Tag: History

Glad it’s all over

A recent piece by the FT’s Gideon Rachman, on the re-awakening of the nuclear ams race, sent me back to the early 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war stalked the pop charts, even as unseen crises such as Able Archer 83 secretly brought the world to the brink.

Because I am a cheery soul, I already have a playlist on Spotify called ‘Nuclear‘, which draws together some of the irradiated pop dystopias that sold in such numbers 40 years ago. There are some absences (such as Sting’s ‘Russians’) largely on the grounds of my tastes, but the list does give a sense of how pervasive the nuclear threat was in popular culture – at a time when the charts were much more of a communal experience than they are today. I don’t detect the same looming anxiety about, say, climate change in today’s pop music. But I don’t listen to much modern pop music so what do I know?

And it wasn’t just music. In the UK alone, TV dramas such as Edge of Darkness (1985), A Very British Coup (1988) and, unforgettably, Threads (1984) all touched or centred on the politics and potential consequences of nuclear defence, nuclear diplomacy and nuclear war. There are, of course, US films such as War Games (1983) too, but there’s a blend of ghoulishness, glee, melancholy and cynical fatalism that seems peculiar to the UK dramas and pop songs.

I was a teenager in the early 1980s, so was perhaps particularly sensitive to this sense of dread that seemed draped over the world, just as I started taking an interest in it. Looking back, I suspect that spending long afternoons in darkened rooms listening to how different mixes of ‘Two Tribes’ by Frankie Goes to Hollywood incorporated civil defence warnings was not the most psychologically healthy of hobbies. (And I wonder whether the political apathy often attributed to ‘Generation X’ relates to us not confidently expecting to reach voting age, let alone maturity.)

But it wasn’t just morbid protogoths. The likelihood of nuclear war, “within the next year or two”, was a commonplace of discussion between my parents and their friends, sometimes overheard from upstairs as the dinner party drinking continued.

All that seems curiously distant now, only half-glimpsed through pop culture reflections, crowded out by more tangible 1980s markers such as Concorde and Sony walkmen. In his history of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides commented that distant observers would judge Athens to have been far more powerful than it was owing to its wealth of monunmental buildings, but would not understand the power of Sparta, a great power that had a minimal (and mainly wooden) physical footprint.

In a similar way, the physical traces of this part of the Cold War are hard to find: missile and civil defence sites were buried or locked away, and most still are. You saw the women camped out at Greenham Common, but you never saw what they were protesting against. For most of us, the standoff was a strangely immaterial event, even a psychological one. But the songs and dramas of the 1980s can still give a sense of its power and how it was imprinted on our consciousness, like the ghostly shadows left by the nuclear blast at Hiroshima.

The Lady Kennaway’s last voyage

This is a family story, an unexceptional but striking vignette of the British Empire.

On 20 November 1857, The Lady Kennaway made anchor at East London, South Africa, having sailed from Plymouth, England, two months earlier. The ship was a rough passenger ship (in poor shape by then, judging by the fact that it had been refused insurance that year), about 121 ft long. Following its launch in Calcutta in 1817, it had been chartered by the East India Company, and subsequently transported convicts and settlers to Australia.

East London River Port, 1870s

The Lady Kennaway was wrecked a few days after landing, but not before its passengers had been disembarked. They included 153 women and girls, collected from orphanages and workhouses across Ireland (filled to bursting point by the Great Irish Famine of 1845-49), and taken to South Africa to marry demobilised soldiers.

These soldiers were not British, but mainly German mercenaries, recruited to fight for Britain in Crimea, and relocated to South Africa after the war (which they had barely fought in) had concluded. The British governor’s idea was that they could form the basis of a colonial settlement (and be rescued from the twin perils of intermarriage and homosexuality) by bringing out marriageable women. One of those women was my great-great-grandmother, Margaret Gallagher.

What must it have been like for her, plucked from the trauma of Ireland aged 20, where she had probably seen friends and family die from hunger, transported across the ocean in an ageing hulk and dropped into the heat of East London, the bright sunshine of a Cape spring, with the uncertain prospect of being married off to a soldier she had never met?

Margaret seems to have been lucky. She took up with Patrick Lowry, one of soldiers escorting them to King William’s Town, the provincial capital (now called Qonce). They married and had numerous children (family sources seem unsure of precise numbers), the second-youngest of whom, Annie, was born in Gibraltar, presumably a new posting for Patrick. Annie subsequently married and settled in Essex, where our lives overlapped for a year in the early 1970s.

As I said above, the story is far from exceptional – there must be 152 others like it from that one journey – but it is one little instance of how the great machine of the British Empire scooped people up and moved them halfway across the world, like so many pieces on a chess board.

It recruited foreign mercenaries for a Black Sea war, found it couldn’t use them, and shipped them to settle the lands from which the British had displaced Dutch settlers (who had in turn displaced the indigenous Khoikhoi through warfare and disease). It created orphans through negligent famine in one place, and sent them halfway across the world as soldiers’ concubines. It could be a surprisingly mobile and inter-connected world, but a cruel one too.