Reading about SAS Sergeant Danny Nightingale, who was recently imprisoned after a Court Martial for possession of a gun presented to him by a group of Iraqi soldiers that he had helped to train, I was reminded of something I read in HV Morton’s book, “In Search of London”, first published in 1951, which I read when I was a young Bobby on the Savile Row beat; it was one of the introductions to the City to which I was about to devote most of my working life and grow to love – a love affair is now over, as it no longer exists as I once knew it, because of the policies, vandalism and neglect of successive administrations.
I don’t know the full story of the evidence presented against the Sergeant, and have not read the Court proceedings, but from the main stream media hoo-hah since, it would appear that a miscarriage of justice may well have taken place.
The passages from Morton’s book, which I looked up again as a result of my flash-back, seem poignantly apposite to Nightingale’s case. Defence Sec. Philip Hammond, after a spat with Dominic Grieve, the Attorney General, is reported to be batting for Sgt. Nightingale. He should quote some of Morton’s musing to the lawyers and current senior officers of our military, who seem, in common with other vital public institutions, to have had Britain’s proud heritage and the vital catalyst of esprit de corps expunged from both their educational and professional studies and instructions.
HV Morton was narrating a walk along Whitehall (Chapter Six – part three) when he reaches the Royal United Services Museum in Whitehall, and I quote:
Extract:
Most Londoners will probably agree that unless you are going to enlist in the Army, or unless you are a Government official, or soldier on leave, or are on your way to show provincial relative the Horse Guards and the Cenotaph, you do not often walk down Whitehall. You may rush down it in a bus on your way to Waterloo or Victoria, or may flash past it in a taxi cab, but you do not often stroll along it.
But the other morning I was quietly walking down Whitehall, and in a few minutes I found myself looking at the skeleton of Napoleon’s charger, Marengo. That is the fantastic sort of thing that can happen to you in London. I had no idea I was going to do this. It just happened.
In Whitehall on the left going towards Westminster, is the most surprisingly housed museum in the world. It is called the Royal United Services Museum. It is the only museum I can recollect that puts samples of its wares in the window. Each window contains one exhibit in the best Bond Street manner: a shark’s head, a full dress foreign uniform, two or three realistic little battle scenes cut from cardboard; and beside the entrance leans the painted figure-head of a ship of the line.
The museum is housed in all that now remains of the ancient Palace of Whitehall—the great Banqueting Hall which James I built for happy occasions, with no idea that his son, Charles, would step from one of the windows to the scaffold. It is, after Westminster Hall, the most splendid building of its kind in London. It is so magnificent that one resents the mass of things which congest and crowd it: the glass cases, the models, and especially the innumerable flags which obscure the noble proportions of the building.
Rubens painted for it a superb ceiling showing James I being received among the Gods of pagan antiquity. It is all so splendidly painted and so full of movement and vigour that it does not occur to one at the time to wonder what Minerva, for instance, or Hercules, would have made of James I. It is pathetic in view of the later history of this hall, that young Prince Charles should be shown on this ceiling as a little naked boy supported by various mighty allegorical figures, while his father, throned, points to him approvingly.
It is difficult in such a room to give your attention to glass cases, but it should be done, for the museum is full of interesting relics. [And it is here that the significance of the Sergeant Nightingale case begins – my emboldened italics].
It is a museum which every schoolboy in England should know. Here are souvenirs picked up on the battlefields from Crecy to Alamein. Here are to be seen hasty pencil scrawls ordering cavalry divisions to advance. Here are bullets that killed heroes. Here are fragments from ships whose names came gloriously to us out of the smoke of ancient battles. Here are swords and pistols and scalping knives, helmets sabretaches and epaulettes, saddles, spurs, drums, lances, despatch boxes, trumpets, bugles, scimitars—all the rough material of romance.
The museum is a complete record of military and naval events from ancient times until “D” Day in 1944. There is even a case of 1939-1945 War Relics, and a series of beautifully painted dioramas arranged in historical sequence, showing battles, beginning with Norman times and ending in the landing of British and Allied troops on the Normandy beaches, and a dramatic and realistic air battle.
I walked around with the feeling that the American is not really, as most imagine, the perfect souvenir hunter. For Centuries the British soldier and sailor have been on the look-out for relics. One has a vision of enterprising soldiers going round after every battle, determined to pick up something to send home to mother. After Waterloo, Surgeon-Major Sir William Whymper set an exceedingly high standard by annexing the chain of the garden gate of Hougomont! There is a certain pathos to these relics, possibly because the lustre fades so swiftly from the reputation of a soldier.
This passionate instinct to preserve anything connected to a national hero almost reaches its limit with “Bottle of Port, being a portion of Lord Nelson’s cellar in H.M.S. Victory during the Battle of Trafalgar”. So this perishable thing, this bottle of port, survived Trafalgar`, and poor Nelson did not! Then we have “some of the spirit in which Lord Nelson’s body was preserved on board H.M.S Victory during her voyage home”; or this: “Umbrella used by the Duke of Wellington”.
As I was wandering around this queer, fascinating and entirely absorbing museum I came face to face with Marengo. Now Marengo was a light-grey barb, fourteen hands and one inch high, which Napoleon bought in Egypt after the battle of Aboukir. He became his favourite charger. Napoleon rode this horse at the battle of Marengo, which explains his name. Marengo carried his master at Jena, Wagram and during the retreat from Moscow. We have all seen Vernet’s picture of Napoleon crossing the Alps on this horse.
But alas, Marengo, who in his time trotted so importantly across the map of Europe is now a skeleton. He stands on horrid tip-toe in a glass case. You look at his skull and his brown ribs, and at the little bits of metal which hold him together, and feel sorry that he could not have been decently buried; for he is a distressing sight. No matter future generations may say of a soldier, surely his horse is always above criticism.
Marengo was wounded at Waterloo, and after Napoleon’s capture became the property of Lord Petre. He was then sold to General Angerstein, who kept him in Ely and bred from him. Marengo was carefully tended in his old age, and when he died snuff-boxes were made from two of his hoofs—one of them is used to-day in the guard-room at St James’s Palace—and his skeleton was unfortunately preserved.
Looking at poor Marengo now, there galloped through my mind a number of horses famous in legend, literature and history, who still remain beautiful because they were never seen as bones. There was El Borak, the horse which took the Prophet into the Seventh Heaven, and Bucephalus, the horse which only Alexander the Great could mount; Pegasus, the winged steed of Apollo; Zanthus, the steed of Achilles; Incitatus, the horse that the mad Caligula made a consul; Lamri and Spumador, King Arthur’s steeds; Grani, the horse of Siegfried; Rosabelle, the favourite palfrey of Mary Stuart, and Jenny Geddes,, the horse of Robbie Burns. Among the funny lovable horses, I remembered Rosiante, Don Quixote’s charger, and the poor scraggy Grizzle, who took Dr Syntax in search of the Picturesque.
They are all vivid, alive and beautiful. And so to me, until this moment, was Marengo. Even when some white cab-horse stood stolidly among the fireworks, with an actor on his broad back, during A Royal Divorce, the real Marengo could not be injured. His hoofs were too firmly planted in immortal pastures.”
End of Extract.
Perhaps I extended the extract beyond the remit of the point I was trying to make, but it was so evocative of the times he described, and my own memories of Central London, that I wanted to share it with you. The book is a gem; he continues his story with the execution of Charles I – and also muses over the history Sir George Downing (of Downing Street fame); his flip-flopping between the Cavaliers and Roundheads, his deviousness – Morton remarks on the fact that Charles II after the interregnum kept him ‘inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in’ (my paraphrase of course a la Lyndon Johnson), indicative of the Stuart nous, because he could have despatched him to the gallows any time he wished, but chose instead to make full use of Downing’s low cunning to facilitate his own wheeling and dealing in both domestic and foreign affairs. Downing Street, named after him – a gift from the King – has always been the site of political chicanery, but has that chicanery even been so puerile and damaging to Britain’s interests as during this century and new millennium?
One wonders what relics future generations will be able to view as evidence of the existence our own current generation of treasonous politicians? The bones of the retired Police horse involved in Davis Cameron’s escapades with Rebekkah – together with some faded copies of the News of the Screws in the glass case delineating the sordid details of his, and its own, disgrace? A grainy video of David Cameron’s interview with David Letterman, as evidence of his ignorance of British History (The Magna Carta in particular) and his oily subservience to the destroyers of Western Civilisation – the internationalist socialist cabal manipulating the buttons of the robotic POTUS Barack Hussein Obama?
If Sergeant Nightingale should be banged up for having a relic from his heroic war adventures, then perhaps most of our heroes of yore should have suffered the same fate; more to the point, there seem to be many politicians, defence chiefs and Generals of today’s crop who are more deserving of a cell in one of HM penitentiaries.
More links arising from this train of thought:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_United_Services_Institute
and this is particularly interesting, given the post-Iraq career of General Petraeus, his defection to the Obama regime and his eventual fall from grace as a result of his own personal “surge” and resultant indiscretions:
http://www.rusi.org/analysis/commentary/ref:C46E65267D917E#.ULTDNOS6cwc
I thoroughly enjoyed reading this and I’m grateful that you shared it. The point was made well with the extract unabridged. It says everything about our glorious past and the drab, mean-minded pettiness that has succeeded it. Thank you.
I think H. V. Morton is brilliant, and my father and I especially enjoy his writings on the lands of the Bible. It’s very interesting reading his experiences in the not so distant past with communities of Christians I know quite well.
Marengo certainly supported that bloody fool Bonaparte’s bum part of the way back from Moscow and here is a picture of both of them looking a bit chilly:
http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m135/icon_watcher/More%20Thumbnails/Napoleons_Retreat_from_Moscow.jpg
But in due course, Marengo and everyone else was left to fend for himself as Napoleon, as was his wont when defeated, abandoned his army and took the first sled back to Paris – was it after he had crossed the Berezina or much earlier? I forget:
http://media.kunst-fuer-alle.de/img/36/m/36_127730.jpg
About 1% of the men he had led into Russia made it home… Bloody fool.
Malfleur
November 27th, 2012 – 23:59
Norton threw up this ‘threat report’ surmounted by a white X on a red background, for the Napoleon’s Retreat photobucket link:
Threat Report
Total threats found: 1
Viruses (what’s this?)
Threats found: 1
Here is a complete list: (for more information about a specific threat, click on the Threat Name below)
Threat Name: Trojan.Maliframe!html
Location: http://i103.photobucket.com/albums/m159/rtk0806/th_3308.gif
What’s that all about I wonder?
Frank P.
I don’t know; it’s ok when I click on it, but I only have McAfee. When I click “Location” in your Norton report, I get a cartoon turtle’s head… Sorry, if it’s a virus lurking in my drives somewhere.
Like you, I know very little about the case of Danny Nightingale but I’m glad that he hasn’t been forgotten. A nice piece of writing, on both your’s and Morton’s part.
Thank you Frank a most enjoyable post, I have read somewhere that Danny Nightingale has said that it had been his intention to pass the the weapon and ammunition on to his regiment as valued mementos but I suspect that he really wanted them for himself, in my opinion an entirely human wish.
But then that mad man Blair’s attempt to jump on the bandwagon in his endeavour to be popular by the blanket ban on hand guns after the Dunblane school massacre has had far reaching and possibly unintended consequences.
Frank a question if I may, until of late we have long boasted that our police forces are unarmed and yet I seam to remember reading many years ago that a police constable going on night shift in London pre-war had to secure the permission of his sergeant if he did not want to carry a hand gun, is there anything in this story?
Good read, Frank. What Baron objects to is the criminalisation of possession of an object, just think of it, why should possessing anything be criminal? Perhaps soon, those who govern us will extend the definition of illegal possessions to include thoughts, too. Poor, poor Albion.
David Ossitt
November 28th, 2012 – 14:47
David, this brief web page summarises the position about armed police, as far as the Met is concerned, anyway:
http://www.met.police.uk/sco19/history.htm
Empirically (or perhaps anecdotally would be a better word) when I first patrolled the beats in the early fifties at West End Central – Savile Row – which was responsible for policing both Mayfair and Soho (and a multitude of sins of the full spectrum of class and ethnicity – both indigenous and imported), I knew no pacifists among my colleagues there; most had been in the armed services, either in WW2, or as National Servicemen thereafter. It was a sanguine Police FORCE in those days which was, as we were wont to say, all part of the Austin Reed service. We all were familiar with firearms and the police training was therefore unnecessary and skimpy. As we had several ‘fixed posts’ on our manor that required armed protection, when, during the normal rostering cycle a Pc was assigned to such a ‘fixed patrol’, he would draw a pistol (bog standard Webley jobbies in those days, if I remember correctly) and a clip of ammo, with instructions not to marry the two unless a threat to one’s own life or the lives of others was imminent; and then to shoot to kill! We carried them concealed. That was about it.
The American Embassy; the Greek Embassy; the Egyptian Embassy were all on our patch. Why it was necessary for a Bobby with a baton and a puny pistol to guard the US Embassy always puzzled me, as a glance through the front door revealed two hairy-arsed leathernecks in full battle regalia, tooled with sub-machine guns – enough to repel any anti-American demonstrator (not many in those days, anyway: this period pre-dated Vietnam War activism). But our token gesture was all part of the diplomatic protocol.
The Greek Embassy required armed protection because the Cypriot troubles generated noisy demonstrations from Eoka and Enosis; later the Egyptian Embassy was a target during and after the Suez crisis.
The Dorchester Hotel became an occasional target when Archbishop Makarios III stayed there during his negotiations with the Government; another target at that time was the In & Out Club in Piccadilly*, because Field Marshall Sir John Harding, the Governor of Cyprus, bunked there when visiting London, during that crucial period of the Cyprus troubles. I’m sure Sir John felt much better when he saw the lone Bobby lurking in the Courtyard, apparently unarmed! Given his illustrious pedigree, he could have managed any bubble and squeak rabble – single handed, I guess. Mind you, ‘General’ George Grivas did manage to get a bomb planted under his bed once, but that was in Cyprus I believe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Harding,_1st_Baron_Harding_of_Petherton
but the Field Marshall, always cheery and polite, never failed to stop to have a word with his ‘protector’ going In or Out.
Incidentally we dubbed the old reprobate Makarios “Archbishop Mac Hairy-arse – the Scottish Pope” and resented having to cover his back; I think I related some of the adventures in the early stages of the innovation of the Speccie blog, or perhaps it was Melanie’s old blog, so I won’t bore you again. Suffice to say the Dorchester staff were very grateful for our assistance and they had the best coffee and éclairs in the West End always available for the fixed patrol guy when he was relieved for a break – and so on ad infinitum.
Things changed regarding armed police in later years, when in 1966 the unarmed Q Car crew were wiped out on Wormwood Scrubs by Harry Robert and two associates. I was working Notting Hill’s patch at that time and all three of the slain cops were friends of mine; I attended the scene. Carnage! Bastards … the true story of that has never emerged; one of these days …
But it was really after the Grosvenor Square riots, then the IRA bombing campaign in London, that the ‘powers that be’ decided to organise fully fledged para-military police armed response units; we’ve been descending into the abyss ever since.
If you watch the video contained in the link that Well-Wisher posted today at 09:23 on The Wall, viz:
http://www.4liberty.org.uk/2012/09/20/the-quislings-get-in-through-the-backdoor-at-local-level/
you will discover how the Marxist-Leninist terrorist organisations have developed since the 1950s and the part they have played in today’s geopolitical chaos. As I’ve always averred – carefully planned chaos. Obama is just the latest manifestation and the folks of the electorates of the West remain mainly unwitting useful idiots in the cause. The POTUS is now surrounded by ex-terrorists and other subversives. And the Islamic dimension has complicated it exponentially since then.
* http://www.navalandmilitaryclub.co.uk/
Frank P
November 29th, 2012 – 13:32
Thank you Frank.
Saw today that Danny Nightingale has been released. Good call.
Noa, at 10.24 today on The Wall, draws attention to an excellent Daily Mail article by ‘William Forbes’ (a Defence Correspondent with wide military experience who uses a sobriquet for obvious reasons) analysing the Nightingale case. It raises several issues that are illuminating and timely:
http://forbesblog.dailymail.co.uk/2012/11/sergeant-nightingales-prosecution-a-stitch-up-.html
A left wing writer for the Law Society Gazette blames the release of Nightingale on hysteria.
http://www.lawgazette.co.uk/blogs/blogs/news-blogs/danny-nightingale-hysteria-sets-worrying-precedent#comment-24335
Malfleur (17:15)
The writer, John Hyde, reminds me of a succession of legal eagles who crossed my path in my tussles with the ungodly over the years. His condescending remarks about ‘The Daily Mail’ and ‘public opinion’ in general, describing understandable public outrage as ‘hysteria’ is typical, I’m afraid, of the majority within his profession. The man is exactly what his photograph indicates – an elitist cunt, who thinks that the decision about possible miscarriages of justice, should be left to people like him. Well, fuck that! As the senior representatives of his profession adjusted the sentence, he’s obviously wrong. I hope Nightingale gets a similar adjustment at the Court of Appeal if and when his conviction is considered. What is wrong with the generation that Hyde emanates from? All wind and piss! Cosseted bastard!