Daily Grind?
With the drawn out planning that had engulfed the first week and a half of August now over, Britain slipped back into gradual acceleration, cautious but steady powering-up. This was achieved by continuing construction of aircraft carriers, their air groups and the expansion of the army; by shoring up British resource stockpiles and by continuing research into strategic technologies.
The funding and energy put into technological advancement was shown clearly by the reshuffling of the RAF’s tactical bombing command structure, due to revolutionary new developments in Britain’s understanding of the an army air command structure. This change would result in RAF light and medium bombers being better organised and better able to withstand continued bombing missions.
The integration of light and medium bombers into the ground forces that they were fighting with would allow longer and thus more effective bombing missions.
The rest of August would see no new military deployments, no changes in the United Kingdom’s gradual accumulation of resource stockpiles and no technological advancements. It did, however, hold one key event.
The island of Jamaica was first a colony under the Spanish, when it was named Santiago. However England (later Great Britain and the United Kingdom) took control of the island in 1655 and named it ‘Jamaica’. Its largest city, the port of Kingston, held a well-equipped dockyard, but the strategic importance of the island and of the Caribbean in general was far smaller than in its 18th Century heyday. Faced with a declining strategic importance and thus declining investment from the homeland, the population of Jamaica (2.8 million today) grew increasingly restless. The temperature was rising, and the first spark would set off a wildfire. The spark, when it came, was in the form of the shooting of a Jamaican by a British soldier of the governor’s personal escort. The Jamaican, a youth of 16 years, was shot three times in the back by the soldier, a Sergeant Harris from England. He had believed that he had seen the youth stealing fruit from a small shop in Kingston. In fact, the youth’s mother, who owned the shop, had told him to bring his ill aunt some fruit. He was shot while carrying the fruit across the road to his aunt’s house. Realising his mistake, Sergeant Harris left the scene, leaving the youth bleeding to death. The clear nature of Harris’ guilt and the outright refusal of the governor to put him on trial rightly angered the community. In less than a week, mass demonstrations led to a march by a crowd including armed Jamaican policemen on the governor’s house. The governor was able to escape on his yacht. Sergeant Harris was arrested by members of the Jamaican police force, put on trial, found guilty and imprisoned.
The British government, with no troops in the region and no intention of redeploying any there, took the only course of action that it could. Condemning Sergeant Harris’ actions, the government ensured that the governor was arrested when he arrived in Haiti and extradited to the Bahamas, where he was flown back to England. Then, Lloyd George rushed through Parliament a bill giving Jamaica independence on a level equal to that of nations like Malaya and India. The crowds in Kingston dispersed, the governor’s house became the house of the President and Jamaica became at least a semi-independent state.
The Jamaican people rose up and demanded independence after the ‘August Murder’.
The British government gave the island a large amount of autonomy soon afterwards.
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