26 DECEMBER
ROYAL NAVY DESTROYS LAGOS – ‘AN IMMENSE NUMBER OF NATIVES BEING KILLED’
[ 26 December 1851 ]
On 26 December 1851, British naval vessels began a three day bombardment of the coastal town of Lagos on the west coast of Africa, reducing it to rubble, at a cost, to quote a British press report, of ‘an immense number of natives being killed.’1
FOREIGN OFFICE – SEND JEWISH REFUGEES TO THE INTERIOR OF GUIANA
[ 26 December 1940 ]
Today in 1940, a memo drafted by Richard Latham, an official in the refugee section at the Foreign Office, suggested that Britain might revive an earlier proposal to create a ‘second Jewish National Home’ in the interior of British Guiana,’ as a refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.2
FOOTNOTES
- ‘The Coast of Afrcia: Destruction of Lagos,’ The Northampton Mercury, 21 February 1852, p. 1.
- Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe: 1939 – 1945, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 1988, p. 46.
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