fortunately they did not explode, and could not have done so. The incident had nothing to do with enemy action and was the result of a tragic accident.

During the Cold War the United States was prepared at all times for the outbreak of hostilities and regularly flew bombing missions over Eastern Europe, although no bombs were ever released intentionally. The bombs were nuclear as well as conventional, and many flights by B-52 bombers took place on a daily basis.

On the morning of 16^th January 1966 a B-52 was flying over the western Mediterranean and preparing to return to the United States. It carried a cargo of four 1.5 megaton hydrogen bombs, each about 20 feet long. As usual, the plane needed to be refueled before flying back across the Atlantic, and this entailed an aerial rendezvous with a tanker aircraft carrying 30,000 gallons of fuel.

The procedure was a standard one, carried out at 30,000 feet. It was one that the captains of both aircraft had carried out many times before, and they had no reason to doubt that that morning’s operation would not also go according to plan. However, on this occasion things went disastrously wrong when a misjudgment was made as the bomber approached the tanker and the two planes collided.

Three crew members on board the B-52 were able to eject safely, but four others, and all seven men on board the tanker plane, were not so lucky. The planes fell from the sky and crashed on Spanish territory close to the coast, as did three of the four hydrogen bombs.

Because the bombs had not been primed there was no chance of a nuclear explosion, but there was certainly a danger that the casings could have been damaged by the fall, or more probably by explosions caused by their TNT detonators. If the casings had been breached, there was every chance that radioactive materials could have leaked out and threatened the well-being of local residents.

As might have been expected, the American military authorities were extremely anxious to hush the matter up as much as possible. Nothing could be less welcome to the general public than the news that nuclear weapons were regularly being flown over their heads and could – should disaster strike – land at their feet. The press were told that a military aircraft had crashed in Spain but no mention was made of its cargo. Reporters were, however, barred from the area which made them highly suspicious that they were not being told the whole truth.

Also kept in the dark were the inhabitants, mainly farmers, of the region near Palomares, to the east of Almeria in southern Spain. While being told to stay calm and not be unduly concerned, they were also instructed not to work on their land or venture outside their village. Reports of thousands of military personnel swarming over their fields clad in protective garb cannot have been particularly reassuring.

Two of the bombs, in open countryside, were found quite quickly, but the third had fallen close to a villager’s home and was not easily visible from the air. The villager in question had stood on top of it and given it a kick, possibly in the hope of stopping the flow of smoke that was issuing from it. It was probably a good thing that he went off to find someone who might know what it was and did not examine it any more closely, given that it was venting radioactive dust. This was also true of one of the other bombs that had already been discovered.

As mentioned above, the B-52 had been carrying four bombs, so where was the fourth? It soon became clear that it had fallen into the sea, because it had been seen to do so by a local fisherman. However, his news took a long time to reach the Americans, partly due to the cloak of secrecy that they had thrown over the incident. Not even the local police – to whom the fisherman reported his sighting – were aware that anything had happened that involved nuclear weapons.

Eventually a huge operation got going with the aim of finding the fourth bomb. Although the chances of it threatening immediate danger were slim, the Americans were worried about the Russians finding it before they did. It took two months to locate it, through use of a mini-submarine, but it was eventually spotted on an undersea ledge above a 500-feet precipice. The operation to recover the bomb took another three weeks.

The net result of the accident was that nuclear disaster was averted, although the leakage of radioactive material did have long-term knock-on effects. Decontaminating the affected land was a huge job, given that about 50 acres were involved. Large quantities of soil were removed and taken to the United States for processing, but there is evidence to show that there is still contamination in the area more than 50 years after the event.

Compensation was paid, although the amount was never disclosed and some farmers complained that they never received what had been promised to them.

The incident just goes to show how one person’s carelessness – for that is almost certainly what caused the accident – can lead to extremely serious consequences, especially when nuclear weapons are involved.

© John Welford

The origin of the Molotov cocktail

Most people will not need to be told that a Molotov cocktail is not a drink, although some of the earliest ones were actually made in a vodka factory! They are in fact home-made weapons of war.

The Molotov Cocktail

A Molotov cocktail is (usually) a glass bottle filled with an inflammable liquid, such as petroleum spirit, with a rag or something similar stuffed in the top. When lit and thrown it is likely to explode on landing, thus spreading burning fuel towards anyone unfortunate enough to be in the way. A Molotov cocktail is therefore a cheap and crude weapon that is often used today when street protests against the forces of law and order get violent.

Molotov’s name is not attached to the “cocktail” because he invented it, given that he did not do so. However, the term was originally used as an insult and has stuck ever since. Few people today will know who Molotov was, and his name is only remembered for something that only had an indirect connection with him.

Molotov the hammer

Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin (1890-1986) was a Russian revolutionary who took the name “Molotov” (meaning “hammer”) and led something of a charmed life, not only surviving to an advanced age (96) as the last of the Bolsheviks, but managing to do so through the era of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Only four members of the original Bolshevik government of 1917 achieved this feat, and Molotov did so by being one of Stalin’s most loyal deputies and a prime mover in instigating the purges. He was, in short, as unpleasant a character as Stalin himself.

The Finland campaign and the resulting “cocktails”

As Soviet foreign minister, it was Molotov who was responsible for launching the “winter war” against Finland in November 1939, not long after the outbreak of World War II. The Soviet Union believed that it could simply help itself to Finland while the rest of Europe was otherwise engaged, and on paper this looked entirely feasible. The Soviet forces were vastly greater than those of Finland, both on land and in the air, but they were led by commanders who were relatively inexperienced, given that the purges mentioned above had stripped out a large number of competent military leaders, leaving the less competent ones to take over. For this, Molotov himself was largely to blame.

Molotov’s campaign against Finland was completely illegal and against the rules of the League of Nations, of which the Soviet Union was a signatory.

Molotov thought that he would get away with this action by pretending that his cluster bombs were actually food parcels that were being dropped to support starving people. In response, the Finns decided that such “bread baskets” deserved a decent “cocktail” to accompany them, thus the Molotov cocktail was named as a piece of black humour.

The device did not originate with the Finns, as it had been used to good effect during the Spanish Civil War that had concluded earlier that year. The Fascists led by General Franco had triumphed over the Republicans, who had used Soviet-built tanks that could be disabled by the use of well-placed petrol bombs. If they worked in Spain, they could also do so in Finland.

Some 450,000 Molotov cocktails were assembled in a vodka factory and thrown at the Soviet invaders. They were not the only weapon that the Finns had at their disposal, but they proved to be very effective. The Soviets eventually had to sign a peace treaty, after 103 days of fighting, having gained only part of their original objective.

The Finns had national pride on their side and a determination not to be defeated by the forces of the giant next door. Their reputation as guerrilla warriors was greatly enhanced by their conduct during the winter war, of which their use of the Molotov cocktail was an important part.

It is ironic that the name Molotov might have become known only to historians had it not been for its borrowing for a device adopted for his defeat and used by revolutionaries and rioters ever since. 

© John Welford

The Newport Rising, 1839

The event known as the Newport Rising, which took place on 4^th November 1839, was the last armed rebellion in British history.

The Rising was a by-product of the Chartist movement, which was a protest movement that began in 1838 and would rumble on for more than a decade. Its aim was to take the political reform movement forward from the 1832 Reform Act that had started the process of making Parliament more democratic.

The Chartists hoped to further their cause by gathering huge numbers of signatures to the “People’s Charter” that made a series of demands that would – in effect – have given parliamentary representation to working class people. The government of the day was alarmed by the threat of a mass protest movement and did everything it could to frustrate the Chartists’ ambitions, especially when their activities contravened public order.

In May 1839 one of the leaders of the Chartists, Henry Vincent, was arrested in Monmouth, South Wales, and subsequently imprisoned. His fellow Chartists organised a huge protest march targeted on Newport, a town to the southwest of Monmouth, where it was believed that several Chartist prisoners were being held.

Some 7,000 protestors arrived outside Newport’s Westgate Hotel in the early hours of 4^th November, to be met by a force of 500 special constables who had been sworn in especially for the occasion, plus a number of armed soldiers. Some of the demonstrators also carried muskets and other weapons.

The protest began peacefully enough, with much shouting and cheering, but the net result was that the hotel was under siege from a large crowd of people and the authorities had to take action.

The town’s mayor did what he could to keep order, which consisted of the traditional “reading of the Riot Act”. This was a law, dating from 1715, that forbade the assembly of more than twelve people if there was any likelihood of trouble breaking out. An official had merely to read out the relevant part of the Act to declare such an assembly illegal and order its dispersal.

As this action clearly had no effect, the soldiers and constables were authorized to use force to break up the crowd. With several hotheads in the crowd equally prepared to resort to violence, it is little wonder that people got hurt.

The mayor was among those injured by musket fire, but it was the protestors who came off second best. In all, 22 people were killed and many more were injured. The number of fatalities was the greatest in any civil disturbance in modern British history.

The Chartist ringleaders were arrested and punished, some by hanging and others transported to Australia for life. The Mayor of Newport, however, received a knighthood.

Chartism in Wales never recovered from the aftermath of the Newport Rising, but the movement still had a long way to go in Great Britain as a whole. The People’s Charter continued to attract support, with the 1842 version gaining more than three million signatures. However, it would not be until 1867 before the next step along the road to full democracy took place.

© John Welford

The gentlemanly but absurd Convention of Cintra

The story of the 1808 Convention of Cintra is an excellent example of why incompetent people should never be allowed to be in charge of anything as important as an army. However, the lessons are not always learned, and lack of ability did not cease to be a bar to promotion for many years after the affair in question.

The convention was a treaty drawn up after an early British victory in the Peninsular War fought against the forces of Napoleon Bonaparte. The war was fought to support the Spanish and Portuguese forces that had revolted against the French invaders.

The Battle of Vimeiro was fought on 21^st August 1808 between the British army led by General Arthur Wellesley (who would later become the Duke of Wellington) and the French under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot. The latter had invaded Portugal in November 1807, being largely unchallenged until the British Expeditionary Force arrived in August 1808.

The French were soundly beaten at Vimeiro and forced to withdraw, their losses amounting to more than 2,100 casualties (killed and wounded) as against the British 750. The French withdrew, but the British declined to pursue them.

The reason for this lack of a follow-up was that Wellesley was relieved of his command immediately  after the battle, that role being assumed firstly by Sir Harry Burrard and then (only one day later!) by Sir Hew Dalrymple. It was not that Wellesley had done anything wrong, merely that the rules of military precedence decided the pecking order.

Sir Hew Dalrymple

Sir Hew Dalrymple came from military and aristocratic stock, the latter guaranteeing that he would rise rapidly through the ranks as an army officer. He was therefore a captain at the age of 18 and a lieutenant-colonel when aged 31. His experience of military action – although not entirely absent – was not extensive, and he had spent the two years before the Portuguese adventure as Governor of Gibraltar. His appointment as Commander of the Portuguese Expedition was therefore entirely unconnected with any direct experience of what had gone before, and he turned up find Wellesley on the point of pursuing the defeated French towards Lisbon.

The Convention of Cintra

Sir Hew’s first action was to tell Wellesley to stop what he was doing. Instead, Sir Hew drew up a treaty that was duly agreed and signed by Major-General Junot.

Under the treaty, Sir Hew arranged for the entire French army, together with its equipment and goods previously looted from the Portuguese, to be given a free ride back to France, conveyed thither in British ships. Presumably Sir Hew thought that this was the gentlemanly thing to do, but he appeared to suffer from the delusion that the French would accept the deal in the same light. However, there was absolutely nothing in the treaty to prevent the French from coming straight back again, which of course they did.

The absurdity of this convention was not lost on the British government, which promptly recalled all three commanders back to London, given that the other two had concurred with Dalrymple’s decision.

An enquiry was held, due to the derision that the convention had caused, but no disciplinary action was taken against the three men. However, Burrard was too embarrassed to seek another commission and Dalrymple was never offered one.

The only person to escape with his reputation unscathed was Wellesley, who had not actually signed the convention document. His experience and record of military success was too valuable to be discarded and he returned to Lisbon in April 1809 as supreme commander of the British forces. He continued to fight a long and arduous campaign in the Peninsular that was eventually successful.

© John Welford

The First Chimurenga: Zimbabwe's first war of independence

Zimbabwe gained her independence from British rule after a long struggle that began with the “Unilateral Declaration of Independence” by the white Prime Minister Ian Smith in 1965 and ended in 1980 after the Bush War that brought Robert Mugabe to power. However, this was not the first war of independence but the second.

The land that is now Zimbabwe came under British rule thanks to the imperialist ambitions of Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company annexed vast areas of territory north of the Limpopo River. By 1895 Rhodes had acquired more than a million square kilometres between the Limpopo and Lake Tanganyika, land that was given the name Rhodesia in May 1895. Today, the northern part comprises Zambia and the southern part Zimbabwe.

However, the British advance into tribal lands was not without opposition. The indigenous people, the Ndebele and the Shona, took up arms to regain their lands and their cultural and political dignity. The resistance offered in 1896-7 became known as the First Chimurenga by the Africans but the Second Matabele War by the British. The name Chimurenga was coined by Sororenzou Murenga, who had led his people during First Matabele War in 1893. It can be roughly translated as “revolutionary struggle”.

Mlimo and Nehanda

The inspiration for revolt came from spiritual mediums such as Mlimo, who persuaded the Ndebele that the white men were responsible for all their woes, including introducing the cattle disease rinderpest (he may have been correct in this) and bringing drought and plagues of locusts (for which the whites were unlikely to have been guilty). However, the Ndebele had good cause for revolt, in that the settlers had been responsible for thefts of land and cattle and acts of rape and murder against the people.

Like most mediums of his kind, Mlimo was able to convince the warriors that they were immune to the bullets of the white men, a claim that has never been proved in reality. Also credited with inspiring the people was a female warrior called Mbuya (Grandmother) Nehanda Nyakasikana, who was largely responsible for getting the Ndebele and Shona to fight against a common foe. The title of Mbuya was given much later in recognition of her role as the grandmother of Zimbabwean independence.

The siege of Bulawayo

Mlimo had hoped to capture the town of Bulawayo, because most of the British garrison was absent dealing with the “Jameson Raid” emergency in the Transvaal, but attacks on settlers in the countryside started before he could make his move, which he did in March 1896 by which time many white people had escaped into the town for safety. There they built a “laager”, a makeshift fortification along the lines of the Wild West “corral”, into which they could gather at night for protection.

To say that Mlimo laid siege to Bulawayo would be something of an exaggeration, because the Ndebele were fearful of the British maxim guns that they had encountered during the 1893 war, and had no great desire to get within range, despite any spiritual protection that their mediums might offer. They even overlooked the need to cut the telegraph wires that connected Bulawayo with the outside world, so the settlers were able to communicate and call for assistance.

The settlers were able to send patrols out into the countryside to rescue other settlers and to fight back against the Ndebele. This became known as the Bulawayo Field Force, led by the remarkable American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham, who was to leave his mark on the world for a different reason, mentioned below.

It was not until late May that two relief columns reached Bulawayo, one from the north and the other from the south. These were able to break the siege, and the settlers were saved. The second-in-command of the restored garrison was Lt-Col Robert Baden-Powell, whose meeting with Frederick Russell Burnham was to have consequences that spread far beyond Bulawayo.

The death of Mlimo

The British were now able to take the offensive against the Ndebele, but they did so in more subtle ways than simply mounting full-scale assaults, which were impossible when their enemy had the advantage of being able to melt away into a countryside that was alien to the white invaders. After the relief of Bulawayo, Mlimo and his warriors had retreated to the Matobo Hills, an area of sacred significance about 20 miles to the south that is dotted with many caves, in one of which Mlimo took refuge.

Burnham and an associate were able to infiltrate the area and enter Mlimo’s cave without being seen, by using the skills of scouting such as tracking and camouflage. There they waited for Mlimo to enter and shot him dead when he appeared. They were able to escape back to Bulawayo despite being chased by a hundred angry warriors. With Mlimo dead, the Ndebele resistance was broken, and Cecil Rhodes was able to accept their surrender in person in October 1896, offering them a land settlement in return for peace.

The war in Mashonaland

However, the war in Mashonaland, to the north and east of Matabeleland, continued. The Shona were particularly cunning and calculating in the planning of their rebellion. The official British report of the war stated: “So cleverly was their secret kept, and so well laid the plans of the witchdoctors, that when the time came the rising was almost simultaneous, and in five days over five hundred white men, women and children were massacred in the outlying districts of Mashonaland.”

In June 1896, the Shona launched an attack on the Alice goldmine at Mazowe, and a number of settler families were murdered as they tried to flee the area. The Native Commissioner, a man named Pollard, was captured and killed by being beheaded.

It took many months for the rebellion to be brought under control, and for the Shona leaders to be captured. Nehanda was eventually caught in December 1897 and was tried for the murder of Commissioner Pollard. She refused to convert to Christianity, as some other leaders did, and was hanged. Her last words were “My bones shall rise again”, and many Zimbabweans believe that it was her spirit that led to the successful Second Chimurenga that created the modern country.

Apart from the legacy of the spirit of rebellion, the First Chimurenga had another consequence that was much less to be expected. The friendship that developed between Frederick Russell Burnham and Robert Baden-Powell at Bulawayo led to Burnham passing on his scouting skills, which Baden-Powell was later to apply to great effect during the Boer War and to develop as a movement that has prospered and spread around the world, namely the Boy Scouts (now known simply as The Scouts).

(See also: The Second Chimurenga: Zimbabwe's Successful War of Independence)

© John Welford