Learning From Disasters

One of the worst events of Empire was the Amritsar Massacre of April 1919, see Wikipedia, which ever since has been a subject of angry debate and a matter for which the Raj and the British Government of the time was responsible.

As I was born rather later, my parents were not yet teenagers and none of my grandparents nor their parents never went anywhere near India, why I should be carrying the can I do not know.

Which brings me to Colonel Reginald Dyer, the literally dyspeptic acting Brigadier General who was in charge of the troops. He had been an soldier for thirty years with a long record of active service. During the First World War he was in one of the forgotten sectors, the borders of Persia, where bitter battles were fought between the tribes and peoples.

In the spring of 1919 the British Army was still running down its troop levels in the Occupying Force in Germany as well as having had the Murmansk Expedition to Russia to support the White's against the Reds. At home there had been the Spanish Flu epidemic and the economy was in the throes of post war change.

In the UK the Coalition Government elected in November 1918 were still struggling to make decisions of any kind leaving India to The Raj. The Labour Party, now a large number in Parliament, were more concerned with Russia and the impending centenary of Peterloo and its meaning for electoral reasons.

Those ruling The Raj believed that the Empire was on the brink of collapse, so when trouble begins around Amritsar etc. they send for Dyer to deal with it. He proved to be the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. They needed a diplomat and negotiator and sent in a warrior, with his own problems.

One was his personal situation. The end of war meant contraction of the armed forces and with it the officer class facing not a reliable career of promotions and service bringing notice and honours but years of routine garrison duty and paper pushing without much, if any, promotion.

The secret, perhaps not so secret, was that Dyer, whatever his record in combat etc. was not officer class and therefore going to be off the lists for the positions of highest status. His father had been a brewer who did well after being sent to India around 1860, the period of the Mutiny and the reprisals, when there were a lot of thirsty troops in action.

His parents were of London skilled working class origin and had married in Islington, the home of his mother's family. This district is now  the centre of a socialism determined to wipe out private enterprise.

How ironic that so many of our  private and smaller enterprises have been created and run by those from the Sub Continent.