7 September 1973
Well, if it’s 7 September, it must be… yes, of course: the 51st anniversary of the most shocking diplomatic incident in all of maritime history — the carrot-hurling scandal of 1973.
Yes, I’m sure some of you beastly cynics are wondering why you’ve never heard of it, if it’s so important and historic. Well, clearly, you weren’t paying attention at school, because here’s the news story all about it from The Straits Times of two days later.
This is, incidentally, what has allowed me to pin down the date — otherwise my only source would have been this frankly quite silly and unreliable book.
The article, published on Sunday 9 September, you see, refers to Official Displeasure the day before, presumably in response to the incident itself the day before that. Well, it supports the idea of 7th being the correct date, anyway. And, as you can see, it was a big and serious thing, what with the Icelandic government threatening to break off diplomatic relations over some root crops.
This was an incident during the second of three cod ‘wars’ between 1958–61, 1972–3, and 1975–6, during which Icelandic fishermen got not unreasonably pissed off with British trawlermen scooping up delectable ocean foodstuffs rather too close to the Icelandic shoreline. The Brits had been doing this for centuries, and rather thought they could continue indefinitely.
Strictly speaking, of course, they weren’t wars. According to Gunther Hellmann and Benjamin Herborth in the Review of International Studies in 2008, they were “militarised interstate disputes in the transatlantic community” — but they did involve both armed vessels, and a good deal of aggression. One popular tactic was to drag a net cutter behind a gunship and slice through the ropes attaching the net to the trawler, releasing the catch. There was also some firing of non-explosive missiles, which were still capable of causing significant damage.
A gentlemanly dispute this was not. In fact, if we jump to the last paragraph of the Straits Times story…
…you can see that the bulk of the offence was actually taken at HMS Lynx repeatedly trying to ram patrol boat Thor, just off the east coast of Iceland. However, British military personnel being what they are (and, after all, our national character including at least as much taking-the-piss as it does aggression), they chose to compound the insult to the dignity of the Icelandic navy by hurling vegetables at them from about a foot away.
Ultimately, some years later, a deal was done because Iceland threatened to leave NATO, and if they’d done that, NATO would no longer have had guaranteed access to the GIUK (Greenland, Iceland, and the United Kingdom) Gap, a vital bit of the North Sea which was handy for submarines during the Cold War.
After the deal, the Icelanders were happier, and the British were not. One of the consequences of having fished in someone else’s waters for so long (and one of the reasons for carrying on) was that thousands of jobs in and around Britain’s northern fishing ports depended on it. When the disputes were finally settled, a great many of these were lost. (That doesn’t make it right to have nicked anyone else’s fish, but it is a consequence of the deal.)
So, yes, this isn’t really the carrot-throwing incident of 1973, but it is strange and (relatively) obscure history, so into the repository of idiocy it goes. Join me soon for some other, possibly more consequential, nonsense, whenever the hell I have time to write it up.
