Weekend feature: The Battle of New Orleans

Over recent weekends, we have published a number of articles about interesting incidents in local people's jobs, including Mike Hill's adventures with the Queen's motor car in Sweden and his exploits in Africa while last Sunday Nigel Epps described a frightening incident at sea on a bulk transport carrier.

Today, Bob Cartwright describes a presentation he gave in New Orleans:-

The Battle of New Orleans

For six years in the late eighties, I had a somewhat controversial job working for British Nuclear Fuels trying to re-establish the reputation of the nuclear industry after an incident at Sellafield in 1983, a task that became all the more difficult after the Chernobyl disaster of 1986.

The basis of the campaign I ran was to invite people to make up their own minds by visiting the Sellafield site. We had built and opened the Sellafield Visitors Centre in 1988, were running coach trips around the site, were inviting TV crews in and generally moving away from the industry's old, and unsuccessful approach of initially, secrecy, and then just telling the public that nuclear power was 'Safe' and 'Necessary'.

Fortunately, the new approach, dubbed "Open and Honest", was working according to opinion research, albeit it had been so controversial at first that the TV advertisements also made it onto the news bulletins.

The campaign even went on to win the Public Relations industry's top award in 1989, although the Guardian's editor, who was on the selection panel, resigned in protest at what his colleagues proposed. That made the ITN national news too.

News of the campaign spread internationally and, in 1989, I received an invitation to address the Annual General Assembly of the American Nuclear Society in New Orleans. This was quite something, as non-Americans rarely spoke at this event. It was big too. I was told there would be around 600 in the audience. I have to admit to being excited too to be visiting New Orleans, a city I had never been to.

Lonnie Donegan

Before setting out, I recorded on cassette (remember those things) Lonnie Donegan's version of the song originally recorded by Johnny Horton, 'The Battle of New Orleans' which tells the story of the 1815 battle from an American perspective. Hearing the words of the chorus, I titled my talk "And the British Kept A'Coming" as it tied in with the almost a quarter of a million visitors that were pouring into the Sellafield Visitors Centre in its first year.

I arrived in New Orleans armed with the music cassette, a Kodak Carousel of slides (this was in the days before Powerpoint), and a video cassette with copies of the TV ads, all in the USA format which differed from the video formats in the UK – hoping the technology would work.

My confidence was not increased when I met the technical team at the huge hotel. They were not used to multi-media presentations as American speakers at conferences tend to use a somewhat folksy approach and rarely used any slides or illustrations. In contrast, I was planning to use all that the current technology would allow. We set up speakers and I coached the hotel staff when the various recordings would be used – and kept my fingers crossed it would all work.

Glancing through the list of speakers, I saw I was the only non-American on the programme, and looking through the Speaker Biographies, noted with interest that I was the only one not to be a prominent member of a local Church group. So praying all would go well was out for me!

An audience of 600

I must confess to nerves. It was a huge hall and it was packed. There was only one British representative in the audience – the Energy correspondent of the Financial Times, so no added pressure!

Once I was introduced – with no reference to my lack of religious affiliation – it went really well. I kicked off by telling the story of the Battle of New Orleans from the British perspective:

"You will recall the battle took place in January 1815" I declaimed. "It was the final battle of the war of 1812 to 1814 between our two nations. The Peace Treaty had been signed in December 1814. We knew that the war was over, the peace treaty signed and assumed you guys did too. We were heading into New Orleans unarmed for a night out on Bourbon Street when you simply gunned us down."

I finished my introduction by declaring it a perfect example of excellent communications not always being a good thing!

My dates were correct about the Peace Treaty – the "unarmed" bit was not. But it was an excuse to get the whole audience on its feet singing the chorus to Lonnie Donegal's song:

"We fired our guns and the British kept a-comin',
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago,
We fired once more and they began to runnin'
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico."

I have to say it was quite a feeling conducting 600 Americans from that stage, most of them laughing and enjoying a break from a rather serious conference agenda. Fortunately, the rest of the presentation went well, the technology worked and it was all well received.

So much so that I wanted only at that moment that my old school Physics master had been there. Years earlier he had flung me out of his class with a torrent of abuse after I achieved an all-time low mark of 7% in a Physics exam. "I bet he'd never addressed the American Nuclear Society" I thought to myself!

The Natchez

That night, it was time for my night out on Bourbon Street to celebrate. But before hitting the French Quarter, we – I had met up with a party of old friends, all Americans, at the conference – it was a trip on the 'Natchez', one of the stern-driven paddle steamers that runs tourist trips on the Mississippi out of New Orleans.

We were well into the Cognac by the time the ship passed the site of the 1815 battle with the captain telling the story over the loud-speaker system. As you would expect, his description was from an American perspective. But then he astonished me by saying:

"Mind you, I hear there's a guy in town telling the story as the English see the battle" ....before retelling my version from that morning's speech, word for word. To this day, I don't know how he got hold of it, and as I was not operating off a script, how he had it pretty well accurate in every respect. But it was a lovely moment.

I have to confess that the night turned into a bit of a riot after the Cognac, two or three of the notorious Hurricane drinks served in the famous Pat O'Brien's bar and then visits to numerous music venues – and worse dives as I can just about recall – before getting back to my hotel room at 4.30am just in time to head straight to the airport and home.

Terrible News from Home

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a day to remember for the wrong reasons, for on the TV screens everywhere came news of the Hillsborough disaster back home.

It was seeing those moving scenes of the commemorative one minute's silence 27 years on from Anfield at Thursday's match against Borussia Dortmund that reminded me where I was that very sad day in April 1989 – in New Orleans, reinventing the history of the Battle of New Orleans.

This article is from our news archive. As a result pictures or videos originally associated with it may have been removed and some of the content may no longer be accurate or relevant.