5 January 1943 On 5 January 1943, Winston Churchill ordered the tonnage of shipping allocated for the Indian Ocean area to be slashed by 56 per cent, despite grave concerns expressed by Lord Linthigow, the Viceroy, that India faced a crippling food shortage. By contrast, Britain’s food reserves still exceeded, by at least fifty percent,…
5 January 1869 It was a crime which Maoris have never forgotten, committed when New Zealand, though technically self-governing, was still, both in name and in the thinking of much of its settler population, a colony of Great Britain. On 5 January 1869, the first of several batches of captured Maori rebels, who had attempted…
3 January 1938 At 6 pm on 3 January 1938, BBC Radio broadcast its first fifteen minute news bulletin in Arabic. The chimes of Big Ben and ‘This is London’ were broadcast across the Middle East. Then several short news items followed, one of which informed listeners that an Arab from Palestine, where the British…
3 January 1916 On 3 January 1916, during the First World War, a line was drawn on the map from Acre on the coast of Palestine to Kirkuk in northern Iraq, dividing much of the Middle East into what were planned as post-war British and French spheres of control. It was a draft memorandum of…
1 January 1987 On 1 January 1987, the British government belatedly released documents under the thirty year rule, exposing the secret collusion between Britain and Israel to manufacture a phony pretext for military intervention in Egypt during the 1956 Suez crisis. For years, successive governments had denied such claims, using the thirty year rule as…
13 June 1978 On 13 June 1978, at the insistence of Britain’s Labour government, the Queen welcomed Romania’s murderous dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, at Buckingham Palace, as part of a British effort to encourage the regime to continue to distance itself from Moscow. The royal invitation was extended despite a warning from Reggie Secondé, the British…
13 June 1958 On 13 June 1958, during an insurgency against British rule in Cyprus, which had also exacerbated tensions between the Greek and Turkish communities, Major General Douglas Kendrew ordered a day and night curfew on the entire population of Nicosia ‘until further notice.’ He explained with typical British arrogance that ‘I am going…
1 January 1921 At about 2 pm on New Years Day 1921, several lorry loads of British soldiers and Royal Irish Constabularly disembarked in the town centre of Midleton in County Cork. They handed out notices to three residents in Midleton’s Main Street and four residents in the neighbouring villages of Ballyadam and Knockgriffin, ‘giving them…
9 December 1958 On 9 December 1958, Patrick Bourke, the Chief Justice of Cyprus, published the conclusions of an inquiry in to a massacre of unarmed Greeks outside the Turkish Cypriot village of Geunyeli. On 12 June thirty five Greek detainees had been released from the British Army’s custody into the countryside between two Turkish…
9 December 1863 On 9 December 1863, thousands of men and women in the Chinese rebel city of Suzhou were massacred, four days after the town was seized by British and imperial Chinese forces. Colonel Charles Gordon (later lauded as a war hero for his last stand and death at Khartoum in 1885) had guaranteed…
