THERE is a tendency to change history to coincide with the current agenda, and the poster campaign to persuade us that Ealing Technical College has been a university for the past 150 years (published in the Gazette on December 17), is just one example of this. It is not difficult to find others.
When, as Prime Minister, Tony Blair went to Washington after the September 11 terrorist attack, he spoke of how America stood shoulder to shoulder with us during the Blitz and the Battle of Britain. Due to faulty intelligence
he did not know that it was not until more than a year after these events that Germany and Italy declared war on the United States.
On a later occasion Foreign Secretary Jack Straw told us that the French founded this country in 1066.
He obviously did not know that it was the Normans who invaded and, far from founding this country, took over a well-organised and prosperous land.
When we were celebrating the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade bill (applicable to British sea captains) it was stated, and has been repeated since, that we were involved in the Atlantic slave trade for 400 years. It was the first time I had heard that we got to the New World almost 100 years before Christopher Columbus.
2008 was the 50th anniversary of the occasion when 492 Jamaicans paid £28.10s 0d (£28.50) each for a one-way ticket, on the troopship Empire Windrush, to start a new life in this country.
It was the only time that the vessel put in to Kingston to pick up fare paying passengers who joined servicemen being brought home after serving their country in far-flung trouble spots. Nevertheless, the newsreader on BBC television news described the incident as "thousands of West Indians crammed aboard the Empire Windrush".
It can be confusing when the Greenford Clairvoyant is trying to foretell the past.
JAMES DARBON Greenford
