The Three Kingdoms and the First Civil War:

Though they are usually referred to as the English Civil Wars, the wars of the 1640s and early ’50s are more accurately described by the name used by generations of Irish historians – ‘the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. The economically dominant gentry and merchants of south-east England, East Anglia and East Midlands, including most of the English ports, generally opposed the king, while the royalist support was strongest in the poorer and more peripheral west and north of England, as well as in Wales. After winning the ‘Bishops’ Wars’ of 1639-40 against the King, the Scots then remained neutral before the Presbyterian ‘Covenanters’ took to the field in support of the English Parliament in 1644. Charles I’s strategy of using both royalist Protestants and rebel Catholics, together with Montrose’s royalist Scots, linked the three kingdoms together in their struggles against the Stuarts, which turned against the king in 1644, culminating in his loss of York in July.

The Drudgery of it all – War Weariness:

By the winter of 1644-5, the first ‘English Civil War’ was already more than two years old, and it was clear by the end of the long and hard-fought campaigning season that if the parliament was to win in the field against the forces loyal to Charles I, it must concentrate its resources and reorganise its armies. But though this imperative was obvious, the obstacles to carrying it into effect were formidable. The overall commander of the armies, the Earl of Essex, although recently defeated, still had powerful friends and allies and remained popular with all who hoped, as he did, for a negotiated peace with the King. Sir William Waller, a seasoned campaigner in the Thirty Years’ War on the continent, had once seemed a plausible alternative commander since he had shown a far stronger fighting temperament. But the battle of Cropredy Bridge, fought near Banbury at the end of June 1944 (see the map below), and the second battle of Newbury, at the end of October, had exposed serious limitations in his generalship, and by his own admission, he had become so perfectly tired with the drudgery of the military command that he was ready to lay it down.

As for the Earl of Manchester, whose Eastern Association had once been the great hope of the war party, he had been so reluctant to engage in sorties against the royalists that a running quarrel had developed between him and Cromwell, his Lieutenant-General. Following the failures of the 1644 Campaign, there had been a concerted effort to remove Manchester from the command of the Eastern Association. The conflict between Cromwell and Manchester had begun in early 1644. Religion, as well as political views, played an important role in the dispute. In a Statement by an Opponent of Cromwell, it was claimed that, like Cromwell, …

… Colonels Montague, Russell, Pickering, and Rainsborough’s regiments (are) all of them professed Independents, entire.

Both Manchester and Major-General Crawford, his strongest supporter, were ardent Presbyterians, at least in a political sense. Cromwell had had a famous row with Crawford, the Scottish commander of the infantry in Manchester’s army in March 1644, when the latter arrested the lieutenant-colonel of his own regiment and sent him up to headquarters, apparently because he was unwilling, as a Baptist, to sign the ‘Covenant’, the agreement to impose the Scots’ system of church government on England. It was hardly the place of the lieutenant-general of Horse to rebuke the major-general of the infantry for disciplining a subordinate officer who was not complying with the law as laid down by parliament, but that was what Cromwell did, and in writing:

Sir, the state, in choosing men to serve them, takes no notice of their opinions; if they be willing faithfully to serve them, that satisfies … Take heed of being sharp … against those to whom you can object little but that they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion.

Matters of Religion – High Churchmen, Puritans & ‘tub-thumpers’:

It is difficult to overstate the importance that matters of religion played as a backdrop to both the military campaigns and the debates in parliament. As Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Charles I and his bishops had angered the Puritans, or Calvinists, within it, by giving their support to a group of High Church clergy called Arminians, who supported the Stuart doctrine of the ‘Divine Right of Kings.’ Laud ‘s enforcement of High Church ceremonies and his persecution of Puritans had aroused the passionate anger of the Puritan middle class. Besides, the Stuarts’ pro-Catholic foreign policy aroused suspicions that they were ‘closet’ Catholics at a time when most Englishmen and lowland Scots had a fanatical hatred of ‘Papists’. The Church of England still remained the established national church requiring all the king’s English subjects to attend for communion every week. As the ‘Anglican’ Church, often referred to the ‘Episcopalian’ Church in Presbyterian-controlled Scotland, it retained bishops and archbishops and also continued to derive much of its iconography, liturgy and teaching from the traditional Catholic model. Its greatest defendant in this was Archbishop Laud, who by the beginning of 1645 had lain in the Tower of London for over three years before parliament, at the insistence of the Scots, had proceeded with his impeachment in March 1644.

As the proceedings dragged on into the autumn, it became doubtful whether the remnant of the House of Lords still in attendance at Westminster would convict Laud of treason, so the Commons switched to an ordinance of attainder, for which they no longer needed the King’s assent. They sent it up to the Lords on 22 November but despite pressure from the London mob the peers held out against passing it until 4 January. The seventy-one-year-old prelate was then beheaded on Tower Hill, although he had long ceased to be a threat to the parliament. The malignity with which it pursued him to death, largely as an act of revenge for the brutal persecution that they had suffered at his hands, in the 1620s and ’30s, is a mark of the power of the adversaries of Episcopalianism, who were often lumped together under the single nomenclature ‘puritan’, but, in reality, they were very diverse in their beliefs.

The most influential puritans in Parliament were the Presbyterians, who had been predominant in Scotland since the time of the return of the reformer, John Knox, from John Calvin’s Geneva. They also existed both inside and outside the Church of England and their aim was to replace its episcopalian structure with a system of presbyteries, something like local church committees, and regional ‘synods’. Their brand of Protestantism was very strong in the House of Commons and its adherents hoped to use Parliament to enforce its doctrine upon the Chuch of England and upon the whole population of England and Wales. The Independents were opposed to both the Episcopalians and to the Presbyterians. They did not believe that either the King or Parliament should dictate how they should worship. Among their numbers were Baptists, Congregationalists and Quakers, together with a large number of sects. The single point of agreement between them was that there should be a separation between the Church and the State, though many, like Cromwell himself, wanted there to continue to be a national church in both England and Scotland, though with the local congregations able to choose their own ministers.

But whilst Royalists tended to be Episcopalian, Parliament was solidly Presbyterian and the Army was largely Independent in religion and increasingly radical in its politics, some puritans supported the King and some Episcopalians who opposed him. Also, as the war dragged on, there were Independents, increasingly ‘pacifist’ in perspective, who wanted to reach an ‘agreement’ with the King. Much also depended on the social ‘orders’ to which people belonged. But war-weariness in the country at large and divisions at Westminster were further impediments to the forging of the means of victory. The previously strong ‘middle group’ in Parliament were finding it increasingly difficult to hold together a solid parliamentarian centre together in support of the war effort while fending off the defeatest ‘peace party’ on the one hand and a disruptively radical tendency on the other.

York to Westminster: Presbyterians v Independents:

During the winter of 1643-44, as both sides looked for military allies, John Pym, the puritan leader in the House of Commons negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant with the Scots, which was then enacted by parliament. Scotland’s leaders saw that a victory for Charles in England would doom their Presbyterian revolution, so they abandoned their neutrality in favour of an alliance with the English Parliament in January 1644. Meanwhile, Charles sought further reinforcements from Ireland, but their military value was not worth the damage that his willingness to accept Catholic support did to his cause in England and Scotland. This resulted in the military intervention of the Scots on the side of the English Parliament.

Reinforced by Scottish forces under Alexander Leslie, the Yorkshire Army of Lord Thomas Fairfax and the Eastern Association cavalry commanded by Oliver Cromwell decisively defeated the main royalist army under the King’s nephew Prince Rupert and the earl of Newcastle at Marston Moor on 2 July. Cromwell’s cavalry proved its worth and the ‘cavaliers’ lost the North of England. But in the West Midlands, the Welsh marches and the South-West, Charles was still on the offensive. An attempt by parliamentary forces under the Earl of Essex to capitalise on the success in the north by invading the West Country was heavily defeated at Lostwithiel in Cornwall in August. The picture below shows Restormel Castle, which was captured by Grenville.

Throughout 1644, parliament increasingly tended to polarise between two parties, which came to be commonly referred to as the ‘Presbyterians’ and the ‘Independents’. As the nomenclature implied, religious differences had much to do with this division, but religion was never the sole cause of it and labels were partly misleading. In Parliament, the old middle group and the original war party coalesced as Independents, covering a broad political spectrum, so that they were not homogeneous. The Presbyterians included the old peace party, though some who were Presbyterian in religion remained strongly committed to the war effort. The political differences between the ‘parties’ at this stage have often been exaggerated, for neither was contemplating a post-war settlement that would exclude the king. Cromwell, Saye and other leading Independents were still seeking for a means to reinstate the king on safe and honourable conditions more than three years later, before the Second Civil War.

Charles attempted to retrieve his fortunes in Scotland and to relieve the pressure in England, through a series of campaigns led by James Graham, the marquis of Montrose, a resourceful commander, but the royalist position in Scotland was a microcosm of that in England. Royalist support was strongest in the largely Catholic Highlands, but this was also the poorest part of the country; the richer and more populous Presbyterian Lowlands remained committed to the Covenanter alliance with the English parliament. Reinforcements from Ireland never arrived in sufficient numbers, the two thousand sent in June being the only significant contribution. Montrose was eventually crushed by Leslie’s Covenanters in September 1645, but not before he had unnerved them and distracted them from the siege of Chester earlier that year, as detailed below.

In 1644-45, the parties differed on the terms rather than the principle of a future settlement, and religion was a major point of contention in this. It came to the fore because all through 1644 the Westminster Assembly was debating the form of government which it would recommend for the Church of England. The Scottish Commissioners were pressing for a pure Presbyterian model, with a church session exerting its coercive jurisdiction in every parish, with parishes grouped in classical presbyteries, provincial synods elected by and from presbyteries, a national synod at the summit, and with lay participation by ruling elders at every tier of the pyramidal structure. Since episcopalians were unrepresented in the Assembly, most of the English divines were prepared to endorse such a system in its essentials, but they were persistently opposed by a small group of Independents who became known as ‘the Dissenting Brethren’. Unlike the ‘separatists’, however, they fully accepted the authority of the civil power in matters of religion, so long as it did not oppress the churches over essential matters of faith and conscience.

Doctrinal matters were not at issue, however, as in theology, the moderate Independents professed a common orthodox Calvinism with the Presbyterians. What many of them rejected was the concept, common to Anglicans and Presbyterians, of a church coterminous with the nation-state; they could never accept that church membership was conferred simply by being born and baptised in a particular parish. A true church for them could only consist of a congregation of committed believers, men and women who had given mature covenant to live in accordance with it. Every such ‘gathered church’, they argued, should have the right to choose its own pastor and the power to discipline its members, even in the last resort to cast them out; so the Presbyterians’ entrustment of ordination and ex-communication to presbyteries was unacceptable to them. But they did not claim the right to total autonomy for each congregation that most separatists demanded, but rather proposed a kind of federal association. They didn’t like being called ‘Independents’, because they believed …

… the truth to lie and consist in a middle way betwixt that which is falsely charged on us … and that which is the contention of these times, the authoritative Prebyterial government in all the subordinations and proceedings of it.

Although they were few in number in the Assembly, the Independents had powerful supporters in parliament, including Cromwell in the Commons and Viscount Saye and Sele in the Lords. These and most of the other lay Independents were strongly committed to a vigorous prosecution of the war, so, understandably, ‘Independent’ became a loose label for all who pursued total victory and ‘Presbyterian’ for those who preferred a negotiated settlement. It was also generally true that most Independents advocated some degree of liberty of conscience in religion, whereas most Presbyterians favoured the continuance of a single national church, conformity to which would be enforced by the state. Yet even here the labels could be misleading, and religious beliefs were not always matched by political practice and priorities regarding church governance. Thus, it is often necessary to distinguish between the political and religious senses of the terms ‘Independent’ and ‘Presbyterian, since the correlation between them was so imperfect. References to political groupings should, therefore, be made without capitalisation, and ‘parties’ suggests a greater degree of identity, coherence and organisation than actually existed in the 1640s. There was also a social dimension to the mutual opposition between Presbyterians and Independents. Politicians like Cromwell would have extended liberty of conscience not only to their fellow Independents but also to the more peaceable separatists – Baptists, Quakers, Seekers – which were proliferating in the unsettled climate of the mid-1640s. Conservative souls, however, distrusted the whole principle of electing ministers of religion and were horrified by the prospect of giving free rein to sectarian ‘tub-thumpers’ without academic training who were elected by their fellow plebeians.

The Westminster Assembly promised the continuance of a single national church in which the majority of the parish clergy would continue to be chosen by wealthy gentry patrons.  Such a church was likely to cement the existing structures of society, whereas sectarian preachers were seen as potential social dynamite. In December 1944, the Earl of Essex, in overall command of the parliamentary forces, was complaining that:

Posterity will say that to deliver them from the yoke of the King we have subjugated them to that of the common people, (whose) audacity (he would henceforth) devote his life to redressing.

 

Right: The title page of an anti-radical tract. Moderate ‘independents’, horrified by the growing extremism engendered by the war, struggled to make their voices heard.

How to Win the War? Parliament & The Army:

When Oliver Cromwell emerged as the leader of the ‘war party’, linking up with radicals in many locations, it was natural that there should be social overtones to this shift in national policy. These radicals were described by their enemies as a company of Brownists, Anabaptists, … factious inferior persons. He had built up a virtually impregnable position for himself before he struck at Manchester and all he stood for. Not only was he a person of great favour and interest with the House of Commons as one hostile fellow-MP put it. By sheer hard work and military efficiency, he had become the outstanding figure in the Eastern Association, which after London was the main centre of support for parliament, especially in Essex and Suffolk. In June 1644 his leadership had been decisive at the battle of Marston Moor, the first really crushing victory the Parliamentarians had won. Cromwell’s troopers, originally,  were picked men, well equipped, well horsed, well paid. All these factors enabled him to use the cavalry charge as a battering ram instead of as a mobile infantry lightly armed with pistols. Prince Rupert’s horse charged once, often with devastating effect, but then lost cohesion in destroying enemy stragglers or in the search for plunder; a rabble of gentility, as Monck (below left) called the Cavalier cavalry. As Claredon (below right) put it, …

… though the King’s troops prevailed in the charge and routed those they charged, they never rallied themselves again in order, nor could be brought to make a second charge again the same day … whereas Cromwell’s troops, if they prevailed, or thought they were beaten and presently routed, rallied again and stood in good order till they received new orders.

This, Clarendon added, was only under him, and had never been notorious under Essex or Waller. At Marston Moor, it had been the repeated charges of Cromwell’s horse that had turned apparent Parliamentary defeat into complete victory. Yet he had remained in the background when the London radicals had tried to build up Sir William Waller as a rival commander to the Earl of Essex, and so had not suffered their discomfiture when ‘William the Conqueror’ was routed by a royalist cavalry charge at Roundway Down in July 1643. On the question of winning the war the issues between Cromwell and Manchester and between the two ‘parties’ were clear-cut. Manchester is often quoted as saying:

If we beat the King ninety-nine times, yet he is King still. … but if the King beat us once, we shall all be hanged.

To which Cromwell is said to have retorted with irrefutable logic:

My Lord, if this be so … why did we take up arms at first? This is against fighting ever hereafter.

The dispute between the Independents and Presbyterians within the Army was part of the process that led, despite its military successes, to the eclipse of the Eastern Association army under Manchester’s generalship. The conflict, in political terms, was between those who believed the war could be won and those who did not want to defeat the king. It was the success of the Independents, like Pickering and Montague, which enabled the creation of an army committed to winning the war. Manchester, for his part, alleged that Cromwell had admitted to packing the Eastern Association Army with men of his own principles …

… so that in case there should be propositions for peace, or any conclusion of a peace, such as might not stand with those that honest men should aim at, this Army might prevent such a mischief.

Cromwell did not contest this charge, but soberly told the House of Commons that:

I had a great deal of reason to think that his Lordship’s miscarriage in these particulars was neither through accidents (which could not be helped) nor through his improvidence only, but through his backwardness to all action; and had some reason to conceive that that backwardness was not (merely) from dullness or indisposedness to engagement, but (withal) from some principle of unwillingness in his Lordship to have this war prosecuted unto full victory, (but rather end it) on some such terms to which it might be disadvantageous to bring the King too low.

Cromwell was not pursuing a personal vendetta against Manchester, nor did he relish the antagonisms within and between the two Houses that their quarrel was generating. He was waiting only for the Committee of the Army to endorse the evidence of Manchester’s persistent unwillingness to fight since the fall of York. It did so when it reported to the House on 9 December, and towards the end of a long debate, Cromwell rose to make the most important speech of his career to date. He was speaking to a report from a committee which had been set up to inquire into the quarrel between himself and Manchester, but he succeeded in elevating the dispute to one of principle. It was this speech, and what immediately followed it, which demonstrated his consummate skill as a Parliamentary tactician:

It is now a time to speak, or forever hold the tongue. The important occasion now is no less to save a nation out of  a bleeding, nay, almost dying condition, which the long continuance of this war hath already brought it into; so that without a more speedy, vigorous and effectual prosecution of the war – casting off all lingering proceedings like … soldiers of fortune beyond sea, to spin out a war – we shall make the kingdom weary of us, and hate the name of a Parliament.

For what do the enemy say? Nay, what do many say that were friends at the beginning of the parliament? Even this, that the members of both Houses have got great places and commands, and the sword, into their hands; and what by interest in the Parliament, what by power in the Army, will perpetually continue themselves in grandeur, and not permit the war speedily to end, lest their own power should determine with it. This I speak here to our own faces is but what others do utter abroad behind our backs.

… I know of the worth of those commanders, members of both Houses, who are yet in power; but if I may speak my conscience without reflection upon any, I do conceive if the army be not put to another method, and the war more vigorously prosecuted, the people can bear the war no longer, and will enforce you to a dishonourable peace.

So then, he concluded, let them cease pursuing particular complaints against any single commander, since none was infallible, but apply themselves instead to the necessary remedy; he hoped that no member of either House would take offence at his speech, or hesitate to sacrifice private interests for the public good. He had clearly prepared his ground well behind the scenes, colluding with the Presbyterian chairman of the Committee for the Army, Zouch Tate, a firm believer in fighting the King to a finish. Tate immediately moved that …

… during the time of this war no member of either House shall have or execute any office or command, military or civil, granted, or conferred by both or either of the Houses. 

Above: The House of Commons in 1640. It changed little over the following five years.

This was a master-stroke of parliamentary manoeuvring since, as a presbyterian, Tate could be seen as a political opponent of Cromwell. But it was Oliver’s close colleague, Sir Henry Vane, who seconded the motion, who offered to lay down his commission as co-Treasurer of the Navy, and Cromwell himself then offered to resign his own military command. This ‘Self-Denying Ordinance’, as it was more formally adopted by the Commons ten days later, was one half of the remedy; the other would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be a thorough recasting of the parliament’s military forces, but that would be fruitless unless they were put under commanders with a wholehearted will to win. Removing Essex and Manchester was the first problem to be faced, though other peace party peers and MPs were holding less exalted commands, including Thomas Fairfax, Haselrig, Brereton, Cromwell himself, and half-a-dozen others who were equally committed to total victory. For Cromwell to have hung up his sword would have been a serious strategic loss to the army, but he told the House of Commons that the recall of their fellow-members to Westminster …

… will not break, or scatter our armies. I can speak this for my own soldiers, that they look not upon me, but upon you, and for you they will fight, and live and die in your cause.

The Radicals of the Eastern Association:

Cromwell’s enemies no doubt saw the Ordinance as a means of getting rid of him; he and his friends saw the broader problem of removing peers and all those who owed their military commands to social rank rather than to ability. It was a logical extension of the policy of promoting ‘russet-coated men’ within his own regiment according to merit.

The New Model Army, according to one of its chaplains, Richard Baxter, was partly the envy and partly the scorn of the nobility. Baxter was a Presbyterian both in religion and politics. He joined Colonel Whalley’s regiment of horse in the New Model because he thought that the King should often do what Parliament wanted and that people should not be forced to accept bishops or the Prayer Book. However, he was soon shocked to hear how the troopers spoke of the King:

We that lived quietly did keep our old principles and took the true happiness of King and people, Church and State, to be our end. But when I came among Cromwell’s soldiers I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of. I perceived that they took the King for a tyrant and an enemy and really intended to master him or ruin him.

Although there were not that many radicals in the army, they were already beginning to influence among the ordinary soldiers whose hatred for the King was becoming more extreme as the war continued. Baxter blamed himself and other nonconformist ministers for not persuading Cromwell and other commanders to be more peaceable in outlook earlier in the war. In assessing Cromwell’s statesmanship in parliament and the army, we suffer from hindsight. Baxter had been invited by him to become ‘pastor’ to his troops at the beginning of the war when his officers had purposed to make their troops a gathered church’, but he had believed, like many others, that the war would soon be over and there would soon be a peace settlement with the King. When by the end of 1644, this was obviously not the case, he decided he must support Parliament and go to minister to the ’roundheads’. From the start, Cromwell’s troops had enthusiastically carried out the Commons policy of destroying stained glass and images in the churches, for which he was wrongly blamed. In his home city of Ely (pictured below) in January 1644, he had warned Canon Hitch …

… lest the soldiers should in any tumultuary or disorderly way attempt the reformation of your cathedral church, I require you to forbear altogether your choir service, so unedifying and offensive, and this as you will answer it, if any disorder should arise therefrom. … leave off this fooling and come down.

When Hitch ignored the warning, Cromwell emphasised that he was a man under authority, … commanded to dismiss this assembly. Whether or not they were ‘under authority’ to carry out their acts of iconoclasm, there can be little doubt that Cromwell and his troopers were willing to do so, though not altogether as wantonly as many others in East Anglia. It was in the Suffolk town of Bury St Edmunds, in January 1645, that Cromwell summoned a conference to plan the formation of the New Model Army. The half-trained county levies had proved more than a match for the royalist forces, but they had been reluctant to fight far from home or to permit their military duties to interfere with the demands of their farms and businesses. This was certainly true of the Suffolk men who frequently had to march to distant parts of the realm. Six months later, Cromwell urgently called upon Suffolk’s cavalry to muster at Newmarket and for the infantry to muster at Bury. Each trooper, he promised, would receive fourteen shillings per week and each dragoon 10s. 6d. per week.

But the growing power of the army and the fanaticism of some of its leaders and troops also alarmed many Suffolk people. The use of churches as stables and their ancient windows and monuments for musket practice made the soldiers increasingly unpopular. Added to this disrespectful treatment, William Dowsing of Laxfield was appointed to the post of ‘Parliamentary Visitor’ by Manchester, as General of the Eastern Association. Between January and October 1644, he toured Suffolk with a troop os soldiers, smashing stained glass, defacing bench ends and carved fonts, breaking down crucifixes, tearing up brasses and obliterating inscriptions. In the course of his disastrous rampage, he visited 150 churches at random and carefully noted down his work of destruction in a journal. The entry for the parish church of Clare reads:

… we broke down one thousand pictures superstitious. I broke down two hundred; three of God the Father and three of Christ and the Holy Lamb, and three of the Holy Ghost like a dove with wings; and the twelve apostles were carved in wood, on the top of the roof, which we gave order to take down; and twenty cherubims to be taken down; and the sun and the moon in the east window, by the King’s arms to be taken down.

Some parishes welcomed Dowsing and co-operated with him, but others, such as Ufford, put up a show of resistance, locked the church and tried to keep the desecrators at bay. Even where there was support for his actions, many churchwardens resented having to pay the standard charge of 6s. 8d. for his visitation. Meanwhile, Cromwell’s protection of religious radicals under his command had won him respect from all those who feared a Scottish-imposed Presbyterian discipline. On one of his rare visits to the Commons during the campaigning season, in September 1644,  Cromwell had suggested to one of his independent allies, Oliver St John the wording of a successful motion that asked, failing substantial agreement in the ‘Assembly of Divines’, that the House should continue:

… to endeavour the finding out of some way, how far tender consciences, who cannot in all things submit to the common rule which shall be established, may be borne with according to the Word as may stand with the public peace.

The ‘Self-denying’ & ‘New Model’ Ordinances enacted:

We also know now that Cromwell and other MPs retained their commands, while the Self-denying Ordinance got rid of Essex, Manchester and other ‘peace party’ peers in the army. But it was by no means clear in advance that this would be the outcome. Tate’s original resolution had proposed that ‘no members of either House’ should hold a military command. Yet Cromwell ended up playing a leading role in the whole course of events which led from the Self-denying Ordinance to the formation of the New Model Army. He also ensured that Sir Thomas Fairfax was to be appointed Commander-in-Chief of the new force in January, although this was not finally confirmed until April.

Above: Sir Thomas Fairfax. General of the Parliamentary forces.

Both Fairfax and Cromwell were eventually exempted from the ordinance, though they could hardly have expected this when they first offered to resign. Despite reports of a mutiny in his regiment at the prospects of it being put under another colonel, Cromwell was actually at Windsor, paying his respects to Fairfax before laying down his commission, when he was ordered by the Committee of Both Kingdoms to prevent a rendezvous between the King’s forces and those of Prince Rupert before moving northwards. No doubt Cromwell’s supporters hoped from the start that he would survive the Self-Denying Ordinance, the issue remained in doubt for at least six months after it was first proposed. Cromwell’s political tactics at that first point were superb, but they included the risk that he might have to pay the price of political eclipse himself. The fact that he survived and went on to become Lord General and Lord Protector should not blind us to the chances he took, and to his clear belief in personal providence over ‘blind’ individual ambition.

These twin measures to transform the conduct of the war, the Self-Denying Ordinance and its follow-up the New Model Ordinance, were not solely the product of the war party within the Commons but were devised with the small group of like-minded peers who included Viscount Saye and Sele and the Earl of Northumberland. These formed a coherent group of with their allies in the Commons, a group that some historians have called the ‘royal independents’ because of their subsequent importance in the brief period between the first and second Civil Wars. Saye proposed the Self-Denying Ordinance in principle in the Lords the same day as it was proposed in the Commons, but the peers took ‘great offence’ and rejected it ‘out of hand’. When it came up to them having passed the Commons on 19 December, they laid it aside and resisted all pressure to take it into consideration until 13 January, when they threw it out formally following a ‘vote’ in which only four peers recorded their dissents in favour of it. What finally moved the Lords to action was the reading of the New Model Ordinance later that month, when the Committee of Both Kingdoms recommended the formation of a new army of twenty-two thousand men, to be supported by a levy of six thousand pounds per month on a number of the districts controlled by Parliament.

The establishment of this New Model Army was set at twelve regiments of foot each of twelve thousand men, eleven regiments of Horse of six hundred men each, and one regiment of a thousand dragoons, divided into ten companies, each of a hundred men. The senior officers of the army were selected on 21 January, and Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed as Commander-in-Chief (on a salary of ten pounds a day) and Philip Skippon as Sergeant-Major General (two pounds per day). Cromwell was only nominated as Lieutenant-General of the Horse (two pounds per day) on the eve of the Battle of Naseby in June and was not appointed as Commander-in-Chief until after Fairfax’s retirement five years later in June 1650. The choice of Fairfax was far from simple because the Self-Denying Ordinance ruled out almost everyone who had commanded anything larger than a regiment. Philip Skippon was an exception and was nominated to the post which best suited him, that of major-general of the infantry. Sir Thomas Fairfax was only thirty-two and had had no pre-war military experience, his highest command having been that of the Horse in his father’s small army, and he had not distinguished himself, unlike Cromwell, at the Battle of Marston Moor. But wherever he had fought he had shown the flair of a born leader of cavalry and he communicated his calm nature in the heat of battle to his officers and men: Cromwell had seen him in action more than once. Although an MP for Yorkshire, he had no known political leanings beyond a steady devotion to the parliamentary cause, and in religion, he was a devout but undogmatic puritan.

The Commons passed the Ordinance without a division. The measure had three main objects, the first of which was to forge a genuinely national army out of the remnants of earlier ones, an army free of the regional ties which had made Waller’s London trained bands and Manchester’s East Anglian foot look over their shoulders when they had been away from home ground for any length of time. Three regiments of horse and foot were to come from Essex’s army and two from Waller’s. The remaining nine regiments of horse and four of infantry were to be from the Eastern Association. This comprised 3,578 men, consisting of four regiments of foot, Crawford’s, Rainsborough’s, Montague’s and Pickering’s. The second aim of the Ordinance was the creation of a fully professional army whose officers were wholly dedicated to the prosecution of the war, without political control. Thirdly, this army was to have an undisputed first call on parliament’s financial resources. The creation of so powerful a force aroused the deepest misgivings of the Lords, especially since peers were to be precluded from holding command in it. Its proposers sought to appease their potential opponents by writing the names of its generals and colonels into the ordinance itself.

The Lords delayed passing the New Model Ordinance until 15 February, despite constant pressure from the Commons, and they disputed the lists of officers submitted by Fairfax for more than a month after that. Although he proposed no-one for the service who did not already hold a commission, they tried to make no fewer than fifty-seven changes in his recommendations, most of them politically motivated; thirty-five of the fifty-two of the officers whom they tried to remove were independents or men of radical views. They tried to make every officer take the Covenant and undertake to conform to the church government to be settled by parliament and to cashier or disqualify any who refused. Under extreme pressure from the Commons and the City, and under the threat of both to withhold essential financial provisions until they gave way, an evenly divided House of Lords finally approved Fairfax’s nominees on 18 March. Even then, at the end of the month Essex, Manchester and Denbigh had still not resigned their commissions and the presbyterian peers were holding up Faifax’s appointment because it did not bind him to preserve the safety of the King’s person. Essex’s infantry was in a state of mutiny and some of his cavalries had refused to serve under Waller. The Lords were jeopardising the whole parliamentarian cause, and they still had not passed the Self-Denying Ordinance. The Commons then threatened to discharge all members of both Houses from their military commands or civil offices. The Lords then approved Fairfax’s commission by one vote, enabling him to gain control of all the troops. Essex, Manchester and Denbigh resigned their commands on 2 April, and the Self-Denying Ordinance was passed by the Lords the following day.

Beyond the obvious sense of injured pride felt by Essex and Manchester in particular, it is difficult to explain why the Lords obstructed the measures which were essential for the prosecution of the war by Parliament. There is some evidence to suggest that Essex’s aim was to revive the medieval office of ‘Lord High Constable’, which had carried supreme military authority, and to occupy this position as a possible step towards even more vice-regal powers. His repeated refusals to obey the Committee of Both Kingdoms’ directions may be attributable to an ambition become not just the master of the war but also the architect of the peace. If this was his plan, the New Model Army and its political sponsors in the Lords soon put paid to it. At the same time as parliament passed the New Model Ordinance, it appointed Northumberland, Saye’s ally and the most senior peer still attending the Lords, as Governor of the King’s children, and it was reported that if the King still refused reasonable terms for a settlement, his youngest son, the Duke of Gloucester, would be made king and Northumberland would become Lord Protector. The rapid elevation of Northumberland by the war party looks very much like an aristocratic move to block Essex’s pretensions and his potential path to power.

The Radical Regiments:

Thus, the New Model Army was finally established in April 1945 under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, while Cromwell was only later appointed to the command of the cavalry. But it is surely to Cromwell that we must look to see why Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments were put forward for inclusion in the new army. Both had been regiments in the Eastern Association army, which had proved itself by the end of the 1644 Campaign to be the best organised and most successful parliamentarian forces. Besides, Pickering, Montague (who was distantly related to the Earl of Manchester) and their officers had demonstrated that they had all the right credentials to fulfil Cromwell’s objective of creating an effective national standing army committed to complete military victory. But when the list of officers for the New Model was debated in parliament, their names were struck out by the Lords, along with others. Although his elder brother, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was a well-respected MP, John Pickering was described as a fanatical Independent, and his regiment had earned a reputation as being the most radical of all the parliamentary forces. Therefore, the Lords voted to leave out the entire regiment at first on both political and religious grounds, undoubtedly reinforced by Manchester’s determination to purge his personal enemies from any new army that was created.

Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments had already been reported to the Committee for the Army for, on Cromwell’s instructions (as claimed), absolutely refusing orders from Major-General Crawford during 1644. Crawford himself refused to serve in the New Model Army after the failure of presbyterian MPs to control its formation and eventually transferred to Leslie’s presbyterian Scottish army. He was sent to command at the siege of Hereford where he was killed in August 1645. The religious controversies he sparked with Cromwell are revealed in the various disparaging remarks made about Pickering’s and Montague’s regiments by Sir Samuel Luke, governor of Newport Pagnell, another presbyterian. John Pickering was one of the officers who were questioned by parliament, in December 1644, about the events surrounding Manchester’s seeming unwillingness to prosecute the war against the King’s forces. He had reported on the Earl’s failure to capitalise on the successes of the early summer, 1944, and his wish to winter in East Anglia rather than advance into the west with Pickering’s infantry. It was in this acrimonious atmosphere that the ‘radical’ regiment was to be excluded by the Lords, but when the pressure from the Commons eventually led to the passing of Fairfax’s original list by just one vote, Pickering’s became the twelfth regiment of the New Model Army.

After the Battle of Marston Moor in the summer of 1644, fighting had tended to be concentrated around the royalist strongholds of Newark, Chester, Exeter and Oxford. Oxford was the king’s headquarters; its garrison dominated the main routes to the West Country. Large parliamentary forces were committed to besieging these centres, while the king prepared a new offensive. Colonel John Pickering’s Regiment of Foot had been quartered at Abingdon throughout the winter, and it was there on 4 January 1645 that the regiment was paid, and it was still there in April. The regiment was therefore probably involved in the defence of the town when Prince Rupert of the Rhine, the King’s nephew and commander of his cavalry, attacked with eighteen hundred troops on 10 January. New works had just been constructed around the garrison and these proved effective, the royalists being driven back with heavy losses. On 5 April, two days after the establishment of the New Model Army in Parliament, Sir Samuel Luke wrote that two of Pickering’s soldiers were among prisoners held by the royalists at Boarstall, one of the cavalier garrisons that ringed the king’s capital at Oxford.

Although the New Model was being formed from the existing units of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, these had suffered so many losses in the campaign of 1644 that they could supply only seven thousand of the required fourteen thousand plus infantry. It was intended that the balance should be provided by impressment in London and the south-east, but when the New Model began its first campaign it was still short of four thousand men. Nevertheless, it was an instrument of war by which its professionalism, courage and discipline would bring victory for Parliament. Sheer military necessity forced the Committee of Both Kingdoms, with the Commons’ backing, to go ahead with the forming of the Army before it received parliament’s legislative backing. The general aim was to embody in it intact such units in the armies as had proved their military worth. Fairfax was entrusted with the nomination of all officers below the rank of colonel,  and he faithfully observed the principle of keeping together officers and men who had already forged a bond in war. Despite acute Scottish suspicions to the contrary, there was no deliberate design to create an army of a specific political or religious complexion. The overriding criterion for appointment and promotion was military effectiveness. The senior officers named in the ordinance covered a wide ideological spectrum, though the greater commitment of Independents, both religious and political, gave them greater preponderance.

There was no difficulty in filling the ranks of the cavalry in the New Model Army, with a large number of redundant officers enlisting as troopers. The service carried much more prestige and better pay and conditions than the infantry enjoyed. A trooper’s two shillings a day was about twice what he basically needed to feed man and horse, whereas a foot soldier’s eightpence was the wage of a common labourer, and his rations in the field usually consisted of cheese with bread or biscuit. Proven fighting quality ensured the embodiment of most of Cromwell’s Eastern Association cavalry, furnishing five of the New Model’s original regiments of horse. In his efforts to enlist men who knew what they were fighting for and loved what they knew, Cromwell had found them mainly among those who saw their cause as that of the people of God, and so many of them were puritan enthusiasts. He was accused unjustly of favouring sectaries at the expense of moderate, orthodox men, for he did not probe into their beliefs if he sensed that he had what he called ‘the root of the matter’ in them. For a while after the incident with Crawford related above, he did promote Independents and sectaries in preference to rigid Presbyterians, not because of the latter’s religious convictions but because of their intolerance towards comrades-in-arms who did not share them. But  this phase did not last long, and his true spirit spoke in his dispatch to Speaker Lenthall after the New Model Army’s heroic storming of Bristol in 1645:

Presbyterians, Independents, all had the same spirit of faith and prayer, the same presence and answer; they agree here, know no names of difference; pity it is it should be otherwise anywhere. All that believe have the real unity, which is most glorious because inward and spiritual. … As for being united in forms, commonly called uniformity, every Christian will for peace sake study and do as far as conscience will permit; and from brethren, in things of the mind, we look for no compulsion but that of light and reason. In other things God hath put the sword into the Parliament’s hand, but the terror of evildoers and the praise of them that do well.

Re-organisation, Recruitment & Religion:

Thomas Ayloffe was a presbyterian who had originally been included in the list of colonels for the New Model. During the winter of 1644-45, as the conflict between the independents and Presbyterians was fought out in parliament, Ayloffe’s were in the garrisons at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell, under the command of Crawford and Luke. Ayloffe was not selected to serve in the New Model because of the failure of the Lords to purge it of radicals like Pickering. It was another ‘independent’ regiment, Rainsborough’s, which accompanied  Pickering’s and Montague’s from the Eastern Association into the New Model Army. However, because of the drastic collapse of the numbers in Pickering’s regiment during 1644-45, it was decided by the Commons, on 16 April, that Colonel Thomas Ayloffe’s regiment should be reduced into Pickering’s to help restore the regiment to strength. Ayloffe’s, which probably drew its men from Essex, had spent most of 1644 in the garrison at Aylesbury and Newport Pagnell and did not see action in any of the major battles of that year, although they were involved in the storming of Hillesden House. This process of consolidation was repeated throughout the parliamentarian army because most regiments were under strength. Ayloffe’s men had been with him throughout 1644, while Pickering’s had supported him throughout the winter of 1644-45. The soldiers from Ayloffe’s were successfully transferred to Pickering’s in early April, as Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson reported to the Army’s Treasurer:

… the officers of Collo. Aliffs Regiment did with all willingness and request deliver unto us ther men according to order… 

However, more recruits were still required and though recruitment was still carried on in East Anglia, Pickering’s likely acquired some men from other areas. Pickering took with him into the New Model seven of his company commanders, including Hewson. Not one Captain from Ayloffe’s regiment was included, indeed it would appear that no commissioned officers transferred, for Hewson’s letter clearly states that Ayloffe’s officers ‘delivered’ their men. This was not simply a matter of political or religious differences. One objective of combining regiments was to redress the balance of officers to men. Even when the number of common soldiers in Pickering’s reduced to below three hundred they retained a nearly full complement of officers. The infantry of the older armies was so depleted that just over half of the New Model foot had to be raised by conscription, and they were not raised easily. An impressment ordinance was quickly passed at the end of February, with most of the burden falling on London, which had to find 2,500, and on East Anglia and Kent, whose quota was a thousand each. Pressed men were so prone to mutiny or desert that they had to be guarded all the way to their regiments. They were drawn from the lowest orders, for those worth three pounds in property or five pounds in goods were exempt, as were a whole range of occupations. The penalty for desertion was death, but many were homeless men who could easily disappear without a trace. During the New Model’s first year, nearly twice as many men were pressed as actually served. Desertion rendered it chronically short of infantry, who were down to only eight thousand by September 1945. As Ian Gentles has written, conscripting infantry in 1645-6 was like ladling water into a leaky bucket.

The New Model was better armed and equipped than its predecessors, and it was the first English army to wear a uniform: red, or ‘russet’ coats faced with blue (Fairfax’s colour) with grey breeches. It was even paid fairly regularly, but that did not stop the looting large quantities of livestock, bacon, beer, grain, firewood and household goods wherever they marched. The Eastern Association regiments had always paid their way but in the ‘transition’ period before the Battle of Naseby. The figure below is of a warrant for payment for bullocks delivered for Pickering’s regiment, signed off by Manchester. But in its early months, many of the new infantry recruits behaved as one would expect of unwilling conscripts.  We have seen already how a silk-weaver captain in the garrison at Newport Pagnell incurred the wrath of Sir Samuel Luke by refusing to take the Covenant. But the ordinary soldiers commanded by such men of religious conscience were described by Luke as ‘an ungodly crew’ as they trained for what, for many, was to be their first battle:

 I think these New Modellers knead all their dough with ale, for I never see so many drunk in my life in so short a time.

As Underdown has pointed out, the effect of the establishment of military committees was to supplant the role of JPs, and as many of their members came from origins less elevated than those of the substantial gentry who made up the Commission of the Peace, they were often unpopular with the leading men of the county, even those of nominally Parliamentarian persuasion. The moderates, peace-party men or political ‘Presbyterians’ thus wished to curb the powers of the County Committees; the radicals, war-party men, pro-Army ‘Independents’, wished just as passionately to maintain them. The issue on which local quarrels often turned was finance. The original committee members were anxious to protect their friends and relations, to keep money and troops inside the county and not to be compelled to pay for military activities which did not directly affect their mainly parochial, interests. The radicals who gradually displaced them were less interested in ‘county’ society and property rights; and were more outward-looking. To begin with, it had been assumed that the war would be financed by voluntary subscriptions and loans: Cromwell himself had contributed a thousand pounds in this way, but as it became clear that these would prove inadequate, an excise was introduced and then a land tax. In addition to the sequestered property of loyalists were used for military purposes. This led to tensions between the local sequestration committees, dominated by men with purely local interests, and ‘London’, to which more and more radicals looked for national leadership as well as for finance.

Thus, winning the war became a matter of financial as well as a military re-organisation. The New Model Army was financed by a policy of ‘compounding’ with delinquents, i.e. allowing them to buy back their sequestered estates for a fine calculated according to the degree of their delinquency. This was a compromise, falling short of the confiscation the radicals wanted, but the military revolution necessitated a financial revolution. As Colonel John Pickering took up his new command at Abingdon, where his regiment had been in winter quarters, the Eastern Association ceased to be responsible for his regiment on 5 April. The total cost of maintaining it had been over four and a half thousand pounds, of which three hundred and fifty was for provisions and fifty was for the payment of staff officers. The administrative system of the Association had been unable to raise adequate resources to cover such large sums of money for so many regiments. This is why the pay to Pickering’s regiment had fallen into arrears and the situation regarding supplies and equipment for it and other Eastern Association regiments may however have been better than for some other Civil War armies due to its efficient organisation before the creation of the New Model Army.

However, the problems over pay did not improve after the transfer into the New Model. For forty-two days in April and May, the regiment went without pay. This may have been a factor leading to the mutiny later in April, but the catalyst was apparently a sermon preached by Colonel Pickering following the confirmation of his command of the regiment. This apparently antagonised the men who had transferred from Ayloffe’s regiment who were strongly influenced by the strong presbyterian views of their former commander. According to a royalist broadsheet, it was Pickering’s condemnation of the proposed imposition of the presbyterian church system to which the men particularly objected. It was not unusual that Pickering should have preached to his troops their commanding officer, in the absence of an ordained chaplain, and his strong Calvinist beliefs would have been appreciated by religious Presbyterians and Independents alike. Lay preaching was, after all, an evolving nonconformist practice at this time, but the Presbyterians were determined to impose new conformity in religion through their ‘Covenant’ with the Scots. Parliament, with its presbyterian majority, issued an order which instructed Fairfax …

… that no person be permitted to preach who is not ordained a minister …

But the bad feeling between the regiments of the New Model Army and the other parliamentarian regiments was only in part due to religious and political views. It reflected more the growing resentment at the apparent rise in the status of the New Model regiments, especially when this was exacerbated by the competition for resources. This can very clearly be seen as a primary ‘feeder’ of the conflict between the garrison of Newport Pagnell and Pickering’s regiment while it continued to be billeted in the south Midlands during May 1645. On the 19th, Sir Samuel Luke wrote:

There is such an antipathy here between my men and the New Model that you will every day hear of new encounters. My party which encountered Col. Pickering is returned with the loss of one man only, whom I intend to relieve so soon as I know where he is.

There is some evidence to suggest that, in keeping with Underdown’s thesis, that the general population in the town did not share the hostility of the county gentry and the garrison towards Pickering and his troops, as Luke himself later wrote:

Col. Pickering exercises … twice at North Crawley last Lord’s Day, as I hear, and our townsmen at Newport admire him beyond Mr. Birdett (the commander of Newport Pagnell garrison).

Hostile commentators, both royalist propagandists and Presbyterians like Samuel Luke, misrepresented the general character of the new army from the start. They sneered at the base birth of its officers, though of the thirty-seven who fought at the Battle of Naseby a few weeks later, with the rank of colonel or above, nine were nobles and only seven others were not gentry, while a high proportion of the more junior officers were also of gentry stock. On the other hand, the New Model was widely feared as the supposed military wing of the independent party, but in fact, it refrained from engaging in any kind of collective political activity before 1647. In its early years, it was not indifferent to political issues, for most of its officers and any of its ordinary soldiers, especially its troopers, cared passionately about what they were fighting for. But over these two years, under Fairfax’s leadership, it remained wholly and solely dedicated to beating the enemy in the field, as its creators had intended. At the outset, the high proportion of Independents and sectaries in regiments drawn from the Eastern Association retained much of their old character, especially in Cromwell’s cavalry. But in choosing officers for regiments that had to be reorganised or newly raised, the criteria were previous service and military fitness.

In practice, broad toleration prevailed in most of the army during its fighting years. Something can be gleaned from the names of its chaplains, whose appointment, outside army headquarters, lay with the regimental commanders. Over thirty have been traced who served with various regiments between 1645 and 1651, but few stayed with the colours for more than a few months. Of the nine appointed during 1645, five were Independents and four certainly or probably Presbyterian. Chaplains in the New Model Army preached to civilian congregations as well as to soldiers. Some, like Richard Baxter, were ordained ministers before the war (see above), but these were hard to find and reluctant to leave their ‘flocks’ at home. An increasing number of common soldiers took upon themselves preaching functions, having much in common with itinerant mechanic preachers. Army chaplains also included many radicals, including Henry Pinnell, who became chaplain to Pickering’s regiment, presumably following the complaint from Ayloffe’s men about the Colonel’s preaching and the prohibition on lay-preachers. Later, in 1647, it was Pinnell who defended the ‘Agitators’ to Oliver Cromwell’s face. He was a classical scholar, translator and pamphleteer, and therefore probably an ordained minister, like Baxter. Pinnell was an ‘Antinomian’, contrasting the way a man knows a thing by the reading of it with experimental certainty of it in himself. Although an Independent who championed the rights of ordinary soldiers and was radical in political views, Pinnell also wanted to see an agreement reached with the King. Both were critical of the ‘presbyterian’ parliament, as Baxter often heard men say:

It will never be a good world while knights and gentlemen make us laws, that are chosen for fear and do but oppress us, and do not know the people’s sores. It will never be well with us till we have Parliaments of countrymen like ourselves, that know our wants. 

The Campaign of 1645 – Long Marches & Sieges:

Even at full strength, the New Model accounted for less than half the men in arms in England. Although it absorbed most of what was left of the armies of Essex, Manchester and Waller, Massey’s Western Association Army, the Northern Association Army under Major-General Poyntz, and Brereton’s Cheshire brigade continued in force. There were also numerous local garrisons, as well as the London trained bands. But it was the New Model Army which was to seal Parliament’s victory in the first Civil War. But the delay in getting the New Model ready for action allowed the initiative to pass to the royalists in the early months of 1645. They took Weymouth in February, though it was soon recovered. Colonel Mytton then scored a rare success for parliament by capturing Shrewsbury on 22 February. Plymouth and Abingdon managed to survive determined royalist assaults, but Goring’s cavalry captured Farnham, only thirty-eight miles from London, though he was soon forced to draw them back. More threateningly, the king sent the Prince of Wales with a group of privy councillors to Bristol, to reanimate the war in the West Country and create a new field army there with the specific aim of besieging the much-contested town of Taunton. But the royalists had quarrels of their own in the west country. Charles’ indulgence of Goring led to him becoming commander-in-chief of all the western forces, but neither Grenville, besieging Plymouth, nor Berkeley, governor of Exeter, were willing to take orders from him.

In March 1645, Prince Rupert was sent to relieve Chester, which was threatened by Brereton. Leven had dispatched five thousand Scots under David Leslie to reinforce Brereton, and it looked as though a major battle was impending. However, Rupert was forced to fall back by a popular uprising in Herefordshire and Worcestershire which threatened his rear. Exasperated countrymen had formed themselves into an association to defend themselves against plundering soldiers from both sides. They were nick-named ‘Clubmen’ because most of them were armed only with cudgels and farm implements, though some of them had firearms. They were crushed by the combined forces of Rupert and Maurice and then punished by having the princes’ troopers quartered in the county. But though the cavaliers’ force of arms stamped out the movement in the Marches, for the time being, Clubmen risings followed in Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset in the late spring. The Clubmen were not just aggrieved with having the armies in their midst, but also by the New Model Ordinance and the increased power of the county committees which stemmed from it and the way it impinged on the local rights of property.

Rupert then wanted to march north, first to relieve Chester from Brereton’s besieging forces and then to attack Leven’s now much reduced Scottish army, which was besieging Pontefract Castle. But Cromwell was still in the field with a brigade of horse, making the most of the forty days that the Self-Denying Ordinance allowed him. When Fairfax took to the field at the end of April, his army still at barely half strength, his main impediment was the Committee of Both Kingdoms, which insisted on directing his operations from Westminster. It ordered him, against his own better judgement, to march to the relief of Taunton, so on 1 May, the bulk of Fairfax’s New Model Army marched into the west, leaving Cromwell and his party of horse and dragoons …

… and four regiments of foot besides, who were ordered, when their recruits were come up, to joyn with him to busie the Enemy about Oxford.

These were likely the four regiments of Foot from the Eastern Association, with which Cromwell had worked so well in 1644. Pickering’s regiment was already with Cromwell in late April. Moreover, the brigade of infantry accompanying him was under the command of Richard Browne, Major General of Oxfords, Berks and Bucks (left), under whose command Pickering’s had remained throughout the winter. Rainsborough’s, another of the former Eastern Association regiments, had also been placed under Browne’s overall command in April and May 1645.

Cromwell was already involved in an attempt to clear several small garrisons around Oxford.  On 25 April, following a cavalry skirmish, he had taken Bletchington House, an important garrison only seven miles from Oxford, and went on to harry the outer defences of the city itself, frustrating the northward movement of the king’s artillery by driving off most of the draught horses. From there he turned his attention to Faringdon Castle, then in Berkshire. This was a more difficult challenge, so he had to wait until 29 April, for a body of infantry to join him before he could attack. Five to six hundred infantry were sent by Browne from Abingdon where Pickering’s were quartered. Sprigge recorded that Captain Jenkins was killed at Faringdon, the first of Pickering’s officers to be lost, along with fourteen ordinary soldiers. The regiment may have numbered between five and six hundred by this time since their ranks had been swelled by the men from Ayloffe’s regiment, so they may have been the only regiment involved in the siege.

Above: The Campaign of 1645

This caused Charles to change his plans; he recalled Goring from the west and to summon all his army, including Maurice’s forces in the Marches from Worcestershire southward, to a general rendezvous at Stow-on-the-Wold on 8 May. The results of the siege of Faringdon were inconclusive and on 3 May Goring’s cavalry and dragoons, from the south-west, attempted to ‘beat up’ Cromwell’s quarters and to relieve Faringdon. They were engaged at Radcot Bridge by Cromwell’s horse, but although there were some losses, Goring did not press home his advantage. Having survived Cromwell’s attack, the garrison at Faringdon remained in the royalist’s hands for a further year. At Stow, Charles mustered at least five thousand foot and six thousand horse, as much as Fairfax had when he set out for the west, and the arrival of Langdale with his northern horse gave him an appreciable advantage in cavalry. Meanwhile, when the New Model Army reached Blandford on 14 May, Fairfax was recalled to besiege Oxford and directed to detach six regiments to reach Taunton. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was alarmed by the movements of the Charles’ forces and lured by a false report that the faithful governor of Oxford was ready to betray the city. Fairfax must have thought that there were better ways of raising the morale of raw and reluctant infantry than taking them on long marches for no apparent reason. The Committee of Both Kingdoms was determined to take Oxford before engaging the King’s army in the field. With five thousand men detached for the relief of Taunton, Fairfax was temporarily very vulnerable, yet the Committee ordered him to advance against Oxford.

At Stow, however, the king’s council of war was as usual divided, and it proceeded to throw away its advantage. Rupert and Langdale wanted to stick to their plan for a northern campaign, but most of the rest, including the civilians, pressed for the whole army to move westward and engage Fairfax while the New Model was still raw and under strength. That surely was what the parliament and its general had most to fear, but Rupert opposed it strenuously, and he broke what was becoming an impasse by proposing a division of forces: Goring and his men would be sent westward to check Fairfax, while the rest of the royal army proceeded northward. It was not a good solution, but it pleased Goring, whose authority was enhanced, and it was adopted. It did at least force Brereton to lift the siege of Chester. The strategically-placed city was also the port that Charles hoped to use to land further reinforcements from Ireland. The Committee of Both Kingdoms had tried to keep the siege going by requesting Leven to hasten to Brereton’s assistance and by ordering all available local forces, including Lord Fairfax’s Yorkshiremen, to do likewise. But Leven, though he did not refuse, was deflected by the news of the most brilliant of all Montrose’s victories at Auldearn. He feared that Montrose might advance through the lowlands to join up with the royal army moving northwards, so he made a long detour through Westmorland, so Brereton did not receive the help he needed in time.

The Committee of Both Kingdoms was still transfixed by the mirage of an easy siege of Oxford, and the independent politicians were looking for an ultimate victory which would owe as little as possible to the Scots, who had become a political liability at the same time as their military value had shrunk. As a result, a proposal to send the New Model north was lost by one vote in the special committee of both houses. As a compromise, Fairfax was ordered to send 2,500 of his cavalry and dragoons to assist Leven and to move his remaining troops against Oxford. His political masters had therefore succeeded in splitting his army into three parts before it was even up to strength. , with nearly half his cavalry moving northwards, four thousand men still in Taunton, where they were trapped by Goring after relieving the town, and maybe ten thousand men preparing to lay siege to Oxford. Cromwell’s and Browne’s forces were also instructed to rejoin the army, which they did at Marston on 22 May. Pickering was with the army at Southam in late May and Lieutenant-Colonel Hewson was active in carrying arms and surgeons’ equipment to the siege.

By the end of May, Fairfax had received at least four thousand infantry recruits since first taking to the field, but had also lost three thousand through desertion, disease or skirmishing in the course of his gruelling march into Dorset and back. Rupert also had to contend with politically-motivated civilians in the king’s council of war, but now at Market Drayton, he guided it towards wiser decisions than those he had urged at Stow. Though he had been keen on a northern campaign, he was aware that the major part of the divided New Model had returned as far as Newbury, and he was eager to engage it while he could still catch it at a disadvantage. He had already sent orders to Goring, who had become obsessed with retaking Taunton, to return with his whole force and rendezvous with the main army at Market Harborough in Leicestershire. He now successfully urged that by striking eastwards towards the parliamentarian heartland he would be sure to draw off Fairfax from Oxford, and hoped on the way to collect three thousand Welshmen that Charles Gerrard had been raising and the bulk of the cavalry from the Newark garrison. Since the royal army already numbered eleven thousand, he had a good prospect of giving Fairfax battle on equal or better terms. But Goring decided to ignore his orders to return to the Midlands and remained in Bath, besieging Taunton.

To draw Fairfax off, Charles and Rupert marched upon Leicester, launching what effectively amounted to an invasion of the parliamentary stronghold of the East Midlands, which took its inhabitants by complete surprise. Although it was a wealthy city, it was inadequately garrisoned, and its hastily built fortifications were compromised by suburban buildings which gave cover to an attacking force. Its plunder would fill the soldiers’ stomachs and still leave plenty of loot for the king’s coffers. Rupert invested it methodically and summoned it to surrender on 30 May. Without a response, the royalist guns opened fire in mid-afternoon, and by six they had breached its best-defended quarter, the Newark.  At midnight, they launched a general attack which was resisted by the defenders, a mere 480 foot and 400 horse, assisted by 900 townsmen in arms. They had to be driven back street-by-street until they were finally cornered in the market place and forced to surrender. They did not all receive quarter, and both men and women were killed during the night since Rupert had lost thirty officers and was exasperated by the city’s resistance. The ensuing plunder went on for days, at the end of which 140 cartloads of ‘booty’ were carried off to Newark. It was reported that no royalist taken prisoner between Leicester and Naseby had less than forty shillings on him, two months’ pay for a foot soldier.

Following the fall of Leicester to the royalist army on 31 May, Cromwell (right) was dispatched to secure Ely while Pickering’s regiment remained with Fairfax. Leicester’s agony had the expected effect of making the Committee of Safety abandon the folly of besieging Oxford. Parliament promptly accepted its recommendation that Fairfax should now take the field against the king forthwith, thus removing the New Model’s shackles, simply instructing its general to follow the royal army’s movements and leaving the rest to his own judgement.

(to be continued…)

Sources:

Oxford: OUP (2002).

The cover of the book shows a section of ‘England’s Miraculous Preservation’. The ark contains the two Houses of Parliament, and among those struggling in the flood are Archbishop Laud, Prince Rupert and the Earls of Hamilton and Newcastle, as well as Oliver Cromwell (centre).

Whitstable: Pryor Publications (1994). In the acknowledgements, Glenn refers to the work he and this author did on the history of the regiment:  ‘It had been intended that we write the book together, before his departure to Hungary.’

Harmondsworth: Pelican Books (1972).

Christopher Hill (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas  During the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

David Smurthwaite (1984), The Ordnance Survey complete guide to the Battlefields of Britain. Exeter: Webb & Bower (Publishers).

John Hayward et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

Above: Denis Healey in combatant mood

Labour’s ‘Civil War’ and the Creation of the SDP:

As a general election loomed, with Labour in visible disarray, Margaret Thatcher moved within a couple of months from being one of the least popular prime ministers ever to being an unassailable national heroine. This was the result of two ‘factors’, the struggle for power within the Labour Party, which (as I wrote about in the first part of this article) began with Callaghan’s decision to step down as its leader in the autumn of 1980, and the Falklands Crisis and War of 1982.

Labour’s Civil War began with constitutional arguments about whether MPs should be able to be sacked by their local constituency parties. It became nasty, personal, occasionally physical, and so disgusted those outside its ranks that the party almost disappeared as an effective organisation. Undoubtedly, there was widespread bitterness on the left of the party about what were considered to be the right-wing policies of the defeated Wilson-Callaghan government, and about the small number of party conference decisions which found their way into Labour’s manifesto at the May 1979 election. In this atmosphere, the left wanted to take power away from right-wing MPs and their leadership and carry out a revolution from below. They believed that if they could control the party manifesto, the leadership election and bring the MPs to heel, they could turn Labour into a radical socialist party which would then destroy Thatcher’s economics at the next general election.

At Labour’s October 1980 Blackpool Conference, the left succeeded in voting through resolutions calling for Britain to withdraw from the European Community, unilateral disarmament, the closing of US bases in Britain, no incomes policy and State control of the whole of British industry, plus the creation of a thousand peers to abolish the House of Lords. Britain would become a kind of North Sea Cuba. The Trotskyite Militant Tendency, which had infiltrated the Labour Party, believed in pushing socialist demands so far that the democratic system would collapse and a full-scale class war would follow. Tony Benn, who thought that their arguments are sensible and they make perfectly good rational points, saw Militant as no more than of a threat than the old Tribune group or the pre-war Independent Labour Party. He thought that the left would bring about a thoroughly decent socialist victory. In fact, thuggish intimidation in many local Labour parties by Militant supporters was driving moderate members away in droves. Many mainstream trade unionists went along with Militant, feeling let down by the Wilson and Callaghan governments. So too did those who were driven by single issues, such as nuclear disarmament.

Shrewd tactics and relentless campaigning enabled a small number of people to control enough local parties and union branches to have a disproportionate effect in Labour conference votes, where the huge, undemocratic block votes of the trades unions no longer backed the leadership. At the 1980 Conference, the left won almost every important vote, utterly undermining Callaghan, who quit as leader two weeks later. Since new leadership election rules would not be in place until a special conference the following January, Labour MPs had one final chance to elect their own leader. Michael Foot, the old radical and intellectual, was persuaded to stand.  Benn would stand no chance against him, especially since he had now allied himself with the Trotskyists who were attacking the MPs. But Foot was a great parliamentarian and was considered to be the only candidate who could beat Denis Healey, by now the villain of the piece for the Labour left.

Healey had already highlighted the fatal flaw in their strategy which was that if they did take over the Labour Party, the country wouldn’t vote for it. Activists, he told them, were different from the vast majority of the British people, for whom politics was something to think about once a year at most. His robust remarks about what would later be called ‘the loony left’ were hardly calculated to maximise his chances, despite his popularity in the country at the time. At any rate, he was eventually beaten by Foot by 139 votes to 129. Many believe that Foot was the man who saved the Labour Party since he was the only leader remotely acceptable to both the old guard and the Bennite insurgents. He took on the job out of a sense of duty, with his old-style platform oratory. He was always an unlikely figure to topple Margaret Thatcher, the ‘Iron Lady’. It was the last blast of romantic intellectual socialism against the free market.

At the special party conference, Labour’s rules were indeed changed to give the unions forty per cent of the votes for future Labour leaders, the activists in the constituencies thirty per cent, and the MPs only thirty per cent. Labour’s struggle now moved to its next and most decisive stage, with the left in an exuberant mood. It was decided that Benn must challenge Healey for the deputy leadership the following year. This would signal an irreversible move. A Foot-Benn Labour Party would be a fundamentally different one from a party in which Healey continued to have a strong voice. Both sides saw it as the final battle and ‘Benn for Deputy’ badges began to appear everywhere. Benn went campaigning around the country with verve and relentless energy. I heard him speak impressively at the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea, though his analysis of the problems in the British economy was far stronger than the solutions he proposed. At public meetings, Healey was booed and heckled and spat at. The intimidation of anyone who would not back Benn was getting worse, though Benn himself was apparently unaware of what was being said and done in his name. Neil Kinnock eventually decided that he would support neither Benn nor Healey, announcing his decision in Tribune. As education spokesman, he had been gradually moving away from the hard left, while continuing to support his neighbouring south Wales and fellow-Bevanite MP and now party leader, Michael Foot. Popular in the party, he was regarded with increasing suspicion by Tony Benn. But this open break with the left’s ‘champion’ shocked many of his friends. At the Brighton conference, Benn was narrowly beaten by Healey, by less than one per cent of the votes. Neil Kinnock and Arthur Scargill clashed angrily on television, and a young Jeremy Corbyn openly called for the mandatory deselection of Tribune MPs who had refused to back Benn.

This next phase was too much for those who were already planning to break away and form a new party. Roy Jenkins had already mooted the idea before the Bennite revolt, as he contemplated the state of the British party system from his offices in Brussels, where he was President of the European Commission. He argued that the Victorian two-party system was out-dated and that coalition government was not such a bad thing. It was time, he said, to strengthen the ‘radical centre’ and find a way through the economic challenges which accepted the free market but also took unemployment seriously. Although he was in touch with David Steel, the Liberal leader, and was close to Liberal thinking, he judged that only a new party would give British politics the new dimension it needed. He began holding lunches for his old friends on the right of the Labour Party, including Bill Rodgers, still a shadow cabinet member, and Shirley Williams, who had lost her seat but who remained one of the best-liked politicians in the country. At this stage, the public reaction from Labour MPs was discouraging. Williams herself had said that a new centre party would have no roots, no principles, no philosophy and no values. David Owen, the young doctor and former Foreign Secretary, who was now fighting against unilateral nuclear disarmament, said Labour moderates must stay in the party and fight even if it took ten or twenty years.

The Bennite revolt changed many minds, however. After the Wembley conference, at which Owen was booed for his views on defence, he, Jenkins, Williams and Rodgers issued the ‘Limehouse Declaration’, describing Wembley as ‘calamitous’ and calling for a new start in British politics. Two months later, this was formalised as the ‘Social Democratic Party’ (SDP) two months later, in March 1981. In total thirteen Labour MPs defected to it and many more might have done so had not Roy Hattersley and others fought very hard to persuade them not to. Within two weeks, twenty-four thousand messages of support had flooded in and peers, journalists, students, academics and others were keen to join. Public meetings were packed from Scotland to the south coast of England, and media coverage was extensive and positive. In September an electoral pact was agreed with the Liberal Party, and ‘the Alliance’ was formed.

After running the Labour Party close in the Warrington by-election, the SDP won their first seat when Shirley Williams took Crosby from the Conservatives in November, with nearly half the votes cast, followed by Jenkins winning Glasgow Hillhead from the Tories the following year. His victory allowed Jenkins to become the leader of the party in the Commons, but David Owen had always believed that leadership was more rightly his and feared that Jenkins was leading the SDP towards a merger with the Liberals. Owen saw himself still as a socialist, although of a new kind. By the early eighties, the Liberal Party was led by Steel, ‘the boy David’ who was looking for a route back from the Thorpe scandal to the centre ground. The alliance with the SDP provided this, but Owen was not alone in despising the Liberals and the eventual merger between the two parties was bitter and difficult. Nevertheless, the initial upsurge in the SDP’s support shook both the Labour Party and the Conservatives and by the early spring of 1982, the SDP and Liberals could look forward with some confidence to breaking the mould of British politics.

The Falklands ‘Escapade’:

One of the many ironies of the Thatcher story is that she was rescued from the political consequences of her monetarism by the blunders of her hated Foreign Policy. In the great economic storms of 1979-81, and on the European budget battle, she had simply charged ahead, ignoring all the flapping around her in pursuit of a single goal. In the South Atlantic, she would do exactly the same and with her good luck, she was vindicated. Militarily, it could so easily have all gone wrong, and the Falklands War could have been a terrible disaster, confirming the Argentinian dictatorship in power in the South Atlantic and ending Margaret Thatcher’s career after just one term as Prime Minister. Of all the gambles in modern British politics, the sending of a task force of ships from the shrunken and underfunded Royal Navy eight thousand miles away to take a group of islands by force was one of the most extreme.

On both sides, the conflict derived from colonial quarrels, dating back to 1833, when the scattering of islands had been declared a British colony. In Buenos Aires, a newly installed ‘junta’ under General Leopoldo Galtieri was heavily dependent on the Argentine navy, itself passionately keen on taking over the islands, known in Argentina as the Malvinas. The following year would see the 150th anniversary of ‘British ownership’ which the Argentines feared would be used to reassert the Falklands’ British future. The junta misread Whitehall’s lack of policy for lack of interest and concluded that an invasion would be easy, popular and impossible to reverse. In March an Argentine ship ‘tested the waters’ by landing on South Georgia, a small dependency south of the Falklands, disembarking scrap-metal dealers. Then on 1 April, the main invasion began, a landing by Argentine troops which had been carefully prepared for by local representatives of the national airline. In three hours it was all over, and the eighty British marines surrendered, having killed five Argentine troops and injured seventeen with no losses of their own. In London, there was mayhem. Thatcher had had a few hours’ warning of what was happening from the Defence Secretary, John Nott. Calling a hurried meeting in her Commons office, Sir John Leach gave her clarity and hope, when her ministers were as confused as she was. He told her he could assemble a task-force of destroyers, frigates and landing craft, led by Britain’s two remaining aircraft carriers. It could be ready to sail within forty-eight hours and the islands could be retaken by force. She told him to go ahead. Soon after, the Foreign Secretary, Peter Carrington, tended his resignation, accepting responsibility for the Foreign Office’s failings.

But Margaret Thatcher was confronted by a moral question which she could not duck, which was that many healthy young men were likely to die or be horribly injured in order to defend the ‘sovereignty’ of the Falkland Islanders. In the end, almost a thousand did die, one for every two islanders and many others were maimed and psychologically wrecked. She argued that the whole structure of national identity and international law were at stake. Michael Foot, who had been bellicose in parliament at first, harking back to the appeasement of fascism in the thirties, urged her to find a diplomatic answer. Later she insisted that she was vividly aware of the blood-price that was waiting and not all consumed by lust for conflict. Thatcher had believed that from the start that to cave in would finish her. The press, like the Conservative Party itself, were seething about the original diplomatic blunders. As it happened, the Argentine junta, even more belligerent, ensured that a serious deal was never properly put. They simply insisted that the British task-force be withdrawn from the entire area and that Argentine representatives should take part in any interim administration and that if talks failed Britain would simply lose sovereignty. The reality, though, was that their political position was even weaker than hers. She established a small war cabinet and the task-force, now up to twenty vessels strong was steadily reinforced. Eventually, it comprised more than a hundred ships and 25,000 men. The world was both transfixed and bemused.

Above: Royal Marines march towards Port Stanley during the Falklands War.

The Empire struck back, and by the end of the month South Georgia was recaptured and a large number of Argentine prisoners taken: Thatcher urged questioning journalists outside Number Ten simply to ‘rejoice, rejoice!’ Then came one of the most controversial episodes in the short war. A British submarine, The Conqueror, was following the ageing but heavily armed cruiser, the Belgrano. The British task-force was exposed and feared a pincer movement, although the Belgrano was later found to have been outside an exclusion zone announced in London, and streaming away from the fleet. With her military commanders at Chequers, Thatcher authorised the submarine attack. The Belgrano was sunk, with the loss of 321 sailors. The Sun newspaper carried the headline ‘Gotcha!’ Soon afterwards, a British destroyer was hit by an Argentine Exocet missile and later sunk. Forty died.

On 18 May 1982, the war cabinet agreed that landings on the Falklands should go ahead, despite lack of full air cover and worsening weather. By landing at the unexpected bay of San Carlos in low cloud, British troops got ashore in large numbers. Heavy Argentine air attacks, however, took a serious toll. Two frigates were badly damaged, another was sunk, then another, then a destroyer, then a container ship with vital supplies. Nevertheless, three thousand British troops secured a beach-head and began to fight their way inland. Over the next few weeks, they captured the settlements of Goose Green and Darwin, killing 250 Argentine soldiers and capturing 1,400 for the loss of twenty British lives. Colonel ‘H’ Jones became the first celebrated hero of the conflict when he died leading ‘2 Para’ against heavy Argentine fire. The battle then moved to the tiny capital, Port Stanley, or rather to the circle of hills around it where the Argentine army was dug in. Before the final assault on 8 June, two British landing ships, Sir Tristram and Sir Galahad were hit by missiles and the Welsh Guards suffered dreadful losses, many of the survivors being badly burned. Simon Weston was one of them. Out of his platoon of 30 men, 22 were killed. The Welsh Guards lost a total of 48 men killed and 97 wounded aboard the Sir Galahad. Weston survived with 46% burns, following which his face was barely recognisable. He later became a well-known spokesman and charity-worker for his fellow injured and disabled veterans. He recalled:

My first encounter with a really low point was when they wheeled me into the transit hospital at RAF Lyneham and I passed my mother in the corridor and she said to my gran, “Oh mam, look at that poor boy” and I cried out “Mam, it’s me!” As she recognised my voice her face turned to stone.

Simon Weston in 2008

The Falklands Factor and the 1983 Election:

The trauma of the Falklands War broke across Britain, nowhere more strongly than in Wales. The impact on Wales was direct, in the disaster to the Welsh Guards at Bluff Cove and in anxieties over the Welsh communities in Patagonia in Argentina. Plaid Cymru was the only mainstream party to totally oppose the war from the beginning, and it evoked a strong response among artists in Wales. Students from the Welsh College and Drama in Cardiff staged a satirical drama on the war which won many plaudits. They portrayed the war as a mere butchery for a meaningless prize. Veteran Labour MP Tam Dalyell hounded the Prime Minister with parliamentary questions as he sought to prove that the sailors on the Belgrano had been killed to keep the war going, not for reasons of military necessity. One of the few memorable moments of the 1983 election campaign came when Mrs Thatcher was challenged on television about the incident by a woman who seemed a match for her. Among the Labour leadership, Denis Healey accused her of glorifying in slaughter and Neil Kinnock got into trouble when, responding to a heckler who said that at least Margaret Thatcher had guts, he replied that it was a pity that other people had had to leave theirs on Goose Green to prove it.  But there had also been those on the left who supported the war, together with Michael Foot, because of their opposition to the Argentine dictatorship, and there is little doubt that it gave a similar impetus to British patriotism across the political spectrum. It also bolstered a more narrow nationalism, jingoism and chauvinism both in the Conservative party and in the media.

For millions, the Falklands War seemed a complete anachronism, a Victorian gunboat war in a nuclear age, but for millions more still it served as a wholly unexpected and almost mythic symbol of rebirth. Margaret Thatcher herself lost no time in telling the whole country what she thought the war meant. It was more than simply a triumph of ‘freedom and democracy’ over Argentinian dictatorship. Speaking at Cheltenham racecourse in early July, she said:

We have ceased to be a nation in retreat. We have instead a newfound confidence, born in the economic battles at home and found true eight thousand miles away … Printing money is no more. Rightly this government has abjured it. Increasingly the nation won’t have it … That too is part of the Falklands factor. … Britain found herself again in the South Atlantic and will not look back from the victory she has won. 

Of course, the Falklands War fitted into Margaret Thatcher’s personal narrative and merged into a wider sense that confrontation was required in public life country’s politics. The Provisional IRA had assassinated Lord Mountbatten on his boat off the coast of Donegal in 1979 and the mainland bombing campaign went on with attacks on the Chelsea barracks, then Hyde Park bombings, when eight people were killed and fifty-three injured. In Northern Ireland itself, from the spring of 1981, a hideous IRA hunger-strike had been going on, leading to the death of Bobby Sands and nine others. Thatcher called Sands a convicted criminal who chose to take his own life. It was a choice, she added, that the PIRA did not allow to any of its victims. She was utterly determined not to flinch and was as rock-hard as the ruthless Irish republican enemies.

Thatcher was now becoming a vividly divisive figure. On one side were those who felt they, at last, had their Boudicca, a warrior queen for hard times. On the other were those who saw her as a dangerous and bloodthirsty figure, driven by an inhumane worldview. To the cartoonists of the right-wing press, she was the embodiment of Britannia, surrounded by cringing ‘wets’. To others, she was simply mad, with a sharply curved vulture’s beak nose, staring eyes and rivets in her hair. Gender-confusion was rife. France’s President Mitterrand, who in fact had quite a good relationship with her, summed up the paradox better than any British observer when, after meeting her soon after his own election, he told one of his ministers, She has the eyes of Caligula but she has the mouth of Marilyn Monroe.

The Falklands War confirmed and underlined these opposing and paradoxical views of Thatcher. She encouraged the government’s think tank, the Central Policy Review Staff, to come up with a paper about the future of public spending. They came up with a manifesto which could be characterised as ‘Margaret Thatcher unconstrained’. They suggested ending state funding of higher education, extending student loans to replace grants, breaking the link between benefits and the cost of living, and replacing the National Health Service with a system of private health insurance, including charges for doctor’s visits and prescriptions. In effect, this represented the end of Attlee’s Welfare State. Although some of these ideas would become widely discussed much later, at the time the prospectus was regarded as ‘bonkers’ by most of those around her. The PM supported it but ministers who regarded it as, potentially, her worst mistake since coming to power, leaked the CPRS report to the press in order to kill it off. In this they were successful, but the whole episode was an early indication of how Thatcher’s charge-ahead politics could produce disasters as well as triumphs.

The electoral consequences of the Falklands War have been argued about ever since. The government had got inflation down and the economy was at last improving but the overall Conservative record in 1983 was not impressive. The most dramatic de-industrialisation of modern times, with hundreds of recently profitable businesses disappearing forever, had been caused in part by a very high pound boosted by Britain’s new status as an oil producer. Up to this point, unemployment had been seen as a price worth paying in order to control inflation, but the extent of de-manning required by 1983 had been underestimated. Howe’s economic squeeze, involving heavy tax increases and a reduction in public borrowing deflated the economy, reducing demand and employment. In the 1980s, two million manufacturing jobs disappeared, most of them by 1982. Given the shrinking of the country’s industrial base and unemployment at three million, a total tax burden of forty per cent of GDP and public spending at forty-four per cent, there were plenty of targets for competent Opposition politicians to take aim at. In an ordinary election, the state of the economy would have had the governing party in serious trouble, but this was no ordinary election.

After the war, the Conservatives shot into a sudden and dramatic lead in the polls over the two Opposition groupings now ranged against them.  In the 1983 general election, the SDP and the Liberals took nearly a quarter of the popular vote, but the electoral system gave them just twenty-three MPs, only six of them from the SDP, a bitter harvest after the advances made in the by-elections of 1981-2. Labour was beaten into third place in the number of votes cast. This meant that the Conservatives won by a landslide, giving Mrs Thatcher a majority of 144 seats, a Tory buffer which kept them in power until 1997. It would be perverse to deny that the Falklands conflict was crucial, giving Thatcher a story to tell about herself and the country which was simple and vivid and made sense to millions. But there were other factors in play, ones which were present in the political undercurrents of 1981-2 and the divisions within the Labour Party in particular. For one thing, the Labour Party’s Manifesto at the 1983 Election, based on the left-wing Conference decisions of 1980-82, was later considered to be the longest suicide note in history.

The Political and Cultural Landscape of Wales:

In Wales, we had expected that the calamitous effect of the monetarist policies would produce a surge in support for Labour and that the effect of the Falklands factor would not weigh so heavily in the Tories’ favour as elsewhere in Britain. We were wrong. Moreover, we believed that the efforts we had made on the left-wing of the national movement in association with Welsh language activists, libertarian socialist groups, ecological, peace and women’s groups would bring dividends in electoral terms. But, in the Wales of 1983, these remained marginal movements as the country remained, for the most part, locked into the British two-party system. The General Election of 1983 exposed the myth that South Wales, in particular, was still some kind of ‘heartland of Labour’ and continued the trend of 1979 in relocating it within the South of the British political landscape. In Wales as a whole, the Labour vote fell by nearly ten per cent, exceeded only in East Anglia and the South-East of England, and level with London again. The Labour vote in Wales fell by over 178,000, the Tories by 24,000 (1.7 per cent), the great ‘victors’ being the Alliance, whose votes rocketed by over two hundred thousand. This surge did not, however, benefit the third parties in terms of seats, which simply transferred directly from Labour to Conservative.

The Conservatives, with a candidate of Ukranian descent and strong right-wing views, took the Cardiff West seat of George Thomas, the former Speaker, and swept most of Cardiff. They also took the marginal seat of Bridgend and pressed hard throughout the rural west, almost taking Carmarthen. Michael Foot visited the constituency and held a major rally, during which he spoke powerfully but almost fell of the stage. We canvassed hard on the council estates for the Labour MP, Dr Roger Thomas, managing to hold off both the Tories and Plaid Cymru, in what turned out to be Gwynfor Evans’ last election. Nevertheless, the Tories ended up with thirteen seats out of thirty-eight in Wales. Plaid Cymru, disappointed in the valleys, still managed to hold its green line across the north-west, holding Caernarfon and Merioneth and moving into second place, ahead of Labour, on Anglesey. The Alliance more than doubled the former Liberal poll, reaching twenty-three per cent in the popular vote, and coming second in nineteen out of the thirty-eight seats. But it won only two seats. Labour’s defeat seemed to be slithering into rout even though it retained more than half the seats, twenty in all. It held on by the skin of its teeth not only to Carmarthen but also to Wrexham, its former stronghold in the north-east. In the fourteen seats which covered its traditional base in the south, one fell to the Conservatives and six became three-way marginals. The SDP-Liberal Alliance came second in ten and, in the Rhondda won eight thousand votes without even campaigning. The remaining seven constituencies gave Labour over half of their votes. Of the old twenty thousand majority seats, only three remained: Rhondda, Merthyr Tydfil and Blaenau Gwent (Ebbw Vale). As Gwyn Williams commented:

They stand like Aneurin Bevan’s memorial stones on the Pound above Tredegar and they are beginning to look like the Stonehenge of Welsh politics.   

Two other ‘events’ of cultural significance took place in Wales in 1983. The first demonstrates how the question of culture in Wales had become caught up with the arguments over language. The language became a badge, the possession of which by learners is a sign of good faith: I was one of them, though I never learnt how to write in Welsh. In 1979, however, I had managed, with the help of friends, to write a speech in ‘Cymraeg Byw’ (Colloquial Welsh) as ‘Cadeirydd’ (‘Chair’) of UCMC (NUS Wales), which I delivered at the National Eisteddfod in Caernarfon. I argued for English- speaking and Welsh-speaking students to come back together throughout Wales in order to defend the country, the University and their colleges, paid for by the ‘pennies’ of miners and quarrymen, from the cut-backs in education which the Tories were bringing in. I was not successful in persuading the Welsh-speaking students from Bangor, who had formed their own separate union in 1977, to form a federal union, like the one which existed in Aberystwyth. But what chance did we have when, four years later, the renowned poet R S Thomas, himself a learner of the language, fulminated at the Eisteddfod that the Welshman/ woman who did not try to speak Welsh was, in terms of Wales, an ‘un-person’. His fundamentalism as Dai Smith called it, demanded that reality, the chaos of uncertainty, be fenced in. R S Thomas, for all the brilliant wonder of his own poetry in English, had:

… turned Wales into ‘an analogy for most people’s experience of living in the twentieth century … a special, spare grammar and vocabulary in which certain statements can be made in no other language’. 

Thomas’ conversion to Welsh language fundamentalism had come rather late in life. In the sixties and seventies, he had remarked that he was rather tired of the themes about nationalism and the decay of the rural structure of Wales and that whereas he used to propagandise on behalf of Welsh Country Life and … the Welsh identity, he felt that he’d wrung that dishcloth dry. In May 1983, the Western Mail had welcomed the poet to Cardiff on the occasion of his seventieth birthday to Cardiff, describing him as a man whose genius found expression in the search for the ancient simplicities of rural Wales. R Gerallt Jones, introducing an evening of celebration at the Sherman Theatre in the capital some days later, acclaimed Thomas as the poet who has expressed the national identity of the Welshman. As Tony Bianchi showed in 1986, Thomas’ work has been used  – within the context of a wide range of prescriptive notions concerning the “Welsh heritage” – to condemn most of the Welsh to a marginal existence in which they are permitted only a vicarious identity. That’s what makes R S Thomas’ statement at the 1983 National Eisteddfod so surprising and intriguing.

The second cultural ‘event’ was the publication of an impressionistic but learned survey of Welsh history by the distinguished Welsh novelist Emyr Humphrys. The Taliesin Tradition took as its theme the survival of a continuous Welsh tradition in the face of all contrary odds. He ascribed this to a ‘poetic tradition’ which had invested the native language with the power and authority to sustain ‘national being’. In order to explain the unfolding of Welsh history, however, he welcomes the blurring of history and myth:

The manufacture and proliferation of myth must always be a major creative activity among a people with unnaturally high expectations reduced by historic necessity … In Wales history and myth have always mingled and both have been of equal importance in the struggle for survival. 

For ‘organic nationalists’, like R S Thomas and Emyr Humphrys, history must not only mingle with myth but also have its disciplines submitted to the needs of the nation. Dai Smith pointed out that while this provided for acceptable politics for some, it is not good history. The verbal dexterity which it requires, Dai Smith claimed, obscures the reality of Welsh life, by emphasising the myths of ‘the murder of the Welsh language’, and the ‘kowtowing to ‘Britishness’ at the expense of ‘Welshness’. On this theme, Gwyn Williams (below) wrote:

Ahead, a country which largely lives by the British state, whose input into it is ten per cent of its gross product, faces a major reconstruction of its public sector … a country whose young people are being dumped like in town and country faces the prospect of a large and growing population which will be considered redundant in a state which is already considering a major reduction in the financial burden of welfare.

Small wonder that some, looking ahead, see nothing but a nightmare vision of a depersonalised Wales which has shrivelled up to a Costa Bureaucratica  in the south and a Costa Geriatrica in the north; in between, sheep, holiday homes burning merrily away and fifty folk museums where there used to be communities.

… What seems to be clear is that a majority of the inhabitants of Wales are choosing a British identity which seems to require the elimination of a Welsh one.

As it happened, Dai Smith was right. The idea that ‘Britishness’ and ‘Welshness’ were mutually exclusive was indeed a myth, and both were able to survive as dual identities into the later eighties and beyond.

Ghost Town – The Case of Coventry, 1979-83:

By the late 1970s, the British motor industry had reached an historic crossroads. Entry into the EEC had coincided with an unusually weak range of British products. Models were either outdated or bedevilled by quality and reliability problems. European manufacturers soon captured nearly forty per cent of the home market. The choice facing British manufacturers was varied. Those companies owned by American parents integrated their UK operations with their European counterparts. Ford and General Motors are two successful examples of this strategy. Unfortunately for Coventry, the Chrysler Corporation was experiencing problems in many parts of their ’empire’ and did not possess the resources necessary for the establishment of a high-volume European operation. British-owned Leyland faced a more complex situation. The company produced both high-volume and specialist products. The Cowley and Longbridge plants which produced high-volume products badly needed investment to keep up with the European companies and the American subsidiaries. The specialist producers, Jaguar, Rover and Triumph, also required a large injection of capital in order to meet the growing competition from such companies as Audi, BMW, Alfa Romeo and the Scandinavian manufacturers. The various schemes devised by Ryder and the National Enterprise Board underlined Leyland’s commitment to the large and medium volume plants. The announcement of the collaborative agreement with Honda in 1979 to produce a new Japanese designed quality saloon at Canley was seen by many as an end to uncertainty over Leyland’s long-term commitment to Coventry.

The change of government in 1979 soon quashed the cautious optimism that had been present in the local car industry. The Conservative economic strategy of high-interest rates overvalued the pound, particularly in the USA, the major market for Coventry’s specialist cars. Demand for Coventry models declined rapidly and Leyland management embarked upon a new rationalisation plan. The company’s production was to be concentrated into two plants, at Cowley and Longbridge. Triumph production was transferred to Cowley along with the Rover models produced at Solihull. The Courthouse Green engine plant in Coventry was closed and three of the city’s other car-manufacturing concerns – Alvis, Climax and Jaguar – were sold off to private buyers. Only Jaguar survived the recession. In the first three years of the Thatcher government, the number of Leyland employees in Coventry fell from twenty-seven thousand to just eight thousand. One writer described the effects of Conservative policy on manufacturing industry in these years as turning a process of gentle decline into quickening collapse. The city’s top fifteen manufacturing companies shed thirty-one thousand workers between 1979 and 1982. Well-known names at the base of the pyramid of Coventry’s economic life – Herbert’s, Triumph Motors and Renold’s – simply disappeared.

Even in 1979, before the change in government, unemployment in Coventry stood at just five per cent, exactly the same level as in the early seventies. There was a noticeable rise in youth unemployment towards the end of the decade, but this, as we have seen, was part of a national problem caused mainly by demographic factors. Neither was the election of the Tory government seen as a harbinger of hard times to come. Coventry had prospered reasonably well during previous Tory administrations and even enjoyed boom conditions as a result of the policies of Anthony Barber, Heath’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Heath had ridden to the rescue of Rolls-Royce when it needed government assistance. Unfortunately, the economic brakes were applied too rapidly for the car industry and monetarist policy quickly cut into it. Redundancy lists and closure notices in the local press became as depressingly regular as the obituary column. The biggest surprise, however, was the lack of protest from the local Labour movement. It was as if all the ominous prophecies of the anti-union editorials which had regularly appeared in the Coventry Evening Telegraph during the industrial unrest of the previous decades were finally being fulfilled.

In any case, it was difficult to devise defensive industrial strategies. Michael Edwardes’ new tough industrial relations programme at British Leyland had seen the removal of Derek Robinson,  ‘Red Robbo’, the strongest motor factory union leader from Longbridge. He also demonstrated, at Speke in Liverpool, that he could and would close factories in the face of trade union opposition. Factory occupations, used to such effect by continental trades unionists had, thanks to the Meriden Triumph Motorcycle fiasco, no chance of local success. The opposition to closures was also undoubtedly diminished by redundancy payments which in many cases cushioned families from the still unrealised effects of the recession. Young people, especially school- leavers, were the real victims. Coventry’s much-prized craft apprenticeships all but vanished, with only ninety-five apprentices commencing training in 1981. In 1982, only sixteen per cent of sixteen-year-old school leavers found employment. The early 1980s were barren years for Coventry’s youth. Even the success of the local pop group, The Specials’, brought little relief, though for a brief moment the band’s song Ghost Town was a national success, giving vent to the plight of young people throughout the manufacturing towns of the Midlands and the North of England, not to mention Wales. The sombre comparison in the lyrics of boom time and recession express an experience that was felt more sharply in Coventry than elsewhere.

For the first time in over a century, Coventry became a net exporter of labour, but unemployment levels still remained stubbornly high. The main loss was mainly among the young skilled and technical management sectors, people who the city could ill afford to lose. Little research and development work was taking place in local industry. Talbot’s research department at Whitley including much key personnel, for example, was removed to Paris in 1983. The Conservatives promised in 1979 that a restructuring of the economy would be followed by increased investment and employment opportunities, but by 1983 there were very few signs of that promise being fulfilled. Coventry’s peculiar dependence on manufacturing and its historically weak tertiary sector has meant that the city was, at that time, a poor location for the so-called ‘high tech’ industries. As a local historian concluded at that time:

Coventry in the mid 1980s displays none of the confidence in the future that was so apparent in the immediate post-war years. . The city, which for decades was the natural habitat of the affluent industrial worker is finding it difficult to adjust to a situation where the local authority and university rank among the largest employers. Coventry’s self-image of progressiveness and modernity has all but vanished. The citizens now largely identify themselves and their environment as part of a depressed Britain. 

This was a sad contrast to the vibrant city of full employment in which my mother had grown up in the thirties and forties and where she had met and married my father in the early fifties. By the time I returned there as a teacher, from a former mill town in Lancashire in 1986 which had recovered from its own decline in the sixties and seventies, Coventry was also beginning to recover, but the shiny new comprehensive schools built thirty years before were already beginning to merge and close due to these years of recession, unemployment and outward migration.

Revolution or retro-capitalism?

Thatcher’s government of 1979-83 was not the return of ‘Victorian Val’, a revival of Gladstonian liberalism, nor even of the Palmerstonian gunboat imperialism which it sometimes resembled in its rhetoric. It was more of a reversion to the hard-faced empire of the 1920s when war socialism was energetically dismantled, leaving industries that could survive and profit to do so and those which couldn’t to go to the wall. As in the twenties, resistance to brutal rationalisation through closure or sell-off of uneconomic enterprises, or by wage or job reductions, was eventually to be met by determined opposition in the confrontation of 1984-5 between Thatcher and the NUM, led by Arthur Scargill, a battle comprehensively won by the PM.

The trouble with this ‘retro-capitalism’ masquerading as innovation was that sixty years after the policy had first been implemented, the regions that were the weaker species in this Darwinian competition were not just suffering from influenza, but prostrate with pneumonia. They were now being told to drop dead. These included South Wales, Lancashire, the West Riding, Tyneside and Clydeside. Those regions which had risen to extraordinary prosperity as part of the British imperial enterprise were now, finally, being written off as disposable assets in a sale. What interest would the Welsh and Scots, in particular, have in remaining part of Great Britain plc? They were also now being joined by those same manufacturing areas which had provided respite for millions of migrants from the older industrial areas in the thirties, centres such as Coventry. The euphoria felt by the Conservatives following their unexpected second victory in 1983 disguised the fact that their majority was built at the price of perpetuating a deep rift in Britain’s social geography. Not since Edward I in the thirteenth century had a triumphant England imposed its rule on the other nations of Britain.

Thatcher’s constituency was not, however, to be found among the engineers of ‘Middle England’ or even the Lincolnshire grocers from whom she hailed, who might have voted for Ted Heath’s ‘Third Way’ Tories. It was overwhelmingly to be found among the well-off middle and professional classes in the south of England, in the Home Counties, or the ‘golden circle’ commuter areas. The distressed northern zones of derelict factories, pits, ports and decrepit terraced houses were left to rot and rust. The solution of her governments, in so far as they had one, was to let the employment market and good old Gladstonian principles of ‘bootstrap’ self-help take care of the problem. People living in areas of massive redundancy amidst collapsing industries ought simply to ‘retrain’ for work in the up-and-coming industries of the future or, in Norman Tebbitt’s famous phrase, “get on their bikes” like their grandfathers had done and move to places such as Milton Keynes, Basingstoke or Cambridge where those opportunities were now clustered. But this vision of ex-welders, or even assembly workers, lining up to use computers was not helped by the absence of such publicly funded retraining. And even if it was available, there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it, no apprenticeship system. The whole point of the computer revolution in industry was to save, not to expand labour. The new jobs it created could, and would be taken by the sons and daughters of the industrial workers of the early eighties, but not by those workers themselves.

Finally, the kick-up-the-rear-end effect of the eighties’ Thatcher counter-revolution ran into something that she could do little about; the Coronation Street syndrome. Like the residents of the mythical TV soap opera, millions in the old British industrial economy had a deeply ingrained loyalty to the place where they had grown up, gone to school, got married and had their kids; to their extended family with older generations, to their pub, their parks and hills, to their football or rugby club. In that sense, at least, the post-war social revolution and welfare state had helped to maintain and even develop towns and cities that, for all their ups and downs, their poverty and pain, were real communities. Fewer people were willing to give up on these places than had been the case fifty years earlier, and certainly not on cities like Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham, Derby and Coventry. But not everything the Thatcher government did was out of tune with social ‘harmony’. The sale of council-houses created an owner-occupier class which corresponded to the long passion of the British to be kings and queens of their own little castles. Nationalised industries were failing to take advantage of enterprise and innovation. But many of these more popular reforms were to come after her confrontation with the miners and especially in her third term.

Sources:

Gwyn A Williams (1985), When Was Wales? A History of the Welsh. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Dai Smith (1984), Wales! Wales?  Hemel Hempstead: George Allen & Unwin.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (1984), Life & Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: University of Warwick Cryfield Press.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain III, 1776-2000: The Fate of Empire.  London: BBC Worldwide.

Andrew Marr (2008), A History of Modern Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, was one of the twelve disciples, possibly the first and previously one of John the Baptist’s disciples (Mt. 10 v 1, Jn. 1 v 40). He and his brother were originally from Bethsaida in Galilee (Jn. 1 v 44), moving to live and work at the fishing port of Capernaum on the northern shore of Lake Galilee (Mk. 1 v 29). Pointed towards ‘the Lamb of God‘ by the Baptist (Jn. 1 vv 35-40), he, in turn, introduced his brother to Jesus, telling him that he had found the Messiah (Jn. 1 v 42). There are several references to his role in the ministry of Jesus, especially in terms of mediating within the group of apostles and facilitating Jesus’ contact with would-be disciples and enquirers (Jn. 6 v 8, 12 v 22, Mk. 13 v 3). He also witnessed the Ascension of Jesus (Acts 1 v 13).

Andrew means ‘manly’ in Greek and, as he was not just Simon Peter’s brother, but also his partner in the fishing business, it was a name that he no doubt lived up to. However, after meeting Jesus, he gave up the trade, at least as a full-time occupation, and, together with Simon, he joined Jesus’ itinerary ministry as a ‘fisher of men’. Before the cross became the symbol of Christianity in Roman times, the fish was the sign which Jesus’ disciples recognised on each other’s houses and later in the catacombs in Rome. After Jesus’ ascension he travelled in Asia Minor and along the Black Sea as far as the River Volga. He therefore became the patron saint of the Volga  boatmen and then of Russia. He was taken prisoner as a Christian and condemned to death by crucifixion. Legend has it that he considered himself unworthy to be put to death in the same manner as Jesus, and so elected to be crucified in the form of a ‘crux decussata’, or diagonal, hence his white diagonal cross on a blue background making up the flag of Scotland and, of course, the background of the Union Flag. The white stands for the purity of the saint and the blue for the sea which he loved.His remains were taken from Patros where he was buried (hence his association with Greece) to Constantinople. He was canonised by the Church long before being adopted by the Scots as their patron. His remains are now said to be on the spot over which St Andrew’s Cathedral was built and around which the university town grew up.

There are also many legends about the manner in which the relics of the saint came to rest in Scotland. One of the most attractive recounts how a group of monks set out from Constantinople to reach Scotland to spread the gospel and convert the Scots to Christianity, probably in the sixth century.  They asked for the relics of a holy man to take with them as a protection from all the dangers of the voyage. Given the length of the journey and the number and nature of the hazards, known and unknown, that they were likely to encounter, they needed a pretty hefty insurance policy, and so were given the bones of St Andrew. After months of travel, they arrived on the east coast of Scotland, buried the relics near where they landed and set up an altar within a small church which they built on the spot. On being converted to Christianity, the people then declared St Andrew as their patron and St Andrew’s became a place of pilgrimage.

Since then, Scottish people all over the world celebrate St Andrew’s Day, though Hogmanay, a two-day public holiday in Scotland, and Burns’ Night are more important events in Scotland itself and among expatriates. Stories are told in schools which illustrate the bravery and independence of the Scots. Many of these tales date back to the period when the Scots contested the claims of Edward I and Edward II to be the Kings of Scotland, following great historical characters such as William Wallace, Robert Bruce and the Black Douglas. Perhaps the best-known legend is that of Bruce in despair following the capture of his wife and execution of his brother. He was considering giving up his claims to the Scottish throne and going into exile, lying back on his straw bed looking up at the roof of his miserable hut. Then he saw a spider hanging by a long thread, trying to swing itself from one beam to another. He counted the creature’s six attempts to link up with the other beam before finally succeeding. Bruce remembered that he had fought and lost six battles, and vowed to fight on.

A distinguished follower of Bruce was the Good Lord James of Douglas who fought fiercely to recover the castles of Scotland that had fallen into the hands of the Norman English. The castle at Linlithgow was one of these, having the usual defences of huge gates to the only entrance and a portcullis behind them, a huge iron grate which could be let down rapidly, crushing all below it with its spikes. Not far from the castle lived a farmer called Binnock who supplied the castle garrison with hay. One night, he loaded a great wagon with hay, hiding eight fully armed soldiers beneath it, lying flat at the bottom of the cart. In the morning, he and his driver approached the castle and the portcullis was raised to allow the two men to enter. When the cart was directly under the portcullis, the driver took his hatchet and severed the horses’ harness. The horses, freed from their load, started forward, leaving the cart of hay under the portcullis. Binnock shouted ‘Call all, call all!’ as he pulled his sword from under his farm coat and slew the gatekeeper. The English soldiers were unable to lower the portcullis with the hay cart in the way. The soldiers hiding in the cart were joined by reinforcements lying in wait outside and the castle was taken.

The dreaded Black Douglas was so-called for his deftness at using the cover of darkness to retake the castles. He used the night of Shrove Tuesday, when most of the English troops were tucking into their pancakes, to take back Roxburgh. The wife of one of the English officers was sitting on the battlements singing a lullaby to the child on her lap. She saw black objects moving about in the darkness below and thought they were cattle. However, they were Douglas’ soldiers, able to scale the walls without detection. When she realised what was happening, the mother changed her song:

Hush ye, hush ye, little pet ye,

Hush ye, hush ye, do not fret ye,

The Black Douglas shall not get ye.

From the darkness at her shoulder a voice said, Ye canna be sure o’ that! and was followed by a heavy hand on her shoulder. She turned to see the Black Douglas himself. Although many English died that night, Black Douglas saw to it that no harm came to the woman or child. Sir Walter Scott tells this tale in Tales of a Grandfather, commenting ‘I dare say she sang no more songs about the Black Douglas’. A third legend tells a tale of a group of English soldiers approaching a castle held by the Scots. It was a black, moonless night, and this time the English were wearing black cloaks over their uniforms. However, one of them put his hand on a thistle and gave a cry of pain. This alerted the garrison and the castle was saved. After that, the thistle, an unlikely flower to choose as a national emblem, became just that. The other, sometimes preferred, emblematic purple flower is, of course, the heather.

There are historic ties between Hungary and Scotland predating Edward I,  the hammer of the Scots, and even the Norman conquest of England. These relate to Margaret of Wessex, who was born in exile Mecseknádás in southern Hungary. Margaret was the daughter of the English prince, Edward the Exile and granddaughter of Edmund Ironside, king of England. After the Danish conquest of England in 1016, Canute had the infant Edward exiled to the continent. He was taken first to the court of the Swedish king, Olof Skötkonung, and then to Kiev. As an adult, he travelled to Hungary, where in 1046 he supported Andrew I‘s successful bid for the throne. Margaret’s mother, Agatha, was related either by blood or marriage to István (Stephen I), the founding king of Hungary. and Margaret was born in Hungary around 1045. Her brother and sister were also born in Hungary around this time. Margaret grew up in a very religious environment in the Hungarian court. Andrew I of Hungary was known as “Andrew the Catholic” for his extreme aversion to pagans, and great loyalty to Rome, which was probably what induced Margaret to follow a pious life.

Still a child, she came to England with the rest of her family when her father, Edward, was recalled in 1057 as a possible successor to her great-uncle, the childless Edward the Confessor. Whether from natural or sinister causes, her father died immediately on landing, but Margaret continued to reside at the English court where her brother, Edgar Ætheling, was considered a possible successor to the English throne. When the Confessor died in January 1066, Harold Godwinson was selected as king, Edgar perhaps being considered still too young. After Harold’s defeat at the battle of Hastings later that year, Edgar was proclaimed King of England, but when the Normans advanced on London, the Witenagemot presented Edgar to William the Conqueror who took him to Normandy before returning him to England in 1068, when Edgar, Margaret, Cristina and their mother Agatha fled north to Northumbria.

According to tradition, the widowed Agatha decided to leave Northumbria with her children and return to the continent. However, a storm drove their ship north to Scotland, where they sought the protection of King Malcolm III. The spot where they are said to have landed is known today as St. Margaret’s Hope, near the village of North Queensferry. Margaret’s arrival in Scotland in 1068, after the failed revolt of the Northumbrian earls, has been heavily romanticized, though Symeon of Durham implied that her first meeting with Malcolm III may not have been until 1070, after William the Conqueror’s harrying of the north.

Malcolm was a widower with two sons, Donald and Duncan. According to the sources on which Shakespeare based his ‘Scottish Play’, Macbeth, the ‘evil tyrant’ who had his wife killed after Malcolm had escaped into exile in England, returning to overthrow Macbeth and claim the Scottish throne. He would have been attracted by the prospect of marrying one of the few remaining members of the Anglo-Saxon royal family. The marriage of Malcolm and Margaret took place some time before the end of 1070. Malcolm followed it with several invasions of Northumbria, in support of the claims of his brother-in-law Edgar, as well as to increase his own power. These, however, had little result beyond the devastation of the province.

Margaret’s biographer Turgot, Bishop of St. Andrews, credits her with having a civilizing influence on her husband Malcolm by reading him stories from the Bible. She instigated religious reform, striving to make the worship and practices of the Church in Scotland conform to those of Rome. This she did with the inspiration and guidance of Lanfranc, the future Archbishop of Canterbury. She also worked to bring the Scottish Church practice in line with that of the continental church of her childhood. Due to these achievements, she was considered an exemplar of the “just ruler”, and influenced her husband and children – especially her youngest son, later David I– also to be just and holy rulers. She attended to charitable works, serving orphans and the poor every day before she ate, and washing the feet of the poor in imitation of Christ. She rose at midnight every night to attend church services. She invited the Benedictine order to establish a monastery at Dunfermline in Fife in 1072, and established ferries at Queensferry and North Berwick to assist pilgrims journeying from south of the Forth Estuary to St. Andrews in Fife. A cave on the banks of the Tower Burn in Dunfermline was used by her as a place of devotion and prayer. St Margaret’s Cave, now covered beneath a municipal car park, is open to the public. Amongst her other deeds, Margaret also instigated the restoration of the monastery at Iona. She is also known to have been an intercessor for the release of fellow English exiles, forced into serfdom by the conquest.

In her private life, Margaret was as devout as she was in her public duties. She spent much of her time in prayer, devotional reading, and ecclesiastical embroidery. This appears to have had a considerable effect on the more uncouth Malcolm who could not read; he so admired her devotion that he had her books decorated in gold and silver. One of these, a pocket Gospel with lavish images of the Evangelists, is kept at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Malcolm seems to have been largely ignorant of the long-term effects of Margaret’s endeavours, not being especially religious himself. He was content for her to pursue her reforms as she wished, a testament to the strength and affection inherent in their marriage. Malcolm and their eldest son, Edward, were killed in a fight against the English at the Battle of Alnwick on 13 November 1093. Her son Edmund was left with the task of telling his mother of their deaths. Margaret was not yet fifty, but a life of constant austerity and fasting had taken their toll. Already ill, Margaret died on 16 November 1093, three days after the deaths of her husband and eldest son.

Below: Site of the shrine of St. Margaret,Dunfermline Abbey, Fife

Saint Margaret was canonised in 1250 by Pope Innocent IV in recognition of her personal holiness, fidelity to the Church, work for religious reform, and charity. On 19 June 1250, after her canonisation, her remains were moved to Dunfermline Abbey.

The Roman Catholic Church formerly marked the feast of Saint Margaret of Scotland on 10 June, because the feast of “Saint Gertrude, Virgin” was already celebrated on 16 November, but in Scotland, she was venerated on 16 November, the day of her death. In the revision of the Roman Catholic calendar of saints in 1969, 16 November became free and the Church transferred her feast day to 16 November. However, some traditionalist Catholics continue to celebrate her feast day on 10 June. She is also venerated as a saint in the Anglican Church.

Several churches are dedicated to Saint Margaret. One of the oldest is St Margaret’s Chapel in Edinburgh Castle, which was founded by her son King David I. The chapel was long thought to have been the oratory of Margaret herself, but is now considered to be a 12th-century establishment. The oldest building in Edinburgh, it was restored in the 19th century, and refurbished in the 1990s.

Right: St Margaret’s Chapel, Edinburgh Castle

Others include the thirteenth century Church of St Margaret the Queen in Buxted, East Sussex, St Margaret of Scotland, Aberdeen and the Church of England church in Budapest. There are also memorial stones and shrines to her in and near Mecseknádásd in Baranya County (see below).

 

Sources:

Victor J Green (1978), Festivals and Saints Days: A Calendar of Festivals for the School and Home. Poole: Blandford Press

Wikipedia, Saint Margaret of Scotland.

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Chapter Four: Those Two Impostors: Triumph and Disaster

In 1978 the House of Lords held a special debate on the state of the English language. Due to rapid social and economic transformation, thanks mainly to the technology of mass communication, fears for the future of British English had become one of the staples of newspaper columns and television chat shows. Now it was the turn of the peers of the realm to have their say. The record of the debate, The English language: Deterioration and Usage, makes very interesting reading. All but one of the speakers in it accepted, without question, that the language was deteriorating. They unrolled a catalogue of familiar complaints. One peer remarked,

It seems to me virtually impossible for a modern poet to write ’the choir of gay companions’. What has happened is that is that a word has been used for propaganda purposes which have destroyed its useful meaning in English.

 

Pronunciation was also considered to be slipping, and here the BBC came in for a substantial amount of criticism for failing in its clear duty to uphold the standards of English. There was praise for the Plain English Campaign, which had begun a series of successful battles against Civil Service gobbledygook, and complaints about the prevalence of jargon in official documents. There were also laments over the latest translations of the Bible and the recent revisions of the Book of Common Prayer. And, of course, more than one noble speaker blamed the Americans. Lord Somers, observed:

If there is a more hideous language on the face of the earth than the American form of English, I should like to know what it is!

 

In fact, the noble peers blamed just about every institution in society – the schools, the universities, and the mass media. Children were no longer educated in grammar or the classics. Newspaper, radio and television were familiarising the public with a language that depends on generalisations which are usually imprecise and often deliberately ambiguous… a language that makes unblushing use of jargon whenever that can assist evasion. They also displayed more than a touch of xenophobia, one of them arguing rather perversely that a major cause of deterioration in the use of the English language is very simply the enormous increase in the number of people who are using it. The most revealing comment of all was perhaps the one made by Lord Davies of Leek who remarked,

Am I right in assuming that in an age tortured by uncertainty with respect to religion, God, family, self, money and property, there is a worldwide collapse of not only the values of the past but of our language which, more and more, tends to be vague, indecisive, careless and often callous?

 

Certainly, as with sexual intercourse, the moral relativist revolution of the sixties and seventies had also encouraged a more permissive approach to social intercourse. Tongues were loosened and noses unblocked. However, Lord Davies’ remark was using language-change as a means of complaining about deeper changes in society. Against this, we might point out that speakers of Standard British Mercian English have often taken second place to other users, whether Scots, Irish or Welsh, the East Anglian Founding Fathers, Cockneys, Jews, Caribbeans or Indians. Influential changes and diversifications have usually occurred at the cultural centre of the language rather than at its fringes, in Britain itself. From this perspective, Standard British English remains as radical a tool as it did in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Just as in the ninth century, the fusion of Norse and Saxon languages was happening far from the main centres of trade and administration in the South of England, so in the late twentieth century the dominant forms, accents and voices in British English as it was used and taught were not those of the Establishment, speaking in the House of Lords, but those of Brixton, the East End and Coventry.

The Celtic countries and provinces also have their own brands of English, each of which can be subdivided into further localised varieties. For example, Welsh English, or Anglo-Welsh, has differing northern and southern varieties, also spoken in some of the border areas of England. The traditional Northumbrian Saxon dialect, sometimes referred to as the Scots’ language, and there is also Lallans, another lowland Scots dialect. Both have literary traditions. In Northern Ireland, Ulster Scots remains as the dialect of those who migrated from south-west Scotland. While some traditional features of these varieties fall out of use, other innovations, both regional and national, continue to be made to British English, so that the idea that there will one day be a uniform standard spoken English throughout the British Isles is unlikely to ever become a reality. In addition, there are still (officially) half a million Welsh-speakers, about one in five of the resident population of Wales. In Scotland, the Gaelic speech community is just over one per cent of the population, sparsely distributed through the western islands and highlands. In the Republic of Ireland, about forty per cent of the population have some level of Irish, but the number of habitual speakers is far lower. There are few monoglot speakers of either Irish or Welsh, but both languages are taught to school-leaving age to all students, thus ensuring continuing bilingualism. Both languages have strongly influenced the forms, vocabulary and pronunciation of Anglo-Welsh and Irish English, sometimes deliberately recorded by poets and writers.

 

Above: Factory workers strike over low pay

In the 1977-79 there was an explosion of resentment, largely by poorly paid public employees, against a minority Labour government incomes policy they felt was discriminatory. It began earlier in the year, but got far worse with a series of strikes going into winter, resulting in rubbish being left piled up in the streets throughout the country.This became known as the Winter of Discontent after Shakespeare’s opening soliloquy spoken by Richard, Duke of Gloucester in his history play, Richard III. The scenes provided convincing propaganda for the conservatives in the subsequent election in May. Using the slogan Labour isn’t working, which appeared on huge hoardings showing long dole queues, they came back to power with a clear majority in the General Election in 1979, led by Margaret Thatcher, who promised a return to the values which had made Victorian Britain great. However, what the British people got was more of a return to the hard-nosed Toryism of the interwar years as the Thatcher government set about the task of deliberately lengthening those dole queues. As wage-rises were believed to be the main source of inflation, heavy unemployment, it was often openly argued, would weaken trade union bargaining power, and was a price worth paying. At the same time, an economic squeeze was introduced, involving heavy tax increases and a reduction in public borrowing to deflate the economy, thus reducing both demand and employment. In the 1980s, two million manufacturing jobs disappeared, most of them by 1982.

Above: Rubbish is left piled up in London’s Leicester Square in February 1979

In Coventry, nearly sixty thousand jobs were lost in this period of recession. The Conservative policy of high interest rates tended to overvalue the pound, particularly in the USA, the major market for Coventry’s specialist cars, leading to a rapid decline in demand. Also, the Leyland management embarked on a new rationalisation plan. The company’s production was to be concentrated at its Cowley and Longbridge plants. Triumph production was transferred to Cowley, and Rover models were to be produced at the new Solihull plant. The Coventry engine plant at Courthouse Green was closed and Alvis, Climax and Jaguar were sold off to private buyers. In these first three years of the Thatcher government the number of Leyland employees in the city fell from twenty-seven thousand to eight thousand. One writer summarised the effects of Conservative policy on Coventry in these years as turning a process of gentle decline into quickening collapse. Overall the city’s top manufacturing firms shed thirty-one thousand workers between 1979 and 1982. Well-known pillars of Coventry’s economic base such as Herbert’s, Triumph Motors and Renold’s all disappeared. Unemployment had stood at just five per cent in 1979, the same level as in 1971. By 1982 it had risen to sixteen per cent.

 

None of this had been expected locally when the Thatcher government came to power. After all, Coventry had prospered reasonably well during the previous Tory administrations. The last real boom in the local economy had been stimulated by the policies of Ted Heath’s Chancellor, Anthony Barber. However, the brakes were applied rather than released by the new government. Monetarist policy was quick to bite into the local industry. Redundancy lists and closure notices in the local press became as depressingly regular as the obituary column. The biggest surprise was the lack of resistance from the local Labour movement, given Coventry’s still formidable trade union movement. There was an atmosphere of bewilderment and an element of resignation characterised the responses of many trades-union officials. It was as if the decades of anti-union editorials in the Coventry Evening Telegraph were finally being realised. There were signs of resistance at Longbridge, but the BL boss, Michael Edwardes, had introduced a tough new industrial relations programme which had seen the removal from the plant of Red Robbo, Britain’s strongest motor factory trade union leader. He had also closed the Speke factory on Merseyside, demonstrating that he could and would close plants in the face of trade union opposition. Coventry’s car workers and their union leaders had plenty of experience in local wage bargaining in boom times, but lacked strategies to resist factory closures in times of recession. Factory occupation, imitating its successful use on the continent, had been tried at the Meriden Triumph Motorcycle factory, but with disastrous results. The opposition from workers was undoubtedly diminished by redundancy payments which in many cases promised to cushion families for a year or two from the still unrealised effects of the recession.

 Above: Employment levels in Coventry

Young people were the real victims of these redundancies, as there were now no places for them to fill. The most depressing feature of Coventry’s unemployment was that the most severely affected were the teenagers leaving the city’s newly-completed network of Community Comprehensives. As the recession hit the city large numbers of them joined the job market only to find that expected opportunities in the numerous factories had evaporated. By June 1980, forty-six per cent of the city’s sixteen to eighteen year-olds were seeking employment and over half of the fourteen thousand who had left school the previous year were still unemployed. Much prized craft apprentices all but vanished and only ninety-five apprentices commenced training in 1981. The Local Education Authority was pioneering in its attempts to provide even basic employment and training for youngsters in cooperation with central government schemes and with major firms such as GEC and Courtaulds. It established a city-wide Careers Service, with full-time officers attached to individual schools, but working from a centralised service for employers and school leavers. In 1981-2, some 5,270 youths were found posts in training course, work experience and community projects, but with limited long-term effects. The early 1980s were barren years for Coventry youngsters, despite the emergence of their own pop group, The Specials, and their own theme song, Ghost Town, which also gave vent to what was becoming a national phenomenon. The lyric’s sombre comparison of boom time and bust was felt much more sharply in Coventry than elsewhere.

Coventry paid a very heavy price in the 1980s for its over-commitment to the car industry, suffering more than other comparable Midland towns such as Leicester and   Nottingham, both of which had broader-based economies. Its peculiar dependence on manufacturing and its historically weak tertiary sector meant that it was a poor location for the so-called sunrise industries. These were high-tech enterprises, based largely along the axial belt running from London to Slough, Reading and Swindon, so they had little initial impact on unemployment in Coventry and other Midland and Northern industrial centres. The growth in service industries was also, initially at least, mainly to the benefit of the traditional administrative centres, such as Birmingham, rather than to its West Midland neighbours. While little development work took place in local industry, but Nissan recruited hundreds of foremen from Coventry for its new plant in Sunderland, announced before the Thatcher government, and Talbot removed its Whitley research and development facility to Paris in 1983, along with its French-speaking Coventrians. Only at Leyland’s Canley site did research provide a service for plants outside the city. For the first time in a hundred years, Coventry had become a net exporter of labour. By the time of the 1981 Census, the city had already lost 7.5 per cent of its 1971 population. The main losses were among the young skilled and technical management sectors, people who any town or city can ill afford to lose. Summing up the city’s position at this time, Lancaster and Mason emphasised the dramatic transition in its fortunes from boomtown, a magnet for labour from the depressed areas, to a depressed district itself:

Coventry in the mid 1980s displays more of the confidence in the future that was so apparent in the immediate post-war years. The city, which for four decades was the natural habitat of the affluent industrial worker is finding it difficult to adjust to a situation where the local authority and university rank amongst the largest employers. Coventry’s self-image of progressiveness and modernity has all but vanished. The citizens now largely identify themselves and their environment as part of depressed Britain.  

 Above: A 1982 cartoon: Britain was at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. The inhabitants of the islands, a dependent territory of the United Kingdom, wanted to remain under British rule, but Argentina invaded.

Thatcher was victorious, but it was a costly war for the British.

Below: The Royal Marines march towards Port Stanley during the Falklands War, June 1982

The government had promised in 1979 that a restructuring of the economy would be followed by increased investment and employment opportunities but three years later, in the spring of 1982 there was no sign of this promise being kept.   There had already been serious rioting by the disaffected of Brixton in 1981. After this, the Tories had looked destined for defeat in the 1983 General Election, but following the Falklands War, the Iron Lady, also variously characterised as Boadicea and Britannia, swept back to power on a tidal wave of revived jingoistic imperialism. Even in Labour heartlands, such as south Wales, the Tories made major gains. The government then took a more confrontational approach at home. As in the 1920s, resistance to brutal rationalisation through the closure or selling off of uneconomic enterprises, or by wage or job reductions, was met by determined opposition, never tougher than in the confrontation of 1984-85 with the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthur Scargill. The National Coal Board, supported by the government, put forward a massive programme of pit closures. The bitter, year-long miners’ strike which followed was roundly defeated, amid scenes of mass picketing and some violence from both miners and the police. Ultimately the government proved too determined even for the miners, and had, in any case, built up the resources to resist their anticipated demands for it to back down.

 

Above: Miners’ leader, Arthur Scargill/ Striking Yorkshire miners

However, the strike and the colliery closures left a legacy of bitterness and division in British which was only too apparent at the time of Margaret Thatcher’s recent state funeral, and is the subject or background for many recent films, some of which have distorted or trivialised our recollection of the reality. Among the better representations of it is Billy Elliott. Under the thirty years rule, the government documents from 1984 have only just become available, so we can now look forward to the more rounded perspectives of historians on these events. Already, politicians have called for government apologies to be given to the miners and their families.

 

Above: In the Durham Coalfield, pits were often the only real source of employment in local communities,

so the economic and social impact of closures could be devastating.

The 1984-5 Strike was an attempt to force a reversal of the decline.

The pit closures went ahead and the severe contraction of the mining industry continued: it vanished altogether in Kent, while in Durham two-thirds of the pits were closed. The government had little interest in ensuring the survival of the industry, determined to break its militant and well-organised union. The social cost of the closures, especially in places in which mining was the single major employer, as in many of the pit villages of Durham and the valleys of south Wales, was devastating. The entire local economy was crippled. On Tyneside and Merseyside a more general deindustrialisation occurred. Whole sections of industry, including coal, steel and shipbuilding, simply vanished from their traditional areas. Of all the areas of the United Kingdom, however, it was Northern Ireland that suffered the highest levels of unemployment. This was largely because the continuing sectarian violence discouraged inward investment in the six counties of the Province.

Nationally, in February 1986 there were over 3.4 million unemployed, although statistics were manipulated for political reasons and the real figure is therefore a matter of speculation. The socially corrosive effects of the return of widespread mass unemployment, not seen since the early thirties, were felt throughout the country, manifesting themselves in the further bouts of inner-city rioting that broke out in 1985. This was more serious for the government than the rioting against the Means Test of half a century before, because it occurred in cities throughout the country, rather than in depressed mining areas. London was just as vulnerable as Liverpool, and a crucial contributory factor was the number of young men of Asian and Caribbean origin who saw no hope of ever entering employment: opportunities were minimal and they felt particularly discriminated against. The term underclass was increasingly used to describe those who felt themselves to be completely excluded from the benefits of prosperity.

The only sizeable addition to the immigrant population during the recession of the early eighties was among the Polish community. After the Polish government’s clampdown on the shipyard-led Solidarity movement in 1980, about two thousand refugees entered Britain. It was hard for researchers at the time to assess the extent to which these new arrivals influenced the already well-established Polish communities and organisations throughout Britain. The only reported figures, taken from a Language Census conducted by ILEA between 1981 and 1987, shows nearly six hundred Polish pupils in London schools. Assuming that these were pupils with Polish as their strong first language (L1), requiring English as an Added Language (EAL) tuition support, rather than established Polish bilingual children with English as a strong L1 or L2, we might therefore conclude that the majority of these new immigrants settled in London, probably using already-established kinship networks and institutions. No matter how much Polish was the language used at home, second-generation Polish children showed a strong preference to switch to English in conversations involving the expression of abstract concepts, even within the home context.

The Linguistic Minorities Project (LMP) Survey, conducted in Coventry and Bradford in 1985 showed that the Polish language skills of the adult respondents were, perhaps predictably, very high. However, the reported levels of fluency in Polish for members of respondents’ households as a whole, likely to include a high proportion of British-born children, was significantly lower. Ninety-one per cent of the respondents in Coventry reported that their children used only English between themselves, and third-generation children in Polish Saturday schools used Polish only with the teachers and assistants. The influx of younger first-generation Poles in the 1980s helped to create new relationships in which second and third generations could use Polish in more realistic ways. The Survey also showed that in Coventry and Bradford, whereas almost half of Polish workers were in a workplace where at least one fellow-worker was a Polish-speaker, more than sixty per cent of them used only English with their workmates. Nevertheless, the Poles maintain a network of friends with whom they could use their mother tongue. They also had a wide range of opportunities to use the language in the community:

The Pole can buy Polish food from Polish shops, eat in Polish restaurants, sleep in Polish hotels or digs, with a Polish landlady, entertain friends in Polish clubs, attend a Polish doctor (over five hundred are practising in Britain) or dentist (eighty Polish dental surgeries), have a Polish priest and be buried by a Polish undertaker.

In the 1980s, Polish was not taught in the mainstream schools, though there were some unsuccessful attempts made in this direction in Stepney in 1981. Some years later, ILEA approached the Polish Educational Society Abroad with a similar suggestion which also failed, partly because Poles insist that mother tongue teaching must include Polish cultural content. In 1982 a section of Polish Studies was added to the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at the University of London. For L1 or bilingual speakers of Polish, the degree lasted for three years and included language, literature and history as compulsory elements. Additional options included economics, politics, geography and planning. The Polish Section also organises conferences for Polish teachers and pupils. Otherwise, only Oxford and Cambridge hold lectures on Polish as a Slavic Language. These developments encouraged a note of optimism for the Polish community in Britain at a time when other immigrant groups were struggling to integrate, or felt alienated by the host country, particularly in the second and third generations. Together with the arrival of the Solidarity generation, there was a revival of awareness of linguistic and cultural roots in Britain in this decade. This helped the Poles to integrate into British society while resisting linguistic and cultural assimilation: becoming British did not necessarily involve losing their Polish identity.

By 1987, service industries were offering an alternative means of employment in Britain. Between 1983 and 1987 about one and a half million new jobs were created. Most of these were for women, many of whom were entering employment for the first time, and many of the jobs available were part-time and, of course, lower paid than the jobs lost in primary and secondary industries. By contrast, the total number of men in full-time employment fell still further. Many who had left mining or manufacturing for the service sector also earned far less. By the end of the century there were more people employed in Indian restaurants than in the coal and steel industries combined, but for much lower pay. The economic recovery that led to the growth of this new employment was based mainly on finance, banking and credit. Little was invested in home-grown manufacturing, but far more was invested overseas, with British foreign investments rising from 2.7 billion pounds in 1975 to 90 billion in 1985. At the same time, there was also a degree of re-industrialisation, especially in the Southeast, where new industries employing the most advanced technology were growing. In fact, many industries shed a large proportion of their workforce but, using new technology, maintained or improved their output. These new industries were certainly not confined to the M4 Corridor by the late eighties. By then, Nissan’s car plant in Sunderland had become the most productive in Europe, while Siemens established a microchip plant at Wallsend. However, such companies did not employ large numbers of local workers. Nissan recruited its foremen in Coventry, while Siemens invested more than a billion pounds, but only employed a workforce of about 1,800.

Regionally based industries suffered a dramatic decline during this period. Coal-mining, for example, was decimated in the decade following the 1984-85 miners’ strike, not least because of the shift of the electricity generating industry to other alternative energy sources, especially gas. During the period 1984-87 the coal industry shed a hundred and seventy thousand miners, and there was a further net loss of employment in the coalfields, with the exception of north Warwickshire and south Derbyshire, in the early 1990s. The economic effect upon local communities could be devastating, as the 1996 film Brassed Off accurately shows, with its memorable depiction of the social impact on the Yorkshire pit village of Grimethorpe of the 1992 closure programme.

The trouble with the economic strategy followed by the Thatcher governments was that South Wales, Lancashire, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Tyneside and Clydesdale were precisely those regions that had risen to extraordinary prosperity as part of the British imperial enterprise. Now they were being written off as disposable assets, so what interest did the Scots in particular, but also the Welsh, have in remaining as part of that enterprise, albeit a new corporation in the making? The understandable euphoria over Thatcher and her party winning three successive general elections disguised the fact the last of these victories was gained at the price of perpetuating a deep rift in Britain’s social geography. Without the Falklands factor to help revive the Union flag, a triumphalist English conservatism was increasingly imposing its rule over the other nations of an increasingly disunited Kingdom.   Thatcher’s constituency was, overwhelmingly, the well-off middle and professional classes in the south of England, whilst the distressed northern zones of derelict factories, pits, ports and terraced streets were left to rot and rust. People living in these latter areas were expected to lift themselves up by their own bootstraps, retrain for work in the up-and-coming industries of the future and if need be get on Tory Chairman, Norman Tebbitt’s bicycle and move to one of the areas of strong economic growth such as Cambridge, Milton Keynes or Slough, where those opportunities were clustered. However, little was provided by publicly funded retraining and, if this was available, there was no guarantee of a job at the end of it. The point of the computer revolution in industry was to save labour, not to expand it.

In the late 1980s, the north-south divide seemed as intractable as it had all century, with high unemployment continuing to be concentrated in the declining manufacturing areas of the North and West of the British Isles. That the north-south divide increasingly had a political dimension as well as an economic one was borne out by the 1987 General Election in the UK. Margaret Thatcher’s third majority was this time largely based in the votes of the South and East of England. North of a line running from the Severn estuary through Coventry and on to the Humber estuary, the long decline of Toryism, especially in Scotland, where it was reduced to only ten seats, was apparent to all observers. At the same time, the national two-party system seemed to be breaking down so that south of that line, the Liberal-SDP Alliance were the main challengers to the Conservatives in many constituencies.

Culturally, the Thatcher counter-revolution ran into something of a cul-de-sac, or rather the cobbled streets of Salford, typified in the long-running TV soap opera, Coronation Street. Millions in the old British industrial economy had a deeply ingrained loyalty to the place where they had grown up, gone to school, got married and had their kids; to the pub, their park, their football team. In that sense at least the Social Revolution of the fifties and sixties had recreated cities and towns that, for all their ups and downs, their poverty and pain, were real communities. Fewer people were willing to give up on Liverpool and Leeds, Nottingham and Derby than the pure laws of the employment market-place demanded. For many working-class British people, it was their home which determined their quality of life, not the width of their wage-packet.

Not everything that the Thatcher governments did was out of tune with social reality. The sale of council houses created an owner-occupier class which, as Simon Schama has written, corresponded to the long passion of the British to be kings and queens of their own little castles. Sales of remaining state-owned industries, such as the public utility companies, were less successful, since the concept of stakeholderdship was much less deeply rooted in British traditions, and the mixed fortunes of both these privatised companies and their stocks did nothing to help change customs. Most misguided of all was the decision to call a poll tax imposed on house and flat owners a community charge, and then to impose it first, as a trial run, in Scotland, where the Tories already had little support. The grocer’s daughter from Grantham that it would be a good way of creating a property-owning, tax-paying democracy, where people paid according to the size of their household. This was another mistaken assumption. Soon after, the iron lady was challenged for her leadership of the Party, and therefore the country, and was forced to step down from the contest. She was then replaced as PM by one of her loyal deputies, John Major, another middle-class anti-patrician, the son of a garden-gnome salesman, apparently committed to family values and a return to basics. Although winning the 1992 General Election, the Major government ended up being overwhelmed by an avalanche of sexual and financial scandals and blunders, as well as by the back-bench right-wing in the House of Commons who wanted Britain to withdraw from the European Union.

 

The old north-south divide in Britain seemed to be eroding during the recession of the early 1990s, which hit southeast England relatively hard, but it soon reasserted itself with a vengeance later in the decade as young people moved south in search of jobs and property prices rose. Even though the shift towards service industries was reducing regional economic diversity, the geographical distribution of regions eligible for European structural funds for economic improvement confirmed the continuing north-south divide. The administrative structure of Britain also underwent major changes by the end of the nineties. The relative indifference of the Conservative ascendancy to the plight of industrial Scotland and Wales had transformed the prospects of the nationalist parties in both countries. In the 1987 election, Scottish and Welsh nationalists, previously confined mainly to middle-class, rural and intellectual constituencies, now made huge inroads into Conservative areas and even into the Labour heartlands of industrial south Wales and Clydeside.

In a 1992 poll in Scotland, half of those asked said that they were in favour of independence within the European Union. In the General Election of the same year, however, with Mrs Thatcher and her poll tax having departed the political scene, there was a minor Tory recovery. Five years later this was wiped out by the Labour landslide of 1997, when all the Conservative seats in both Scotland and Wales were lost. Only one Scottish seat was regained by the Tories in 2001. The Tories became labelled as a centralising, purely English party. Nationalist political sentiment grew in Scotland and to a lesser extent in Wales. The devolution promised and instituted by Tony Blair’s new landslide Labour government did seem to take some of the momentum out of the nationalist fervour , but apparently at the price of stoking the fires of English nationalism among Westminster Tories, resentful at the Scots and Welsh having representatives in their own assemblies as well as in the UK Parliament. In 1999, twenty years after the first campaigns for devolution, a devolved Parliament was set up in Scotland, in Edinburgh, Wales got an Assembly in Cardiff, and Northern Ireland had a power-sharing Assembly again at Stormont near Belfast. In 2000, an elected regional assembly was established for Greater London, the area covered by the inner and outer boroughs in the capital, with a directly elected Mayor. This new authority replaced the Greater London Council which had been abolished by the Thatcher Government in 1986, and was given responsibility over local planning and transport.

 

The process of deindustrialisation continued into the nineties with the closure of the Swan Hunter shipyard on the Tyne in May 1993. It was the last working shipyard in the region, but failed to secure a warship contract. It was suffering the same long-term decline that reduced shipbuilding from an employer of two hundred thousand in 1914 to a mere twenty-six thousand by the end of the century. This devastated the local economy, especially as a bitter legal wrangle over redundancy payments left many former workers without any compensation at all for the loss of what they had believed was employment for life. As the map above shows, the closure’s effects of spread far further than Tyneside and the Northeast, which were certainly badly hit by the closure, with two hundred and forty suppliers losing their contracts. According to Keynesian economics, the results of rising unemployment are multiplied as the demand for goods and services declines. The closure of Swan Hunter certainly had a widespread impact on Suppliers as far afield as Southampton and Glasgow, as well as in the West Midlands and the Southeast. They lost valuable orders and therefore also had to make redundancies. Forty-five suppliers in Greater London also lost business. Therefore, from the closure of one single, large-scale engineering concern, unemployment resulted even in the most prosperous parts of the country. In the opposite economic direction, the growing North Sea oil industry helped to spread employment more widely throughout the Northeast and the Eastern side of Scotland, with its demands for drilling platforms and support ships, and this benefit was also felt nationally, both within Scotland and more widely, throughout the UK. However, this did little in the short-term to soften the blow of the Swan Hunter closure.

 

Overall, however, the 1990s were years of general and long-sustained economic expansion. The continued social impact of the decline in coal, steel and shipbuilding was to some extent mitigated by inward investment initiatives. Across most of the British Isles, there was also a continuing decline in the number of manufacturing jobs throughout the nineties. Although there was an overall recovery in the car industry, aided by the high pound in the export market, much of this was due to the new technology of robotics which made the industry far less labour-intensive and therefore more productive. The service sector, however, expanded, and general levels of unemployment, especially in Britain, fell dramatically in the 1990s. Financial services saw strong growth, particularly in places such as the London Docklands and Edinburgh. Indeed, by the end of the decade, the financial industry was the largest employer in northern manufacturing towns like Leeds, which grew rapidly, aided by its ability to offer a range of cultural facilities that helped to attract an array of UK company headquarters. Manchester, similarly, enjoyed a renaissance, particularly in music and football. Manchester United’s commercial success led it to become the world’s largest sports franchise.

 

Other areas of the country were helped by their ability to attract high technology industry. Silicon Glen in central Scotland was, by the end of the decade, the largest producer of computer equipment in Europe. Computing and software design was also one of the main engines of growth along the silicon highway of the M4 Corridor west of London. But areas of vigorous expansion were not necessarily dominated by new technologies. The economy of East Anglia, especially Cambridgeshire, had grown rapidly in the 1980s and continued to do so throughout the 1990s. While Cambridge itself, aided by the university-related science parks, fostered high-tech companies, especially in biotechnology and pharmaceuticals, expansion in Peterborough, for instance, was largely in low-tech areas of business services and distribution.

 

Getting around Britain was, at least, getting easier. By 1980 there were nearly one and a half thousand miles of motorway in Britain. In the last twenty years of the century, the stretching of the congested motorway network to just over two thousand miles, mostly involving the linking of existing sections. Motorway building and airport development was delayed by lengthy public enquiries and well-organised public protest. Improving transport links was seen as an important means of stimulating regional development as well as combating local congestion. Major road developments in the 1990s included the completion of the M25 orbital motorway around London, the Skye bridge and the M40 link between London and Birmingham. However, despite this construction programme, congestion remained a problem: the M25 was labelled the largest car park on the planet, while average traffic speeds in central London fell to only ten miles per hour in 2001, a famous poster on the underground pointing out that this was the same speed as in 1901. Improvements to public transport networks tended to be concentrated in urban centres, such as the light rail networks in Manchester, Sheffield and Croydon. At the same time, the migration of some financial services and much of the Fleet Street national press to major new developments in London’s Docklands prompted the development of the Docklands Light Railway and the Jubilee line extension, as well as some of the most expensive urban motorway in Europe. Undoubtedly, the most important transport development was the Channel Tunnel rail link from Folkestone to Calais, completed in 1994. By the beginning of the new millennium, millions of people had travelled by rail from London to Paris in only three hours.

 

The development of Ashford in Kent, following the opening of the Channel Tunnel rail link, provides a good example of the relationship between transport links and general economic development. The railway had come to Ashford in 1842 and a railway works was established in the town. This was eventually run down and closed between 1981 and 1993, but this did not undermine the local economy. Instead, Ashford benefited from the Channel Tunnel rail link, which made use of the old railway lines running through the town, and its population actually grew by ten per cent in the 1990s. The completion of the Tunnel combined with the M25 London orbital motorway, with its M20 spur, to give the town an international catchment area of some eighty-five million people within a single day’s journey. This, together with the opening of Ashford International railway station as a main terminal for the rail link to Europe, attracted a range of engineering, financial, distribution and manufacturing companies. Fourteen business parks were opened in and around the town, together with a science park owned by Trinity College, Cambridge, and a popular outlet retail park on the outskirts of the town. By the beginning of the new millennium, the Channel Tunnel had transformed the economy of Kent. Ashford is closer to Paris and Brussels than it is to Manchester and Sheffield, both in time and distance. By the beginning of this century, it was in a position to be part of a truly international economy.

 

Transport policy was only one of the ways in which the EU increasingly came to shape the geography of the British Isles in the 1990s. It was a key factor in the creation of the new administrative regions of Britain in 1999. At the same time, a number of British local authorities opened offices in Brussels for lobbying purposes. The enthusiasm the Scottish National Party discovered in the late 1980s for the supposed benefits that would result from independence in Europe may help to explain its subsequent revival. The European connection has proved less welcome in other quarters. Fishermen, particularly in Cornwall and on the East coast of England, have felt themselves the victims of the Common Fisheries Policy quota system. A strong sense of Euroscepticism developed in England in particular, fuelled by a mixture of concerns about sovereignty and economic policy. Nevertheless, links with Europe have been growing, whether via the Channel Tunnel, or the connections between the French and British electricity grids, or airline policy, as have the number of policy decisions shaped by the EU. This pace of change quickened as the result of the 1987 Single European Act, as it became clear that the UK was becoming increasingly integrated with the European continent.

 

By the late 1990s, another indispensible marker of British identity, the monarchy, began to look tired, under strain of being simultaneously a ceremonial and familial institution. Ever since the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936, which suddenly propelled the ten year-old Princess Elizabeth into the spotlight as the heir apparent, the membership of this institution was thought to require standards of personal behaviour well above the norm of late twentieth century expectations. Just as the monarchy had gained from its marriages, especially that resulting from the fairy tale romance of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981, whose wedding at St Paul’s in 1981 had a world-wide audience of at least eight hundred million viewers, so it lost commensurately from the failure of those unions. The year 1992, referred to by the Queen as her annus horriblis, saw not just the separations of Charles and Diana (the Wales) as well as Andrew and Sarah (the Yorks), but also a major fire at Windsor Castle in November. When it was announced that the Crown would only pay for the replacement and repair of items in the royal private collection, and that repairs to the fabric would therefore come from the tax-paying public, a serious debate began about the state of the monarchy’s finances. In a poll, eight out of ten people asked thought the Queen should pay taxes on her private income, hitherto exempt. A year later, Buckingham Palace was opened to the public tours for the first time and the Crown did agree to pay taxes. In 1994 the royal yacht Britannia, the emblem of the queen’s global presence, was decommissioned.

 

Above: A sea of flowers laid in tribute to Diana, Princess of Wales, outside Kensington Palace, London, August 1997

The most difficult moment came in August 1997, when Princess Diana was killed in a car accident in Paris. Royal protocol dictates that the royal standard should be flown above Buckingham Palace when the Queen is in residence. The Union Flag is only flown above the royal palaces and other government and public buildings on certain special days, such as the Princess Royal’s birthday, 15 August. Since it was holiday time for the Royal family, they were away from London, so there were no flags flying. The Queen, as the only person who could authorise an exception to these age-old customs, received criticism for not flying the union flag at half-mast in order to fulfill the deep need of a grief-stricken public. They are only flown at half-mast on the announcement of the death of a monarch until after the funeral, and on the day of the funeral only for other members of the royal family. Although Her Majesty meant no disrespect to her estranged daughter-in-law, the Crown lives and dies by such symbolic moments. The immense outpouring of public emotion in the days and weeks that followed was very different from the more conventional but no less heartfelt mourning of the Queen and her immediate family. The crisis was rescued by a television speech she made which was both informal and sincere in its expression of personal sorrow, adding to the tidal wave that swept over the whole country, for England’s rose, or the People’s Princess of Wales.

 

The monarchy was fully restored to popularity by the Millennium festivities, at which the Queen watched dancers from the Notting Hill carnival under the ill-fated Dome, and especially by the Golden Jubilee celebrations of 2002, which continued the newly struck royal mood of greater informality. Brian May, the lead guitarist of the rock-band Queen began the pop concert at Buckingham Palace by playing his instrumental version of God Save the Queen from the roof-top overlooking the Mall. Modern Britannia seemed at last to be at ease with its identity within a multi-national, multi-ethnic, United Kingdom, in all its mongrel glory.

Above: Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2001, aged 75. She has already (in 2014) reigned for another thirteen years,

and celebrated her Diamond Jubilee in 2012.

Sources:

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (eds.)(n.d.), Life and Labour in a Twentieth Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry: University of Warwick Cryfield Press.

Simon Schama (2002), A History of Britain; The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000. London: BBC Worldwide.

Robert McCrum, William Cran & Robert MacNeil (1987), The Story of English. London: Penguin Books.

John Haywood & Simon Hall, et.al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British and Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

Safder Alladina, Viv Edwards & Elizabeth Muir (1991), Multilingualism in the British Isles. Harlow: Longman (Linguistics).

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Burns Night, 25^th January

English: Robert Burns Source: Image:Robert burns.jpg Replacement of existing commons image with higher res version (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It is agreed by most Scots that Robert ’Rabbie’ Burns was the greatest Scottish poet, especially since many of his poems were written in Scots, a northern variety of the language of the Angles who settled in Northumbria and occupied the south-eastern lowlands of modern-day Scotland in the seventh century. The Scotti were another Celtic people, originally living in Ireland, one of the five ethnic groups who settled in northern Britain in the Dark Ages, also including the Picts, the Britons, and the Norsemen. Each group had their own distinct language, but Scots emerged as the strongest, until in the seventeenth century it began to be replaced by English, due to the Scottish King James VI’s (James I of England) insistence on the use of his ’Authorised Version’ of the Bible in the Scottish ’Kirk’ (Church). In fact, the Kirk had already provided a Scottish translation into English, following the Geneva Bible, which had been distributed to every significant ’householder’ by a law of 1579.

A map of Scots dialects. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The themes of Burns’ poetry are nature and the humanity of nature. In ’To a Mouse’ (1786) he shares the problems of the mouse whose home is lost when the farm worker destroys it by accident. These lines have become particularly famous, partly through their use by the twentieth-century American writer, John Steinbeck, in the title of one of his novels:

The best laid schemes

Of mice and men

Gang aft agley

(The most carefully planned projects…often go wrong)

Burns was himself a farm-worker, born in Ayrshire in 1759, only later becoming a tax-collector, or ’exciseman’. Growing up on the land and living the hard life of a farmer, he had great sympathy for the life of country people and this, plus the sense of humour they needed to survive such a life, comes across to the reader of poems like, ’The Cotter’s Saturday Night’ (a ’cotter’ was an old word for a farm-worker, giving us the word ’cottage’ for a traditional, small village house, usually made of wood and thatch), ’The Twa Dogs’ and ’Halloween’. He was an immensely likeable, charming man, who enjoyed the company of women and, later in life, good living. After his poems became successful, he moved to Edinburgh and was able to live off his writing and his pension as an ’exciseman’ when his farm failed. His ’A Man’s A Man for A’ That’ (A’ = All) catches the mood of the times with its ideas of common humanity. Most of his compositions were now songs, which are still well-known, either new or adapted; ’A Red, Red Rose’, ’Scots Wha Hae’, ’Comin’ thro’ the Rye’, ’The Banks of Doon’ and ’Mary Morrison’. His hard-living lifestyle and a week heart got the better of him, and he died in 1796, aged only thirty-seven. He continued to be admired by the Romantic poets who saw him as the first of them, but he is remembered now as the first major figure to write in the Scots language as well as in English, a country poet with world-wide appeal. Throughout his life he was capable of both speaking and writing in formal English. Though well-educated, however, Burns was of peasant stock, close to the land, its customs and people. His genius was his ability to draw on the despised Scottish tradition, half folk ballads and half Court poetry. Burns fused these two styles into one with colour and eloquence.

Map of the areas where the Scots language is spoken. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Scots is a language you hear now in its full richness only when Burns is quoted. He gave his nation back its tongue and its pride. When Scots celebrate ’the immortal memory’ on Burns Night, they are honouring the writer who showed them that it is the loyalty to the Scots language and culture that is the best and most lasting assertion of Scottish patriotism. After his death, the process of Anglicisation took hold, though first Sir Walter Scott and later Robert Louis Stevenson continued the tradition of re-discovering Scottishness through a literature which drew on the authenticity of ’the Guid Scots Tongue’.

Burns Supper (Photo credit: thorland2006)

The Burns Supper, held on our around the bard’s birthday on 25^th January, is a major institution of Scottish life: a night to celebrate the life and works of the national Bard. Suppers can range from an informal gathering of friends to a huge, formal dinner full of pomp and circumstance. The celebration begins with  ‘Piping in the guests’ with some traditional music, played, at bigger events, by a bag-piper in full highland dress. The audience stands to welcome arriving guests: the piper plays until the high table is ready to be seated, at which point a round of applause is due. At a more informal gathering – with no high table – the Chair simply bangs on the table to draw attention to the start of the evening’s proceedings. He/She then warmly welcomes and introduces the assembled guests and the evening’s entertainment.

A short but important prayer is read to begin the meal, The Selkirk Grace is also known as Burns’s Grace at Kirkcudbright. Although the text is often printed in English, it is usually recited in Scots:

Some hae meat and canna eat,

And some wad eat that want it,

                             But we hae meat and we can eat,

                             And sae the Lord be thankit.

(Some have meat, but cannot eat, and some would eat but lack it; but we have meat and we can eat, and so the Lord be thanked).

Dr Bob Purdie addressing the haggis during Burns supper, St Columba’s United Reformed Church, Oxford, 2004-01-24. Copyright Kaihsu Tai (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Guests then stand to welcome the dinner’s star attraction, delivered on a silver platter by a procession comprising the chef, the piper and the person who will give The Address to the Haggis. At bigger parties, a whisky-bearer is also on hand to ensure that the toasts are well-lubricated. During the procession, guests clap in time to the music until the Haggis reaches its destination at the table. The music stops and everyone is seated in anticipation of the address.

The honoured reader now seizes their moment of glory by offering a fluent and entertaining rendition of To a Haggis. The reader should have his knife poised at the ready. On cue, he cuts the casing along its length, making sure to spill out some of the tasty meat within. This distribution of bits of haggis about the assembled company is regarded  as a part of the fun.The recital ends with the reader raising the haggis in triumph during the final line ‘Gie her a haggis!’, which the guests greet with rapturous applause. Prompted by the speaker, the audience now joins in the toast to the haggis. They raise a glass and shout: ‘The haggis!’ Then it’s time to serve the main course with its traditional companions, neeps and tatties (potatoes). In larger events, the piper leads a procession carrying the opened haggis out to the kitchen for serving; audience members clap as the procession departs.

Served with some suitable background music, the sumptuous ‘Bill o’ Fare’ includes:

·        Starter: Traditional cock-a-leekie soup;

·        Main course: Haggis, neeps & tatties (Haggis wi’ bashit neeps an’ champit tatties);

 

·        Sweet: Clootie Dumpling (a pudding prepared in a linen cloth or cloot) or Typsy Laird (a Scottish sherry trifle);

·        Cheeseboard with bannocks (oatcakes) and tea/coffee.

Variations do exist; beef lovers can serve the haggis, neeps & tatties as a starter with roast beef or steak pie as the main dish. Vegetarians can of course choose vegetarian haggis, while fish-lovers could opt for a seafood main course such as Cullen Skink.

To drink: Liberal lashings of wine or ale are served with dinner and it’s often customary to douse the haggis with a splash of whisky sauce, which, with true Scots understatement, is neat whisky. After the meal, it’s time for connoisseurs to compare notes on the wonderful selection of malts served by the generous Chair.

The nervous first entertainer follows immediately after the meal. Often it will be a singer or musician performing Burns songs such as:

My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose:

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, 

That’s newly sprung in June: 

O my Luve’s like the melodie, 

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass, 

So deep in luve am I; 

And I will luve thee still, my dear, 

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, 

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun; 

And I will luve thee still, my dear, 

While the sands o’ life shall run.  

And fare-thee-weel, my only luve!

And fare-thee-weel, a while! 

And I will come again, my Luve, 

Tho’ ’twere ten thousand mile

 

Alternatively it could be a moving recital of a Burns poem, such as Tam o’ Shanter or ‘For a’ that and a’ that’.

Following the songs and recitals, the keynote speaker takes the stage to deliver a spell-binding oration on the life of Robert Burns: his literary genius, his politics, his highs and lows, his human frailty and, most importantly, his patriotism. The speech must bridge the dangerous chasm between serious intent and sparkling wit, painting a colourful picture of Scotland’s beloved Bard. The speaker concludes with a heart-felt toast: To the Immortal Memory of Robert Burns!

The chair next introduces more celebration of Burns’ work, preferably a poem or song to complement the earlier entertainment. Then follows the humorous highlight of any Burns Night comes in the Toast to the Lassies, which is designed to praise the role of women in the world today. This must be done by selective quotation from Burns’s works, building towards a positive note. Particular reference to those present makes for a more meaningful toast.

The final course of the evening’s entertainment comprises more Burns readings, followed by a Reply to the Toast to the Lassies, revenge for the women present as they get their chance to reply. A ‘vote of thanks’ is the Chair’s last act in the proceedings, as he now climbs to his/her potentially unsteady feet to thank everyone who has contributed to a wonderful evening and to suggest that taxis will arrive shortly. He/She closes the proceedings by inviting guests to stand and belt out a rousing rendition of Auld Lang Syne. The company joins hands and sings as one, having made sure to brush up on those difficult later lines.  At some gatherings, the evening will continue with Scottish Country Dancing.

Printed Sources:

Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil, The Story of English: Penguin, 1986.

Ronald Carter and John McRae, The Penguin Guide to English Literature: Britain and Ireland: 1996

Internet:

BBC Online Guide to Burns Night.