The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Page 40
In determining its policy towards the empire, the Labour party was strongly influenced by parallels between its own struggles and those of contemporary embryonic democratic, nationalist and trade union movements in India, Egypt and South Africa. This consideration, a socialist faith in the brotherhood of man and an instinctive sympathy for the underdog made the Labour party the natural ally of what a later generation would call colonial freedom movements. Links were quickly established between the Labour leadership and nationalist politicians in India, where the anticolonial opposition was strongest, Egypt and South Africa. Ramsay MacDonald, the future leader of the party, toured India and was dismayed by the racial aloofness of his countrymen and the lack of official energy in extending education for Indians.7 Keir Hardie, who visited India in 1907, consorted with Bengali nationalists and was received by Hindus as a holy man, much to his secret satisfaction, for he was a vain man.8
Keir Hardie also had first-hand knowledge of South Africa, which he used to champion the blacks during the debate on the bill granting the country a federal constitution in 1909. The government’s willingness to accommodate the Boers and disbar blacks from the franchise would, he predicted, sour relations between the races and reduce the blacks to a ‘landless proletariat’, forced to accept the lowest wages to keep alive.9 In the same year, Keir Hardie lectured representatives of the Young Egypt party in Geneva and urged them to forge an alliance between students and fellahin. This accomplished, the Egyptians could proceed to press Britain for self-determination, but, as Keir Hardie insisted, in an orderly manner.10
The significance of these statements and the links between colonial liberation movements and what was, in the 1900s, still a small party lay in the future. Nonetheless, the educated élite who led the nascent nationalist movements in Asia, the Middle East and Africa believed that they would always receive a sympathetic hearing from the Labour leadership. In a letter of August 1917, which was intercepted by military intelligence, an Iraqi nationalist exile warned the Labour MP and member of the war cabinet, Arthur Henderson, that the government was mistaken in funding Hussain, sharif of Mecca, on the grounds that he was an untrustworthy reactionary. He added with premature and naïve optimism that he hoped Britain would withdraw from Iraq when the war was over.11
There was a wide gulf of attitude and temperament between the Labour party and the men who ran the empire and Conservative and Liberal imperialists at home. The Indian government smeared Keir Hardie as a firebrand and sedition-monger during his visit to the country, and Ramsay MacDonald wondered whether the empire’s rulers would return home with their heads full of authoritarian ideas. This fear was not new; it had been expressed by Burke in the late eighteenth century and had been repeated intermittently by Liberals and Radicals in the next century who were disturbed by the fact that their countrymen, mostly from the upper classes, governed the colonies as autocrats. In his futuristic fantasy, News from Nowhere (1891), the Socialist William Morris described how a government faced with working-class unrest placed London under the control of one of the ‘youngest and cleverest generals … who had won a certain sort of reputation in the disgraceful wars in which the country had long been engaged’. This thinly disguised Wolseley figure uses the weaponry of colonial warfare, machine-guns, to shoot down a crowd in Trafalgar Square.
Paradoxically, such an action would not have been beyond the real Wolseley, who was a host to Cromwellian phantoms. He once confided to his wife that he relished the coming of a time when ‘the licence of democracy and socialism will be conquered by the sword, and succeeded by a cruel military despotism’ under which Gladstone and his colleagues would be forced to polish officers’ boots.12 Admiral Lord Fisher was equally contemptuous of politicians, but his wry sense of humour prevented him from going as far as Wolseley. He did, however, once observe that his experience of politicians had convinced him that Divine Providence alone had enlarged and preserved the empire.13
Milner disdained party politics which he considered parochial, petty-minded and dangerously distractive for a country whose attention needed to be concentrated on the ‘big’ issues raised by the empire. He therefore deliberately chose the Lords as his platform for, like Coriolanus, he found the idea of directly canvassing the masses repugnant. Leo Amery thought imperial issues were too important to be bandied about the floor of the Commons, and hoped that in the future their discussion could be confined to a reconstituted House of Lords.14 This body, swollen by peers from the dominions, would become an imperial legislature while the Commons concerned themselves with such mundane trivia as licensing laws and the disestablishment of the Welsh church.
Authoritarian imperialist sentiments were probably strongest among officers of both services. Just how strong was dramatically revealed by events in Ireland during the spring of 1914 after Herbert Asquith’s government had been driven to contemplate measures for the enforcement of the Irish Home Rule Act. Necessity rather than conviction had forced the Liberals to introduce this measure in 1912 as a payment for Irish Nationalist support in the Commons, after their majority had been swept away by the two general elections of 1910. As in 1886 and 1893, Conservatives and Unionists denounced Irish self-government as a potentially lethal blow to imperial integrity. This time, however, the Lords could only postpone the bill’s enactment, and so, having exhausted the customary forms of political opposition, its adversaries resorted to force. The Protestant majority in Northern Ireland screamed ‘Home Rule! Home Rule!’; affirmed their wish to remain part of the British empire; formed a volunteer army and, early in 1914, began procuring rifles and machine-guns. Mainland Conservative and Unionist leaders applauded what they saw as a gallant defence of imperial solidarity.
Faced with a rebellion, the cabinet proposed at the end of March 1914 that troops from the Irish garrison (concentrated in the Catholic south of the island) might be used to guard arsenals, and prevent the Ulstermen from getting more weapons. The majority of officers involved promptly resigned; such a duty was against their consciences, as it was against those of officers on board the warships that had been ordered to take stations off Belfast. Senior officers openly sympathised with their subordinates’ gesture, and a distraught cabinet was compelled to temporise. The outcome was a pledge that British soldiers would not be deployed to disarm the Ulster Volunteers, which was a victory for them and the officers.
What was called with discreet understatement the Curragh Incident (after the name of the camp where the first batch of resignations had occurred) was a testament to the depth and passion of imperial loyalty within the army. It was also revealing that those who approved the officers’ actions believed that imperial considerations outweighed the traditional obedience of the military to the civil power. Imperialists on the right saw the moral issue as clear cut. One argued that the disaffected officers behaved as they did because they had realised that ‘the Ulstermen are loyal subjects who refused to be placed under the heel of a faction which Mr Gladstone [before his conversion to Home Rule] asserted to be “marching through rapine to the dismemberment of the Empire.”’15 It was unthinkable that officers of an army which had by a hundred years of exertion and sacrifice enlarged and protected the empire, should have allowed themselves to become accomplices to what was widely seen as a betrayal of empire. They could not remain true to themselves if they made war against men who wished to remain part of the empire on behalf of those who wished to leave.
A private soldier, watching events at the Curragh from the sidelines, wondered why the officers of the ‘aristocratic and plutocratic’ army had previously shown not the slightest qualm about using force against those of their fellow countrymen who happened to be industrial workers on strike. This was the language of class politics, a recent phenomenon in British life which was a direct consequence of the growth of the Labour party and militant trade unionism. Class politics were wormwood to the Conservative and Liberal imperialists who saw them as undermining national unity and therefore weakening the empire. Out of a
population of 45 million, 34 million were working class and it was therefore imperative that an antidote be found to the poison of class antagonism.
Chamberlain had hoped that his personal programme which melded dynamic imperialism and tariff reform would win over the working classes. Even the most traditionalist Conservatives were of the same mind. ‘The greatest resource of the Empire is the British character,’ proclaimed Lord Wylloughby de Broke, a right-wing Tory racing peer. But he admitted that the inner strengths of the Briton could only be sustained if everyone was allowed free access to what he described as ‘the moral and material essentials of life’. Only then, no one could complain, ‘The British Empire has done nothing for me.’16 So long as there were large sections of society which felt no benefit from the empire, Britain could never obtain the national solidarity needed to guarantee its maintenance. Or, as Robert Blatchford, an ex-soldier who was both an imperialist and a Socialist, once observed, while the sun was said never to set on the British empire, there were city slums over which it had never risen.
The working classes had, therefore, to be made aware of the empire, taught to feel pride in it, understand how its existence was to their advantage, and most important of all, learn the special virtues that would be expected of them as its citizens. What today might be called raising imperial consciousness was a task undertaken by a collection of voluntary organisations founded and funded by the middle and upper classes. The lists of patrons and subscribers were roll calls of imperialists from all parties, former proconsuls and senior army and navy officers. Together they directed and paid for a formidable propaganda machine which operated throughout the years between the Boer and the First World Wars.
One of the largest and most influential of the bodies which broadcast the imperial message was the Primrose League. It had been established in 1883, was named after Disraeli’s favourite flower, and claimed to be apolitical, although atheists and enemies of the empire were denied membership. In 1900 it had 1.5 million members, nearly all working class.17 It promoted a robust imperial patriotism (one of its heroes was Gordon) through a mixture of entertainments and instruction, paying for lectures, lantern-slide shows, exhibitions and public rallies. A more forceful pressure group was the National Service League whose supporters campaigned across the country for compulsory military training for all schoolboys, and conscription. A living national hero, the aged but still sprightly Field Marshal Lord Roberts, frequently addressed its public meetings. The National Service League had accumulated 200,000 members by 1914, including some formerly attached to the Lads Drill Association with which it had merged in 1906.
The Lads Drill Association was the brainchild of Reginald Brabazon, Earl of Meath, an Anglo-Irish Tory who had dedicated his old age to spreading the gospel of empire to the young. His conversion to imperialism had occurred one winter’s day in the 1850s when he had been a schoolboy at Eton. Wiping snow from his knees, he was upbraided by a schoolmaster, who used the occasion for an off-the-cuff sermon on imperial manliness:
Do you call yourselves British, boys?… Your fathers are the rulers of England, and your forefathers have made England what she is now. Do you imagine that if they had minded a little snow that Canada would have been added to the Empire, or if they had minded heat we should ever possess India or tropical Africa? Never let me see you shrink from heat or cold. You will have to maintain the Empire which they made.18
This harangue affected the young Meath deeply, and later he set about making sure that future generations would keep faith with their ancestors.
Homage to the imperial past and commitment to its future were the objects of Empire Day, which Meath wanted celebrated annually in schools throughout the empire on 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday. Empire Day was commemorated first in 1902 and within four years was being observed in 6,000 schools. A parliamentary attempt to secure it official recognition failed in 1908, to the audible delight of Labour and Irish MPs, and Labour councils such as Battersea banned it from their schools as militaristic. Nevertheless, Empire Day increased in popularity, especially in south-eastern England and rural areas everywhere. In 1916 a wartime government, willing to do anything that would encourage popular patriotism, gave Empire Day official recognition.
Something of the flavour of an Edwardian Empire Day is conveyed by a pamphlet issued by the Empire Day League in 1912 with suggestions for uplifting entertainments. For older schoolchildren there was an abridged version of Henry V which centred on the scenes before, during and after Agincourt. Younger pupils were offered a simple pageant in which a procession of heroes, whose ‘noble deeds’ had contributed to the growth of the empire, paid homage to Britannia. Clive and Nelson rubbed shoulders with symbolic figures representing the army, navy and, an up-to-date touch, ‘air power’. As each appeared, they were greeted with rehearsed cheers from the spectators – ‘Hurrah to our brave soldiers!’ and so on. In conclusion, Britannia made a short, inspiring speech: ‘My Empire shall hold; and, like summer roses, perfume the world with freedom’s gladsome fragrance. Be brave, be bold, do right!’ In an alternative and equally colourful tableau vivant children dressed to represent the dominions and colonies paid their respects to their mother, Britannia. Recommended costume for South African blacks consisted of ‘two fur rugs’, ‘strings of melon seeds’ and an improvised assegai.19
The spectacles were a climax to a morning during which children had learned patriotic songs such as ‘I’d like to be a soldier or a sailor’, which was performed by girls, and memorised facts about the empire such as, ‘They [the colonies] have helped to make our people the richest in the world’. Work and fun were not enough, and Meath emphasised that pupils should be given the rest of the day off. The young, he wrote, ‘do not readily appreciate the importance of any event unless it brings a holiday in its train.’
Everyday lessons were constructed around imperial themes. The Prince and Princess of Wales’s Indian tour of 1906 was an opportunity for elementary schoolchildren to learn about the subcontinent and the firm and fair way in which it was governed. Nationalist agitation, which had recently flared up in Bengal, was brushed aside with the statement, ‘The British rule has brought peace … and the native police and soldiers are usually able to preserve order among a people who are naturally docile.’20
Public schoolboys continued to be bombarded with imperial propaganda, relentlessly delivered by headmasters who were invariably Anglican clerics of the muscular Christian persuasion. Themes of athletic prowess and warrior patriotism mingled in the rousing school songs which became so popular at this time. The sentiments of Harrow’s ‘Forty Years On’, which always brought tears to Churchill’s eyes, were typical:
God gives us bases to guard or beleaguer,
Games to play out in earnest or fun,
Fights for the fearless and goals for the eager,
Twenty and thirty and forty years on.
Stiffened by such appeals and brought to a high pitch of fitness on the playing field, the public school man was ready to do his duty by the empire; but what of boys from other classes?
The question was asked continually in Edwardian Britain. The answers were often disquieting; in 1898 one commentator summed up working-class youth as ‘stunted, narrow chested, easily wearied, yet voluble, excitable, with little ballast, stamina and endurance’.21 Generalisations of this sort were confirmed by the cold statistics gathered by army doctors who examined would-be recruits, and the surveys undertaken in the urban slums by proto-sociologists like Seebohm Rowntree. The underfed, sickly sons of the industrial cities were evidence that Anglo-Saxon manhood was in decline. On one level, this fact was ammunition for social reformers of all persuasions, and on another, it provided the impetus for a body of determined imperialists to launch programmes for the regeneration of the masses. What was needed, claimed Baden-Powell, was the ‘hardening of the nation’ and the ‘building up of self-reliant, energetic manhood’ which would, in time, be able to populate and defend the empire.22
/> ‘Wishy-washy slackers’ were Baden-Powell’s target. A public celebrity, he used his considerable influence to awaken the nation’s youth to its duty and prepare it for its fulfilment. In an appeal which echoed that of Meath’s schoolmaster, he invoked the exploits of past heroes to shame their lethargic descendants:
Your forefathers worked hard, fought hard, and died hard to make this empire for you. Don’t let them look down from heaven, and see you loafing about with your hands in your pockets, doing nothing to keep it up.23
In December 1904 he exhorted the readers of Union Jack and the Marvel to learn how to drill and shoot. He concluded with an appeal for letters from captains of soccer and cricket XIs whose teams were keen to learn how to fight.24
Baden-Powell’s ideas were translated into action in 1908 with the foundation of the Boy Scouts who, two years later, totalled 100,000. The scouting movement’s philosophy was simple patriotism, and its activities, largely undertaken outdoors, were derived from Baden-Powell’s textbook on fieldcraft and survival which was based on his experiences fighting the Ndebele in Rhodesia. Appropriately, Scouts wore a khaki uniform like that of one of Rhodes’s troopers, complete with broad-brimmed bush hat and bandanna.
The Boy Scouts joined a number of other organisations dedicated to the proper diversion and instruction of youth. The well-established Boys Brigade drilled its largely working-class members with wooden rifles; dressed them in uniforms, which included the same pill-box hat that was then worn by soldiers; and instilled doctrines of Christian manliness and loyalty to crown and country. There were other, smaller bodies dedicated to the creation of upright and sturdy sons of empire, including the Anti-Smoking League and the League of St George. The latter campaigned against pornography and masturbation, which was also a source of anguish to Baden-Powell, who warned his scouts that, quite literally, it weakened the imperial seed, led to general debility and even madness.