Small naval battle; not many hurt.....

Now for something completely different.

When I was working in Malawi 50 years ago I heard the comical story of the very first British naval victory of WW1 that took place on Lake Nyasa. About 25 years later I met a contemporary when I was in Australia and we started to chat about the event; He told me that in fact he had an original copy of the eye-witness account which was written many years later and  only published in the Nyasaland Journal. He later sent me a copy which I recently dug out of my archives.

How he managed to get hold of the original is a mystery. However, I visited Mangoche in 1990 and went to the Yacht club. When the Guen was broken up the ship’s bell was hung in the club, and I guess all other memorabilia was also kept there, including  this account.

At independence these were all ‘liberated’ and I was told that the bell is now resident in a yacht club ‘somewhere in England. I guess thus was how the paper came to be preserved.

I reckon that it has seen the light of day in the past, as it may well have been the inspiration for ‘The African Queen’ and ‘Shout at the Devil’.  When my late friend George Walker owned Elstree Studios I tried to persuade him to film this, but he went pear-shaped first!

Although the story is intrinsically funny, if Rhoades had not taken out the Weismann, von Lettow-Vorbeck might well have won the East African campaign.

It is quite a long story and I have edited it only to correct spelling errors etc. It is worth persevering with.

*******************

I should state at the outset that I have written this account of the 'naval battle’, which took place on Lake Nyasa shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, entirely from memory and only in response  to numerous requests. I believe it to be substantially correct because the adventure made a great impression on me at the time and it remains in my mind's eye as a sequence of pictures; it is, however, possible that after all these years some of these may be slightly out of focus, resulting in errors of detail, in which case I crave the reader's indulgence.

I was on ulendo north of Mount Mangoche in the South Nyasa district when, on July 31st 1914, I received a telegram from Zomba ordering me to report immediately at Port Mangoche for active service.  This fort was at that time an outpost of the King's African Rifles and was occupied by a Company (four sections of 25 men) commanded by Captain Griffiths, a very able soldier whom I was destined to know very well.

When war was declared on August 6th, Griffiths marched the Company to the Bar, headquarters of the Marine Transport Department some six miles north of Port Johnston, which automati­cally became an Advanced Base from the future 'front'. We had a difficult time getting the 'artillery down the steep and rocky slopes of the mountain as specifically ordered - it consisted of two muzzle-loading cannon, seven pounders, I think. These, with one monster 9-pounder and two ancient maxims, comprised the only fire-arms other than rifles with which we cheerfully went to war.

At the Bar we joined forces with two other companies of K.A.R. under Captains Collins and Portal, and sundry very recently recruited details mostly commissioned and attached to that regiment. The N.V.R. (Nyasaland Volunteer Reserve) was still being organized in Zomba and their uniforms designed and issued} these consisted solely of two yellow shoulder straps stencilled 'N.V.R.* which were sewn to the members' own clothing.

The Marine Transport was a Government Department having the following European personnel: Commander Rhoades (Lieut. R.N.R.), Chief Officer, with Tait as his Number One, Haynes, Chief Engineer, with Urquhart and Fernandez as his assistants, and lastly, Bishop, clerk and storekeeper, later the hero of the battle of Karonga. The fleet comprised the Guendolen (so spelt) , Pioneer and Dove, in commission, with Queen Victoria  and Chauncey Maples  under charter.

Our only frontier with German East African (now Tanganyika Territory) was west of the northern end of the Lake, beginning at the mouth of the Songwe River, some 20 miles north of Karonga in the North Nyasa District which was at that time the property of the Chartered Company. This five-man station Karonga, with normally two officials and three civilians, was therefore the objective, whether for offence or defence, of Nyasaland's tiny army, and as there was no road usable by wheeled traffic and, incidentally, not half a dozen vehicles other than ox-carte, its L. of C. must perforce be by way of the Lake and this was unusable as long as any enemy ship, however lightly armed, was at large. 

The Germans had four ports on the northern half of the Lake, two of them on the flank of shipping from the south. No-one was surprised, therefore, when Rhoades received a telegram from Sir George Smith, Governor .and Commander-in-ordering him to 'sink, burn or otherwise destroy the Hermann von Weismann, the German 'gun-boat' though the belligerency of this signal was somewhat tempered by its conceding Passage, which warned Rhoades that under circumstances was he to risk the Guendolen.

The armament of the Guen consisted of a 3-pounder Hotchkiss mounted in a sponson immediately abaft the break of the fo'c'sle on the main deck and, if I remember correctly, two Nordenfeldts on the boat deck. The Weismann had only a one-pounder but this mounted on the fo'c's'le so that its field of fire more than compensated for its lack of weight.

Our 3-pounder immediately presented two problems, the whereabouts of its ammunition and the lack of a gunner; eventually Bishop found the ammo, in boxes painted a Naval grey and labelled by somebody "Spares", and Providence supplied the gunner: an assistant in the A.L.C. store at Fort Johnston volunteered the information that he had been trained as a seaman-gunner in the Clyde Division of the R.N.V.R., though he modestly admitted that he was not very sure how much he had remembered of it all.  Unfortunately I forget the name of this gallant Scot but I think he was usually called Jock. 

It so happened that while a student I had for a time been a P.O. in the London Division, R.N.V.R. and between us we were able to evolve some sort of drill for the benefit of the beaming crew supplied by Rhoades from among his "pirates".  Jock promoted himself to Gunlayer.

Normally the crew of the Guen consisted of two Europeans (Rhoades or Tait, in command, Haynes or Urquhart, engineer) and many Africans, deck-hands and stokers; most of the former were competent helmsmen who knew every inch of the Lake and could con her with their eyes shut.  When we put to see on this occasion, however, both engineers were on board, Rhoades was in command with Jock as gunner and me as surgeon, and we carried a section of askari as Marines (pro tern) under the command of Beaumont, a P.W.D. official usually known as Champagne Charlie, because he sported a monocle, recently commissioned as Second Lieut. K.A.R. (Temp).)

It must have been during the second week of August that we sailed from the Bar en-route for Nkata Bay where Rhoades hoped to be able to obtain recent news of the Weismann’s whereabouts from some of the Atonga plying to and fro across the Lake in canoes.  It was only after sailing (perhaps when wooding at Nkudzi Bay) that someone commented on the vulnerability of the main steam-pipe between boiler and engine where it rose in a graceful curve above deck. Haynes and his merry men remedied this, we hoped, by hanging some spare plates round it at different angles designed to deflect bullets.

Meantime, I, probably inspired by a former visit to Nelson's Victory, was busy converting the forward into a 'cockpit' for the reception of casualties. It contained a large number of bags of rice (crew rations) which I had piled from floor to deckhead after the manner sandbags in the hope that they would afford me at least some protection while attending the wounded on my camp bed erected under the only light, amidships.

On arrival at Nkata the most recent information obtainable was that three weeks previously the Weismann was at Sphinxhaven. almost due east of Nkata across the Lake, hauled out of the water on a slipway having some new plates fitted.  It seemed too much to expect that she could be in this undignified position but Rhoades decided that the chance, however remote, must be taken, risk or no risk; as he said, this was the deepest part of the Lake (2300 feet, 800 below sea level).

As we approached the land, now running dead slow, and turned north along the coast. Jock called my attention, quite unnecessarily I may say, to the multitude of campfires all along the shore, it looked as if the whole German army was awaiting us. Actually they were heaps of burning rubbish in the gardens.

The bay of Sphinxhaven was made into a harbour by a peninsula of huge rocks enclosing its southern part and crowned by a large boulder said by the more imaginative to resemble the Sphinx, This cape afforded us useful cover as we circled it but I for one had a sinking feeling below my belt because it afforded even better cover for machine gun or other lethal weapon in the hands of an enemy.  One shot from the veriest pip-squeak of a gun, would suffice to sink us.  The same applied to the Weismann, of course, for neither vessel was intended for other than native warfare.

As we cleared the point and swung towards the bay, the swell caught us broadside on and the Guen, wide in the beam but shallow of draught, began to roll, not really heavily but enough to embarrass an amateur gunlayer.  Then simultaneously a voice from above rapped out the order 'Open Fire, 2000 yards', and the Weismann slid into view, a sitting duck, still on the slipway. Jock belted away making a lot of noise between duds, partly owing to some overestimation of the range and partly, no doubt, to the rolling of the Guen, all the first shots that were no misfires soared away over the hills behind the target probably 'scaring the lights out of' peaceful villagers far inland.

The ammunition was Victorian in date and about one in four was dud so that when Jock found that none exploded during the period of waiting, before opening the breech decreed by the Lords of the Admiralty, he soon dispensed with that formality altogether though he barked at his crew if they delayed in dumping a misfire overboard. Then without warning, just as Beaumont had strolled over to offer advice Jock scored a hit on the slip, a shower of splinters went up and everyone cheered,

That was the only score - a bye, so to speak, for immediately afterwards a small white dinghy put off from the shore, in which was a European clad in a single and a pair of shorts pulling furiously straight for the :Guen.  Rhoades ordered ‘Cease Fire" and a blessed silence fell.  It was his drinking pal, the skipper of the Weismann with whom every meeting was a party. The accommo­dation ladder was lowered and Rhoades descended from the bridge to receive him at the gangway.

The Dinghy came alongside and. its infuriated occupant, having flung his oars into the boat, leaped to his feet and shaking both fists above his head, exclaimed, ‘Gott for damn, Rhoades, vos you drunk?

The news that Der Tag had arrived had not yet reached him.

Rhoades invited him aboard and as he stepped on deck we onlookers moved in behind him, forestalling any complication such as an attempted escape.  When Rhoades informed him rather apologetically that he was a prisoner, one could sec his anger turn to horror as he realised his fatal mistake? he seemed to shrivel and allowed Rhoades to usher him up the ladder and into a cabin without a word.  We all felt very sorry for him, and Rhoades as well for that matter.

The Guen was very vulnerable where she lay at anchor close to the shore and Beaumont picked the ridge bordering the "beach with his askari: if any troops had happened to be on their way to occupy the port they would now be advancing at the double to investigate the cause of all the noise. Meantime Haynes and his engine-room staff were swarming round the Weismann, inside and out, dismantling every removable part, each being grabbed, passed to the waiting deckhands and dumped aboard the Geun. 

At the same time some miscreants were wandering about in search of souvenirs which might otherwise fall into the hands of the locals after our departure. I secured the clock in the chartroom and a very good one it proved to be.  Every single African in the immediate vicinity of the Weismann had vanished at the first cannon shot but the German engineer was discovered under Ms African-type bedstead in the grass shack in which he and his Captain had been living for coolness sake.  He offered no resistance when winkled out, and was put into the bag.

We returned to Nkhata that afternoon in order to wood and also to send a telegram from the Company's office to Chinteche. Rhoades detailed Beaumont and me to draft the message and after obtaining his approval to put it into code, using the old-fashioned book whose contents were doubtless known in all parts of Europe.  All I remember of his signal is that the first sentence read, 'Weismann taken completely by surprise', and that 'silver-grey' mean 'stop’.

We learnt later that anything our message lacked in drama was supplied by Fleet Street for it arrived during the black days prior to the Marne and was splashed as ‘Naval Victory on Lake Nyasa' even in the sober Times.

Imperial echoes..........

I have read a number of reviews of a new book about the British Empire. The writer is a young guy of Ghanaian parentage. He is public school and Oxbridge, a Tory MP and a rising star. What fun it would be if the first black PM was black! He says that being black and 6ft 4ins he is easily noticed by the Speaker!

But I shall not buy the book. I have more personal experience of how the Empire was run than he does because I have lived it. I have little patience with people who pontificate about stuff when they have no experience. Only the other day an ‘expert’ was pontificating about the Cape Coloureds being the offspring of unions between Afrikaners and the Bushman aka San people. Complete bollox! They are a mixture of black, white and SE Asian. Afrikaans was originally the language of the Cape Coloureds when the ‘Hollanders’ spoke Old Dutch. The San were treated as vermin by white and black alike. They were driven off their ancestral hunting grounds and had to take refuge in some of the most inhospitable country in Africa, the Kalahari and the Great Namib deserts. They are now being persecuted in Botswana, but this being black-on-black nobody much cares.

It seems that his general theme is that the wicked men who ran the Empire were a bunch of overbearing, bullying snobs who treated their subjects with contempt. Not so in my experience.

He only deals with Nigeria when writing about Africa, although Africa was the main continent of colonial administration. And it was not typical in that basically it was governed on a minimalist basis as in India.

In my experience the people who really administered the African colonies were the District and Assistant District Commissioners. They were extremely able, dedicated and resourceful people. They led lives that were often very isolated, with maybe 3 whites – the DC, ADC and a Police Inspector - manning a ‘boma’ hundreds of miles in the bush. They were required to become fluent in the local language within 6 months or it was ‘on your bike’. The ‘sleeping dictionary’ was often the chosen avenue of instruction. If they got posted to different colonies at the end of each 3-year tour they became very multi-lingual and often very fed up!

The DC was administrator, magistrate, engineer, arbitrator, and much else besides. His wife was often school-teacher, medic and general factotum. They were not allowed to get married until they were 26; but they were expected to find a wife on their first long home leave (6 months).

On first arrival in the colonial capital, the new ADC would be given a horse and baggage train and told to push off into the bush and find his boma maybe a 100 miles or more away. The DC frequently went off on ulendo – a tour of his district to collect taxes, resolve disputes, dispense justice etc. It is reputed that the role of the ADC was to minister to the needs of Mrs DC whilst the boss was away, but that might be merely anecdotal.

Their living conditions were pretty basic – no electricity, cooking over a wood-burning stove, water from a borehole, sanitation via a pit latrine. And no tarmac roads; in fact few roads of any kind.

Their shared characteristic was their dedication to their people, and the unshakeable integrity of their administration.

What is not appreciated is that in essence most of the Empire lasted only the span of a single lifetime. Let’s take Malawi as an example, as this was one of the countries in which I lived during colonial times.

Wikipedia says it was colonised in 1891. It wasn’t. It became a protectorate in 1891 at the request of the tribal chiefs to protect them from the ravages of slave-traders, Arabs in the north, Portuguese in the south. To show how short was the colonial era, I met an old askari at the veterans’ home in Zomba who had taken part in the last battle against the slavers at Fort Johnston in  the 1890s. I have a photo of Jumbe, the leader of the slavers, with his entourage, all with firearms. He reneged on the peace-deal after the battle and Harry Johnston promptly hanged him!

I also met  an ancient clergyman, Canon Winspear, who had accompanied a missionary ship,  the ‘Chauncey Maples’ which was portered in sections from Beira to Lake Nyasa at about the same time. The ship is still there.

In 1891 the entire colonial administration consisted of only 10 people. If the locals had been unhappy with the way they were governed the 10 would have lasted about as many minutes. Independence came 73 years later.

There was never any large scale white settlement and the early settlers, such as they were, bought their land from the tribal chiefs. Typically, the first brick building in Blantyre, the commercial capital was the Blantyre sports club, then the magnificent church of St Michael and All Angels together with the Henry Henderson Institute, a secondary school for African boys. All these actually preceded the establishment of British rule, so the mazungu obviously has a pretty good relationship with the Africans.

Those who criticise the colonialists for exploiting but not developing Africa should ask themselves how much it takes to bring people up to modern standards who often had not progressed as far as the invention of the wheel or formal written language. For example, in the late 1950’s my brother-in-law, who was an Inspector in the Northern Rhodesia Police, was tasked with moving a small tribe (called the Batonka, I think) out of the Zambezi valley as the waters rose from the construction of the Kariba Dam. He found himself at the receiving end of the last impi charge in colonial history.

Afterwards, they had to be persuaded to wear clothes; it was so hot in the valley that they had never been necessary.

This is very untypical, of course. The marvellous Great Zimbabwe is an architectural masterpiece that could only have been created by a sophisticated civilisation. The problem is it had long since disappeared by the time the whites arrived in 1890. We don’t know who they were or what happened to them, but my guess is that the population simply outgrew the food supply. We do know that the Portuguese were mining there for gold in the 16^th century.

Race discrimination? Plenty, but it was mostly social rather than political and at a time when you would still see ’No coloured, no Irish, no dogs’ signs in UK and USA, so this was a reflection of the era. And American military units were still segregated, and ‘coloreds’ made to sit at the back of the bus at a time when most colonies were free. Oddly enough, it was the memsahibs who were most colour-prejudiced. India is not a topic of mine, but I understand that discrimination scarcely existed in the early days, and intermarriage even the most exalted levels was completely acceptable. It was only when the ‘fishing fleet’ of young women looking for husbands began to arrive in India that it became frowned upon but not eliminated.

One very noticeable factor was that wives freshly out from the UK started off by fawning over their poor, downtrodden African domestics and ended up virulent racists, whereas the old-timers rubbed along quite easily. Personal relationships were much more complex than they would appear at first sight. For example, I met a old guy some years ago who had arrived in Nyasaland in 1944 as an Agricultural Extension Officer, mentoring Africans in improved agricultural techniques. He stayed on after independence.

When he first arrived he took on a ‘kitchen toto’, a small boy who helped around the house; 45 years later they were still together. He told me that every Xmas he will tell the ‘boy’ that it was time he retired and each time the reply was ‘But who will look after you?’ and that was the end of the conversation for another year. The relationship was no more ‘master and servant’ than Jeeves and Wooster.

The book maintains that colonial policy was made on the hoof and that this was a reason for post-colonial chaos. Rubbish. The chaos in India after independence was not caused by the Raj but by the lack of it. Partition was the cause; this only came onto the agenda late in the day because Ali Jinnah threatened to derail the negotiations otherwise. It was always contemplated that there would be one India. In any case, India as a nation did not exist before the Raj; it was a collection of fairly small states ruled by maharajahs and such. Britain created it.

There was no post-colonial chaos in British Africa, but only chronic and serious misgovernment that continues to this day. You can’t blame colonialism for your problems half a century on. The population of Africa has mostly been born into ‘freedom’, and that includes freedom to make a complete balls of things.

And colonial policy was admirably clear. It was that the interests of the native population were pre-eminent, and that they were to be encouraged to develop at their own pace and in their own way. The French, of course, tried with some success to convert their Africans into Frenchmen.

As for Britain ‘dashing for the exits’, as is suggested, the decolonisation process actually took 35 years.

The whole justification reminds me of John Cleese in ‘Life of Brian. ‘What did the Romans ever do for us? Apart from law and order, water, roads, sanitation, sport.......’

The Brits did all these things, the big difference being that the Romans had 1000 years and we had about 80.

My firm belief is that the British Empire was the greatest civilising mission since the Romans.

Our enduring legacy was the English common law and the English language. Imagine trying to get on in this day and age speaking only Chichewa, Bemba or Yao.

Oh to be in England.

Back again in the Land of the Falling Rain after a brief trip to England. Fortunately it was fine on IOM all week so the blasted motor bike races went off on schedule, otherwise we would not have been able to get from the airport to home as the buggers are authorised to close the circuit roads up to 9 p.m. if rain delays the start of a race. And we left England in shirt sleeves and today it’s –yes – raining here.

Only two bikers killed this year. One was a 71-year old competitor; the old fool should have been home with his grandchildren.

We had several memorable lunches, including one of my favourite venues, The George at Stamford, a fine old coaching inn that still has separate lounges marked ‘London’ and ‘York’ from  the days when the stage coaches used to stop there. The outcome was that in five days I managed to gain 3 lbs.

Impressions? This was our first trip to UK for a couple of years apart from our week-end garden party outing to Yorkshire in May 2010. Forget all the doom-and-gloom stories about UK being on the bones of its arse; prosperity shouts at you. The smallish town where we stayed has every  major retail outlet and the ones we visited were crowded with affluent-looking shoppers. The parking areas where our son lives are replete with up-scale SUVs, BMWs and the like; never a banger to be seen.

Dress styles have changed in the last ten years since we lived there. From scruffy-chic it is now sexy-chic. England is full of stunning women who know it and dress the part. How times have changed! When I was at school 60 years ago, there were perhaps two girls in the whole school who just made it as ‘pretty’. The rest were dogs. And with few exceptions they were all totally flat-chested. Today even the 14 year-olds are bustin out all over.

The gorgeous gal who sold me a couple of shirts had the most amazing tan. I commented that she sure didn’t get that in Huntingdon. She said she sure didn’t and gave me a whopping discount. There are Mediterranean tans everywhere, suggesting that hard times have not stopped the annual exodus to Spain. And it is reported that the average British woman has 34 pairs of shoes.

But the world continues on its dotty way.

As we predicted, the Great Storm was a bit of a wash-out. That didn’t stop the loonytoons from saying it was all Obama’s fault or that it was God’s, as a punishment for out wicked, wicked ways. Shades of the puritans and the Salem Witch Trials!

And Big Brother Watch has just released the top ten dottiest Elf ‘n  Safety bans of the year. Here they are:

1.Murray Mount closed at Wimbledon because of rain
2. Butlins ban on dodgem cars from bumping into each other
3. A ban on Royal wedding street parties
4. The removal of a bulky TV from a pensioner’s home
5. Carnivals with fancy dress parades
6. Kite flying on a popular tourist beach in east Yorkshire
7. Stopping pupils from going on playground monkey bars
8. Using pins to secure commemorative poppies
9. School football games without a sponge ball
10. Children banned from the sack race on sports day.

How to post comments..........

We post on both this site and on My Telegraph. We get plenty of comments on My T but none on here. People have said that the comment facility is not user-friendly and that you have to register to post a comment.

Not so.

If you scroll down to the bottom of the post there is a very small note that says 'o comments' or '1 comment' or whatever.

Click on this and the  comment box comes up. You can now write and post your comment. Ignore everything else on the page.

If you don't see this, go down a bit more and you will see 'post a comment'. Then just click 'publish comment' after you have written it - and that's it!

Easy peasy! Alternatively,  bring up the Daily Telegraph,  scroll down  the bottom of the page, click 'My Telegraph and up come the blog sites of everyone posting.

'You're dead; it was in the news!'

Both Haymakers were working together in Kingston, Jamaica, on a project that was being carried out by a firm of German consultants, the MD of which was Dr Dewdrop (for want of a better name). He told us his favourite traveller’s tale.

His speciality was trade missions to ‘developing’ countries, and on one assignment he was covering the Caribbean with a party of about 20 fellow Germans.

They were due to depart from Cuba to Jamaica on a commuter flight, but when they arrived at check-in they were told that they had all been  bumped to the next flight some hours later because their flight was over-booked. Dr D remonstrated that his could not possibly be correct because they had booked every seat months ago.

The authorities were adamant. They were going on the later flight, no arguments.

They eventually arrived at their hotel in Kingston in the early hours of the morning. Dr D followed his usual practice of phoning his wife to report his safe, if late, arrival. It would now be about 9 a.m. in Germany.

When his wife answered the phone, she said ‘Who is calling?’ ‘It’s me, you silly old hausfrau’ he replied (or words to that effect).

‘But this is not possible’ she replied ‘You are dead!’ (Dr D did not disclose whether there was a note of disappointment in her voice), ‘It was in the news’.

The plane had crashed into the Caribbean shortly before landing at Kingston, with no survivors.

It later transpired that the plane had been carrying a bomb. The Germans must have been bumped to make way for a VIP. But somebody wanted him out of the way.

When Dr D met up with the rest of the party, his first action was to advise them all to phone home immediately.

This was not the end of their drama.

They were put on a BA flight out of Kinston heading for London. Dr D had a window seat overlooking the wing. About a half-hour into the flight, he looked out of the window just in time to see an engine explode!

They made an emergency landing at an airport that was not equipped for ground-handling passengers on a 747, so they had to stay on board for the considerable time it took to replace the engine.

As a footnote to this, and in(almost) similar vein, he told me that when he was Mayor of his city, he had to deal with the Case of the the Deceased Pensioner.

An old lady arrived to collect her pension at the Rathaus. It was refused. When she asked for a reason she was told that it was because she was dead. Her corporeal presence made no impression upon the official. He had her death certificate in front of him so, according to the regulations, she had definitely snuffed it.

Dr D solved the impasse when he discovered that another woman of the same name and age was the real ex-pensioner. But rules is rules!

Hillary: a Texas take.......

Your article from The American Thinker was fun to read and reflects much of my thinking. Many people believe Hillary will run for President, but I do not as it would be very difficult for her to win the nomination. Nor am I sure she wants to run as she looks burnt out. The author claims she enjoys very high ratings. I don't see them. Nor do I pay much attention to ratings as they are highly subject to bias and fluctuate from day to day. My take is that Hillary is in hiding as Secretary of State. She has not captured much air time and when she does, it is often because she screwed up.

 One of the flaws of democracy is that of tyranny against minorities. We see it big time in the so called democratic states in the third world where majority tribes win elections

Doomsday, anybody?

Armageddon is upon us. Earthquakes, floods, droughts and now the hurricane of the century. Then again, we may be living in quite normal times while victimized by the media and everyone who uses it.

I do believe that before long, and according to the media, you can help us out as the US is but a step away from poverty. Perhaps as a member of the third world, we could benefit from foreign aid and possibly even migrate somewhere. I hear the UK is accepting outsiders.

  

The shelves are bare in our east coast produce stores as residents have hoarded water, food, batteries, generators and related survival kit. Wal-Mart and others are claiming record sales. Just what we need for a speedy economic recovery. I suppose that after Irene our population will have been so decimated that there will be jobs enough for everybody including illegal immigrants from Mexico and legal ones from Somalia.

Needless to say, everyone is glued to the TV or radio in anticipation of real time reports on the devastation predicted from Irene. One of our notorious talk show hosts, Sean Hannity, asked one climatologist for an assessment of how New York's skyscrapers will fare during the storm and to what extent will bricks begin to fall from them. Unbelievable! Sean appears on 'fair and balanced' Fox News for which we have Mr. Murdoch to thank.

One bright ray of hope is that O decided to terminate his much publicized holiday a day early in order to be on hand to coordinate military and civilian relief efforts. One might also suspect that he wanted to leave early in order to land Air Force 1 before the Washington airports closed.  Speaking of which, a national debate is occurring as I write over the condition of the Washington Monument. You may recall this tall white obelisk towering over the area surrounding the White House.

The recent earthquake in Virginia is said to have caused the Monument to crack in one, or a few or several places depending on which expert one listens to. We may well dedicate next year's foreign aid budget to having it repaired. If so, we might conclude that a) development in the third world will accelerate beyond measure and b) the Washington Monument as the beneficiary of so much aid will rot and decay.

The Central Texas prairie is told to expect temperatures of 108F tomorrow.

The DT today contains no news at all of any importance or relevance. It mirrors our media caution about Irene and features some no-name editorialists going on about no-brain subjects. It is now certain that the assassin of PC Yevonne Fletcher may be known. This is according to an eye witness who may have recognized a young diplomat firing a machine gun from a window in the Libyan Embassy.  Perhaps the SAS can pick him up along with the freed Pan Am bomber. It would not surprise me if both were granted visas.

If doomsday is not here, most of us are in a doomsday mood as you can well see from the tone of this. We really need something to pick us up from the economic and political doldrums in which we find ourselves.

Fast buck.....

I wrote a piece for the DT in 1989. This was election time. I was returning  officer for the Parliamentary Elections, and the DT phoned me at home early one morning and asked if I would write a piece called ‘My Election’ for the op-ed page. They wanted 1000 words and they wanted it in the next 20 minutes! They said I could dictate it to a copy-taker. So I duly obliged.

The guts of my piece concerned my small but beautifully formed friend, Arthur, who was also a Returning Officer. Arthur’s main interest in life was racing. We were both at a meeting in Mayfair but as it dragged on I noticed that he was getting very agitated. When I asked what was up, he said that he had the 3 candidates’ £500 cash deposits in his brief case and he was on to an 8 to 1 certainty in the 1 o’clock at Fakenham races.

Incredulous, I said ‘Arthur, surely to God you are not going to put £1,500 of the candidates’ money on a nag?’

At a few minutes to 1 o’clock the meeting  broke up and we dashed across the road to the ‘Horse and Groom’ pub opposite to get the result from the Irish landlord who was also a turf addict. Too late! And the bloody horse won!

The question I later posed was if Arthur had managed to lay his bet who should have collected – him or the candidates?

The candidates had not gambled, so how could they be entitled to the winnings? The money Arthur put at risk was not his, so how could he be entitled to profit?

What would Albert Haddock made of it?

Actually the real winner was me. A few days later I got a cheque from the DT for £600, the fastest buck I have ever made!

More relevant to our own times, I read in the Eye that the ‘rolling comment factory’, the DT Blogs which hosts Janet Daley, Norman Tebitt and other luminaries has introduced a ‘culling’ mechanism. The writers are judged not by the quality of their posts but by the number of hits that they get, which as we know has a very high proportion of people who are – shall we say – a little disturbed. Anyone who stays in the lowest 25% gets a warning and after another 3 months they get the boot. Hardly conducive to rational argument and much more likely to encourage sensational headlines and barmy rants. According to a DT source, Delingpole is always in top spot ‘because he really is batshit mad!’

Famine in Africa? Quelle surprise!

As I predicted a week or so ago, we are now getting the tear-jerking, withers-wringing appeal for aid to starving Somalis. There’s Angela Rippon on radio (remember her?) telling us with breathy urgency that unless we open our wallets now Amina’s starving waif will die of hunger, thirst, and general shortage of breath.

So what are the realities?

First, Somalia is not a country. It is a geographical concept. It has no government, no recognisable administration, no law and order, no public safety, nothing that comprises ‘the state’. It has been engaged in apocalyptic fighting between rival clans and between religious fanatics for almost ever. There are no goodies and baddies here; only baddies and baddies.

So who will administer the feeding programmes?

The locals? If so I would not rate highly the prospects of the food getting to the neediest.

The aid agencies? It is difficult to see how it would be wise or safe or even possible to deploy foreign aid workers in all the current circumstances, so distribution would have to be done by locals. See above.

And then Somalia is not short of money.  It has a highly profitable shipping industry in which foreign shipping companies pay huge sums of money to get their ships back. It is sitting on billions of dollars-worth of ships pending settlement with the owners. If it has to spend money on food it will have less to spend on terrorism and funding Al Qaeda.

Now I see that Wateraid has climbed on the bandwagon. Twenty-odd years ago I worked very closely with Wateraid on an EU-sponsored committee aimed at water development in poor countries. It was the charity of the water industry that makes vast profits, and the charity projects were funded entirely by the water companies. So what are they now doing by begging off the public?

Perhaps the needs of Somalis could be met by their co-religionists, as they conspicuously failed to do in the Pakistan flooding.

It would seem that there is not too much concern in neighbouring Ethiopia, where it hasn’t rained for 18 months. One million people are in need of water plus 100,000 Somali refugees.

The government is anxious to privatise the state breweries, the likely buyer being Heineken for $164 million. They use vast quantities of water and so have been given exclusive rights to the only efficient deep well in the region but the local population is rationed. The regime has also abrogated colonial-era treaties governing the water flow in the Nile and has embarked on a major programme of dam-building, not primarily for water supply but for power.

Egypt and Sudan are not best pleased.

The Thin Blue Line......

Reverting to the eternal debate on the effectiveness of policing in the UK which has reached a crescendo as a result of ‘the riots’ (and the reports that left me highly tickled that nobody except Sir Hugh Orde wants the top job at the Met but nobody wants Hugh Orde), there is a weekly TV show called ‘Police Interceptors’, the cream of the Essex Constabulary who are equipped with super-fast rally cars full of amazing electronics that can tell what you had for breakfast. Their task is to apprehend hard-case villains who also have fast motors.

So how are they doing?

Often they use several cars and a helicopter to catch criminals who have committed a string of serious offences – robbery with violence, burglary, car theft, etc. And what happens afterwards when the cases come to court? Why, community service orders, suspended 3-month prison sentences and the rest. Never any porridge.

This week they gave chase, in two cars, of a driver who was very dangerous, weaving from lane to lane on the motorway, exceeding 100 m.p.h in crowded traffic – the full monty. They eventually trapped him in the fast lane, about as dangerous as it gets. The driver was extremely violent and it took 4 cops to subdue him and handcuff him to the Armco barrier. On searching the car they found a large quantity of class A drugs. So quite a charge sheet there, you would think – dangerous driving, refusing to stop, resisting arrest, possession of illegal substances, for starters.

And what happened when they got him down the nick? Why, he got a police caution!

Other highlights included using a police helicopter at about £1000 an hour to chase a couple of youths joy-riding in a VW which they had ‘taken and driven away’, and an emergency call-out to a leaking tap in a flat (normally the role of a plumber who at least wouldn’t have smashed the door down with a police battering-ram) and to round-off an eventful night the Sergeant dropped his handcuffs down a drain.

How different in the old days. I keep a collection of press cuttings from long ago that amused me. Here is a sample.

‘Detective Sergeant Farr said ‘It is highly probable that my closed fists might have come into contact with his face’, but he denied deliberately punching Mr Rose’. 

‘PC Alcock denied using any violence. He said he could explain the fact that polish found on the zip of the accused’s trousers was identical to that on his shoe’.

‘A police officer kicked a man so hard that the sole of his boot came off, it was claimed in Leeds County Court. The man was accused of criminal damage to a police boot’.

Evenin’, all!

The good old days - an American view.......

I just read Janet Daley's column and as usual was impressed. She does, however, gold plate sentences that would be more  powerful if plainly inked. She has a point. Namely, that the recent riots were the product of a society that has lost respect for almost everything decent such as authority, law, humanity, tradition and so on. She is adamant that, as some observers are want to conclude, the riots are not the result of class war and the logical conclusion of the liberal, socialist and welfare state.

The American right jumped on this conclusion with delight as it gave them an object example, however erroneous, of what the USA will come to under the likes of Obama and his liberal henchmen. Your riots were politicized here to the propagandistic advantage of the far right and a lot of Americans swallowed it hook, line and sinker. This perspective was followed with the caution that in all probability, the USA will be the next host of proletarian riots.

The greater truth is that something is seriously wrong. The political, social and cultural anarchy precipitated by changing values during the 60's has fostered a motherless society. Your were absolutely correct in your observation that the past was a different country.

Your first trek to Africa in 1959 marked my first trek to England and the British Isles. I landed wide-eyed and alone in Southampton after a stormy crossing. Initial impressions remain strong. One was the presence of bombed-out houses and buildings. Another was an almost total lack of color. A third was the apparent poverty; by contrast with the US. I vividly recall sheep in the meadows sporting black sooty coats, tiny cars, and yet a refreshing sense of tidiness. People queued, streets walkways were free of debris, greengrocers and butchers neatly displayed their goods. It was a Sunday and as I walked aimlessly around Southampton I saw young boys, identically clad in sweaters and short pants, playing soccer on lush greens. Above all, nobody was in a hurry. Tradition appeared to dominate and dictate pace, destination and comportment. Nobody seemed to notice I was there.

Your characterization of the village bobby could have been taken from the streets of New York or Boston. Big, friendly, strict, unarmed and Irish. They knew instinctively if a neighborhood denizen had done something wrong. And often a stern glare was enough to rectify the misdemeanor. That is all gone now. Modern sentinels are rigged up with technical hardware, deadly weapons and a host of crime-fighting gadgets that are at once intriguing and frightening.

  

As for censorship, you were not alone. I guess we would have needed to visit the Continent to be free of that and all that. My parents posted a list of all the current films on a cabinet door and each was rated by what was called The Legion of Decency. I too wondered how members of this legion remained untainted by the much flaunted evils of the films they rated. In any case, we scrupulously adhered to the ratings and avoided those tainted by the devil. Words like sex were banned from TV as were images of pregnant women. Housewives were normally portrayed as extremely happy and content women who cleaned house and cooked in a blouse and skirt, tasteful jewelry and a new coif with not a hair out of place.

There was also the terror of politics in the form of our hunt for Communists in the workplace, schools and universities, homes and in the arts, including the film industry. I was too young and immature to understand the dynamics of Sen. Joe McCarthy's witch hunt, but I intuited a few things; Joe was not a good person, Communists were bad people, I pitied Individuals interrogated by Joe and his minions, and the Soviet Union was evil incarnate. Those were the days, as you so quaintly noted, before Doris Day became a virgin.

Unquestionably, you and your lot in the UK had it much worse. I think Western Europe was even better off in the decade or so after WWII. Subsequently, milk and honey flowed like never before in Western history. Those born into this lifestyle never knew anything different and took our well-being for granted. Enter masters of the universe and those sufficiently void of social responsibility to amass fortunes, or do nothing, as long as it suited them.