My heart leapt last month when I read of Blairite smoothie Ben Bradshaw telling the British parliament that there was no need for panic over recent deaths in Turkey from avian ‘flu.
Instantly, I spotted another opportunity to recite the evidence of the great Albert Harris in the seminal case of Regina vs. Gilbert. Not to mention a chance of pushing the peace process forward.
Said Bradshaw: “In Turkey, in some of these small backyard plots, people actually sleep with their birds. They have very, very intimate contact with them. As far as we know, this doesn’t happen in this country.”
The Guardian reported ‘a shocked silence.’ And I wasn’t one bit surprised. What did surprise me was that the British embassy in Ankara wasn’t reduced to a smouldering ruin by dawn of the following day.
Had Sir John Holker been in the House, he might have obviated the offence to the people of Turkey. He was Attorney General in 1877 when asked by Home Secretary Richard Cross for a definitive opinion on whether the Court of Appeal ruling in the case of Dodd and the duck could be applied to Hone in the matter of the hen.
The case of Hone and the hen was sensational in its day, sparking learned discussion (even a Times editorial!) of whether the behaviour involved could be considered mortally sinful, given that beasts, not having souls, were incapable of giving, or, more pertinently, of withholding informed consent to the act under scrutiny.
Sir John explained that the decision re. Dodd and the duck had been grounded not only in precedent but in the court’s opinion that the act with which Dodd had been charged was physically impossible, a consideration which apparently did not arise in the case of Hone and the hen. There are things which can be done with a hen that can’t be done with a duck.
Disappointingly, no record has survived of the cabinet meeting which pondered the Holker opinion before moving on to mundane matters such as Disraeli’s decision to purchase a controlling interest in the Suez Canal and ongoing argy-bargy with Gladstone over the Bulgarian revolt and the Russo-Turkish War.  
The relevance of Hone and the hen to the Northern Peace Process might seem to some a tad remote. Let us call to mind, then, the well-attested story of the Cullybackey man marooned for years on a desert island with a comely pig and a jealous Alsatian who, when a beautiful woman arrived deshabille on the beach on a piece of driftwood and offered in gratitude for landfall to do anything he desired, asked would she ever mind taking the Alsatian for a walk.
All of which provokes the thought that the chances of revival of the Stormont Assembly would surely be boosted were the parties involved to shrug off all bigotries and adopt instead the inclusive approach epitomised in the exchange between prosecuting counsel and the aforementioned Albert Harris in the trial of George Gilbert.
Prosecutor: “Mr. Harris, on the day in question, were you proceeding along a lane adjacent to the farm of Mr. Clarke?”
Harris: “I was.”
Prosecutor:“Would you describe for his Lordship what you saw?”
Harris: “Well, George Gilbert was standing in the doorway of the barn with a sheep.”
Prosecutor: “Yes. And what was he doing?’
Harris: ‘Well, he was messing about with the sheep.”
Prosecutor: “By that statement, are we to understand that the accused was having sexual intercourse with the sheep?”
Harris: “Er, yes.”
Prosecutor: “Mr. Harris, what did you do when you observed this shocking spectacle?’
Harris: ‘I said, “Mornin’, George.’’
Isn’t there a lesson in that for us all?
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Hugh Thompson’s death last month went largely unnoticed. I suppose it’s only people of a certain generation and a particular perspective who’d recognise the name now. But what he did deserves remembering.
In March 1968, Thompson, 24, was flying one of those helicopters with a bubble-shaped windshield above the Vietnamese village of My Lai when he saw a platoon of American soldiers shooting unarmed civilians cowering in ditches. Piles of bodies and dead water buffalo were strewn across the scene. He landed and appealed to the officer in charge, William Calley, to stop. Calley told him to ‘mind your own business.’
Thompson took off again. As he did, he and his crew saw the soldiers on the ground resuming chasing and shooting survivors. Thompson landed again, this time between a group of villagers and the troops, and ordered his crewmen, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, both 21, to fire at any soldiers shooting civilians.
Three years later, Thompson and crew member Colburn (Andreotta was killed in combat a month after My Lai) helped convict Calley at a court-martial. “Rallies for Calley” were held all over the US. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Calley’s home State, Georgia, urged citizens to leave car headlights on to show support for the killer. Calley was pardoned by Richard Nixon after serving four days in jail. No other soldier was ever convicted of the massacre. For years, Thompson and Colburn were subjected to death threats and insult and shunned by former colleagues.
In 1998, however, the pair were awarded the Soldier’s Medal. “There was no thinking about it,” Thompson said at the ceremony. “It was something that had to be done, and done fast.”
But what was remarkable about the intervention of Thompson, Colburn and Andreotta was that it wasn’t ‘done fast.’ It hadn’t been spur-of-the-moment. They’d taken off and had hovered above the scene before landing a second time. Thompson had then stood in front of a bunker where survivors were crouched, flanked by his crewmen, and had called in gun-ships to carry four adults and five children whom they coaxed out into the open to safety, as the ground troops stood silently watching.
Colburn recalled: “Glenn and I were staring at each other, dumbfounded.” He says he never actually pointed his gun at an American soldier, but thinks he might have opened fired if they’d fired first.
As the gun-ships took off, Thompson and his crew saw a small child stir among the dead in an irrigation ditch. Andreotta waded through bloodied corpses to pull the bundle out. Thompson then flew the child to a hospital.
In March 2001, Thompson and Andreotta travelled back to My Lai to dedicate a school and a peace park. Alongside them at the ceremony stood Do Hoa, the boy their long-dead comrade had dragged from the death-clogged ditch.
The My Lai three were unusual, but not a once-off.
Lawrence Rockwood, a captain in the 10th Mountain Division, was court-martialled and kicked out of the US army 10 years ago after he defied orders and personally investigated the torture of detainees at the national penitentiary in Port au Prince, Haiti. He had kept a photograph of Hugh Thompson on his desk
Army specialist Joseph Darby of the 372nd Military Police Company, despite threats to his family back home in Maryland, steadfastly insisted on reporting fellow soldiers who he knew were torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Baghdad.
And so it goes. In the midst of evil, there’s always good, in the midst of cruelty, always heroism.