52 Times Britain was a Bellend: The History You Didn’t Get Taught At School

by James Felton

Polar bear A gift from King Haakon of Norway in 1252, the polar bear was allowed to swim in the Thames by Henry III, which must have been quite the mindfuck for the fish. It wasn’t done out of kindness though; Henry just didn’t like how expensive it was to feed a fully grown polar bear, which is about number 12 on the Big List Of Reasons You Don’t Accept A Fucking Polar Bear As A Gift In The First Place, right below ‘it’s a fucking polar bear, why not try a rabbit first and see how you get on’. The polar bear was allowed to fish in the Thames for its own food (whilst attached to a rope). Bearing in mind how grim the Thames was back then without a sewer system, this is like buying a puppy and instead of feeding it Pedigree Chum, making it hunt for rats in a toilet.

To complicate things a bit, Jonas was also a bellend. He was a big advocate for solitary confinement and was against letting tea and Jewish people into the UK. Ergo, perhaps the abuse was justified – it just would have been nice if it had been about the racism rather than for using an object we went on to adore. We ended up using the umbrella so much, in fact, that it has become part of our national stereotype. If we had to shout abuse, and it would appear we did, we should have led with, ‘Oi that umbrella looks both practical and suave, I quite fancy getting me one of those, you trendsetting but problematic antisemitic and tea-hating arsehole.’

definitely a science.’ But Darwin, famous evolutionist and naturalist, also went around chain-eating exotic species like they were goddamn flumps.

In between twatting rare animals and eating their delicious endangered corpses, he discovered evolution to keep himself busy in his down time.

It spawned the phrase ‘the blacker the goose the cleaner the flue’ whereas in any civilised society it would have led to the saying, ‘what in the name of fuck are you doing with that goose, Craig? No. Bad Craig.’

The use of the scold’s bridle continued in this way till as late as 1856, even though it should have ended the very first time this conversation happened: ‘Why have you got your wife in that muzzle, Kenneth?’ ‘She said I’d been mistreating her.’ ‘I don’t want to be rude, Kenneth, as you strike me as a dangerous fucking psychopath, but you are sort of leading her about town in a horse muzzle so maybe she’s got a point?’

*If you’re asking ‘but what about the people who already inhabited Australia’ you have not been paying attention to how much of a shit we give about people who live in countries that aren’t us. We’re basically like the toddlers of the world, waddling about the place and saying, ‘THIS IS MINE’ when we find things we want.

He gave his name as ‘John Johnson’ which is only slightly better as an alias than ‘Mr Innocent McMadeupname’.

They called themselves at times the ‘Honourable’ East India Company, which is a massive red flag. It’s like how North Korea calls themselves the Democratic Republic of North Korea, or if some guy late at night at a bus shelter introduces himself as ‘Not Even Remotely Stabby Ben’.

guided by Manteo, the chief of a local tribe (who had made the mistake of befriending the English and travelling with us to England on several occasions, making him far less suspicious of the cunts who would one day go on to kill his mother).

But so much worse is the time Sir Thomas Swinburne forgot someone to death in the 16th century.

Archibald Armstrong, a member of the Armstrong clan, was captured alive during a food raid and imprisoned in Thomas’ castle in Haughton. Whilst waiting for a decision on Archibald’s punishment from the courts, Thomas agreed to look after him. But then Thomas sort of got distracted from providing his prisoner with food. He was called away for a meeting with Cardinal Wolsey in York, and rode off to meet him, delegating the task of looking after his prisoner to a servant. Then, after riding for three days, he had a bit of a feel around in his pocket and found (oh god) the only key to Archibald’s cell.

Thomas, who to be fair to him was forgetful but not a complete bellend, turned his horse around immediately. Though it had been more than enough time without water to kill Archibald, he rode as fast as he could back to the castle, probably checking his other pockets to see if he’d murdered anyone else to death by mistake. Thomas claimed he rode the horse so hard the horse died. This was turning into a bit of a spree. He bought and rode a second horse, which survived and took him back to the castle. He arrived around midnight and opened the dungeon cell. Inside was most of Archibald, minus a chunk of flesh in his arm where he’d gnawed at it for food. Archibald ...

According to several accounts, the group of well-off criminals stalked the streets rolling women down hills in barrels and mutilating people’s faces, as well as cutting off noses and hands, spawning the phrases ‘that escalated quickly’ and ‘hey what are you doing to my nose you bellend’. They were reportedly so rich they didn’t even bother mugging their defence- and nose-less victims afterwards.

All the accounts end with Jack leaping away from his crimes like some sort of dickhead rabbit.

According to legend, during the Napoleonic Wars a French ship was wrecked just off the shore of Hartlepool. The locals rushed out to the shore to check out the wreck. There were no survivors, except for one. He was short, dressed in a full French army uniform and also he was a monkey.

It’s like going to a foreign country on purpose and then complaining about how foreign it is when you arrive, which to be fair to the Victorians is an activity we still do.

For all our notions of being a kindly nation interfering through warfare only when other countries really need our help, we’re actually much more of what military strategists call ‘a big vindictive shower of petty bastards who will fight you for looking at them funny’.

Bored of our usual tactic by this point of merely grabbing a shitload of weapons and killing every man, woman and child in sight, we decided on this occasion to go a bit Bond villainesque. We decided what we really wanted to do was to take the Nile as a hostage.

The plan, which finally got declassified in 2006, did not specifically deny that they were planning on sending threatening cups of the Nile water to Egypt like a kidnapper would send a finger to prove the victim is still alive. Which I find quite sinister.

Once we were in, we immediately began occupying the canal, taking it hostage the old-fashioned way, with big guns and absolutely no fucking shame. The UN, under pressure from the US, quickly put a stop to this when they realised we were up to our usual ‘taking stuff that doesn’t belong to us’ shenanigans.

They thought they were pioneering scientists heading to space, but it turned out they were just two idiots killing and scaring the shit out of birds.

Doctor-recommended children’s cough syrup was basically just smack In Victorian England we would very much rather get ill kids smacked up on morphine than listen to them cough, and so scientists invented cough medicine to do just that. Morphine, chloroform, codeine, more morphine, powdered opium, cannabis and heroin were all ingredients in ‘Children’s Soothing Syrup’ the 19th-century equivalent of Calpol. But you should see their 6+ version.

We’ve always loved New Zealand, even before archaeologists discovered that’s where the events of Lord of the Rings took place.

As we’ve already established, there’s nothing the British liked more in the 19th century than tea and stealing things that weren’t ours. Robert Fortune and the British East India Company found a way of combining both loves whilst also mixing in our lesser-known third love of doing offensive impersonations of people with whom we had beef.

All because when people saw an obviously Scottish man dressed up as a Chinese person none of them thought they should report it – probably because it’s not something you would expect a sane adult to do outside of cartoons.

From 1757 to 1858, India was ruled by the (British) East India Company, a cotton and tea company that strayed quite quickly from their mission statement and branched out into being brutal colonial dictators. In 1857, the residents of India – Muslim and Hindu – got fed up of being ruled by what was essentially an evil version of Twinings, and rebelled. The uprising failed and it led to the British government directly ruling in India instead.

The islands were already occupied, of course, but nobody gave a shit about that.

The Americans didn’t like this, and sent a collector to try to tax Charles, who didn’t like that very much either. Charles deputised one of the local shepherds and told him to arrest the American tax collector, Henry Webber. Henry didn’t like being arrested by a farm boy who had just been promoted to deputy, and pulled a gun on him, which his three seconds of experience in the role and precisely fuck all training hadn’t really prepared him for. After an awkward few moments, both sides backed away quietly.

All ready to cannon the fuck out of each other if there was another pig murder.

The problem – for MacPherson’s part – was that she didn’t really give a shit what happened to them the second they got off that boat. She made little or no effort to track the kids once they were gone, and barely vetted them beforehand, making her (at best) a shit travel agent, and (at worst) an actual child trafficker who wasn’t too fussed about profits.

Imagine if you would that Eastenders gets desperate for ratings and introduces a character based on Hitler. Now imagine he gets his own major story arc where he conks his head (clumsy Hitler!) and gets a specific type of soap-amnesia where he can remember only the good stuff he’s done. He spends the whole week-run wondering why people in the Queen Vic are calling him a cunt and explaining to whoever is kicking the shit out of him at the time ‘BUT I’M A GOOD GUY – I DON’T EVEN EAT MEAT’ whilst Ian Beale cleans blood off his shoe. Anyway, amnesia Hitler is basically us Brits. Over the last few years, ranging anywhere from three to fifty, there’s been a trend of politicians and media and people on the street taking credit for the good bits we’ve done in history and conveniently forgetting about all the atrocities. Politicians who weren’t even close to being loaded into their fathers’ penises yet, let alone being fired into their mums, somehow manage to use the pronoun ‘we’ when talking about defeating Hitler. And yet suddenly we go all ‘we aren’t responsible for what our ancestors did’ when reminded about one of our many massacres. In short, you can either be responsible for what our ancestors did or you can’t. You can’t just pick out the good bits and say ‘we did that bit’. We’ve made some very weird decisions lately and you could say that our selective memory of history and our idealised vision of our own place in the world is at least in part to blame. We’re soap-amnesia H...

So, until we’ve solved our delusions of grandeur I propose that if we must allude to our glorious past we caveat it with: ‘We’re a great nation, we saved France in the Second World War. Of course we did fucking murder the Mau Mau like it was going out of fashion, so swings and roundabouts.’ Or, to be more exact: ‘We helped to defeat Hitler. Mind you we did sort of twat the fucking life out of indigenous peoples of the world for profit for centuries, test nuclear weapons in Australia, realise there was more radiation than expected but decide not to tell Australia nor the nearby aboriginals, and we built ships for the confederates, one of our first forays into arming cartoonishly evil maniacs for money. Then there was that time King John took a trip around Ireland, and spent most of it pulling the beards of Irish kings and laughing hysterically at how annoyed they got. And of course we massacred and severely injured peaceful protestors at Peterloo because they wanted mild Parliamentary reforms. Also we sent all our orphans and criminals to Australia and told some of the orphans they were orphans but really they had parents. And that time we (repeatedly) caused genocides by legally installing hierarchies of ethnic groups where none existed beforehand, then arming them and then leaving the country saying ‘whatever happens now is on you’ and that time in the 18th century where we had a zoo and the price of admission was a live dog or cat that could be fed to the lions. Then we ...