Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  Strains of boom and shanty-town, too, ran through Jo’burg, and made the old-school Afrikaner, in for the day from the countryside, hasten home aghast to his farm in the evening. Crime was common, and increasing. Many a white man kept his black mistress. The South African Labour Party had its headquarters in the city, and there were frequent strikes. In 1922 one of them had assumed such proportions that the army was used to put it down and 153 people had been killed: it had been organized by a Marxist Council of Action, and even now, on Labour Day, when the Jo’burg workers marched in procession to the Town Hall, predicants and politicians of the Volk were horrified to observe that Communist banners proliferated.

  For the Boers had not abandoned Johannesburg. They still thought in terms of Redneck and commando, they knew that Jo’burg was theirs by inheritance, and they planned for the day when Afrikanerdom would take over the city. The Broederbond, the semi-secret society of Afrikaner activists, was busy there already: and though in this, the biggest city of South Africa, there was no daily paper in Afrikaans, still the Afrikaner population was increasing steadily, year by year—increasing in influence, too, as clerks rose to managerships, as yokels became technicians, and the first Afrikaner investors put their boots tentatively in the door of the Stock Exchange.

  Besides, when they surveyed the humming, grasping city, they could reassure themselves with the truth that if its society was alien, many of its philosophies were home-grown. Jo’burg hardly subscribed to the trusteeship ideal of imperialism. Liberal progress was scarcely a preoccupation at the Chamber of Mines, or in the drawing-rooms of the Rand Club. In Johannesburg as in Pretoria or Bloemfontein, the Boer view of race was paramount. By the 1920s South Africa had virtually abandoned any pretence to racial synthesis, and the country was fast moving towards the ultimate negation of the imperial trust, apartheid—the absolute separation of the races, which was seen by its academic progenitors as a philosophical solution to a human predicament, but was interpreted by the populace as a licence for baaskap, boss-ship. Nowhere was the idea more welcome than in Johannesburg, for the whole economic and social structure of the city depended upon that vast helot community of blacks: blacks mined the gold, blacks cleaned the houses and watered the gardens, blacks without franchise, without unions, without even the right to move freely about the country, enabled the citizens of Johannesburg to live in the manner to which easy money had long accustomed them.

  The Boers had founded Jo’burg, and the Afrikaners saw it still as theirs. The shape they foresaw for South Africa as a whole was already visible in this city of the uitlanders. The Colour Bar Bill, then going through Parliament, would finally separate the races in Johannesburg’s public places; the new Immorality Bill would deprive its citizens of an old imperial privilege, the right to sleep with partners of any colour. Mr Justice Stratford passed four death sentences in one week of 1928, one on ‘a native called Jim’, two on women. The civic authorities of Jo’burg were preparing to celebrate, for the first time, Dingaan’s Day, one of the great festivals of the old Afrikaner republics, which commemorated the Boer victory over the Zulus at Blood River in 1838, but had nothing whatever to do with the British Empire.

  So we see a city not, like Toronto, somewhat neurotically displaying its Britishness, but steadily deserting it. Once more the concentrated folk-will of the Afrikaners was proving too formidable for the flabbier convictions of the British. The Boers were on their way to winning the third and last of the Boer Wars, and Jo’burg had come a long way indeed since Lionel Curtis took office as its first Town Clerk in the brave days of the Kindergarten.1

  5

  So the Dominions diverged, and there was no pretending either that the scattered peoples of the British stock were always in harmony. British Governments at home were at best bored, at worst infuriated by the average Dominion leaders, Haig’s ‘second-rate sort of people’, and often treated them disgracefully, ignoring them in their economic and strategic calculations, imperiously demanding their compliance when needed, and sometimes being downright rude. The only colonial leaders they really welcomed to their homes and councils were the cultivated statesmen of Afrikanerdom, and as the legends of Anzac and Vimy faded the Dominions became ever mistier, ever less interesting in the public mind.

  Kangaroo! Kangaroo!

  Thou spirit of Australia,

  That redeems from utter failure,

  From perfect desolation,

  And warrants the creation

  Of this fifth part of the earth!2

  As for the colonials themselves, they viewed the British still with an astonishing ambivalence. On the one hand there remained a profound sentimental loyalty to the idea of England, running much deeper than mere snobbery, and constituting even in the 1920s a powerful political energy. The colonials were stirred by England, responding almost despite themselves to its age, its grandeur, its continuity, even its damp and misty climate. Susceptible Newfoundlanders felt a sense of pride even in speaking its name. New Zealanders never out of Ruatoria thought of it still as ‘Home’. ‘If you were to ask any Canadian’, wrote Stephen Leacock, ‘“do you have to go to war if England does?” he’d answer at once, “Oh no.” If you then said, “Would you go to war if England did?”, he’d answer “Oh yes.” And if you asked “Why?” he would say, reflectively, “Well, you see, we’d have to.”’ Most of the Governor-Generals were still transplanted English grandees, and few of the colonials objected: they preferred it, feeling that Lord Y, the Duke of C or General Z elevated the tone of the place by his presence and impartiality, even if he was a bloody pom or limey.1

  At the same time they were, by and large, more realistic about the state of the Empire than were the policy-makers of the Mother Country. Even the New Zealanders, the most conformist of the colonials, complied with British wishes so obligingly chiefly because they were, economically, hardly more than an agricultural annexe of the United Kingdom. The Australians were often at loggerheads with British Governments over one issue or another. In 1930 their Labour Government even clashed with George V himself, when they insisted upon their own Australian nominee as Governor-General: the Irish had done the same thing, they said, but the King was shocked by the analogy—‘Does Australia, with her traditional loyalty to the Throne, wish to be compared with Ireland, where, alas! a considerable element of disloyalty exists?’

  Certainly the politicians of the Irish Free State, who now entered the company of the Dominions premiers, had not abandoned their republican aspirations, while even the most Empire-minded of the South African leaders, even Smuts himself, never forgot their republican origins. And through it all the Canadians doggedly pursued, year after year, their object of absolute independence within the Empire, formal and actual: by 1923 they had signed their first independent treaty with the United States (though the Americans checked with London first, just in case) and by 1927 there was a Canadian Ambassador in Washington.

  Their interests differed widely. On race, for instance, while the British fitfully honoured the criterion of equal rights for all civilized men, the Australians and New Zealanders were concerned to keep all Asiatics out of their territories, the Canadians had allowed no Asian immigrants since the turn of the century, and the South Africans denied their vast black majority any rights of citizenship whatever. On defence, while the British were now concentrating their strength in the Middle East, the Australians and New Zealanders saw Singapore as the most important imperial base, while the Canadians looked most anxiously to the Pacific. On economics the British were anxious to balance their own industries with the raw materials of the Empire, while the Dominions were only anxious to industrialize themselves.

  The Imperial Conferences which met in London, and once in Ottawa, regularly during the post-war years, though they were commemorated always in dutiful group portraits, wing-collared and pin-striped in the garden of No 10, were in fact full of acrimony and exasperation, some of their participants very much disliking one another. Tact was seldom the strong point of c
olonial politicians. In 1926 the Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Bruce, went to Canada: but though he was welcomed with the dignity peregrinating Prime Ministers expect, he did not hesitate to say just what he thought of that Dominion. No proper British subject, he said, could have much patience with the place! Canada called herself independent and self-governing, but when it came to trouble she relied on others to get her out of it! Why, Australia was spending 17/2d per head on naval defence—Canada was spending 8d! ‘How can Canada today’, asked this pugnacious guest, bidding farewell to his hosts before boarding his ship at Vancouver, ‘possibly maintain that she is the equal of Australia, my great country?’

  6

  No wonder King George V, still the Emperor of India and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas, was often perturbed about his Empire. He had visited all its major territories, the first British monarch to travel widely in his Dominions, and he doubtless looked back nostalgically to the heyday of the imperial meaning—to his Indian visit of 1906, perhaps, when 14,000 people with 600 elephants escorted him on shikari, when a road fifty miles long was built to connect his two hunting camps, and when in a single day he and his party shot 39 tigers, 18 lions and 4 Himalayan bears.

  He was concerned to restore some of that old splendour, and to preserve the strength of the Crown Imperial. A proposal that his four princely sons should become Governors-General of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa came to nothing: but instead the heir to his throne, Edward, Prince of Wales, went on a series of imperial tours. One of these took him to India, where he was boycotted by Gandhi, frequently booed by disloyal demonstrators, and assured by old hands that it was no place for a white man any more, but the most successful visits were to the white Dominions: and the flavour of these tours, their period jollity, their mixture of the buoyant and the defensive, the picture they offered of the handsome but unhappy young prince, freed from the restraints of Windsor and Balmoral, almost becoming a colonial himself—the memory of those royal holidays, preserved in many books and thousands of photographs, piquantly reflects the spirit of the colonial Empire during the years of transience.

  This is hardly a king-to-be visiting his future Dominions, this is a young man seeing a new world. Gone is the stately progress of the Viceroys, calm beneath their panoplies, or the grave composure of George V himself, when he sat with his wife as in marble on the Coronation dais at Delhi. The Prince of Wales, heir to all this, wore his shirt without a tie, his trousers short, his cap a’tilt, his heart on his sleeve. It is true that he sailed in the battlecruisers Repulse and Renown, at 32,000 tons among the great warships of the world. It is true of course that he was greeted everywhere with pomp and eulogy, from the Official Odes of the Torontonians and the Sydneysiders to the drum-poems of the Ashanti:

  Thy fellows proclaim thee a man

  Triumphant from the struggles of war.

  To the ruler of kings who comes.

  Who inspires awe in the greatest,

  Hail! Hail! Hail!

  Edward was fawned on everywhere, naturally, flattered at garden parties, curtsied to by a thousand Lady Eatons, bowed to by innumerable Sir Henrys, blessed by manly bishops in surplices and war ribbons, saluted by old soldiers in crutches and eye-patches. When his battlecruiser passed through the Suez Canal biplanes of the Royal Air Force escorted her to the Red Sea, and Indian troops of the Canal Zone base cheered her on her way. When she put in at Aden a huge banner greeted her beneath massed Union Jacks: TELL DADDY WE ARE HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE. The Maharajah of Bharatpur came to meet him in an open landau drawn by eight elephants. The King of Nepal gave him a rhinoceros, a baby elephant, two bears, a leopard, a black panther, an iguana, a python, several partridges and two Tibetan mastiffs.

  All visiting royalty met these people, unveiled these monuments, accepted these gifts. The Prince of Wales’s tours were different, though, for he represented in his own person an almost reckless break with tradition. He was glamour, visiting an Empire that was fast losing allure. He was modernity, honouring an ideal that was growing fusty. He seemed to be visiting his future subjects not in a spirit of authority, but almost with fellow-feeling, and so took to life on the Canadian prairies, indeed, that he bought himself a ranch in Alberta. The white colonials loved him, and many of the coloured subjects too, for he seemed a foretaste of emancipation, a young, fresh embodiment of an ancient legend. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master….’

  Daddy was less impressed. Like the Wembley Exhibition, the royal tours seemed to please people for quite the wrong reasons, and the King was much disturbed by the newspaper cuttings which reached him from his far dominions. Riding bucking broncos indeed! Flirting with colonial girls! Foxtrotting in the small hours! This was not the spirit that made the Empire—or rather, his Majesty perhaps corrected himself, for in point of fact it was exactly that, it was not the spirit that would keep the Empire British!

  7

  New realities must be recognized. It had been clear since Chanak that the white Empire was not exactly an Empire any more, but a group of independent Powers of more or less common origin and generally compatible policies. Federal solutions had been abandoned—in the short run the Dominions would always be outvoted by Britain, in the long run Britain would always be outvoted by India.Instead, in 1930, the assembled Prime Ministers formally approved a new device of the pragmatic British political imagination, a Commonwealth of Nations. Though the name was old, the idea was said to have been perfected by Arthur Balfour, and it was full of sophistry. Britain and her white Dominions, it was decreed, were ‘autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate to each other in any aspect of their domestic or foreign affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.

  This proposition aroused long and intricate discussion. It was like a debate among the Schoolmen. Was the Crown indivisible, or could one man be King of England and King of Canada? Could the King give his signature to opposing Acts from different countries? Could he indeed be at war with himself? Since nobody was subordinate, could anybody be expelled? Mr Hughes of Australia called it ‘an almost metaphysical document’, and King George was much disturbed by it—‘I cannot look into the future’, he wrote, straining his grammar to the limit, ‘without feeling no little anxiety about the continued unity of the Empire.’ The New Zealanders felt the same, and did not subscribe to the new statute.1 Even the Canadians waived the right to alter some aspects of their own constitution, investing it still in the British Parliament at Westminster.2

  Though nobody had ever succeeded in binding together the disparate parts of the Empire, its self-governing Dominions, its Indian Empire, its dependent colonies, its mandated territories, its protectorates and Treaty States and condominiums—though nobody had managed to make a rational structure of it, still the overriding authority of the Crown, exerted through an imperial Parliament at Westminster, had in the past provided a recognizable unity. ‘The British Empire’, is how all the imperial delegates were jointly described, on the roster of the League of Nations. Now even that indeterminate formula was discarded. The King was still the King of all the Dominions, but separately: as the irrepressible Hughes remarked, the King of England was no longer the King of South Africa, but the King of South Africa was also King of England. In future the Governor-Generals, the King’s representatives in each Dominion, would no longer be nominated by the British Government, to represent not only the Crown but the imperial authority itself: in future they would be chosen by the Dominions, and would have no contact with the British Government in London, only with the King.

  In many other ways too the Statute disintegrated the imperial whole. Now Dominion Parliaments could pass legislation in direct contradiction to Westminster. Even the grand machinery of the imperial law, all its multifarious courts culminating in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in Londo
n, was now shorn of its certainty: the Dominions were free to withdraw from it when they wished, and so the Empire stepped down from the most truly splendid of its postures. A man could still say Civis Britannicus Sum, but he could no longer look with certainty to those remote and impartial justices in Westminster: Civis Britannicus my foot, a judge might soon say in Bloemfontein or Montreal, and there would be an end to it.

  The British had tried hard, since the death of Queen Victoria, to give substance to a mystery. Now they gave mystery to a substance. The British Commonwealth of Nations was cloudy from the start. At the time many people claimed to see the Statute of Westminster as a final charter of imperial development, and Balfour himself described it as ‘the most novel and greatest experiment in Empire-building the world has ever seen’. But it was really an admission of failure. The Empire would never be a super-Power now. Its Roman aspirations were abandoned: the only overseas delegates ever to sit in that Tribune of Empire, the House of Commons, were those from Ireland. As the Empire’s diverse parts matured into independent nations, first the Dominions, then India, then inevitably the great African and Asian colonies, so the British Empire would cease to be among the prime movers of the world, and Britishness would hive off once and for all in separate and often conflicting patriotisms.