Radio New Zealand - Te Reo Irirangi o Aotearoa

Russophobia

Comment

Sunday, 21 October, 2001

Before Osama bin Laden, suicide bombers and Anthrax, the big threat to our security was nuclear. Before that, it was invasion by Japan and Germany. And before that, for most of the second half of the century befeore last, it was the fear that the Russians were coming.

Not to invade and occupy the country but to send a warship into one of our ports and demand a ransom in, preferably in gold bullion, but they'd likely accept cash and jewellery.

Like the present emergency, the first big scare was sparked by an event far away in the northern hemisphere, in the Crimea, where Britain joined France and Turkey in going to war to stop Russian expansion into the Balkans in eighteen fifty-three.

Back then, Britain played the same role in world affairs that the United States does now. Everybody was scared of Russia with New Zealand most worried by the arrival anytime of three warships which, incidentally, the Russians had bought from America.

All communications came by sea. News from Mother Ship England took about three months to reach her furthest-flung colony. The Crimean War had been going for ninety-six days before New Zealand could even start worrying about it.

The advent of a cable link to London in 1876 delivered the news more quickly and in greater quantity. That meant there was a lot more to worry about but we could at least be up with the play.

Replacing the insecurity of isolation, the telegraph cable created a new and fertile source of alarming headlines about foreign wars in which Russians were always the baddies.

And it didn't seem to matter how old the news was. A month-old report of Britain and Russia shaping up over some obscure part of the Balkans caused a suprisingly violent reaction on the other side of the world, in Dunedin. Reading the news posted outside the Otago Daily Times - the late-nineteenth century's version of CNN - the crowd started shouting, pushing, struggling and swaying to and fro, before breaking into the newspaper's printing room, that according to a report in the Auckland Weekly News, quoted in Glynn Barratt's book, Russophobia in New Zealand.

Creating that sort of excitement in readers seems to have been a big thing with newspaper editors. When they ran out of headlines to back their rousing editorials calling for more spending on defence, they simply made it up.

After the Crimean War there were more Russian scares in 1863 and 1871 with another two years later that caused by a newspaper hoax, written by the editor.

David Luckie was appointed editor of The Daily Southern Cross, Auckland's morning newspaper, by its owner, Julius Vogel, an English journalist and politician who became prime minister barely twelve years after arriving here in 1869 to go mining for gold in Central Otago.

After founding the Otago Daily Times with his partner, W H Cutten, got himself elected to parliament in 1863 and bought the Daily Southern Cross to promote his ambitious plans for public works and increased immigration.

As well as pushing his owner's policies, David Luckie was an enthusiastic supporter of Vogel's desire to spend more defence. Frustrated at government delays, he published a report on February the 17th, 1873 about an overnight raid on Auckland by a Russian ironclad warship, Kaskowiski. Readers who thought that sounded suspiciously like Cask of Whisky may also have spotted the small print at the bottom of the story, advising them that it was only what might happen one day.

But most were taken in by the amount of authenticating detail that Luckie packed into the story. The Kaskowiski, for instance, had a crew of 953 men and twelve 30-ton guns. And there was also the dreaded secret weapon, in this case a mephitic water-gas which the Russians used to overpower a British frigate at anchor in the harbour.

Then there was the sum of the one hundred and thirty-one thousand and ninety-six pounds, seventeen shillings and sixpence that the Russians extracted in ransom, leaving Auckland in a state of despair which Luckie said:

Deep as that is the loss of our treasure, a far deeper pang fastens on each heart to think of the dishonour this affair has cast on the British flag and the British nation... From the depths of our despair we cry: where is the British navy?

Gleefully reporting on the success of his hoax the next day, Luckie noted that his newspaper's office had been besieged by crowds of people.

While that, at least, may have been true, a similar story further south was a fictional response to yet another hoax.

In April 1885, in the midst of the biggest of all the Russian war scares, sparked by renewed new conflict with Britain over the town of Pendjeh in northern Afghanistan, the Wanganui Herald published a detailed account of a Russian attack on Wellington causing heavy casualties on both sides. That caused such a sensation that the following day that the paper's rival, the Wanganui Chronicle, published an account - also fictional- of how a crowd had got hold of the Herald's editor and lynched him for making fools of them.

Those were the days.