A few days later, on 23 May, as the Manitoba spring began to turn to summer, it was the turn of Winnipeg’s schools to sing out their loyalty to the mother country and to the Crown in celebration of Empire Day. A private initiative which had gained public support across the British Empire, Empire Day was now celebrated more in the empire’s farthest corners than it was in London. This year, 10,000 children in Winnipeg’s schools were given Union Jacks, the national British flag. ‘Nothing apparently could have made them prouder and happier’, noted the Free Press.3 In Norquay school the local Anglican clergyman reminded schoolchildren that ‘we belong to a great empire’, great in numbers and in extent but above all great in its level of civilisation. ‘No Empire in the world has laws so good as ours’, he declared, ‘one king, one flag, one fleet, one empire – a mighty confederation of nations linked together in the most wonderful way’.4
On the other side of the world, in the southern hemisphere city of Melbourne, Australia’s temporary federal capital – a few weeks distant from Winnipeg by rail and ship, via Vancouver and Fiji, but linked to it securely by telegraph cable and familial ties of Britannic unity – the Australian subjects of the crown celebrated Empire Day in much the same way. As in Canada, children were at the centre of events. ‘It is the duty of all teachers employed in State schools’, read a circular from the education department of the State of Victoria, ‘to foster in the minds of their pupils the sentiments of love of country, respect for its laws, and loyalty to its Sovereign … opportunity should be taken from time to time to impress upon children that they are citizens, not merely of Australia, but also of a great empire’.5 Flags were to be hoisted high into the autumn sky above the state’s school playgrounds, and three cheers given for the King, the empire, and the newly formed Commonwealth of Australia, now entering its teenage years. The saluting of the flag, suggested a local newspaper, would be the most pleasing part of the day’s proceedings for the children (although the fact that school closed in the afternoon was perhaps nearer the mark). In the evening, there were electric illuminations in the Melbourne suburbs of Camberwell and Surrey Hills, following a local tradition set over the last few years.
The Melbourne Argus reminded its readers of the true meaning of Empire Day as an affirmation of an essential Britishness which could be found in every corner of the world, on every continent. The empire, in this conception, was not only about reason but about emotion; not only about strength in numbers but about opportunities afforded to the individual:
The Australian in Britain, as in Canada or in South Africa, is at home. He is a citizen with all the rights of citizenship and that without losing in the least his Australian citizenship, which he can resume when he pleases. This world-wide British citizenship which makes him at once of the old world and of the new – a man with civic rights on every continent and on multitudinous islands, the representative everywhere of a vast pervasive world-power whose flag flies near by every land as the sign of ubiquitous influence – is in itself a precious gift to the Australian tourist and trader alike …6
Above all, noted the Argus, national and imperial identities should be seen as mutually enhancing rather than antagonistic: ‘to be a good imperialist one must first be a good Australian or a good Canadian’. Put another way, to strive for British ideals of self-government (and for freedom from the direct control of London) was not to question the imperial ideal, but to honour it more perfectly in a free partnership of Britannic nations, each evolving their own policies and interests, but bound by custom and culture to British ideals. In its widest sense this communion of Britannic nations allowed Britain to exist, not only in the countryside of England or the mountains of Wales or the hills of Scotland, but in the bush of rural Victoria and the wheat fields stretching from horizon to horizon in the open farmland of Manitoba. Melbourne and Winnipeg could be seen as being as British as Manchester or Glasgow; the names of their streets and buildings recalled local heroes of the construction of their cities, Britons abroad building a new Britain over the seas.
That was the theory. The reality was more complicated. Canadians and Australians were not just expatriated Britons, though their parents or grandparents might have been. They had developed a relationship to the land, a sense of national destiny wrapped up in imperial destiny, a sense of having cut loose from Britain as well as recreating it. Australians congratulated themselves on having created a paradise for the working man, more liberal and more equal than in Britain. Canadians had built a continental nation, with almost unlimited promise for the future. What, then, was owed to the mother country? Affection? Loyalty? Money? Men? As Australia and Canada emerged from the status of colony, and took on a life of their own, how was their relationship with Britain to alter?
There was another change afoot. While the majority of the populations of Canada and Australia could still point to heritage from the British Isles – importing into their new homes, amongst other things, the squabbles of Catholic and Protestant, the Church hierarchy of Catholic Irishmen and the Orange Order bands of Ulstermen, the pride of the Scots and the songs of the Welsh – some new Australians, and many new Canadians, had origins in Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Russia or Italy. In 1913, immigration into Canada reached 400,870 – more than in any year before or since, and from increasingly diverse origins. If things were simply left to run, would Canada and Australia cease to look and feel British, and become American melting pots in miniature? Empire Day, then, was not just an affirmation of imperial identity, it was intended to be a creator of it.
‘First of all’, wrote English-born Canadian Stephen Leacock in 1907, asserting his vision of Canada as an engine of empire rather than as a dependency of it, ‘we must realize, and the people of England must realize, the inevitable greatness of Canada’.7 This, suggested Leacock, was ‘not a vainglorious boast … no rhodomontade’:
It is a simple fact. Here stand we, six million people, heirs to the greatest legacy in the history of mankind, owners of half a continent, trustees, under God Almighty, for the fertile solitudes of the west … Aye, such a little people, but growing, growing, growing, with a march that shall make us ten millions tomorrow, twenty millions in our children’s time, and a hundred millions ere yet the century runs out. What say you to Fort Garry [essentially, Winnipeg], a stockaded fort in your father’s day, with its hundred thousand of today, and its half a million souls of tomorrow?
The nineteenth century had been that of the United States, the twentieth century would be that of Canada, went the line first expressed by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Canada’s Prime Minister up until 1911, now leader of the Liberal opposition. Although Australia was less populous than Canada, with less immediate prospect of rapid advancement and fewer European immigrants – partly a matter of distance, partly a consequence of the effective advertisements of Canada’s boom and partly, one visitor wrote, ‘because stories reach Europe at intervals of drought and commercial disaster [in Australia]’ – it too could look to its future as a growing part of the empire, steadily opening up its vast land to farming and development.8 Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, coined a phrase almost as grand as Laurier’s for Canada, and considerably more realistic: ‘for the first time in history we have a nation for a continent, and a continent for a nation’.
But who would defend these new nations? Would they in turn defend Britain? The questions of imperial defence, partially but unsatisfactorily answered during the South African Boer War by the contribution of Canadian and Australian troops to the British war effort, reached an ever-increasing pitch of intensity in the years leading up to 1913. The interests of Australia or Canada, it was accepted, would not necessarily match those of Britain on every issue – on issues of trade, or political relationships, it was natural that there would be differences. Nor could Britain herself always provide an assurance of unlimited security, with her extensive commitments elsewhere in the world, and facing the prospective competition of Germany, or Russia, or even Japan at some distant p
oint in the future. Increasingly therefore, Canadians and Australians might see themselves both as members of a triumphant Britannic race, custodians of the Britannic future – and yet perhaps as vulnerable, too.
For Australians, it was not just the relatively slack rate of British immigration that was a worry but, ultimately, how the sparsely populated continent of Australia – with fewer than five million inhabitants in 1913 – could remain inviolate in a crowded neighbourhood. ‘Japan is packed to the bursting point’, noted British traveller John Foster Fraser, ‘[it] must have somewhere to send her surplus population … [it] is looking around the eastern world and marking the spots where her statesmen want that population to go’.9 Since 1902 Britain had had a military alliance with Japan – an admission both of Japan’s increasing status in the world and of British over-stretch – but that might not last. And what if Britain was dragged into conflict elsewhere? ‘Australian statesmen with imagination may possibly glance into the future, and contemplate the possibility of the British Navy being worsted in the Western Seas’, Foster Fraser continued, ‘it is fit that such statesmen should contemplate what would be the action of Japan under such circumstances’.
In Melbourne, the newspapers were full of Asian scares. ‘The day of the horde is past’, noted the Argus, ‘but there may be a subtler menace to-day from beyond the pale, and the wardens of the marches where West impinges upon East may be instinctively bracing themselves’.10 Visiting London in July 1913 the Premier of Victoria, William Watt, told his British audiences of Australia’s desire to build up a ‘Southern Pacific nation’ but warned that should Australia weaken, ‘the yellow man will come’. He went on: ‘The present generation may see little of this anticipated development, but it must come sooner or later, and then the theatre of the great struggle may be transferred from the northern to the southern hemisphere’.11 A few days later, in Melbourne, Major C. A. Mitchell of the Intelligence Corps delivered a public lecture on the subject of Australian defence, raising the prospect of invasion.12 The aims of a Melbourne Overseas Club, inaugurated in the presence of leading political figures from across Australia, were described as ‘unity, comradeship, and readiness for defence’.13 Suitably enough, prospective members were asked to sign up at the clubrooms in Empire Arcade on Flinders Street. As it was, the state of Victoria boasted 325 rifle clubs in 1913, and 15,000 boys between the ages of twelve and fourteen were members of the Junior Cadets, while permanent militia and volunteer forces, shown off proudly to a visiting British parliamentary delegation that September, numbered nearly 17,000.14
On the more expensive question of a navy, the Commonwealth of Australia had bitten the bullet a few years previously under Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher and invested in a flagship for its own navy, the HMAS Australia, in order to replace departing British vessels. In 1913 the battleship and her escorts steamed from British shipyards towards their new station, stopping in South Africa to impress the locals there with the loyalty and sacrifice of the Australian taxpayer, before powering across the Indian Ocean. ‘From out of the morning mist, the long grey line came in’, wrote a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald in October, describing the arrival of the Australian fleet near the spot where Captain Cook had landed in 1770:
The thing was done. The talking time was past … There, in front of their eyes, on this bright morning, was the splendid realisation of the dream of years – a dream that was born of our Nationhood. Not the full realisation of it, in truth, but the beginning of it, the nucleus of the Fleet that is to be. And all knew, as they looked, that there could be no turning back. The full meaning of it, with all its responsibilities, shot home, as these terrible engines of war, withal so stately and majestic, rode in triumph through the Heads.15
Like the country as a whole, the navy was to be in one sense separate from its British mother, and yet attached to it ‘with the same traditions to live up to, the same worlds to keep’. Being Australian, it would also be imperially British: ‘a thing apart, and yet a part of a glorious and indivisible whole’.16
As in Australia, most English-speaking Canadians accepted the case for Canada taking up a greater burden of imperial defence. There was broad agreement with the proposition made by the Canadian Conservative MP George Foster in 1909 that Canada was now, whether she liked it or not, ‘launched upon the world’s waters … open to every storm … exposed to every danger’.17 ‘She cannot escape the common burden’, Foster warned, ‘she cannot neglect the common duty, she cannot ignore the common responsibility’. As in Australia, the case was made in reference in part to the stronger powers which surrounded Canada, and in part to the complications of geography. ‘East and west, across two mighty oceans, she is face to face with two immense masses of human activity’, Foster opined, ‘on one side, in the Orient, 350,000,000 people waking up into a new life … on the other side, the activities of the old and well-known nations of Europe’.18 To the south lay the United States, seen by some as the perennial threat to Canada’s Britannic identity, and by others as a natural British ally, being both predominantly white and of largely Anglo-Saxon stock. In the other direction, ‘the wide cool reaches of the north, silent and mysterious’. As with Australia, a vast sea lay between Canada and the geopolitical centres of Europe, though in Canada’s case it was a matter of a few days’ sailing rather than several weeks. In any event, Foster reminded the Canadian parliament, ‘we must not think that because we are not within sound of the artillery, or in sight of the vessels that are engaged therein, that it is not our battle’.19
But whatever Foster’s eloquence or the cogency of his imperial reasoning, there were vocal groups opposed to the principle of the matter – the idea that Canada was bound to fight the wars of the mother country – and heated differences over the practical form that any Canadian contribution should take. By early 1913, as Winnipeg’s citizens crowded into the Industrial Bureau building to see the Pageant of Empire, the issue of naval defence had become the most divisive issue in Canadian politics, fraught with allegations of disloyalty, and entangled with questions of constitutional legitimacy.
Some Canadians saw greater military expenditures as an excuse for greater taxation which, in turn, would act as a brake on the economic development and prosperity that was Canada’s true birthright and its best protection. Others argued that additional spending on defence would be more likely to encourage war than avert it. ‘What need is there for a navy now more than there has been for the last fifty or a hundred years?’ asked James Scallion, the Irish-born president of the Grain Growers’ Association in Winnipeg, in a letter to the local newspaper. ‘Are the people of Canada going to encourage European militarism and the estrangement of nations by spending millions in the construction of warships?’20 At its annual meeting at Brandon, just outside the Manitoban capital, the association voted overwhelmingly against any naval policy at all. ‘They [the grain growers] seem to weigh all public issues on their grain scales’, commented one observer caustically.21 In French-speaking Quebec, Henri Bourassa led the charge against British imperialism. Having broken with Laurier for having caved in to London in sending Canadian troops to fight in the Boer War, he now warned darkly of a warlike imperial clique dragging Canada into more bloody adventures in the future, with conscription just over the horizon.
But even amongst avowed patriot-imperialists, those who accepted the need for a Canadian naval contribution to imperial defence, there were stark divisions on how to achieve it. The middle course charted by Laurier between English-speaking jingoists and French-speaking refuseniks – essentially offering a small Canadian-run naval service – satisfied no one. It still left Canada on the hook for British wars, argued Bourassa; it left Canada with a ‘tin-pot navy’ made up of second-hand British ships which would otherwise have ended upon the scrapheap, argued the Conservatives. Having won the election of 1911 on an imperial platform – against free trade with the United States, and in favour of a stronger contribution to imperial defence – Conservative leader
Robert Borden found himself in 1913 in the middle of an ill-tempered debate over which was more patriotic: an immediate financial contribution to the British Treasury of $35,000,000 to allow for the construction of dreadnoughts (the Conservative proposal), or a Canadian naval service (even if that took longer, was less capable, more restricted to Canadian waters, and came less directly under a broad imperial command, except in wartime).
The Conservatives argued that their policy was necessary, and that it was welcomed in London – although in truth British politicians were divided on the issue too, both whether more ships should be built, and whether a direct financial contribution was the appropriate way for a dominion to proceed. The Canadian Liberals argued that the Conservative policy amounted to a new subjugation to Whitehall; Laurier himself stood up in parliament to argue that ‘if we pass this bill we will certainly interrupt, and perhaps put an end to, the spirit of self-confidence and self-reliance which has made Canada what it is today’.22 Attacked on all sides, and with the government accused of parliamentary bullying tactics in trying to get its way, the Borden plan ultimately died, unloved and unmourned. Canada – seen by many as the elder brother of Australia for having confederated thirty-four years before her – was left in an embarrassing mess. By the end of 1913, while Australia had proudly formed a Royal Australian Navy dedicated to South Pacific security – and to keeping Australia white – Canada had a limited naval service with no naval policy for the future, even as most of Canada’s politicians proclaimed their Britannic identity, their unswerving loyalty to the crown and their commitment to imperial security.
But then this was perhaps the new reality of Britain abroad in 1913 – more complex and more challenging than in years past, celebrated on Empire Day in the same way in Winnipeg as in Melbourne, in Toronto as in Auckland, in Cape Town as in Sydney, but subject to national variations within imperial unity, and a layered sense of identity, self-interest and obligation.
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