Their finest hour

On 22 January last year, the entrance whiteboard at London Underground’s Dollis Hill carried a brief factual statement:

On this day in history

On the 22–23 January 1879 in Natal, South Africa, a small British garrison named Rorke’s Drift was attacked by 4,000 Zulu warriors. The garrison was successfully defended by just over 150 British and colonial troops. Following the battle, 11 men were awarded the Victoria Cross.

A female passenger complained that it was ‘celebrating colonialism’. The board was wiped clean and a suitably opaque quote from Martin Luther King substituted: ‘We are not the makers of history. We are made by history.’

Too late to avoid the Twitter storm, however, whipped to fury by the pop singer Lily Allen who, according to her Wikipedia entry, ‘left school when she was 15 to concentrate on improving her performing and compositional skills’ (which include the memorable number ‘Fuck You’). She reportedly declared the whiteboard ‘disgusting’, TFL quickly apologised:

Our staff across the network share messages on these boards, but in this instance the message was clearly ill-judged. We are speaking with our staff to remind them of what is and isn’t acceptable.

Professor Ian Beckett, one of the most respected historians of the British army, tells this story in the conclusion of the latest volume of the OUP’s ‘Great Battles’ series. It illustrates the problem of communicating facts to a public increasingly prone to interpreting history in terms of the present, and apparently unable to celebrate bravery for what it is.

It also, perhaps, shows what a problem the British army has in its efforts to be inclusive, for a survey by the British Forces Broadcasting Service in 2008 revealed Zulu (1964) to be the most popular film of all time among servicemen. In Afghanistan there were frequent allusions to Rorke’s Drift: the defenders of isolated posts in Helmand were determined not to give way there either.