I Didn't Do It for You (14 page)

In the years to come, winning Eritrea was to become a near-obsession, a craving that demanded to be satisfied. But while Haile Selassie waited for an opportunity to stake his claim, the European nation entrusted with Eritrea's care was not sitting idle. When the Emperor finally got his hands on what he regarded as his rightful inheritance, he would find that while he had certainly won access to the sea, the rest of the legacy had been plundered.

On April 17, 1950, Count Gherardo Cornaggia Medici Castiglioni, the Italian government's somewhat extravagantly-named representative in London, was ushered into the African Department at the Foreign Office. The Italian nobleman was not happy, but he was careful to keep his tone of voice level, his manner deferential. This was something more than the diplomat's professional self-control. As the envoy of a defeated nation forced to accept the occupation of its African colonies, the count knew he enjoyed no leverage over the British official sitting before him. Going on the offensive would gain him nothing.

Presenting his compliments, he confessed that Rome had been disappointed by a letter the British government had sent in response to concerns raised, he admitted, on a purely unofficial basis. Italy, he said, did not want to argue the legal issues. It felt, however, that what the British were doing in
Eritrea went against basic economic good sense. To support his comments, he handed over a wad of black-and-white photographs. They showed what had so outraged Cornaggia and his colleagues back in Italy.

The naval base in the port of Massawa, built by the Fascists to hold 1,000 sailors, had been bulldozed to the ground. Navy headquarters, a 500-bed hospital with its air-conditioning plant, the oil storage tankers, main water supply tank, electricity unit, naval warehouses, customs offices–more than 75 buildings in all–had been reduced to an expanse of rubble. The photographs tracked the relentless demolition from start to finish. The first showed the neoclassical colonnaded buildings standing tall. In the next, sweating Eritrean labourers with pickaxes stood perched on collapsed piles of masonry that had been toppled by explosives. The last showed the steel rods and blocks of timber extracted from the reinforced concrete, neatly crated up on the quayside and waiting to be shipped abroad.

R Scrivener, the British official who received the count, was not unsympathetic. ‘The Italians have no official standing in this matter,' he acknowledged in a note to his superiors. Nonetheless, he said, ‘it would be helpful if we were to show that our action was economically sound and not just wanton. I think the Italians feel we are just being spiteful over this. This is foolish of them, but we ought to try and smooth the ruffled feathers even if we are under no obligation to do so.'
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A month later, the African Department drafted a lofty response. If the Italians raised the issue in future, it decreed, they could be told that buildings decayed rapidly in the humidity of the Red Sea and were liable to be looted by ‘local natives'. Since the British taxpayer could hardly be expected to shell out for the police force needed to guard the site, destruction had been the only option. The possibility that grubby mercantile motives might
have played a role was not even deemed worthy of mention.

Nowadays, anyone who cares to can leaf through the same photographs and read the furious comments scrawled on their backs by some Italian hand. They lie in individual waxed paper bags at the Public Record Office in Kew, south London.
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Only made public in 1981 under the 30-year rule, they record the final, small-minded episode in a sequence of breathtakingly petty British actions in the Horn of Africa. Both Eritrea and Ethiopia would share a strikingly similar fate at Britain's hands, a fate that would have gone totally unnoticed in the West had it not been for a pigheaded iconoclast called Sylvia Pankhurst and her equally stubborn son.

 

Miss Pankhurst–for she was always to be a ‘Miss', despite the eventual acquisition of both partner and child–could be described as one of Ethiopia's earliest True Believers.

She discovered the country late in life, but like all converts, she made up in enthusiasm for what she lacked in experience. ‘This confounded Pankhurst woman,' a Conservative member of parliament once complained in a letter to Anthony Eden, the then Foreign Secretary, ‘[is]
plus fuzzy-wuzzie que les fuzzy-wuzzies
.'
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If the language grates today, he had nonetheless put a finger on the characteristic that constituted both Sylvia's most admirable quality and her biggest weakness. She would always be her own government's most implacable critic, showing an almost uncanny instinct for the baser motives that lay behind the British establishment's obfuscations. But when it came to Ethiopia–the land in which she chose to end her days–everything would always be viewed through an indulgent golden haze.

By the time she latched on to what was to be the last of her many all-consuming crusades–a passion that would span over
a quarter of a century–Sylvia was already in her early fifties and had learned all there was to know about being an effective lobbyist and relentless agitator. An understanding of how to achieve a maximum of political impact at a minimum of expense had virtually been imbibed at her mother's breast, for Sylvia came from the least ordinary of families.

During the 1900s and 1910s Sylvia, her more glamorous sister Christabel, the quiet Adela and their widowed mother Emmeline had all braved violence on the political podium in their campaign to win British women the vote. The suffragettes, as they came to be known, had been manhandled by male hecklers, arrested by police and–when they went on hunger strike to protest their imprisonment–been subjected to the horrors of force-feeding, an experience the women regarded as akin to rape. But as the suffragette cause had gradually triumphed, the family had split asunder, riven by ideological differences and long-simmering jealousies.

Emmeline had swung firmly to the right. Christabel had found God and lectured on the Second Coming. Adela had sailed for Australia and become a pacifist. Sylvia–now not on speaking terms with Christabel and Emmeline–had set herself up in London's deprived East End, publishing the socialist paper
Women's Dreadnought
through the First World War. She had embraced Bolshevism–an enthusiasm that waned with time–and travelled to Moscow to meet Lenin, moves that brought her under the scrutiny of the British police's Special Branch.

Of solid middle-class stock, she had led a Spartan existence, the modest sums earned by journalism and political writing, combined with the odd contribution from a former patron of the suffragette cause, barely saving her from real poverty. For the Pankhursts, money matters always came a careless second. Like every member of the family, Sylvia could not imagine life
without a cause, preferably one that seemed, at least at its inception, doomed to failure. Once the slogan ‘Votes for Women' had lost its crowd-pulling force, she dabbled with Indian history, took up Interlingua–an alternative to Esperanto–and grew interested in the Romanian poet Mihael Eminescu. But Mussolini's coming to power was to provide her with the fresh intellectual focus she craved.

To her credit she grasped, more clearly than most of her contemporaries, that Mussolini's brand of thuggish expansionism posed a threat extending far beyond the frontiers of Italy itself. Encouraging her to concentrate on events in Rome was Silvio Corio, an Italian anarchist seven years her senior. Exiled to London, he had worked with Sylvia on the various political journals she produced, becoming her lover and father of her only child. They never wed, a fact Sylvia–very much the dominant partner–made no attempt to conceal. A vocal exponent of free love, who had in her youth conducted a doomed relationship with the married Labour politician Keir Hardie, she brazenly sold the story of her ‘eugenic' baby–‘eugenic' because he was born to two intelligent adults free from hereditary disease and untrammelled by social convention–to the sensationalist
News of the World
. ‘I suppose you think I am awfully silly, don't you?' the 45-year-old unmarried mother asked a journalist in an uncharacteristic moment of girlishness. Her own mother thought her not so much silly as shameless. When Emmeline died six months after the birth of Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst–named after Sylvia's adored father–many friends blamed it on the shock caused by her estranged daughter's outrageous behaviour.

With Corio as self-effacing editorial helpmate, providing her with insights and news of his native country, Sylvia turned her attention to exposing the horrors of Mussolini's Italy. Campaigning against Fascism led ineluctably to campaigning
on behalf of the African nation Italy was preparing to attack. To the British public, the invasion of Ethiopia was little more than an exotic distant adventure, immortalized in Evelyn Waugh's semi-fictional
Scoop
, which allowed a generation of foreign correspondents to win their spurs. Glossing over the cudgellings, castor-oil treatments and murders that had accompanied Il Duce on his rise to the top, many Britons dismissed Mussolini as a grandstanding buffoon, all comic-opera wind and bluster. His African escapade was soon sidelined, as public attention focused on Hitler's ascension and the threat of a second, devastating world war.

For Sylvia, the two developments could not be separated. Ethiopia, she sensed, represented a dry run for the Fascists; Rome's readiness to use chemical weapons there was likely to be a grim precursor of atrocities to come in Europe. With remarkable prescience, she warned that appeasement in Ethiopia would merely encourage Europe's bully boys to make ever more presumptuous territorial claims. ‘REMEMBER–Everywhere, Always, Fascism means War',
⁴
she was to tell her readers, long before many could bear to think she might be right.

She had always found it difficult to share the limelight or work alongside fellow activists. Now, realizing she had found a neglected niche in which she could flourish virtually alone, she set about making the Ethiopian cause her own. On May 5, 1936, the day the Italian army entered Addis, she launched the
New Times and Ethiopia News
, a weekly newspaper dedicated to keeping the Ethiopian war in the public eye. If the concept of collective security was to have any meaning, the League of Nations should impose sanctions on Italy, she argued. ‘As I view it,' she explained to a friend, ‘both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany are going to make war whenever they find a sufficiently good chance of success, and I am perfectly convinced that if the [Italian] armies come back from Africa with a
victory, a new enterprise will be entered upon before long…You cannot buy these super-militarist governments off by treating them well.'
⁵

History was to prove her correct, but it was not a message the British government was disposed to hear. The timing was not right: frantically scrabbling to rearm ahead of the coming storm, London wanted Mussolini indulged and appeased as long as possible rather than punished and pushed into Hitler's arms. The invasion of Ethiopia seemed a small sacrifice to make in the context of the greater game of gearing up for another world war, hence the eventual decision by both the United Kingdom and France to recognize the Italian conquest. This was exactly the kind of short-term, pragmatic calculation Sylvia, by her very nature, was incapable of making.

 

By the age of 50, George Orwell once wrote, everyone has the face they deserve. In Sylvia's case, his maxim did not quite ring true. Her true face crept up on her through the decades, the gap between personality and appearance narrowing with the years. But a vital element somehow remained missing: nothing in the placid portraits left behind explains why quite so many British officials came to regret coming into contact with Miss Pankhurst, or what element in her make-up prompted the splenetic comments spluttered across government paperwork of the day.

Photographs of the young Sylvia show a gloomy child, just the kind of oversensitive introvert likely, as contemporaries remembered, to indulge in fits of copious weeping. The artistically-gifted daughter of a left-wing, politically-active Manchester lawyer, she was brought up in an agnostic, anti-monarchist, cash-strapped, decidedly eccentric household in which the children were often left to educate themselves,
Emmeline Pankhurst having developed a deep suspicion of formal schooling. Sylvia registered early on that she was not her mother's favourite–that role went to Christabel–and the realization cast a plaintive shadow across her life. As the years passed and the puppy fat of youth disappeared, it became clear that the girl had not inherited the aristocratic cheekbones and high forehead of Emmeline, vivacious beauty of the family. The adult outline that emerges is that of a somewhat doleful young woman. From her hooded eyelids to her protruding top lip and receding chin, Sylvia's features seem to have surrendered early to gravity's pull: they drooped more dramatically than was necessary, a mournful effect heightened by the severe hairstyle of the bluestocking. Here was a woman, the photographs suggest, resigned to suffering, capable of self-sacrifice and nobility of purpose. A woman commanding respect, but not someone you would necessarily want sitting next to you at a dinner party. Somehow, it is impossible to imagine her in fits of laughter. ‘She had an overwhelming personality,' confirms Eritrean academic Dr Bereket Habte Selassie, one of the many students Sylvia was to take under her maternal wing. ‘When she was in the room she filled it. But she had absolutely no sense of humour.'
⁶

What the photographs fail to capture, at any age, is the element of steel. She had a talent for self-flagellation, setting suffragette records in Holloway prison for the refusal of food, water and sleep. On one occasion, she was left so debilitated she had to be carried in a stretcher along a demonstration's route. Her long life saw a vast outpouring of physical and mental energy, funnelled into her grittily realistic paintings, impassioned speeches and relentless lobbying work. All the while, she produced a ceaseless stream of books, articles, poems and translations. The
New Times and Ethiopia News
, for which she penned a 2–3,000 word weekly editorial, was largely made
up of her own contributions. While juggling that commitment, she pumped out a flow of importuning letters, political pamphlets and appeals. Even in old age, the kindly grandmother's face that gazes out at us, its contours softened by trailing wisps of grey hair, gives little hint of this tremendous capacity for hard work. ‘A biographer once asked us what we used to do in the holidays,' her daughter-in-law Rita Pankhurst later recalled. ‘It was only then we realized that there were no holidays. With Sylvia it was always work, work, work.'
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