Transport for London has apologised for a tribute to the historic defence of Rorke’s Drift written on an Underground station’s whiteboard after one person complained that it ‘celebrated’ colonialism.
A TfL staff member wrote the note on Dollis Hill station’s whiteboard on Tuesday morning to commemorate the battle which was immortalised in the 1964 film Zulu starring Michael Caine. The post read:
“On this day in history: On the 22-23 of January 1879 in Natal South Africa, a small British garrison named Rorke’s Drift was attack [sic] by 4,000 Zulu warriors.
“The garrison was successfully defended by just over 150 British and colonial troops. Following the battle, eleven men were awarded the Victoria Cross.”
The station’s staff were later accused of “celebrating colonialism” by one commuter and TfL issued an apology to “any customers who were offended”, saying the post was “ill-judged”, reports The Telegraph.
“We are speaking with our staff to remind them of what is and isn’t acceptable,” TfL added.
TfL staff are encouraged to write motivational or interesting posts on their whiteboards daily at stations across the capital.
The Dollis Hill staff who wrote, and subsequently had to erase, the post is an Army reservist and from a military family.
He was flummoxed that someone would be offended by an apolitical, historical note, saying: “It was only fact, it was just what had happened. There was no opinion in there, so when someone said they weren’t happy with it, in line with what TFL tell us to do if someone complains and that we should avoid a conflict situation I just wiped it off.
“People had been going through all day taking pictures of it and no one had complained, not one person said anything about it for hours – it had been up since 7 am and it was after lunch that this one person said something.”
Breitbart London reported Wednesday that a Winston Churchill-themed cafe in London had to remove its mural of the war-time hero after leftists repeatedly vandalised it with “imperialist scum” and “warmonger” graffiti.
Universities and other public spaces across the UK have faced protests from cultural Marxists who want to demolish memorials to historical figures who have shaped the world, including removing Nelson’s column in Trafalgar Square because Viscount Horatio Nelson was a “white supremacist”.
In 2015, the student union-led ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, resulted in the statue of Cecil Rhodes, former prime minister of the Cape Colony, being removed from the campus.
The movement to “decolonise” education spread to Oriel College, Oxford, England, with the student union voting in favour of removing their statue of Rhodes; however, the monument remains unmolested after alumni donors threatened to pull funding.
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