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

by James Felton

The Prime Minister (in Love, Actually) famously once said, ‘We may be a small country, but we’re a great one too’ and sweet merciful Christ haven’t we banged that drum as hard as we can.

The events in this book will be judged by today’s standards. Most of the examples were horrific even by the standards of the day, but equally ‘oh but I’m from 1612’ will not be considered an adequate excuse for going on a massive racist killing spree.

there are of course occasions when it was just the English being wankers all on their own, or times when the Anglo-Saxons decided to set the tone for the centuries to follow. But I am nothing if not inclusive, so if you made these isles your permanent home and were a gigantic bellend, congratulations – you made the book.

In the 18th century, China was pretty much the only producer of tea in the world. True to stereo-type, we’d do anything we could to get our hands on the stuff. Unfortunately for us, China didn’t really want anything we had to trade.

Say what you will about addictive precursors to heroin, they do sort of create their own demand quite quickly.

By 1833, we were smuggling 30,000 chests (weighing around 1,950 metric tons or 17 smacked-off-their-face blue whales) to a market of 4–12 million addicts in China.

Eventually China offered to let companies forfeit their opium in exchange for the tea. Unfortunately, our love of shipping drugs to a country with a massive drug addiction we’d fuelled won out.

It’s like if Ross from Friends suddenly started pounding on Joey because he didn’t want to smoke any more of Ross’s meth.

Over the next three years the British government sent gun boats to attack key targets, leading to the phrases ‘gunboat diplomacy’ and ‘God, the British really are dickheads, aren’t they’. China, outgunned, gave in three years later. During the truce, we arranged better trading terms for ourselves and whilst we were there helped ourselves to Hong Kong, which was ceded to Britain.

So committed were we to get China to smoke more of our fine British opium, grown in let’s say ‘less than humane’ conditions, this time we even teamed up with our natural enemies, the French.

In 1820, before the First Opium War, China’s economy was the largest in the world. After the end of the Second Opium War, we left them with half the GDP and millions of drug addicts.

In 1002, King Æthelred the Unready ordered the massacre of ‘all the Danish men who were among the English race’1 on St Brice’s Day.

In Oxford, one group of Danish men broke into a church to hide from the locals who were in full pitchfork mode. Rather than think ‘oh well, we tried’ the locals decided the best course of action would be to set fire to the church, burning at least thirty-four men alive – on a religious holiday.

‘The Danes made themselves too acceptable to English women by their elegant manners and their care of their person,’ one 13th-century chronicle reads, justifying why the slaughter took place.

On 27 August 1896, the British took part in a war that lasted less time than a documentary about that same war. The Anglo-Zanzibar War took place when the Sultan of Zanzibar, Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini, died. The British had a successor in mind, so when he was succeeded by someone else, who was anti-colonial, the British responded by getting all colonial on their asses.

Cue us immediately loading up gunships whilst Sultan Khalid bin Barghash hid himself in the palace. We told Khalid to leave the palace by 9 a.m. on the 27th or face the consequences, like a school bully offering you the options of having your money stolen inside or slightly outside the cafeteria.

Khalid, who let’s be frank was also a terrible person and wanted to be free of the British in order to profit from slavery, gathered together a meagre army of 2,800 (mostly untrained) civilian Zanzibaris and gave some of them machine guns – I imagine a really bad thing to be let loose with on the first day of your job. Meanwhile, the British assembled three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 fricking marines and sailors, and 900 Zanzibaris.

Thirty-eight minutes later, the war was over as the Sultan fled for Germany and the flag at the palace was shot down. Five hundred Zanzibari men and women fighting the British had died, whilst on the British side there was a grand total of one injury from which the soldier in question recovered in full.

Defeated, abandoned by their leader and only barely not dead, Khalid’s supporters left the palace, a sight so pitiful you’d have to be heartless not to feel sorry for them. Then, to really clarify that we were wankers in case anybody was too distracted by being bombed to notice, we made the survivors cover the cost of the shells we had used to kill 500 of their fallen allies, retroactively funding the slaughter of their own friends.

There’s nothing the English find more offensive than foreigners in their own country speaking their own language.

True to form, when they arrived and found that the Welsh children were speaking Welsh in Wales, they were madder than an expat in Spain who’s just discovered their local tapas restaurant doesn’t serve pie.

The schools introduced something called a ‘Welsh Not’. If a child was heard speaking Welsh, they were given a piece of wood inscribed with ‘WN’ to wear around their necks. This could only be passed on to another student if they were found to be guilty of the heinous crime of also speaking in their native language.

At the end of the day (or week in some generous accounts), whoever was left wearing the Welsh Not was beaten mercilessly by their teacher. Sort of like pass the parcel, but instead of a prize the winner gets the shit kicked out of them by someone trusted with their wellbeing.

I don’t want to defend imperialism but hey, you don’t break into people’s houses to not steal a lot of shit.

We pinched so much from around the world that walking into a museum in London is basically like walking into an evidence locker with a cafe.

The indigenous Rapa Nui islanders do believe this, and have asked regularly from the 1950s till 2018 for the heads at Easter Island to be returned to them precisely for this very reason. In 1963, in response to a lot of ungrateful countries having the cheek of asking for their stuff back, we passed the British Museum Act, forbidding the British Museum from returning any of its holding, except in a small number of ‘special circumstances’.

Churchill – one of Britain’s greatest heroes, who stood up to Hitler and won (with the help of many allies) – also caused the death of three million people in India*, and we should probably acknowledge that a bit.

In 1943, famine was sweeping through India, still one of Britain’s colonies at the time. The situation was dire. People were dying in their millions. Parents dumped the bodies of their starved children into rivers and took their own lives by jumping in front of trains. There were reports of dogs eating the dead in the villages of Bengal. Yet during this time, under instruction from the British, India exported more than 70,000 tonnes of rice to Britain, which could have kept around 400,000 people alive for a year.

Accounts at the time from Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell say that Churchill thought that giving food to ‘already underfed Bengalis is less serious than [giving it to] sturdy Greeks’3. I.e. why would we give it to millions of Indian people who are quite hungry anyway, when we could be giving it to Europeans who are already well-fed enough to be buff.

We even stockpiled food from other countries that we didn’t need yet. Rather than divert it to deal with the crisis in one of our colonies where millions were starving, Churchill allowed food imported from Australia to sail right on past India to be stored in Europe.

Food prices in India shot up as a result of fewer imports, and hoarders took advantage, stockpiling and shooting the prices up even higher, making food unaffordable for the millions of poor.

Historian Madhusree Mukerjee writes4 that Churchill operated a scorched earth policy – in order to make sure supplies in India were low and transport was not around if Japan were to invade Bengal. Under this policy, rice deemed ‘surplus’ would be thrown in the water, and boats were confiscated from fishermen, killing the local fishing industry – which would have been quite useful considering there was no food.

In essence, we starved and bankrupted a lot of Indian people, to starve the Japanese in a hypothetical...

In the 13th century we decided to rebrand Britain’s most famous torture chamber, prison and site of execution as a zoo.

When you see the natural habitat of lions – the plains of Africa – your first thought probably isn’t that it bears a striking resemblance to a castle in England during the drizzle. Nevertheless, at several points in history the Tower was rammed full of lions who were allowed outside only during the day.

Things improved down the line under James I when they got more ‘exercise’, by which of course I mean they were forced to fight dogs for the King’s enjoyment.

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.

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.

In 1623, the King of Spain gave King James I an elephant and very little instruction whatsoever.

Fortunately it probably didn’t find this too distressing due to the fact the zookeepers also got it pissed up on an actual gallon of wine a day from April to September, believing it to be unable to drink water during these months and lacking the imagination to try offering squash.

Don’t ask me why, but someone clever thought that ostriches could eat metal, and so, even though we also thought they could eat actual food, the ostriches kept in the Tower were fed quite a lot of nails.

In the first week of September 1939, in those last lazy days of summer, Londoners set about systematically murdering 400,000 puppies and kittens.

We patiently queued up (God love us: we play to our stereotypes even during mass acts of pet murder) outside animal shelters, waiting our turn to have our beloved cats and dogs executed. Work carried on through the night. There was a queue outside one vets over half a mile long.

Jesus

It got to the point that crematoriums couldn’t burn the bodies fast enough, and animal welfare societies ran out of chloroform to murder dogs with, because of all the dog murder. In just four days, before a bomb had even dropped, over a quarter of London’s pets were dead. They outnumber the human civilians in London that were killed during the entire war by six to one.

The Times lamented that it had become clear they were being killed for no reason at all, other than the fact it was inconvenient to keep them alive. In fact, the pets that survived the killing frenzy would survive the rest of the war alive, healthy and un-euthanised.

You’d think as an island nation that invaded half of the world just to get away from our own weather that we would have killed for a device that would let us stay dry without having to e.g. invade India and live there, but the umbrella caught on in Britain surprisingly late.

The British public genuinely regarded the idea of not getting soaked when it’s pissing it down as ‘too French’, with accounts saying we called people a ‘mincing Frenchman’6 if they were caught using one.

the first man who tried to start carrying an umbrella was mocked mercilessly and pelted with abuse and projectiles, and one man...

Jonas Hanway was a British man who just wanted to stay dry. In the early 1750s he started carrying an umbrella with him, and to the shock of everyone in London at the tim...

He especially came under attack from people who were terrified of umbrellas. Coach drivers hated him for it, because they (quite rightly) saw it as a threat to their business. When it rained, people used to rush to get in their coaches. If the umbrella caught on their whole business model of waiting for England’s crap weather to be crap was fucked.