There didn’t seem to be a great deal happening in and around London for St George’s Day – April 23 – this year. Not that that is unusual, as for many years the only national saint’s day we really celebrated here was St Patrick’s, but in recent years there has been more of a movement to celebrate the ‘English’ saint.
St George wasn’t of course English. His father was a Roman citizen, his mother a Palestinian, and he was born in either in Roman occupied Palestine, in Lydda, where he was martyred or in Turkey. Lydda since 1948 has been a part of Israel and RAF Lydda eventually became Israel’s main ‘Ben Gurion International Airport, just a few miles from Tel Aviv. We share him as patron saint with a dozen or so countries and numerous cities around the world – including his native Palestine. So perhaps on St George’s Day we should demonstrate in support of the Palestine cause.
The St George’s flag became the flag flown by English ships over 800 years ago, but in more recent times has become a flag associated with English sporting teams, and with football hooligans and extreme right wing nationalist groups. Part of the increasing demands to celebrate our national saint’s day comes from these groups, but it also arises from those who want to reclaim St George and the flag from the extremists.
St Georges Day is also celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday, although his real date of birth is not known, and it is actually the day on which he died in 1616, so perhaps after demonstrating for Palestine we should all go to watch one of his plays. Cervantes also died on April 23, 1616 (though not the same day as Shakespeare as they used different calendars) and for this reason UNESCO in 1995 declared April 23 World Book and Copyright Day.
Well, at least I did read a book, as I usually do when travelling on the train the half hour or so up to London. And I just about found some St George celebrations, although most seem to have been either postponed or cancelled in favour of the royal wedding celebrations six days later. But the event in Trafalgar Square did seem rather desultory and I didn’t stay long. There are a few more pictures on My London Diary: St George’s Day in London
It was actually a day when most of the events that were in my diary didn’t happen. I’d started looking for a small extreme right wing group who were planning to march along to the St Georges day non-events, but they were so small I couldn’t see them. Later in the day I’d been promised there would be several hundred people marching elsewhere, but again they didn’t materialise. I’d been sent an invitation by yet another group who were to be protesting at an embassy and then marching, but by the time I arrived they had abandoned their protest without the march.
I’d started the day with seven events listed and in the end only found three to photograph (and took a few pictures of a fourth I hadn’t intended to cover.) But it was a day when logistics – working out how to get to seven different places at suitable times – was more of a problem than the actual photography. I didn’t expect to see all seven, as many events are planned and publicised but don’t take place, but it isn’t usually this bad.
St George is perhaps surprisingly not the patron saint of Armenia, but Armenians were out on the streets a day early, as April 24 is Genocide Remembrance Day, when in 1915 the Turkish authorities began the arrest and killing of the around 1.5 million Armenians in Turkey, around 70% of the Armenian population. Armenians in the UK hold an annual march calling for Turkey to recognise the Armenian Genocide, calling on the UK government to put pressure on them to do so as a condition of joining then EU. This year they gathered outside Selfridges in Oxford St and marched from there to lay wreaths and to hand in a letter to Downing St. You can read more about the event and the Armenian Genocide in Recognise The Armenian Genocide.
I left the Armenians near Piccadilly Circus to take the tube to go to a no-show at Trafalgar Square, and then another further north, before making my way to Great Portland St, and here it was my planning that let me down. Great Portland St is around a kilometre long and I’d assumed without checking that I wanted the wrong end.
So I had to run a bit and arrived just in time for a lively protest by the International Congolese Rights organisation who were marching from the Congolese Embassy in Great Portland Street to Downing St calling attention to human rights violation in the DRC. It was an all-singing all-dancing event, and there were a lot of police surrounding them. More at Congolese Protest in London
I left them at Oxford Circus in time to make my way to the next march that didn’t happen. By the time I’d found it wasn’t there I was ready to go home.