Hey everyone just a quick foreword. The blog and podcast are going to slightly different places over the next month, as, in an effort to buy myself a little free time to work on polishing the podcast up a little I am running shows on Altamont and Spring Heeled Jack – two topics I have blogged about earlier. For the next few weeks I am going to blog a few short tales which interest me but are mostly too short to make into a podcast episode.

Today’s tale owes a huge debt of gratitude to New Zealand singer songwriter Emma G. Back in August she posted a meme to her personal Facebook profile along the lines of some text “So in the middle of the Civil War someone was like “You know what this country needs? A delicious steak sauce” followed by a close up on a bottle of A1 steak sauce, est. 1862. This did catch my imagination for a second, for what little I did know about this – and I started to wonder, like seriously.

I knew that pre Civil war, America’s favourite meat was pork, post war it became steak. Much of this did come down to the very land that the union and confederate states were arguing over in the lead up to the war. To simplify, many confederates felt they should have the option to settle in the land the union had acquired through land purchases, war and genocide… and bring their slaves with them. The union wanted these states not to be slave states. After the war of course much of the land got seized at way more than the 160 acres per person guaranteed by Abraham Lincoln’s Homestead act… coincidentally also of 1862… by the ‘Beef Barons’.
Please note I am glossing over something here with way more moving parts than I make it out to have… But I wondered was there some underlying political motive? Some social phenomenon I had not come across before? Some eminent historian I had not even heard of before with a book about how the war was fought over cattle, not slavery?

Well…. Before too long I found that was the wrong question. A1 Sauce was invented in Britain. What was happening in Britain in 1862 you might ask? I did. Quite a bit, but today I want to look at the story I had never heard of before. Thanks Emma for leading me towards it – That of Charles Lennox Richardson and the Namamugi Incident.

When in Rome…
“When in Rome do as the Romans do”. If anyone has ever wondered where the old proverb comes from, it came from the pen of 4th Century AD ‘Doctor of the Catholic church’ St Augustine, recalling the advice of the older priest St Ambrose- probably some time around 387AD. It’s origins are nothing earth shattering.
He arrived at a new job, teaching rhetoric to the wealthy kids of Milan. When he observed to Ambrose how odd it was in Rome they fasted on a Saturday, but in Milan they didn’t Ambrose uttered something similar to the proverb. It changed wording slightly over hundreds of years, till, in 1777 a book of letters by Pope Clement XIV were published with the exact phrase ‘When in Rome do as the Romans do’. I think we all understand what it means right? If you’re holidaying in Amsterdam it is OK to partake in a little weed at a cafe. If in Tehran, say, sorry women, headscarves and cover those pins out in public. Be like the locals, for their joyous excesses or for their bronze age prudishness. Be a respectful guest. I think most travellers do their best on this count… but then we also get our share of Westerners- these days often social media influencers are the ones we hear of – who fail at this in a major way. The first thing I should say is if Charles Lennox Richardson was around in 2019 I think he may well have been a Logan Paul type character.

So… who was Charles Lennox Richardson?

I really couldn’t find much on our protagonist, but all sources say Charles Lennox Richardson was born in London, England on 16th April 1834. He came from enough money to launch a career for himself as a merchant in his late teens, and in 1853 he moved to Shanghai, China. His product of choice was Chinese export ceramics. The Chinese had been exporting their porcelain for hundreds of years, largely with Central Asia and the Near East, before Europeans discovered their intricate – extraordinarily difficult to imitate pottery – the first pieces to reach Europe having first come to Europe via Istanbul in the 15th Century. In the 17th century it was in hot demand in Europe – the Dutch East India Company – the VOC- brought in an estimated 35 million pieces between 1600 and 1685. In Richardson’s time it was still crazy popular and in 1862, a 28 year old Richardson announced he had made his fortune, was retiring and would be headed back to England with his takings. On the way back he planned to stop in Yokohama, Japan.

Now it should be pointed out that Yokohama was a ‘Treaty Port’ in 1862. One way of describing a treaty port is to say they were cities who were open to trade with the ‘Occidental’ nations of the west. Another way of putting it is to say they were bullied into ‘unequal treaties’ with occidental powers; the victims of ‘gunboat diplomacy’. In other words the Chinese and Japanese had seen it in their best interests to let European powers establish little enclaves on their land and trade largely by their terms because option B would have been a hiding from the better armed Europeans. Treaty ports had sizeable enclaves for the Occidentals too, little slices of European life for them too – European looking buildings, clubs, churches, restaurants… race courses even. The occidentals had an easy life in these ports in many respects…Even people who would have been doing modestly in Europe could afford comfy lodgings, and servants to look after their every need. Inside the treaty port ‘When in Rome…” did not apply. You were governed by European rules, and no expectation existed to not treat the locals like garbage. Rules outside the treaty port? Well we’ll come to that. Japan did finally shake off the burden of treaty ports in 1899, after an incredibly fast modernization process meant they no longer had to put up with them.

So… when outside Yokohama?

Well, let’s say Charles Lennox Richardson did not get much of a chance to reflect on the words of St Ambrose.
On 14th September 1862, Richardson, alongside three other British subjects; Woodthorpe Charles Clark, William Marshall and Margaret Borradaile, rented some horses and went sightseeing. Their intended destination was the temple of Kawasaki Daishi. While picking up the horses the party was instructed that things were different outside the treaty port, and to ‘do as the Romans do’. In 1862, at the tail end of the Tokugawa Shogunate (please check out my blog on Yasuke the African samurai for more on earlier in the shogunate here), local warlords – Daimyo – ruled, in a feudal system with similarities to medieval Europe. The local daimyo was one Shimazu Hisamitsu. It was made very clear to the party, should you meet the Daimyo, you get off your horse and bow to the man.

The party were travelling along the Tokaido road, through the village of Namamugi, when they met the Daimyo coming the other way – carried on a palanquin (a litter carried by several men) and surrounded by a bodyguard of samurai. At this point Richardson could have been like St Augustine among the people of Milan… of he could have been like Czech fitness models Soloina Dolezalova and Zdenk Slouka- who disrespected a Hindu temple in Ubud, Indonesia in 2019 after ‘frolicking’ in the holy water. Dolezalova and Slouka did get away with a public apology, and having to attend and pray at the purification ceremony. Richardson wasn’t so lucky. In spite of repeated warnings he rode towards the palanquin, some reports stated boasting he had lived for years among the Chinese and he ‘knew how to deal with these people’ He was cut to shreds by the bodyguards. Marshall and Clark were also seriously injured in the incident.

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So…. What happened next?

Well… his body was recovered, and brought back to Yokohama to be buried. In spite of word having preceded his arrival among the enclave of his arrogance, and mistreatment of the Chinese in Shanghai, and word his own uncle allegedly (I could only find this statement in Wikipedia, not other sources and well… Wikipedia… take it with a grain of salt) laying the blame for the incident squarely on Richardson’s foolhardiness and arrogance, the British needed to demand restitution. If you have bullied your way into ports all around the region you cannot be seen to do nothing over a challenge to your authority. The traders got this, they had been bastards to the locals, and the locals have yet to revolt because Britain carried a big stick. Not to act put their lives in danger.

Britain demanded a huge settlement (of which £25,000 would eventually be paid) and the arrest and prosecution of the killers (which never did). The daimyo stalled, so Britain, in August 1863, sent in a squadron of warships, to Kagoshima, the Daimyo’s capital, and proceeded to bomb the living daylights out of the place. Now if you were looking at casualties, the death count in what they called the Kagoshima bombardment, and the Japanese called the Anglo- Satsuma war, they were small. The Japanese had time to move the civilians out, leaving several men to fire back at them from their boats, equipped with around 80 cannons. All up 3 British warships were damaged, 3 Japanese ships sunk. British casualties ran to 20 with a further 53 wounded, while the Daimyo lost 5 men with 20 more injured. The British inflicted heavy property damage to the capital however, destroying 500 buildings. So much destruction arose out of the arrogance of one young English merchant.

And…. there we have it. Probably safe to file this one under ‘Tales of History and Imagination are all around us’ one of those odd tales you come upon by happenstance. Please feel free to drop a comment, maybe a like? What do you think? – should we ‘do as the Romans’? Would Charles Lennox Richardson have been a star of Instagram if he were around in 2019? Were some Japanese right to be angry over the ‘Treaty ports’ they had forced upon them since Commodore Perry’s famed arrival and Convention of Kanagawa in 1854?

I’ll be back next week, this time looking at something which happened in Central Asia several centuries earlier. Keep an eye out for new posts and stuff on our Facebook page.
Simone.