Let's Talk About The War

by Les May

SIR John Hawkins is considered the first English trader to profit from the demand for African slaves in the Spanish colonies of Santo Domingo and Venezuela in the late 16th century.  In other words he, along with Sir Francis Drake, was a slave traders as well as privateer.

From 1577 onwards Hawkins was Treasurer of the English Navy.  He rebuilt older ship and helped design newer, faster, sleeker, more manoeuvrable ‘race-built galleons’.  These were the ships that he and Drake commanded when with less than fifty ships they took on and defeated the 130 strong Spanish Armada in 1588.

The stories around this have sometimes been described as forming the ‘foundation myth’ of English identity; plucky little England standing up to more powerful bullies and giving them a ‘bloody nose’.  Nearly five hundred years later it was woven into another now British myth in Edward Shanks’ poem ‘The other little boats’ (see below)

On 13 July 1916 my uncle Tom died during the battle of the Somme, when ‘lions were led by donkeys’.  His name is on the war memorial in Littleborough near Rochdale. Somewhere in Germany there will be memorial with the name of a man who died the same day.  On the island of Tiree there is a tiny graveyard and in it are fifteen stones recording Merchant Seamen whose bodies washed up on its beaches in WW2.   Near Kiel is the Möltenort U-Boat Memorial it records the names of the 30,000 submariners who died in the same war.

In Europe we have learned to live with the knowledge that our past and those who peopled it, were imperfect.  We do not demand that the names of the U boat crew who fought for the Nazis be erased from memory.  We honour them as brave men, like we honour the imperfect men who ran up the beaches of Normandy in 1944.

It is that capacity, to not forget what happened, but also not to hold grudges about it, that gives me a sense of pride in being British.  Perhaps that is just something that my generation, who knew people on both sides who had lived through WW2 and are thankful it did not happen to them, can feel.  Particularly amongst students it seems that it is being replaced by an intolerant and puritanical insistence that only those whose views are deemed acceptable in the present should be remembered. Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

If I take a somewhat jaundiced view of this it is nothing to how I feel about those privileged academics who, no doubt with an eye on furthering their careers, have decided that ‘the sins of the fathers shall be visited upon us even unto the third and fourth generation’.  Yes, Hawkins and Drake had better watch out.

The Other Little Boats

A pause came in the fighting and England held her breath
For the battle was not ended and the ending might be death
Then out they came, the little boats, from all the Channel shores
Free men were those who set the sails and laboured at the oars.
From Itchenor and Shoreham, from Deal and Winchelsea,
They put out into the Channel to keep their country free.
Not of Dunkirk this story, but of boatmen long ago,
When our Queen was Gloriana and King Philip was our foe,
And galleons rode the narrow seas, and Effingham and Drake
Were out of shot and powder, with all England still at stake.
They got the shot and powder, they charged the guns again,
The guns that guarded England from the galleons of Spain,
And the men that helped them do it, helped them still to hold the sea
Men from Itchenor and Shoreham, men from Deal and Winchelsea,
Looked out happily from heaven and cheered to see the work
Of their grandsons' grandsons' grandsons on the beaches of Dunkirk.

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