Page 22 - Who Was Sapper Brown

Sapper Brown’s World

In the year 1878,1 in the proud days of the British Empire, the war with Russia in the Crimea between

1854–1856 (when Britain was allied to Turkey), and the Indian Mutiny of 1857–1859 were both very
recent and traumatic memories. Sapper Brown, born around 1850, would have had his boyhood filled

with tales of derring-do from these conflicts and he may well have been inspired to join the Army as a
result.

The Suez Canal, creating a direct route to India, the jewel of the British Empire, had only just opened

in 1867, and the perceived need to safeguard the canal was paramount in the mind of Britain’s Prime

Minister, Benjamin Disraeli:

‘The canal and the route to India had to be protected from the Russian Bear, still with a sore head from the
defeat in the Crimea and still anxious to advance into the warm waters of the Mediterranean.’2

The opportunity to protect this route, and to establish a British presence in the eastern Mediterranean,

came in the aftermath of another war. It was indirectly due to the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878,
the fourth war between these neighbours in the 19th century, that Sapper Brown came to Cyprus in the

first place. This war ended with the Treaty of San Stefano, imposed on the Ottoman Government by a
victorious Russia on 3 March 1878 in the village of San Stefano just west of Istanbul, and with the balance

of power in Europe now greatly disturbed.

The major European powers, including the United Kingdom, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, revised

this Treaty at the hastily-convened Congress of Berlin barely three months later (13 June – 13 July 1878),
concluding it with the Treaty of Berlin.

Just before this Congress began, as a result of behind-the-scenes jockeying for support, the British

signed a secret agreement with the Ottoman Empire, on 4 June 1878. This Cyprus Convention, as it
became known, granted control of Cyprus to the United Kingdom in exchange for their support of the

Ottomans against the Russians during the Congress of Berlin and thereafter. The details of the Cyprus
Convention, and the fact that Cyprus was to be leased to the United Kingdom, were made public with an

announcement in Parliament on Monday 8 July.3

In the meantime, on 1 July the British Government had despatched a secret telegram to Vice-Admiral

Lord John Hay in Crete, in charge of the Mediterranean Fleet (recently reinforced with three battleships
from the Channel Squadron), commanding him ‘to take over Cyprus forthwith from the Turks in the name

of our Queen’. The Government simultaneously ordered Lieutenant General Sir Garnet Wolseley, then in
England, to sail to Cyprus to take on the role of High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief.

Wolseley was one of the most popular generals of the Victorian era, a hero in Sapper Brown’s world, and

he was to provide the inspiration for ‘the very model of a modern major-general’ in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
operetta The Pirates of Penzance, which would premiere in New York in December 1879.
4

1 Thus began ‘A Study in Scarlet’ by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. 1878 was a great year for literature, and a momentous one for

Cyprus.
2 Dietz, Peter (1994), The British in the Mediterranean (London: Brassey’s), p. 84.
3 Cavendish, Anne, ed. (1991), Cyprus 1878 – The Journal of Sir Garnet Wolseley (Nicosia: Cyprus Popular Bank Cultural

Centre), p. 1. (Hereafter referred to as ‘Wolseley Journal’).
4 Holmes, Richard, ed. (2001), Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press)

12