by Jan Morris
The millions who did go often went for the wrong reasons, paying altogether too little attention to the New Zealand dairy products, and altogether too much to the amusement park, the dance hall and Joe Lyon’s gigantic grill room. The Bright Young Things of Mayfair treated it as a spree, misbehaving themselves in the Nigerian Handicrafts Exhibition, or strumming the ukulele as they paddled about in symbolic pools. As P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster put it, ‘I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia—but not Bertram…. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast village and were looking towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indies section….’
‘I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire,’ says Father in Noel Coward’s This Happy Breed, ‘and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems.’1
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It was difficult to remember, as one watched the fashionable young clowning at the British Empire Exhibition, that only twenty-five years before their parents had seen Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as an apex of pride and excitement. A generation that had survived the Somme, Kut and Gallipoli had different standards of indulgence. Few ordinary Britons were much moved, for instance, by the prospect of new imperial responsibilities in the Middle East, or the news of riot and disturbance that arrived week after week from India. The middle-aged and the governing classes might care about the British Empire: the young and the working people did not.
Its symbols had gone threadbare. The opulence of the Victorian heyday had been suited to an age of hope and progress, presided over by an almost mythical mother-figure. Since then the British had lost their grand optimism, and all the paraphernalia of imperial power, the banners and the elephants, the guards of honour and the peregrinating battleships, seemed to many citizens irrelevant to the times. The time for posturing was over. So was the age of Carlylean hero-worship which had been essential to the old romance. Hardly a new national hero had emerged from the Great War: the generals were discredited, the admirals were no Nelsons, Lloyd George was a Welshman and even the genuine epic of T. E. Lawrence, when dressed up for the public by the popular Press, came out dated and unconvincing, like a late yarn from Henty.1
But there were other sources of excitement. There was Hollywood, for instance. Hollywood easily out-dazzled the fading splendours of the pro-consuls and the Empire-builders, and through its illusory window people glimpsed new worlds more compelling, more voluptuous, than ever the Raj had been. Once the mill-girls and the bank-clerks had dreamed of Indian adventures, African romances, even death or glory upon the imperial battlefields—
Yet ever ’twixt the books and his bright eyes,
The gleaming eagles of the legions came,
And horsemen, charging under phantom skies,
Went thundering past beneath the oriflamme.1
Now they were transported instead to the glamorous new world of the film stars, where all life seemed to be played to incidental music, and where even stories of the Empire itself, a not infrequent subject, were given the gloss of fairy-tale. How could a Viceroy compete with a Fred Astaire, or a Governor’s lady, however gracious, match up to a Norma Shearer? Wembley was a poor competitor for the Sunset Strip, and the chairman of the Empire Day Movement was bound to admit that in the Britain of the 1920s there were ‘many dark corners where the rays of our Empire sun have not been able to penetrate’.
Thick and fast came rival historical movements, too, which seemed to make the existence of Empire more than ever peripheral to English life. The rise of the Labour Movement to power had nothing whatever to do with Empire. Communism was passionately opposed to it. Empire did not save the British people from the Great Depression or the General Strike. Empire contributed nothing to the new functional architecture, the new abstract art, the social experiments that were gradually changing the form of English society. So immediate and so vivid in the 1890s, Empire now seemed dimmer and more distant, and was becoming, like the British institutional architecture of the day, pompously retrospective. The message of the New Imperialism, wrote Philip Guedalla in 1924, so thrilling to the generation of fin de siècle, now held no more than ‘a dim interest for research students’.
With lack of interest went doubt. They doubted everything, and many now doubted the justice of the imperial idea. Gandhi’s influence was everywhere. Opposition to Empire was not yet a political platform, not even among the Socialists, but it was a temper of thought growing ever more fashionable among the British middle classes, and was allied with pacifism, internationalism and a woolly sort of Marxism. Among students it was the contemporary orthodoxy—‘This House’, as the Oxford Union blandly voted in 1933, ‘will on no account fight for King and Country.’ Among readers of the progressive papers it was almost taken for granted. Kipling found himself reviled by the trendier critics; ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ no longer seemed to sing the majesty and beneficence of Empire, only its vainglory; Rupert Brooke was out, and only the lines of more bitter war poets, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, were quoted now in the common-rooms.
There was a reaction then against all things Victorian, oratorios to antimacassars, and this inevitably rebounded against that ultimate Victorianism, the British Empire. The social structure of the nation was slowly changing, the landed classes were giving ground to the up-and-coming bourgeoisie, and so the hold of Empire weakened too, for it took loyalty, consistency, discipline to rule a quarter of the world—as the young American observer Walter Lippmann perceptively observed, no Empire in the history of the world had long survived without a governing class at the centre.
Most damagingly of all, the imperialness of Great Britain was now more often treated frivolously. It became rather funny. The New Zealander David Low was tilting at the Empire when he created his preposterous cartoon character Colonel Blimp, forever declaiming the glories of the past to his Turkish-bath cronies, and here is the humourist ‘Beachcomber’, J. B. Morton, in the Daily Express:
ADVERTISEMENT CORNER
Will the gentleman who threw an onion at the Union Jack and repeatedly and noisily tore cloth during the singing of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ at the Orphans’ Outing on Thursday, write to Colonel Sir George Jarvis Delamaine Spooner, late of Poona, telling him what right he has to the Old Carthusian braces which burst when he was arrested?1
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In the field some of the imperialists, too, especially the younger men, now had their niggling doubts. ‘It is the virtue of the Englishman’, wrote Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1913, ‘that he never doubts. That is what the system does for him.’ But it was no longer true. The men who ran the Empire, many of them ex-servicemen themselves, could hardly help sharing the new national attitudes. To some of them it was now apparent that the British Empire was not eternal after all, that parts of it indeed might not outlast themselves. They understandably resented this prospect, not merely because it might cost them their jobs, but because they believed still in the British mission, and thought they knew more about the true state of things in Burma or Somaliland than did President Wilson in Washington or the radical intellectuals of NW3. The villains of the Victorian Empire-builders were the villains of their successors too: meddling MPs, Americans, leftist agitators, lady do-gooders, self-righteous newspapers and their ignorant reporters. Their fathers, though, had argued from positions of power and certainty: by the 1920s the young imperialists were playing, as they might say, upon a losing wicket.
One senses consequently a new modesty in their approach, a new frankness with their literate subjects. Public education had never been a forte of the British Empire, which had frequently left the task to missionaries and private enterprise, but even so an educated subject class had emerged in several parts of the Empire. In India the western-style universities, established in the prev
ious century, had by now produced thousands of men with western manners and ideas, and Indians vastly out-numbered Britons in all but the highest ranks of the administration. In Africa there was a sizeable class of educated blacks, mostly mission-trained, and many young men were now going for further education in England. In the new provinces of the Middle East there existed already an urbane and sophisticated intelligentsia, rooted in the Islamic culture, and as the years went by many more young men there, too, absorbed western ways and values, until the Anglicized subject of Empire, with his upper-class English accent, his freedom with English literary quotations, his acquaintance with the Wars of the Roses, became almost a generic figure, whatever his own language, origin or religion, from Sierra Leone to Calcutta.
All this meant a modification of the ritual aloofness of the imperialists, maintained as a matter of policy, as of taste, at least since the Indian Mutiny. It was impossible now for the British to live altogether separately from their subjects, as they had with such success for nearly a century: and though the new proximity often led to irritation, and sometimes to more rather than less misunderstanding, still it meant that the British in the field were less arrogant and disdainful than they used to be. We need not doubt that for most of them, in 1930 as in 1860, the white race was inherently superior to the black, the brown, the yellow or the half-caste. A note of condescension, at best, coloured every instinct of the Briton in his Empire. Now, though, he was more likely to be self-conscious about his attitudes. It no longer came quite so spontaneously, that clap of the hands for the bearer, that stick on the bottom for the Gandhian demonstrator. Even the forms of Empire came to be questioned sometimes. Was it really to impress the Orientals, younger men sometimes wondered, that the Empire maintained its pomp and pageantry, or was it to sustain the self-esteem of imperialists?
Racial bigotry, one of Empire’s ugliest aspects, was past its worst, and the imperialists in the field were matured, softened perhaps, weakened almost certainly, by the changing order of things. ‘All over India’, wrote George Orwell, ‘there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part’: and he told the story of a journey he made by train with a man of the Indian Educational Service, in whom he gradually discovered a common antipathy to the imperial values. ‘We parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple’—and with reason, for these half-hidden self-questionings were to prove as effectively treasonable, in the long run, as any armed rising against the Crown, or conspiracy of Bolsheviks.
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India was lost, anyway, and the imperialists were more concerned now with the Crown Colonies, once the poor relations of Empire, now its chief hope. None of them enjoyed any real responsibility, and most of them seemed likely to remain within the Empire for ever and ever. The dependent colonies were expected to pay their own way—the total British expenditure on them in 1930 was only £3 million, and the tropical possessions were mostly in an appalling state of dereliction: but they seemed to represent the imperial structure of the future. ‘The Empire is Still in Building’, said the Empire Marketing Board in one of its neo-Biblical slogans, and the allegorical figures likely to appear now in the imperial propaganda were smiling Negroes of Jamaica or West Africa, garlanded Fijians, resolute Malays or diligent junk-men of Hong Kong.
Since it seemed likely to last longer, the colonial administrative service now offered more coveted careers than India. There was in fact no Colonial Service as such. Some colonies chose their men by competitive examination, but most recruits were selected by patronage. Officially the patron was the Colonial Secretary: unofficially, throughout the 1920s, it was one of his private secretaries, Major Ralph Furse, and it was Furse more than any other man who set the tone of the imperial services in the post-war years.
He was a conservative of a complicated sort. The son of a crippled agnostic—‘he taught me to ride a horse, to tell the truth, to love my country and to honour soldiers’—Furse was a member of Pop, the ruling society of Eton, and he remained a very responsible schoolboy all his life. He liked to call his seniors ‘Sir’, and had a sensible weakness for the great and famous: ‘I bowed as we shook hands,’ he recorded of his first meeting with Milner, ‘then, on an instinctive impulse, I drew myself up to my full height and looked him straight in the eye. He gave a perceptible start….’ Though he had an unexpected passion for ballet, he stood for manly values, straight, prefectorial values: during his service on the western front he took a cold bath every morning, often in the open air, and there was a seven-year engagement before he married the daughter of Sir Henry Newbolt. Furse was not a brilliant man, but he had many of the traditional qualities of the Englishman: courage, patience, fitness, sympathy, good humour.1
For thirty-eight years this man chose the rulers of the colonial Empire. He liked to call his method ‘one of the arcana imperii’, for it was altogether unwritten, instinctive and customary. He worked like a mole, he said, burrowing, tunnelling, establishing private contacts with headmasters and university tutors, so that likely men were sometimes unwittingly shunted, by one means or another, along the corridors of the establishment to his office in Westminster. A new genre of imperial service had come into being during the past half-century, since the acquisition of Britain’s vast African empire. Those ragbag black territories, it was thought, strewn across a continent without culture, without history—those bold and earthy possessions did not require intellectuals, but all-round men of practical skills. The men they needed, said Frederick Lugard, Governor of Nigeria, were plain English gentlemen, ‘with an almost passionate conception of fair play, of protection of the weak, and of playing the game’.
These were Furse’s men, not especially clever, not particularly ambitious, but healthy, and brave, and cheerful. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the Indian Empire faltered, they gave to the colonial empire a new cohesion. They were not zealots. They had principles but not beliefs, says a character in one of the novels of Elspeth Huxley, herself an Anglo-Kenyan, and if they were seldom gifted men, and perhaps unlikely to rise to great office at home in England, still they were seldom prigs or bigots either. The African empire did not require ideologies in the field. A recruit for the Nigerian service in 1930 spent a year at Cambridge learning the rudiments of law, tropical medicine and Nigerian languages, but learnt no local history at all, not even imperial history, and indeed went out to the colony without ever having heard of its founder, the Rhodes of West Africa, George Goldie.
Furse had got a third at Oxford, and it was the game man with the third-class degree that he favoured for the Empire. He recruited thousands, for after the war there was a great expansion in the service. Most of them were ex-servicemen, most of them public school boys—‘the public school spirit’, it was said, ‘is greatly valued in the colonial service, and it is a matter of conscious policy to ensure that the supplies of it shall be constantly replenished.’ For the most part the new recruits had no lofty sense of mission. They generally assumed the colonial empire would last indefinitely, and took the job because it offered them honourable responsibilities, excused them the drab British grindstone, sounded fun and promised a pension. They were very decent men. They were Sanders of the River. They were Great White Carstairs. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master’, wrote the American philosopher George Santayana, in one of the most widely quoted of imperial compliments, and he was thinking of Furse’s men.
They were often very close to their subjects, closer by far than the administrators of India, for the colonial officials were less hamstrung by tradition or convention, and were also, not infrequently, very fond of their charges. Relations with chiefs and potentates were often easy and friendly, and the concept of Indirect Rule—allowing the native peoples to run their own affairs, by their own cultures—meant that racial prejudice was never extreme. Settlers might talk of damned niggers, or mock the customs of the indigenes: Furse’s men would think it, by and large, hardly cricket. Here is part of a minute circu
lated by a Governor of the Gold Coast among his staff:
‘I wish all officers to remember that a very high standard of work and conduct is expected from members of the service. We must always remember that we are Civil Servants—servants of the public. We are in this country to help the African and to serve him. We derive our salaries from the Colony and it is our duty to give full value for what it pays us. I attach considerable importance to good manners, especially towards the African. Those people who consider themselves so superior to the Africans that they feel justified in despising them and insulting them are quite unfitted for responsible positions in the colony. They are, in my opinion, inferior to those whom they affect to despise, and often betray, by their arrogance and bad manners, the inferiority of which they are secretly ashamed….’1
It was a resurgence of the trusteeship ideal, but it was weakness too. Furse’s colonial service was perfect for the imperial decline—not too aggressive, not too dogmatic, not even too sure of itself. These post-war imperialists were, without doubt, the nicest rulers the Empire ever sent abroad, but they were not the strongest. They saw the other side too generously, and if ever it came to My Empire Right or Wrong, one did not need to be a medicine-man to prophesy their resignation. ‘In such dangerous things as war,’ Clausewitz had said—and Empire was essentially a risky business—‘the worst errors are caused by a spirit of benevolence.’