Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire

by Simon Winchester

  And how they agonised over it! Mr Attlee and Mr Eden, Lord Halifax and Viscount Cranborne and Lord Stanley argued and dithered, sent copies to the nervous dominions, decided to act out the policy of the entire Declaration (which was a great deal longer), then decided not to, then decided to abandon the whole document and make it secret and pretend it had never happened. But it had: planted in the minds of two men who were later to become Prime Minister, and two others who were to have a long and continuing influence on British foreign and colonial policy, were the seeds of a new scheme of things: after the war India was going to be handed over to the Indians, and then, in an unending cascade, all those other dominions and protectorates and trustee states and protected states and mandated territories and Crown colonies were going to be helped, slowly and surely, to stand on their own two feet, with England looking on, less a weary Titan, more a proud parent.

  But the war, and its ultimate result, briefly clouded this new appearance of policy. In victory, Britain seemed to regain her Imperial energies. She had doughtily recaptured all the lost particles of Empire—the West Kents fighting hand-to-hand with the Japanese on the tennis court at Kohima, to win back Burma, and no less a grandee of Empire than King George’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, accepting the enemy surrender at Singapore. And the British sphere of influence in Europe and North Africa—particularly on the littoral of what was now truly, it seemed, the British lake of the Mediterranean—had actually increased, tremendously. But it was all an illusion: almost as swiftly as the dreariness of post-war Britain became apparent to her subjects—the rationing, the bitter weather, the bombed buildings, the shoddiness and weariness of it all—so, to the world, did her new and diminished role. She was on the second tier of a new grand alliance of nations that were richer, more powerful, more expansive and more confident than herself; and, fatally for the Empire, she had no stomach for foreign possession, no enthusiasm for hanging on to much more than the mere trappings by which her glories had been proclaimed, only three decades before, to a humble and obedient world.

  If India went, the axioms had it, the end was inevitable. Curzon had foretold of that: ‘If we lose it, we shall step straight away to a third-rate power…your ports and your coaling stations, your fortresses and your dockyards, your Crown colonies and your protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary, or the tollgates and barbicans of an Empire that has vanished.’ But India did go, swiftly and explosively, divided and perhaps cruelly misdirected by those Britons who were determined to get away. And once India had gone, and King George stopped signing his letters with the letter ‘I’ to denote him as Imperator, and once the Union flag that had flown night and day over the Lucknow Residency had been returned to Windsor Castle, so, gradually, and with some pain and not a little sadness, the remaining shards of Empire fell away—they were, it was felt, too costly, too inconvenient, too restive and anyway, in many cases ready (if not always quite able) to stand alone.

  Burma and Ceylon were the first to peel away, and then, with consequences still so unhappily evident today, the mandated territory of Palestine. Newfoundland, Britain’s oldest colony (Sir Humphrey Gilbert had taken possession of it in 1583), a place of codfish and pinewoods and where they used dogs for pulling carts, had gone bankrupt before the war; once the fight was over the Bank of England had a look at the Newfies’ account book, pronounced all now well and—such was the fading Imperial spirit—organised a referendum so the loggers and the fishermen could decide what to do next. The first time round half opted to stay colonials, to considerable irritation and embarrassment; they had a second go, and voted to confederate with Canada, and nestle up alongside Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. By January 1949 Newfoundland was out; one more colony down, seventy-odd to go.

  There was a last rush of blood to the head in 1953; wet and miserable though that June day dawned, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth (the first monarch in nearly a hundred years not to be described as ‘Imp.Ind.’, but instead merely as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’) provided an opportunity for the final grand march-past of Empire. Suitably The Times announced a final Imperial triumph: Mount Everest had been climbed by a British party (though it was a New Zealander and a Nepali who actually made it to the top); the massed bands and regiments that thumped and clattered through the rain marched with even a little more spring and verve as a result.

  There, behind Lieutenant-Colonel G. N. Ross of the Gordon Highlanders (‘attached Royal West African Frontier Force’), were the massed thousands of the colonial contingents—armed police detachments from North Borneo and Trinidad, Air Force detachments from the Aden Protectorate Levies; the Barbados Regiment, the Leeward Islands Defence Force, the Kings Own Malta Regiment, the Malaya Federation Armoured Car Squadron, the Fiji Military Forces, the Somaliland Scouts, 154 HAA Battery, East Africa, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and a dozen more besides. And there were the colonial rulers—the Sultan of Zanzibar sharing a carriage with the Sultan of Perak, the Sultan of Kelantan with the beaming and drenched (for she declined to carry an umbrella) Queen of Tonga. The entire procession, miles long and impeccably drilled, from Colonel Burrows, OBE, TD, of the War Office Staff who led, to the final man of the Fourth Division, the Sovereign’s Escort, who brought up the rear, was a last celebration of Empire—a muted and diminished version of the great jubilee of Queen Victoria, on a warmer and sunnier June morning fifty-six years before.

  One by one the colonies departed. Comets and VC-10s and destroyers and frigates brought ever more junior members of the royal family to the rituals of Independence—the lowering of the Union flag, the lament of a piper or the solitary bugle call, the celebration ball and the hopeful speeches, the luncheon at the Government House and the unnoticed departure for London on the morning after. Usually the pomp was perfect, sometimes not—at the Bahamas ceremonies an awning fell on poor Prince Charles’s head, and the frigate dispatched to help St Lucia on her road to freedom collided with the mole, and all the sailors standing at attention along its decks fell over in a grand confusion.

  But via evenings of grand ceremony or amusing bathos, and in the wake of ugly fighting or quiet agreement over lunch at Lancaster House, they went. The Sudan and the Gold Coast, Malaya and Somaliland, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Western Samoa, Uganda and North Borneo, Malta, Basutoland, Aden Colony, Mauritius and Swaziland, Grenada, the Gilberts, the Ellices, St Kitts, St Vincent, Antigua, British Guiana, British Honduras—even the Condominium of the New Hebrides which was jointly run by the British and the French and was so consequently ungovernable that, it was joked, cars would drive on the right on Mondays and on the left on Tuesdays. By the 1980s, when television viewers in England had seen what they assumed had been the last of the flag-lowering and heard the last echoing of the bugles, once Churchill was buried and Suez was relegated to history and no longer embarrassed anyone—by that time the colonial Empire was, it was safely imagined, dead, buried and if not forgotten at least consigned to the past and no longer wished for, if little regretted either. All was gone.

  But stay! In truth it was not quite gone. Almost, but not quite. A few colonies did remain, unwilling to let go, or unable to stand alone. A few governors still were appointed each year or so, a few geese still had to be plucked to provide plumes for a few Imperial helmets, a few grand houses still had to be maintained and lawns mowed and servants paid to keep a relic Imperial enginework chugging along. And in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, up a stairway so long and twisting, so dark and unmemorable that newcomers would take a week or so to learn just where they worked and all other workers in more glamorous departments professed ignorance of its whereabouts, even its existence—up in the eaves and among the gurgling radiators and the dusty collections of the registry and the accountants, was an office that ran it all.

  I tried to get there once to see
the place from where the Empire was directed. But the Foreign Office is a place without a soul these days, no longer peopled by the clever and the romantic; and I had a dry note from a head of department saying that no, a visit would not be possible, but that perhaps a few questions, if suitably and solemnly written, might be answered in due course. There seemed no point in an arid correspondence, so I gave up this small aspect of the quest—far easier to fly to Cockburn Town, or to sail to Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas than to inspect the heart of Imperial power in London!

  In a sense, though, it was a pity. The very reason for my journeying, after all, had been to make a last inspection of the Empire’s remains, to try to see how we were managing these final responsibilities of ours. It might have been instructive to talk to the civil servants whose parishes were the faraway outposts I had seen. I would have liked to ask the lady on the St Helena desk why she took a full month to answer a simple query from the Castle, or to ask the gentleman whose allotted tasks included the daily management of Pitcairn Island just why it was that Mrs Christian’s queries from Adamstown had to proceed across the sea by morse code, and that supplies for the colony were sent by courtesy of a market gardener in south London, who listened out for the plaintive cries from the island on his ham radio set.

  I wanted to ask, I think, why it was we seemed to have given up on our last few charges—why, simply because they were so few, so far between, so unpeopled and so wanting in importance, they were of less intrinsic interest than when there had been many, and the Empire had been grand, and full of moment. The ethos of Empire had never been—or never during its accretion, anyway—an ethos that had much to do with global dominion, or the fierce assertion of naked power. We had power, of course, and once possessed power is a difficult thing to relinquish. But our success in making an Empire, in running it, in handing back and in winning the respect and, yes, the love even of those whom we had ruled—our success in all this grand endeavour came in no small part because we cared. We felt we had a mission, a divine right. We attended to the details of the thing. We managed the Empire with men and women of compassion and skill, energy and intellect, and something of a romantic dream about them. Whether they directed, from the Office, or whether they ruled, as members of the Service, the colonial mandarins seemed to be a breed who cared. They had no need to do so, these District Commissioners and these Colonial Secretaries and these Governors and Commanders-in-Chief. But they seemed by and large to have done—ambitions and territorial jealousies seemed to run second to fascinations and enthusiasms, as though the colonial officers were pursuing their private and amateur interests, and had come out here, or gone over there, in pursuit of obsessions and hobbies, rather than aggrandisement or Machiavellian intent.

  I have beside me, on this fine old East India Company desk, a copy of The Colonial Office List for 1950. The Empire was just then beginning to wane; the thick pink book was a little less thick than the year before, and the editorials and the essays showed signs—easier to read now, in retrospect, than at the time—that the purpose was indeed faltering, that the steel was showing its fatigue. But there are, at the back of the book, 200 pages that display the human reason for the Empire having been, on so many levels, a force for general good. The pages contain the complete lists of all those men and women in the Colonial Service—all those currently stationed overseas, involved in the daily devotionals of Empire. I take a page at random, and the full complexity of the thing becomes immediately apparent:

  William Henry DeLisle, organiser of the anti anthrax campaign on the island of Nevis; Cicely Denly, hospital matron, Mauritius; Arthur Dennier, engineer on the Ugandan telephone service; Thomas Dennison, district magistrate, Kenya; John Denny, superintendent of Police in Singapore; Ronald Derrick, author of The History of Fiji, The Geography of Fiji, The Fiji Islands; Lawrence Des Iles, Chief Inspector for Poor Relief, Trinidad; Frederick Deighton, OBE, mycologist, Saint Lucia; Frank Dixey, author of A Practical Handbook of Water Supply, now with the Geological Survey of Nigeria; Henry Dobbs, Assistant Secretary to the Western Pacific High Commission and author of Some Difficulties in Dirac’s Representation Theory. They were, in truth, a remarkable body of men and women—Haileybury and Harrow schooled them, Balliol and Caius polished them, the finer ethos of Imperialism motivated them. A disproportionately large number of them came from the manse and the cathedral close—of 200 governors who served during the first sixty years of this century, thirty-five were the sons of clergymen: men of intellect and good sense, Church of England and high traditions, Barsetshire principles sent out to minister to the brown and yellow in the world outside.

  Some are still in the traces. The sixteen last relic islands attract the final survivors of the Colonial Service, and they shuttle slowly around the globe, a treasurer here, a secretary there, and finally governor, or administrator, or commissioner at last. They all know each other—Dick Baker in St Helena sends his Christmas card to David Dale in Montserrat, Rex Hunt in Port Stanley writes the occasional letter to Eddie Brooks in the Turks and Caicos Islands; the Tristan Administrator takes up a new job in Hong Kong, the Treasurer in Jamestown takes a ship for Gibraltar and a post at the Convent, and nurtures the fond hope that he’ll be made Governor in Anguilla before the place goes independent.

  It would be pleasant to suppose that old colonial hands are still around to manage old colonies. Unhappily, though, there are now more surviving responsibilities than there are old hands to be responsible for them. The corps d’élite is winnowed to a very few, all about to retire from the service for all time; the surviving islands are having to be governed, run and—more unfortunately—directed from London—by the lesser men and women in a diplomatic service that has no time for and no interest in what Empire stood for, or what it stands for now. A colony may be lucky—it may still win the attentions of men who feel affection for the idea and the ideal; more usually these days it is unlucky, and its affairs are directed and its people ruled by civil servants who are either young, ambitious, and on their way to better and more exciting things, or by the old, the unsuitable, the drunk and the incompetent who are not able or willing to play in the greater games of major league diplomacy.

  A fellow works in some minor capacity in our Embassy, in some remote country, pushing paper in disconsolate fashion, upsetting no one, inspiring even fewer. His fifty-fifth birthday comes up, and the Personnel Department in London decides he must be given his head-of-mission job before he leaves the service. He can’t go to Khartoum—too tricky, too potentially important; he can’t go to Lima, or Ulan Bator, or even to Fernando Po. But how about, let’s see—Ascension Island, or the British Virgins? No trouble there—parish pump stuff, really, a few cocktail parties in the evening sun. Very pleasant. Fellow ought to be rather glad.

  And so off goes the Third Secretary (Commercial) to take up the post of Colonial Administrator; he lives in his lovely old bungalow up in the hills, drives his Ford with the Union flag flying from the bonnet, he invites the island grandees to drinks and ‘At homes’ and—if the entertainment allowance provides—to dinners as well—and keeps his territory out of the public eye for the three years of his posting, and then he leaves. If he ever realised that his job was unimportant, the pleasantness of its routines softened the realisation; he could have made something of it—could have nagged and irritated and cajoled and tried to leave the island in better shape than when he found it. But as like as not he wouldn’t have bothered: too much trouble, London didn’t care for the place, and so, keen for an easy last few years in Diplomatic life, why should he care either?

  And in that lies the problem. The islands that remain are not, by and large, places for which London has any time to spare. No one—either those who labour in the bureaucratic labyrinths in Whitehall or, more sad to say, those who find themselves in the Government Houses and colonial bungalows out in the far-flung fragments—has time, or energy, or the inclination to spare to deal with problems that, when set beside the graver matters of the world
, must appear so monumentally insignificant. The matter of where to place the petrol storage tanks in St Helena or how to find a ship to take toilet rolls to Pitcairn or what to do when there is a massive rainstorm over Ascension that washes out the road to Two Boats village—all these are, quite reasonably, of almost no significance at all.

  But an ailment untreated has a habit of becoming an affliction untreatable. To ignore the needs—small, insignificant needs maybe, but needs nonetheless—of our remote dominions is to court disaster. The Falkland Islands proved that to all the world—for though there can be no argument that the events of April 1982 sprang as a direct consequence of Argentina’s invasion of the islands, it was Britain’s inability and unwillingness to deal with a nagging colonial problem that led to the frustration that prompted Argentina to make her foolish and fatal move. I hold no brief for the Argentine Government in this matter; nor is this account concerned with the merits of the various claims to those windy islands—that ‘bunch of rocks down there’ as President Reagan liked to call them. But some aspects of the early chapters of the tale are incontrovertible: Argentina had a passion to win the islands back for her own; the British refused to countenance the claim, kept Argentina talking about the claim—and sundry other less momentous matters, too—for nearly two decades, coquettishly hinting at a willingness to discuss the claim, but never doing so. Signals were sent out suggesting that a deal might be possible—the Royal Naval vessel that guarded the islands was to be withdrawn, private exasperation was expressed about the islanders’ intransigence, diplomats talked of the need to consolidate the long-standing friendship between the two great sovereign states on either side of the Atlantic. And yet the years went by, and precisely nothing of any substance happened. The problem was not considered a great one; the men and women who were deployed to manage it, to contain it, were not of sufficient calibre or commitment to realise its potential, nor to devise a means of reaching a solution.