When I read books or watch movies things go much faster when I don’t have access to the internet. A person, place, or event will pop up that catches my interest and I’ll end up googling it, or even more time consuming, searching for more information about it in various academic databases (MUSE, JSTOR, Lexis-Nexis, google books, etc.). For example, while eating some noodles for dinner this evening and reading the latest issue of the Economist, I got distracted looking at the flag of Singapore in an illustration and then ended up looking up the meaning of the various parts of the flag online; not believing the standard explanation of its parts and ended up trying to find alternative descriptions which told me more about the crescent in the flag. My noodles got cold.
Now I’m watching my latest Netflix movie, The Charge of the Light Brigade and while watching the movie got distracted trying to find out more about the Crimean War (Did you know the excellent Iron Maiden heavy metal song “The Trooper” is inspired by Tennyson’s poem about the famous charge?). I then got interesting in searching for more info on a curious story about the English-Scottish border town of Berwick-upon-Tweed.
In the Wikipedia entry on the Crimean War, there is this little note at the bottom mentioning the town:
There is a rather charming but apocryphal story, recently repeated on the BBC comedy programme, QI, that goes that when the UK joined the war, Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions declared war. Berwick-upon-Tweed is situated in Northumberland and had been long disputed by England and Scotland. When the war ended, Great Britain, Ireland and all British Dominions declared peace. The Mayor of Berwick-upon-Tweed subsequently visited the Soviet Union in 1966 to negotiate a peace settlement.
Actually, if you go to the Wikipedia entry for the town itself, there is a longer description:
There is a curious apocryphal story that Berwick is (or recently was) technically at war with Russia.
The story goes that since Berwick had changed hands several times, it was traditionally regarded as a special, separate entity, and some proclamations referred to “England, Scotland and the town of Berwick-upon-Tweed”. One such was the declaration of the Crimean War against Russia in 1853, which Queen Victoria supposedly signed as “Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, Ireland, Berwick-upon-Tweed and all British Dominions”. However, when the Treaty of Paris (1856) was signed to conclude the war, “Berwick-upon-Tweed” was left out. This meant that, supposedly, one of Britain’s smallest towns was officially at war with one of the world’s mightiest powers for over a century.The BBC programme Nationwide investigated this story in the 1970s, and found that while Berwick was not mentioned in the Treaty of Paris, it was not mentioned in the declaration of war either. So was Berwick ever at war with Russia in the first place? The true situation is that since the Wales and Berwick Act 1746 had already made it clear that all references to England included Berwick, the town had no special status at either the start or end of the war.
Nevertheless, in 1966 a Soviet official waited upon the Mayor of Berwick, Councillor Robert Knox, and a peace treaty was formally signed. Mr Knox is reputed to have said, “Please tell the Russian people that they can sleep peacefully in their beds.” To complicate the issue, some have noted that Knox did not share the authority of Queen Victoria in the arena of foreign relations, and thus may have exceeded his powers as mayor in concluding a peace treaty.
