The Union Jack: The Story of the British Flag by Groom Nick

Author:Groom, Nick [Groom, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780857899316
Publisher: Atlantic Books Ltd
Published: 2012-06-03T22:00:00+00:00

VI AN ENGLISHMAN, AN IRISHMAN, AND A SCOTSMAN

Unite the Empire; make it stand compact,

Shoulder to shoulder let its members feel

The touch of British brotherhood, and act

As one great nation – strong and true as steel.

Henry Newbolt, from Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys (1908)

BY THE NINETEENTH century, the Union Jack was everywhere – whether flown across the globe as the ‘red duster’, the Red Ensign of the Merchant Navy, or sported by fashionable gents, who could purchase Union Jack handkerchiefs from the Burlington Arcade. The Union Jack and the Royal Navy ensigns became the most widely recognized trading and military emblems in the world, and symbolized both the high idealism and the high-handed cruelty of empire. In fact, the story of the Union Jack in the nineteenth century is predominantly the story of the British Empire, the Empire on which the sun never set. At its greatest extent, this covered about a quarter of globe’s land territory (12.7 million square miles), one in five of the global population lived and worked under British rule (444 million people), and three-quarters of the world’s shipping sailed under its flag. In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, the St James’s Gazette claimed that Queen Victoria ruled over ‘one continent, a hundred peninsulas, five hundred promontories, a thousand lakes, two thousand rivers, ten thousand islands’.1 Sir John Seeley – who, incidentally, preferred the term ‘Greater Britain’ to ‘British Empire’ – expressed the sense of disorientation that accompanied this huge expansion: ‘We seem, as it were, to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind.’2

What could all these peoples possibly have in common? The victories over France, culminating with Waterloo in 1815, had given support to the belief in the destiny of Britain, and the union and its dominions were again regarded as the bearers of divine providence, their primacy confirmed by military victories and the stretch of Empire. But by the second decade of the nineteenth century, British identity needed rethinking both at home and abroad. The country had now lost its old enemy, and the two countries would henceforth go to war as allies. Moreover, Catholic Ireland had joined the union. Defining British identity at home as anti-French and anti-Catholic had been possible in the eighteenth century, but was no longer a credible option.f44

There was, as ever, an attempt to unify Britain and the Empire in celebrating military victories, whether on the battlefield or at sea. At the beginning of the century, Felicia Hemans eulogized the new British union by invoking Arthur in her poem on the spectacular victory at the Battle of Vimiera (21 August 1808), during the Peninsular War:

Bright in the annals of th’ impartial page,

Britannia’s heroes live from age to age…

From doubtful Arthur, hero of romance,

King of the circled board, the spear, the lance;

To those whose recent trophies grace her shield,

The gallant victors of Vimiera’s field;

Still have her warriors borne th’unfading crown,

And made the BRITISH FLAG the ensign of renown.3

The inclusiveness of the diverse British

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