The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The future mothers of the imperial breed received their own indoctrination. The Church of England Girls’ Friendly Society which, in 1913, had 200,000 members, was primarily concerned with giving moral guidance to young working-class women. As well as counselling deference, chastity and quietism, this society helped unmarried women to emigrate, and its leaflets contained a scattering of imperialist propaganda. ‘I look on imperialism as a means of eradicating the selfishness of Socialism,’ announced the Honourable Mrs Joyce, the society’s emigration secretary, in 1913.25 The Girl Guides, an offshoot of the scouting movement, adopted similar patriotic values. A leaflet issued for Guides in 1910 drew their attention to a role that they might have to play in defence of the empire:

  Girls! Imagine that a battle has taken place in and around your town or village … what are you going to do? Are you going to sit down and wring your hands and cry, or are you going to be plucky, and go and do something to help your fathers and brothers…?26

  Just how far those on the receiving end of Edwardian patriotic and imperial propaganda were converted by it cannot be known. It contained, and this was recognised and regretted by those on the left, elements designed to smother class politics. There were also charges that the emphasis placed on such military values as obedience and duty fostered militarism, which was true up to a point. Admiration for the services had grown throughout the nineteenth century, but the British cult of the warrior hero had always laid great stress on his Christian faith which, as with Gordon, was the basis for his superior courage. The fighting man was respected not just because he was physically strong and brave, but because of that interior moral stamina which made him perform his duty.

  Like his predecessor, the Edwardian soldier was essentially a bringer of civilisation. This was how he was depicted in newspaper reports of the small and rather unglamorous campaigns fought between 1902 and 1914 on various frontiers. The Daily Mail, now with a daily circulation of three quarters of a million, gave coverage to operations in Somaliland during 1902 and 1903, and the invasion of Tibet in 1903. In each case the old formula was adopted, with the empire’s adversaries being represented as wild, brave and reckless savages engaged in a hopeless struggle against civilisation. Incidentally, in its reporting of the Somaliland war, the Mail astonishingly asserted that the Mad Mullah’s near victory at Erigo in 1902 was certain proof of his clinical insanity.27 Presumably only a lunatic could expect to defeat a British army!

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  The patrician high priests of imperialism, while they approved of attempts to widen the public’s knowledge of the empire, had always been disdainful of the sudden upsurges of popular patriotism that had been triggered by victories in colonial wars. For the likes of Chamberlain and Milner, jingoism distracted the public from the more serious but less romantic aspects of empire, and was an uncomfortable reminder of the fickleness of public opinion. It was a drawback of democracy that the public at large was easily bored and could not be persuaded to concentrate on any issue for long. For this reason, such figures as Milner were anxious to convert to the imperial creed those who really mattered, the young men who would be the future rulers of Britain and the empire.

  In South Africa, Milner had collected around himself a knot of young, zealous imperialists who had, between 1900 and 1906, worked with him towards the country’s reconstruction. Known as the kindergarten, this band of talented Oxonians included the journalist and future novelist John Buchan, Philip Kerr and Lionel Curtis, all of whom would dedicate their lives to the promotion of imperialism. Their circle was joined by Leo Amery and formed the nucleus for the Round Table, a cross-party, imperial pressure group founded in 1910 and partly financed by the Rhodes Trust. The Round Table’s object was to influence those who shaped public opinion in Britain and the empire by press articles, pamphlets, discussion groups and individual contacts.

  An imperial federation was the Round Table’s goal. Its members believed that Britain could not survive economically and remain a global power unless it became the dominant force within a closely bonded empire. They feared that this ‘big’ issue could easily get lost amid public debates over tariffs and the price of a loaf of bread. Just what the Round Table achieved is hard to judge, at least before 1914. Lionel Curtis, the Round Table’s roving ambassador to the dominions was cordially welcomed by their leaders, but his message cut no ice with them. As in the colonial conferences, they identified manoeuvres to secure a formal imperial unity with the machinations of the British ruling class. There was also an understandable fear that if a federation was formed, the dominions would find themselves relegated to the role of passive junior partners.28 So, while dominions were sincere in their profession of emotional attachment to Britain, they remained extremely lukewarm towards the forging of more tangible links.

  By 1914 imperial union was as far off as ever. There had been greater progress in making the public and the working class in particular more aware of the empire. It is impossible to know how far the catchwords of those organisations which promoted various forms of patriotism and imperialism entered the national consciousness. Many who heard them became the rank and file of the mass volunteer army formed between 1914 and 1916 to fight on the Western Front. Then, as in the Boer War, the slogans of popular patriotism did not travel to the fighting line; the letters home written by working-class soldiers reflected little of the strident patriotism whipped up by the press and the recruiters or the lower key pre-war imperial propaganda. What they did reveal was an acute sense of duty, a determination to persevere and an intense loyalty to comrades and unit.

  11

  To Join the Khaki Line: The Empire and the Coming of War

  Hints that a major war was imminent, even welcome, were implicit in much Edwardian imperial propaganda. Baden-Powell urged his Boy Scouts to ‘Be Prepared’, and in a pamphlet of 1911 the National Service League reminded the British ‘lad’ that he alone stood between ‘his mother and sister, his sweetheart and his girlfriend’ and the ‘inconceivable infamy of alien invasion’. Any ethical or physical qualms which the young patriot might have had about taking up arms were swept aside by the unbelievably glib assertions that ‘war is not murder, as some fancy, war is sacrifice – which is the soul of Christianity’, and ‘fighting and killing are not of the essence of it [war], but are accidents’.1

  Speculation about the causes and likely course of a future war had become a well-established and highly popular literary genre by 1900. The next fourteen years saw a steady rise in the output of sensational, semi-fictional accounts of wars between Britain and one or more of the great powers. The demand for this sort of fantasy was in part a reflection of the prevailing national mood of uncertainty and in part fascination with the new technology, particularly aerial, which was currently being developed for military purposes. The scenarios for these imaginary wars changed significantly after 1900. William le Queux, a jobbing wordsmith who specialised in this kind of fiction, made France and Russia Britain’s antagonists in his 1894 novel, The Great War of 1897, whereas Germany was the foe in his 1906 best-seller, The Invasion of 1910. This was serialised by the Daily Mail, whose owner, Lord Northcliffe, was a passionate Germanophobe and always looking for an opportunity to awaken his countrymen to the peril across the North Sea. After a tour of Germany in which he visited its growing industrial cities, he remarked, ‘Every one of these new factory chimneys is a gun pointed at England, and in many cases a very powerful one.’2

  This sort of scare-mongering encouraged war-mongering. From 1906 onwards the country was convulsed by spasmodic bouts of spy mania, with rumours of an underground army of German secret agents and equally ridiculous reports of nocturnal Zeppelin flights over Yorkshire. Even the government got the jitters and introduced a badly prepared Official Secrets Act in 1912. Much of this agitation was orchestrated by the conscription lobby, which carefully exploited that intense, irrational fear of sudden invasion which had long been embedded in the national psyche. It had broken surface intermittently t
hroughout the past century with invasion alarms and accompanying calls for national vigilance and rearmament. There was, however, an important difference between Victorian and early twentieth-century invasion scares which made the latter far more convincing; the growing German navy.

  The 1898 German Naval Law and its successors outlined an ambitious programme of ship construction which, when completed in 1920, would provide Germany with a fleet of forty-five battleships and thirty-two cruisers. This projection had been revised by 1914 to give a total of sixty-one battleships by 1928. The inspiration for this enterprise was an American naval officer, Captain Alfred Mahan. His analyses of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British seapower convinced the Kaiser that if Germany, like Britain, possessed a large fleet, she could become a world power on the same scale and with equal, if not greater influence. At first, Wilhelm II had regarded the German navy as a necessary counterbalance to those of France and Russia, but it was soon apparent to him that it could be used as the servant of Germany’s new Weltpolitik.3 If, as he and his advisers wished, Germany was to acquire colonies and international power commensurate with its growing wealth, it would have to be prepared to challenge Britain on more-or-less equal terms.

  This intention was conveyed in the belligerent preamble to the 1900 Navy Law which insisted that ‘Germany must have a Fleet of such strength that a war, even against the mightiest naval Power would involve such risks as to threaten the supremacy of that Power.’4 The German fleet might not be able to defeat the British, but it could inflict wounds that would prove mortal. There was even greater menace in the planned deployment of Germany’s new warships, for all but a handful were to be concentrated at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven. As one British naval commentator observed in 1905, the North Sea had become in effect an imperial frontier, and an extremely vulnerable one.

  The creation of the German navy, its presence 400 miles from Britain’s coastline, and the possibility that it might be used as a bludgeon to extort overseas concessions presented the government with three problems. The first two were practical: new ships had to be laid down to preserve the Royal Navy’s advantage in numbers, and the existing fleet would have to be redistributed to provide squadrons for home defence. Calling home men-o’-war from overseas stations demanded a complete overhaul of Britain’s relations with those powers against which they had hitherto been deployed, France and Russia. Rearmament and diplomacy therefore proceeded side by side in what became a search for world-wide security. The first phase of this new course in British policy opened with the Japanese alliance of 1902, which cleared the way for the reduction of the Far Eastern fleet.

  The radical restructuring and modernising of the navy began in 1904 under the direction of the First Sea Lord, Admiral Lord Fisher. He was a pugnacious, effervescent sexagenarian, well aware of his intellectual superiority over his brother admirals and, unusually for his times, the possessor of a refreshing contempt for all forms of sport and organised games. Twice, in 1904 and 1908, Fisher proposed to remove the German threat once and for all by the ruthless stratagem that had been used in 1806 against the Danish fleet, and more recently by the Japanese against the Russians; a preemptive attack. ‘My God, Fisher, you must be mad,’ was Edward VII’s reaction to the first suggestion, but it was aired in the press and caused consternation among German naval officers, who knew that their fleet could not have defended itself against such an assault.5 It was not only the British who were jumpy about the ‘bolt from the blue’.

  Fisher’s greatest contribution to the remaking of the Royal Navy was pushing through the design and building of a new type of battleship, HMS Dreadnought. Dreadnought took a record eleven months to construct, was completed in October 1906, and rendered all other battleships obsolete. It displaced 17,900 tons, mounted ten twelve-inch guns, and could steam at over twenty knots. Three more Dreadnought class battleships were laid down in 1906–7, along with two battlecruisers, HMS Inflexible and Indomitable. These were also novelties, faster than conventional battleships thanks to lighter armour-plating, but armed with eight twelve-inch guns. These warships represented a revolution in naval architecture and gave a new, almost frenzied momentum to the race between Britain and Germany. In October 1906, as the original Dreadnought was beginning its trials, the German navy ordered its first ‘Dreadnought’, SMS Westfalen.

  HMS Dreadnought was a two-edged sword. By relegating all earlier, conventional battleships to antique status, its launch had cut Britain’s considerable lead over Germany in this class of warship. Nonetheless, Dreadnought and its immediate successors gave Britain a head start in what was a new contest with Germany; but the Germans possessed the will, technology, and most importantly the cash to narrow the gap. As German naval planners realised, the Anglo-German naval race was an economic marathon, rather like the American Star Wars project of the 1980s, in which victory would ultimately go to the power with the longest purse.6

  Nearly every Dreadnought-class battleship and battlecruiser built between 1906 and 1914 was earmarked for service in the reconstituted Home and Channel fleets, which were now the empire’s first line of defence. Since 1904 there had been a gradual redistribution of the fleet organised by Fisher, which included the scrapping of over 150 assorted gunboats and sloops, the small vessels which had hitherto policed Britain’s official and unofficial empires. Large enough to overawe Chinese pirates or Arab slavers, they could play no useful part in a modern war, and the recent introduction of wireless now meant that the light cruisers, deployed on foreign stations, could be swiftly summoned to trouble spots. Reductions in the numbers of battleships attached to overseas squadrons was undertaken gradually and cautiously. The five serving in the Pacific were only withdrawn in June 1905, following the destruction of the Russian fleet at Tshushima and the renegotiation of the alliance with Japan in which each party pledged to assist the other in the event of attack by one rather than two powers. There was no such guarantee for British interests in the Mediterranean and so eight older battleships were retained there, supported after 1912 by two battlecruisers sent to shadow the German battlecruiser Goeben. The presence of these modern ships was needed in home waters, but it was thought that their withdrawal would have a disturbing effect in Egypt and India.7 Nevertheless, between 1904 and 1910 Fisher had completely changed the disposition of Britain’s navy: in 1896 there had been 74 ships stationed in home waters and 142 overseas, fourteen years later these totals were 480 and 83 respectively.

  Such a sweeping change in the Royal Navy’s deployment had been facilitated by the new course in Britain’s foreign policy. In April 1904, Britain agreed the entente cordiale with France, a collection of accommodations which ended twenty years of acrimony and sabre-rattling over colonial boundaries and spheres of influence. Most important in terms of imperial security was French recognition of Britain’s position in Egypt, a concession paid for by Britain’s acknowledgement of France’s paramountcy in Morocco. This was put to the test in 1905 and 1911, when Britain stood by France in resisting German encroachments in this region.

  It was less easy to come to a similar understanding with Russia, despite French encouragement. There was profound suspicion of Russian expansionism among British diplomats and strategists, and fears of a Russian attack on India were as strong as ever. This could have been forestalled had the Japanese been persuaded to lend troops for the defence of Afghanistan or diversionary operations in Persia, suggestions that were put to Japan’s delegates during the renegotiation of the terms of the alliance in 1905. The response was disappointing since, while prepared to fight Russia in Manchuria and Siberia, the Japanese had no desire to defend Britain’s empire.8

  This rebuff drove Britain to open direct talks with Russia. The outcome was the Anglo-Russian Convention of August 1907, which terminated an eighty-year cold war in the Middle East and Asia. Russia promised to respect Indian integrity, and the two powers agreed to partition Persia into spheres of influence, Britain getting the south-eastern part of the country, which bordered
on India, and the southern, which lay on the shores of the Persian Gulf. These terms had been extracted from Russia at a time when it was still recovering from its defeat by Japan and the subsequent revolution of 1905–6. By 1912, when a vast rearmament programme was in full swing and national confidence had been restored, there were clear indications that the Czar’s ministers were reactivating old expansionist policies. There was evidence of fresh Russian interest in such sensitive areas as Tibet and Chinese Turkestan.9 At the same time there was a recrudescence of Russian intrigue inside Persia which suggested that its government did not feel bound by the 1907 Convention.10 Misgivings about Russia understandably remained strong in British official circles. A plan concocted in 1912 for the possible occupation of the Turkish province of Mesopotamia (Iraq) included a proposal to build a railway from Basra to Mosul which would make it easy to launch a counter-attack into the Caucasus if Russia made moves against India.11

  Britain had done comparatively well from its détentes with France and Russia, even if Russian goodwill was brittle. Disentanglement from old disputes had left successive British governments free to adjust their overall strategy to meet the threat of the German fleet in the North Sea. This had been achieved without entering into any formal engagement binding the country to war if either France or Russia was attacked; indeed, as late as 1912 strategists could still seriously contemplate the possibilities of a war against the latter in certain circumstances. This view of future neutrality in a European conflict between the great powers was not taken by the War Office, which in January 1906 asked for and obtained cabinet permission to open covert discussion with the French general staff on future cooperation in the event of a war with Germany.