British Lion Research Articles

Biographies and Revisionist Histories in Modern China

Abstract Born and raised in the British Caribbean island colony of Trinidad, Eugene Chen was one of China’s foremost foreign ministers during the early twentieth century, defending his nation’s interests despite its military weakness and political disunity. Relying primarily on newspapers and what he calls the “Eugene Chen Papers,” sourced from Eugene Chen’s grandson in Hong Kong, Walton Look Lai reveals Eugene Chen’s multiple identities, first as “Sun Yat-sen’s personal representative and spokesman in Shanghai,” then as “the global face and voice of the Wuhan regime,” and ultimately as “China’s ‘dynamite’ diplomat [who] challenged the British lion over the Hankow concession and won.” For many, Eugene Chen, for all his political accomplishments and connections to the most illustrious personalities in Republican Chinese history, cut a relatively obscure figure. Eugene Chen’s obscurity points to an old problem in Chinese historiography, or any historiography, for that matter. The privileging or canonization of certain historical figures at the expense of attention to others stems partly from the binary of reform and revolution held by historians when investigating the transformations of twentieth-century China or its transition from empire to nation. Walton Look Lai’s book on Eugene Chen is thus a contribution to our broader historiographical attempt to dismantle the obsolete paradigms that caricature complex historical personalities as one-dimensional persons of their times.

‘Praise these daring men’: ACT Films Ltd, 1950–1963

During the 1950s the film technicians’ trade union, the Association of Cinematograph Technicians (ACT), was a significant force in the film industry. At the same time the ‘second feature’ or ‘B-film’ sector was producing a constant stream of low-budget titles. This article examines an initiative which combined the two: ACT Films Ltd, a film production company active in the second-feature sector, which was created by the union to provide jobs for its unemployed members. It explores some of the internal tensions this generated within ACT, the company’s production record, including its occasional forays beyond B-films, and its relations with other industry players. It also sheds light on the role of the National Film Finance Corporation and the distributor British Lion during this period, and their relations with independent production companies.

The British Lion’s Triumph over the Bengal Tiger: The Royal Combat and the Allegory of Imperial Dominance

This article shows how the allegory of British-tiger rivalry became a distinct feature in 19th-century British imperial visual culture to imagined imperial attitudes over India. After the second Anglo-Mysore war (1799) between the East Indian Company and the Tipu Sultan, in 1808, a visual description of lion-tiger bloodshed was issued as a medal by the East India Company to reward its troops. Such a description shows a lion, representing the British nation’s suppression over a Bengal tiger, the royal emblem of Tipu Sultan. After this, the same imagery served to be imagined and visualised the British dominance and control over ruthless and unwilling India. Moreover, in such an allegory, a fiction of dead white women was added to invoke nationalism among Britons. This raises a feminist issue of how this fictional image of victimised women fulfils the British masculine agenda of imperialism and nationalism while the women remain deprived.

“The British Lions Crouched to a Nest of Owls”: The South Sea Bubble through the Lens of the London Press

The South Sea Bubble is one of history's most iconic economic events. While much ink was spilled during the bubble year to make sense of events as they unfolded, commentators were left scrambling for ways to grasp what happened because no one had ever experienced a stock market bubble before. This article focuses on how the London press covered the events that later became known as the South Sea Bubble. A review of every newspaper article in which the company was mentioned during the year of 1720 captures how the movement of the price of the company's stock was interpreted, as well as how it was related to broader social, political, and geopolitical affairs.

Food analysis: a practical guide

Food analysis: a practical guide

“It is the principle behind the issue which is important and sacred”: Kenyan rugby and the 1980 University of Nairobi campaign to end British contact with apartheid sport

A London-based rugby team toured Kenya mere days after the recently concluded, extremely controversial 1980 British Lions rugby tour of apartheid South Africa. Failure by Kenyan officials to retract the invitation for yet another British team was an outright denial of clearly stated anti-apartheid principles. After student campaigners advocated a boycott of the tour by the London Metropolitan Police, the University of Nairobi rugby team was the first to refuse to compete. This action by a Kenyan university team choosing to disrupt a British sports tour broke the top-down mold of past Kenyan anti-apartheid sport activism and was a rare instance of a student-led sport boycott that directly opposed the stance taken by Kenyan sport officials.

Good eggs

Good eggs

“If Britain Wants War on Africa, She Will Have It”: African Reprisals to the 1974 British Lions Rugby Tour of South Africa

The Supreme Council for Sport in Africa announced that all independent African nations would boycott all British sport if the British Lions rugby team toured South Africa in 1974. Despite condemnation from segments of the British public, entreaties from government ministers, and African threats, the rugby tour went ahead. This article adds to a large body of scholarship on the struggle against apartheid in sport, within which the 1974 Lions tour has received little attention, and focuses on the transnational efforts to stop that tour led by Kenya and independent Africa. Calls for reprisals across the continent were not unanimous, and the disparity of African reactions challenges perceptions of the “Africa bloc” as a monolith guaranteed to maintain a united front on anti-apartheid sport activity. Reactions to the tour anticipated events two years later at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, and this event became a test case for strategies designed to isolate South Africa through punitive actions against third-party nations that broke ranks.

North American Counterterritoriality: Nineteenth-Century Black Activism and Alternative Legal Spatiality

This contribution uses the terms “territoriality” and “legal spatiality” to consider how they shape our understanding of the significance of the North American border between the US and Canada (British North America) in the nineteenth century. It looks, first, at the ways in which Black intellectual leaders constructed Upper Canada as a counterterritory to the United States in the context of debating Black emigration by combining politics and geography to challenge conflicting territorialities. Canada’s ambiguous position as a safe haven under the British lion’s paw that was formerly invested in slavery and the slave trade is reinforced, second, by the increasing numbers of black fugitives onto its territories. This perceived mass exodus provoked aggressive reactions from US slaveholders who relied on the fugitive slave laws to lay claims on their “property” in the form of fugitive slave extradition cases. The activism by Black communities along the border that emerged from the crises to save fugitives from being returned to bondage, this contribution shows, enacted a form of counterterritoriality that called on the British imperial center to challenge the legality of slavery, introducing alternative forms of “legal spatiality.”

Egg consumption in pregnancy and infancy: Advice has changed

The UK government has now revised its advice on the safety of eggs for vulnerable groups, such as pregnant women, infants and young children, confirming that they are safe to eat ‘runny’ or even raw, provided they are British Lion eggs. The government's Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) has also re-confirmed that eggs can be introduced from around 6 months when complementary feeding begins, despite their allergenic potential. Furthermore, it suggests that deliberate exclusion or delays in introducing eggs beyond 6–12 months may increase the risk of egg allergy. This article discusses the revised recommendations in more detail and sets the SACN recommendations in the context of developing research on egg allergy. It compares advice on egg consumption for non-atopic and high-risk infants in the UK, the US and Australia, and examines the evidence on the influence of maternal diet during lactation on the risks of infant egg allergy. Finally, it provides an update on the nutritional benefits of eggs for pregnant women, infants and young children, including new research on critical but lesser known nutrients such as iodine and choline, with consideration of the suitability of eggs in baby-led weaning.

Between the Lion Cub of Judea and the British Lion: cause lawyers, British rule and national struggle in Mandatory Palestine

The tempestuous political environment of the final days of British Mandate rule in Palestine saw intensive activity by cause lawyers. As a test case of this activity, this article examines the conduct of the attorneys who handled the case of Dov Gruner, a member of the Irgun Zionist underground. In April 1946, Gruner was sentenced to death by a British military court. Informed by cause lawyering paradigm, the article examines the tactics used by his lawyers and their relations with players within and outside the court. This examination sheds light on the links between nationality, the law and lawyers at that time in Palestine. In particular, the analysis highlights the key role played by the lawyers in the Gruner affair, similar from that perspective to the dominant role of lawyers in the Irish War of Independence and different from the relatively marginal role played by lawyers in Indian freedom struggle.

Double Standards: South Africa, British Rugby, and the Moscow Olympics

The year 1980 proved to be a time of diplomatic crisis for the British government and the Commonwealth due to the confluence of two events: a British Lions tour of South Africa and the Moscow Olympics. The Thatcher government debated its Commonwealth counterparts over the perceived hypocrisy of British policy towards South Africa and Moscow. While the British government campaigned internationally for a boycott of the Moscow Games, many African and Caribbean countries believed Britain was taking a harder line against Moscow than in enforcing the Gleneagles Agreement to end all sporting contacts with apartheid South Africa. This inconsistency led to threats of retaliation from African countries and seriously affected the influence Britain had in Africa during the period of Rhodesian independence and the ongoing conflict in Namibia. Controversy erupted surrounding the plans for a British Lions tour, how the invasion of Afghanistan changed the target of the Moscow boycott, and about the discussions between Britain and other countries about sporting ‘double standards’.

British eggs: Back on the menu for all

AbstractThis article updates the latest guidance and research on the suitability of eggs as a good source of nutrition for particular population groups. This follows the publication of two important UK government reports: revised advice for vulnerable groups from the Food Standards Agency and a draft report about infant feeding from the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN), as well as a recent review on egg consumption and cardiovascular disease risk in people with type 2 diabetes. The Food Standards Agency now advises that raw or lightly cooked British eggs are safe to eat for vulnerable groups, such as pregnant women, babies, toddlers and older people, provided that the eggs bear the Lion mark. This indicates that they have been produced under the British Lion Code of Practice, a scheme that includes more than 700 auditable criteria, of which vaccination of laying hens against Salmonella is a key aspect. The draft SACN report Feeding in the First Year of Life recommends that first complementary foods should be introduced from around 6 months of age and that there is no need to differentiate hens’ egg from other foods in this respect. There is also a warning that the deliberate exclusion or delayed introduction of allergenic foods including egg may increase the risk of allergy to these foods later in childhood. As regards people with type 2 diabetes, despite earlier concerns from epidemiological studies that higher egg intake might increase cardiovascular disease risk, more recent high‐quality intervention studies indicate that, provided eggs are consumed as part of a healthy, energy‐controlled diet, there is no need for concern. Eggs provide a wide range of important nutrients, including several that are found in only a limited number of other foods, such as vitamin D, iodine and the long‐chain omega‐3 fatty acid, docosahexaenoic acid. They are therefore a useful and versatile ingredient for pregnant women, infants and children, and older people.

The image of the USA and Great Britain in the political cartoon magazine "Perets" in the first years of the Cold War

The study deals with one of the most important episodes of the history of the twentieth century - the beginning of the Cold War. The focus is on the peculiarities of the formation of the image of the external enemy for the USSR on the pages of periodical media, namely, the political cartoon magazine "Perets". It is revealed that the main ideological adversaries of the Soviet apparatus of propaganda were the United States and Great Britain, the countries that formed the basis of the anti-Hitler coalition. Due to the analysis of materials of the publication - political cartoons, short stories, satirical poems - the characteristic features of the image of these two states are revealed. It is proved that the images of the opposing countries were filed by the magazine "Perets'" in the form of three categories. The first block is the image of the American and English leaders (in this case G. Truman, V. Churchill), which began to appear massively in the journal in connection with the Fulton speech of Churchill and the implementation of the "Marshall Plan". The emphasis is placed on political cartoonists' tendency to compare the leaders of the United States and Great Britain with the leaders of Nazi Germany. The second unit features personalized images of the United States and the Britain (Uncle Sam, John Bull, British Lion, etc.). A characteristic feature of this group is the demonstration of the domination of American symbols over the British, which was to show the Soviet reader an American-dependent position of the United Kingdom and other Western European countries. The last block of images combines works that demonstrate the relations between "capitalist" countries. In order to create the desired effect on the reader, the Soviet propaganda machine emphasized the emergence of territorial or economic disputes between the United States and Britain, presenting this as a stage of aggravation of relations between "imperialist countries." All of these features in the images of external enemies were aimed at elevating patriotic sentiment among the Soviet society and confidence in the actions of the ruling Communist Party.

The reinvention of the British Lions: amateurs, professionals and contested identities

ABSTRACTWhen rugby union became an openly professional sport in the mid-1990s it appeared that one of the institutions most under threat was the British Lions. Now more usually referred to as the British and Irish Lions, this touring team comes together every four years to take on one of the three leading southern hemisphere rugby nations in a three-match Test series. The first tour of the openly professional era in 1997 was celebrated for the ways in which important professional concepts were introduced, yet the touring party retained valued elements of the amateur ethos. The next two tours were not as successful, and led to questions about the very role of the Lions in the professional game. The 2009 tour saw a return to some of the values shaped during the age of amateurism and four years later the Lions achieved their first Test series win since 1997. Drawing upon the written (auto)biographies of those involved in elite-level rugby, this offers us an interesting case to unpack aspects of the fuzzy frontiers between amateurism and professionalism and some of the wider issues relating to sporting identities with specific reference to the topic of working-class amateurs.

Bryanston Films: An Experiment in Cooperative Independent Film Production and Distribution

By the end of the 1950s, independent film producers in Britain were facing an increasingly difficult challenge in sustaining their businesses. They were dependent on the major distribution companies for finance, but the combines that had long dominated the British film industry – the Rank Organisation and the Associated British Picture Corporation – had drastically reduced their production commitments, preferring to concentre on less risky aspects of their operations, notably exhibition and other leisure activities. Independent producers were therefore forced to find new ways to operate and as the new decade began one notable example of this was the formation of new collaborative enterprises to provide greater integration between production and distribution. One of the first and most significant examples of this was Bryanston Films, established by Maxwell Setton and Michael Balcon in 1959 and involving an array of distinguished directors, producers and other industry figures. Over a period of five years, Bryanston was responsible for the production and distribution of some 33 films, released through their association with British Lion. This article examines the formation, subsequent development and eventual decline and failure of this significant experiment in collaborative independent production and distribution. Drawing on the Michael Balcon papers held at the British Film Institute and the files of the completion guarantee company, Film Finances, the article examines Bryanston’s financial successes and failures, shedding light on some of the key players and projects in the Bryanston story and providing insight into the wider operations – including collaboration with a number of other companies. It will also touch on the wider opportunities and challenges facing independent production and distribution in a rapidly changing British film market during the early part of the 1960s.

Can practice make perfect? Security and the 2010 FIFA World Cup

The security of major events such as the FIFA Confederations Cup (FCC) in 2009 and the FIFA World Cup (FWC) in 2010 is crucial to their success. This article explores South Africa's readiness for the FWC from a security perspective, and considers the security machinery responsible for the planning of the operation and its eventual implementation. It also provides a synopsis of other security operations during 2009, such as the general elections, the Indian Premier League Cricket tournament and the British and Irish Lions rugby tour, and the lessons learnt from these. In addition, policing the wave of service delivery protests and strikes during the first half of 2009 added valuable lessons, especially in relation to crowd management. Finally, the article considers some of the real and potential security threats for the FWC and concludes that, in spite of a few remaining concerns, South Africa has the will and capacity to provide high quality security for one of the world's biggest sporting events.

Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in VietnamGregory A.Daddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Westmoreland's War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam Gregory A. Daddis. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.Until now, the historical fate of General William Westmoreland can best be compared to that of British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, who, during World War I, commanded the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front from 1915 through the end of the war in 1918. Haig led his troops into the bloodbaths of the Battle of the Somme and Passchendaele. In the years after the Great War, Haig's command came to symbolize the murderous attritional warfare of the trenches; he was seen as one of the donkeys who sacrificed a generation of young British lions in the bloody mud of Flanders. In recent years, a new generation of scholars has attempted to rehabilitate Haig's reputation, arguing that he was a capable and, at times, even an innovative general, who was forced to work within constraints imposed by the new industrialized technologies of destruction which had been unleashed in 1914. William Westmoreland, who headed the United States's Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) from 1964 to 1968, receives much of the blame for American failure in the Vietnam War. Like Haig, he is derided as yet another military practitioner of attrition, fixating on body counts in a conflict where such bloody statistics were beside the point. Typical of this perspective is Lewis Sorley's Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam (2011). As the title of Sorley's book makes clear, he believes that Westmoreland lost a winnable war in Vietnam by focusing on conventional tactics rather than on counter-insurgency warfare. Westmoreland also figures prominently and unhappily in Thomas E. Ricks's The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today (2012), where he is an exemplar of what Ricks sees as the modern American general, bureaucratically savvy, but unable to produce military victories.Gregory A. Daddis, a colonel in the United States Army who teaches history at West Point, takes issue with the conventional wisdom in Westmoreland's War. He boldly contradicts the stereotypical picture of William Westmoreland. He does so in classic revisionist style by revisiting and reexamining the primary sources. A virtue of Daddis's book is his attention to the institutional culture of the United States Army during the early 1960s. He creates a context for his study of Westmoreland by analyzing trends in American military thinking in the early Cold War. …

Front Matter

Editorial Alun Howkins and Marybeth Hamilton Much of this issue of History Workshop Journal looks back to the middle years of the twentieth century. Our feature ‘Sexual Politics in mid twentieth-century Britain’ explores the sexual and social upheavals during and after the Second World War. Though the topics covered are diverse – from provincial adultery to 1950s queer London, from the emotional dynamics of a socialist marriage to the sexual dynamics of the films Kes and Billy Elliot – what unites these pieces is their concern to delineate the complex and sometimes fraught relations between politics and emotion, between mutuality and individualism, and between public engagement and private selves. That same concern prompts our second feature in this issue, which marks the fiftieth anniversary of a momentous year. In a sense, this journal itself, like so much of what emerged from the radical culture of the 1960s and 1970s, was a product of the events of 1956. From the ‘secret speech’ given by Khrushchev at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to the Anglo-French and Israeli invasion of Egypt and the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, the British left, in common with comrades throughout the world, found some of its most fundamental assumptions shaken to the bone. For at least one member of the founding Editorial Collective of History Workshop Journal, Raphael Samuel, the Soviet invasion of Hungary had a profound and lasting impact, both on his politics and his writing of history, as it did for a generation of broadly socialist or communist historians. For others of us, children or young people in 1956, the impact of that year's events was less direct but still fundamental. For anyone who came on to the left in the 1960s, be it in London or Lahore, the legacy of that year was iconic, profound and continuously divisive. To others 1956 was the year of Suez. For those living in the Middle East war and occupation were traumatic day-to-day reality. For the former imperial powers, Britain and France, the ‘nationalization’ of the Suez Canal by Nasser was a blow to their control of crucial sea routes and the tip of an anti-imperialist iceberg which could not be ignored. To many young men and women, particularly in Britain, the invasion was a violent demonstration that despite all the gains of 1945–50 in terms of social justice, the British Lion, albeit a moth-eaten and battered beast, was still capable of behaving as if the year were 1880. When we came to look at the possibility of marking 1956 in some way we were deeply conscious of these separate legacies. We were also aware that [End Page i] many others would look again at those histories – and that has certainly been the case. In the last months the broadcast media and the broadsheet press in Britain have returned time and again to 1956, and especially to Suez. In much of this writing the Anglo-French and Israeli interventions have been cast, through the lens of hindsight, as forerunners of strictly contemporary events like the Iraq War and the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. While this has merit, it can obscure the experiences of those who lived through the earlier time. This is especially the case in regard to Anglo-American relations which in the memories of 1956 seem to have played a much lesser part than in subsequent analytical accounts. All this has led us to take, for the present at least, a rather different view of 1956. In the feature on that year which forms part of this issue we have brought together a number of memoirs of 1956 from very different perspectives – and not usually the expected ones. In the pieces by Rod Prince, Michael Wolfers, and Jean McCrindle we have the memories of three young Britons – one just finishing military service, one a schoolboy and one a youthful activist from a Communist Party background. They reflect inevitably their different ages, involvements and subsequent political development. McCrindle vividly portrays how her own disillusionment with the Communist Party after Hungary led, paradoxically, to a kind of liberation: the Hungarian Revolution...

The motivation behind unsanctioned violence in international rugby: A case study of a former elite player

At focus in this case study was the participant's perception of, and personal involvement in, rugby violence. The participant was a 50-year-old ex-international and former British and Irish Lions rugby union player. A qualitative approach informed by reversal theory and incorporating retrospective semi-structured interview procedures with inductive and deductive elements was used to explore a number of topics related to his rugby playing career, including rugby violence. Among other statements related to play and power violence, the participant described his experience of three major incidents involving personal rugby violence. Each incident resulted in injury to the opposing player which required extensive medical attention. Two of the reported incidents supported previous reversal theory-based research findings related to the motivation behind anger violence in sport. The third incident illustrated a type of sport violence not previously identified in reversal theory-based sport research. It was termed “protective” or “supportive” violence, where an athlete comes to the aid, rescue or defence of a teammate. The findings provide valuable new insights on rugby violence, adding to sport psychology's understanding of the motivational processes involved.