The Foreign Office gave a polite cough, and said that, no, actually, Crown colonies were not actually for sale, and certainly not to aliens. But Smiley was not that easily put off. He had heard the Pitcairn Islanders grumble about how London spent so very little on them—so he played a shrewd hand. He told the Foreign Office he would give the Pitcairners a million dollars if he could just lease Henderson—999 years should do the trick, he said—and, moreover, he would throw in a ferry boat and would build an airstrip on Henderson so that the group of islands could have certain access to the world outside.
And this time—for such are the ways of today’s Imperialist mind—the Foreign Office stopped short, and began to think very seriously about Mr Ratliffe and his money. Every Empire builder, it seems, has his price.
For a while—and particularly during those rainy summer days when I would go and see him at his desk in Frog Level—old Smiley was able to dream. He drew up the most elaborate plans—men would be shipped into Henderson by landing craft, and would have the airfield built in six months; then there would be dairy herds and a piggery and Smiley’s gun collection and his thousands of cowboy videotapes, and his new mansion built and his girlfriends brought over…two years, maybe, and paradise would be ready for him. Lord Belstead, the Foreign Office man who was considering the case, had told Parliament itself, no less, that the Government was seriously considering the matter. Optimism reigned at Frog Level, and Smiley would drive his Silver Wraiths down the country lanes at a furious pace, scattering the chickens, singing southern songs and giving a war-whoop of victory as he sensed the imminent realisation of his life-long ambition.
But it was not to be. The World Wildlife Fund reminded the world that Henderson Island was a repository for great natural treasure. It wrote a report for the Foreign Office. ‘The Island remains largely in its virginal state. It supports ten endemic taxa of flowering plants, four endemic land-birds (including the Henderson Rail, known to ornithologists as the Black Guardian of the Island), various endemic invertebrates, a colony of fifteen species of breeding seabirds and extensive and virtually unexplored fringing coral reefs.’ There was a special breed of snail, a fruit-eating pigeon and a parrot that sipped nectar. Mr Ratliffe chewed tobacco, and could not under any circumstances be allowed to settle on Henderson, the Fund declared. Moreover, the island should be protected from settlement by any member of the human species, and left entirely for the world of animals and birds. Her Majesty’s Government, the Fund concluded, ‘has a profound moral obligation to take immediate steps to protect Henderson Island…’
Mr Ratliffe received his letter a few days later. So sorry to have indicated there might be cause for optimism, really cannot permit settlement, unique natural heritage, taxa here, taxa there, nice of you to offer such generous terms, great pain to have to decline kindness, no need to enter into correspondence on the matter, infinite regret, yours respectfully. And down in Frog Level that night there was much chewing and hawking, and sounds of disgust rattled around the Appalachian hills as Smiley Ratliffe unburdened himself of yet more invective, and prepared to begin his search once again, for a place where there were no drugs, no psychiatrists, no rock stars, no Commies and, particularly, no officials of the British Foreign Office. They, in Mr Ratliffe’s view, were the worst of the lot of them. ‘Hell, they were gonna sell me the goddam lease. They didn’t give one tuppenny damn for the place. They jes’ saw it as a way of making a million bucks—until them critturs weighed in on the side of some pesky little ol’ snail, and some dingbat of a parrot, and the British realised they wouldn’t look so good to a bunch of parrot-lovers. Damn hypocrites, you British! Just damn hypocrites.’ And I left Frog Level forthwith, and have not spoken to Mr Ratliffe since.
On Pitcairn Island the news was received with sullen dismay. The islanders wanted the money, and the ferry, and thought an airfield on Henderson would be a good idea. Mrs Christian could have had a doctor flown in from Tahiti, they said. When we have a problem here someone could fly in, they said. Who cares about fruit-eating pigeons, and birds called Rails, they said.
The Foreign Office said it was moderately sympathetic. Glynn Christian, a young man related to most of the island families, and who now lives in London demonstrating cooking for early morning BBC television viewers, planned to lead an expedition to go to Pitcairn in 1989 and study the animals and birds. It would leave behind its boats and its buildings for the bicentenary the following year of Fletcher Christian’s arrival; a royal visit would take place then as well, he hoped. Pitcairn would be put back on the map.
His idea was, essentially, to rescue the colony from extinction. He, and those few friends of Pitcairn to be found in Britain, are convinced the Foreign Office wishes the island to be depopulated totally—the last few islanders should go to New Zealand, or to Norfolk Island, and live a better life. If the trend of the last two decades continues, no one will be left on Pitcairn by the end of this century, and the rocky islands of this tiny and remote group will be left to the wind and the waves, the pigeons, the parrots and the snails.
But lately one additional argument is finding official favour: it concerns the strategic importance of the Pacific Ocean. The argument is simple. The sovereign sea area that surrounds the four islands of Pitcairn is vast. There are said to be dark forces—the very forces Mr Ratliffe so despises—who would dearly like to fill any Imperial vacuum that might be created in what President Reagan called ‘the Ocean of the twenty-first century’. The depopulation of Pitcairn might create such a vacuum: the argument for trying to retain at least token inhabitation, a small band of colonists set down in the silver sea, is more powerful than can be influenced by mere considerations about ecology, or sentiment, or the bicentenary of an event that official Britain would prefer, in any case, to forget.
The decision not to visit Pitcairn was difficult. I felt no particular regret, however, at keeping away from both South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territory: neither has a population, neither has a resident administrator (though the chief official of the Antarctic Survey acts as magistrate and British Government representative should any problems arise—such as the illegal landing of the Argentine scrap men at Leith harbour in March 1982). The scenery, of course, appears to be stunning; but such architecture as the Empire has left is the gimcrack wreckage of scientific stations and whaling factories, and only the memorial cross to Shackleton on a snowy hillside above Grytviken appears to have a trace of the Imperial feel about it.
When I began the journey, and mentioned to friends that I was wandering around the world looking at the remaining British colonies, most would look puzzled. ‘Do we have any left, then?’ they would ask. Not a few, though, would assume a more sophisticated attitude. ‘Places like the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, that sort of thing?’ And in the early days I grimaced inwardly, and gritted my teeth, and said that no, these were not colonies, not part of the Empire, not abroad, you see…
Technically, though, they were right to suggest these most British of Isles for inclusion. (And it is perfectly correct to call the Channel Islands British Isles. The word ‘Britain’ refers to two places—that wedge-shaped island comprising England, Wales and Scotland on the one hand; that duck’s-bill of a peninsula known as Brittany on the other. The latter was always known as ‘Little’ Britain, the former ‘Great’ Britain. The Channel Islands, belonging to both, may have the sound of Gaul about them, but are British through and through.)
Both they, and the Isle of Man, are true dependencies of the Crown. They are not a part of the United Kingdom. They have their own laws, parliaments, taxes and customs. They have a British governor, the representative of the sovereign to whom they own their allegiance and their loyalty. They are willing colonies, their citizenry colonials, in every sense the same as those in Bermuda, on Grand Turk, or up on the Peak in old Hong Kong.
But I did not go there. I decided not to for the most prosaic of reasons, though one tinged with a kind of logic. They are not, in the acc
epted sense, abroad. You don’t have to have a passport to go there. They are not within the remit of the Foreign Office. They have not been within the remit of the Colonial Office. They do not appear in the histories of Empire, nor in the directories of dependent territories. Their governors were not chosen from the select lists of the Colonial Service, but from the same loyal rolls as came the lords lieutenants of the counties.
Their association with England, whatever the technicalities of their status, was far more intimate than the relation between, say, the United States and Guam, or between France and Martinique. In those latter cases the word ‘colony’ can, with some degree of literal truth, still be fairly applied; in the case of Man, in the cases of the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, and of Alderney, Great Sark, Little Sark, Brechou, Lihou, Jethou and Herm, not even the most fervent apologist would suggest that an Imperial foot was placed against a colonial neck, and that any subjugation or inequality still obtained. These may not be part of the Kingdom; but nor are they part of the Empire, nor have they been for many centuries past.
And then, finally, I cast logic and good reason to the winds, and went back to Ireland.
The British had held Ireland for longer than any other people on the face of the earth. The First Empire—that of France, and of America—had come and gone; the great Imperial adventure, of which these three years of wandering may be a final journey, grew, reached its zenith, and began its decline. And yet still there was Ireland; the flag flew over Dublin Castle, the soldiers drilled in the parks and the squares, the police were still royal, the Viceroy still ruled a sullen and unforgiving people. For the Irish hated it, they resented it, and they were the first to throw the British out.
Conventionally the British think that the first colonies they lost were those in America; but that irruption of nationalism and violence did not spell the end of an Imperial attitude, merely the closing of one Imperial phase, and the dawning of another. When the Irish rose, with all that wonderfully misguided valour at the General Post Office, the writing was truly on the wall for the Empire of the English. I have taken the common view that, in strict colonial terms, it was Weihaiwei in China that was the first real loss to the Empire; but the first wound was struck in 1916, the first grave and fatal blow was struck with Home Rule, the institution began to crumble from within—if not yet without—from the moment the Pale, eight long centuries old, ceased to exist in the Ireland of modern times.
True, there was the Act of Union: Ireland was not a colony, in the same strict technical sense that decided me to leave out journeying to Douglas or St Peter Port. But it felt like one. It felt like one to the Irish. And the English behaved as though it were one. There was a distinction drawn, and the Gael was on the distaff side of it, always.
And, what’s more, so was the Planter, too. The English cared as little for the Protestants of Ulster as they had for the Catholics of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. The colonial mind ruled in the northern six counties too, even when the Free State had been born, and the North had been legally subsumed into the United Kingdom, and made to feel, constitutionally, part and parcel of and wholly equal to the motherland across St George’s Channel. The republicans and the nationalists in the mean streets of Belfast and Derry belted it out as a slogan—‘Ulster—England’s last colony!’ and they were right, in a strange, indefinable sort of way, righter than they knew.
So I spent the last hours of the journey in the town of Hillsborough, in County Down, at the great stone mansion they called Government House, and where the symbol of Ireland as part of Empire had come to rest after being chased out of Dublin by the heroes of the rising and the architects of Home Rule. It had been called Hillsborough House back then—the family house of the man who had been England’s first Colonial Secretary, and a man who believed passionately in Union with Ireland, and the denial of independence to the Americans.
In 1921 the family gave the house to the Crown—with provision that they might have it back should the Crown ever decide it had no need for it. The first of the five Governors moved in—to sign bills, to affix the great seal of Ulster to legislation, to hold investitures in the throne room, to hold garden parties on the lawn, to open fetes, present awards, dress in full Imperial raiment on the sovereign’s birthday, on Armistice Day, on the State Opening of Parliament at Stormont, and the delivery of the speech from the throne.
They were said to stand for no side, these men; and yet all were Protestant, all were loyal to the Crown, all stood for the very antithesis of what fully one-third of the people they ruled were said to want. In this way more than any other the Governors of Northern Ireland seem now to have been truly colonial—for like the viceroys of Ireland in Dublin Castle, they stood, to some extent, for subjugation and rule, rather than as a pleasant symbol of a universally accepted association.
There was the Duke of Abercorn, who had a decorative embellishment of soldiery at Government House, changing the guard each noon and night, to remind the passing people that the Crown ruled this corner of the island. Next the Fourth Earl Glanville, gruff, intemperate, unloved—but married to the sister of the Bowes-Lyon Queen, and thus beloved by association, if loathed by virtue of his person. Lord Wakehurst of Ardingley, come to Ireland from Governor-Generalling in New South Wales, a man so given to nocturnal excursions that his official portrait was painted with an open fly, and the newer paint ordered to conceal the white silks below is still visible to even the casual eye.
And then Lord Erskine of Rerrick, who was chased away by the beginnings of the Troubles, a man said by his biographer to have been tortured by his bewilderment of Ireland—not the first, and assuredly not the last to be so.
Finally, Lord Grey of Naunton, who arrived to govern at Hillsborough after governing both British Guiana and the Bahama Islands. I remember him—a jaunty man with a white moustache and a twinkle in his eye, one of the few dashes of style and colour in a country that, during the five years he held office, was collapsing in a miasma of blood and dirt and misery.
The British told Lord Grey to go in 1973. His butler, Albert Harper, who had buttled for all five Excellencies and their ladies, remains puzzled at the way they made him go. They tried, he told me one afternoon as we walked down the endless carpet of the throne room, they tried to make him take the ferry home, and said there was no Queen’s Flight for him; they tried to stop a soldiers’ guard of honour for him; and they made him go in his civilian clothes, without his swan’s-feather plumes, or his great sword, or his fine blue uniform.
But in the end Ralph Grey of Naunton left in style. There was a detachment of Scots Guards in the Square; there was a Heron of the Queen’s Flight; there was a final salute. But he did go in his black suit, and the final wave, as he stepped from the North of Ireland and into his English plane, was not with a plumed hat, but with a black bowler.
There was a dinner at Hillsborough the night I last saw Albert Harper. The menu read ‘Hillsborough Castle’—the name ‘Government House’ had long since gone. The silver knives were each an exact one inch from the table edge; the freesias were fresh from the garden; the servants were briefed, the fires were lit, the whisky glasses had been polished, the kitchen staff was at the ready.
But it was all a sad pretence. Where the Governor once sat, there was now but a Secretary of State, a mere politician, and usually one of little note, and with little reason to be noted. The footmen had long gone. The portraits of former Governors and Irish Viceroys triggered no memories, no conversations. The great seal of Ulster had been officially defaced with two great scratches of a knife, and the man who sat at this table’s middle signed no bills, affixed no sign manual, had no role that was not dictated by a political superior in London.
The argument by which we called Ireland part of the Empire must apply, right or wrong, to the remanent six counties of today. This is, in a way, a colony still. But since Lord Grey waved that bowler hat down from the Heron that June afternoon in 1973, Ulster has just not had, for me, the feel of
Empire any more. Nor for Butler Harper. He sat down at the long table, and gazed down over the lawns, to where a policeman stood with a machine-gun crooked under his arm. ‘It was grand here in those days, right enough. But now—the Empire, if that is what we were part of, has vanished. Into thin air.’
And he stood up wearily and stretched his back. He opened the great door of Government House, and let me out into the afternoon sun and the fresh shower of rain. And as I walked away I heard him turn the great key in the lock, shutting himself in with a fine Imperial memory, while all outside the Empire had, as he realised, just vanished clear away.
12
Some Reflections and Conclusions
And what an Empire it had been! These little sun-bleached bones, scattered around the world in silent memorial to it all, stir some sadness and a lot of pride. It is a Saturday morning in St Helena—I came back for a second visit, early one recent southern autumn—and this could be an England of 6,000 miles away and a hundred years ago.
Before me, through the uneven glass windows of this East India Company mansion, a long garden slopes down towards the sea. There is a border of roses and marigolds; a row of fig trees, cow parsley hedges, a small jungle of banana palms, jacaranda trees and a magnificent magnolia. The sea sparkles in the warm morning, touched by a faint grey haze. There are a score of boats at anchor, including the Royal Mail boat the RMS St Helena from Bristol which came in last night, bringing me back to this speck of Imperial memories.
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire Page 35
