by Jan Morris
At the same time Britain’s chief foreign allies in the struggle were hardly less dedicated to the redistribution of the Empire. Nations seldom go to war for old times’ sake, and in the Second World War the British Empire was fighting alongside allies whose ideologies were specifically hostile to the imperial idea. The United States had actually come into being in reaction to Empire, and still earnestly supported the principle of self-determination for all peoples, while the Soviet Union equated Imperialism with Capitalism as surely as the muscular Christians of the previous century had associated cleanliness with God. It was plain that when the war against Hitler’s Axis was over, these ambiguous associates would see to it that the British imperial era was ended. Britain would obviously be bled white by the war, and had no chance of remaining one of the great Powers, when the world sorted itself out again after the battle. Even the staunch Dominions, loyally though they sprang yet again to arms, could hardly suppose that the British Empire would survive another such reshuffling of interests, and subtly shifted their attitudes and allegiances as the war progressed.
But the British put it all out of their minds, and fought on, once more, as though they meant it. Theatrical arts had always been essential to their imperial methods, and in this their last exhibition they excelled themselves. Their initial defeat, their expulsion from the European mainland in 1940, they presented as the triumph of Dunkirk. Their initial success, the Battle of Britain later that year, they shamelessly exploited and exaggerated. Hitler thought their war propaganda ‘wonderful’, and by their skill in it, by the magic of their historical reputation, they convinced half the world that they were uniquely brave in adversity, subtlest in perception, most unanimous in patriotism. The BBC was much the most trusted of the wartime broadcasting services, and the legend of the British patrician style, eccentric and assured, was assiduously cherished—handsome Lord Lovat at the head of his Lovat Scouts, General Carton de Wiart with his arm-sling and his black patch, or the astonishing Admiral Sir Walter Cowan, who had won the DSO with Kitchener in the Sudan in 1898, and got a bar to it when he was seventy-three for his services with the Royal Marine Commandos.
And persistently it was as an Empire that the British presented themselves. In fact the possession of the Empire vastly increased their burdens and anxieties, but they interpreted it as a mighty asset, so that it never occurred to their own people, whatever their enemies sometimes thought, that on balance they might be safer without it. On the face of it, as David Low had suggested, it was an enormous reservoir of manpower and materials. More than 5 million fighting troops were raised by the British Empire, and there was hardly a campaign in which imperial troops did not play a part, sometimes a predominant part. Australians and New Zealanders fought in North Africa, Italy, the Far East, the Pacific. South Africans fought in North and East Africa and Italy. Canadians provided half the front-line defence of England in 1940, a quarter of the pilots of the RAF, and a sizeable proportion of the invasion force that went back to the European continent in 1943. Indians, forming the largest volunteer army in history, fought almost everywhere, and volunteers from the remotest and most insignificant of the imperial possessions, from Ascension Island and the Seychelles, from the Falklands and British Guiana, somehow found their way across the oceans to the British forces, the flashes sewn to their uniform tunics bringing an uplifting suggestion of far-flung brotherhood to the wartime London scene. Thousands of Englishmen were trained to fly in Canada. Jan Smuts, twenty years on and Prime Minister of South Africa again, resumed his place in the imperial councils, and this time became a Field Marshal too.
At their head, from the summer of 1940, stood that incorrigible imperialist romantic, Winston Churchill. His view of Empire was flexible, but he played the old theme unblushingly. If Britain fell, he said, he would continue the war from Canada, and thither the fleets and armies of the Crown would sail with him—‘I have not become the First Minister of the Crown in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire!’1 When the apes of Gibraltar, traditionally the custodians of British rule, seemed likely to die out, Churchill personally saw to it that new stock was brought in from Morocco, and his speeches and messages reverberated with the imperial idiom—‘From all over the Empire and from the bottom of our hearts we send to the Armies of the Nile every good wish for the New Year’—‘I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy’—‘If the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “this was their finest hour!”’
Churchill lived the imperial theatre. He knew that Powers, like people, are taken at their own valuation, and he behaved always as though Britain were a super-Power, the leader of a great disciplined Empire destined to last a millennium. He approached President Roosevelt the American, Marshal Stalin the Russian, not simply as personal equals, but as political equals too. He spoke as he might have spoken if the Victorian Empire were still at his back, in its unchallengeable zenith. He spoke in imperial hyperboles, saw with an imperial vision, and gave to the British themselves, for the last time, the feeling that they were a special people, with honourable duties all their own.
3
Without her equivocal allies Britain could never have won the war, and she could no longer defend her Empire single-handed. In the first months of the war the Channel Islands, the oldest overseas possessions of the Crown, were surrendered to the Germans without resistance. Thereafter many an imperial property was attacked, and many lost. British Somaliland, Hong Kong, Burma, Malaya, Singapore, many islands of the Pacific, were taken by the King’s enemies. Egypt was invaded, Australia was bombed, Malta was almost obliterated, enemy submarines penetrated the harbours of Sydney, Muscat and St Lucia. Even the frontiers of India were crossed by enemy armies at last, fulfilling one of the Empire’s oldest nightmares.
Just as, in 1915, the British sought to make a decisive assault by way of the Ottoman Empire, so a generation later they still saw the Middle East as the epicentre of their struggle. The Suez Canal had become, if not in fact at least in theory, the fulcrum of their power in the world: their oil supplies, their links with India, their dominance of the Arab land mass—all seemed to depend upon their power in Egypt. Before the war their only standing expeditionary force was designed to go, not to France, but to Egypt: at the most crucial moment of the Battle of Britain, when an assault on England seemed imminent, they sent 100 aircraft and an armoured brigade to the eastern Mediterranean. Whatever else might happen Egypt, threatened first by the Italians, then by the Germans, must not fall.
If we think of the imperial armies in the First World War, we think of France and Flanders and Gallipoli. If we think of them in the Second we think of them first, perhaps, in Cairo. Cairo in the 1940s was the last great assembly-point of the imperial power, the last place where, in a setting properly exotic, the imperial legions mingled in their staggering variety. Every kind of imperial uniform was to be spotted in Cairo, in the first years of the war. There were kilts and turbans and tarbooshes, slouch hats and jodhpurs. There were Kenyan pioneers, and Indian muleteers, and Australian tank crews, and English gunners, and New Zealand fighter pilots, and South African engineers. There were scholarly staff officers straight from their Oxford colleges, and swaggering extroverts back from secret missions in the Balkans, and rumbustious troopers of the sheep-station and the surfing beach (‘I look to you to show the Egyptians,’ General Sir Archibald Wavell told the Australians, when they first arrived in Cairo, ‘that their notions of Australians as rough, wild, undisciplined people given to strong drink are incorrect’—but alas, their notions were all too often confirmed).
Cairo had been a pseudo-imperial city for sixty years, and although since 1936 Egypt had been nominally independent, and was officially neutral in the war,1 the whole capital was now in effect a British military base. The British Army still occupied the dismal old Kasr el Nil barracks, in the centre of town bes
ide the Nile, and the British Middle East Command had its headquarters in Garden City, conveniently close to the British Embassy. From Cairo, during the first years of the war, operations were directed all over the nearer East. The North African campaigns, the battles for Greece and Crete, the reconquest of British Somaliland, the capture of Ethiopia, the invasion of Syria, the reoccupation of Iraq, the occupation of southern Persia, guerilla war in Jugoslavia—all were organized from Garden City. Aircraft passed this way to India and East Africa. The Royal Navy’s Mediterranean headquarters was up the road at Alexandria.
For some years of the war Cairo was the military capital of the British Empire. A British Minister of State was in residence there. Dignitaries and celebrities were constantly passing through, Noel Coward to the Duke of Northumberland, ‘Chips’ Channon the diarist to Cecil Beaton the photographer or J. J. Astor the owner of The Times, and in 1943 Churchill, Roosevelt and the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, met in conference at Mena House beneath the Pyramids. In Cairo life was still richly lived. They served French wines and grouse in season at the worst moments of the war, they played polo most days over the river at Gezira, the brothels of Clot Bey flourished exceedingly and military offices, like all others, closed from one till half past five each afternoon.
We never went West of Gezira,
We never went North of the Nile,
We never went past the Pyramids
Out of sight of the Sphinx’s smile.
We fought the war in Shepheard’s and the Continental Bar,
We reserved our punch for the Turf Club lunch
And they gave us the Africa Star.
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It was in this crowded and frenetic city, full of power, indulgence and intrigue, that the most traditionally imperialist gesture of the war was made. Britain’s paramountcy in Egypt had always been based on force—acquired by invasion in 1882, consolidated by the perpetual presence in the country of strong British forces. By 1942 the omnipotent British Agent and Consul-General of Cromer’s day, the persuasive High Commissioner of the 1920s, though still inhabiting the same Residency beside the river, had matured into a British Ambassador in the person of the bluff and overwhelming Sir Miles Lampson. Lampson was a gigantic man, 6 foot 5 inches tall and 18 stone in weight, and since his arrival in Egypt in 1934 he had become an inescapable figure of Cairo life, closeted with Egyptian Ministers, calling on the King, dancing, shooting, riding, gambling at the Mohammed Ali Club, learning to fly at Heliopolis airport, driving from appointment to appointment in the enormous Embassy Rolls, the best-known car in Egypt.
He was an old-fashioned, straightforward, robustly patriotic imperialist, and when war broke out he saw his duties as essentially imperial. Though Egypt was officially neutral, it was absolutely subjugated to the British Empire’s war effort: and though Lampson was ostensibly an Ambassador like many others, he was effectively the Satrap of Cairo. He believed that any means were justified to keep Egypt within the traces. Many Egyptians held different views, and prominent among them was the young King, Farouk, who was twenty-two years old and understandably impatient of British authority. He had been educated, like other kings of Anglo-Araby, to be a puppet: schooled in England and tutored by an Eton master, kept always beneath the eye of the British Embassy, he was only just an independent monarch at all, but held his throne on sufferance. He was, however, far from subservient. His entourage was chiefly Italian, at a time when the British were at war with Italy, he lived a life of louche dissipation in his Abdin Palace in the heart of Cairo, or at Monza beside the sea at Alexandria, and his devotion to the imperial cause was distinctly fragile.
Lampson, who habitually called him ‘the boy’, treated him first with condescension, later with contempt, and the King responded predictably, by snubbing him, deliberately misunderstanding him, or keeping him waiting for appointments. Lampson was enormous, and very strong: the King was smallish, and fat. Lampson was a man of the past, a survivor of an all-powerful Britain; Farouk was a young man of modernist instincts, amoral, materialistic, who had perhaps sensed more quickly than the Ambassador himself the decline of British power. The two men naturally detested each other, with equal reason on either side, and when in 1942 King Farouk determined to appoint a new Egyptian Government more amenable to his own views, but less acceptable to the British, Lampson decided it could not be tolerated. Rommel seemed about to break through the British positions in the western desert and advance upon Cairo: at such a moment Lampson felt it within his authority to depose the King of Egypt himself, if British interests demanded it.
It so happened that among the British officials in Cairo, working in the propaganda department, was Walter Monckton, the lawyer who had, six years before, drafted the instrument of abdication for King Edward VIII. He was now instructed to draw up a similar document for Farouk, the king of an ostensibly independent Egypt. Farouk was to be sent an ultimatum demanding the appointment of an administration more favourable to the British. He was given until 6 p.m. on the evening of February 2, 1942, to name Mustapha el Nahas Pasha Prime Minister, or else face the consequences—by which Lampson meant that His Majesty would be obliged to abdicate, and would be whisked away by the British Army to be held prisoner on a cruiser in the Red Sea.
Here was a return to form! The British had hardly acted with such peremptory decision since Victoria’s day, and Furse’s men would probably have been appalled. Farouk replied only with a letter, received at the British Embassy a quarter of an hour after Lampson’s deadline, protesting against such a blatant infringement of Egyptian sovereignty, and so there was set in motion one of the last acts of imperial swashbuckle. Shortly before 9 that night, when Cairo was in full spate, the cinemas bright with neon lights, the night clubs opening their velvet-curtained doors, the red-capped military policemen warily patrolling the stews of Boulac, the pavement cafés thronged, the open-air cinemas booming above the traffic—through the bright and noisy city, smelling as always of dirt, jasmine, food and inadequately refined petrol, a convoy of British tanks, armoured cars and military trucks rumbled across town to take up positions around the royal palace.
At 9 o’clock precisely Lampson’s Rolls arrived at the gates, and the Ambassador, accompanied by the commander of the British troops in Egypt and followed by a specially picked posse of armed officers, entered the palace. True to his code even then, Farouk kept him waiting for five minutes in an ante-room, but once inside the royal chamber, with the general glowering at his back, Lampson allowed no nonsense. He was the last in the domineering line of Clive or Cromer, with an oriental monarch in his power before him (‘it doesn’t often come one’s way,’ as he wrote in his diary next day, ‘to be pushing a Monarch off a Throne.’)
First he read the unhappy king a statement, very loudly, ‘with full emphasis’, as he later reported to the Foreign Office, ‘and increasing anger’. It accused the King of assisting the enemy and thereby violating his commitments to Great Britain, described his attitudes as unfaithful, wanton, reckless and irresponsible, and said he was ‘no longer fit to occupy the Throne’. Lampson then handed Farouk Monckton’s abdication instrument, and told him to sign it at once, ‘or I shall have something else and more unpleasant to confront you with’. Even as he spoke, they could hear the growl and clatter of the tanks outside the palace gates.
The abdication instrument was simple enough: ‘We, King Farouk of Egypt, mindful as ever of the interests of our country, hereby renounce and abandon for ourselves and the heirs of our body the Throne of the Kingdom of Egypt and all Sovereign rights, privileges and powers in and over the said Kingdom and the subjects thereof, and we release our said subjects from their allegiance to our person.’ It was typed on old British Residency paper from which the letter-head had been removed, and Farouk’s first response was to complain about its sloppiness. He was answered only by an overbearing silence, and after a moment or two of indecision, cowed and frightened he picked up a pen to sign the abdication. But then he hesitated. Would Lamps
on give him one more chance? The Ambassador agreed, provided that the King immediately complied with the ultimatum. Farouk thereupon submitted, ‘for his own honour and his country’s good’, and the Ambassador and his cohorts stamped away down the corridors of the palace, between the steel-helmeted British soldiers with their tommy-guns at the gates, past the tanks squatting watchful in the street outside, into their cars and back to their great Embassy beside the Nile.
‘So much’, reported Lampson, ‘for the events of the evening, which I confess I could not have more enjoyed.’ Certainly they seemed to have been successful—‘I congratulate you warmly,’ cabled Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, ‘result justifies your firmness and our confidence.’ Nahas Pasha, summoned to the palace next day, formed a Government that remained loyal to the British connection for the rest of the war, even when the Germans advanced so threateningly towards Cairo that the British Embassy burnt all its secret papers and officers queued around an entire city block to withdraw their money from Barclay’s Bank. What the longer effects of the affair would be, when the world returned to normal, nobody knew or even cared: the imperial instinct now was for survival, and the days of apology were suspended, as the saying was, ‘for the duration’.1
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The Middle East never did fall—when the war ended the British military position there was stronger than it had ever been. Nor was the Mediterranean, Mussolini’s Mare Nostrum, ever denied to those British fleets which had frequented it since the end of the Napoleonic wars: and this achievement was largely due to another peculiarly imperial episode of the war, the defence of Malta.
