Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  It had been more or less British for 200 years, the first settlers being rapscallion communities of woodcutters, mostly of mixed Scottish and Negro blood, but it was declared a Crown Colony only in 1884. Since then nothing much had changed. Floods and hurricanes ravaged the capital sometimes, but it was rebuilt much as before: there was a Legislative Council, but the Governor was its president and held the deciding vote. Most of British Honduras was wild country, mountain, forest and savannah, and nearly half its people lived in Belize, the capital. Here the sugar, the teak and the citrus fruit came down to the sea: here all the varied peoples of the colony, the Negroes, the Mayans, the Indians, the Europeans, mingled on the foreshore, and here, in its modest premises around the bay, the imperial authority still resided.

  Belize was everyone’s idea of a tropical port, fretted, woody, shabby, jolly, cheek-by-jowl, smelling of rum and fermenting fruit,loud with car-horns and market cries. It was surrounded by mangrove swamps, and drained by a series of gaseous canals, and it lay unreformed by town planners after all on both sides of an inlet called Haulover Creek. Here the teak and mahogany logs came floating down the Belize River—Old River to the locals—and Belize still felt rather like a lumber-camp, makeshift and temporary. Its houses were mostly of shabby clapboard, stilted against heat, floods and rats, and they all seemed to look down to the river mouth, where rafts of logs were towed out to sea by ancient tugs, where fishing boats bobbed at the quay, and long outboard motorboats, with quaint names like Passenger Lady or Nigger Gal, passed to and fro beneath the iron bridge, all their passengers sitting bolt upright and facing forward, like Indians in log canoes. Since the people of Belize were overwhelmingly half-caste, a tangled mixture of white, black and Indian, and since everyone seemed to know everyone else, visitors got the impression that everyone was related, and this heightened the sensation of a community encamped there, waiting to move on to some more settled country, but in no hurry to go.

  Yet its loyalties were old and rooted. The thirteen original quarters of town maintained their identities—Cinderella Town, Lake Independence, Queen Charlotte Town—and though Front and Back Streets, the original trading streets, had been officially renamed after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, everyone called them by their old names. East and west across town the street names commemorated the imperial heirarchy—Bishop Street, King Street, Prince Street, and pointedly supervising both the St Ignatius Catholic Church and the Wesleyan Chapel, Dean Street. Nearby Basra Street, Allenby Street and Euphrates Avenue honoured the Belize men who had fought for the Crown in the Middle East during the Great War.

  The imperial establishment was small, but absolute. Nobody but Britons had ever ruled this colony, and Britons distinctly ruled it now. The Governor was Uppingham and Cambridge, the Development Commissioner had spent most of his life in Basutoland, the Chief Justice was the author of The Law of Compulsory Motor Vehicle Insurance, the Conservator of Forests had published A Working Plan for Settlement Forests in the Lango District of Uganda. The garrison, a battalion strong, was quartered along Barracks Road, north of the town. The Dean of Belize lived in a trim clapboard Deanery, with flowers on its verandah and a lawn of buffalo grass. Prominent in the Legislative Council were old Belize families who had made their fortunes in timber—the ‘mahogany kings’ who dominated local society, the Bradleys, the Stuarts, the Gabourels. Sometimes a Royal Navy ship put in, on a Caribbean cruise, and sometimes an official from the Colonial Development Corporation flew down from Miami (for the only way to fly in or out of British Honduras was by way of the United States).

  The climate was awful but they lived cosily enough. Local politics could be rip-roaring, but their animosities were seldom directed against the colonial government, and there were no racial tensions, religious rivalries or tribal vendettas.1 Alone in the British Empire the Legislative Council had evolved directly from the Public Meeting, the forum of the early settlers, and even now it had some of the family quality of a New England Town Meeting. In British Honduras even the relationship between owners and slaves had been relaxed, since both sides were utterly vulnerable in that remote environment, and equally subject to the rapine of Spanish buccaneers, so that society in the colony had escaped the blood bitterness of Africa or Jamaica. There was a recognizable camaraderie to the place, most happily apparent at the race meetings which were held on public holidays at the polo ground along Barracks Road in Belize. Everyone went, and had a grand time. Soldiers marched here and there to the thump of a military band, the administrators’ wives assembled in their best cottons on the club verandah, the races were started gallantly by bugle calls, and at the corner of the pavilion the merry Belize children queued for free lemonade at His Excellency’s expense.

  It was a little living relic, an enclave of the past. It had been, on the whole, a successful imperial enterprise, and though by the 1960s they were preparing a new constitution for the colony, the first step towards independence, it was still cheerfully loyal to the Crown—when, in 1962, twenty filibustering Guatemalans invaded the colony from the south, announcing the liberation of ‘Belice’, what they did to symbolize the great day was to burn in a village market-place photographs of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, together with a Union Jack (they were tried at Stann Creek Town Assizes, but within the year were all safely home in Guatemala). The Union Jack indeed flew all over Belize. There was one outside the Court House, and one on the Customs House, and one on the Anglican Cathedral, and one on the Fort George Hotel, and one on the Bliss Institute.1

  And at the end of the foreshore, fluttering over Yarnborough Lagoon as the Consul-General’s flag at Muscat commanded the harbour, or the Governor’s at Le Réduit rose above the camphor trees, the biggest of them all flew over everybody’s idea of a colonial governor’s residence, basking among its lawns and flamboyants between the cathedral and the sea. This house was enough to make a Nehru or a Kenyatta nostalgic for Empire. It was a square building, not very beautiful, painted a dazzling white and mounted on stilts, and it breathed a mingled suggestion of Virginia, Queensland, Jamaica, Nova Scotia and the Carnatic—an anthology in itself of the imperial yearnings. It was not air-conditioned, its plumbing was erratic, its attics and boxrooms smelt a little musty and were frequented by tropical weevils. But upon its rickety verandahs were placed the chaise-longues and shabby sofas of the imperial afternoon, in its shrubberies cats licked themselves and spaniels bounded, around its gravelled paths the white-helmeted policemen dutifully patrolled, and through its dining-room windows one could sometimes see, beneath the not very skilful portraits of his predecessors, His Excellency the Governor and Commander-in-Chief of British Honduras, smiling agreeably at the Archdeacon’s wife across a less than epicurean bean stew.1

  6

  Across the old Empire many another community looked back wistfully to its heyday, and felt itself abandoned or betrayed by the course of history. Millions of half-castes, especially in India, were left to fight their own battles in a world where it was a handicap rather than advantage to be able to claim descent from a corporal of artillery or a planter’s assistant. The Coptic gentry of Egypt, for so long the acolytes of Empire, were now left defenceless and reproachful in the flaking grandeur of their Assiut palaces, hung with Pharaonic devices and portraits of Lord Allenby. The Malays of Singapore were overwhelmed at last by the ambition and acumen of the Chinese, the Arabs of Israel festered in the occupied villages of their homeland or rotted down the generations in sordid refugee camps. Loyal servants and grateful deputies everywhere remembered lost friendships and comradeships—kind Mrs Weatherby who loved the baby so—Colonel Repton Sahib, a gentleman through and through—my dear old friend Judge Torrington, to whom I owe so much and to whom I affectionately dedicate this little memoir—Mr Glover of Public Works, who would never have allowed this kind of thing—Holden Bey, who still writes every Christmas—or dear Annie Lyttleton, the Governor’s wife, you know, who was one of my very dearest friends, and who gave me that particular embroidered c
ushion you’re sitting on, as a matter of fact, embroidered with her own dear hands …

  Here and there they tried to stem the tide. The Maltese and the Seychelloise unsuccessfully proposed integration with the United Kingdom itself, while the Falkland Islanders steadfastly preferred the rule of London, personified by a genial Governor whose official car was a London taxicab, to the rule of the Argentine, personified as often as not by dictatorial criminals and military thugs. The Sultan of Brunei clung to his British protectorate when all about him were losing theirs. The Protestants of Northern Ireland were as ready now as they had been in 1914 to defy the Catholics by force of arms—a favourite banner of the Orange Order in the 1960s showed Queen Victoria presenting a Bible to two kneeling black men, above the motto ‘The Secret of England’s Greatness’. While the white leaders of Southern Rhodesia plotted once more to break away from the Empire and maintain their own supremacies for ever, the black leaders looked to Britain still to impose a fair solution. When the Gibraltarians held a referendum to decide whether to stay British or join Spain, 44 voted for Spain, 12,158 for the Empire: the Governor of the Rock was still a serving officer of the British Army, the apes flourished, and every night in the Ceremony of the Keys, at the Main Guard, the sentries bawled out their imperial catechism:

  Halt, who goes there?

  The Keys.

  Whose Keys?

  Queen Elizabeth’s Keys.

  Pass, Queen Elizabeth’s Keys. All’s well.

  7

  But the passion was spent, for or against Victoria’s Empire, and so, except for these quaint or adamant anachronisms of loyalty, it came to an end calmly and almost apathetically, like an old soldier pacified at last by age, pain and experience. The last garrisons were withdrawn from the distant fortresses. The great fleets were no more. The British, turning their backs upon the great adventure, made themselves once more a European nation. Abroad the emancipated peoples soon adopted new styles and philosophies of government, or even acquired new overlords: at home a generation came of age which had never heard the trumpets.

  1 In the early 1800s the Muscatis had a fleet of seventy-five warships, but it has been unkindly suggested that only one could be manned at a time.

  1 Me!

  1 ‘Good drawing-room,’ noted Storrs characteristically when he visited the house in 1917, ‘with a new Collard and Collard and two large China rice vases….’

  1 Much more disturbs it now, for though in 1977 the British still play an equivocal role in the affairs of the Sultanate, Muscat has been transformed by the accession of great oil royalties: a busy corniche runs along the waterfront today, air-conditioned hotels welcome the visiting executive, and you can travel to that Byronical seaport by direct flight from London.

  1 They closed it down in 1962. During a general election the following year one ballot paper was scrawled accusingly: ‘You have taken away the railway jobs that Queen Victoria gave us!’

  2 Even in 1975, though Mauritius was by then altogether independent within the Commonwealth, I found that the chief of police, the Cabinet secretary and the comptroller of Le Réduit were all Britons; the rock was still on the mountain-top, too.

  1 The only British Governor to die violently in Belize was Hart Bennett, in 1918: observing the Court House flagpole smouldering during one of the capital’s not infrequent fires, he promptly ordered it to be cut down, and it fell on his head.

  1 A library and cultural centre named after an engaging imperial philanthropist, Henry Victor Bliss, JP, of Marlow, Bucks, 4th Baron Bliss in the Portugese kingdom, who sailed into Belize in 1926 upon his yacht Sea King. Before he had time to go ashore he died, but he left his fortune to the colony, and his body to be buried in a granite tomb at the harbour point. His bequest is still being put to good purposes—what other library in the tropics has a copy of Charlotte S. Morris’s Favourite Recipes of Famous Musicians (1941)?

  1 To this day (1978), though a new capital has been built inland from Belize, the entire colonial structure almost uniquely survives—Governor, garrison and all.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Home!

  IN the winter of 1965 Sir Winston Churchill, aged, beloved, hazed by brandy and long campaigning, died at his home in London. He had by then passed beyond the bickerings of party politics, and had become the living examplar of British glory. Loathed and reviled in earlier life, he was to be calumniated again after his death, in the way of legends: but for the moment, as he lay massive on his bed in death, ninety-one years old and the most universally honoured man on earth, he was beyond criticism. He was a dead spirit of grandeur, and for a day or two not only his own nation, but half the world paused wondering and reverent to mourn him. It was like that moment of antiquity when, the wild god Pan having died, strange music sounded and spirits moved from one end to the other of the classical world. Churchill had gone, and a sigh, part regretful, part wry, part sentimental, went around the nations.1

  In him the lost Empire of the British, bad and good, had found its fallible embodiment—brave, blustering, kind, arrogant, blind in many things, visionary in others, splendid but often wrong, lovable but frequently infuriating. For seventy years Churchill had lived the experience of Empire more intensely than any other man, through six reigns and many wars, from the brazen climax of the old Queen’s jubilee to the melancholy disillusionments of Suez. He had forced the Malakand Pass in ’98. He had argued with Thorneycroft on the path up Spion Kop. He had conjured the fearful beauties of Gallipoli. He had been Colonial Secretary, Secretary of State for Ireland, First Lord of the Admiralty, Prime Minister. He had soldiered for the Queen as a subaltern of cavalry, for the King as a colonel of Fusiliers, and it was he whose edict had sent Fisher’s Grand Fleet to its war stations at Scapa Flow, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought’.

  In his rhetoric, his humour and his rotund prose Churchill had expressed the best and worst of imperial attitudes. After Amritsar he had spoken nobly of ‘the British way’, which did not include public murder as a deterrent, yet Gandhi he could describe only as ‘a miserable old man who has always been our enemy’. His unerring opposition to Indian independence sent him into the political wilderness between the wars: yet when Nehru called upon him after independence Churchill saw him to the door in tears—‘we put that man in gaol for ten years, and he bears us no malice. I could not have been so magnanimous.’ His was the Empire that was to last a thousand years, but the Statute of Westminster he described as ‘a repellent legalism’. For half a century he sent £2 every month to the Indian servant of his military youth, but he displayed no jot of sympathy for the patriotism of the coloured peoples, nor any fellow-feeling for subject leaders who sought to do for their own countries just what he wished to do for England.

  Churchill was only half English, his mother being American, and devoted as he was to the British tradition, touchingly proud of his forebear the Duke of Marlborough and his father Lord Randolph Churchill, still intellectually he was more an internationalist than an imperialist. In this he illustrated one of the recurring paradoxes of Empire—the wider it spread its frontiers, the more parochial it became. Churchill was much more at home with Americans than with Australians or Canadians. He was bored from the start by the provincial hierarchy of Anglo-India (‘a third-rate watering-place’, was his image for the garrison town of Bangalore, ‘out of season and without the sea’). Imperial economics meant nothing to him, colonial diplomacy was dull beside the grand sweep of global activity which was his true metier, and he surprised King George VI by the sang-froid with which, when the time came, he adapted to the inevitable conclusion of the Raj.

  Yet to another half of him the fact of Empire was the truth of Britain’s greatness. He loved the colour, the majesty, the idiom of it—its ‘valiant and benignant force’, its ‘fortress-islands’, its ‘scattered family of the Crown’. He was an aesthetic imperialist. Holding no very strong moral views about it, believing as most of his generation did that British rule was probably bet
ter than any other, while he was no heady imperial idealist, he was no reformist either. The detail of Empire bored and sometimes repelled him. It was the idea of it that he found exciting, the spectacle of that immense estate enhancing the grandeur of England. Churchill was an Anglo-American diplomatically, a European instinctively, an Englishman cerebrally: but emotionally he was an imperialist in the classic High Victorian mould, loving Empire for its own sake, for the swagger and the allegory.

  2

  Of all the charges of Empire, this simple dynamic had been the most consistent. Economics, strategy, world politics had all contributed to the British expansion, but the taste for glory had underpinned them all, degenerating down the years into a hunger for prestige or self-esteem, but still recognizable in 1965 as the same atavistic tribal pride that animated the Diamond Jubilee at the apogee of Empire.

  Because it was fantasy, it was not unreal. To an astonishing degree the world had been changed by its drive. The rise of the Victorian Empire had acted as a gigantic prod or catalyst, stirring dormant energies across the continents. It had been the principal agent of an immense historical evolution, the distribution almost everywhere of industrial civilization—which, having had its beginnings in western Europe, was implanted in Africa and Asia principally by this Empire. If it had not been done by the British, it would have been done by somebody else: but still a combination of chance, energy and geographical fact really had given to the British people, as they liked to imagine during their evangelical years, a providential duty to perform. They really had been Chosen. That they fulfilled the mission with a mixture of motives and methods was irrelevant: they were simply the instruments of history or perhaps of biology, like the birds and beasts which, attracted by the gaudy appurtenances of sex, unwittingly perpetuate their species: there was never a mating dance like the dance of Empire, or plumage so seductive to its participants.