After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The next day, Dyer grudgingly permitted the Indians to reclaim their dead and to begin burying them. When they went on strike and closed their shops, Dyer harangued them in bad Urdu: ‘Speak up if you want war. In case there is to be peace, my order is to open all shops at once. Your people talk against the Government and persons educated in Germany and Bengal talk sedition. I shall uproot these all.’ As a punishment for the attacks on Miss Sherwood, Dyer forced all the residents who had been living in the alley where she was assaulted to be punished – even though it was by no means clear that any of them had been responsible. He made every resident crawl along the alley on their stomachs, through the dust, the grit and the animal excrement. If any lifted a limb or their heads, they were prodded with rifle butts and bayonets. Conditions in the street only became worse, since street-cleaners were afraid to enter it, and anyone wanting to leave their house to buy food was obliged to crawl, in a street with no drainage and where the only way of getting rid of the human excrement was to throw it out of the window. The ‘Crawling Order’ as it was called was in force for about two weeks, until 24 April, when the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, got to hear about it and insisted that it be revoked.

  There were many other tortures and humiliations enforced by British officers upon the Indians. At Kasur, an entire wedding party, including the priest, were flogged because the wedding broke curfew regulations. Captain Doveton, an obvious sadist, ordered beatings and floggings of men found in a brothel; the prostitutes were forced to watch as their clients were punished. Women had their veils wrenched off while Mr Bosworth Smith, the district administrator, spat at them and called them ‘flies, bitches, she-asses and swine’. Shopkeepers were taken out and flogged if they did not sell their goods cheap to British soldiers, and children were made to salute the Union Flag three times a day. An order was given that Indians should dismount from their vehicles and bow if a European approached. At Wazirabad a man who failed to salaam a British officer was forced to lick his boots.5 Dyer’s excuse was the same as that given throughout the twentieth century by brutal people inflicting death and injury on their fellow mortals – ‘It was my duty – my horrible, dirty duty.’6 Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, gave an accurate picture of public opinion in Britain when he wrote to the Viceroy: ‘On the one hand he [Dyer] is condemned for what is regarded as heartlessness, callousness and indifference to the value of human life; on the other hand, there are those who sum up their position in the words, “Dyer saved India”.’ History has shown that the latter view could not have been more wrong. The Amritsar massacre united Indians behind Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience, and destroyed any claims the British might try to advance that they were bringing values to the Indians which were more ‘civilized’ than what they could evolve for themselves.

  Dyer was a child of Empire. He was born in the Punjab, where his father was a successful brewer. He had been educated at Simla – Bishop Cotton School – and almost his only experience of England was training at Sandhurst. After being commissioned into the Queen’s Royal Regiment in 1885, his professional life had been spent in the Indian army, in which he had served with bravery and distinction in the Burma campaign of 1886–7, the relief of Chitral (1895), the Waziristan blockade and other examples of imperial derring-do from the pages of G. A. Henty. His India was not that of the early days of the East India Company, when Englishmen delighted in the exotic and alien civilization into which they had come as traders. It was post-Mutiny India, in which the white men were afraid of the brown men, and so asserted their invented superiority with racialistic slurs and military brutality.

  It has been astutely observed that the Amritsar massacre had strong Irish overtones. Both Dyer and Sir Michael O’Dwyer (governor of the Punjab, who approved Dyer’s actions and was assassinated in 1940) were ethnically Irish Protestants. In the Commons debate about Amritsar it was the Unionists and the Ulstermen who stuck up for Dyer, most notably Sir Edward Carson.7

  Ireland had cascaded into violent anarchy almost before the end of the World War. The postwar election of December 1918 produced an overwhelming majority in Ireland for the Sinn Fein party. The old moderate Nationalists or Home Rulers had been ousted in favour of those who wanted complete independence of England, an Irish Republic with its own laws. The Irish Secretary in London said that ‘the Irish question will be settled peaceably or bloodily within the next six months’. Four years were to elapse before the last British troops left Ireland. In the intervening period, both sides did their best to settle matters bloodily rather than peaceably, foolishly rather than wisely. After a dreadful Civil War, in which many had been killed, the island of Ireland was split up. The Irish Free State came into being one year after the signing of a treaty on 5 December 1922, and the six counties of Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom. It was the worst possible solution, and certainly not one which either the Irish Nationalists or the English Unionist politicians had envisaged.

  There was probably no way of solving the Irish question, but of one thing we can be certain. After the agitations and terrorist outrages began in Ireland, and on the British mainland, the government of Lloyd George made it far worse by attempting, Dyer-style, to intimidate the population by acts of state-sponsored terror.

  Hear the words of Lieutenant-Colonel Smyth, DSO, a one-armed Great War hero who had been appointed divisional commissioner of the Royal Irish Constabulary for Munster after some Sinn Fein violence in June 1920:

  Now, men, Sinn Fein has had all the sport up to the present, and we are going to have the sport now. The police are not in sufficient strength to do anything to hold their barracks. This is not enough, for as long as we remain on the defensive, so long will Sinn Fein have the whip hand. We must take the offensive and beat Sinn Fein with its own tactics … If a police barracks is burned or if the barracks is already occupied, then the best house in the locality is to be commandeered, the occupants thrown into the gutter. Let them die there – the more the merrier. Police and military will patrol the country at least five nights a week. They are not to confine themselves to the main roads, but make across the country, lie in ambush and when civilians are seen approaching, shout ‘Hands up!’ Should the order be not immediately obeyed, shoot and shoot with effect. You may make mistakes occasionally and innocent people may be shot, but that cannot be helped, and you are bound to get the right parties some time. The more you shoot, the better I will like you, and I assure you that no policeman will get in trouble for shooting any man.8

  Yes, this speech was written up in the Irish Bulletin, a Republican propaganda sheet, but the behaviour of the men whom Smyth was addressing showed that such orders were being carried out to the letter. These were the so-called Black and Tans, named after a pack of foxhounds which ran with a hunt in County Tipperary, but very far from being good sportsmen. They were not, as Irish propaganda liked to believe, the scourings of the British gaols, but out-of-work ex-servicemen recruited by Lloyd George as deliberate agents of terror to supplement the army and the regular police force. Sir Henry Wilson, himself destined to die by an IRA bullet in June 1922, discovered that Lloyd George believed that the Black and Tans were murdering ‘two Sinn Feiners to every Loyalist the Sinn Feiners murdered. I told him, of course, that this was absolutely not so, but he seemed to be satisfied that a counter-murder association was the best answer to the Sinn Fein murders. A crude idea of statesmanship, and he will have a rude awakening.’9

  After the election, the Sinn Fein members of Parliament, rather than assembling in Westminster, convened their own parliament, or Dail, in the Dublin Mansion House in 1919. Eamon de Valera, hero of the 1916 Easter Rising, escaped from Lincoln gaol in February 1919, was elected president of the Dail, and went to New York to rally support. He raised money, but no mainstream American politician at this date would recognize an Irish republic. On the very first day the Dail met in January 1919, two policemen were killed at point-blank range in County Tipperary and ‘the Troubles’ had begun.
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  Undoubtedly the mastermind behind the Sinn Fein operations was Michael Collins, who had joined the Fenian movement when working as a Post Office clerk in London. He was a natural organizer, and one of nature’s spies, with agents in almost every big police station, a ruthless killer and fighter. All the most effective terrorist outrages had been planned by him. When the Irish Republican Brotherhood/Irish Republican Army began its offensives it had all the tricks up its sleeve. By contrast, the British were appallingly badly prepared. When General Sir Nevil Macready, commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, was put in charge of the forces in Ireland in March 1920, it was an appointment made by Lloyd George without consulting Churchill, the Secretary of State for War, or Sir Henry Wilson. Macready was appointed because Lloyd George could remember the vigour with which he had supervised the crushing of the Welsh miners’ strikes in 1910. Arriving at Dublin, he recorded: ‘Before I had been here three hours, I was honestly flabbergasted at the administrative chaos which seems to reign here.’10 But if the British were in their usual muddle over Ireland and its affairs, they ultimately possessed more fire power, and more political clout. Michael Collins could outwit them by planting a bomb here, stealing some police papers there, but in the long term he was a pragmatist. After a hopeless struggle (hopeless both politically and militarily) to achieve a treaty with the English which allowed the Irish possession of the whole island, he compromised and went along with peace and the Free State. There was a certain illogic in his position. He gave as his reason for signing the treaty in 1922: ‘To me it would have been a criminal act to refuse to allow the Irish nation to give its opinion whether it would accept this settlement or resume hostilities.’ But he had not consulted the Irish nation as to whether it wanted to start the hostilities in the first place. The treaty was subsequently ratified by the Dail and passed overwhelmingly in a referendum. Collins, an official delegate in the peace negotiations, paid for the compromise with his life. He died in an ambush set up during the civil war in County Cork in August 1922.11

  The carnage in Ireland has still, at the time of writing, not entirely ceased. When one contemplates the heroes of the Republican cause such as de Valera and Collins, it is hard to see them entirely as victims. They gloried in bloodshed and violence. The double standards applied were, admittedly, grotesque. If the English hanged an Irishman for sedition, there would be lachrymose scenes outside the prison, with crowds saying the rosary, followed by a huge funeral. When it came to Irishmen executing other Irishmen during the civil war the deaths were meted out with rather less ceremony. (Seventy-three Republicans were executed by their fellow Irish between November 1922 and May 1923.) But the Irish people whose shops and farms and houses were wrecked in the civil war were victims, both of Fenian terror and of English reprisals. It was very simple really. ‘If we lose Ireland,’ Sir Henry Wilson said, ‘we’ve lost the Empire.’12 If the British lost the Empire, what had been the point of fighting the Great War? How could the British define themselves?

  A British soldier sets up a light Maxim gun at Chilas Fort on the North-West Frontier. Younghusband’s expedition to Tibet was based on the false belief that the Russians were infiltrating that country and threatening the British Raj. The ensuing massacre of Tibetans was widely criticized.

  George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India leaves Bombay on 18 November 1905. Becoming Viceroy was for this learned, arrogant man ‘the dream of my childhood, the fulfilled ambition of my manhood’.

  Rudyard Kipling, here painted by John Collier, was the greatest writer to embrace the Imperial Theme.

  Winston Churchill, whose career dominated the first half of the twentieth-century, and to some extent determined its course. Here, as Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty, he is seen arriving by air at Portsmouth from Wiltshire in 1914.

  (Top) Here Churchill is seen defending Lloyd George’s controversial Budget of 1909. At this stage of his career, Churchill believed in the abolition of the House of Lords. (Bottom) As Home Secretary, Churchill held the values of the clubland heroes depicted by John Buchan and ‘Sapper’. He is seen at the head of the queue besieging a house of violent criminals in Sidney Street, Stepney, enjoying the prospect of pitched battle with anarchists from Eastern Europe.

  Sir Edward Elgar, a keen cyclist, was the greatest English orchestral composer since Purcell; his mingled themes of elegy and triumphalism caught the period’s mood

  Model ‘T’ Fords at the factory in Trafford Park Manchester, poised to destroy rural England

  Gertrude Jekyll (pronounced to rhyme with treacle) the inspired horticulturalist

  The Edwardian age was marked by fierce industrial unrest. London crowds are here seen swarming on to the overcrowded buses during a tube strike.

  George V succeeded to the throne in 1910. Here he is seen with his wife, the former Princess Mary of Teck, on their way to India for the Durbar ceremony at Delhi, one of the most magnificent of all Imperial demonstrations of pomp and glory.

  Two power maniacs meet on horseback – Kaiser Wilhelm II and President Theodore Roosevelt

  A late photograph of King Edward VII (left in the carriage) being escorted through the streets of Berlin by his nephew Kaiser Wilhelm II (to the right of the picture)

  The great American novelist Henry James who adopted British citizenship during the First World War

  Gaudier-Brzeska’s sculpture were craggy embodiments of the new modernism. He was destined to die fighting for France before his twenty-fifth birthday.

  Percy Wyndham-Lewis, novelist, Vorticist painter, and controversialist

  Lewis’s Vorticist Review, Blast, sought to relate art to the forces of industry, machinery and the mechanized warfare which was the most sinister development of the age

  H.G. Wells (1866–1946) depicted here with his mistress, the writer Rebecca West, and other friends. Wells’s prophetic fictions saw the centrality of science in the new century’s imaginative life.

  Dr Hawley Crippen was an American and not really a doctor. His arrest for the murder of his wife was facilitated by the new Marconi telegraphy. Here he is seen in the dock with his mistress Ethel le Neve.

  Women’s struggle for political suffrage led to many scenes such as this in British cities

  Ireland’s political destiny haunted that of England and helped to bring it down. The poet W.B. Yeats, here photographed with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees, was a fervent nationalist.

  The strange career of Sir Roger Casement (1864–1916) took him from British consular service to the gallows where he was hanged for treason. British intelligence made unscrupulous but successful use of his homosexual diary-confessions to blacken his reputation.

  Eamon de Valera (1882–1975), ultimately the President of Ireland, seen here addressing a meeting in Los Angeles to drum up support from the American Irish whence he sprang Three Imperialisms. The Entente Cordiale between France and Britain could be said to have led ineluctably to the First World War. In a French cartoon, President Wilson of America helps David Lloyd-George, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Georges Clemenceau, the French leader, to carve up the world after the War.

  Arthur Balfour, former Tory Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary in Lloyd-George’s coalition Government made the famous Declaration giving support to the aspirations of the Jews for a political homeland. Here he is seen in Jerusalem laying the foundation stone of the Einstein Institute with Chaim Weizmann the Russian chemist and Zionist champion – later first President of Israel.

  Such an idea was, for most political and military Britons, unthinkable. That is why the Morning Post, the most Tory of the newspapers, was able to raise £26,371.4.10 for General Dyer as a token of its readers’ high esteem for a man who in a later age would probably have been prosecuted. (Rudyard Kipling gave £10.) That is why readers of popular English newspapers are still encouraged to think of the Irish as potential troublemakers, and to see the British Empire as an essentially benign institution – which in some respects, compared with other empires in
the world, it undoubtedly was.

  The British Empire had in fact now passed its apogee, begun its decline. After the Irish treaty it ceased its expansion. Talk of the Empire being on the point of dissolution would have seemed complete insanity to the vast majority of its citizens in 1922. Far from being in retreat, the Empire was growing, and had been hugely expanded by the treaty of Versailles. In the postwar settlement it gained over 800,000 square miles, more than twice the area of Nigeria. Mesopotamia, now renamed Irak, with all its Mosul oilfields, became a British mandate. So did Palestine. Though Egypt became an independent kingdom in 1922, the British insisted on maintaining a military presence there in order to protect the Suez Canal. Much of Africa remained under British control, and the dominions of South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia all owed allegiance to the Crown. There had never been a moment in history when, technically at least, Britain dominated a larger area of the planet. Yet for all its power, or perhaps because of it, it was not immune from the convulsions which upset less obviously fortunate countries, and the experience of Amritsar and of the Irish Troubles appears to offer a demonstration of the fact that the British government, no less than any other in the world, depended ultimately upon its willingness to use violence, not merely in war but against political enemies within its own state, and on its own civilian population.