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Colonial Encounters in a Time
of Global Conflict, 1914–1918
Santanu Das is Professor of English and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls
College, Oxford.
The First World War is a subject of perennial interest to historians and is often
regarded as a watershed event, marking the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the ‘modern’ industrial world. The sheer scale of the
conflict and massive loss of life means that it is constantly being assessed and
reassessed to examine its lasting military, political, sociological, industrial,
cultural and economic impact. Reflecting the latest international scholarly
research, the Routledge Studies in First World War History series provides
a unique platform for the publication of monographs on all aspects of the
Great War. Whilst the main thrust of the series is on the military aspects of
the conflict, other related areas (including cultural, visual, literary, political
and social) are also addressed. Books published are aimed primarily at a
post-graduate academic audience, furthering exciting recent interpretations
of the war, whilst still being accessible enough to appeal to a wider audience
of educated lay readers.
PART I
Spaces: camp, city, colony 35
PART III
Instrumentality: propaganda, resistance and the
post-war world 215
We would like to thank, above all, the contributors for their patience, enthu-
siasm, good humour and commitment to this volume. We would also like to
thank Routledge and particularly Max Novick and Rob Langham for their
warm support and encouragement.
This volume is one of the outcomes of a three-year, collaborative research
project Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals
and Belligerents During the First World War (CEGC) that ran from
2013 until 2016 and was funded by HERA (Humanities in the European
Research Area). Throughout the three years of the CEGC project’s duration,
we were fortunate to work alongside our wonderful co-investigators at
Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań), Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient
(Berlin) and Utrecht University. It was a very intense but thrilling period.
Our special gratitude goes to Natasha Awais-Dean, our project manager,
whose tremendous work with us at King’s College London, overseeing all
the project’s strands, was vital to its success. We thank Jan Brauburger,
Geert Buelens, Tessa Lobbes, Martyna Kliks, Heike Liebau, Larissa Schmid,
Natalia Stachura, Hubert van den Berg and Jennifer Wellington. We thank
the project’s associate partner organisations and collaborators, especially
Suzanne Bardgett (Imperial War Museum), Dominiek Dendooven (In
Flanders Fields Museum) and Elisabeth Tietmeyer (Museum of European
Cultures) for their invaluable help. We are grateful to all of the contributors
to the project’s digital sourcebook (http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu): this
book mobilises ideas and content which first found a home there.
The book originated at a conference held at King’s College London in
January 2016 in conjunction with the German Historical Institute. We
would particularly like to thank Andreas Gestrich, then director of the GHI,
for his support facilitating the conference and the generous funding. It was
a memorable conference and we warmly remember all those who took part
and gave papers for their intellectual curiosity and generosity, which stimu-
lated many of our ideas for this volume.
Thank you to the Australian War Memorial, the British Library, the C adbury
Research Library, the Special Collections at the University of Birmingham,
the Imperial War Museum, the King’s College London Archives and the Leeds
University Library for granting permission to reproduce images in this book.
All efforts have been made to contact the copyright holders.
Colonial encounters in a time
of global conflict
An introduction
Santanu Das, Anna Maguire and Daniel Steinbach
DOI: 10.4324/9781315112671-1
2 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
Figure 0.1 Two soldiers of the South African Native Labour Corps seen during a
‘war dance’ and sports day.
Source: © Imperial War Museum (Q 2382).
the African soldiers in the First World War, especially those forcibly con-
scripted, to ‘literally slavery’ (see Keene, Chapter 9).3
Jingoes was among the two million Africans (including West Indians and
African Americans) who served in the war – as volunteers, conscripts and
mercenaries, or a combination of all three – and for many of whom, histories
of slavery and the war and empire were inextricably entangled.4 The impe-
rial call to arms occasioned for a subject such as Jingoes both a re-encounter
with the racial past and a recalibration of that identity, which would, in
turn, shape his subsequent encounters with Europe. He continued:
When we boarded the train, before we left Liverpool, the girls of that
place arrived with teapots, cups, and biscuits to serve us with tea. They
were so friendly, and we warmed to their concern for us.
‘Go and fight’, they said, ‘for your country and for your King, but we
think that most of all you will go and fight for us, because you would
not like us to die.’
Although white women had served us with tea in Cape Town, we
know they were only doing it because we were going to war. These girls
were different.
Colonial encounters 3
One of our preachers had told us that we would find no colour bar
in England, but we did not believe him: how could there be a country
where black men were treated the same as white men? On our ship com-
ing over there had been an Indian called Cassim who had told us the
same thing. He seemed very well informed. He had come from German
East Africa with his Captain, whose batman he was.
‘I’ve been there,’ he told us on the ship, ‘and I assure you that there is
no colour bar in England or France.’
‘You tell a good story my friend,’ we mocked him.
‘As you look at me, I am a French-speaker.’
We only laughed louder.
‘You’ll believe me when you get to France!’
The girls at Liverpool talked to us so easily that it seemed Cassim was
right, but it was a little early to judge yet, so we kept open minds on the
subject until we had had more experience of the place.5
Figure 0.2 A page from the Gallipoli diary of Private Charles Stinson, where an
Indian had signed his name in English, Urdu and Gurmukhi.
Source: Australian War Memorial, Canberra, PR 84/066.
8 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
and West Indian troops billeted with elderly French women whom they
referred to as their ‘mothers’: a photograph of a Maori lumberjack and a
local Belgian woman reveals the combination of goodwill and awkwardness
that underlay many of these meetings.
Dendooven uses the resonant phrase ‘living apart together’ to describe
the relationship between colonial troops and the local Belgian people.25
Occasionally, deeper relationships developed. Consider the following two
accounts:
The first extract, from the letter of Sher Bahadur Khan, an Indian sepoy,
testifies to the rich terrain of inter-racial relationships forged not on the
basis of war camaraderie or sexual longing but wartime loneliness and
bereavement; the second extract is from the writer and imperialist Rudyard
Kipling’s war fiction, The Eyes of Asia, published in New York in 1918,
showing how such personal letters were not just accessed by the censors in
the British War Office but unscrupulously repurposed for imperialist propa-
ganda purposes.28
However, the Western Front and its narratives were by no means an
exception for being the ‘cosmopolitan dumping-ground.’ The campaigns in
Mesopotamia, East Africa and Gallipoli were equally diverse, with soldiers
and labourers from almost every part of the world.29 In Gallipoli, the Maori
Every social space is the outcome of a process with many aspects and
many contributing currents, signifying and non-signifying, perceived
and directly experienced, practical and theoretical. In short, every social
space has a history.
Colonial encounters 17
He further notes how, ‘around 1920, just after the First World War,’ there
was a twofold shift in the thinking of space: first, a sharper consciousness of
a ‘global space’ and a more definite linking between ‘industrialisation and
urbanisation, between workplaces and dwelling-places.’52 More recently,
while thinking about ‘contact zones’ in an imperial world, the postcolonial
historian Mary Louise Pratt spoke to the ‘space in which peoples geographi-
cally and historically separated come into contact with each other.’53 For
both, space is not merely a discursive site but a finely nuanced, densely
populated, sociocultural reality, marked by the intersection of histories,
perceptions and practices. In a global war marked by mass mobilisation of
bodies, advanced technology and improved telecommunications, such spa-
tial imaginaries became even more complex and diverse, each with its dis-
tinct ‘culture.’ In fact, the terms ‘frontline’ and ‘homefront,’ coined during
the war, show how fundamental and enduring our spatial understanding of
the world’s first global war has been and its influence on First World War
historiography.54
Part I focuses on the intricate sociocultural minutiae of specific spaces –
embodied and heterogenous – as a way of understanding cultural encoun-
ters. In doing so, it responds to two impulses in how we write and think
about the spatial dimensions of the war: first, the burgeoning interest in
the understanding of the ‘homefront’ as a crucial site of the war experience
and having regular points of contact with the ‘front’; second, a remarkable
expansion from Europe into the rest of the world, particularly the colonies,
as part of the ‘global turn’ in First World War studies. This volume builds
on such interest to refine and examine the cultures of specific spaces – ships,
camps, cities, streets, cafes, hospitals – as a way of understanding how war-
time populations, both the enlisted and civilians, encountered each other
or were kept separate, lived, loved or drew apart, experienced new social
relations, and developed new forms of behaviour. Space, we felt, was par-
ticularly helpful to catch both the complex intersectionalities – race, gender,
rank, class, among others – as well as the specific contexts and shifting
hierarchies that shaped interpersonal relations. For example, the authority
of being an ‘occupier’ created different interactions with the city and peoples
of Jerusalem (Murphy, Chapter 3) than the navigation of the ‘neutrality’ of
one’s host city in the bustling cosmopolitanism of Salonika (Immig, Chap-
ter 2). On the other hand, for New Zealand soldiers to be stationed along-
side an encamped battalion of Gurkhas in France (Maguire, Chapter 1) was
very different from troops from across the British Empire meeting in colo-
nial East Africa (Steinbach, Chapter 4). In an imperial world, the dynamics
of spaces determined the very nature of the encounters as well as the stakes
involved in contacts that were brokered by the war. These new or altered
spaces also created new and different modes of power that impacted the
everyday lives of those within that space: military, civic, colonial, imperial.55
In organising this section, we think about how the enlisted occupied and
moved within the locations they were sent to as part of their military service
18 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
and their geographic trajectories, which confronted understandings of cen-
tre and periphery. We start in the military camp, where soldiers spent large
amounts of their time, where they slept, ate and exercised, and where they
attended to the cultural, social and psychological shifts that war required
of them. For those who travelled where military campaigns decreed they
should – drawn from overseas colonies and dominions to serve in Europe or
the Middle East, or leaving European homes for the first time to fight in the
campaigns in Asia and Africa – camps were spaces of central importance to
their sense of belonging. Military infrastructure was overlaid with familiar
signifiers of the world left behind: London’s street names finding new homes
on global fronts, as one example.56 In the potential ‘emotional communities’
of camp spaces, efforts to sustain and restore military fitness and morale
might work to broker more friendly, or even intimate relations with those
they lived alongside. As Maguire (Chapter 1) shows, the distance travelled
by combatants and non-combatants from the British Empire to the Western
Front, where they met their fellow colonials, comrades from the ‘mother-
land’ and their (imperial) allies, was most immediately realised in the per-
ceived pageantry of empires uniting in arms. Yet in these spaces, colonial
troops’ encounters with their fellow servicemen demanded their attention
to the racialised structures of camp life, where militarised jurisdiction and
imperial hierarchy were mutually designed and sustained. Camps were not
the frictionless contact zones that the imperial pageantry usually suggested
but were places where the explicit and implicit rules of colonialism were
elaborated upon and experienced by individuals, which could be evocative,
congenial, violent or painful.
As we shift from the specificity of the camp, to look beyond its bounda-
ries, we remember that camps were not closed spaces. This might be the
porous boundaries of inter-military visiting, as Immig’s (Chapter 2) use of
photographs taken in camps to demonstrate the reciprocal attendance of
concerts, plays and sporting competitions by troops stationed in Salonika.
The photographs remind us of the ‘optical confusion’ of encounters as sol-
diers and civilians alike tried to make sense of the new people and places
they interacted with, using visual signifiers. These images bridge the gap
between military and civilian, as in a football match between Italian soldiers
and the local football club, Aris, in 1917. Camps also accommodated close
contact and exchange with civilian contractors and tradespeople, entertain-
ers or other visitors, who regularly entered the military sphere. From the
presence of YMCA workers to visiting concert parties to the curious civil-
ians who attended sports days and ceremonies, camps created room for
lively conviviality and economic opportunity which jostled alongside the
governing military infrastructure.57 In these interactions, the racial dynam-
ics of encounter were further complicated as understandings of ‘whiteness,’
‘Europeanness’ and ‘colonised’ were tested by the presence of so many
troops in a ‘peripheral’ and formerly ‘neutral’ city.
Colonial encounters 19
If soldiers tried to project notions of civilian city life onto their military
camps, cities themselves became military spaces in the war. Due to the geo-
graphic trajectories of the war, military forces both lived on the outskirts
of and spilled into cosmopolitan centres and enacted new forms of spatial
control through their presence. The pervious boundaries of camp allowed
enlisted men out into the city spaces they lived alongside, though military
restrictions on movement, to prevent racial mixing or the spread of disease
requires the disaggregation of soldiers’ ‘freedom.’58 These cities take us fur-
ther on a longitudinal journey within national and imperial structures as
much as the military. Both cities discussed here, Salonika and Jerusalem,
were multi-ethnic, multi-lingual and multi-religious places before 1914 and
both represent a different form of imperial control with cultural, economic
and political power constantly contested. The war, and especially the occu-
pation by foreign troops, created new forms of urban life reflecting new,
shifting power structures. Encounters and interactions between soldiers and
civilians did not merely reflect an opposition between occupier and occu-
pied but were also determined by familiarity, expectations and dependency.
Murphy (Chapter 3) takes up this theme as city and (proto-)colony collided
through the British occupation of Jerusalem from 1917. Murphy analyses
how the soldiers’ encounters with the city led to a reshaping of their identity
as tourists, soldiers and pilgrims. Significantly, the occupation of the city
also led to its physical remaking, as the British ‘occupation’ saw the con-
struction of a re-imagined biblical Jerusalem. This physical building helped
the new arrivals to overcome the dissonance of ancient and modern. Mur-
phy enables us to ask questions about what it means to occupy, to take up
space in wartime, to assume the reins of colonial governance, through the
experiences of the men on the ground, who marched and toured and created
new frames of ‘knowing’ for their readers at home.
The multi-directional waves of travel move us through each of these
spaces, shifting the political framing and colonial relations of empire and
their influence on the encounters which took place. The final chapter in this
section moves us further along still on our version of the journey ‘out’ from
the ‘heart’ of Europe on the Western Front, through a European ‘periph-
ery,’ to Africa where the imperial powers mobilised their colonial subjects
to fighting each other. As Steinbach (Chapter 4) demonstrates, the inhabit-
ing of inherited colonial mentalities and the enactment of white superiority
and violence, in their writing and behaviour, were essential to the exertion
of order in British troops’ encounters with ‘Africa.’ In doing so, Steinbach
moves far beyond the charms of encounters to their brutalising impact. Brit-
ish soldiers responded to their encounters in East Africa with articulations
of racially ‘justified’ authority and control in their behaviour and interac-
tions, which descended into savage violence. As we delve into these spatially
bounded zones of contact, these case studies offer both the ‘messy’ experi-
ence of encounters and attempts to implement order within this messiness,
20 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
so that we begin to turn to the politics of encounters’ occurrence during the
First World War from which action could evolve.
Though Manjapra does not mention the First World War, some of his ideas
are particularly germane for this volume. What we have here is a more polit-
icised and aspirational version of cosmopolitanism which, rather than being
defined in opposition to nationalism, is powered by the spirit of anti-colonial
resistance.61 Cosmopolitanism in this version provides the ethical ground on
Colonial encounters 21
which ‘zones of conversation’ outside the imperial axis and between dif-
ferent cultural, linguistic and political communities develop not just in the
pursuit of a particular political or nationalist agenda but because of larger,
shared and more intimate histories of subjugation and exploitation.
On 30 July 1914, even before Britain had declared war, the Lahore-based
newspaper Zamindar predicted:
War will not be confined to Austria and Serbia but will be a universal
war in which all the great empires of Europe will be involved; for hav-
ing partitioned Asia and Africa, they have no hunting grounds left, and
will now descend into the arena and hunt each other [. . .] the materials
of war which have so far been used to destroy Orientals will now be
employed in the destruction of Europeans.62
They took 2,000,000 black men from America, from the West Indies
and Africa, to fight for this farcical democracy they told us about; and
now we are after winning the fight, winning the battle, we realize that
we are without democracy; and we come before the world, therefore,
as the Universal Improvement Association, to demand our portion of
democracy.69
As Keene (Chapter 9) notes, Garvey ‘gave great speeches, but he also offered
concrete strategies for building fleeting wartime cultural encounters into
something more lasting.’ It is with these ‘concrete strategies’ for political
alliances and change that the chapters in Part III examine.
These chapters testify both to the vision of a more equitable and demo-
cratic post-war world – evident in pan-African and pan-Asian movements,
and in the burgeoning of anti-colonial and civil rights movements – and
the ways these aspirations, in turn, were manipulated by different stake
holders and power groups. Rather than the contingent or spontaneous
encounters behind the battle lines, camps or cities, as explored in Parts
One and Two, the complex affiliations – interpersonal or textually and
24 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
visually mediated – examined here were ideologically motivated. Keene thus
examines the political potential of the kinds of encounters described by
Hammond and Smith through the way the achievements of the West African
combatants were drawn upon by African American veterans and activists
in newspaper articles, pictorial books and wartime lectures to forge a com-
mon black combatant experience and consciousness. She investigates both
the politics of these strategic translations and their complex appropriation,
with inner differences, by key black intellectuals – the Jamaica-born Marcus
Garvey, the African American war veteran Rayford Logan and the US civil
rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois. Together, the chapters by Hammond, Smith
and Keene form a triumvirate that examines the contested meanings and
spaces of black war service and their role in the ‘dawning of black world’;
in the process, they bear testimony to the expansiveness and complexity of
the term ‘encounter.’
If these three chapters explore the commonality of black experience and
its contribution to a pan-African consciousness, the final chapters (Chap-
ters 10, 11 and 12) explore an alternative imaginary where issues of race,
ethnicity and nation were similarly intertwined. In The Politics of Anti-
Westernism in Asia, Ceymil Aydin notes the rise in the nineteenth century
of ‘strategic essentialism against the European discourses of race, orient,
and empire and a legacy of the universalism inherited from the non-Western
humanistic traditions of Islam, Confucianism or Buddhism.’70 The war
seemed to provide confirmation of the moral crisis of the Eurocentric world
order and strengthened the appeal of pan-Asian and pan-Islamic ideas on
the global stage; but, unlike the pan-African movement and because of the
enlistment of Ottoman Empire on the side of the Central Powers, these aspi-
rations were strategically manipulated by the German Foreign Office, defy-
ing any neat divisions across the line of race and ethnicity.71
The three chapters document the range of encounters, personal or textual,
in all their covert politics, aspirational idealism and moral murkiness, struck
between unequal partners with widely divergent aims, drawn in varying
combinations from the belligerent, neutral and colonised countries. At the
outbreak of the war, the British and the French empires ruled over 120 mil-
lion Muslim subjects: how will the Allied states retain the loyalty of these
men when they were being made to fight their co-religionists in Mesopota-
mia or the Middle East? As early as 14 November 1914, in Constantinople,
the Ottoman sultan in his role as caliph declared a ‘holy war’ against Britain
and its allies. As Hew Strachan observes, ‘This was a call to revolution which
had, it seemed, the potential to set all Asia and much of Africa ablaze.’72
Consequently, the world’s Muslim population became an important pawn
in the propaganda wars between the Entente and Central Powers, the target
of various journals, magazines, films and lectures; but what they, in the pro-
cess, allowed was intense engagement with and greater visibility of the Mus-
lim world, feeding into discourses of pan-Islamism. McEvoy (Chapter 10)
focusses on the British propaganda publication – the illustrated newspaper
Colonial encounters 25
Al-Haqīqah – to counter German propaganda; yet what this elaborate
propaganda inadvertently reveals is the wartime Western construction of
the ‘Mohammedan mind,’ with its discourses of Orientalism, pan-Asianism
and strategic essentialism. What Lobbes (Chapter 11) and Jenkins (Chap-
ter 12) examine is exactly the same space but seen through the other end
of the telescope, facilitated by Germany’s ‘Programme for Revolution,’ in
conjunction with various colonial actors, resulting in something altogether
rich and strange.
One of the most shadowy yet tantalising areas in this lateral network of
instrumental encounters is the relationship between the anti-colonial actors
and activists belonging to different racial and national groups: were the
encounters physical and interpersonal, or were they largely discursive and
mediated through articles and journals? For example, in wartime Berlin,
there were societies for Indians, Tunisians, Indonesians and Algerians. Did
they compete among themselves to get their voices heard or secure access to
the key actors in belligerent or neutral states? Lobbes (Chapter 11) uncov-
ers this endlessly intriguing world through the enigmatic figure of Ernest
Douwes Dekker, the anti-colonial intellectual and politician from the politi-
cally neutral Dutch East Indies. Revealing the East Indies as a ‘hub of Indian
anti-colonial activities,’ Lobbes places Dekker at the centre of an intricate
web of anti-colonial encounters, both mediated and intertextual: journals
such as Het Tijdschrift and De Indiër that he founded were in dialogue with
the activities of nationalists in India, the Philippines, China and Egypt while,
in 1915, he made an extraordinary journey to meet Indian nationalists, Jap-
anese sympathisers and Chinese nationalists in San Francisco, Tokyo and
Shangai. Even if circumscribed within the workings of the German Foreign
Office, Dekker is an example of how the war did not just foster these com-
plex networks but created considerable space for their agencies and agendas.
The shifting, complex and deeply ambivalent relationship that many of
these colonial intellectuals had in relation to the German programme is
explored further by Jenkins (Chapter 12) with her focus on the journal The
New Orient, a German foreign policy publication with pieces by both Ger-
man officials and anti-colonial intellectuals, which provides the counterpoint
to Al-Haqīqah. Neither merely a propaganda mouthpiece nor the learned
Orientalist scholarly publication it was assumed to be, Jenkins examines
how this journal became ‘an arena for the encounter of the [anti-colonial]
activists with German officialdom and a political weapon in their struggle.’
In spite of the unequal balance of power, what is particularly remarkable,
as Jenkins notes with reference to the case of Persia, is the seriousness with
which it debated different visions and versions of post-war worldmaking,
ranging from questions of empire and ‘self-determination’ (often exclusively
associated with Wilson) to a ‘new Orient’ beyond Islam and Orientalism.
In her introduction to World War One in Southeast Asia, Heather Streets-
Salter called for attention to relationships beyond metropole and colonies,
to ‘the many other structures, flows, and processes that were neither wholly
26 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
defined by such bilateral relationships nor limited by national-colonial bor-
ders.’ Instead, Streets-Salter suggests a conceptualisation ‘that is messier and
more multilateral.’73 Through the 12 chapters of this volume, we examine
encounters as the spaces and processes through which this multi-directional
mess was lived in wartime, experienced, recorded and instrumentalised. In
doing so, we suggest the rich potential and possibility of this approach in
its multiple iterations and locations. From their entanglement with past his-
tories to the bold imagination of a more equitable post-war future, these
encounters allow us to see how the world was understood in the midst of a
global conflict.
Notes
1 Stimela Jason Jingoes, A Chief Is a Chief by the People: The Autobiography of
Stimela Jason Jingoes, ed. John and Cassandra Perry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975), p. 80.
2 Ibid., p. 78.
3 Emily Balch, Secretary of Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
to Mary White Ovington, 16 March 1921, folder ‘Senegalese Soldiers’, quoted
in Jennifer D. Keene, Chapter 9.
4 The figure of ‘two million’ comes from Hew Strachan, The First World War
(London: Penguin, 2005), p. 67 (particularly see the chapter ‘Global War’,
pp. 67–95); for war and memories of slavery, see Mark Whalan, The Great War
and the Culture of the New Negro (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida,
2008); Norman Clothier, Black Valour: The South African Native Labour Con-
tingent, 1916–1918 and the Sinking of the Mendi (Pietermaritzburg: University
of Natal Press, 1987), p. 12.
5 Jingoes, A Chief Is a Chief by the People, p. 80.
6 It is worth noting that ‘colonial’ is employed variously to include those who
were colonised and racialised as of colour, those white people from the domin-
ions who participated in processes of settler colonialism and self-identified as
‘colonial’ in contemporary writing, and white British people who worked as
part of the colonial administration. The capacious use of the term requires atten-
tion to the intention and analytical weight it carries as it is applied differently
throughout this book. The historical interchange of this term and the ‘shifting
imaginings’ of colonial frontiers are well articulated by Bill Schwarz, Memories
of Empire, Volume I: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2011), p. 109.
7 See Timothy C. Winegard, Indigenous Peoples of the British Dominions and the
First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Anna Magu-
ire, ‘ “I Felt Like a Man”: West Indian Troops Under Fire During the First World
War’, Slavery & Abolition 39 (2018), 602–621. We use the term ‘people of col-
our’ here due to its encompassing nature and ability to describe those racialised
as ‘not white’ by who they were rather than who they were not. However, we
remain conscious that this term does not disaggregate the experiences and differ-
ent oppressions of people of colour (including for example, anti-Blackness) and
can collapse them into a falsely singular category: where we can be more specific,
we are.
8 Richard S. Fogarty, Race and Empire in France: Colonial Subjects in the French
Army, 1914–1918 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008),
p. 3. Also see Christian Koller, ‘Representing Otherness: African, Indian and
Colonial encounters 27
European Soldiers’ Letters and Memoirs’, in Santanu Das (ed.), Race, Empire
and First World War Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011),
pp. 127–142.
9 Dominiek Dendooven and Piet Chilens (eds.), World War I: Five Continents in
Flanders (Ypres: Lanoo, 2006). See Santanu Das, India, Empire and First World
War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2018) for such a mixture in British and French responses to Indian sepoys,
pp. 119–173, 176–177.
10 Jingoes, A Chief is a Chief by the People, p. 93.
11 Ibid.
12 Alfred Horner, From the Islands of the Sea: Glimpses of a West Indian Battalion
in France (Kingston: The Guardian, 1919), p. 55.
13 Nicole M. Zehfuss, ‘From Stereotype to Individual: World War I Experiences
with Tirailleurs Senegalais’, French Colonial History 6 (2005), 137–157.
14 Bakary Diallo, ‘Force-Bonté’, in David Beus (trans.), Cultural Exchange in a
Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/270
accessed 10 December 2020).
15 Sisir Prasad Sarbadhikari, Abhi Le Baghdad [On the Road to Baghdad], trans.
Upasana Dutta (Calcutta: Privately Printed, 1957), quoted in Das, India, Empire
and First World War Culture, Chapter 5.
16 Hew Strachan, ‘The First World War as a Global War’, First World War Stud-
ies 1 (2010), 3–14; Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing; Robert
Gerwarth and Manela Erez (eds.), Empires at War (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2014); Richard S. Fogarty and Andrew Tait Jarboe (eds.), Empires
in World War I: Shifting Frontiers and Imperial Dynamics in a Global Conflict
(London: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
17 This central thesis informed our 3-year collaborative research project (2013–
2016) ‘Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict: Colonials, Neutrals
and Belligerents in the First World War’, https://cegcproject.eu, and our online
sourcebook (http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu). See also Anna Maguire, Contact
Zones of the First World War: Cultural Encounters across the British Empire
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
18 For the statistical breakdown, see Das, Race, Empire and First World War Cul-
ture, p. 27: ‘The figure of over four million is arrived at easily by adding up the
1.4 million Indians, 2 million Africans, 400,000 African Americans, 100,000
Indochinese and 140,000 Chinese labourers, mentioned above. To this should be
added, among other groups, the numbers of Maori, Aboriginal Australians, First
Nations Canadians, West Indians and Amerindians. Not all of them saw active
service though.’
19 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New
York: Routledge, 2008), p. 8.
20 Dendooven and Chielens, World War I; John Horne, ‘Workers in France During
World War I’, French Historical Studies 14 (1985), 57–88. See also Dominiek
Dendooven, Asia in Flanders Fields: A Transnational History of Indians and
Chinese on the Western Front, 1914–1920 (unpublished PhD thesis, University
of Kent, Universiteit Antwerpen, 2018).
21 We are grateful to Dominiek Dendooven for bringing these notebooks to our
notice and translating the above passages. It was published in three volumes
in the 1960s: Achiel Van Walleghem, De Oorlog te Dickebusch en omstreken
1914–1918 (Brugge: Genootschap voor Geschiedenis, 1964–67). See vol. I,
pp. 54, 109 and vol. III, p. 92.
22 Vivian G. Simmons, ‘Brotherhood in War Time’, Red Triangle 2 (1919), 353,
quoted in Richard Smith, Chapter 8.
28 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
23 Diary of Private Charles Stinson (1st Australian Light Horse Brigade), Austral-
ian War Museum, PR 84/066.
24 See Das, Race, Empire and First World War Writing, pp. 45–46, 150.
25 Dominiek Dendooven, ‘Living Apart Together’, in Santanu Das (ed.), India,
Empire and First World War Culture: Writings, Images, and Songs (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 143–157.
26 Letter from Sher Bahadur Khan, 9 January 1916, Censor of Indian Mails 1914–
1918, Part 2, British Library, India Office Records [IOR], L/MIL/826.
27 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Fumes of the Heart’, in The Eyes of Asia (New York:
Doubleday, 1918), p. 36.
28 See Das, India, Empire and First World War Culture, p. 190.
29 See Leila Fawaz, A Land of Aching Hearts: The Middle East in the Great War
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Anne Samson, World War I
in Africa: The Forgotten Conflict Among European Powers (London: I.B. Tauris,
2012); Heather Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, Colonialism
and Anticolonialism in an Era of Global Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2017); Jenny McLeod, Gallipoli: Great Battles (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2015); Justin Fantauzzo, The Other Wars: The Experience and
Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2020).
30 Rikihana Carkeek, Home Little Maori Home: A Memoir of the Maori Contin-
gent, 1914–1916 (Wellington: Totika, 2003), p. 74; Peter Stanley, ‘Remembering
the Contribution of Indian Troops’, www.sbs.com.au/radio/article/2015/04/25/
remembering-contribution-indian-troops-gallipoli (accessed 22 June 2020).
31 Francis Brett Young, ‘Letter by British Author Francis Brett Young to His Wife
in England’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.
cegcproject.eu/items/show/173 (accessed 10 December 2020). See also Daniel
Steinbach, ‘Shifting Tides: The Port City of Mombasa and the First World War’,
Journal of Indian Ocean World Studies 5 (2021), 1–18.
32 Sugata Bose and Kris Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South
Asia and the Global Circulation of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2010), p. 2.
33 See Sadia McEvoy, The Construction of Ottoman Asia and Its Muslim Peo-
ples in Wellington House’s Propaganda and Associated Literature, 1914–1918
(unpublished PhD thesis, King’s College, 2016).
34 Ibid.
35 See for example Kate Winskell, ‘The Art of Propaganda: Herwarth Walden and
“Der Sturm”, 1914–1919’, Art History 18 (1995), 315–344.
36 Militärische Film- und Photostelle (Berlin), ‘Bayramfest im Mohamedaner-
Gefangenenlager (Halbmond- und Weinbergslager) zu Wünsdorf bei Zossen
(1916)’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.
cegcproject.eu/items/show/68 (accessed 10 December 2020).
37 Jennifer Jenkins, Heike Liebau, and Larissa Schmid, ‘Transnationalism and
Insurrection: Independence Committees, Anti-Colonial Networks, and Germa-
ny’s Global War’, Journal of Global History 15 (2020), 61–79.
38 Abdul Jabbar Khairi Abdul Sattar Khairi, ‘India Under British Rule’, Cultural
Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/
show/32 (accessed 10 December 2020).
39 Indian National Party, “ ‘Is Indië Loyal?’,” Cultural Exchange in a Time of
Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/22 (accessed 10
December 2020).
40 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-
Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
Colonial encounters 29
41 Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton (eds.), Bodies in Contact: Rethinking
Colonial Encounters in World History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2005); Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (eds.), Tensions of Empire: Colo-
nial Cultures in a Bourgeois World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
1997); Kris Manjapra, Age of Entanglement: German and Indian Intellectuals
across Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Michael Wer-
ner and Bénédicte Zimmerman, ‘Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the
Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45 (2006), 30–50.
42 Heinz-Gerhard Haupt and Jürgen Kocka (eds.), Comparative and Transnational
History: Central European Approaches and New Perspectives (New York,
Oxford: Berghan, 2009), p. 20.
43 Ibid., p. 2; Joanne Miyang Cho, Eric Kurlander, and Douglas T. McGetchin
(eds.), Transcultural Encounters Between Germany and India: Kindred Spirits in
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 3.
44 Urs Bitterli, Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-
European Cultures, 1492–1800 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989).
45 Manjapra, Age of Entanglement, p. 6.
46 ‘Introduction’, Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://source
book.cegcproject.eu/introduction/ (accessed 10 December 2020).
47 Joseph Clarke and John Horne (eds.), Militarized Cultural Encounters in the
Long Nineteenth Century: Making War, Mapping Europe (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2018), p. 19.
48 Private Papers of Mrs Alison Mullineaux, 13 September 1918, Imperial War
Museum, Documents 6867; Hubert Grimme, ‘Liebeslied Marokkanisch’,
Cultural Exchange in a Time of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcpro
ject.eu/items/show/67 (accessed 10 December 2020); Kabir Evelyn Underhill
Rabindranath Tagore Frederik van Eeden, ‘Kabir’, Cultural Exchange in a Time
of Global Conflict, http://sourcebook.cegcproject.eu/items/show/62 (accessed 10
December 2020).
49 Clarke and Horne, Militarized Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Cen-
tury, p. 5.
50 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1975).
51 Jay Winter, War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great
War to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 36.
52 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Paris: Anthropos, 1974), pp. 110
and 124.
53 Pratt, Imperial Eyes, p. 8.
54 See, for example, Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas, ‘Home Fronts, Gender,
War and Conflict’, Women’s History Review 26 (2017), 523–527; Krisztina
Robert, ‘Constructions of “Home”, “Front”, and Women’s Military Employ-
ment in First World War Britain: A Spatial Interpretation’, History and Theory
52 (2013), 319–343; Bill Nasson, ‘Sometimes Somnolent, Sometimes Seething:
British Imperial Africa and Its Home Fronts’, Historical Research 89 (2016),
363–374; Yigit Akin, When the War Came Home: The Ottoman’s Great War
and the Devastation of an Empire (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press,
2018).
55 Burton and Ballantyne, Bodies in Contact, p. 6; Myra Rutherdale and Katie
Pickles (eds.), Contact Zones: Aboriginal and Settler Women in Canada’s Colo-
nial Past (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004), p. 3.
56 See Rachel Richardson, Home Away from the Home Front: The British in the
Balkans During the Great War (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London,
2014).
30 S. Das, A. Maguire and D. Steinbach
57 Peter Chen-main Wang, ‘Caring Beyond National Borders: The YMCA and Chi-
nese Laborers in World War I Europe’, Church History 78 (2009), 327–349;
Amanda Laugesen, ‘More Than a Luxury: Australian Soldiers as Entertainers
and Audiences in the First World War’, Journal of War & Culture Studies 6
(2013), 226–238.
58 Mario M. Ruiz, ‘Manly Spectacles and Imperial Soldiers in Wartime Europe,
1914–1919’, Middle Eastern Studies 45 (2009), 351–371; Phillipa Levine,
‘Battle Colours: Race, Sex and Colonial Soldiery in World War I’, Journal of
Women’s History 9 (1998), 104–130; Tyler Stovall, ‘The Color Line Behind the
Lines: Racial Violence in France During the Great War’, The American Histori-
cal Review 103 (1998), 737–769.
59 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 110.
60 Bose and Manjapra, Cosmopolitan Thought Zones, p. 2.
61 The reference point in this debate is of course Martha Nussbaum, For Love of
Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon, 1996). See
Amartya Sen, ‘Is Nationalism a Boon or a Curse?’, in Sugata Bose and Kris
Manjapra (eds.), Cosmopolitan Thought Zones: South Asia and the Global
Circulation of Ideas (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 23–37; Kwame
Anthony Appiah, ‘Cosmopolitan Patriots’, in Pheng Cheng and Bruce Robbins
(eds.), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), pp. 91–116.
62 Zamindar, 30 July 1914, Reports on Punjabi Newspapers (RPN), IOR,
L/R/5/195, 914.
63 Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007).
64 The Grenada Federalist, 27 October 1915, quoted in Glenford Howe, Race,
War and Nationalism: A Social History of West Indians in the First World War
(Kingston: James Currey, 2002), p. 17. Desh, 4 December 1915, IOR, RNN,
L/R/5/196, 728.
65 Walter E. Seward, ‘Who Went Over the Top?’ in Negroes’ Call to the Colours
and Soldiers’ Camp-Life Poems (Athens, GA: Knox Institute Press, 1919), p. 46.
66 Mahatma Gandhi, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, vol. IV
(Ahmedabad: Government of India, 1965), p. 489.
67 See Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the Interna-
tional Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
68 Ibid., p. 20.
69 UNIA Meeting at Carnegie Hall, 25 August 1919, New York (State), quoted in
Jennifer D. Keene, Chapter 9.
70 Aydin, Politics of Anti-Westernism, p. 201.
71 See Prasanta Duara, ‘The Discourse of Civilisation and Pan-Asianism’, Jour-
nal of World History 12 (2001), 103–104; also see Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘Indian
Nationalism and the “World Forces”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions
of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’, Journal of
Global History 2 (2007), 325–344.
72 Strachan, The First World War, pp. 99–100.
73 Streets-Salter, World War One in Southeast Asia, p. 6.
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Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Recollections
of James Anthony Gardner, commander R.N.
(1775–1814)
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away
or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this ebook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you
are not located in the United States, you will have to check the
laws of the country where you are located before using this
eBook.
Language: English
Vol. XXXI.
RECOLLECTIONS
OF
OF
(1775–1814)
EDITED BY
AND
MDCCCCVI
THE COUNCIL
OF THE
PATRON
PRESIDENT
VICE-PRESIDENTS
COUNCILLORS
Atkinson, C. T.
Clarke, Col. Sir George S., K.C.M.G.
Corbett, Julian S.
Custance, Vice-Admiral Sir Reginald N., K.C.M.G.
Dartmouth, The Earl of.
Drury, Vice-Admiral Sir Charles C., K.C.S.I.
Field, Captain A. M., R.N., F.R.S.
Ginsburg, B. W., LL.D.
Godley, Sir Arthur, K.C.B.
Gordon, The Hon. George.
Gray, Albert, K.C.
Liverpool, The Earl of.
Loraine, Rear-Admiral Sir Lambton, Bart.
Lyall, Sir Alfred C., G.C.I.E.
Markham, Admiral Sir Albert H., K.C.B.
Newbolt, Henry.
Prothero, G. W., Litt.D., LL.D.
Seymour, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edward H., G.C.B.
Slade, Captain Edmond J. W., R.N., M.V.O.
Tarleton, Lieutenant A. H., R.N., M.V.O.
Thursfield, J. R.
Watts, Sir Philip, D.Sc., K.C.B., F.R.S.
White, Commander J. Bell, R.N.R.
White, Sir William H., K.C.B., F.R.S.
SECRETARY
TREASURER
and for a young man, with a young wife at home, that is impossible.
His allegiance is divided; the wife on shore has the biggest share and
continually calls for more, till the husband gets a home appointment
—a guardo, a coast-guard, or a signal station—pleasant for the time,
but fatal to all chance of promotion. No doubt there have been
exceptions. It would not be impossible to cite names of officers who
married as lieutenants and rose to high rank; but either under
peculiar conditions of service, or because the wife has had sufficient
strength of mind to prevent her standing in the way of her husband’s
profession; possibly even she may have forwarded him in it. Exceptio
probat regulam; but Gardner was not one. His direct connection
with the service ended with the peace in 1814. It does not appear that
he either asked for or wished for any further employment; but spent
the rest of his life in a peaceful and contented retirement in the
bosom of his family, at Peckham, where he died on 24 September
1846, in his 76th year. He was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary’s,
Newington Butts, where a head-stone once marked the site of the
grave. But the churchyard has been turned into a pleasure-ground,
and the position of the stone or the grave is now unknown.
The ‘Recollections’ which by the kindness of the authors
grandsons, Francis William and Henry James Gardner, we are now
permitted to print, were written in 1836, and corrected, to some
small extent, in later years. We have no information of the sources
from which he composed them. He must have had his logs; and we
may suppose either that these took the form of journals, or that he
had also kept a journal with some regularity. Certainly it is not
probable that, without some register, he could have given the lists of
his shipmates, correct even—in very many cases—to the Christian
names. That their characters and the various highly flavoured
anecdotes were matters of memory is more easily believed.
What is, in one sense, the most remarkable thing about the work
is the strong literary seasoning which it often betrays. The
manuscript is a little volume (fcap. 4to) written on both sides of the
paper, in a small neat hand. This, of itself, is evidence that Gardner—
leaving school, after six or seven broken years, at the age of twelve—
did not consider, or rather was not allowed to consider, his education
finished in all branches except in the line of his profession. Of the
way in which it was continued, we have no knowledge. It is quite
possible that Macbride, the drunken and obscene schoolmaster of
the Edgar, may, in his sober intervals, have helped to inspire him
with some desire of learning. The educational powers of Pye, the
schoolmaster of the Salisbury and of the Barfleur, can scarcely have
stretched beyond the working of a lunar. In the Berwick he was
shipmates with the Rev. Alexander John Scott—in after years
chaplain of the Victory and Nelsons foreign secretary—a man of
literary aptitudes, who was ‘always going on shore to make
researches after antiquities’ (p. 150), and Gardner may sometimes
have been allowed to accompany him in his rambles.
However this may have been, it is very noteworthy that a
tincture of polite learning was shared by many of his messmates. To
those whose notions of life afloat are gathered from Roderick
Random and other descriptions of the seamy side of the service, it
will seem incredible that such should have been the case. We are not
here concerned to prove it as a general proposition. It is enough to
refer to the particular instances before us—that of Gardner and his
messmates. He tells us that Macredie, who was with him in the
Edgar, and afterwards in the Barfleur, was ‘an excellent scholar, well
acquainted with Greek and Latin, ancient history and mathematics’
(p. 80), which must mean something, even if we allow a good deal for
exaggeration. In the Edgar they were with that disreputable but
amiable and talented sinner, Macbride; and it was also in the Edgar
that the assumption of Homeric characters was a common sport, in
which Macredie figured as Ajax Telamon, Culverhouse as Diomede,
and Pringle won the name of ‘Ponderous and Huge’ (pp. 84, 93).
This does not, perhaps, go for very much; but it cannot be lost
sight of that, as concerns Gardner, it was accompanied by a readiness
to apply quotations from Popes Iliad and from the Aeneid,
sometimes in Dryden’s version, sometimes in the original. He was
certainly, also, as familiar with Hudibras as ever Alan Quatermain
was with The Ingoldsby Legends. Shakespeare he does not seem to
have studied; and though it is but a small thing in comparison that
he should have read Ossian and A Sentimental Journey, his
knowledge of, his familiarity with, Roman history may be allowed as
a makeweight, unless indeed—which is quite possible—it was drilled
into him by Scott on each separate occasion. Thus, when the Berwick
goes to Tunis and Porto Farino, he is reminded of the fate of Regulus
(p. 136); he connects Trapani with the destruction of the Roman fleet
under Claudius (p. 137), and knows that the concluding battle of the
first Punic war—the battle which, as Mahan has shown, decided the
result of the second Punic war—was fought off the Egades (p. 138).
Incomparably more attention is nowadays paid to the instruction of
our youngsters; but we are confident that very few of them could
note such things in their journal unless specially coached up in them
by a friendly senior.
In this, again, there have been exceptions. Until recently there
has probably always been a sprinkling of officers who kept up and
increased the knowledge of Latin they brought from Eton or
Westminster[1] or other schools of classical learning; and Hannay, the
novelist, who had a personal acquaintance with gunroom life of sixty
years ago, has represented the midshipmen and mates of his day
bandying quotations from Horace or Virgil with a freedom which
many have thought ridiculous, but which, we must admit, might
sometimes be met with. We were told by an officer who served in the
Hibernia under the flag of Sir William Parker, that it was easy to fit
names to all the principal characters in Hannay’s novelettes; and it
may be assumed that what was true for the captains was equally true
for the midshipmen.
Such familiarity with the Latin poets was, of course, very
exceptional then; it has now, we fancy, entirely dropped out. The
Latin which our present youngsters bring into the service must be
extremely little, and they have no opportunity of continuing the
study of it; and though English history and naval history form part of
the curriculum at Osborne and Dartmouth, there is but little
inducement to a young officer to read more when he goes afloat. But
there are certainly many of our older officers who would say that a
sound and intelligent knowledge of history is more likely to be
profitable to the average captain or admiral than the most absolute
familiarity with the processes of the differential or integral calculus.
A considerable, and what to many will be a most interesting,
part of the volume is occupied by lists of names and thumb-nail
sketches of character. No attempt has been made to amplify these
beyond filling in dates and Christian names [in square brackets]
from Navy-lists and Pay-books. More would generally have been
impracticable, for most of the names are unknown to history; and
where otherwise, anything like full notices would have enormously
swelled the volume, without any adequate gain. It has seemed better
to add a mere reference to some easily accessible memoir, either in
the Dictionary of National Biography (D.N.B.), Charnock’s
Biographia Navalis, Marshall’s Royal Naval Biography, or
O’Byrne’s Naval Biographical Dictionary; sometimes also to
James’s Naval History, Schomberg’s Naval Chronology, or to
Beatson’s Naval and Military Memoirs—all books which are quite
common, and are or ought to be in every naval library.
It remains only for the Editors to express their grateful thanks to
the Messrs. Gardner, who not only permit them to publish the
‘Recollections,’ but supplied them with a copy of the MS., typed at
their expense; to the Very Rev. the Dean of Waterford, who has most
kindly had all the registers at Waterford searched (though vainly) in
the endeavour to determine the exact date of Commander Gardner’s
birth; and to the numerous friends and even strangers who have so
kindly helped them in answering the various queries which have
presented themselves. These are too many to name; but the Editors
must, in a special degree, mention their obligations to Commander
C. N. Robinson, R.N., whose very exceptional knowledge of the
byways of naval literature has been most generously put at their
service. That some of their queries have remained unanswered and
that explanatory notes are thus sometimes wanting will serve to
emphasise the importance of the assistance referred to. What, for
instance, is the meaning of the phrase ‘My hat’s off’ (p. 108)?
Apparently ‘Not a word!’ but why? or again, what are ‘ugly podreen
faces’ (p. 214)? To a mere Englishman the epithet looks as if it might
be Irish; but Irish dictionaries and three competent Irish scholars are