Robert Holland - Blue-Water Empire

ROBERT HOLLAND

Blue-Water Empire

The British in the Mediterranean since 1800

ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

In Memory of Peter Trevor Holland

List of Illustrations

For their assistance in identifying and obtaining images relating to Cyprus thanks are due to Dr Anastasia Yiangou at the Cyprus Research Centre and to Marina Vryonidou-Yiangou and Christina Christodolou in the Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre in Nicosia.

The destruction of LOrient at the Battle of the Nile, 1 August 1798, painting by George Arnald (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) HMS Britannia leaving a Mediterranean harbour, 1835, painting by Lieutenant Robert Strickland Thomas (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich) British mounted patrol emerging from the Old Fortress of Corfu, c . 1850 (Reading Society of Corfu) Troops and stores being landed at Larnaca during the British occupation of Cyprus, July 1878 (Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre) HMS Himalaya anchored off Limassol, August 1878 (Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre) A parade of British troops at North Camp, Troodos, Cyprus, 1889 (Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre) A district court in Cyprus, 1899 (Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre) British monitors leaving Malta, 28 April 1915 (Imperial War Museum) Men of the 1/11th London Regiment, 54th Division, bathing at Mahamidiyeh on the Palestine coast, February 1917 (Imperial War Museum) Arabs with their British captors near Gaza, April 1817 (Imperial War Museum) The Allied fleet fires a victory salute after arriving at Constantinople, 13 November 1918 (Imperial War Museum) Review of the 33rd Artillery Division by Field-Marshal Allenby on the cornice of Alexandria, December 1918 (Imperial War Museum) British soldiers relaxing at a caf in Gallipoli, 1919 (Imperial War Museum) Royal Navy personnel watching over Constantinople, 1920 (Imperial War Museum) HMS Agamemnon steams into Grand Harbour, Malta, 1920, painting by Frank Henry Mason (Imperial War Museum) Parade on George Vs birthday in front of Government House, Nicosia, 3 June 1930 (Sukey Cameron Collection/Public Information Office, Republic of Cyprus) Burnt-out car of Governor Sir Ronald Storrs outside the ruins of Government House, 31 October 1931 (Sukey Cameron Collection/Public Information Office, Republic of Cyprus) Palestine police face Arab demonstrators in Clock House Square, Jaffa, 27 October 1933 (Imperial War Museum) A British naval escort ship enters Grand Harbour, Valletta, September 1941 (Imperial War Museum) Empire Day, Cairo, 27 May 1942 (Imperial War Museum) Maltese women and children cheer the arrival of the remnants of the Pedestal convoy, 14 August 1942 (Imperial War Museum) Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan at Maison Blanche airport, Algiers, 28 May 1943 (Imperial War Museum) Churchill addresses British Army and Royal Air Force units at Carthage, Tunisia, 9 June 1943 (Imperial War Museum) George VI, accompanied by a parish priest, views the ruins of Senglea, 22 June 1943 (Imperial War Museum) HMS Formidable exercising with destroyers in the Strait of Gibraltar, December 1943 (Imperial War Museum) A Spanish worker crosses the frontier into Gibraltar, 1943 (Imperial War Museum) Workers in Gibraltar collect their rations from NAAFI (Imperial War Museum) The Victory Parade for British Forces, Alexandria, July 1945 (Imperial War Museum) Navy House gutted, Port Said, after the British assault on 6 November 1956 (Imperial War Museum) Michael Karaolis emerges under guard from the Nicosia courthouse, December 1955 (from Alex Ethyvoulu and Marina Vryonidou-Yiangous Cyprus 100 Years / Marfin Laiki Bank Cultural Centre) Anti-British signs in Kingsway, Valletta, 1960 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

List of Maps

Europes southern waters Malta and Gozo Valletta and Grand Harbour The Rock and town of Gibraltar The Strait of Gibraltar The United States of the Ionian Islands The Aegean Cyprus Palestine under British Mandate The Mediterranean in 1815 The Mediterranean in 1923

Map 1

Europes southern waters

The Mediterranean in 1815

The Mediterranean in 1923

We must therefore sometimes conquer, and if we are sometimes excluded from the continent of Europe, form for ourselves an insular empire, complete in its parts, and sufficient to itself.

G. F. Leckie (1808) on Britain in the Mediterranean

With the English for my friends I can do anything; without their friendship I can do nothing Wherever I turn, they are there to baffle me.

Mehmet Ali, Viceroy of Egypt (1834)

Introduction: The British and the Mediterranean

A British diplomat, standing on a Greek steamer at the beginning of June 1864 as it passed between the channel separating the Ionian islands of Zante and Cephalonia, and coming within sight of Corfu, felt a strong surge of emotion at a vista which, he said, had been dear to so many of our English race for over half a century. He was going to attend the handing over of those islands by Great Britain to the Kingdom of Greece. An echo of that emotional chord can still be conjured up today by visitors to Corfu Town architecturally a unique blend of Venetian splendour, early Victorian neoclassicism and modern Greek blight who take the advice of the Rough Guide and visit the botanists heaven of the British Cemetery, tended in 2011 by the same dedicated local caretaker for over sixty years.

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