In April 1912, the then leader of the British Labour Party, Keir Hardie, proposed in the House of Commons that (common) soldiers be excused deployment in Industrial disputes which might pit them against their own families or class. I don’t know how much support he got from his fellow Labour MPs. I suspect he suffered the same opprobrium Jeremy Corbyn gets for not voting for the 2003 War on Iraq launched under false pretences. Anyhow THE TIMES made a meal of Hardie’s suggestion that (common) soldiers could pick and choose between orders given them by their superiors.
THE TIMES report and editorial were printed whilst RMS TITANIC was still within UK waters, and might even have reached Queen’s Town in time to be appreciated and chuckled over by its First Class passengers, who had a higher survival rate than that of the hoi polloi in steerage. Steerage passengers will have been careful of their limited funds, not slugging draught Guinness by the gallon, or dancing to Sean O’Riada’s creations as in the silly movie.
Twenty-three months after the Titanic sank, the high-horsed Lancer Officers at the Curragh promised to resign their commissions rather than go to Ulster to guard Government stocks from the Ulster Volunteers, who were being supported to the hilt by THE TIMES in their defiance of the British Parliament. Apparently it never occurred to the Government to promote some of the other ranks so that the Army might honour the principle which THE TIMES professed to hold in its April 1912 Editorial.
The most notable survivor of RMS TITANIC was Joseph Bruce Ismay. He got away, with some celerity, on a lifeboat. The ship was not equipped with enough lifeboats or rafts for the ship’s complement of passengers or crew. And there were strict priorities. Crew and steerage passengers were at the bottom of the heap and best represented at the bottom of the sea. Ismay was Chairman of the White Star Line, owners of RMS Titanic, and the ship was his inspiration. He outlived the ship by 25 years, dying in Connemara in 1937. THE TIMES carried an obituary of him, never once mentioning the White Star Line, RMS TITANIC nor his dismaying good fortune as it sank. The usually excellent DICTIONARY OF NATIONAL BIOGRAPHY quotes THE TIMES word for word and is no more informative about him.
Coming back from the MALVINAS WAR in 1981, British soldiers unfurled a huge banner on a troopship. It carried the threat “CALL OFF THE RAIL STRIKE OR WE’LL CALL UP A RAIL STRIKE”- not the sort of sentiment I can imagine on THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN. Nearly 70 years after Keir Hardy wished them some sort of autonomy, the squaddies remained virtual serfs, to be used and abused by the horse-mounted Lancer Officers and the bull-shitting TIMES.
When Neil Kinnock was leading the Labour Party to successive electoral disasters he visited paratroopers in Belfast, where it was reported he saw, with apparent approval, in one of the Regiment’s Messes, a boasting poster about their shooting dead of a teenage joy-rider.
I understand also that during Kinnock’s leadership of the Labour Party cavalry horses and military horsemen participated in the riding down and striking down of miners and their families, without a peep of protest from him.
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