The Story of Britain

by Patrick Dillon

  The Indian Mutiny

  ONE of the reasons Britain went to war with Russia was to protect India, which was such a valuable part of the empire that it was called the “jewel in Britain’s crown”. The British often worried the Russians would invade India from the north – so often that sometimes they sent armies into Afghanistan, the country that lay between. Afghanistan was a mountainous place, full of warlike tribes, and it was madness to think it could be easily conquered. The first time the British invaded it, twenty thousand men set off into the mountains with elephants, horses and carts carrying ammunition. Three years later, a single horseman rode into a fortress in the mountains north of India, so badly wounded that he could barely stay in the saddle. When the soldiers revived him, he explained that he had been a doctor with the army that invaded Afghanistan.

  “And what happened to the others?” the soldiers asked.

  The doctor closed his eyes. “All dead,” he whispered.

  Despite such disasters, the British Empire kept growing. The countries Britain fought didn’t have modern guns, so they couldn’t defend themselves; and besides, the soldiers of the British army – Scottish, English, Welsh and Irish – were brave and well-disciplined, while the ships of the British navy ruled every ocean in the world.

  It was a strange kind of empire, though, for it grew almost by accident as merchants looked for trade and the army followed to protect them. In fact, there were still a lot of people in Britain who didn’t think the empire was a good idea at all.

  “Is it right for us to run other countries?” they asked. “We want to be free. Why shouldn’t they?”

  All the same, the British became more and more proud of their empire, and at the Great Exhibition the biggest crowds of all gathered around cocoa beans from the Caribbean and furs from Canada, ivory from Africa and India’s Koh-i-noor diamond, the biggest jewel in the world.

  As the years passed, the British took over more and more of India (which included the countries we now call Pakistan and Bangladesh). The first merchants and soldiers who went there fell in love with the place, many of them taking on Indian ways and marrying Indian wives. But as the British grew more powerful, they became arrogant. They started to believe they must be better than the people they conquered. And instead of leaving Indians to live in their own way, Christian missionaries tried to make them give up being Hindu, Muslim or Sikh, and become Christian instead.

  The Indians began to hate the British, and not long after the Crimean War they rebelled, just as the Americans had done in their War of Independence.

  The British army in India had many regiments of Indian soldiers, known as sepoys. They were proud soldiers who fought bravely, and at first their British officers didn’t notice some of them were grumbling. The problem was a new kind of bullet they had been given, whose cartridge – which they had to bite open to load their rifles – was greased with animal fat. To Muslims pig fat is unholy, while Hindus can’t touch the grease of cows. So the idea that they were touching pig or cow grease every time they loaded their rifles made the soldiers furious.

  “Trust the British not to care what we believe in!” they raged.

  And before the officers realized what was happening, three sepoy regiments mutinied, killed all the British they could find, and seized the city of Delhi. In the Red Fort in Delhi they found the last of the old Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah, living in retirement, and made him their emperor.

  “India for the Indians!” they chanted. “Drive the invaders back to the islands they came from!”

  Next they laid siege to Cawnpore and Lucknow, towns where British women and children lived alongside the soldiers. At Cawnpore the British retreated until they were crammed into a few small buildings. Fever broke out, and when they realized they couldn’t hold out any longer, they made a truce with the Indians, who agreed the survivors could take a boat down the river to safety. But as they climbed on board, the British noticed soldiers watching them from the bank, and no sooner had they cast off than the soldiers started shooting. Children screamed as bullets smashed through the thin sides of the boat. Their mothers were shot trying to protect them, while those who flung themselves into the water to escape were hacked to death. Not one of the British made it out of Cawnpore alive.

  In Lucknow things were almost as bad during the siege. There was little food for the desperate British trapped in the fort, and hardly any water. A soldier volunteered to break through the Indian lines and go for help, but it was months before the sound of bagpipes was heard and a Scottish regiment marched across the plain to rescue them.

  Unfortunately for the Indians, they had no proper leaders, for before the British came they had been ruled by the Mughals. Besides, a lot of Indian families were afraid of what would happen if India turned to war. So before long, the mutineers were defeated, and the authorities won control again.

  After the mutiny the British changed the way they ruled India, setting up a proper government instead of leaving everything to the East India Company. But they forgot that many Indians had helped end the mutiny, and began to treat all Indians with suspicion. From now on, British India would never be a contented place. Like Ireland, it had two separate races, subjects and masters, and – like the Irish – the Indians would one day rise up to challenge their conquerors again.

  Queen Empress

  TOO much power spoils people, and the British had too much power. They no longer wondered what their subjects in the empire thought of them, and were too busy enjoying themselves to care about those they governed. Every time news came of a victory in Africa or Afghanistan, they held a parade, waved flags and sang songs about how great Britain had become.

  “We’ve got the greatest empire the world has ever known!” they boasted.

  Not everything went their way. When they attacked the kingdom of the Zulus, in South Africa, the British were defeated. The survivors escaped to a ford called Rorke’s Drift, where they held out all day against the whole Zulu army. Only when reinforcements arrived did their better weapons enable them to beat the Zulu king, Cetewayo, and take over his country. Later on, they were challenged by the Boers, Dutch settlers in South Africa, who didn’t want to be part of the British Empire either.

  But still the empire went on growing. An Englishman called Cecil Rhodes took over the old capital of Harare in East Africa, and called the new country after himself – Rhodesia. It was as if Cetewayo had conquered Britain and renamed it Cetewayoland. When maps were unrolled in schoolrooms, a third of the world was marked red, the colour of the British Empire, and one in four people on earth was a subject of Queen Victoria.

  “The greatest empire the world has ever known,” the British repeated proudly.

  “And an empire,” said the new prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli, “needs an empress.”

  So he made Queen Victoria Empress of India.

  After her husband, Prince Albert, died, the queen was so grief-stricken that for years she didn’t appear in public. It was Disraeli who persuaded her to go out again, and when he suggested she become empress of India, she agreed at once.

  Victoria could not go to India to be crowned, but she sent a Viceroy to Delhi instead, and her advisers planned a lavish ceremony. Dressed in silk and covered in jewels, the Indian princes arrived on elephants to swear their oath of loyalty, while Indian regiments marched past, bands played, and the Union Jack waved in the burning heat. To the spectators, it seemed as if the British Empire really was the greatest the world had ever known.

  “And the most civilized as well,” they boasted.

  And it was true that the British built roads, railways and bridges in the countries they governed, set up schools, introduced medicine and established law courts in places that had never had them.

  Yet they could also be terribly cruel. No one knew that better than the Irish, for when disaster struck Ireland one terrible summer, the British did nothing to help.

  The Irish Famine

  IRELAND was still as poor a
s ever. Despite Dublin’s elegant streets and squares, the stink of its slums hung over the river Liffey, while in the countryside families lived in mud shacks, scraping a living out of the bogs. They didn’t have enough land to plant wheat or vegetables, or keep sheep. All they could grow were potatoes, so the Irish grew them year after year and ate them every day – potatoes for breakfast and dinner, potatoes morning and night. And when the potato crop failed, the Irish starved.

  Plants can catch diseases, just like people, and the potato disease arrived without warning. The plants came up healthily enough, but their leaves turned yellow, and whole fields began to rot as if they had been cursed. Fathers went out to fetch dinner and came back empty-handed. Children scrabbled in the mud, searching for healthy potatoes to eat, but found none. The first day they felt hungry, and the second, worse; but the plants went on dying and their hunger grew.

  Today, people in Britain and Ireland don’t know what it is like to starve. We don’t know how it feels to have an aching belly at dinner time, but no dinner to eat, so the ache grows into a pain. We don’t know what it is like to wake in the morning and find the pain still there, sharper and crueller. Children don’t know what it is like to ask their parents for food and be given nothing.

  Sometimes on television we see pictures of children starving in Africa. But the Irish famine wasn’t happening in Africa – it was only a few hundred miles from London. And the government did little to help.

  “The Irish never were good farmers,” sighed one minister.

  “Can’t they buy bread instead?” asked another.

  And they passed a law to make bread cheaper. But the Irish had no money for bread. Some of the English landowners gave them work so they could buy food, but most of the landowners never went to Ireland, didn’t know about the famine, and didn’t care what happened to the men, women and children who lived on their land.

  The famine continued until the stink of death hung over the whole island. Fields reeked of decaying potatoes; people collapsed in the street, too weak to reach home; and crows flapped over bodies lying by the roadside.

  When the famine had been going on for months and thousands had died, a group of starving villagers decided to walk to Dublin to ask the governor for help. When he looked out of the window of Dublin Castle, the governor thought he was having a nightmare, and an army of skeletons was invading the city. But as they came closer, he realized the skeletons were living people, so stooped they could hardly walk, so thin the bones cut through their flesh. And in horror he watched them sink down and die on the pavements of Dublin.

  By the time the potato famine was over, a million Irish had died of hunger. A million more had decided they didn’t want to live in a country where there was no food to eat and no chance of changing how things were run. So they walked west to the Atlantic shore, just as the Scottish highlanders had done when they were driven from their land. Crammed into leaking ships, still dying of hunger and disease, they sailed across the ocean to America in search of a better life.

  Meanwhile, the Irish who stayed behind became more determined than ever to get rid of the British and govern themselves.

  Home Rule for Ireland

  THERE seemed little chance of Ireland governing itself, even though Irish MPs did what they could to win “Home Rule”. The most determined of them was Charles Stewart Parnell. Parnell was a rich man, but he hated the way the poor suffered; he was a Protestant, but he wanted to help Catholics. He came from one of the English families who ruled Ireland – the Anglo-Irish – but longed for Irish freedom more than anyone.

  Parnell knew there weren’t enough Irish MPs to win a vote for Home Rule, so he came up with a new tactic: to disrupt the House of Commons so it wouldn’t be able to pass laws or do any other work until it agreed. He and the other Irish MPs did that by talking. Under the rules of the House of Commons, you weren’t allowed to interrupt an MP making a speech. So they talked for hour after hour, and no one could interrupt them or talk about anything except Irish Home Rule.

  At the same time, Parnell persuaded the Irish to campaign against unfair English landlords. One of the landlords had an agent, Charles Boycott, who wouldn’t pay decent wages, so all the Irish in the district stopped talking to him. When Boycott went into shops, people ignored him. When he shouted orders, they stared through him as if he wasn’t there. They went on “boycotting” his estate until it was bankrupt, and the landlord had to give in.

  Normally, if you want to change something, you persuade people to agree with you, campaign, write articles and make speeches until Parliament changes the law. But what if you live in a country that doesn’t have a parliament – a country where the law is unfair and the government won’t let you write what you believe? In that case, some people think they have no choice but to break the law, because if they don’t, nothing will ever change.

  Parnell wanted freedom for Ireland without breaking the law, but more and more Irish thought there was no chance of that.

  “If we wait for Parliament to free us,” they muttered, “we’ll wait for ever!”

  And a few went even further and turned to violence.

  One evening, the governor of Ireland was waiting in his house in Phoenix Park for two British officials to arrive for dinner. But as he stood by the window he heard a scream and saw two men running off into the trees. He went out into the park to investigate, and found the two officials’ bodies. Terrorists had murdered them.

  Violence always makes things worse. It poisons understanding, destroys trust and spreads fear. When they heard about the murders in Phoenix Park, people in Britain were so angry that they swore never to give Ireland freedom. Many in Ireland were just as outraged.

  “We want freedom,” they said, “but not through murder!”

  Parnell condemned the killings, and went on trying to win Home Rule by persuasion, not violence. At last he persuaded the prime minister, William Gladstone, to agree. Some people found Gladstone pompous, but he was passionate about freedom. He hated Disraeli bragging about the empire, because he thought everyone had the right to rule themselves – and that included the Irish.

  Unfortunately MPs in Britain were so angry about the Phoenix Park murders that even when Parnell and Gladstone proposed Home Rule together, they shouted them down.

  “We’d have to give the Indians their own parliament too!” they protested. “And then the Africans!”

  However stubbornly Gladstone and Parnell argued, they were defeated. And then Parnell got into trouble. A story came out that he had fallen in love with a woman called Kitty O’Shea, who was married to someone else. In those days people thought marriages should never be broken, so Parnell’s career was ruined.

  Because of Parnell’s affair and the murders in Phoenix Park, the last chance of freeing Ireland peacefully was lost. From now on, the story of Irish independence would be written not in words, but in blood.

  Chartists and Communists

  ALTHOUGH the British were better off than the Irish, they were still angry they didn’t have more say in their own lives. The Great Reform Act had made things fairer, but Britain still wasn’t a democracy, where everyone had an equal share in choosing the government. Most men weren’t allowed to vote, while women couldn’t vote at all.

  People didn’t mind so much in good years, but they became angry when the price of food went up so they couldn’t feed their families. Everyone knew politicians kept the price high on purpose. Because most MPs were landowners, they had passed Corn Laws (corn meant wheat and barley, from which flour was made) to stop bread being sold too cheaply. Working men joined a campaign to get the Corn Laws changed, and eventually forced Parliament to give in.

  “But it would be even better,” they said, “if we could choose the MPs who make laws in the first place.”

  So they signed a petition demanding that all men should be given the vote, poor men should be allowed to become MPs, and MPs should be divided fairly between towns. They called it the People’s Charte
r, to remind people of Magna Carta, and the men who signed became known as Chartists. However, when the Chartists sent their petition to Parliament, it was ignored.

  Today we’re so used to the idea that everyone should be allowed to vote that we don’t even think about it, but in those days aristocrats still thought it was dangerous to give a poor factory worker as much say in running the country as a lord – and others agreed. The Chartists rioted, went on strike, and prepared another charter, which three and a half million signed. Parliament ignored that as well. A third charter was drawn up, and the Chartists held a great meeting on Kennington Common in London before presenting it to Parliament. Thousands came to listen to speeches demanding the right to vote; but once again, Parliament refused to listen.

  When the charter was refused for the third time, some workers decided the only way to free themselves was by a revolution. And just then, two Germans, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx, came up with a revolutionary new way of thinking, which they called communism.

  Engels, who lived in England, made a study of the terrible conditions working people suffered in Manchester. It couldn’t be right, he thought, that factory owners became rich just by investing their money, or capital, while the men who actually did the work starved. Marx and Engels called that capitalism, and said it would be better if workers ran the factories themselves. They urged workers to start revolutions, get rid of aristocrats, abolish religion and private property, and make everyone equal. They wrote a book about their ideas called The Communist Manifesto.

  “Workers have nothing to lose but their chains,” it ended. “They have a world to win. Workers of the world, unite!”

  The idea of sharing everything sounded fair. The trouble with communism was that it meant no one would have anything that was really theirs. The government – the state – would own everything, and tell everyone what to do.