the french invasion

The annals of history record the name of Hastings as the site of the last invasion of Britain by French, well Norman, forces in 1066. True, this was the last successful invasion. However, little is reported about the French invasion of Fishguard, which took place in southwest Wales in 1797, nor of the brave resistance offered by "Jemima Fawr" (Jemima the Great), who single-handedly captured twelve of the invading soldiers.

In 1797, Napoleon Bonaparte was busy conquering in central Europe. In his absence the newly formed French revolutionary government, the Directory, appears to have devised a 'cunning plan' that involved the poor country folk of Britain rallying to the support of their French liberators.  Obviously the Directory had recently taken delivery of some newly liberated Brandy!

On Wednesday, February 22, the French warships sailed into Fishguard Bay, to be greeted by canon fire from the local fort. Unbeknown to the French the cannon was being fired as an alarm to the local townsfolk, nervously the ships withdrew and sailed on until they reached a small sandy beach near the village of Llanwnda. Men, arms and gunpowder were unloaded and by 2 am on the morning of Thursday, February 23rd, the last invasion of Britain was completed. The ships returned to France with a special despatch being sent to the Directory in Paris informing them of the successful landing.

The French invasion force comprising some 1400 troops set sail from Camaret on February 18, 1797. The man entrusted by the Directory to implement their 'cunning plan' was an Irish-American septuagenarian, Colonel William Tate. As Napoleon had apparently reserved the cream of the Republican army for duties elsewhere in Europe, Colonel Tate's force comprised of a ragtag collection of soldiers including many newly released jailbirds. Tate's orders were to land near Bristol, England's second largest city, and destroy it, then to cross over into Wales and march north onto Chester and Liverpool. From the outset however all did not proceed as detailed in the 'cunning plan'. Wind conditions made it impossible for the four French warships to land anywhere near Bristol, so Tate moved to 'cunning plan' B, and set a course for Cardigan Bay in southwest Wales.

The French invasion force upon landing appear to have run out of enthusiasm for the 'cunning plan', perhaps a result of those years of prison rations, they seem to have been more interested in the rich food and wine the locals had recently removed from a grounded Portuguese ship. After a looting spree, many of the invaders were too drunk to fight and within two days, the invasion had collapsed, and Tate's force surrendered to a local militia force led by Lord Cawdor on February 25th 1797.

Strange that the surrender agreement drawn up by Tate's officers referred to the British coming at them "with troops of the line to the number of several thousand." No such troops were anywhere near Fishguard, however, hundreds, perhaps thousands of local Welsh women dressed in their traditional scarlet tunics and tall black felt hats had come to witness any fighting between the French and the local men of the militia. Is it possible that at a distance, and after a glass or two, those women could have been mistaken for British army Redcoats?

Prussia's shattering defeat of France in 1870 did not mean the end of invasion fear in Britain. As the traditional enemy against which massive new defences had been constructed during the 1860s, France had been removed as a threat but the manner of its removal caused new fears. Revealed as efficient, militaristic, ruthless and ambitious for world power and territory, Germany was now seen by Britain as the potential new enemy - the next invader. This new fear was expressed in an unusual form as the polemical invasion novel and the (usually jingoistic) popular magazine or newspape
The non-arrival of the Germans on Britain's shores during the 1870s did not cool the fevered imaginations of the alarmist novelists. The next target for invasion terror was the proposed Channel Tunnel; in 1882 a scheme to build a railway tunnel from Calais to Dover was proposed in Parliament. The titles of the novels this scheme provoked - England in Danger, The Seizure of the Channel Tunnel, The Battle of the Channel Tunnel - reveal the popular concerns that were shared by Queen Victoria, who called the tunnel 'objectionable', and by Lord Randolph Churchill who probably summed up public opinion when he observed that 'the reputation of England has hitherto depended on her being, as it were, Virgo intacta'.

During their two days on British soil the French soldiers must have shaken in their boots at mention of name of "Jemima Fawr" (Jemima the Great). The 47-year-old Jemima Nicholas was the wife of a Fishguard cobbler. When she heard of the invasion, she marched out to Llanwnda, pitchfork in hand and rounded up 12 Frenchmen. She brought them into town and promptly left to look for some more. - Men of Harlech meet your match!

Objections from all levels of society stopped the project after a couple of miles of tunnel had been excavated from each coast, but no sooner had this 'threat' been stymied than another appeared. As if to underline the almost manic nature of Britain's late 19th century invasion fear, France, so suddenly thrashed by the Prussia, made a sudden reappearance in the mid 1880s as enemy number one. What if, wondered some more pessimistic military analyst, France and Russia joined forces to invade England to strike with terrifying ease at the very heart of the British Empire - London. The capital's defences were outmoded and organised primarily for the defence of its dockyards at Tilbury and Chatham while the regular army was small and scattered over much of the world policing the empire.

The first of these alarmist articles, which appeared initially in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and then in sixpenny-book form, was the Battle of Dorking. Published in 1871 and written by George Chesney, it described vividly the way in which a German invasion would affect ordinary households and argued that Britain was, due to its complacency and reductions on military spending, vulnerable to attack from Germany.

The capital's defences were outmoded and organised primarily for the defence of its dockyards at Tilbury and Chatham...

A flurry of learned and sensational articles and anxious debates in Parliament stirred up great public and political concern. Typical was a little book, published anonymously in 1885 and entitled The Siege of London. It envisaged a French invasion that culminated in a tremendous battle in Hyde Park, the capitulation of London and the eventual loss of India, the Cape, Gibraltar and Ireland.

The consequences in Britain of this new fear of France was an increase in the size and improvement in training and equipment of Britain's volunteer forces, and the construction, to the southeast of London, of a ring of fortified mobilisation centres, notably at Box Hill and Henley Grove near Guildford. These centres were to act as supply depots and as rallying points around which local volunteers could muster and from which they could draw arms 

With the signing of the Entente Cordiale between France and Great Britain the fear of French invasion was finally and formally laid to rest in 1904. Attention was now firmly focused on Germany as the future foe and it was at this moment that Britain's most famous invasion novel was published. The Riddle of the Sands, written by Erskine Childers and published in 1903, focuses on a cunning German invasion plot with troops sneaking across the North Sea hidden in fleets of coal barges. Although the technique by which Childers envisaged a German invasion was novel, the essential method of attack - a sea-borne onslaught - was entirely traditional. This is hardly surprising since, around 1900, an arms race between Britain and German was in full swing and the focus of this competition was the battleship.

In 1898 and 1900 Germany passed Navy Laws which identified the types and numbers of warships required and which provided permission and cash for the project. To justify the vast expense of the undertaking, these laws also identified a specific and dangerous enemy that this fleet was being built to counter: 'For Germany, the most dangerous naval enemy at the present time is England.... Our fleet must be constructed so that it can unfold its greatest military potential between Heliogoland and the Thames....' As the construction of a massive fleet was being debated and agreed by the Kaiser and his military and political advisors another undertaking, of great relevance to future German naval strategy, was being completed. The Kiel Canal, which opened in 1895, provided the German navy with a fast connection between the Baltic and the North Sea and so allowed its different fleets to work in close co-operation.The German bid to become a world power with its own far-flung empire was very much the personal ambition of the young Kaiser Wilhelm II who came to power in 1888. An overseas empire was needed, argued Germans, not only for prestige but because the German economy would atrophy if it did not acquire colonies that could provide raw materials and markets for finished products. To acquire, service and protect these colonies a strong German naval and merchant fleet was essential, but the construction of a powerful fleet of warships, making Germany into a significant maritime power, brought it into direct conflict with Britain. Since the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 Britain's Royal Navy had been the dominant fighting fleet in the world; now Germany was challenging this position.