We British are known for our propensity to apologise. Even when we need not, many of us do. However, our excessive concern for others’ feelings has reached a new low (or should that be high?). The latest Astute Class Submarine was set to be called HMS Agincourt after Henry V’s famous victory over the French in 1415. Now, it has been decided that another name ought to be used to avoid offending the French.
Naming naval ships and submarines after military and naval victories and successful admirals is a normal thing to do. For example, the Italians deployed during the Second World War a ship called Vittoria Veneto which commemorated the Italian defeat of Austrian forces at Vittoria Veneto during the First World War. This was while Italy was allied to Nazi Germany, whose leader was an Austrian, and who had merged Germany and Austria in 1938.
Yet some spineless apologisers at the top of the Royal Navy (or lurking somewhere in the British government or civil service) have decided that naming the new submarines after the battle of Agincourt will not go ahead to avoid upsetting French sensibilities.
But where is the evidence that the French would be offended? You would have thought that after two centuries of peace with our Gallic neighbours, fighting shoulder to shoulder in two world wars and now the closest of military allies, the name of a submarine would be of no consequence. No French person took offence at Britain’s Great War dreadnought HMS Iron Duke, and no French person appears to be offended by the fact that the Royal Navy today has a frigate by the same name. An estimated 3-400,000 French people have chosen to live in London despite the existence of Trafalgar Square, Waterloo train station and Waterloo Bridge. The thinking seems to be just in case the French are offended, which they are unlikely to be.
What makes the Royal Navy’s concern so silly is that the French navy has ships named after admirals and captains who got the better of us, and there is no plan to rename them.
The historian Robert Tombs has done a fine job in finding out the names of these ships. The frigate Surcouf is named after Robert Surcouf, who traded slaves and added to his fortune by attacking and plundering British merchant ships. The submarine Duguay-Trouin commemorates René Trouin, who did exactly as Surcouf did and went one step further by capturing several Royal Navy warships – for which he was made an admiral. The submarine Suffren takes its name from the man regarded by some as France’s greatest admiral: Pierre André de Suffren de Saint Tropez. He temporarily gained control of the Indian Ocean against the British in the late eighteenth century. The frigate La Fayette remembers the Marquis de La Fayette, who helped the American colonists rebel against their British overlords in 1776.
And so it goes on: the submarine Tourville, the destroyer Forbin and the frigate Chevalier Paul memorialise admirals and sea captains who captured and sank British battleships.
Should we British be offended? Not at all. This is a case of a nation keeping alive its martial history as part of its national identity. The irony, of course, is that as allies, those French ships and submarines named after Brit-bashers will be deployed to defend France and Britain in the event of both our nations being at war with a mutual enemy! The same will be true of British ships and submarines called after French defeats. Indeed, HMS Iron Duke has last week been shadowing Russian naval vessels passing through the Channel which protects French security also.
Yet here in Britain, our cultural and academic elite are doing their best to teach us not only to be ashamed of our history, but to see it as uniquely evil. Their perverted narratives paint Britain as the greatest ever slave-trading, racist and colonising nation that has ever existed, and therefore does not deserve to exist. It is hard to decide whether to be more angry at their anti-British calumnies or at being taken for a fool by their assumption that we will believe their gross historical inaccuracies.
This whole matter is more serious than fears of ruffling feathers in the Quai D’Orsay. George Orwell once wrote that ‘the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history’. British history needs to be kept alive accurately for the British people through books, films, documentaries, historic sites and buildings, statues and of course the names of naval ships and submarines. It needs to be understood and remembered in all of its glories, mundanities and horrors. For without our history, who are we? And without our history, we have no unifying identity by which to resist the pressures of globalism, cultural relativism and if it comes to it again, a foreign aggressor seeking to plunder our land, our resources, our people, and imposing on us a wicked ideology.
Peter Harris is a freelance writer.
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Only goes to show it’s as easy to ‘educate’ default pride as it is default shame, the cynic will deduce that TPTB will revert to pride again when it suits their purposes.