Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

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  In September 1922 the British found themselves looking apprehensively once more towards the Dardanelles. Under the peace treaty Turkey had been dismembered: the Greeks occupied parts of Asia Minor, the British maintained garrisons along the Dardanelles. In 1920, however, a virile new Turkish State was formed, centred upon Ankara in the heart of Asiatic Turkey, under the leadership of the visionary Mustafa Kemal, a general who had played a brilliant part in the defeat of the British at Gallipoli. Kemal repudiated the peace agreements, and resolved to rid his country of foreign troops. First he drove the Greeks out, without much trouble, then he turned his attention to the British. The main British outpost on the Asian side of the Dardanelles was Chanak, whose ramparts and minarets we glimpsed so tantalizingly that June morning on the Lone Pine Ridge, and upon this little town the Turkish armies now threateningly advanced.

  In itself Chanak was not much: a shabby little Muslim town at the water’s edge, with a row of foreign consulates along the waterfront, for it was the port of entry to the Strait, a clutter of high-walled crooked streets, and a fortress still badly knocked about by the guns of the Royal Navy. For Kemal to threaten it, though, was an astonishing challenge. He was the representative of a defeated lesser Power: the British not only represented all the victorious nations, but were themselves, in their imperial capacities, now the towering suzerains of all the Middle East. To the British Government under Lloyd George the situation was charged with emotional nuance.

  The Colonial Secretary was Winston Churchill, who had first sent the imperial fleets and armies to the Dardanelles, and it was he who addressed an ‘inquiry’ to all the Dominion Governments, asking if they would send troops to the straits if fighting broke out. At the same time he told the Press what he had done. This was, in the context of 1922, a terrible gaffe. The Dominions had been left altogether in the dark about British policy towards Turkey, and they were infuriated by Churchill’s presumption. Mackenzie King, the prickly Prime Minister of Canada, first heard about the ‘inquiry’ when he read about it in his own Sunday newspaper, and all the Dominion leaders were affronted by what seemed to be a bland British assumption of their support. ‘Although the Dominions may speak with many voices for themselves as individuals,’ The Times had imprudently declared, ‘they speak as one when the time comes to speak for the Empire’: but nothing could be less true, when it came to this dubious imperial summons. The Dominions were tired of European squabble, intrigue and bloodshed, and they were notably disinclined to send their young men once again to the Dardanelles, where so many of their brothers lay uselessly buried.

  Only New Zealand and Newfoundland, the most thoroughly British of all the Dominions, unequivocally agreed to send troops if needed. The Australians agreed under protest. The South Africans did not answer. But the Canadian reply was the conclusive one. The Canadian Prime Minister was not competent, Mackenzie King coldly cabled, to commit troops to the Dardanelles upon a British request—such an action required the consent of the Canadian Parliament. Only eight years after George V’s unilateral declaration of war on behalf of his entire Empire, this was a portentous rebuff, and Mackenzie King well realized its meaning. ‘If membership in the British Empire’, he wrote in his diary, ‘means participation by the Dominions in any and every war in which Great Britain becomes involved, without consultation, conference or agreement of any kind in advance, I can see no hope for an enduring relationship.’

  So the white settler Empire, the bedrock of the whole imperial structure, which had demonstrated its kinship so movingly in war, displayed its maturity in the new world of the peace. The Chanak affair finally dispersed any movement towards a centralist Empire, with a single foreign policy or executive, and paved the way for an altogether different imperial machinery, paradoxically at once more formal and less binding. The crisis itself came to nothing, for the British presently concluded an agreement with Kemal, and the town was never attacked after all: but the episode presented a very different imperial image from those brave assemblies of loyal statesmen which had expressed the unanimity of Empire in the flush of victory.1

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  Though the Empire was to expand still further, and there were stil men eager to pursue the imperial mission, and propagate the imperial faith, from now on the story of the Empire would be the story of decline. Year by year the British vision would contract, and the abilities of the nation would chiefly be applied, not to projects of aggrandisement, risk or experiment, but to social reform at home. Economics rather than diplomacy would be the first preoccupation of British statesmen, and the prospect of dominion would no longer excite the nation’s young men. The British were becoming a more ordinary people in their wisdom. Nothing revealed this truth more frankly to the world than the surrender by the British Empire, four years after that triumph at the Firth of Forth, of the maritime supremacy which had been its inalienable prerogative, and its surest protection, since the Battle of Trafalgar a century before.

  In the heyday of Empire it had been a maxim of British policy that the Royal Navy should be equal in power to any two navies that might combine to oppose it—in practical terms, that it must be beyond challenge. Any lesser margin, it was thought, would be suicidal, and in the 1890s the British were spending twice as much on their fleet as any other Power. By 1918 this tremendous criterion was untenable. Wasted by the war, Britain could no longer afford to maintain such overwhelming odds. Besides, two of her allies, Japan and the United States, were now great maritime Powers themselves, with oceanic commitments of their own. In 1922, symbolically in Washington D.C., a new ratio of sea-power was devised by international agreement, and for the first time since Nelson’s day the Royal Navy was no longer the guarantor of the world’s seas, nor even primus inter pares. In future, it was agreed, the navies of Great Britain, the United States and Japan would be limited to the ratio 5:5:3, with those of France and Italy at 1.75. The Royal Navy would no longer be able to design its ships to its own imperial requirements, for there was agreement too on what type of ships each fleet might have, and what size they might be. Even Britain’s imperial fortresses, Fisher’s ‘keys to the lock of the world’, were no longer hers to use as she pleased: under the Washington Treaty she specifically undertook not to develop Hong Kong as a base, in deference to American and Japanese opinion, and presently, under the same pressures, she would withdraw from Wei-hai-wei altogether.1

  As a result of this treaty the British scrapped 657 ships, with a total displacement of 1,500,000 tons: they included 26 battleships and battlecruisers, among them many a proud stalwart of Beatty’s Grand Fleet. Never again would a Fisher at the Admiralty be free to set the standards of the world’s navies according to British requirements. No such magnificent fighting ships as the Queen Elizabeth, the apex of British naval assurance, were ever again constructed in British dockyards. Compromise set in. So ended Britain’s absolute command of the seas, the mainstay and in some sense the raison d’être of her Empire.

  The British public did not object, and even the representatives of the Dominions signed the treaty without demur. As it turned out the Washington Treaty was the only international armaments agreement that ever really worked—the Powers abided by its terms, and it provided a decade of respite from naval scares and extravagances. Hard times were coming for the British people, as the world declined into economic depression, and only sailors, imperialists and shipyard men much resented, or perhaps even noticed, the end of Rule Britannia. The glory days were gone already. Better a safe job and a home of your own than heavenly commands to splendour.

  1 Seven months later the surrendered fleet, taken to Scapa Flow in Orkney, scuttled themselves on a pre-arranged signal from Admiral von Reuter, watched by an astonished party of schoolchildren on an excursion trip from Stromness, some of whom thought it was a show arranged especially for them. As for the Royal Oak, between whose decks Drake’s Drum had sounded, twenty-one years later she was one of the first British warships lost in the next war against th
e Germans, when the submarine U47 found a gap in the Scapa Flow defences and torpedoed her twice: her shadow may still be seen there, marked by a memorial buoy, and ships of the Royal Navy salute it as they pass.

  1 President Wilson was shocked. Was Australia really proposing, he asked Hughes, to flout the opinion of the civilized world by profiting from Germany’s defeat and extending her sovereignty as far north as the equator? ‘That’s about it, Mr President,’ the Prime Minister replied.

  1Orpen (1878–1931) may have intended it so—he was an Irishman with a caustic eye for politicians. He spent nine months as an official artist at the Peace Conferences, but was to be best remembered for the compassionate pictures of life in the Great War trenches which he presented to the nation, and which are now in the Imperial War Museum in London.

  1 His wife too, sometimes. It was said that Lady Godley, wife of the British commander of the New Zealanders at Gallipoli, complained when she visited the wounded in an Egyptian hospital that they were not lying properly to attention.

  1 So ended Chanak’s brief celebrity. Now called Cannakale, it has lost its consulates too, but on a bluff above the town gunners of the Turkish Army still keep watch on the straits, and are still suspicious of foreigners until kindly talked to.

  1 In 1930. This most absolutely forgotten of imperial outposts was forcibly leased from China in 1898, in response to Russia’s acquisition of Port Arthur (now Lushun) across the Gulf of Chihli, and emulatively renamed Port Edward. The Royal Navy, which used it as a coaling station and sanatorium, grew very fond of it—the summer climate was delightful, it was a free port, and ‘the inhabitants’, reported a correspondent to The Navy and Army Illustrated, 1898, ‘are a comfortable set, easy to deal with.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A First and a Last Blow

  FOR another generation, though, Empire would not let them be. The Afghans were troublesome again; the Persians rejected their protectorate; the Indians were restive; Sierra Leoneans went on strike; Kenyans rebelled; the Egyptians murdered their Sirdar, second in succession to Kitchener himself. Above all the British were plagued by the anxieties of the closest, oldest and most reproachful of all their possessions, Ireland: for it was in Ireland, even before the Great War ended, that the prototype of imperial revolution was launched—the precursor of all the coups, rebellions and civil wars which were to harass the British Empire from now until the end.

  The English had been in Ireland for nearly 800 years. The Empire in France had gone; the Empire in America had come and gone; the vast Empire of Victoria had achieved its climax and now entered its decline; through it all they had kept their hold upon Ireland from the fortress-palace of their Viceroys, Dublin Castle. The Irish, for their part, consistently resented this occupation. Overwhelmingly Catholic in a predominantly Anglican Empire, proud of traditions as ancient as the English, they were never really reconciled to government from London: even the deliberate settling of Scottish Protestant families in Ireland, which gave some counties of the north a loyal nonconformist majority, had failed to stifle the perennial Irish instinct of rebellion. Time and again the Catholic Irish had risen, always to be subdued, and nothing it seemed could quench their spirit for long. For several centuries an Anglo-Irish gentry, the Protestant Ascendancy, had owned most of the land and governed the destinies of the country, but the Irish still honoured their own ways, preserving their national identity through every rebuff, and periodically giving their hearts to some new political Messiah.1

  Many Englishmen refrained from reading Irish history, wrote Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, ‘but it is a brand of knowledge as indispensable to the statesman or publicist as morbid anatomy to the surgeon’. He was right.2Ireland was the running sore of English politics. The Liberal Party had been split asunder by it, political reputations were made or broken on it. In the years before the Great War the House of Commons habitually devoted two days a year to Indian affairs, and one to colonial, but seldom a debate passed without a passionate exchange on Ireland. To most Englishmen it was a domestic problem, concerning a constituent part of the United Kingdom: but to the Irish, and their sympathizers abroad, it was a matter of Empire, and the Irish patriots habitually claimed to represent all the subject peoples in their struggle for liberty.

  The Liberal solution for the problem was Home Rule—limited self-government for Ireland—but two Home Rule Bills had failed to get Parliamentary assent, one being defeated in the Commons, the other vetoed in the Lords. The Conservative-Unionists had shelved the issue during their years of power, concentrating instead on social reform in Ireland, but in 1911 the Liberals came back into office dependent upon the Irish vote, and a third Home Rule Bill was introduced. The veto of the peers was now limited to a delaying power of two years, so its passage seemed almost certain. All being well, Ireland would be self-governing within five years. The Irish Nationalist Party, Ireland’s constitutional representatives at Westminster, accepted the promise and worked to implement it, and several Government committees, in London and in Dublin, began to prepare the machinery of Home Rule.

  Not everyone, though, viewed the prospect sanguinely. The Conservatives remained immovably hostile—and there was always the chance that they might return to power before Home Rule became law. The more extreme of the Irish Catholic patriots, including the ultra-secret Republican Brotherhood, would accept nothing but absolute independence. And most fiercely of all, Home Rule was opposed by the Protestants of Ulster in the north.1 Tough, down-to-earth, implacably anti-Catholic, they wanted nothing of a self-governing Ireland. They vehemently distrusted the southern Irish, with whom they shared little but their island, and they believed that under Home Rule their whole manner of living, not to speak of their thriving industries and well-run commerce, would soon fall prey to Papist or Socialist bigotries. An Ireland run from Dublin would be an affront to the organic hierarchy of Empire—and it was after all Mrs Alexander, wife of the Bishop of Derry, who had most famously expressed the imperial instinct for order and decorum—

  The rich man in his castle,

  The poor man at the gate,

  God made them, high or lowly,

  And ordered their estate.

  The peculiar situation of Ireland was to prove harbinger to the disintegration of Empire itself, and it was brought to a head by the arrival on the coast of Antrim, one spring night in 1914, of a small and undistinguished steamship.

  2

  She was a collier, the Clydevalley, 460 tons, twenty-eight years old, ex-Londoner, ex-Balniel, and familiar for years on the regular run between Glasgow and Belfast, the capital of the Irish north. On April 25, 1914, this unlovely vessel, its hull red with rust and blackened with decades of coal-grime, sailed quietly into the small packet-port of Larne, eighteen miles north of Belfast, with a cargo of 25,000 German rifles and 2½ million rounds of ammunition. They were to be used, if need be, to prevent by force the creation of a united self-governing Ireland.

  Larne was a pleasant humdrum town, very typical of the Protestant north. Its streets ran gently down a hillside to the harbour, and there was a prominent Protestant church, and a discreet Catholic chapel, and a few shops, and a straggle of offices and warehouses along the water-front, where twice a week there docked the ferry-boat from Stranraer, forty miles away on the Scottish coast. Larne did not seem at all a passionate place. Its social order was secure—there was the Smiley family in the mansion outside town, there was the Protestant Minister in the manse, there was the usual handful of professional families, there were the dockers and seafarers in their cottages at the waterside, there was the Orange Order, the ancient society of Protestant militancy which bound all ranks and classes in sectarian loyalty. The Catholic minority kept to itself, and life in Larne was generally orthodox and uneventful—the rich man in his green demesne, the poor man at the docks.

  A visitor indeed might have thought himself not in Ireland at all, that island of vitriol, but over the water in Scotland. The light was a washed, Scottish light, the sea
had a clear Scottish glitter, the accents of the people sounded nearer Inverness than Dublin, and when the weather was right you could actually see, dimly beckoning across the Irish Sea, the distant outline of the Wigtown coast. The people of Larne were proud enough of being Ulstermen, but were still attached to Scotland too, one of their most popular holiday trips being a weekend visit, at excursion rates, to the home of their ancestors over the water.

  All Protestant Ireland looked metaphorically towards Larne that night, for upon the supply of weapons, so its people believed, depended Ulster’s future. ‘Home Rule’, they had been told by their leaders, ‘is Rome Rule’, and they were prepared to resist it even at the price of rebellion against the British Government at Westminster—of treason, in fact, against the Crown. All classes were united in this resolve, from the baronial industrialists of Belfast, who foresaw economic catastrophe in a self-governing Catholic-dominated Ireland, to the labourers’ wives of the Londonderry slums, who simply hated Catholics. A Provisional Ulster Government was already in being, a shadow-regime for the north, and the public resolve was passionate, sometimes fanatic. Only guns were needed, to give it teeth.

  It was a kind of resistance movement, but of the oddest kind. In Africa it would have been called a revolt against the Imperial Factor, the interference of Whitehall with the affairs of settlers: the Ulster Protestants were intensely loyal to the Crown and to the Empire, but they felt that the Liberal Government’s policies were treacherously mistaken. Far from wishing to leave the Empire, they wished only to remain for ever part of the United Kingdom itself. This underlying loyalty, all the more poignant because it was to become, over the years, increasingly unrequited, gave to the Ulster Movement a character of its own. Though it was potentially revolutionary, half the British Establishment sided with it. The British Army was almost unanimously with these rebels, and so were all the imperial activists, from the cleverest Milnerites to the crudest surviving Jingos.