The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  He did not succeed. Wilsonian high-mindedness had destroyed all hope of a peace along traditional European lines in which Britain would have bartered colonies for redrawn continental boundaries. This was a nuisance for Lloyd George and the government, but they had to put up with it as the price of American financial and material assistance. As Vansittart drily noted of Wilson’s peace terms, ‘Our ruling class did not relish the role of John Bull with a ring through his nose.’ Nine months before the publication of Wilson’s proposals, the former Conservative prime minister, Arthur Balfour, had warned the cabinet not to allow ‘Central European Philanthropy’ to stand in the way of the achievement of post-war imperial security.29 The interests of Poles, Czechs, Rumanians and assorted Yugoslavs, who had done little or nothing to further the Allied cause, had to remain subordinate to those of Britain. Moreover, Australia and New Zealand, which had acquired Germany’s Pacific islands, and South Africa, which had conquered South West Africa, refused to consider relinquishing them. Likewise, the British government was unwilling to surrender Togoland and the Cameroons, which had been overrun between 1914 and 1916, or German East Africa, which had been finally taken after a prolonged and arduous campaign in December 1917.

  All speculation about peace was purely academic in January 1918. German forces, lately released from the Russian front, were being transferred to the West in preparation for a war-winning offensive which was expected to be of unprecedented ferocity. Those who had stayed behind were beginning to advance eastwards towards the Black Sea, while the newly formed Turkish ‘Army of Islam’ was preparing to push towards the Caspian Sea. No Russian troops worth the name were able to oppose them. As the year unfolded the Allied position seemed precarious everywhere save on the seas where the German submarine threat had been greatly reduced.

  Three successive German offensives in France launched between March and July 1918 sliced through the Allied line, but on each occasion retreating forces were able to regroup and hold fresh defensive positions. The counter-offensives began in August and continued to the end of October. The German army lost ground and the will to fight on. The end came unexpectedly for the Allies, whose high command was preparing for operations in 1919 and a possible outright victory the following year. During the first week of November the disintegration of public order in Germany, the Kaiser’s abdication and a mutiny by sailors of the High Seas fleet drove the government to ask for terms. The armistice, which was tantamount to a German surrender, took effect on 11 November. On other fronts it was the same story of hammer blows followed by a swift collapse. In the Middle East, Allenby’s brilliant and fast-moving offensive shattered an outnumbered Turko-German army and Damascus was liberated by Australian cavalrymen on 30 September. Within a month, Aleppo and Antioch had fallen and the Turkish government had surrendered. Simultaneous Allied offensives in northern Italy and south-eastern Europe brought Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria to their knees.

  The British empire had survived and won. Soon after Germany’s capitulation, Curzon, in exultant mood, spoke of a future world in which the empire would be supreme:

  The British flag never flew over more powerful or united an empire than now; Britons never had better cause to look the world in the face; never did our voice count for more in the councils of the nations, or in determining the future destinies of mankind.30

  Plenty of such hubristic stuff poured from the lips and pens of statesmen, politicians and journalists during the next few months. Much of it was justified, for the empire’s subjects had made a titanic effort and paid a heavy price. The totals for dead and wounded were:

  Most of the casualties had been suffered in France where, in November 1918, there were just under two million British soldiers under arms, alongside 154,000 Canadians, 94,000 Australians and 25,000 New Zealanders. A further 306,000 imperial troops including 92,000 Indians and 20,000 Australians were deployed in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. There were 222,000 soldiers serving in Mesopotamia of whom 120,000 were Indian and 102,000 British. There were over a third of a million native labourers working on lines of communication throughout the Middle East.31

  For the dominions, the experience of war had been a rite of passage to nationhood. Anzac Day, the anniversary of the landings at Gallipoli, became a national day of remembrance in Australia and New Zealand. Its emotional meaning and the part played by those who had died in the development of national consciousness were poignantly illustrated in a small ceremony re-enacted at school morning assemblies in New Zealand during the 1920s. A boy faced a portrait of George V, saluted and then announced: ‘Our King inspires loyalty and devotion to our country and its laws because he rules by consent of the people. God Save the King!’ The National Anthem was sung. Afterwards, a boy recited these lines:

  The Great War proved that thousands of New Zealanders thought our beautiful country worth dying for. Like them, we pledge ourselves to live and, if necessary, die for our country and for our comrades throughout the Empire …32

  But had men died for the empire? Recruiting slogans and posters made much of the empire; a patriotic ABC for Canadian soldiers written in 1916 included the exhortation, ‘E is the Empire for which we would die’, and there were plenty of illustrations which showed the British lion roaring defiance with her cubs (the dominions) adding their yelps.33 Keith Fallis, a missionary’s son who at nineteen had enlisted in the Canadian army, believed that he, and presumably others, had been ‘brainwashed’ by prewar imperial propaganda. ‘I never questioned’, he later recollected, ‘that what we were doing was right and that the Germans were all wrong and that we were fighting to make the world safe for democracy.’34 The front was no place for flag-waving since soldiers’ minds were wholly concentrated on staying alive or recuperating from the trauma of battle. Working-class British soldiers in France were unmoved by the word ‘empire’, although some were stirred by it in the mistaken belief that it referred to the Empire Music Hall!35 During a war cabinet discussion of future imperial organisation in July 1918, the forthright Australian Labour Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, remarked that three-quarters of his countrymen then in France wanted nothing more to do with the empire.36

  The black soldier’s motive for fighting is not always easy to discern, for he seldom left any record of his experiences. When explanations of the war were offered them, they focussed on the possibility that the Germans would come and take their land. This was what recruits in Nyasaland heard in 1914.37 A Nigerian who served as a porter during the 1916–18 Cameroons campaign was told ‘that we were going to the great war to help keep the King’s soldiers who were preventing the Germans coming to our country and burning it.’38

  From the beginning of the war, there had been official misgivings about the mass recruitment of black soldiers. A Colonial Office official reminded the War Office in 1915 that:

  it must not be forgotten that a West African native trained to use of arms and filled with a new degree of self-confidence by successful encounters with forces armed and led by Europeans was not likely to be more amenable to discipline in peace time.39

  The point was understood on the other side of the racial barrier. In South Africa, Solomon Plaatje also recognised the danger of black fighting white. ‘The empire must uphold the principle that a coloured man must not raise his hand against a white man if there is to be any law and order in either India, Africa, or any part of the Empire.40 His fellow blacks were, quite deliberately, not being asked to kill white men but to do their chores, or, as George V told them when they arrived in France in July 1917: ‘Without munitions of War my armies cannot fight; without food they cannot live. You are helping to send these things to them each day, and in so doing you are hurling your spears at the enemy.’41 What his audience made of this speech is not known. Many had been astonished by meeting educated black men, apparently equal to whites, when they briefly disembarked at Freetown, Sierra Leone. They were also amazed by the sight of white men working on the docks at Liverpool and the free and easy ways of the women of
the port.42

  South Africa’s blacks had left behind them a country where a black skin automatically relegated a man to the bottom of the social pile. West Indians came from a society where the black man enjoyed greater advantages; he was educated by missionaries and governed in a benevolent manner by a paternalist colonial administration. Despite their gallantry in the field during the Palestine campaign, West Indian volunteers, keen to serve Britain, endured racial slights which left them humiliated and angry. Their bitterness exploded in a mutiny at Taranto in December 1918. During a protest meeting one sergeant shouted out, ‘The black man should have freedom and govern himself in the West Indies.’ His views were applauded and some months after, Sir George Fiddes, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, warned officials in the West Indies that the ‘white class does not appreciate the altered tone of the black men’.43

  Indian nationalists saw their country’s war effort as a step along the path towards self-government. Their leader Mohandas Gandhi, who had served with a field ambulance unit in the Boer War and during the 1906 Zulu rebellion, offered his services again, but an attack of pleurisy prevented him from going to Mesopotamia. He accepted the Wilsonian vision of the war as one being waged on behalf of the ‘weaker and minor nationalities’ and, in June 1918, urged his followers to enlist. Nationalist volunteers, he told an audience in Bombay , would form ‘a national army’ of ‘Home Rulers’. ‘They would go to fight for the Empire; but they would so fight because they aspire to become partners in it.’44

  No binding ideology held together the empire’s fighting men. Imperial enthusiasts, mostly in Britain, who held up wartime cooperation as a shining example of how imperial unity could work and the basis for future cohesion were out of touch with reality. An emergency had drawn together Britain and the dominions who, in 1914, were reasonably alarmed by the repercussions of German domination of Europe. British and dominion soldiers fought well, but the latter, particularly Australians and Canadians, were appalled by the rigidity of Britain’s social system which had been translated in its entirety into service life. Many were glad that they or their ancestors had emigrated. Black and brown men discovered new worlds; were exposed to new ideas; became conscious of their position within the empire; and returned home questioning some of its assumptions.

  Nevertheless, the late-Victorian and Edwardian dream of the various parts of empire joining together to form one solid battleline had come true. What imperialists then and after failed to appreciate was that those who had been asked to make sacrifices might expect recompense. Furthermore, in what was its final surge of empire-building, Britain had used the war to conquer territories in the Middle East in alliance with Arab nationalism. In 1918 it remained to be seen how, if at all, acquisitive imperialism could be squared with the rights of Gandhi’s ‘weaker and minor nationalities’ in whose interests Britain had ostensibly been fighting for the last eleven months of the war.

  2

  Clear Out or Govern: Troubles, mainly Irish, 1919–39

  Two viruses afflicted the post-war world. One, Spanish influenza, attacked the body and the other, which no one could put a name to, infected the soul; they were equally devastating. While the origins of the second sickness were the subject of conjecture and debate, its symptoms were clear enough. Treatment seemed beyond the powers of statesmen, as Arthur Balfour, then acting Foreign Secretary, remarked in a letter to Sir Reginald Wingate, the high commissioner in Egypt, at the end of March 1919:

  The Egyptian unrest is doubtless part of a world movement which takes different forms in different places, but is plainly discernible on every continent and in every country. We are only at the beginning of our troubles and it is doubtful whether, and how far, the forces of an orderly civilisation are going to deal effectively with those of social and international disintegration.1

  This was a bleak diagnosis from a man of seventy-one who had been brought up to have faith in the eventual triumph of human progress and those civilised forces which underpinned the old world order. At the end of what had been a distinguished political career, the urbane and cultivated minister looked out on a world full of mischief. Everywhere there was evidence of the disruptive energy of that protean force which appeared not only unstoppable, but threatened the existence of the empire.

  In the past three months Balfour had witnessed the proclamation of an Irish republic by a band of Sinn Fein MPs, and the paralysis of Egypt by saboteurs and mobs clamouring for an end to British rule over their country. As Balfour had feared, matters soon got worse. During April and May, Gandhi’s mass protest against the recent sedition laws triggered disorders on such a scale as to make some officials believe that India was on the verge of a second mutiny. There were anti-white riots in Trinidad, Jamaica and British Honduras; Kurds rebelled against the new British administration in Iraq; and in May 1920, the Arabs followed suit. In the same year there were anti-Jewish riots in Palestine and the spread of a guerrilla campaign by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

  Britain was not immune from the contagion. British and dominion troops mutinied and rioted against delays in demobilisation during the winter and spring of 1919. In June, a detachment of the Staffordshire Regiment refused to leave for service in India and the summer was marked by a series of police strikes.2 Most alarming of all was an upsurge in trade union militancy which was reflected in a sequence of strikes throughout 1919 and 1920 that unnerved the government and stirred up fears that Britain was about to face a revolution along Russian lines.

  Those of a conservative frame of mind like Balfour searched for a single guiding intelligence behind these repeated assaults on the established order. The Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, declared to the Commons in July 1920 his belief that there existed a ‘conspiracy to drive the British out of India, and out of Egypt’.3 Another Ulsterman of strong opinions, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was more specific. He listed the causes of national and imperial disaffection as: ‘Sinn Feiners and Socialists at our own doors, Russian Bolsheviks, Turkish and Egyptian Nationalists and Indian seditionists’.4 He did not say whether their activities were coordinated, but his intelligence department identified Russia as the ultimate source of all anti-British movements in the Middle East.5 Sir Maurice Hankey, successively secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and to the war cabinet, blamed President Wilson’s fourteen points which, by their promotion of nationalism and self-determination, ‘struck at the roots of the British Empire’.6

  The theory that all expressions of popular discontent in Britain and throughout the empire owed their origins to covert Communist agitation appealed to those on the right and in intelligence circles, and proved remarkably durable. Its persistence owed much to the anti-colonial rhetoric which poured out of Moscow after 1917, and Russia’s offer of sanctuary and support to militant nationalists, particularly from India. Likewise, the Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919 to propagate world-wide revolution, aimed to develop the revolutionary consciousness of all colonial peoples. This was, however, a secondary objective, for the Comintern’s attention was principally focussed on the already organised industrial working classes of Europe and America, who were more susceptible to Communist propaganda than the politically unawakened peasantry of Asia and Africa.

  Where they existed, colonial trade unions were a natural target for Comintern agents. British and Indian Communists were sent to India during the 1920s with orders to penetrate and convert local trade unionists. These agitators made little headway, thanks in large part to the counter-subversion measures adopted by the Indian Criminal Investigation Department.7 Precautions against the infiltration of trade unions were taken in Egypt in 1920, when specially chosen native police officers were sent to England to undergo a course in ‘anti-Bolshevist’ surveillance techniques.8 Elsewhere, colonial police departments kept an eye on local Communist parties. That established in Palestine in 1921 proved no danger to the state for, according to
a police report, its subsequent history was ‘little more than a dreary and uninspiring tale of doctrinal bickerings and fiercely waged disputes involving no more than a handful of obscure men and women in back rooms in Tel Aviv and Haifa’.9

  Such details did nothing to allay the fears of British intelligence. In 1927, Field-Marshal Lord Milne, the Chief of Imperial General Staff, summed up an analysis of Communist activities in India with the observation that Soviet subversion was ‘the gravest military menace which faces the British Empire today’.10 This claim rested on reports that Soviet agents, drawing on experience gained in China, were preparing to subvert the Indian nationalist movement. What is striking about this information is what it reveals about the official mentality of the time: both Milne and his staff automatically assumed that the Indian national movement would easily succumb to Communist pressure and accept an ideology far different from that of most of its leadership and rank and file. More alarming was information which indicated that the Russian government was resuscitating Czarist expansionist policies in Afghanistan. During the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, intelligence discovered that the Afghans were seeking Russian aircraft and pilots, and two years later Afghan aviators were being trained in Russia.11 Old ghosts reappeared in the corridors of Delhi and plans for the defence of Afghanistan against a Russian invasion were brought out and updated.12 Even in 1943, when Britain and Russia were allies, military intelligence was disturbed by accounts of Soviet agitators at work among the tribesmen of the North-West Frontier.13