Richard M. Langworth

A read­er asks what Win­ston Churchill was doing on 24 Jan­u­ary 1907.

Churchill was at the Colo­nial Office, Lon­don, deal­ing with an upcom­ing Colo­nial con­fer­ence, and a diplo­mat­ic ker­fuf­fle. The Gov­er­nor of Jamaica, Sir James Alexan­der Swet­ten­ham, had churl­ish­ly demand­ed that the crew of an Amer­i­can war­ship, land­ed in Kingston to lend human­i­tar­i­an assis­tance after a seri­ous earth­quake, retire to their ship, sug­gest­ing that the Amer­i­cans’ action was like a vis­it­ing “British admi­ral land­ing an armed par­ty to sup­port the New York police.”

On Jan­u­ary 24th Churchill advised King Edward VII that, act­ing on a telegram from Lord Elgin, the Colo­nial Sec­re­tary (who was in Scot­land), Swet­ten­ham had been rebuked and ordered to apol­o­gize to the Amer­i­cans.…

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