How to Be Kind E-Book

Andrew Taylor

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 157

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Delve into this trove of anecdotes and stories to prove the core decency of humankind at a time when kindness can seem in short supply. This engaging collection demonstrates that courteous behaviour transcends all barriers, from gender and wealth to age and class – here are noble acts by footballers and fashionistas, television personalities and teenagers, great commanders and humble private soldiers, society ladies and modest housewives, elderly philosophers and very young children.It includes Alexander the Great, Marie Antoinette, the Duke of Wellington, Evelyn Waugh, Winston Churchill, Sammy Davis Junior and Colonel Tim Collins. Often amusing, sometimes moving, occasionally astounding and always fascinating, How to Be Kind is a tribute to the finest, albeit often overlooked, qualities of humankind.

Leseprobe

For Sam, Abi and BecLucy, Sophie and Tom

First published 2011 under the title Random Acts of Politeness: Eccentric, Quirky and Occasionally Suicidal Examples of Selflessness and Courtesy

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Andrew Taylor, 2011, 2023

The right of Andrew Taylor to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75247 288 1

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1     Soldier, Soldier

2     I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here – Please!

3     Home is Where …

4     The Great & the Good

5     A World Elsewhere

6     The Social Whirl

7     Sporting Gestures

INTRODUCTION

Everybody knows, of course, that standards of good manners have declined in recent years. Like the sunnier summers that we used to enjoy, the better music, the funnier jokes and the tastier dinners, this collapse of courtesy becomes increasingly obvious the older and more crotchety we get.

Plenty of the anecdotes in this book seem to support that view. They demonstrate the kindness, consideration and often courage that has been shown in the past by great generals and by ordinary soldiers, by kings and commoners, by people in high society and by very young children.

However, perhaps inconveniently, others will show that precisely the same qualities exist today. By Premiership footballers and international sportsmen, by journalists and television personalities, by the queen herself and from a simple teenage girl writing to her dad: there are contemporary examples of generosity, fellow-feeling, tolerance and decency that stand comparison with anything in the past.

The stories are true, and they come from a wide variety of sources, from our own age and from ancient history. Good manners and courtesy, they say, are not a matter of using the right fork to eat your devilled kidneys, and not much to do with remembering to say ‘Please’ and ‘Thank you’; they are about treating people with unselfishness, sympathy and open-heartedness. Civilisation, perhaps, is a matter of treating people decently.

Often amusing, sometimes moving, occasionally astounding and always fascinating, How to Be Kind is both a marvellous read and a tribute to some of the finest, if often overlooked, qualities of humankind.

Here, then, is a celebration of everything that is most noble and selfless in human beings – even if, just occasionally, the reader may be left thinking, ‘These people must be barking mad!’

1

SOLDIER, SOLDIER

In the eighteenth century, it must often have seemed as if a degree of lunacy was a necessary prerequisite for success as a military commander. Certainly King George II thought so: told by some of his courtiers that General Wolfe, who had captured the Canadian city of Quebec from the French, was clearly mad, he is said to have retorted, ‘Mad, is he? Well, I hope he will bite some of my other generals.’

But that apparent madness could result in exuberant displays of leadership and occasional blistering, reckless bravery and determination. It was an age of aristocratic panache, of extravagant gestures, of brash self-confidence, and of gentlemanly imperturbability under fire.

Perhaps those days are gone: soldiers, after all, no longer march off to war in the bright red uniforms that once made them such a tempting target for enemy riflemen; they no longer fight in smartly drawn-up square formations, firing off regular volleys of musket shot. But the military character has always valued courage, discipline and the readiness to sacrifice oneself for the wider good.

The idea of politeness and savoir faire in battle, when groups of men are straining every sinew in an effort to kill each other, may seem grotesque. But many of these stories demonstrate how aristocrats and commanders and ordinary footsoldiers, sailors and airmen alike, throughout history, have shown their true colours and their essential humanity under almost unimaginable pressure.

Some of them may seem barely sane; some show astonishing courage and self-sacrifice; some speak of sensitivity, even gentleness. But they are all stories about the way people can respond to the challenges of war and the danger of imminent death with grace, dignity and courtesy.

After you …

The Battle of Fontenoy was fought on 11 May 1745, in present-day Belgium, as part of the War of the Austrian Succession. It may be largely forgotten today that it was a French victory over a combined Anglo-Dutch-Hanoverian force, but it is remembered for a bizarre exchange between two rival commanders.

Lord Charles Hay, commanding a detachment of the 1st Foot Guards (now the Grenadier Guards), marched his men to within musket shot of the French Maison du Roi, an elite regiment of the royal guards of King Louis XV. Since muskets – although they inflicted terrible injuries – were notoriously inaccurate, that meant they were barely thirty paces from the enemy.

Riding out in front of his troops, Lord Charles raised a silver hip flask towards the French in a mocking toast. ‘Messeiurs les Gardes Françaises, s’il vous plaît tirez le premier!’ he called out (‘Gentlemen of the French Guard, please fire first!’). One sergeant, staring at the levelled muskets of the French, is reported to have said: ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful!’ But the French commander, the Comte d’Auteroche, was equal to Lord Charles’ sangfroid.

‘Gentlemen, we never fire first. Fire yourselves,’ he replied dismissively, in perfect English. For a moment, it looked as though the battle might be postponed indefinitely, in a crazy ritual of ‘After you – no, after you’. It is not certain who did actually fire first, although one account suggests, maybe unconvincingly, that the French loosed off a volley before the English had ‘done laughing’ at their sergeant’s prayer for divine assistance. What is certain is that Lord Charles’ guards subsequently fixed bayonets in a businesslike charge of the French lines which dislodged them from their position.

By the time the battle finished, at around two o’ clock – just in time for a little late lunch for the aristocratic commanders – a total of some 15,000 soldiers had been killed. But whatever the precise truth of the story, the very fact it was so popular and repeated so often demonstrates what a gentlemanly business warfare was believed to be in the eighteenth century.

Facing the conquerors

King Christian X of Denmark was known for his habit of taking a morning ride without bodyguards through the streets of Copenhagen, during which his subjects were free to approach him.

These rides continued even after the Nazi occupation of the country, and the elderly King Christian mounted his own silent protest against the occupiers by publicly ignoring them. A long and fulsome telegram from Adolf Hitler congratulating him on his seventy-second birthday in 1942 received the dismissive reply: ‘Meinen besten Dank, Chr. Rex’ (‘My thanks, King Christian’) – a slight that led to the recall of the German ambassador from Copenhagen and the expulsion of the Danish ambassador from Germany.

There were even stories that the king had responded to a German threat to force Danish Jews to wear a yellow star on their clothing by volunteering to wear one himself. There were no Danish Jews and gentiles in Copenhagen – only Danes.

Although the king’s popularity angered senior German officers, they knew that any mistreatment of him might cause widespread trouble among the people.

In another well-documented incident, word was brought to King Christian that the swastika was flying over Christiansborg, the home of the Danish Rigsdag, or parliament. He immediately ordered that it should be taken down and replaced with the Danish flag.

This was done, but within hours, the German commandant had ordered that the swastika, the mark of German domination and Danish defeat, should be hoisted again on the palace flagpole.

King Christian telephoned him, and told him that if this were done, then a Danish soldier would be ordered to remove it again. In that case, said the commandant, the soldier would be shot by the German guards. ‘I think not,’ King Christian said. ‘I will be that soldier.’

The swastika never flew above the Rigsdag.

Courteous, considerate & kind

The most dreadful of wars often start, at least, with a commitment to human decency, restraint and honourable behaviour. The horrific reality of trench warfare was still in the future when Lord Kitchener, Britain’s Secretary of State for War, sent this message individually to each of the soldiers leaving for France in the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914: ‘You are ordered abroad as a soldier of the king to help our French comrades against the invasion of a common enemy. You have to perform a task which will need your courage, your energy, your patience.’ It said:

Remember that the honour of the British Army depends on your individual conduct. It will be your duty not only to set an example of discipline and perfect steadiness under fire but also to maintain the most friendly relations with those whom you are helping in this struggle. The operations in which you are engaged will, for the most part, take place in a friendly country, and you can do your own country no better service than in showing yourself in France and Belgium in the true character of a British soldier.

Be invariably courteous, considerate and kind. Never do anything likely to injure or destroy property, and always look upon looting as a disgraceful act. You are sure to meet a welcome and to be trusted; your conduct must justify that welcome and that trust.

Your duty cannot be done unless your health is sound. So keep constantly on your guard against any excesses. In this new experience you may find temptations both in wine and women. You must entirely resist both temptations, and, while treating all women with perfect courtesy, you should avoid any intimacy.

Do your duty bravely. Fear God. Honour the King.

Nearly ninety years later, in another war on another continent – almost in another world – Lieutenant Colonel Tim Collins used very different language to convey much the same message to around 800 men of the Royal Irish Regiment as they waited to cross the border in the allied invasion of Iraq in March 2003. Speaking off the cuff, without notes, he urged them to respect the Iraqi people:

We go to liberate, not to conquer. We will not fly our flags in their country. We are entering Iraq to free a people and the only flag which will be flown in that ancient land is their own. Show respect for them.

Don’t treat them as refugees, for they are in their own country. Their children will be poor; in years to come they will know that the light of liberation in their lives was brought by you.

If there are casualties of war then remember that when they woke up and got dressed in the morning they did not plan to die this day. Allow them dignity in death. Bury them properly and mark their graves … If you harm the regiment or its history by over-enthusiasm in killing or in cowardice, know it is your family who will suffer. You will be shunned unless your conduct is of the highest – for your deeds will follow you down through history. We will bring shame on neither our uniform or our nation.

Our sons as well

Among the thousands of tributes all over Britain to the dead of two world wars are one or two that stand out because they extend their grief to former enemies. At Wareham in Dorset, the bodies of German soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Second World War – some of them washed ashore and others those of prisoners from nearby prisoner-of-war camps – lie in graves that are mingled among those of the British dead.

And in a village churchyard in Suffolk can be found a memorial to the crew of a zeppelin airship that crashed nearby during the Second World War. A few minutes before the crash, the crew could have been dropping bombs on the people beneath – but after burying them, the villagers had the following passage from the Bible inscribed in their memory: ‘Who art thou that judgest another man’s servant? To his own master he standeth or falleth.’

But perhaps the most generous tribute of all came after the terrible fighting between Allied and Turkish troops for the Gallipoli Peninsula during the First World War in 1915–16, which cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of men on both sides. Many were buried where they fell, and after the Allied retreat there was great anguish among the families of those who had died over how their graves would be treated by the Turks – particularly because stories of the alleged barbaric actions of both German and Turkish troops were commonplace in wartime Britain.

In fact, the graves were treated with honour, and after the war the bodies were re-interred in either Turkish or Commonwealth War Commission cemeteries, which are still beautifully tended to this day.

Turkey’s Prime Minister, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who had commanded a Turkish infantry division during the fighting for Gallipoli, caused a memorial to be erected on the peninsula, on which were inscribed words generously addressed to the mothers of the fallen Allied soldiers: ‘You, the mothers who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears. Your sons are now lying in our bosom, and are at peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they are our sons as well.’

Few former enemies can ever have paid such a chivalrous, dignified and moving tribute to those against whom they had once fought.

A battle won

A good general never panics – and neither does a gentleman, as this story demonstrates. Lord Uxbridge led the charge of the heavy cavalry of the Royal Scots Greys at the Battle of Waterloo, taking more than 3,000 French prisoners. Later in the day, he was sitting on his horse next to the Duke of Wellington, watching the final stages of the battle, when a stray cannonball screamed through the air between them.

Uxbridge glanced down. ‘By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!’ he exclaimed.

‘By God, sir, so you have!’ replied the duke.

The exchange was immortalised by Thomas Hardy in The Dynasts, his epic drama of the Napoleonic Wars. Hardy has Wellington, sitting astride his horse Copenhagen, going on to say:

Ay – the wind o’ the shot

Blew past the withers of my Copenhagen

Like the foul sweeping of a witch’s broom.

Aha! They are giving way!

The aristocratic insouciance which this story demonstrates, incidentally, did not mean that Wellington had no sense of the bloodshed and suffering that were the price of victory. In a sombre letter home after the battle, he observed sadly: ‘My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.’

An affair of honour

For many years, the military authorities had an ambiguous attitude towards duelling. On the one hand, it exemplified the military virtues of courage and elan – but on the other, it was an extraordinarily wasteful way of getting rid of young officers.

As commander of the Allied armies in the peninsula and then in France during the Napoleonic Wars of 1803–15, the Duke of Wellington ordered that any of his officers who were involved in a duel would be severely punished. Nonetheless, in March 1829, by which time Wellington had become prime minister, he challenged another Tory politician, the Earl of Winchelsea, to a duel over a slight to his honour.

The quarrel had its origin in Wellington’s promotion of Catholic emancipation. Winchelsea, who vigorously opposed improving the constitutional position of Roman Catholics, wrote to several newspapers accusing Wellington of treachery. His honour impugned, and despite his views on duelling, Wellington called Winchelsea out. The duel took place on Battersea Fields, London (now Battersea Park), a popular site for these ‘affairs of honour’, on 21 March. At the word the two men, armed with pistols, moved apart, then turned and faced each other at a distance of twelve paces to fire their single shot. Wellington fired, and missed. Winchelsea then ‘deloped’, deliberately firing his weapon in the air rather than take advantage of his now defenceless adversary. Honour was satisfied and the quarrel declared over.

Wellington later claimed that he had fired at Winchelsea’s legs, to wound rather than kill him; since he was a notoriously poor shot, however, and was just as likely to have hit a vital spot, the other man was probably luckier than he knew. King’s College, University of London, founded in 1829 by non-Anglican Christians and followers of other faiths, still celebrates ‘Duel Day’ on 21 March each year.

It has to be said that Winchelsea’s graceful act in sparing the Great Duke when he had him at his mercy was perhaps at least as wise as it was selfless. Duelling was in any case illegal by that time, and to have killed or wounded the man who was not only prime minister, but also the greatest commander in British history and a popular hero as well, could easily have led to the earl being torn to pieces by a mob.

In fact, the whole custom of duelling has always been hedged around with courtesies and formalities, which have occasionally been used by those who have more shrewdness than courage to avoid a fight that they seemed likely to lose.

A century before Wellington, Sir William Petty, who served under Oliver Cromwell as a surveyor in Ireland, was challenged to a duel because of some real or imagined slight. Sir William was a man of many talents – doctor, mathematician, statistician and political economist – but he was not a fighter, and since his challenger was an officer with long and bloody experience in Cromwell’s army, it seemed likely that he would come off second best. Worse, Petty was known to be extremely short-sighted.

However, since he was the one being challenged, he was entitled to choose where the duel was to be fought and what weapons should be used. For the place, he chose a pitch-dark cellar, and the weapons, carpenter’s axes. His ingenuity brought the whole challenge into public ridicule, and so the duel – doubtless to Sir William’s considerable relief – was cancelled.