Turfalgar Square

A friend who works in the visa section of the British High Commission told me a story once about a Nigerian applicant he was interviewing.
“The guy was applying on the basis he had lived in London before, so I asked him what his favourite place was. He said Trafalgar Square, so I asked him to describe it. He said: ‘Oh it’s very beautiful, with grass and cows.’” the guy’s application was rejected and he never got to see that Trafalgar Square is not the bucolic Eden he imagined.
The only cows in Trafalgar Square are the sacred ones, monuments to empire and the sea power it was built on. Brass generals and admirals ring the square; Admiral Jellicoe, head of the British “Great Fleet” in the First World War; Sir Henry Havelock –his family name derived from the Old English for “sea war”- a participant in the disastrous battles for the Northwest Frontier (now known as Afghanistan) and famous for his role in suppressing the Indian Mutiny of 1857; General Napier, conqueror of the Amirs of East India, who told protesting Hindus he would hang anyone who continued Sati, the burning of widows on their husband’s funeral pyre: “We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours," he said; A statue to Gordon of Khartoum, whose head ended up on a spike when the Mahdi’s army overran the city after a six month siege, was once in the square but it was moved years ago.
The square’s most famous resident is Lord Nelson, who looks out toward Plymouth from his column. Nelson is famous for saying “Kiss me, Hardy” to his friend before dying at the Battle of Trafalgar, although these were not his last words. According to the surgeon who tended to him he repeated the phrase “Thank God I have done my duty” many times before expiring. Apparently Nelson’s Column survived The Blitz when much around it was destroyed by German bombers because Hitler planned to uproot the monument and place it in Berlin after his invasion. Two fingers, Adolf.
Everything that I have just written reeks of the British archetype. Conquerors, valiant in death and defeat, players of the “Great Game” of Empire, obsessed with duty and purveyors of the stiff-upper-lip. They believed it was their duty to bring their values and their rule to the rest of the world, and do it before any other empire had the chance.
And now they are almost completely forgotten. They are ‘old Britain’. Everything I wrote about these people I had to look up. I know who Nelson was, but my knowledge of the others you could just about fit on a postcard. And I’m willing to bet few other Britons my age know anything about them.
A few years ago the left-wing London Mayor Ken Livingstone caused controversy when he said the Top Brass should be removed and replaced by people who Londoners actually knew. First among the suggestions was a nine-foot statue of another Nelson, Mandela this time, for the empty plinth opposite South Africa House. This was opposed by the leaders of Westminster Council who said the vanquisher of Apartheid would not fit the company already in the square. As many people pointed out at the time, it seemed little had changed since the days when the council leader was a member of the right-wing Young Tories, once photographed at a reactionary counter-demonstration wearing a T-Shirt that read “Hang Nelson Mandela”.
But this weekend Trafalgar Square was transformed. For two days emerald green turf was laid across it in a wheeze meant to turn it into a village green -that other cornerstone of the British Archetype. West End workers shed their shoes and walked barefoot on the grass, enjoying the lunchtime sun. This is very ‘new Britain’, informal and commercial, with a hint of nostalgia. Maybe our friend wasn’t a fraud after all, but a visionary who could see the field under the paving stones.