by Jan Morris
Every month, it seemed, a new commission was established, a new inquiry was instituted, a new committee was assembled to discuss health services, legislative reform, educational priorities, the possibility of growing sugar-beet on Ascension Island or the incidence of bilharzia in Dongola. Team after team went out to Africa, the Caribbean or the Far East, and each territory was invited to produce a comprehensive development plan for its own development. Many an old imperial anomaly was weeded out—never again would a Brooke rule in Sarawak, a chartered company govern an African tribe, or a wandering English adventurer raise an eponymous regiment: down on the Embankment the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who had been in existence since 1833, were busier than ever concluding contracts, engaging staff, ordering postage stamps or investing funds on behalf of all the separate colonial governments, wherever they were.
Never had the colonies been so elaborately governed. Everywhere local establishments were vastly increased, sometimes tripled. In five years 6,500 new men were sent out to the colonies, six times as many as had administered the whole of British India in the heyday of Empire. Even the smallest and most neglected colony, a St Helena or a St Lucia, found itself suddenly invaded by technical experts and advisers, nearly all expatriate Britons—in Mauritius Mr Kenneth Baker, former president of the English Fire Brigade Union, was attached to the Governor’s staff as Adviser on Trade Unions. It was the age of town-planning, and scarcely a colonial town escaped its inspection by disciples of Sir William Holford or Sir Patrick Geddes, nearly all of whom had grandiose ideas for plazas, ring roads and housing estates, and almost none of whom ever saw their plans implemented.
Money was poured into the estate out of Britain’s denuded treasuries, and for the first time since Chamberlain’s day the British tried to apply to their colonial empire the latest devices of technology. The Colonial Development Corporation, with its sibling the Overseas Food Corporation, poured cash, men, tractors, test-tubes, bulldozers, specialists and technicians into many a desolate tract of Empire, providing jobs for thousands of Britons otherwise difficult to employ in the officer-like circumstances to which they had become accustomed, and plunging hosts of tribesmen bewilderingly into the deep end of western method. Some of these activities were successful, some were famous fiascos, like the Groundnut Scheme for Tanganyika which sold not a single groundnut, or the Egg Scheme for Gambia which exported not an egg.
Earnest but over-sanguine, too, were the several schemes by which the British hoped to group their colonies into more rational political entities, ready to graduate in time into the ranks of the Commonwealth. They all made sense in theory. The West Indian islands, for example, could surely be united in a federation as a prelude to independence—they shared a common history, a common language, common customs and common problems: and so they were, Trinidad and Jamaica, Barbados and the Windwards, all with a common Assembly in Trinidad, and a smiling Governor-General in Jamaica. In East Africa Lord Delamere’s old federal dream was revived, and Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika were placed under a single East African High Commission.1 Further south the plan was that Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland should federate: the whites of Southern Rhodesia would supply the skills and the capital, the blacks of the other territories the labour and the mineral resources—a partnership, breezily suggested the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Godfrey Huggins, like that between a rider and his horse. Another federation was planned for south-east Asia, coalescing the various States of Malaya with Singapore, Sarawak and north Borneo, while in south Arabia the British hoped that fusion with the reliable rural protectorates might temper the potentially subversive urban society of Aden colony. Even among the ostensibly independent Arab States to the north, the British tried their methodological best: for it was they who first dreamed up the Arab League, a last muffled attempt at an indirect Viceroyalty of the Middle East.
All this was order! More and more complex constitutions were devised for the colonies, rdported in extenso in The Times, as they progressed towards responsible Government: unabated came the flow of pamphlets and encouraging statistics from the presses of the Colonial Office. The official policy towards the colonies was perfectly clear: ‘It is’, said Command Paper 7533, ‘to guide the colonial territories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from aggression from any quarter.’ Yet now as always, it seemed, the British, even the most liberal of the British, did not really believe that the objective would ever be reached. It was simply an article of faith, ritually repeated. The young men still went out in the hope of a life’s career; the theorists presupposed at least a couple of generations for their projects to mature; all those brave federal schemes had as their object some continuance of the old order, some maintenance of British influence or supervision, or at least the survival of Britishness. Even promotion to the Commonwealth seemed to many Britons no more than a confirmation, enabling fledgling States to enter into a fuller state of grace, for while intellectually the British might see the truth about their colonial empire, emotionally they clung still to the old illusions, and hoped it might somehow be induced, by all these infusions of energy, cash and calculation, to last more or less indefinitely.
Almost opposite Westminster Abbey, in one of the finest sites in Europe, a German bomb had created a large empty space, where the Westminster Hospital used to stand. There the British, in the last decades of their Empire, decided to build a new Colonial Office. The India Office had gone, absorbed so thoroughly into the Foreign Office that already very few Londoners could say where it had functioned—even its library, that incomparable repository of oriental knowledge, had been shifted somewhere east of Temple Bar. But in a last hallucination of imperial hopes, these late imperialists determined to erect themselves a headquarters worthy of their history. It would be in the neo-Georgian mode, the predominant style of the declining Empire, eight floors high, with the royal crest large above its symbolically decorated doors, twin flagstaffs on its roof and a façade facing across the square to the ancient purlieus of the Abbey.
Here, passing through the pillared entrance hall, one would find the general staff of the rejuvenated Empire, its Under-Secretaries and its Deputy Secretaries, its legal officers, its information officers, the editor of Corona Magazine—the librarians and archivists, the code and cipher clerks, the radio specialists with their transmitters on the roof. High on the top floor would be the Colonial Officers’ Club, conveniently next door to the Treatment Room, and the ground floor would contain comfortable guest quarters designated on the architectural drawings simply as ‘Visiting Governor’. It is true that the plan allowed for a Tea-Making Room rather larger than the office of the Controller of Overseas Communications, but still, standing as it would directly opposite to Westminster Abbey itself, in rational antithesis to that mysterious shrine it would represent everything frank and enlightened in contemporary colonial government, urban sewage to female education, seal farming in the Falklands to East African Federation. As Sir Alan Burns, a former Governor of the Gold Coast, wrote in his book In Defence of Colonies in 1957, ‘Many years ago Britain undertook the gigantic task of helping the people of various under-developed territories to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by nature and environment…. In many parts of the world the task has not yet been completed, and it is inconceivable that we should abandon it half-done.’
4
It never happened of course. ‘It will clearly be some time’, wrote Sir Charles Jeffries, KCMG, apropos of that new headquarters, ‘it will clearly be some considerable time—though, one may hope, not forty years in the wilderness—before the Office can move into the promised land.’ But the more time passed, the remoter the promise, until at last even Sir Charles, even Sir Alan, were obliged to admit that the day of the Empire was over, the task must be abandoned uncompleted after all, and the Office never would reach Abbey Square.1
For the last rally
of colonial enthusiasm in the 1940s and I950s was one of history’s more endearing misjudgements. To almost everybody but the British activists themselves, all the signs and arguments were against it. Colonialism was excoriated in every corner of the world, and the growing power of African and Asian nationalism, openly backed now by the Soviet Union and certainly not discouraged by the Americans, was apparent for all to see. One did not need to be a George Curzon to realize how insubstantial the imperial structure had become, now that the grand mass of India had been removed. The tide of history, irresistible and one would think unmistakable, was sweeping the imperial idea irrevocably out to sea.
So that brave new building was never even started, and the structural reforms of the colonial empire, too, were mostly aborted or abandoned. It made no difference that throughout the 1950s the Conservatives were back in power. The Empire crumbled nonetheless. The West Indians, being far less homogeneous than they looked on the map, and far more ambitious to be their own Prime Ministers, soon deserted their Federation and split into petty autonomies. The East Africans, being of many different tribes, several different religions and three different colours, never were persuaded into unity. The blacks of the Central African Federation, rightly surmising that it would mean their indefinite subjection to white minority rule, demolished it as soon as possible. Singapore was rejected by the rest of the Malaysian Federation, to set itself up in dudgeon as a City-State on its own. The subversive Adenis, far from being disciplined by the loyal sheikhs of south Arabia, subverted the sheikhs instead, while the Arab League, instead of being a bastion of British influence in the Middle East, soon became the principal organ of Arab anti-imperialism. The hopeful departments of colonial development were dropped by the reference books one by one, converted into organs of foreign aid, or silently dispersed. Soon the Colonial Office itself, still in Great Smith Street after all, would seem a quaint anachronism, and its functionaries would find their way to more contemporary offices of State, like the Ministry of Social Security, or the Totalisator Board.
Let us then, since it is almost our last chance, take a walk through Westminster, one morning in the later 1950s, in search of homo imperialis. It is a relatively prosperous moment of British post-war history, the nation standing for the moment between economic crises, and the civil servants hastening from the St James’ tube station look, for the most part, well-dressed, well-fed, ordinary kind of people—not so very different from Belgians, say, or Norwegians. Up on the morning train from Beckenham or Guildford, they are settled into the mould of western urban man, and want nothing much more than a quiet life, a television set and an annual holiday, with pension rights assured. Among them, it is true, are more colourful figures to remind us, even now, that London is a world capital—black men in white robes and curious hats, an Arab or two, Malays or Chinese, a few huddled Indians: but then in a world now encircled by the jets one may just as easily meet a sheikh in Zurich, a Jamaican waiter in Manhattan or a Nigerian doctor completing his training in Düsseldorf. It is a cosmopolitan crowd, but in the middle of the twentieth century any great city is cosmopolitan, and London looks scarcely more imperial than Stockholm.
But there, look, swinging briskly around the corner from the Abbey, courteously stepping into the gutter to overtake the pavement secretaries, oblivious it seems to the curses of taxi-drivers—there is a figure you will not find in Copenhagen! He is not a young man now, in his fifties perhaps, and he is slightly stooped, as though a succession of fevers has warped his spine. But he is slim, stringy, rather rangy, and his face is so heavily tanned, not simply a sunburn but a deep, ingrained tincture of brown, that physically he scarcely looks like an Englishman at all. Yet British he unquestionably is, the most British man in sight, his expression, his movement, his every gesture reflecting a Britishness that has almost vanished from England. Even his clothes are yesterday’s. He wears a brown floppy trilby hat, looking as though it has been repeatedly soaked in rainstorms and dried in the sun, and slightly scuffed suede shoes. His overcoat looks like a reconstituted British warm. Tucked under his arm to read in the bus (for one suspects he seldom uses the underground, disliking the fug down there), he carries a book from Harrod’s Library—General Slim’s new volume of memoirs, perhaps, or Alan Moorehead’s The White Nile—he doesn’t go in for fiction much. On his finger he wears a signet ring, and as he swings his arm one can just see, beneath the sleeve of his tweed sports coat, the glint of oval cuff-links. He wears braces, one wouldn’t wonder.
Is there something wistful to his worn if still agile figure? There is. He looks out of touch, out of time. He meets nobody he knows, for he has few friends in London now; even at the Office it’s all new faces, and he’s never bothered with any of those damned clubs. He averts his eye from the passing crowd, for to be honest he doesn’t much like the style of Londoners these days. He is not much looking forward to his interview with Sir What’s It, who doesn’t know a bloody thing about Totseland anyway. He doesn’t like the climate. He doesn’t like the traffic. He detests what they’ve done to the South Bank. The young men need a haircut. That play at the Royal Court was a load of old rubbish.
He is a foreigner in his own capital. He is a true exotic among the cosmopolitans. He is the last of the British Empire-builders, home on leave and hating it.
1 Upon which hangs a footnote. In 1836 five of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, the agricultural trade unionists of Dorset, returned from transportation to Australia and decided to try their luck in Canada. They made a pact among themselves that they would never tell their children the story of their imprisonment, to ensure them an absolutely fresh start, and it was only after they and their children had all died that their grandchildren discovered the truth, from a British Labour Party delegation to Canada in 1912.
1 Or the lunar phases. ‘Bank Closed’, said a notice starkly when I went to cash a cheque in Kandy once, ‘On a/c Full Moon Day’.
2 Until at last the Afrikaners achieved their old dream, and declared the country a republic. The institution of apartheid as formal Government policy was too much even for the pragmatic Commonwealth to stomach: in 1961 South Africa’s application to remain a member was rejected at a tense Commonwealth Conference, and the imperial connection with the country came to an end.
1 By the end of the Empire in East Africa, the three territories shared a railway, a currency, a postal union, a customs union, a common market, a university, an airline, a court of appeal, a tourist association, a development bank, a harbour board and an income tax department. By 1977 it had almost all disintegrated.
1 Though the site is vacant to this day, being used bathetically as a House of Commons car park.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The Last Retreat
QUITE suddenly it was to go, like the whisking away of an opera set on the revolving stage. The brief revival of purpose spluttered out, and even the sages of the Colonial Office acknowledged the truth. ‘Mankind has struck its tents’, pronounced Jan Smuts, ‘and is on the march’, and suddenly the imperial idea seemed not merely distasteful, but preposterous. It was like waking from a dream. Young men from England going out to rule the Ashanti, or preside over the courts of Sarawakis! English civil servants in plumed topees receiving the salaams of potentates! A huge department of State, in a middle-sized nation of western Europe, devoted to the governments of people thousands of miles away! What had seemed to the late Victorians romantically splendid seemed to mid-century Britons perfectly nonsensical. In the fantasies of the Groundnut Scheme and the New Town Plan for Totse City, the imperial conviction trailed away in absurdity.
It was inevitable, for by now the British Empire, for so long the backcloth of world events, had been replaced by newer sets, and players from other companies were in rehearsal. Even in Britain a generation was arising who had never experienced its stimulations, never thrilled to the red on the map, and as its elaborate old scenes were dismantled, one by one, only a few traditionalists in the stalls, English gentlemen, Indian prin
ces, African Knights of the British Empire, sentimentally demanded curtain-calls.
2
It was in Palestine that the British imperialists, for the first time, frankly abandoned the imperial responsibilities, and there the last retreat began. ‘No promotion’, Storrs had written, ‘after Jerusalem’, and in a way the possession of the Holy City, and the establishment there of the first Christian Government for a thousand years, had marked the summation of the Empire itself. Jerusalem had set a seal upon the adventure, and the governance of the Holy Land had been the crowning privilege of Victorian imperialism. Yet there the Empire first admitted impotence. The withdrawal from India could be rationalized, even romanticized: the withdrawal from Palestine was without glory.
Exalted though the duty was, Britain’s rule in Palestine had never been happy, for it was based upon equivocals. It was a Mandatory government, for one thing, so that in theory at least the British were not absolute masters. For another it was tinged with the suggestion of betrayal, since so many Arabs, and not a few Britons, believed that Palestine should properly have become part of an independent Arab kingdom. And it was embittered by the ambitions of the Zionists, who had professed to want only a National Home within a multi-racial Palestine, but who really aimed, it had long become apparent, at an independent Jewish State there. The little country, hardly 200 miles from north to south, sacred to three religions, was racked from the start by envy and suspicion, and the benign rule of the British Empire, which made it materially the most advanced country in the Middle East, degenerated over the years into a squalid regime of force and self-protection. Sometimes it was the Arabs who broke the peace, sometimes the Jews, and so inflammatory was the situation after the Second World War, when hundreds of thousands of European Jews desperately sought a new home, that the Holy Land became hardly more than an armed camp.