Cities of Empire
Page 44
Not least his own. ‘What a ceremony!’ he said of his investiture as viceroy.
Everyone who mattered was there. All the Princes. All the leaders. All the diplomats. I put on everything. My white full dress uniform. Orders, decorations, medals, the whole lot … Obviously I wore the Garter. Then I wore the Star of India … I wore the Star of the Indian Empire and then I wore the Royal Victorian Order and that made the four; that’s all you’re allowed to wear.81
Mountbatten was a clarifying embodiment of New Delhi’s alien ethos and a desperate anachronism. The midnight hour presaged the triumph of the middle class of Calcutta and Bombay, not the colonial aristocracy of the Secretariat; it was a victory for the intelligentsia of the Indian National Congress and the urban radical activists, rather than the Ornamental noblesse oblige of Viceroy’s House. Indeed, independence was an epic denial of the lofty condescension of New Delhi – of liberty being generously granted to the people of India by their colonial masters, rather than being taken by Indians as right through struggle.
The fall of New Delhi also signalled something more profound for the future of the British Empire. Lutyens’s stone bells were now tolling as the straitened finances of a postwar economy and the growing ambitions of the American and Soviet empires ushered in the beginning of the end of the British imperial project. Winston Churchill’s long-feared decline and fall of the British Empire – in which he had always regarded the loss of India as instrumental – had come to pass. By 1947 the Rome of Hindustan was awash in the blood of India–Pakistan partition, as communal tensions spilled over into attacks on Delhi’s Muslim neighbourhoods and the imperial elite danced out their final days.
Friday, 15 August 1947 was Independence Day in Pamela Mountbatten’s diary – when India was made free, Daddy an earl and Mummy a countess.
Mummy wore a long gold lamé dress and a little wreath of gold leaves on her head. With the golden thrones and golden carpets and the red velvet canopies over the thrones spot-lit it was very sumptuous. The trumpeters in scarlet and gold had heralded a splendid entrance. At the end of the ceremony the great bronze doors were thrown open and ‘God Save the King’ was followed by the new Indian national anthem, ‘Jana Gana Mana’ … Then Mummy and Daddy, escorted by the Bodyguard, drove in the state carriage down to the Constituent Assembly. I was already sitting with the staff but when the carriage arrived the Council House was entirely surrounded by a quarter of a million frenzied people chanting ‘Jai Hind’.82
Rome had fallen, and another Delhi consumed by this graveyard of dynasties. Among the millions of Indians caught up in the excitement of the city’s transition to independence was G. D. Khosla, a judge in the High Court of Lahore. ‘In a few moments I would be a free citizen of India,’ he wrote of the celebrated midnight session, as Nehru addressed the nation from inside Baker’s Parliament House. ‘Everyone in the hall would be free. Everyone outside and beyond the hall would be free … I had a sudden impulse to stand up and shout: Civis Indicus sum.’83
Another new Delhi, another new Rome, had been born.
10
Liverpool
The Janus Face of Empire
On 22 April 1981 the end of the British Empire hit home. After 112 years of business, the sugar giant Tate & Lyle closed the doors on its Liverpool refinery with the loss of 1,600 jobs. Whereas once the Merseyside warehouses had been piled high with the harvests of Caribbean plantations, the docks now stood idle. With sugar cane from the Commonwealth unable to compete with subsidized sugar beet from the Continent, Tate & Lyle chairman Lord Jellicoe described the Love Lane refinery as ‘a victim’ of UK membership of the European Economic Community. The terms of Britain’s trade with the world were changing, and the port of Liverpool was stranded on the wrong side of history. Only the day before the refinery closure, the Liverpool Steamship Owners’ Association had announced a further haemorrhaging of business. Foreign and coastwise cargo into the Mersey docks had slumped by 19 per cent over the year; the port had lost 957 berthings during the previous two years; and the container trade was withering. ‘And now came the news that Tates was to be shut,’ as the sugar company’s historian describes it. ‘Tates, the household name, probably the one plant in Liverpool that everybody knew about. Tates with its long tradition of family service and its unique place in the minds of Liverpudlians. That this was to go was unbelievable, this was the ultimate blow.’1
The social effects of the port of Liverpool’s slow-motion collapse were apparent across Merseyside: falling population levels; spiralling unemployment; declining business confidence; and rising child poverty. All of this was exacerbated by the economic recession of the early 1980s and heavy cuts to local government spending. In Liverpool, over 80,000 unemployed were chasing just over 1,000 vacancies. So when in July 1981 the disaffected, jobless and frequently brutalized inner-city youth of the ‘Liverpool 8’ district took to the streets, few were surprised. In that long summer of riots – sparked by unemployment, thuggish policing and what a later inquiry would call a culture of ‘institutional racism’ in the police towards Britain’s black and minority ethnic urban populations – which spread from Brixton in London to Moss Side in Manchester to Handsworth in Birmingham, the events in ‘Liverpool 8’ (or Toxteth) were among the most despairing. Over four days and nights of rioting, while seventy properties went up in smoke, cars were torched, 460 policemen injured and hundreds arrested, CS gas was used for the first time on the British mainland. ‘Outside, the entire skyline is an angry crimson,’ was how one local resident described the night of 3 July 1981.
Dense banks of black smoke hang threateningly above the rooftops. The silhouette of Tiber Street School, five hundred yards away, is framed by huge tongues of green and lilac flame, licking skyward. Over by the Anglican Cathedral is a colossal blaze, the like of which we’ve never seen in our lives … the view is like a Hieronymous Bosch painting of Hell.2
Liverpool, the Queen City of the Mersey, whose warehouses had supplied the industrial revolution and whose St George’s Hall stood as the defining symbol of Victorian civic pride, the city that had commanded global trade since the 1700s and had boasted more millionaires than anywhere in the UK outside London, was ablaze. Merseyside’s proud history as the ‘Gateway of Empire’ was going up like the city’s torched Rialto Ballroom.
‘Alone, every night, when the meetings were over and the pressure was off, I would stand with a glass of wine, looking out at the magnificent view over the river and ask myself what had gone wrong for this great English city.’ Michael Heseltine was the government minister who relocated himself from London to Liverpool, in the aftermath of the Toxteth riots, to try to rebuild the shattered city.
The Mersey, its lifeblood, flowed as majestically as ever down from the hills. Its monumental Georgian and Victorian buildings, created with such pride and at such cost by the city fathers of a century and more earlier, still dominated the skyline. The Liver Building itself, the epicentre of a trading system that had reached out to the four corners of the earth, stood defiant and from my perspective very alone. The port had serviced an empire and sourced a world trade.
But since then, thought Heseltine, ‘in truth, everything had gone wrong’.3
Here was the Janus face of Empire. Since Liverpool’s merchants had first set out across the Atlantic for Boston and Bridgetown, or south to the Coast of Guinea, sailing between the West African slave forts, Britain had been enriched by Empire. What Karl Marx called the ‘primitive accumulation’ of colonialism had ensured the prosperity of the UK’s great port cities – Glasgow, London, Bristol and Liverpool. But Indian independence signalled the start of a terrible turn in fortunes for these imperial cities of the British metropole. Autonomy for New Delhi meant the economic underpinning of their imperial wealth was ripped away and, in the aftermath of the end of Empire, their urban civilization came crashing down. Colonial liberation abroad produced postcolonial cities at home: metropolises crippled by both a vanishing economic rationale and the
loss of any coherent sense of their place in the world. Overseas, in the 1980s, Britain camouflaged decline by running its most assertive foreign policy for decades. With the support (sometimes passive, sometimes active) of the American Empire, it would recapture the Falkland Islands in 1982, square up against the Soviet Union and support any number of military sorties in the Middle East. This was Britain ‘punching above its weight’, sustaining its semi-imperial role on the world stage with its fiercely guarded permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council, long after the Empire itself had gone. In the cities of northern England and Scotland, the reality of decline was harder to disguise. Here, at home, the end of Empire spelt deindustrialization, depopulation and unrest. What had once made Liverpool now unmade her: as the riches of Empire receded, urban bravura gave way to urban ruin.
THE BRICKS OF LIVERPOOL
Even today, after Second World War bombing raids, 1970s brutalism and relentless regeneration schemes, the origins of Liverpool’s imperial economy can still be read in the city’s fabric. Begin with the Town Hall, as the most obvious architectural remnant of how the city once sought to define itself. Long since overshadowed by the mighty St George’s Hall, this neo-classical gem was erected at the heart of the city’s commercial district, on the busy junction of High Street and Dale Street, in the 1750s. Jealous of Bristol’s fine Exchange, Liverpool’s civic elite poached its architect, John Wood, for a replica commission on the Mersey with the instruction to lavish extra attention on the wealth and trade that had made its commission possible. So, on the high reliefs between the square Corinthian piers, and above the teeming merchant streets, were carved a series of exotic stone panels revelling in Liverpool’s proud history of human trafficking and colonial trade. ‘Busts of Blackamoors and Elephants with the Teeth of the Latter, with such like emblematical Figures, representing the African Trade and Commerce,’ as one admiring contemporary put it in the 1780s.4
The West African business, slavery, sugar and all the byways of colonial commerce were drilled through the stones of Liverpool. Jamaica Street and Rodney Street (named after Admiral Lord Rodney, who defeated the French at St Lucia in 1782) spoke to the city’s Caribbean connections. Liverpool’s gratitude to the Royal Navy for keeping the trade routes open was further acknowledged in 1813 with a public subscription for a Nelson Monument. Placed between the Exchange and the Town Hall, this macabre bronze composition of flags, cannon, captives and a skeletal figure of Death (so much more melodramatic than Bridgetown’s statue of Nelson) remains one of Merseyside’s most familiar monuments. Close by, the nautical theme continues with the slave-trading dynasties of Earle, Tarleton, Cunliffe, Gildart and Bold giving their names to some of the city’s finest boulevards – the latter described in the 1820s as an ‘imperial trading street … and such shops! Paramount, princely, nay imperial in their way. Here taste, elegance and display are in their element.’5 From the dock warehouses to the family banks, from Pier Head to Rope Walk, the iconography and architecture of Liverpool were a physical reminder of the city’s origins in an eighteenth-century imperial economy. The same power of commerce and slavery as had spurred the growth of Boston and Bridgetown had built cities on the eastern edges of the Atlantic too. Or as the Reverend William Bagshaw Stevens put it more explicitly in 1797, ‘throughout this large-built Town every Brick is cemented to its fellow Brick by the blood and sweat of Negroes’.6
It was in the second half of the seventeenth century that Liverpool started to challenge nearby Chester as the leading port of north-west England. The size of its harbour on the Mersey, compared to Chester’s on the Dee, made it more convenient for ocean-going vessels to manoeuvre, and its ready access to the clothmaking districts of south Lancashire offered an excellent export base for markets in Spain and the Mediterranean. Its traders then started to experiment first with salt exports and Irish commerce, before following Glasgow into the tobacco and sugar businesses. During the 1660s, some 320 years before Tate & Lyle’s closure of Love Lane, Liverpool’s refining of West Indian cane began in the vicinity of Dale Street. The displacement of London shipping during the plague and fire years of the Restoration only helped Merseyside expand its Atlantic networks. Customs revenue and shipping tonnage both accelerated steadily over the course of the eighteenth century, providing a far-sighted Liverpool Corporation with the funds to invest in the world’s first commercial enclosed wet dock, then ape Dublin in widening and improving its streets. Indeed, Liverpool proved far more effective than the myriad of competing London dock companies in investing in its infrastructure and providing cheaper port facilities. The population grew from 5,715 in 1700 to some 78,000 by 1801.7 Yet behind all this prosperity was the lynchpin of Liverpool’s Georgian economy – the ‘blood and sweat’ of those Africans whose visages peered out from the high reliefs of the Town Hall.
‘The West Indian sugar trade brought wealth to many, and in connection therewith the African slave trade grew to enormous proportions,’ admitted an early twentieth-century history of Merseyside. ‘It cannot be denied that Liverpool took a prominent part in this trade, and that many of the leading Liverpool families of the eighteenth century rose to wealth and distinction through the traffic.’ But, the author averred, ‘it is to be remembered that public opinion in those days, at home and abroad, held very different views on the slavery question from those held today’.8 He was right in both respects. The 1750 African Trade Act undermined the monopoly of the London-based Royal African Company, whose Caribbean headquarters had been based in Bridgetown, and opened up the trafficking market to new entrants. Bristol, Whitehaven, Glasgow and above all Liverpool seized the opportunity, Merseyside overtaking its competitors to become Britain’s leading slave port between 1750 and 1770. Over the course of the eighteenth century, some 5,000 slaving ships set sail from Liverpool, constituting around 50 per cent of slave-trading voyages. They journeyed south to the African coast, then across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, before completing the triangle trade and returning home to the Mersey laden with cane, molasses, cotton and foodstuffs. Alongside cotton, coal, sugar, tobacco and salt, slavers could account for up to a seventh of the tonnage clearing Liverpool’s docks in the second half of the eighteenth century, the profits then cascading through the city’s shipyards, shopkeepers, bankers, linen merchants and property speculators.9 Indeed, large parts of Britain’s Midlands and north-west economy would benefit from Liverpool’s bloody enterprise, from the chain-makers of Dudley to the gun merchants of Birmingham and the cotton lords of Manchester, Burnley and Blackburn.
In 1807, after years of effort by William Wilberforce, supported by the highly principled but electorally doomed Liverpool MP William Roscoe, the trade in slaves was abolished across the British Empire. Merseyside was furious, but by then its economy had successfully diversified into servicing the surrounding centres of industrial production, which had been joined to the national and international markets by the expanding canal network. As the Liverpool Daily Post would later put it, ‘Liverpool was called into being … as a junction for the landing, embarkation and storage of vast wealth exchanged between the North and Midlands of England and the overseas world.’10 The Mersey docks brought in the raw materials from West Africa, the West Indies and North America (timber, sugar, grain), and then shipped out finished wares (Birmingham’s metal goods, Staffordshire ceramics, Sheffield steel) to the world. With its hinterland of industrial Lancashire and Cheshire, served by an expanding array of turnpikes and canals, Liverpool was the port of choice for the Workshop of the World. And above all, it was the cotton industry that secured Liverpool’s exponential growth. By the 1860s, the docks were handling some 2.6 million bales of cotton sailed in from the American South to feed the 2,000 mills which clacked and shuttled across Lancashire. The tonnage of shipping using Liverpool doubled between 1815 and 1830, and doubled again by 1845. As in Bombay, the advent of the railway in the 1840s only accelerated the port’s entrepôt role, while the construction of Clarence Dock in 1830 had provided d
edicated steamship facilities with substantial cargo holds, creating new commercial opportunities for ships to service distant Chinese, Indian and South American markets. ‘The commerce of Liverpool extends to every port of importance in every quarter of the globe,’ local journalist Thomas Baines could announce in 1852. ‘In this respect it far surpasses the commerce of any city of which we have a record from past times, such as Tyre, Venice, Genoa, Amsterdam, or Antwerp, and fully equals, if it does not surpass, that of London and New York.’11
The commercial heart of Liverpool lay in the hundreds of acres of quayside that lined the sides of the Mersey. ‘For seven miles and a quarter, on the Lancashire side of the river alone, the monumental granite, quarried from the [Mersey] Board’s own quarries in Scotland, fronts the river in a vast sea wall as solid and enduring as the Pyramids, the most stupendous work of its kind that the will and power of man have ever created,’ wrote the Liverpool historian Ramsay Muir in the early 1900s.12 ‘In olden times it used to be said that “all roads lead to Rome”. Today all seas lead to Liverpool,’ chimed the Liverpool historian W. T. Pike. ‘There is no part of the globe, however remote, whose natives may not be met on the Liverpool landing stage, and there is no territory so distant whose products do not pass from time to time through the docks and warehouses of Liverpool.’13 Across the Mersey, at the Birkenhead Iron Works, the boilermaker William Laird and his son John were building the iron ships to carry the wares to and from Liverpool. In 1903, Laird Brothers Ltd merged with the Sheffield steel firm of Charles Cammell and Co. to create the ship-building behemoth Cammell Laird. Between 1829 and 1947, over 1,100 vessels of all kinds were built and launched from their Birkenhead dockyards into the Mersey.