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 breathFor 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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