24 October 1865 Today at sunset in 1865, Paul Bogle, a Baptist deacon and the leader of a workers revolt in Jamaica known as the Morant Bay Rebellion, was hung by the British. He had been arrested only a few hours earlier when his hiding place, a thicket where he was found reading a hymn…
17 November 1821 In 1817, the London Missionary Society sent John Smith to Demerara (now part of Guyana), with instructions to preach the word of God at a small chapel at Le Resouvenir. The posting was situated in an area where hundreds of slaves were employed on the surrounding coffee, cotton and sugar plantations. In one…
7 September 1938 Shortly before the dawn on the morning of 7 September 1938, a company of the Royal Ulster Rifles (RUR), backed by several Rolls Royce armoured cars belonging to the 11th Hussars, surrounded the Palestinian village of al-Bassa, a large settlement of about two thousand Christian and Muslim Arabs located near the Lebanese…
2 June 1915 On 2 June 1915, Sir Robert Chalmers, the governor of Ceylon, on the pretext that ethnic rioting between Muslims and Sinhalese Buddhists had been provoked by German agents, declared martial law. There was, however, no evidence to suggest any German involvement. Bonar Law, Secretary of State for the Colonies, admitted a month…
28 January 1756 We catch a shocking glimpse of some of the sadistic punishments inflicted on slaves through the journals of Thomas Thistlewood, a plantation overseer in the British colony of Jamaica. He held slaves under his charge in utter contempt. He used many of the women for his own sexual gratification and flogged both…
17 February 1939 On 17 February 1939, the British run mandate government in Palestine introduced a law allowing military courts to order the whipping of children ‘with a light rod or cane or birch,’ of up to twenty four strokes.1 The following month, a question was raised in the House of Commons by Sir Ernest Bennett,…
13 January 1956 On 13 January 1956, six Greek Cypriot boys from Famagusta were birched under one of several emergency regulations introduced the previous month to stamp out an island wide rebellion against British rule. By July, Lennox-Boyd, the colonial minister, admitted that a total of 118 boys had been ‘sentenced to whipping,’ of whom…
THE ROYAL NAVY PUNISHES THE AMERICAN TOWN OF FALMOUTH [ 17 October 1775 ] On 6 October 1775, a squadron of Royal Naval ships, commanded by Captain Henry Mowat, sailed from Boston. Vice Admiral Samuel Graves ordered Mowat to discipline coastal towns deemed sympathetic to the American Revolutionary cause, which earlier that year had erupted…
300 LASHES ‘FOR HIS MANY CRIMES AND NEGLIGENCES’ [ 16 July 1750 ] Today in 1750, plantation overseer Thomas Thistlewood, newly posted to the remote Vineyard Pen sugar plantation in the British Colony of Jamaica, noted in his diary that his employer, Florentius Vassal, ordered one of the slaves under his supervision to be given…
‘HUMANE’ GENERAL CONDONES ‘PROMISCUOUS AND SEVERE PUNISHMENTS’ [ 15 June 1798 ] On the morning of 15 June 1798, the villagers of Clogheen in County Tipperary in Ireland were visited by Redcoats under the command of Major General John Moore. He had been tasked with suppressing an uprising against British rule and punishing all those…
