Commemorations and mythologies

National myths matter. They define, or perhaps more accurately they express, national character.

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a Mexican friend explaining to me how important, to a Mexican, was the story of the ‘Malinche’. She was the native woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Cortés. She is the mother of the nation, formed as it is from the mixture of Spanish and native bloods; she is also the woman who betrayed her people to become the mistress of the man who led a bloody and deadly conquest of her land.

By the same token, Cortés is the father of that people. And yet he was also the murderer of thousands of its ancestors. That erotic but treacherous, intimate but murderous relationship is at the root of Mexican mythological history. And it’s as complex and fluid as Mexican life itself.

The United States has its mythical past too. And like most mythologies, what it owes to historical fact is pretty limited.

Celebration of the myth:
Mayflower pilgrims bring godliness and love of freedom to North America

American mythology starts with a bunch of pilgrims landing at what is now Plymouth rock in Massachusetts, seeking religious freedom. It then picks up the current of representative government, of the notion that the people are the true sovereign power in a state. It culminates in the emergence of democratic rule, at a time when in old Europe democracy was still a dirty word, though it would ultimately become the aspiration of so many countries.

Much of this is true. In the nineteenth century, the torch of democracy was held almost exclusively by the Americans. When Abraham Lincoln talked about the American Civil War as a conflict fought to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth, he was voicing an important truth. And yet, the United States was no democracy when he spoke it: no blacks and no women enjoyed the rights of white men. Even Catholics were far from enjoying the same rights as Protestants.

Those contradictions can be traced right back to the historical roots of the myth.

The Mayflower pilgrims weren’t concerned with religious freedom in general, only with their own religious freedom. As their descendants would show, most dramatically in the Salem witch trials, they were fully capable of being as vicious in their persecution of others as those they fled back in England.

In addition, they weren’t even the first to land in North America. They got there in 1620. A full twelve years earlier, the first permanent European settlement had been set up in Virginia. And a year before the pilgrims landed, two events occurred in Virginia whose fourth centennials have been celebrated in the last few weeks.

Back in July, it was the launching of representative government. Trump attended that commemoration. And this weekend, it was the arrival of the first slaves from West Africa. Trump stayed well away.

At the weekend, today's African Americans commemorated
the first arrival of African slaves in North America
A year before the Mayflower Pilgrims

Back in August 1619, the British privateer White Lion arrived near what is now the town of Hampton in Virgina and landed “20 and odd Negroes” whom he traded for food. The principle that humans could be bought and sold had been established. Slavery had begun its grisly existence on the North American continent and would not end for nearly two and a half centuries. Only in 1865, with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, would slavery finally and for all time be abolished in the US.

Its consequences would not die so soon, however. When Trump tells black Congresswomen to go back where they came from, he is expressing an attitude that underlay slavery and still hasn’t been driven out of US culture: that people of African ancestry are not fully members of American society.

That the attitude still persists is not a truth with which all Americans are at ease. Which is why the foundation myth of the country is much more concerned with the Mayflower pilgrims, misrepresented as champions of religious liberty. And with the birth of representative government, an event in which it’s easier to take pride than in the first arrival of slaves.

Which is why Trump went to the first commemoration. About representative government. Not to the other one. The one about slavery.

But it’s much more important that the second one happened.

Jews: what goes around comes around.

Do you remember the jingle ‘In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue’?

I learned that at school. It was much later that I realised that 1492 was also the year in which King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain took other major steps, at least as significant as the decision to send an Italian sailor on his expedition westward – an expedition on which he left with no idea where he was going and came back with no idea of where he’d been.

It was in 1492 that Spain decided to rid itself of its Jews. 

Jews leaving Spain after August 1492

And 1492 saw Christians complete their reconquest of Spain from the Muslims.

My mother, who always enjoyed history, used to say that the decline of Spain as a great power dated from those times.

By moving against the Jews, Spain deprived itself of its most skilful financiers and traders. That’s no anti-Semitic slur: there is nothing inherent in Jews that makes them good with money, and few Jews were involved in high finance anyway. The law prohibited Jews owning land, forcing them into other professions such as finance, and some became very good at it.

Meanwhile, the most advanced and effective agriculture in Spain was carried out by the Muslim landowners of the south. Moving against them would carry a terrible price for the country. Like the financiers, they were outstanding wealth creators – literally feeding the nation – and it made no economic sense to drive them away.

Paradoxically, at the very moment that Spain was launching the exploration of the Americas which would turn it into a world power, it was ridding itself of the skills it needed to support itself in that position.

This kind of self-harm is what happens when nations deprive themselves of the skills that communities seen as ‘other’ bring with them. The converse is also true: when a nation drives those communities out, their neighbours benefit and move ahead of them. In 1685, France repealed the Edict of Nantes that tolerated Protestantism. Over the next thirty years, other countries such as Britain, Holland and Prussia took advantage of the flood of refugees, many of them skilled artisans – weavers, cabinet makers, clock makers – who fled with skills that enriched their hosts while their loss weakened France.

By 1720, some 11% of the population of Berlin was French-speaking. And the nation whose capital it was, Prussia, was on the way to becoming a European Great Power, one that would, indeed, overtake France in the next century.

Building bridges to take people in enriches a nation where expelling them, or building walls to keep them out, only impoverishes it. A lesson American fans of Trump need to learn. Or British fans of Brexit.

Curiously, over five centuries on Spain has made an effort to learn that lesson. A Spanish law of 2014 offered citizenship to anyone who could prove descent from the Sephardi Jews the nation threw out after 1492. They don’t have to give up their existing citizenship if they have one. They have to pass a language test and a test of culture, but they don’t even have to live in Spain.

Why, they don’t even have to be practising Jews.

The government that enacted this legislation presented it as an attempt to redress the error of 1492. I don’t know whether it does or not, but I feel it’s a remarkable aspiration. One to be admired.

Oddly, I only found out about it through the New York Times. That’s the paper that Donald Trump likes to refer to as ‘the failing New York Times’, though it seems to be flourishing. Perhaps it thrives on his criticisms.

The paper had picked up the story because a number of the Jews who had to get out of Spain decided to follow in the steps of Columbus, to the New World. That way, they remained in Spanish territory though they left Spain.

A number arrived in Mexico and some moved into the northernmost territory of that country, including New Mexico. Which was absorbed and made into a state by the US following its war on Mexico in the 1840s.

It seems that the Mexican authorities kept excellent records. So did the state of New Mexico. Consequently, a number of US citizens from that State are now well placed to prove that they are indeed descended from the persecuted Jews of Spain. With antisemitism on the rise in America, that curious Spanish law offers some Jews a potential bolthole – not one they intend to take, but one that it’s good to have available, just in case.

Through Columbus, 1492 opened up a new land of refuge. Through a law of the same year, made by the sponsors of his expedition, many Jews needed a land to which they could flee. And, in a beautifully cyclical movement – you know, what goes around, comes around – some of their descendants, now less safe in the land where their ancestors sought refugees can now claim citizenship of the land that that persecuted those same ancestors.

One thing hasn’t changed over the centuries. Nations still build walls and persecute minorities. Even it means shooting themselves in the foot.

And we don’t like learning lessons from history.

Trump playing Napoleon? It could end in tears

Is it to be war, then?

Not, thank God, the shooting kind. But something almost as damaging. The enlightened Trump seems to have decided that the best way of dealing with the economic problems of the United States is a trade war with his allies. He’s poised to impose tariffs on imports from his two neighbours, Mexico and Canada, and on the world’s biggest trading bloc the European Union, which still includes Britain for now.

Trump: a latter-day Napoleon?
Without quite the genius...

By coincidence, I’ve just finished reading a biography of Napoleon, recommended to me by a French friend because, though written by an Englishman, it provides a superbly balanced view of the man. Andrew Roberts’ Napoleon the Great is well worth reading, whichever side of the Channel your sympathies lie, since its meticulous research and lucid analysis punctures a lot of myths, of Napoleon as either the greatest of leaders or as a tyrannical monster.

As the Napoleonic wars progressed, both sides attempted to use economic weapons against the other. Britain, then undisputed master of the seas, used the Royal Navy to blockade the ports of France and the nations it had occupied, and even went so far as to wage war against the United States to try to enforce its embargo.

Equally, Napoleon tried to impose the Continental System on France and its occupied territories, to keep out all British trade. He was prepared to go so far as to invade Russia to impose respect of the embargo, a move which would lead to the catastrophic retreat from Moscow and ultimately the loss of his throne.

Describing the impact of these two competing trade boycotts, Roberts writes:

The year 1811 saw the start of a continental economic crisis that lasted two years and that also engulfed Britain, which was beset by bad harvests, wage cuts … and food shortages. Mulhouse in eastern France saw two-thirds of its workforce of 60,000 unemployed, and over 20,000 were unemployed in Lyons. Napoleon needed to stimulate economic growth, but his [adoption of eighteenth-century economic views], which rejected the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena, sent him back to attempting to enforce ever more strictly the Continental System, even if it might eventually mean fighting Russia again…

By 1812 Napoleon believed that the Continental System was working, and cited the bankruptcies of various London banks and commercial enterprises to support this…

The system was, indeed, causing considerable harm to Britain’s economy.

Napoleon was not wrong in assuming that Britain was suffering very seriously as a result of his Continental System… Trade declined rapidly… the bad harvests of 1811 and 1812 led to food shortages and inflation, and war expenditure increased budget deficits from £16 million in 1810 to £27 million in 1812. Some 17 per cent of Liverpool’s population was unemployed during the winter of 1811/12, and the militia had to be deployed against potential rioters … across the Midlands and North of England, with ringleaders sentenced to transportation to Australia, or even in some cases death.

The parallels are striking, aren’t they? We can be sure that Trump will be as convinced as Napoleon that his trade measures are working. But the only certain consequence they’ll have is hardship on all sides – the eighteenth-century rejection of ‘the idea of competition and free exchange as positive phenomena’ is a dangerous illusion, a truth that both Trump supporters in the US and Brexiters in Britain would do well to learn.

The big difference is that, though he came badly unstuck at the end, Napoleon was a political genius as well as a military one. Even if we bend over backwards to be generous towards him, it’s hard to classify Trump as a genius of any kind. Indeed, I find it hard to believe that he has the mental capacity to learn the lessons of Napoleon’s final failure.

Retreat from Moscow
Crushing, immensely costly defeat - not least in lives

Because ultimately, Napoleon’s attempt to impose his system took him to war with Russia, leading to a crushing defeat and his downfall. That Trump suffers the same fate as Napoleon may seem highly desirable. However, Napoleon led an army of 500,000 into Russia and returned with just 50,000. Let’s hope that this isn’t the kind of price we pay for Trump’s failure to learn that adventures with trade weapons are as dangerous as the adventures with firearms he seems so keen to defend in the US.

Especially as the damage done by any such disaster in the twenty-first century is likely to be far greater than even on the retreat from Moscow in the nineteenth.

Countdown to War, Day 16. 13 July: votes for women, a force for peace?

One hundred years ago today, on Monday 13 July 1914, our Mancunian railwayman friend reading his Manchester Guardian, might have been impressed, and had his scepticism shaken, by the scale the movement for women’s rights was taking.

The International Women’s Suffrage Alliance conference had been meeting in London all week, and on the previous day had devoted some time to planning the next conference, in Berlin in 1915. The Berlin session would consider the relation of the vote to wages and prostitution, “with further consideration of wages to the social evil. Another question to be discussed at the conference relates to what women have done and what they can do in municipal government.”

That would make the Berlin conference particularly interesting for France, since “the women there are hoping very shortly to get the municipal vote.”

It might be time for Martin to overcome his reservations and accept that the momentum for women’s suffrage would ultimately prove irresistible. Besides, as it involved international meetings of this kind, it was a further guarantor of peace between nations. A conference in Berlin with support from Britain and France? That meant building bridges across some tense frontiers.

On balance, he was coming round to the idea that women should win the right to vote, and rather hoped that it might be extended to him, too.

Once again, things seemed to be heading for a resolution in one of the world’s trouble spots, Mexico. “Information has been received from Mexico City that General Huerta is about to resign in favour of Señor Carbajal, the newly appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs.” He had little understanding of the implications for ordinary Mexican citizens, but it sounded like a way to stop conflict and, surely, the twentieth century was not a time to settle differences by military means?

William III at the Battle of the Boyne
Pacifying Ireland in England's time-honoured style

That was a lesson still to be learned in Ireland, it seemed. The Ulster Hall in Belfast had seen a 3000-strong meeting of Orangemen to mark the twelfth of July. It was on that day that Protestant Irishmen celebrated the Battle of the Boyne, the moment in 1690 when William of Orange, William III of England, defeated James II, ensuring the Protestant Ascendancy on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Martin had met Irishmen in Liverpool who gave a far less attractive account of the battle and its consequences. As Catholics, they saw nothing to celebrate on 12 July. To the Orangemen, on the other hand, it was a high point in the calendar.

The Rev. Dr. Patterson, of May Street Presbyterian Church, who preached, based his discourse upon the text “And Moses said unto his people, ‘Remember this day.’” (Exodus xiii., 3). Israel, he said, was commanded to keep in remembrance her deliverance from the bondage of Egypt, and to-day hundreds of thousands throughout the English-speaking world were commemorating a great deliverance from the bondage of Rome – a bondage more terrible than that of Egypt.

Referring to the time of the Battle of the Boyne, he went on:

William led; in these days Edward leads, and he is in possession of the flag which went before William... God raised up Moses and Joshua to bring His people from Egypt to Canaan, and we do not question for a moment the fact that He raised up William III. in the seventeenth century to save Great Britain and Ireland from the hierarchy of Rome. Surely we have the same right to believe that Sir Edward Carson has been raised up in the twentieth century to save Ulster...

Well, if it was with the blessing of God that Sir Edward Carson was organising an illegal armed movement, then Ireland’s problems were far from over. It would, indeed, be trouble enough if his supporters merely believed that...

At least Lancashire had stuffed Derbyshire. By an innings and 25 runs. That at any rate was something over which Martin could feel unqualified pleasure.

Countdown to War, day 14. 11 July: why spend on the army when we're at peace? And there's that business about the Austrian Archduke again...

One hundred years ago today, on Saturday 11 July 1914, our young Mancunian railwayman might well have felt his worries of the day before justified by that morning’s edition of the Manchester Guardian. It seemed that Parliament too was concerned about the burden of constantly spending huge amounts on armaments.

Not many in Parliament, though. “From ten to twenty members sat through to-day’s debate on foreign affairs...” he read. “As the general talk went on the attendance became smaller and smaller, for on such occasions it is the habit of members only to wait to read their own speeches. Little pretence is made of debating any particular question.”

“MPs, they’ve got their legal practices to look after.” said the Cynic, “Their banks. Their families. Can’t expect them to spend all their time in Parliament. Specially if it’s to listen to other people.” 

At least the select band who showed up did consider the question that had been bothering Martin: why spend heavily on weapons at a time when war was such a distant prospect? Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, attempted an answer.

Why armaments should be so steadily increasing, despite the present conditions of mutual amity among the Powers, the Minister could not explain. “But it should be observed,” he added, “that the most notable increase in recent years has not been in naval but in military expenditure, and for that part of the increase this country is not responsible.” Speaking with a sarcasm which Mr. Dillon afterwards deprecated as out of place, Sir Edward ... contrasted the suggestions pressed on the Government for a disarmament crusade with the demands with which they were confronted at the same time for a greater display of activity in their foreign relations, particularly in Persia and the Middle East, and even in respect to the internal government of Russia.

The British Army:
why spend so much on it when there's no prospect of war?

Andrew Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative Party and the Opposition pointed to another great trouble spot of the time, much closer to home:

Here is the House of Commons lecturing the Foreign Secretary on the duty of keeping the peace throughout the world, although we all know that it is his duty and that of others to keep the peace within our own borders.

“That means Ireland,” said the Cynic, “they think of Ireland as within our borders. They can’t cope with the idea that it might be a different country.”

“It isn’t,” replied another railwayman, “Just an unruly part of this one.”

Certainly, it was proving as difficult as ever to keep the peace in Ireland. The paper talked of a meeting of the “Provisional Government” of Ulster. The best that could be said of it was that it had turned out to be a damp squib. It seemed that the:

... portentous announcement of the day before that “something serious” would be done at the meeting of the Ulster “Provisional Government” in Belfast yesterday was falsified by the result. The meeting was held, and Sir Edward Carson presided over it, but, according to the official report, nothing was done at all but to pass a declaration reaffirming the familiar attitude of the Ulster Unionists towards Home Rule.

Martin was thankful the outcome had been such an anti-climax, but where else, he wondered, could a rebel organisation operate under the leadership of a prominent lawyer and member of Parliament, and the government take no action? 

Another story was turning into a recurring theme: “General Huerta’s tottering Government in Mexico has suffered another heavy blow...” Rebels had just captured the country’s second city. No sign of things settling there, then.

Back in the news after all:
the Archducal couple head for the car in which they will be murdered

An apparently closed chapter had also re-opened:

Europe has not heard the last of the Sarajevo outrage. Articles in the Vienna press are preparing the way for official Austro-Hungarian representations to Servia. Any attempt to make the Belgrade Government responsible for the Greater Servia agitation, to which the Archduke Francis Ferdinand fell a victim, is certain to anger further the Serbs, already violently excited. Signs are multiplying that the assassination has seriously increased the many grave dangers to the peace of Eastern Europe.

The “Neue Freie Presse” observes that the pan-Servian murder had aroused the conscience of Europe, not only of its peoples, but also of its Governments. The journal refers to the moral isolation of the pan-Servian movement, and points out that the whole German people stands by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. It believes that Austria-Hungary’s ally Italy also shares the feeling of the German Empire...

England, proceeds the article, will most certainly use her great influence in order to bring Servia to her senses and secure the European outlawing of pan-Servdom. Great Britain is never found wanting when she hears the voice of justice. France and Russia can scarcely wish to separate themselves from England in these views.

He tended to sympathise with underdogs, and Serbia certainly seemed an underdog, but that assassination had been a shameful crime. And it was true that Britain was as sorry as anyone about what had happened – why, the same issue of the paper told him that even in Salford, right here on his doorstep in Manchester, there’d been a Requiem mass for the murdered Archduke and his wife the previous day. But – “Grave dangers to peace”? He didn’t like that kind of talk. Surely there was no need for things to come to that?

In more cheerful news, Lancashire had secured a famous victory over Leicestershire. No major scalp, since Leicestershire was one of the minnows of 1914’s Championship. But then, Lancashire too might be one of the smaller fish that year. He’d take what satisfaction he could from any victory.

Countdown to War, Day 10. 7 July: trouble again in Mexico, as ever in Ireland, stirred up by an army figure in England

One hundred years ago today, on Tuesday 7 July 1914, Martin our Mancunian railwayman discovered that problems didn’t always go away, not even when they’d apparently been solved. The troubles in Mexico had seemed over, but here they were, back again with redoubled intensity. 

“BRITISH VICE CONSUL ARRESTED IN MEXICO.” proclaimed the headline. The British and US authorities were trying to help “Mr. Albert St. Clair Douglas, the British Vice Consul at Zacatecas, who has been arrested by the Constitutionalists on the vague charge of ‘complicity with the Federals’.”

There was fear in Britain that Douglas might share “the fear of Mr. Benton, who was murdered by [Pancho] Villa on a trumped-up charge” so the government had been seeking, and had obtained, “assurances that Mr. Douglas will be treated with every consideration”, but clearly the situation was far from under control.

Pancho Villa: figure of legend
But apparently not good for the health of British consular officials

In the House of Commons, meanwhile, normal business seemed to have been suspended the previous day in deference to the death of Joseph Chamberlain. Herbert Asquith, the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, former Prime Minister and previous leader of the Conservative Party, and Andrew Bonar Law, the current leader, had all paid tributes, describing Chamberlain respectively as “the pioneer of a new generation, a builder of Empire, and ‘a great statesman, a great orator, a great friend, and a great idealist’.”

The Lords were less effusive, moving straight from their own tributes to resumed conflict, inevitably over Ireland and the Home Rule measures. Field Marshal Lord Roberts, one of Britain’s most senior military men, gave the House “a quite irrelevant yet extremely interesting deliverance, in which the excuses so ingeniously elaborated by apologists for the heroes of the Curragh incident were almost contemptuously swept aside”. The Curragh was the main base of the British Army in Ireland and, less than three months earlier, officers there had made it clear that they would resign rather than act against the Ulster Volunteers, who were arming to resist Home Rule.

As Lord Roberts pointed out, “it was obvious that when those officers made the choice they did they showed to the whole world that a considerable part of the Army would not undertake operations against Ulster.” It seems that they had been following the dictates of conscience, as Roberts had foretold.

The Manchester Guardian continued:

While the distinguished Field Marshal was thus expounding the doctrine of optional obedience and enforcing it by again predicting without a word of disapproval that in certain circumstances Ulster would “break and ruin the army,” he had as auditors in front of the throne the Attorney General, Mr. Churchill, and Sir Edward Carson. Like everybody else those visitors showed themselves profoundly interested in the convenient theory that since this was no mere political crisis but “a clash of principles which raises the subject far beyond the realm of ordinary politics,” therefore it must be a calumny to suggest that the Army had any political bias, still more to accuse its officers of being engaged in a conspiracy with either one set of politicians or another.

“Very interesting,” said the Cynic. “Does the ‘doctrine of optional obedience’ apply to working men too? Would Mr Winston Churchill kindly indulge us as well? When he was Home Secretary, he didn’t show much kindness to strikers, did he? And does he take the same attitude to sailors in the Navy, how he’s First Sea Lord.”

Even so, it hadn’t all been bad news the day before. Although the county cricket side, Lancashire, had suffered humiliating punishment at the hands of Surrey, at least the city team had notched up a victory, when Manchester ignominiously trounced Southport, from further up the coast.

A small mercy in the general stream of things. But better than nothing.

Countdown to War. Day 6, 3 July: Peace in Mexico? Freight by air? And the Sarajevo business rumbles on

One hundred years ago today, on Friday 3 July 1914, Martin could breathe a sigh of relief: the insufferably hot weather was going to turn cooler. The Manchester Guardian announced: “Heat Wave Breaking. Further Storms. Cooler Weather forecasted for today.” 

A welcome change. But it didn’t mean that elsewhere in the world temperatures, or tempers were, cooling.

The Anglo-Russian convention was creating a dangerous situation in Persia, with Russia unscrupulously taking advantage of it to extend its influence in the country. Competition between the two nations over India, Kipling’s “great game”, meant Russia would dearly love to extend its territory right up to the Indian border. That was something the British Foreign Secretary seemed not to have seized:

The mistake that Sir Edward Grey has made in Persia is to credit Russia with the same loyalty to the professed objects of the Convention that he has himself. It is not that Russian policy and Russian agents are consciously unscrupulous and cynical men. But their whole point of view is diametrically opposed to our own. Our interest is in an independent and strong Persia to act as a buffer between Russia and India. But the disappearance of Persia has no terrors for Russia, and so far from avoiding a military frontier with us, there is nothing that she would like better, if only as a means of keeping us in order or, as she would express it, of retaining our friendship.

Elsewhere, however, trouble seemed to be dying down. Having predicted trouble in Mexico only three days earlier, now the paper was proclaiming the arrival of peace.

Negotiations between the warring Mexican factions, which it is hoped will eventually lead to peace, were begun to-day, when the delegates of General Huerta formally gave the South American envoys a note to be transmitted to the Rebel representatives at Washington declaring willingness to discuss peace terms.

General Victoriano Huerta, President of Mexico
In negotiations with the rebels against his rule

A separate article informed Martin that, despite the worries expressed before and the insistence of the British Minister that they should go, British residents planned to remain in Mexico City. So peace might be in the air. That had to be a good thing, surely? Even if Huerta was one of those military fellows with lots of medals who really ought to be kept well away from power, most things had to be preferable to war. 

The last word had clearly not been said about the assassination in Sarajevo at the weekend. As previously suspected, a thread leading back to Belgrade, the Serbian capital, seemed increasingly likely. Talking about the first, failed attempt on Franz Ferdinand’s life, the Guardian reported:

Gabrinovic, who threw the bomb which the Archduke escaped, has admitted his connection with an organisation agitating for a Greater Servia. The editors of the Greater Servian journals at Sarayevo have been arrested, and one of them has been expelled from Bosnia.

Marconi radio
You could talk to New York without so much as a cable?

But then Martin's eye was caught by a completely different piece on “Future Uses of Wireless.” It quoted a spokesman for the Marconi company who made claims for this bright new technology that seemed a little too good to be true: “... if Marconi does not talk to New York before the year is out I shall be very disappointed.” Conversation between London and NewYork without using a cable? That would be remarkable.

Just as outlandish was another item on “Aerial Transport” which referred to workers who apparently believed “that aeroplanes will become more and more means of carrying cargo.” It seems they felt that “there will be imperative need for a special union as part of the Transport Workers’ Federation.”

Flying cargo? Well, more extraordinary things had happened. And he wouldn’t mind getting involved. Flying around for work instead of grafting on the Earth’s surface to lay railway track sounded like a big improvement. Some interesting things could be happening in the next few years.

Countdown to War. Day 3, 30 June: no major repercussions of Sarajevo assassination

One hundred years ago today, on Tuesday 30 June 1914, when Martin, our twenty-year old railwayman, turned to the Manchester Guardian, he found it reflecting on the possible consequences of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne the previous Sunday.

Fortunately, the repercussions were likely to be minimal, at least in the short to medium term.

It is not to be supposed that the death of the Archduke Francis Ferdinand will have any immediate or salient effect on the politics of Europe, but it may profoundly modify the course which these would have taken had he lived to ascend the throne.

The late Archduke had been open to Slav aspirations, despite the failure of his dream to create a Slavic grouping within Austria-Hungary, similar to Hungary, in the face of “the military successes of the Balkan Allies, who had formed their alliance under the tutelage of Russia...” Now sadly there had been a reinforcement of the “natural hostility between Austria and Servia...”

And, apparently, “that hostility must, of course, be increased by the assassination. There will certainly be a press campaign in Vienna and Budapest against Servia and the Slav races generally.”

However, none of this was likely to lead to anything too serious unless Franz Joseph, no spring chicken, were to die too soon for:

...the excitement to die down and the peoples of Austria and the countries round it to become accustomed to the notion of the undisturbed succession of the new heir.

If he did die before things had settled, there might be dissension within the Empire with various unscrupulous powers taking advantage of it to try to extend their possessions in the Balkans – Serbia, perhaps, or Italy which was currently in Albania together with Austria but might choose to act on its own if the circumstances were right, or even, and this would be the most serious, Russia.

Martin nodded sagely. The article seemed to be much more concerned with showing how much the reporters knew about the region than actually telling him anything useful. But that's how journalists were. They liked to parade their knowledge. Speculate on things happening a long way away at some indefinite date in the future. Which was interesting enough, but not useful when it came to dealing with things that were an immediate, serious concern.

At least it seemed the Austrian business needn’t be.

He turned to another article. It announced that a rising in Mexico city was being predicted. Predicted, for God’s sake. Weird. Nothing had actually happened. 

Mexico city, where they could predict their uprisings

Still, he had to admit there might be something in it when he read that British residents in the city had held “a mass meeting on Saturday night at which they made final plans for the defence concentration of the district.” So people could see trouble coming but they couldn't do anything about it. That must be terrifying.

Abroad was a funny place. He was glad he was living in Manchester.