18 OCTOBER

BRITISH TROOPS BURN DOWN BEIJING’S SUMMER PALACE

[ 18 October 1860 ]

On 18 October 1860, British troops, who had fought their way into the outskirts of Beijing ten days earlier, set fire to one of the world’s greatest collections of art work and treasure, the legendary Summer Palace, also known as the Garden of Perfect Brightness (Yuanmingyuan).

JAMAICAN HUNG FOR HIS ‘LOOK OF DEFIANCE’ WHILE BEING WHIPPED

[ 18 October 1865 ]

Today in 1865, British troops at Morant Bay in Jamaica, under orders to find and punish all those who had participated in a protest against the injustices facing the island’s black population, rounded up a small group of about thirty vagrants.  They found no evidence whatsoever with which any of them might be summoned before a court martial, but decided anyway to tie each one in turn over a cannon to suffer fifty lashes as a lesson that no black Jamaican might expect to escape punishment. The Daily News reported that among them was ‘George Marshall, a brown man of about twenty five years of age, who on receiving forty seven lashes, ground his teeth, and gave a ferocious look of defiance at the provost-marshal. He was immediately ordered to be taken from the gun and hanged. No time was lost, and he was accordingly strung up.’¹

PM ADVISED TO BE “ECONOMICAL WITH THE TRUTH” OVER DETENTION OF CATHOLICS.

[ 18 October 1972 ]

Today in 1972, British Prime Minister Edward Heath was briefed to be ‘economical with the truth’ when he met the Irish Taoiseach Jack Lynch.

THREE AFGHAN BOYS SHOT IN THE HEAD BY AN SAS SOLDIER

[ 18 October 2012 ]

During the autumn of 2012 the SAS conducted numerous armed raids against suspect Taliban members’ homes across the Afghan province of Helmand.

FOOTNOTES

1. The Daily News cited in The Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle for 1866, Cambridge University Press, 2013, p. 71.
2. Margaret Urwin, A State of Denial: British Collaboration with Loyalist Paramilitaries, Mercier Press, Cork, 2016, pp. 66-67.
3. Ibid., p. 69.

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