1 OCTOBER

CABINET BACKS WAR WITH CHINA AFTER OPIUM TRADERS ARE HELD  HOSTAGE

[ 1 October 1839 ]

Today in 1839, the Cabinet decided on a war with China after the Emperor’s Special Commissioner at Canton, Lin Zexu, enforced an imperial decree banning the trade in opium and took several traders and British officials hostage until the 20,000 chests of the drug on the ships anchored offshore were handed over.

THE TIMES GREETS NEWS OF PACT WITH HITLER AS A ‘NEW DAWN’

[ 1 October 1938 ]

The Times editorial, on 1 October 1938, praised British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s Munich agreement with German dictator Adolf Hitler, which compelled Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to the Nazis in return for a doubtful promise of peace. Under the headline ‘A New Dawn,’ the newspaper declared that  ‘no conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come home adorned with nobler laurels than Mr. Chamberlain from Munich yesterday.’¹

UDR SOLDIERS, MANY WITH TERROR LINKS, ALLOWED TO KEEP WEAPONS IN THEIR HOMES.

[ 1 October 1974 ]

On 1 October 1974, a Northern Ireland Office report noted that Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldiers, many of them members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) , with known terror links, were permitted to keep machine guns and rifles at home.  The paper stated that members of the UDR were allowed to take back to their homes a total of 950 rifles, 434 sub-machine guns and 1,866 pistols for personal protection. It also observed that ‘some people,’ had been joining ‘the RUC ( Royal Ulster Constabulary ) Reserve only in order to have legal access to a weapon.’ According to the army’s own internal assessment between five and fifteen per cent of UDR soldiers were members of either the UDA, UVF or other paramilitary loyalist groups.  This was despite the fact that in 1974 alone loyalist terrorists killed 131 people, in Northern Ireland and the Republic.²

HORSE TRADING WITH A TYRANT

[ 1 October 2017 ]

On 1 October 2017, Queen Elizabeth gifted a three year old prize stallion to Bahrain’s murderous tyrant, King Hamad Bin Isa Al Khalifa.

FOOTNOTES

1. Editorial in The Times, 1 October 1938 p. 13.
2. Anne Cadwallader, Lethal Allies: British Collusion in Ireland, Mercier Press, Cork, 2013, p. 35 and p. 67.

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