Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  It is very quiet. If I stand still I can just hear the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral ringing in muffled celebration: the servant girl says there is a wedding this morning, a friend of her sister’s marrying a boy from Sandy Bay. Yes, there is a child already—a ‘spare’, she calls it, laughing—born a year ago. No one exactly certain who the father was. The girl, whose name is Annie, wants to go to England to be ‘in service’ the Government will not allow any girl to leave the island until she is twenty-three, so she has another four years to wait until she sees her first bus, or train, aeroplane, television programme or daily newspaper. Until then she is happy to clear away the Weetabix and Hoover the bedrooms and earn a few pounds to put away in the savings bank. She yearns to know what the outside world is like. She met a girl from Tristan once, who came to St Helena and left in great confusion, unable to cope with the frantic pace of life in Jamestown—she was frightened by what she called the rush hour in the island capital, when perhaps ten cars leave for the hillside, and ten shops all shut at the same hour. ‘They tell me that England’s pretty busy when compared with us,’ observed Annie, gravely. ‘I often wonder what happened to little Jessica when she got up to London. I wonder what I will think, too. It’s so quiet here—so very peaceful.’

  The ship’s arrival had, as always, caused great excitement. We carried tourists, wealthy Americans who were passing through to the Cape, and who fell upon the old streets of Jamestown with locust-like zeal. But we carried some Saints, too, and as they stepped from the dinghy through the great swirls of the rollers, there were tears and hugs and hoarse greetings, people who hadn’t seen each other for months, even years, in touch and view again.

  There was a Saint Helenian soldier, a man who had joined the Royal Engineers twenty-three years before and who had never been home. He had a young wife now, a frightened little girl from Liverpool, who, for days before our arrival, would scan the horizon ahead for the first glimpse of her new home. Her husband had promised to return, and she had agreed to come with him, to give up the rainy streets of Toxteth and the grey waters of the Mersey for a tiny island 700 miles from the nearest land. But on the morning we made our landfall and she had seen the low and ragged outline beneath the clouds, she retreated to the poop deck and silently smoked a cigarette while gazing at our wake, and back towards her old abandoned home. From time to time her husband, his eyes shining with his own excitement, would walk back through the ship to find her. But each time, seeing her staring into the distance, he would back away and leave her, understanding, no doubt, how she must have been feeling. I met him in the street next morning, his hand being pumped by an assortment of grizzled passers-by. His wife had been spirited away within minutes of the boat docking: her new in-laws had taken her home for tea, and by the time he caught up with her ‘it was as though she had been living here all of her life’. He knew it would be all right, he said. The Saints ‘are an awful nice bunch of people’.

  The Empire had, on its better days, been both run by and peopled by ‘a nice bunch of people’ such as these. These places I had journeyed to and through were, by and large, good places—organised kindly, directed along traditional and well-meaning ways, peopled by men and women whose days moved to the comfortable English routines—from Weetabix to Ovaltine, from Sunday communion to the Friday knees-up, from Christmas and Boxing Day to the Queen’s birthday and hot cross buns. They took their ‘O’ levels and their Royal School of Music examinations, listened to the BBC relay broadcasts, sent their telegrams from Cable and Wireless, dispatched their letters by the Royal Mail and learned to call the man in the big house on the hill ‘Your Excellency’. They committed few crimes, stirred up little trouble, kept the Queen’s peace and collected coloured pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Di. And they were, on a small scale, reflections of the larger, grander Empire—that vast assemblage of nations upon which the sun never set (though the original remark—‘the sun never sets on my dominions’ was written in German by Schiller for Phillip II of Spain, and had nothing to do with Britain at all).

  And so here I sit, in an East India Company room, looking down across a Royal Naval fortress, at a Victorian harbour and a Regency town. It is easy to slip into a fine Imperial reverie, and remember how we came to possess only morsels like these as the parting gift from our days of world dominion. Consider how once, from Aden to Zanzibar, from the ice-bound rocks of Arctic Canada to the bone-dry ovens of the Kalahari, from groves of Malayan durian trees to the apple orchards of Tasmania, from the ‘friable and spongy rocks’ of Malta to the granite peaks of Mount Kenya, and, most gloriously of all, from Kashmir to Kannayakumari, northern bastion to southern tip of India, Great Britain was, as the New York Times happily conceded on the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, ‘so plainly destined to dominate this planet’. Endless tracts of land, a quarter of the world’s peoples, every race and creed, from Ashantis and Assamese, Zeptiahs and Zulus, from Buddhists to Zoroastrians, fell under the seemingly eternal paramountcy of London.

  True, some of the possessions were not possessed at all, as such: the self-governing colonies, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, Natal, New Zealand, Canada and the six Australian colonies made their own rules and deferred to London only rarely; India, a splendid law unto herself, above and beyond what she and her servants would have regarded as the undignified rabble of mere colonies; and the protectorates—Somaliland, Nyasaland, the Solomons and that part of Aden between Muscat and Yemen—which were, strictly, foreign countries, whose citizens may have been subject to but not necessarily of the British Crown, and were thus not entitled to the kind of amiable treatment supposedly handed down in the colonies themselves. There were other genera in the Colonial Office menagerie—protected states, trust territories, and a bastard tribe that included such forgotten ends of the earth as Starbuck Island and Vostok Island, and which were lumped together under the heading ‘Miscellaneous islands and rocks’.

  The Crown colonies, as varied in governmental form as they were in governed peoples, were at the centre of it all. Some had parliaments, some had appointed assemblies, some gave the vote to all, some to a few (to one-eighteenth of the population of Malta, for example), some had no laws at all. Some, gigantic and complicated, had all the trappings of independent states—the Gold Coast enjoyed the attentions of an administration that included a cinema technician, a tug master and a grade one foreman platelayer (in 1950 Mr Blackwood, Mr Stewart and Mr Reynolds, all shipped out from Britain); others had only the rudiments—Tonga, for instance, had just one British Minister (of Finance) and was otherwise run by colonial servants a thousand miles away in Fiji.

  This immense and majestic collection of peoples and places was administered by the men of the Colonial Office. They were unhurried folk, bureaucrats of splendid aloofness and determined superiority who were encouraged to pursue any private field of endeavour or research for which they cared, rather as though the office was an out-station of All Souls. One note records that a Mr Darnley of the West Indian Department had a keen interest in whales, and spent much of his time before the fire contemplating, instead of the possibilities of a putsch in Jamaica, the complexities of ambergris and the relative blubber thickness of Fin and Sei.

  The clubbability of the place led, perhaps inevitably, to a certain smugness. In 1956 Sir Charles Jeffries, Deputy Under-Secretary for the Colonies (and a contributor to Punch and the Listener), was content to declare that, ‘The Colonial Office will still have immense continuing responsibilities for as long as any planner can usefully look ahead.’

  It might have been useful had he looked ahead just ten short years; or he might perhaps have been a little suspicious that he and his colleagues had laboured for so long in temporary quarters of Sanctuary Buildings, Great Smith Street, and that the marvellous structure they had been promised just after the war had taken so long to materialise. That structure was never built; by 1966 the Colonial Office suffered the indignity of merger, subsumed into the Commonwealth Relations Office; a mere six mont
hs later, on 7th January 1967, it disappeared altogether. The existence of a Colonial Office meant the perpetuation of the colonial mind in an age that, quite suddenly, had developed a loathing for such things. And, in any case, most British colonies had disappeared: Aden had, and Zanzibar; not one of the protectorates was still protected, nor any trust territory, nor any protected state. India had gone, and Australia, Canada and her dominion colleagues were standing proud and alone. Yes, most of the colonies had gone. Most, but not quite all.

  Historians of Empire will still argue over the reasons for Britain’s Imperial decline. Was it deliberate, or did it happen by accident? Was the gathering of Empire deliberate, indeed? Did this greatest accretion of power and influence the world has ever known come about as a consequence of a sustained fit of absentmindedness? Theses for Doctorates of Philosophy and Bachelors of Letters—and books, of course—will continue to stutter from the typewriters and the word-processors for years to come. This book will certainly not attempt to answer the question. Before we take our final look at the stranded hulks of the Imperial adventure, though, it might be useful if, briefly, we pass by the way-stations of the great decline, if only because so many of the stations themselves bear a remarkable similarity to the fragments that remain.

  Where did it all begin? The loss of the American colonies, of course, brought to an end one phase of the adventure; but the Treaties of Utrecht and of Paris had by then been signed, and the growing dominance of Great Britain within Europe was about to ensure that a new British Empire was about to rise from the wreckage of the old. It was the scuttling of that second Empire that was the long and painful affair which only today seems to be coming to an end.

  The Indian Mutiny—or the First War of Indian Independence, as it is known today by every schoolchild from Amritsar to Assam—sent the first whisper of concern around the London clubs. The mutineers had been subdued, naturally, but not at all easily, and that came as a shock. Compared with the succession of easy victories that had secured most Imperial territories, India was proving, as they might have said in the gymkhana clubs over a not-so-chota peg or two, ‘deucedly tricky’.

  Then there was the Boer War, so hard fought and so hard won, often so humiliating in its losses and eventually so Pyrrhic in its triumph, a massive force of Britain’s mighty army ranged against, and often punished by, a ragged mass of distempered Boer farmers. If the mutiny had checked the hubris, the events at Magersfontein and Spion Kop interrupted, then slowed, and finally stopped the progress. Sure, the aggressive temper could still be called up—Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet, with its accompanying massacres that were, in truth, rarely committed by British empire-builders, took place in 1903, after the events in South Africa; but then there was the Great War, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, and it could safely be said the Empire had reached and passed its apogee, and never would be quite the same, nor as powerful, nor its masters as confident again.

  The first piece of property that was actually let go—if we forget Heligoland (which Lord Salisbury swapped for Zanzibar) and the Balearic Islands of Minorca and Majorca, which were ceded to Spain under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802—was a tiny corner of China known as Weihaiwei. It was a port, on the southern side of the Gulf of Po Hai, and had long been regarded as strategically important, as well as having—a rare thing, in China—an extremely pleasant climate. The Chinese were accustomed to having it snatched away from them (the Japanese had occupied it in 1895, and destroyed the Chinese Imperial North Ocean Fleet at anchor, much as they were to do with the Americans in Hawaii—another station that was briefly in British hands—forty-six years later) and when the British demanded it, acquiesced, in 1898. The British wanted the port as a summer station for the Royal Navy China Squadron, and to provide some Imperial balance to the Russian occupation of the port on the northern side of the Gulf. (And the knowledge that the Germans also wanted Weihaiwei provided a final argument for Lord Salisbury to raise the Union Jack there.) The Russian acquisition was called Port Arthur; Britain renamed Weihaiwei Port Edward, and as such it remained for thirty-two pleasant years, most of them under the benign governorship of ‘the charming, plump and unctuous’ James Stewart Lockhart, who was said to have been a ‘scholar-administrator in the Confucian sense’.

  But American influence in the world had begun to grow; new arguments were interfering with the geopolitical assumptions that had emanated from Downing Street during the heyday of Empire; and when, at a conference in Washington in 1921 it was suggested that Britain might give up Port Edward, voluntarily, and leave China to run her own port at her own whim and leisure, Britain’s Ministers agreed. Not without a grumble—Winston Churchill made a forceful argument that to abandon Weihaiwei would mean a massive loss of prestige for Britain in the Far East, and newspapers in London complained that the Government was knuckling in to pressure from an upstart rival to world dominion. But the nerve had gone, the purpose had faltered, the need for territory seemed to be on the wane. Britain gave up Port Edward, the famous sanatorium where unnumbered matelots had recovered from malaria and gazed out at the sea and the mountains of Shantung was handed over to the Chinese Navy, and the fleet sailed away, for ever. (Eight years after the British left the Japanese moved in again, and the place did not become properly Chinese until 1945. Since then it has been one of the very few Chinese cities where the population has actually fallen: Port Edward had 100,000 inhabitants, today there are only a tenth as many.)

  The ‘rendition’, as Balfour called it, of Port Edward, may have been the first deliberate act in the rundown of the Empire; the fall of Singapore, that most terrible of wartime blows, showed beyond all doubt that Britain had lost both the Imperial touch and, more important, the Imperial ability. By 1942—the date of the surrender, February 15th, was noted by some latter-day Imperialists as being particularly inauspicious: on the same day twenty-nine years later the Kingdom’s shillings and pence gave way to the beastliness of the decimal currency—Britain was militarily incapable of keeping her Empire going. Singapore’s fall was the beginning of the end.

  It had been the axis of the eastern possessions. India, Australia, Borneo, Burma—all the colonial governments and governors had rested their confidence in the knowledge that the fleet was ready, that Illustrious, or Revenge, or Indomitable would sail at a moment’s notice from a dockside only a few days’ steaming away from whatever problem had arisen. Sixty million pounds had been spent after the Great War to turn Singapore into the Portsmouth of the East—the colonies to derive most security from its presence, the Malay States, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong, all contributed towards the cost of pouring concrete and bending iron into the greasy swamp at the eastern end of the great peninsula.

  But only two battleships ever stayed in the dockyard, and then for a week before sailing off. The fortress had guns with which to defend itself—but they were firmly bedded in concrete, faced the southern sea, and could not be turned around. So when the Japanese forces entered Thailand, and then overran Malaya, and found the colonial citadel without its Navy and without any effective firepower pointing towards them, they pushed on to victory without a second thought.

  The colony’s rulers still could not imagine that the Japanese would succeed; when a worried Churchill cabled that, ‘The City of Singapore, must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death’, the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, laconically remarked that he trusted the British Army ‘would see the little men off’. They couldn’t, and they didn’t. The Imperial Japanese met the Imperial British across the Johore Strait on 8th February; one week later General Percival sued for peace, and the surrender was signed in the old Ford motor car factory out on the Johore road. Singapore was renamed Syonan, and all the rubber and tin went off to Tokyo.

  Never again would the Asians—from the Punjabis to the Cantonese—have full and complete faith in the word, the might or the ability of the British. The mirror cracked, the glass dimmed and the muscle became flaccid; no matter that the war was l
ater won; no matter that Singapore came back into the royal fold in 1945 (after the period when it was officially recorded as being ‘temporarily in hostile Japanese occupation’); no matter that the gin slings were slung at the Raffles Hotel and returned nabobs strutted and swaggered just as they had before and just as Sir Stamford would have wished—that February day was the moment when the Imperial will was challenged, and was found wanting.

  Eight months later, and the British Government was to be found officially toying with the idea of running down the Empire. The Atlantic Charter, issued in 1941, had talked of ‘the rights of all people to choose the form of government under which they live’—but when an apoplectic Governor of Burma wired to know if that meant that the Burmese were going to have such a right, he was told that no, of course the Charter did not apply to peoples under the benevolent charge of the British, but to hapless indigents like the Abyssinians who had been jackbooted into submission by less civilised powers, in this case, the Wop. No, no worries, old man—The Atlantic Charter not to be interpreted as end of Empire or any such damn fool idea.

  But the next winter, after Singapore had fallen and India looked even more restless than usual and the Burmese Government was itself in exile (up in Simla—very cold in winter, the Burmese aides complained), a new kind of policy began to be conceived. And these words were at its nub:

  ‘It is therefore the duty of “Parent” or “Trustee States” to guide and develop the social, economic and political institutions of the Colonial peoples until they are able without danger to themselves and others to discharge the responsibilities of Government.’