Eden’s doctors judged that his health benefited from his holiday. But his absence created the strange situation where not only was he disconnected from the party’s – and the nation’s – nervous system, but cabinet colleagues began to feel it was better all round that he was away from London. ‘Your return is likely to be regarded as a sign of panic,’ warned Lord Salisbury in a cable to Jamaica on 4 December – it was better that Eden should stay away to ‘complete your cure’. Ten days later the Prime Minister returned to England and appeared before a contemptuous House of Commons, to repeat the lie that there had been no plans to attack Egypt, and no collaboration with Israel. He swore that if he had ‘the same very disagreeable decisions to take again’, he would repeat them. There followed a miserable Christmas, and in early January 1957 Eden held a long cabinet meeting discussing anything but the Suez debacle, at the end of which he turned to the senior civil servant present and asked if there was anything more to consider. ‘For a moment he was looking directly at me,’ the official said later, ‘and I saw in his eyes a man pursued by every demon. I have never seen a look like it in any man’s eyes, and I hope I never do again.’ A few days later it was all over. Anthony Eden told senior cabinet colleagues he had decided that his position was untenable. ‘The doctors have told me that I cannot last long if I remain in office,’ he said. He was willing to risk his life by continuing as prime minister, he said, but would not do so. That evening he went to Buckingham Palace to submit his resignation to the queen. As prime minister in late-Victorian Britain, perhaps Eden could have got away with a caper like the Suez intervention: might could make right. But the world was smaller now, and Britain’s position within it smaller still. The Suez debacle was at least as great an imperial humiliation as the fall of Singapore. The symbols – the elegant yet sick Prime Minister, the increasingly valueless currency – were more eloquent than any speeches about the country’s ambitions in the world. Britain’s behaviour looked not merely high-handed but inept – it had lied about its intentions and then lacked the means to carry the day: a Full House of failure. The toothlessness of the British lion had been demonstrated to the world, as had the redundancy of imperial thought in the new world order: soon the United Nations would declare that all peoples had the right to self-determination. In an increasingly visible world there could be no more high-handed imperial adventures unless, like the Russians in Hungary, you were powerful enough not to give a damn.
It was all going so fast. An empire accumulated over centuries had vanished within a couple of decades. For the most part, independence came peacefully. But in a handful of places the British fought nasty little campaigns in which the challenge was essentially the same as that faced in the Boer War, in Ireland and in Palestine – how to fight an army which did not fight like an army: organizations which found shelter among the civilian population could rarely be brought to open battle and always retained the initiative. In 1951, Sir Henry Gurney – the man who had left his keys under the mat in the King David Hotel – was serving as high commissioner in Malaya, when he was shot dead in his official Rolls-Royce by guerrillas fighting to end British rule. In the nineteenth century a similar outrage would have brought down massive retaliation, disclosed to the public long after the event in jingoistic newspaper headlines. Thousands more people, including the last Viceroy of imperial India – assassinated by the IRA in 1979 – would lose their lives as the British tried frantically to discover an alternative identity and political strategy for the much more transparent post-war world.
Perhaps the most controversial of the British campaigns was in Kenya, against the Mau Mau, a clandestine organization whose power was bolstered by weird black-magic initiation rituals. Mau Mau was vicious and ruthless, with victims – some white, but the vast majority of them black – treated abominably. In one especially notorious incident, members of the organization set fire to the huts of villagers at Lari in central Kenya, then butchered them as they tried to escape: accounts described mothers being forced to watch as their children were killed and their blood drunk. Over one hundred Europeans were murdered. The reaction of the white settlers to the uprising was a mixture of hysteria and ruthlessness – they, after all, were the ones with the guns – and even though they had few friends among the government in London, it was soon clear that something had to be done. General Sir George Erskine, a career soldier who had acquired something of a reputation for lack of aggression during the Second World War, was dispatched to take command. He was no fan of the white settlers in Kenya, a country he is reputed to have called ‘the Mecca of the middle class … a sunny place for shady people’. But he used the long British experience of fighting guerrilla campaigns – which dated as far back as the Boer War – to good effect, using intensive intelligence-gathering, elaborate propaganda operations and creative pseudo-gangs to infiltrate the Mau Mau.
In April 1954 Erskine launched Operation Anvil, in which, first, the whole of the capital, Nairobi, was searched, most of the population questioned and 24,000 people detained in camps. His forces then moved systematically through the countryside, detaining tens of thousands more suspects who were sent to camps. The tactics were effective, but at great cost: hundreds of prison-villages were created, and in some of them conditions were dreadful. Some of the interrogation methods were as brutal as anything endured by British prisoners during the Second World War. In the camp at Hola, where those considered especially hard-core members were detained, there occurred a scandalous case when eleven prisoners were beaten to death, as the camp authorities attempted to force them to work. Initial attempts to hush up the incident collapsed after an inquest revealed the true causes of death. In the early days of empire, news of the events might never have reached London. But now, not only did Whitehall officials know what was being done in the name of the Mother Country, but politicians could express views on the subject. The House of Commons discussed the report into what had happened at the camp late one July night. The attack was led by the feisty Labour MP Barbara Castle, who accused the government of a ‘nauseating parade of complacency’ in its attempts to explain away what had happened. Then, at 1.15 in the morning, the Conservative Enoch Powell – once such a passionate believer in empire – rose. Powell was sickened by what he had heard. Mrs Castle had let the government – his own government – off lightly. In a speech which electrified an unusually crowded House, he went to the heart of why empire could not survive in the post-war world. ‘All government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion,’ he told the MPs. It was simply impossible to have one set of standards for your behaviour at home and another for your behaviour in the colonies. ‘What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.’ He sat down, overcome with emotion.
In its setting and its impact Powell’s identification of the moral problem at the heart of modern-day imperialism echoed the criticisms Edmund Burke had made of the way that the East India Company behaved in the subcontinent. But his comments were delivered in an utterly changed world – a more intimate place, where news travelled fast and where Britain had a much diminished role. Indifference, the default setting for mid-twentieth-century feelings about empire, was not a foundation on which to attempt to maintain an imperium. It was not that anti-imperialism ever became a vastly popular political cause* – just that there was something in the air. To those who thought about it, the practice of imperialism seemed indefensible, and to those who didn’t think the question was ‘Who needs the bother?’ The only significant colonial territories where the idea of independence was problematical were those – like South Africa or Rhodesia – with an entrenched white population. For the rest, independence was something whose time had come: no one who wished to get anywhere in politics could claim to believe in anything
other than international equal rights, however vaguely expressed. When the patrician old Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who had once been Colonial Under-Secretary, warned the South African parliament in February 1960 that ‘the wind of change is blowing through this continent’, he acknowledged as much. In Nigeria, later on the same tour, Macmillan asked the retiring Governor General, ‘Are these people fit for self-government?’ and received the reply ‘No, of course not.’ That would require another twenty or twenty-five years, said the official. ‘What do you recommend me to do?’ asked Macmillan. ‘I recommend you give it to them at once,’ said the Governor General. The alternative was that all the most talented people in the country would become rebels, and the British would spend the next two decades fighting to try to stave off what was inevitable, while incurring the opprobrium of the world. Nigeria left the empire a few months later, Sierra Leone and Tanganyika the next year, Uganda in 1962.
There was usually some member of the royal family present at the little ceremonies on dusty parade grounds when the flag was run down, acknowledgement of the regal dimension of empire. The rest of the crowd – officials in old-fashioned costumes and feathered hats, representatives of the new ruling class in national dress – listened as a military band marched in and played the anthems of the old and new countries. Flags old and new were saluted, glasses raised and toasts made. And then, summoning the remnants of their dignity, the British scuttled off home, farewells said to a creature of another age. By the turn of the twenty-first century, the massive enterprise which at the start of the twentieth century had straddled the globe was long gone – the speed with which the British jettisoned their empire takes some grasping. They let things go pretty fast (in the case of Palestine and India many would say much too fast). True, in 1982 the British fought to maintain their rule in the Falklands – a scattering of desolate islands at the other side of the earth – but that was a costly, risky enterprise against a military dictatorship, not an attempt to deny self-determination. In 1997, they quit their hugely successful colony in Hong Kong with hardly a murmur: while a war 8,000 miles away in the south Atlantic was a gamble, a confrontation with the Chinese army was a foregone conclusion. The expiry of the lease on part of Hong Kong seemed an appropriate metaphor for world dominance exercised by a small island in the north Atlantic. The dissolution of empire was as much the product of what was militarily feasible as its acquisition had been.
Chapter Thirteen
‘We look on past ages with condescension, as a mere preparation for us … but what if we are a mere after-glow of them?’
J. G. Farrell, The Siege of Krishnapur, 1973
On a sunny afternoon in Kolkata (or Calcutta as it was to the British) hundreds of people – lovers, parents, children, shambling old folk and squawling babies – mill around the gardens of a vast, improbable pile of a building. At the gates, tuk-tuk drivers hustle for fares, hawkers try to sell strips of sun-faded postcards and horribly skinny, deformed beggars stick out their upturned palms. The building behind them is a startling, 200-foot-high confection of white marble, gleaming in the sunshine, part Renaissance Florence, part Fatehpur Sikri. Like India’s most famous building, the Taj Mahal, it marks an act of devotion to a woman: the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, had planned the Victoria Monument as the world’s grandest memorial to the queen whose reign saw the empire spread across the globe. He got his wish. But it was always a white elephant: in the twenty years between plans and completion, the British had transferred the imperial capital to New Delhi. Within a further thirty years, they would quit the country altogether. On the nearby expanse of the Maidan, the immense park created by the British after their victory at the battle of Plassey, where once British troops drilled in the dewy early morning, there is a much more lively memorial. Thirty or forty impromptu games of cricket are taking place, generally with home-made bats, sometimes with home-made balls. The remarkable thing about all these crowds, cricketers or sightseers, is how few of them have any idea what the marble monument commemorates. Many seem hardly to have heard of Victoria. In the context of thousands of years of Indian history it is understandable: the British Empire was an interlude, growing over a few centuries and gone within a few decades.
Many empire-builders were left behind in India, and across town, behind the high walls of what was once the Great Cemetery, moss-covered urns and obelisks, columns and cupolas record their presence, killed in shipwrecks, drowned while crossing the river and a surprising number dead from lightning strikes. Most deadly of all to early settlers was ‘Jack Morbus’ – cholera. It was said you could have lunch with someone one day and be invited to their funeral by suppertime the next – the burials took place at night, in the light of flaming torches. Europeans thought themselves doing well to live through two monsoon seasons, and, when at last the cooler weather of winter arrived, the survivors would gather together to celebrate their achievement in simply being alive. A pyramid in the cemetery marks the grave of Elizabeth Jane Barwell, the great beauty of late eighteenth-century Calcutta, who threw a ball into hilarity by confidentially telling each of her young British suitors beforehand what colour dress she would be wearing: a dozen young men are said to have attended, all in an identical shade of pea-green. Another tomb contains the remains of four infant children from a single family, not one of whom lived to the age of two. Crows squawk in the mango trees. A child’s home-made kite – a sheet of rice-paper on the thinnest of wooden frames – hangs from a wall, the pye-dogs scuttle from their shade when you approach and sulk at a distance. Few visitors call.
All that is now left of the British Empire to which India belonged are fourteen territories, political curiosities scattered across the oceans of the world, known perhaps to stamp collectors or corporate lawyers seeking a tax haven. They are mainly islands and bring no discernible benefit to Britain, which seems to regard them as a form of charity work, dispatching a governor ready to turn out at formal events in a plumed hat (as long as the local people will pay for such a thing) and happy to let the Girl Guides camp in the gardens of the Residence. Should an enemy menace or a hurricane strike, the old imperial power promises to send (and does send) warships and aid. Given a world map, most British citizens could not even stick a pin within a thousand miles of most of them (the Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno islands, anyone?). Many of them are inaccessible (it is a twelve-day journey by smelly fishing boat from Cape Town to Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, almost the only settlement on Tristan da Cunha – population 263 – and there’s a good chance the sea may not allow you to disembark when you get there). But Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is a true metropolis by comparison with the Pacific island of Pitcairn, which has a total headcount of only fifty, descendants of mutineers on the Bounty and electors in the world’s smallest democracy. The only thing these places have in common is the judgement they have made that they cannot make a go of things on their own. Occasionally, some Napoleon of Nowhere blusters about independence, but even on Bermuda, which has the largest population of these imperial relics, there is no great appetite for freedom. The empire on which the sun never set is reduced to a total overseas population of 200,000. On the other hand, between them these places do provide over 90 per cent of the biodiversity which Britain lays claim to.
There are further reminders of empire in the Union Jack which flutters in the corners of the flags of countries like Fiji, New Zealand and Tuvalu. Millions of people of British descent in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (and thousands of settlers in places like Kenya and Zimbabwe) are a living legacy. Schools, solid government buildings, ornate railway stations, out-of-place cottages and tin-roofed neo-Gothic churches testify to the former presence of sun-burned foreigners in improbable places. War graves are scrupulously maintained. But the physical memorials to earnest African missionaries, pickled Malayan planters and cricket-playing doctors on Pacific islands crack and tumble. The empire lives on less in stone and masonry than in the conventions of international trade and law and in the l
anguage of diplomacy, science and travel. It is evident in the mace which sits in parliaments across Africa; in the kilted Chinese who mark New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong by playing the bagpipes; in the dusty monkey-skin hats of King’s African Rifles veterans on Remembrance Sunday in Kenya; in the ‘tuck shops’ at Pakistani filling stations; in the very stones of Jerusalem (for it was the colonial Governor, Ronald Storrs, who decreed that all new building must be finished in local stone, which is why the city retains its magical golden colour); in games of croquet enjoyed by wealthy Cairenes at the Gezira Sporting Club; in racecourses in New South Wales and rugby grounds in Samoa; in the polite applause at the Delhi Gymkhana Club and the drill manual for the officer training academy in Baghdad – to say nothing of the borders of that troubled land, drawn in the sand with a lady archaeologist’s umbrella.
And the empire has turned out to have a remarkable talent for causing trouble from beyond the grave. Britain has yet to elect a prime minister who doesn’t take on a vaguely imperial tone of voice: none can resist the temptation to lecture other governments. Tony Blair took office promising to reinvent Britain and ended up sending its forces into action in six different conflicts. One British Prime Minister says it is time to stop apologizing for empire (Gordon Brown, 2005), the next (David Cameron, 2011) talks of tensions between India and Pakistan over Kashmir and says ‘as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place’. This is the authentic voice of post-war education, proud self-chastisement, a weird blend of Mr Pooter and Uriah Heap. Forgotten is the fact that India was partitioned to prevent the friction which the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, said would otherwise blight the lives of Muslims: does Churchill’s conversion to the cause of creating the world’s first modern Muslim state also make Britain accomplice to the resurgence of political Islam?
Empire Page 30