The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (51 page)

Ever wary of overconfidence, Templer was nevertheless sure by 1953 that the Communists—who had retreated deep into the jungle—were in dire straits. In 1954, just before he left Malaya, he characteristically warned that the fight was not yet over: “In fact, I'll shoot the bastard who says this emergency is over.”
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But he was confident enough to promise the country its first national elections; and though the emergency was not officially ended until 1960, Templer had put the country well on the road to independence (1957) and victory over the Communists.

He came home to become chief of the Imperial General Staff (1955–58), field marshal (1956), and a roving military diplomat. After his retirement Templer devoted himself to establishing the excellent National Army Museum in London, serving as a trustee for other worthy ventures (such as preserving historic churches), doing business as chairman of the British Metal Corporation (among other company work), and indulging his interests in art (his views were soundly traditionalist) and wine. He became Constable of the Tower of London in 1965, Her Majesty's Lieutenant for Greater London in 1966, and in 1970 made the newspapers for, in his dressing gown and waving a sword stick, helping the police capture a burglar. Templer's honors, duties, colonelcies, and exploits (with a sword stick and without) stacked up until his death in 1979. He died of lung cancer, but went out the Templer way—after drinking a pink gin.

“‘I have worked very hard all my life, and I have achieved a great deal—in the end to achieve NOTHING,' the last word falling with somber emphasis. And since his greatest aspirations were for a powerful British Empire and Commonwealth in a peaceful world, what he said was, by his own definition, also historically correct.”

 

O
n 10 November 1942, Prime Minister Winston Churchill gave a speech marking the victory at the Battle of El Alamein. It is known as “The End of the Beginning” speech: “Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” An oft-quoted line from this speech, now tinged with irony, touches directly on the future of the British Empire: “I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Less often quoted is this line: “I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarch, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth. Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world.”

That British imperial rock of salvation survived big and impressive for a brief moment after the Second World War—and then various nationalist,
anti-colonialist forces took hammers and sickles and pangas to hack it to pieces. On 18 June 1940, after the fall of France to the Nazis, Churchill braced Britain for a battle that was, for the moment, to leave the British Empire fighting alone against National Socialist Germany, its then-ally Soviet Russia, Fascist Italy, and imperial Japan. He said, “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire.... Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'” It might very well have been Britain's finest hour, but the Empire, far from lasting a thousand years, began dissolving almost immediately after the war's end: the Commonwealth is largely inconsequential and Christian civilization is, to put it mildly, not what it once was.

Churchill's life was a thoroughly imperial one. As a young cavalry officer he served with the Malakand Field Force, fighting on the Northwest Frontier of India. He rode in what is often considered the last great cavalry charge of the British army, with the 21st Lancers at the Battle of Omdurman in the Sudan. In the Boer War in South Africa he fought, was captured by the enemy, and made a dramatic escape. He drafted strategies at the Admiralty and served in the trenches in World War I. He enlisted Lawrence of Arabia to help him design the post-Great War borders of the liberated territories of the Ottoman Empire. He fought to keep India within the Empire between the wars, was the rhetorical leader of the victorious Anglo-American alliance in World War II, and worked to consolidate the unity of the English-speaking peoples as a postwar power bloc. But for Churchill all these achievements rang hollow. Britain's imperial greatness, which had made all the rest possible, was gone: India given over to partition and slaughter, Suez transformed from a headquarters of British military might into a site of humiliation at the hands of a petty pan-Arabist dictator, Africa left prey
to tribalism and corruption. Britain's imperial vigor was sapped, replaced by a sybaritic swinging London and a stultifying corporatist, “I'm all right, Jack,” welfare state. Churchill was far from a Puritan killjoy (quite the reverse) and he had himself helped enact a limited welfare state (albeit in part for imperial purposes: “If the British people will have a great Empire . . . [it would not be] upon the shoulders of stunted millions crowded together in the slums of cities”
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) but this was not the future he had fought for or envisioned for his country.

Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill and Jennie Jerome, a beautiful American heiress who always seemed to Churchill “a fairy princess,”
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as indeed she seemed to a great many young Englishmen. Winston was, famously, not much of a student, and his father, despairing of his prospects, decided that a young man who liked nothing better than playing with toy soldiers was fit only for cannon fodder. Winston crammed his way into Sandhurst where he excelled, graduating eighth in his class and proving “that I could learn quickly enough the things that mattered”
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—things like horsemanship, field fortifications, tactics, and military history.

As a young officer, he was given leave to cover the Cuban rebellion against Spain as a war correspondent, granted the leisure in India to educate himself (reading Gibbon and Macaulay and parliamentary speeches from his father's time in Parliament), and permitted to combine active service with journalistic dispatches, which he then turned into books. Churchill proved as unafraid to criticize his superiors in print as he was unafraid of the bullets, spears, and swords of the enemy in the field. As he noted in
The Story of the Malakand Field Force
, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
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It was a swashbuckling life, a “roving commission,” as he called it, and it propelled him into Parliament at the age of twenty-five. Like his father, Churchill was a Tory, but a maverick one, and in 1904 he joined the Liberals over the issue of free trade (he was in favor of it and opposed to imperial tariffs). He was rewarded with ministerial office in 1905, declining a position at the Treasury in order to take a more junior position as Under Secretary of State for the Colonies. It was not dull numbers that motivated him but the vast questions of empire, including winning the Boers' happy consent to British rule by granting their republics their own constitutions and large dollops of self-government.

Like most British imperialists, his actions and beliefs were circumscribed by prudence and economy, but they were also guided by principles, which occasionally had to be modified and trimmed, but were constant. One of these was justice. For all his attachment to the superiority of the British race, he believed that superiority could only be justified by “bearing peace, civilization, and good government.”
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His attitude towards the non-white peoples of the Empire was generally paternal. Like most Englishmen he had an admiration for the fighting qualities of Muslims (though he saw their religion as ignorant and fanatical) and credited their loyalty in British India compared to the vexatious Hindus (whose religion he disparaged as decadent and immoral, with child weddings and widow-burnings and untouchables and whatnot).
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He did not care much for the Chinese, but rather liked Africans (his first choice for a command in World War I was in East Africa), even if he regarded them (as many settlers did) as overgrown children, and was astonished, horrified, and saddened at the Mau-Mau rebellion among the Kikuyu in Kenya in the 1950s. If he uttered racist remarks about non-white peoples, he could be rather cutting about whites as well, including the Boers (though he learned to admire their courage and stubborn spirit of independence) and Germans (“the Hun is always either
at your throat or at your feet”
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), not to mention those who embraced the murderous doctrines of the Bolsheviks and the IRA.

In 1921, he returned to the Colonial Office as Secretary of State. In this position he is now notorious among his critics for advocating the use of gas against rebellious Iraqis. The sting of that charge is rather lessened, though, when one remembers that Churchill wanted Britain's boffins to develop a gas “which would inflict punishment on recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them”
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—in other words, a gas like tear gas, used to break up riots. Churchill lost his post simultaneously with losing his appendix in October 1922, and then lost his parliamentary seat to a candidate who favored prohibition (which Churchill of course did not).

By 1924 he was back with the Tories (as he said, anyone can rat, but it takes “a certain amount of ingenuity to re-rat”
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) and received a surprise appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the new Conservative government. On imperial matters, he became known as an ultra-imperialist on India, which he argued was held together only by Britain's humane and disinterested rule, without which Muslim and Hindu would butcher each other (as indeed happened at partition in 1947) and without which the rights of the “untouchables” could not be protected.