Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (63 page)

T
HE end of the Raj in India made the end of Empire certain. ‘As long as we rule India’, Curzon had said, ‘we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third rate power…. Your ports and your coaling stations, your fortresses and your dockyards, your Crown colonies and protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary, or the tollgates and barbicans of an Empire that has vanished.’ So it proved. Half the structure of Empire was mere scaffolding for the possession of India. Many a possession now lost its point, and the whole British attitude to the world, governed so long by the great possessions of the east, slowly and painfully shifted. ‘If India becomes free,’ Gandhi told Roosevelt in 1942, ‘the rest will follow.’ So it was, and after 1947 the British Empire was in a constant condition of dismantlement.

It was hardly a trauma for the British, because few of them recognized what was happening, or realized that with the loss of India three-quarters of the imperial population had gone anyway. Besides, the new Labour Government held confused convictions about imperialism. On the one hand they rightly saw the Empire as a phenomenon of class, tended to agree with Marx that it was an unwarrantable extension of capitalism, and believed in the essential equality of human kind. On the other hand they were by no means Little Englanders. They were patriots, proud as anyone of their part in the Second World War, and convinced that Great Britain should still be a power in the world. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, believed that the day of empires was over, but he did not argue for any helter-skelter withdrawal from the frontiers, only for the establishment under British guidance of some collective partnership
among all the imperial peoples. Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor, accepted the need to retreat, but not apparently on any high moral grounds: ‘If you are in a place where you are not wanted’, he said, ‘and where you have not got the force to squash those who don’t want you, the only thing to do is to come out.’ The
habit
of Empire was almost as strong among Labour men as it was among Conservatives, and Attlee’s Ministers knew all too well how heavily Britain’s economy now depended upon the imperial territories—more than half British exports went there, nearly half British imports came from there—82 per cent of oil from the Middle East, 81 per cent of tea from India, 50 per cent of grain from Canada. Besides, many Socialists hoped that the colonies, especially the white settlement colonies, might be proving-grounds for their own social theories.
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But once they had surrendered India, everything changed. Almost at once Burma and Ceylon fell away from the Empire, without opposition from their imperial masters—‘I only want to see Burma happy’, said Governor Dorman-Smith, benignly surrendering his seals of office. Burma chose independence outside the Commonwealth, Ceylon became a Dominion like India and Pakistan. All at once the Empire became more fluid, more complex, more ungraspable than ever, as it became apparent to the policy-makers in London that the whole immense deposit was likely to start sliding, like a melting ice-flow, year by year towards independence. By 1948 it was an even stranger assemblage than Disraeli had known, when he called it ‘this most peculiar Empire’ a century before. It was no longer held together by the will, the force, or even the prestige of Great Britain, for as the war-clouds cleared it became clear that the British, though they might still enjoy some sensations of imperial power, had lost the ability to retain it. The idea of imperialism itself was almost universally discredited, only a handful of unpersuasive
diehards still arguing the moral right of one people to rule another against its will: and anyway the British could no longer afford, even if they wished it, to keep the huge fleets, expensive bases and scattered armies needed to keep half the globe in order. The British were no longer ‘the world’s policemen’, as they had loved to call themselves before the war, and most of the old justifications of Empire were now invalid.

What to do with it all? How best to adapt it to the times, and employ the remaining imperial years? The British Commonwealth consisted by now of some eighty-five territories, in every stage of development or esteem. There were the four old white Dominions, in all respects independent nations. There were the three new brown ones. There was the anomaly of Southern Rhodesia, which was not quite a Dominion but not quite a colony either, being self-governing in some things but not in others. There was Newfoundland, which had been a Dominion once, had gone bankrupt and was now a colony again. There were the mandated territories like Palestine and Tanganyika, which were in the Empire but not quite of it, and equivocal territories like the Suez Canal Zone or the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman, which were of the Empire but not strictly in it. There were vast rich countries like Nigeria which possessed no political rights at all, and infinitesimal ones like Mauritius which were half-way to sovereignty.

All this survived, and infinitely more, the withdrawal of British power from India: to some an assurance of greatness still, to many more a bore or a deadweight, to the majority only a vague irrelevance. It fell to Attlee’s Government to decide its future: and like so many of its predecessors, that Ministry decided that what the British Empire needed, even in epilogue or afterthought, was logic.

They rationalized the Commonwealth. This brainchild of Rosebery, Smuts and Balfour had been an oddity from the start, and was now a benevolent enigma. The white members, whose combined population was about 75 million, were now joined by the brown, with a combined population of 400 million, overwhelming the bonds of
blood and common culture which had been the truest meaning of the association. The Statute of Westminster had been a sufficiently flexible conception, but even it could not easily embrace these new realities, especially as before long other Afro-Asian newcomers would certainly be joining too. Determined nevertheless that the Commonwealth should not dissolve in bewilderment, the British decided to make it more elastic still, blurring it into a kind of half-imaginary federation, rather like the Holy Roman Empire, whose purpose would be as vague as its allegiance, but whose very existence would keep alive, so it was hoped, some residual majesty of the old order.

In 1953 Queen Elizabeth II, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter, was crowned Queen of England on a drizzly day in June. The occasion was greeted optimistically as an omen of renewed greatness, a new Elizabethan age. The Coronation ceremony was still recognizably imperial, and all the Commonwealth Prime Ministers were there: Nehru svelte in his silken jacket, bluff Robert Menzies from Australia (‘British to my boot-straps’), D. S. Senanayake the Ceylonese tea-planter, even the dour Dr Malan of South Africa, who had been a frank pro-Nazi, who was an outspoken republican, and who viewed all things British, not to speak of all things black and brown, with a properly Krugerian mixture of suspicion and disdain. The imperial symbols were paraded as always, the flags and the bearskins, the battle-honours and the horse-drummers: on the night before the ceremony the Queen was given the news, rushed just in time by runner and diplomatic radio from the Himalaya, that Mount Everest, the last objective of imperial adventure, had been climbed by a British expedition.

But when, amid the arcane splendours of Westminster Abbey, before the hushed peers and the silent trumpeters, the ninety-ninth Archbishop of Canterbury proclaimed Elizabeth Queen, he did so in evasive terms. Her father had been ‘by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, defender of the Faith, Emperor of India’. His daughter was ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the
Faith’. The fanfares blared, the congregation stood,
Vivat!
Vivat!
rang out across the fane: but there was no denying the bathos of this grey title, or hiding the process of retreat that had given birth to it. No longer was the Queen an Empress, and in an association of nations in which Hindus and Muslims outnumbered Christians by three to one, she was only debatably a Defender of the Faith.

So the fantasy of the Crown faded with the reality of the Empire. An immense sentimental web of loyalty had extended from Windsor Castle to the far corners of the British world, and even when nationalists were rioting, angry politicians were hurling calumnies at Governors, colonial newspapers fulminating about imperial exploitation, the Crown had been immune to insult. To have met, or even to have seen, a King, a Queen or a Prince of Wales remained, for millions of the old imperial subjects, one of the great experiences of life: some virtue was attached to the royal legend, and people of every kind aspired to its munificence.

Now this magic was following into oblivion that other, cruder sorcery, the spell of Empire itself. During the next decade the Commonwealth was to be expanded beyond the reach of the Crown, as old imperial territories were promoted from subjection to nationhood, its members being of varying races, colour, religion and culture, linked only,
au
fond
, by the fact that the British had once ruled them. Now a man was a citizen of India, or Canada, or Ceylon, while the only British subjects were the islanders themselves, and the residents of the colonies they still governed direct from Whitehall. Gone was the Roman aspiration of a common citizenship spanning the world. One by one the Commonwealth countries deserted even the imperial law—each year the Legal Committee of the Privy Council, the Empire’s ultimate tribunal, heard fewer cases from Yukon or the Outback, and esoteric litigations of the tropics seldom enlivened the law reports of
The
Times
. Never again would there be an Imperial Cabinet, as there had briefly been during the Great War, and never again would a man like Jan Smuts rise through the agency of Empire to the summit of the world.

The word British disappeared from the title of the Commonwealth. The old Dominions and India Offices were merged into a Commonwealth Relations Office. Each member country was free to
give the Queen its own title, so that ‘Defender of the Faith’ soon dropped from the royal honorifics when local circumstance, such as a universal devotion to Mohammed, or 99 per cent papistry, made it inappropriate. Logic in short was given to the association, but it was a logic shrouded more than ever in imprecision, so that in the end people were less clear than ever what the Commonwealth was all about. It had no constitution. Its members were bound by no obligations. They could leave when they pleased, devise their own status, decide whether they would have a Queen or not, adjust almost anything to suit themselves. It was a very obliging club.

The Indians had decided they wanted to be a Republic, so they became one. The Pakistanis decided they could do without a Governor-General, so they did. The Australians and New Zealanders concluded a defence alliance with the United States, excluding Britain. The Singalese preferred to regulate their affairs by the Buddhist calendar.
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The South Africans pressed ahead with racial arrangements which were repugnant, to all their fellow-members.
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In the United Nations the Commonwealth members voted against each other whenever they felt like it. ‘We want no unwilling partners,’ Attlee declared, so rather than have rules broken, the creators of the new Commonwealth did without rules.

But at least the development of this cloudy new brotherhood helped to muffle the breakdown of Empire. The British deluded themselves that it
was
the Empire, more or less, reconstituted in contemporary form—was not the Queen to be seen gracefully presiding over its assemblies, or sweetly chatting with the black and brown men who, more numerous with each year as the decades passed, soon came to sit in the front row of the group photographs, instead of smirking self-consciously in the background? Ennobling epithets were attached to it—Family of Nations, Brotherhood of
Heritage—and the veteran Milnerite Leo Amery, hopeful to the end, thought it might prove to be the nucleus of a new world order.

As for the other members, most of them approached it with an ambivalent mixture of cynicism, respect and affection. Old habits die hard, even among militant nationalists, and it was still splendid after all to be honoured among the grave monuments of imperial London, familiar to every Commonwealth citizen through generations of indoctrination, and to be received by the Queen of England herself, in a diamond tiara and the Order of the Garter. Besides, there was still something to be gained from membership of the sterling area, the financial structure which underlay it, and which was still one of the great economic blocs of the world. There were many fringe benefits too, technical aid and economic perquisites, access to professional bodies or athletic competitions, even a sort of half-nostalgic bonhomie, like the comradeship of an old school tie, which gave the Commonwealth delegates, even those who had lately fought, imprisoned or hurled insults at each other, an inner membership at international gatherings.

Nobody aspired to much more. The purpose of the Commonwealth, as it was officially defined, was nothing more than to ‘remain united as free and equal members … freely cooperating in the pursuit of peace, liberty and progress’. It did look comforting on the map, though: for even if the cartographers only striped the Commonwealth countries in red, or merely speckled them with pink dots, at a cursory glance it looked as though a third of the world was still, in a manner of speaking, British. The Commonwealth was the last opaque reflection of the grand illusion.

But we must narrow our focus, for the British Empire was now something else. The countries of the Commonwealth became members of the wider world, and so slip away from our story: but in the I950s there were still several million people, in all four continents, directly subject to the rule of London. Towards them the Labour Government looked in a very different spirit, avuncular and improving. It had always been a Fabian view,
pace
Marx, that a good
colonial system could usefully reform and educate, and those few Labour politicians who interested themselves in the Empire clung to the vision of an imperial trusteeship. Generally less worldly than their Conservative counterparts, less experienced in foreign affairs, they were if anything more paternalist towards the coloured peoples, and believed them to need, however shamefully they had been exploited in the past, several generations of kindly British socialist supervision. Giving the African colonies independence, said Herbert Morrison the Home Secretary, would be ‘like giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun’. Whatever had happened to the Dominions and India Offices, nobody suggested winding up the Colonial Office, and young men went out to Africa in the early 1950s looking forward with perfect confidence to a lifetime’s useful career.