Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (37 page)

He took tea with King George V and Queen Mary, at Buckingham Palace. This was a pungent engagement. Though the King had accepted the suggestion reluctantly—‘What! Have this rebel fakir in the Palace!’—still His Majesty was, reported his private secretary, ‘as is his custom, very nice to Mr Gandhi’. The King took the occasion to ‘warn’ the Mahatma, nevertheless, that civil disobedience was a ‘hopeless and stupid policy’, and Gandhi must put a stop to it. ‘Remember, Mr Gandhi, I. can’t have any attacks upon my Indian Empire.’ It probably did not occur to the King, still less to his private secretary, that if he was the not very distinguished monarch of an island kingdom off the coast of Europe, Gandhi was the almost deified prophet of a sub-continent. The irony did not escape the Mahatma, though. When he left the palace reporters asked him if he had felt properly dressed for the occasion, in his loin-cloth and sandals. ‘It was quite all right’, he replied. ‘The King had enough on for both of us.’

The longer the British stalled, the more impossible their task became—between 1921 and 1931 alone the population of India had increased by 34 million. The Victorian imperialists had not only felt themselves to be masters of physical nature, so that almost nothing seemed impossible to them: they had also been men of commanding character, confidence and interest. Now the truly
imaginative men of Empire, the really striking characters, the people who could catch the imagination and fire the spirit, were more often the leaders of their subject peoples. The passion and the poetry of conviction were on the other side—and two or three men with a new song, as the poet Arthur O’Shaughnessy had written, could ‘trample an empire down’.

By now Gandhi was a great world figure, equivocal but inspiring. No imperialist, not even Kipling, had been so universally celebrated, analysed in a thousand essays, visited by a constant stream of pilgrims, ranked with national monuments and rhymed with Napoleon Brandy by Cole Porter himself.
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Letters reached him from everywhere, sometimes addressed ‘Gandhi, India’, or ‘His Excellency President Gandhi’, or even simply with his picture pasted to the envelope. Cartoonists all over the world had merely to sketch a loin-cloth and a pair of spectacles, and every reader would understand.

Gandhi’s opponents, imperialism’s rearguard, were men of a different calibre and carriage—decent British gentlemen, diligent to a man, bravely grappling with the bickerings, sectarian rivalries and snaky intrigues of Indian politics, but lacking now the magic and mystery of success—the dreaming of dreams (O’Shaughnessy again) that could ‘go forth and conquer a crown’. Obsessed as they were with the day-to-day conduct of affairs, they did not often seem to grasp the grandeur of the historical processes in which they were playing a part—only Churchill sensed the scale of it all, and George V could see nothing more to the Gandhi-Irwin meetings than a somewhat disagreeable social ordeal. ‘His Majesty was only troubled’, wrote his private secretary to the Viceroy, ‘by the comical situation of the religious fanatic with his very restricted covering being admitted to your beautiful new house for what, His Majesty feels, must be rather interminable and irksome conversations.’

Irksome conversations, concerning the fate of millions and the destiny of the world! The British were working to the wrong time scale. They did not realize how imminent and how irresistible was the crisis of nationalism, as the subject peoples broke out of their docility into the consciousness of strength. They thought of the
Asians and Africans still as children, or more pertinently perhaps as social inferiors, and talked to them habitually
de
haut
en
bos.
The class system of England was reflected everywhere in the Empire, and nowhere more revealingly than in India: if the mandarins of the ICS looked down upon the box-wallahs of Calcutta, and the businessman looked down upon the railway employee or the British soldiery, one and all looked down, with varying degrees of benevolence, condescension or dislike, upon the indigenous Indian. Even now ordinary Anglo-Indians considered themselves innately superior to Mahatma Gandhi himself. ‘Just a bit of a nuisance’, is how one ICS man described him, ‘and slightly absurd.’ ‘I never allowed anyone to shout “Mahatma Gandhi”’, said a member of one of the oldest Anglo-Indian families, ‘without giving him six on the bottom with a stick. ’

More profoundly the British, whatever their public views or political convictions, instinctively hated the idea of leaving India.
LET CURZON HOLDE WHAT CURZON HELDE
. ‘
I
think
it
very
unwise
to
give
up
what
we
hold
.’ As Thucydides said about the Athenian Empire, in an observation popular among the imperial classicists, ‘it may seem wickedness to have won it, but it is certainly folly to let it go.’ To abdicate India would be a terrible psychological wrench for the British governing classes, let alone for the old Anglo-Indian families who had made it their lives. It was trauma for them.

On one level of thought, since they were honourable men, they were genuinely concerned to create, before they left, a self-governing India that would be peaceful, prosperous and likely to last. On another their interminable hesitations, procrastinations, proposals and inquiries were delaying actions, conscious or unconscious, postponing the time, year by year, conference after conference, when the old adventure must end at last. Throughout the 1920s, well into the 1930s, they argued and conferred, seeking always, if they did not always recognize it, a few more years of grandeur.

Each year the Indian nationalists became more uncompromising. The British offered safeguards, vetoes, reservations, balances, divided responsibilities, executive interventions. The Indians simply wanted freedom—harder than it sounded, because they were bitterly divided among themselves, Hindus, Muslims and
Princely States all seeking their own ends or even their own sovereignties. By 1935, under the pressure of all these separate interests, practical and emotional, obvious or innate, the British had got as far as a new Indian Constitution, giving the Indian people for the first time a substantial share in the running of their country.

This was the Government of India Act, 1935, the longest single act of legislation ever passed by the British Parliament. It was algebraic in conception, its purpose being to unite within a federalist India not only the Muslims and the Hindus, but also all the hundreds of Princely States, each one bound by a separate treaty to the Empire. Inevitably it smacked of pedantry. Churchill called it, with his preference for the bold and simple, ‘a gigantic quilt of jumbled crochet work’. It was certainly elaborate, but it was a true step towards Indian self-government. If the federal Government was to be essentially British still, the provincial Governments would be autonomous, and Indians would be getting their first experience of Parliamentary responsibility. The British applied it diligently, and thought it generous. Elections were held, provincial Governments came to office, some of the forms of democracy were for the first time introduced to the Indian people.

But it was not a solution, only a starting-point. Churchill called it a starting-point for ‘some downward slurge’, while its progenitors believed it to be only a starting-point for a very protracted progress towards self-government. The British were generally thinking in terms of generations, before India became a Dominion: the Congress leaders were counting the years before she became a Republic. Nehru indeed had already appointed a kind of shadow-Government at the centre, appointing its own Ministers to the new provincial Governments, and issuing its own directives from its Allahabad headquarters.

By 1935 only some 500 Britons were left in the Indian Civil Service, and it was becoming more difficult each year to attract recruits from home—what ambitious man wanted to outlive his own career? The outline of an Indian State was already becoming visible, like a pattern discerned in the fire. Gandhi took a year off from politics, devoting himself to spinning, meditation and social work; Lord Irwin became Lord Halifax, and went home to be
Foreign Secretary in Neville Chamberlain’s Conservative Government of 1938. General Dyer, paralysed by a stroke at his home near Bristol, died uncomforted by the expressions of support he still received from eminent Anglo-Indians, the comradely letters from his Indian soldiers, the fact of his honorary Sikhship or the unfailing confidence of his family. ‘I don’t want to get better’, he told his daughter-in-law. ‘I only want to die, and to know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong.’

As for Winston Churchill, when Lord Irwin urged him to bring his views on India up to date by talking to some Indians, he remained immovable. ‘I am quite satisfied with my views on India,’ he said, ‘and I don’t want them disturbed by any bloody Indians.’

A
T home the Empire held little interest for the masses now, and H. G. Wells estimated that nineteen Englishmen out of twenty  knew no more about the British Empire than they did about the Italian Renaissance. The British had lost their taste for the far-flung. Emigration declined so rapidly after the war that soon more migrants were entering the British Isles than were leaving them, and being better educated than they used to be, and more experienced in the world, the people were less ready to accept what their betters told them. ‘Look as though you mean it!’ was an old Lancashire injunction, popular among ex-servicemen: but as an imperial nation, the British no longer looked as though they meant it very fervently.

The ruling establishment, however, even when Government was in the hands of the Labour Party, had by no means abandoned the imperial purpose. Its members knew that the world influence of Great Britain, its wealth, its self-esteem perhaps, depended upon the possession of the Empire, and few politicians, not even Socialists, believed that it should be allowed to wither. Besides, the ‘sacred trust’ which the League of Nations mandate had bestowed upon civilization as a whole was still best administered, they thought, by the British Empire. The effects of the New Imperialism having long worn off, then, repeated attempts were made to boost the image of Empire, make it exciting to a new and more cynical generation, and contrive fresh realities for it.

The most lavish exercise in indoctrination was the British Empire
Exhibition at Wembley in 1924. The biggest fair Britain had ever known, this was a vast advertisement, inspiring to some, laughable to others, innocently entertaining to the vast majority, for the principles, practice and above all continuation of Empire.

Wembley was a suburb on the edge of the countryside, at the end of the London underground railway. The Exhibition made it famous, for to its 220 acres of pavilion and display ground there came, during its 150 days’ opening, 27 million people—more than half the population of Great Britain, and more than four times as many as went to the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition was mounted with the maximum publicity throughout the Empire—the very first broadcast in Johannesburg was an organ recital to raise funds for it—but it was chiefly aimed, of course, at the domestic public, a public becoming more urbanized and domesticated every year, more degenerate, readers of the
Morning
Post
would say, and apparently less ready to respond to the calls of patriotism and derring-do.

Everything that was imperial was packed into Wembley’s fifteen miles of streets. There was a great stadium, to signify sportingness. There was a Palace of Engineering, the largest concrete building in the world, to illustrate invention. There was a statue of the Prince of Wales made of Canadian butter. There was a reproduction of the Niagara Falls, which, being on the Canadian-American frontier, were at least half-imperial, and a reconstruction of the tomb of Tutankhamun, who, since he had been disinterred by Lord Carnarvon, was at least posthumously British, and a posse of Tibetan trumpeters whose origins somewhere east of the Karakoram surely made them more or less Indian. The whole arena was fluttered over by a perpetual cloud of Union Jacks, and at night it was ‘floodlit’, as a recent Americanism had it: while round and round the entire exhibition, night and day, there trundled on elevated tracks, like a figure of the imperial momentum, its private railroad line, the Never-Stop Railway.

The show was opened imperially, too, by the King himself, his speech being ‘broadcasted’ into a million homes by the transmitters of the British Broadcasting Company, and turned into a gramophone record that same afternoon by His Master’s Voice. ‘This great
achievement’, said His Majesty slowly, ‘reveals to us the whole Empire in little…. We believe that this Exhibition will bring the peoples of the Empire to a better knowledge of how to meet their reciprocal wants and aspirations; and we hope further that the success of the exhibition may bring lasting benefits not to the Empire only, but to mankind in general.’ Lord Milner hoped Wembley would provide a ‘powerful bulwark’ against the decay of the Empire, and so clearly did the organizing committee of generals, retired pro-consuls and imperial tycoons—the exhibition cost
£
4 million, but much of the cash was provided by commerce and industry (and it lost
£
1½ million in the end).

Many of the surviving imperialists helped. Kipling named the Exhibition streets—Drake’s Way, Dominion Way, and running grandly down a slight hill through the centre of the great display, Empire Way itself, with the huge pavilions of Canada and Australia, the Palaces of Industry and Engineering (‘six and a half times the size of Trafalgar Square’), and the Empire Stadium standing Romanly at the end of it. Edward Elgar, now Master of the King’s Musick, conducted the massed choirs at the opening ceremony on St George’s Day, and they sang his great hymn, almost an alternative national anthem, ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Edwin Lutyens, the architect of the Viceroy’s palace at New Delhi, designed the Queen’s Doll’s House, which was probably the most popular exhibit in the entire show. The architecture was distinctly gubernatorial, neo-classical with oriental interludes, the gardens were landscaped in the best Jamaican or Ceylonese manner around a cool English stream. Imperial scholars published a twelve-volume Survey of the British Empire to commemorate the event, and as for the British Government’s own pavilion, it frankly described itself as ‘British civilization in microcosm, illuminating and epitomizing the imperial ideal’.

By the standards of the day the publicity arrangements were very expert. There can hardly have been a soul in the kingdom who did not know about the British Empire Exhibition, and the lion rampant which was its symbol became part of the nation’s visual currency. For a whole generation, Wembley came to typify a moment of life, as the Crystal Palace had frozen time for their grandparents seventy years before. Even so, many people saw something flaccid, even
ludicrous, to this self-conscious projection of the imperial theme.
Punch
thought it downright silly, and published a cartoon by H. M. Bateman captioned ‘Do you Wemble?’, typifying the whole exhibition in terms of its roller-coaster. The intellectuals of Hampstead, by now almost unanimously anti-imperialist, disapproved of it on principle, and some of them formed a society called
WGTW
—The Won’t-Go-To-Wembleys.

The millions who did go often went for the wrong reasons, paying altogether too little attention to the New Zealand dairy products, and altogether too much to the amusement park, the dance hall and Joe Lyon’s gigantic grill room. The Bright Young Things of Mayfair treated it as a spree, misbehaving themselves in the Nigerian Handicrafts Exhibition, or strumming the ukulele as they paddled about in symbolic pools. As P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster put it, ‘I mean to say, millions of people, no doubt, are so constituted that they scream with joy and excitement at the spectacle of a stuffed porcupine fish or a glass jar of seeds from Western Australia—but not Bertram…. By the time we had tottered out of the Gold Coast village and were looking towards the Palace of Machinery, everything pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of that rather jolly Planters’ Bar in the West Indies section….’

‘I’ve brought you here to see the wonders of the Empire,’ says Father in Noel Coward’s
This
Happy
Breed
, ‘and all you want to do is go to the Dodgems.’
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It was difficult to remember, as one watched the fashionable young clowning at the British Empire Exhibition, that only twenty-five years before their parents had seen Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee as an apex of pride and excitement. A generation that had survived the Somme, Kut and Gallipoli had different standards of indulgence. Few ordinary Britons were much moved, for instance, by the prospect of new imperial responsibilities in the Middle East, or the news of riot and disturbance that arrived week after week from India. The middle-aged and the governing classes might care about the British Empire: the young and the working people did not.

Its symbols had gone threadbare. The opulence of the Victorian heyday had been suited to an age of hope and progress, presided over by an almost mythical mother-figure. Since then the British had lost their grand optimism, and all the paraphernalia of imperial power, the banners and the elephants, the guards of honour and the peregrinating battleships, seemed to many citizens irrelevant to the times. The time for posturing was over. So was the age of Carlylean hero-worship which had been essential to the old romance. Hardly a new national hero had emerged from the Great War: the generals were discredited, the admirals were no Nelsons, Lloyd George was a Welshman and even the genuine epic of T. E. Lawrence, when dressed up for the public by the popular Press, came out dated and unconvincing, like a late yarn from Henty.
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But there were other sources of excitement. There was Hollywood, for instance. Hollywood easily out-dazzled the fading splendours of the pro-consuls and the Empire-builders, and through its illusory window people glimpsed new worlds more compelling, more voluptuous, than ever the Raj had been. Once the mill-girls and the bank-clerks had dreamed of Indian adventures, African romances, even death or glory upon the imperial battlefields—

Now they were transported instead to the glamorous new world of the film stars, where all life seemed to be played to incidental music, and where even stories of the Empire itself, a not infrequent subject, were given the gloss of fairy-tale. How could a Viceroy compete with a Fred Astaire, or a Governor’s lady, however gracious, match up to a Norma Shearer? Wembley was a poor competitor for the Sunset Strip, and the chairman of the Empire Day Movement was bound to admit that in the Britain of the 1920s there were ‘many dark corners where the rays of our Empire sun have not been able to penetrate’.

Thick and fast came rival historical movements, too, which seemed to make the existence of Empire more than ever peripheral to English life. The rise of the Labour Movement to power had nothing whatever to do with Empire. Communism was passionately opposed to it. Empire did not save the British people from the Great Depression or the General Strike. Empire contributed nothing to the new functional architecture, the new abstract art, the social experiments that were gradually changing the form of English society. So immediate and so vivid in the 1890s, Empire now seemed dimmer and more distant, and was becoming, like the British institutional architecture of the day, pompously retrospective. The message of the New Imperialism, wrote Philip Guedalla in 1924, so thrilling to the generation of
fin
de
siècle,
now held no more than ‘a dim interest for research students’.

With lack of interest went doubt. They doubted everything, and many now doubted the justice of the imperial idea. Gandhi’s influence was everywhere. Opposition to Empire was not yet a
political platform, not even among the Socialists, but it was a temper of thought growing ever more fashionable among the British middle classes, and was allied with pacifism, internationalism and a woolly sort of Marxism. Among students it was the contemporary orthodoxy—‘This House’, as the Oxford Union blandly voted in 1933, ‘will on no account fight for King and Country.’ Among readers of the progressive papers it was almost taken for granted. Kipling found himself reviled by the trendier critics; ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ no longer seemed to sing the majesty and beneficence of Empire, only its vainglory; Rupert Brooke was out, and only the lines of more bitter war poets, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, were quoted now in the common-rooms.

There was a reaction then against all things Victorian, oratorios to antimacassars, and this inevitably rebounded against that ultimate Victorianism, the British Empire. The social structure of the nation was slowly changing, the landed classes were giving ground to the up-and-coming bourgeoisie, and so the hold of Empire weakened too, for it took loyalty, consistency, discipline to rule a quarter of the world—as the young American observer Walter Lippmann perceptively observed, no Empire in the history of the world had long survived without a governing class at the centre.

Most damagingly of all, the imperialness of Great Britain was now more often treated frivolously. It became rather funny. The New Zealander David Low was tilting at the Empire when he created his preposterous cartoon character Colonel Blimp, forever declaiming the glories of the past to his Turkish-bath cronies, and here is the humourist ‘Beachcomber’, J. B. Morton, in the
Daily
Express
:

Will
the
gentleman
who
threw
an
onion
at
the
Union
Jack
and
repeatedly
and
noisily
tore
cloth
during
the
singing
of
‘
Land
of
Hope
and
Glory’
at
the
Orphans’
Outing
on
Thursday,
write
to
Colonel
Sir
George
Jarvis
Dela
maine
Spooner,
late
of
Poona,
telling
him
what
right
he
has
to
the
Old
Carthusian
braces
which
burst
when
he
was
arrested?
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