Berwick-upon-Tweed, the British Town at War With Russia
Did an administrative oversight really mean a bucolic English town ended up at war with Russia? Whatever, the locals still like to re-enact it.
The Keasbury-Gordon Photograph Archive/Alamy
For the first half of the 20th century, residents of a small town straddling the border between England and Scotland believed they were engaged in a long-simmering war with Russia.
Thanks to a bureaucratic mistake, it appeared that all 12,000 residents of Berwick-upon-Tweed were excluded from the 1856 peace treaty between Russia and England that Queen Victoria announced after the Crimean War.
This omission was made possible by a 1502 treaty between England and Scotland that succeeded in ending hundreds of years of land arguments over the tiny border town—it had already switched sides 13 times. But the agreement also greatly confused its classification by defining Berwick as “of but not within the Kingdom of England.”