by Jan Morris
By now the Zionists, financed by Jews throughout the world, had rooted themselves in cities, farms and desert settlements all over Palestine. Though they were still only a third of the population, they were much better organized than the Arabs, and with their powerful supporters in America, far richer and more influential. The Arabs feared and loathed them, and the British by now, after fluctuations of sympathy, tended on the whole to agree. By 1947 the administration, though theoretically impartial, was virtually at war with the Jewish activists. Terrorists kidnapped and murdered British soldiers; Jewish settlements were repeatedly raided and searched by the Army; there were ambushes and explosions and reprisals and threats; the whole country was in a state of fear, racked by violence and conspiracy, meshed with barbed wire, and patrolled always by the armoured cars of the Empire.
Jerusalem was ravaged by these miseries. The British had governed it for only thirty years, but with their gift for balance and decorum, their sense of history, their love of things rooted and traditional, they had made it more truly Jerusalem the Golden than it had been for centuries. Never had the Colonial Service possessed such a city, and its officers had guarded it lovingly. The walled city they preserved intact in all its mediaeval intricacy, its cavernous bazaars and its dusty wrinkled alleys—the Muslims meditating in the Haram esh-Sherif, the black-capped Jews pushing their paper supplications into the crevices of the Wailing Wall, the Catholics, the Greeks and the Monophysites incessantly processing, with bells, censers and harsh canonicals, from one shrine to the other of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Outside the walls New Jerusalem had arisen under the imperial aegis, in golden stone too, but flat-roofed and spacious. Here a new mixture of cultures had been fostered. Here one could see the new generation of westernized Arabs, British-educated and gentlemanly, dressed often in well-cut tweeds or cavalry twill, speaking an exquisite English, and constituting the most highly skilled and widely cultured elite of the Arab world. Beside them the urban Jews flourished, refugees often from Vienna or Berlin, running bookshops, serving scrumptious cakes at Viennese cafés, rehearsing with the Palestine Philharmonic or presiding over intellectual tea-parties behind the Hebrew University. The members of these two communities were not natural enemies: they had much in common, and were much alike: it had been the highest ambition of the British to bring them together, fuse them into a governing class, and so bring their government of Palestine to an honourable conclusion.
But by 1947 they had no such high hopes, the city they had cherished with such pride was all barbed wire and sandbags, and their own presence was defensive, even furtive. Since the war they had been repeatedly urged to admit more of the millions of Jewish refugees made homeless and destitute by Hitler’s war, and by now the floodgates were almost bursting. The Americans were pressing them; the Jews themselves, desperate from the slums and concentration camps of Europe, were sailing to Palestine in their own rickety steamers, half-submerged with the weight of their passengers, only to be driven off the beaches by British troops, or turned away to internment camps in Cyprus and Mauritius.
The Arabs were no less passionate in opposition, and were supported by the Arab States which ringed Palestine, and so Jerusalem festered in a state of incipient tragedy. High barbed-wire barricades closed the streets to Government offices, armoured cars rumbled ungainly through the city, patrols of infantry laboured along the pavements. Not a generation had passed since Allenby entered Jerusalem in triumph in 1917: yet here were the sons of his soldiers, angry and cynical, keeping the Holy City precariously in order by a perpetual show of weaponry. One wing of the King David Hotel, behind its festoons of wire, lay in ruins, having been blown up by Zionist terrorists. Many of the shops kept their shutters down all day, in case of trouble, and the few people in the streets did not loiter, but did their business briskly and hurried back indoors. Nobody felt safe in Jerusalem now, and sometimes one heard a shot from the suburbs, or a sudden rattle of machine-gun fire.
The British had planned to keep Palestine as a Middle Eastern power base, to replace the Suez Canal Zone, and even now they were building a new military complex near Gaza, in the south: but by the middle of 1947 it was obvious that they could be no more than policemen there. All their energies went into keeping Arabs and Jews from each other’s throats. Two divisions of British troops were committed to this unproductive task, and as the year proceeded, as Jewish pressures increased and Arab resentments mounted, it became more and more like war. Casualties were frequent, the cost was enormous, the public at home wanted nothing of it, the world at large watched the sordid drama without gratitude, blaming the British both for creating the problem, and for failing to solve it.
It had been the imperial intention to establish a self-governing Arab-Jewish State in Palestine, but even before the war a commission of inquiry had declared the idea unworkable, and had suggested partitioning the country into three—an Arab State, a Jewish State, a British enclave around the Holy Places. After the war the United Nations came to a similar conclusion, and in November 1947 voted for the creation of Arab and Jewish States. The Arabs rejected the plan, the Jews accepted it, the British refused all responsibility for it. Nagged by the United Nations, pestered by the Americans, bewildered by the Zionists, insulted by the Arabs, excoriated by world opinion, exhausted by the strain of it, impoverished by the cost, disillusioned, embittered, in December 1947 the British Government announced that, like Pilate before them, they would have no more of it. They washed their hands of the Holy Land. On May 14, 1948 the last British soldiers embarked on their troopships at Haifa: and even as they sailed away, behind them the disputing peoples of the Holy Land, emerging from their fox-holes and secret arsenals, hurled themselves upon one another, and, splitting the country furiously between them, prepared to live savagely ever after.
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Palestine was a declaration. The British would no longer fight to the finish. For old hands this was a bitter realization. Churchill, in opposition, foresaw ‘a steady and remorseless process of divesting ourselves of what has been gained by so many generations of toil, administration and sacrifice’. Many of his supporters argued that parts of the Empire were essential to Britain’s role in the world, however diminished her power. Ernest Bevin himself, Attlee’s Foreign Secretary, had staked his reputation upon finding a solution for Palestine. Later a Conservative Minister was to say of Cyprus that the British Empire could ‘never’ abandon the island of Cyprus, while one of his colleagues was to declare that there were some imperial possessions, Malta for example, which could not for strategic reasons ever hope to rule themselves. They all had to eat their words. The world had overtaken them. When it came to the point the British would never again stick it out to the end, though partly in self-esteem, partly to ensure a stable succession, they often felt it necessary to offer a brief rearguard action.
So through the fifties and into the sixties, as people after people awoke to the realization of patriotism, or were goaded into it by politicians, the imperial retreat proceeded. The barbed wire and armoured cars of Palestine were duplicated across the world, as successive colonies flared into revolt, and the British Army whose power had so stirred Macmillan at Tunis a decade before was reduced to squalid duties of repression and withdrawal. It was the Easter Rising magnified a thousand times, and dispersed across the Empire: the same passions, the same ironies, the same waste, sometimes the same poetry, always, in the long run, the identical conclusion. For the rebels these eruptions of patriotic spirit were often splendid, and were to be commemorated for ever in street names, national holidays and heroic legend: for the British they were generally petty and often misguided, for it was apparent to nearly everyone that whatever else the subject peoples would get from independence, it would not be better government.
The British were spared, by their own common-sense, or perhaps lack of will, any such terrible conflicts as the French fought in Indo-China or Algeria. By now the nationalist rebels were generally abusing the conv
erted, for most Britons felt, in the text of their own truest ideology, that it was no longer fair to coerce unwilling subjects. The British people would not have tolerated great wars of reaction: if the blacks wanted to rule themselves, all right then, good luck to them, let ’em get on with it. Nevertheless, in the twenty years after the Second World War they were seldom without a conflict somewhere in the old Empire—as they had seldom been without one, indeed, since the first days of Victoria’s rule. Once these skirmishes of Empire had been stimulating, good practice for the soldiers, good sport for the officers. Now they were good for nobody, but merely served to embitter the rebels, and turn the British themselves more wanly against the profession of arms, the pretension of prestige or even the pursuit of power. Furse, watching it all sadly from his retirement, as the last of his young men packed their bags and handed over their files, thought it was like ‘batsmen playing dangerously hurried strokes at hostile and unaccustomed bowling, on a tricky wicket, in a bad light, confused by contradictory advice yelled at them from the pavilion and by the spectators generally …’.
We see them in every climate and every landscape, always at their roadblocks, barricaded in their barracks, guarding post offices, escorting pale English children to school or squatting behind sandbags on the roofs of Government Houses. In Cyprus, which had never proved of the slightest use to the Empire, they struggle year after year against Greek guerillas; in Lord Delamere’s White Highlands they fight the enigmatic and murderous Mau Mau; in Malaya they wearily stalk guerillas through Spencer-Chapman’s jungle; in Egypt they run down young patriots across Wolseley’s battlefield of Tel el Kebir; in the Shatt el Arab, where Townshend disembarked for Kut, the Royal Navy stands fruitless guard over the oil refineries of Abadan, soon to be nationalized by the Persians.
Often they succeeded, and curbing the impatient passions of the local patriots, managed to restore order in a colony before handing it over to their successors. In Malaya a patient and methodical campaign finally contained the Communist guerillas, returning them to their havens to await more propitious times, and allowing the Malaysian Federation to get off to a peaceful start. In Kenya a ruthless and sometimes brutal operation subdued the rebellious Kikuyu, enabling Jomo Kenyatta, the most famous of the tribe, to become Prime Minister. In British Guiana an inconvenient Communist coup was suppressed by British troops before independence was granted.
Elsewhere the withdrawal of British power, as in India, as in Palestine, left bloodshed behind. Hardly had the last aircraft withdrawn from the bases of Iraq than the young Harrovian king, with all his family, was murdered by the rebellious mob, and the Prime Minister Nuri es Said, a friend and ally for thirty years, was cut in pieces and dragged through the streets of Baghdad. And in Aden, the very first acquisition of Queen Victoria’s Empire, the British left shooting to the last. Step by step they withdrew from the city to the harbour and the airfield, and while Royal Marines kept the indigenes at bay, a stream of aircraft flew off the last of the imperialists. Offshore two carriers, a depot ship and a submarine waited; helicopters clanked heavily around the harbour; at the airfield transport planes arrived in a ceaseless flow from Cyprus, refuelled again and took off with their loads of refugees. Gradually the British perimeter contracted, closer and closer to the shore, while outside it rival groups of Arab guerillas sniped, looted and skirmished. The High Commissioner flew off in a helicopter to the carrier Eagle. The last commandos raced for their helicopters. The last flag was lowered. The last flotilla of the Royal Navy, its crews smartly lining their decks, its radars twirling, sailed away from Steamer Point into the Red Sea.
Behind them the guerillas fell upon the abandoned stores and barracks, swarmed up the steps to Government House, and shot at each other from rooftops.1
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Far more often, though, the sequence of farewell was peaceful, and rather touching. The happiest of the imperial exits were stage-managed by Furse’s protégés of the 1930s, now the Governors and Chief Secretaries of their colonies, and they were characterized by the same tolerance and guileless optimism that Santayana had admired in them in their youth.
The band that played out the Raj on the Bombay waterfront was to perform often again, as colony by colony the Empire was dismantled. Down came the flag, out rang the last bugle, and once again, until they got tired of the performance, the heart-strings of the British were momentarily tugged. The procedure became almost standard, like an investiture. The chief nationalist leader, lately released from detention and propelled into fame, wealth and power, found himself greeted by the retiring British Governor with a comradely new bonhomie, and was saluted by white guards of honour as he arrived, dressed in his own ethnic fineries, at the Independence Day parade. Out from England had come some scion of royalty; and there was an Independence Day ball, at which the new Prime Minister danced enthusiastically with Her Royal Highness; and there were sundry ceremonies of goodwill and fraternity, a message from the Queen, a presentation of maces, or crests, or Speaker’s Chairs, and an editorial from The Times quoted in the local paper, and lots of stamping of boots and quivering salutes by British military men determined to demonstrate their loyalty to the new regime (for if they often had doubts about the ability of coloured people to rule themselves, they were not generally averse to appointments as Chiefs of Staff or even Commanders-in-Chief of emergent armies).
These ceremonies impressed everyone, even in most cases the patriot leaders themselves, and they were quoted all over the world as examples of British liberal good sense. How civilized it all was! With what good grace Her Royal Highness went in to dinner on the arm of a tribal politician of Marxist leanings until recently imprisoned with hard labour in a desert penal camp for subversive activities against the Crown! How moving it was to see the rituals of Westminster and the Inns of Court translated so faithfully to that tropic setting—the Speaker of the new House, preceded by his brand-new mace, attended by his solemn Serjeant-at-Arms—the judges and barristers of the new Supreme Court, authentically wigged and tabbed—the black colonels in their gleaming Sam Brownes and red tabs—the black bishops fluttering in starched canonicals—even perhaps a black naval officer or two, caps tilted at the proper Beatty rake, from the harbour defence launch down at the harbour. Just for the moment they all meant it, and it seemed hardly more than a passing of tradition from one hand to another, or a coming-of-age.
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One by one they went, all through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the Sudan, Uganda, even the never-to-be-abandoned Cyprus. Sometimes they changed their names with independence, confusing older imperialists and infuriating cartographers, but generally the moment of transition was smudged. Most of the new nations passed into the Commonwealth, that limbo of Empire, and anyway manners, methods and even people lingered from the old regimes, and gave an impression of continuity. Sometimes the Governor himself remained, by request of the new Government, to represent the Head of the Commonwealth, and as his political responsibilities declined, so his geniality flourished, and he was often to be seen slapping the backs of former terrorists, or laughing at old tribal jokes.
In the House of Assembly, too, as likely as not, one or two Britons would sit, representing planters, or commercial interests, and generally looking, set in their pale tropical suits against that vivid polychromatic parliament, urbane but unmistakably impotent. Up at the regimental mess Major Carruthers still presided over his orderly room, clipped and expressionless, with crossed assegais replacing the lances upon his cap badge, and beside the swimming pool at the club Mrs T and Mrs Z agreed that, though one could not of course resist progress, and though neither of course was in the least colour conscious as such, still one could not help noticing that the ladies’ room was distinctly messier since, well, since independence and all that.
And for a year or two, in gently falling cadences, the systems of Empire survived. The British constitutionalists, for ever devising more perfect forms of Government to leave behind, seemed to suppos
e that their inventions were actually organic, more than mere artificial formulas, and for a time the new arrangements did seem to have self-generative powers. The Common Law was upheld in all its dignity. The Westminster rules were faithfully honoured. Captain Abdullah Khan’s handbook for young officers of the Pakistan Army suggests that just as the proof of being a gentleman should always be discernible in an officer’s moral standards and mannerisms, so he should not as a general rule carry an umbrella on parade. In the Sudan, when the black District Commissioner puts on his pith helmet with its gay feathered tuft, and strides out of his hut for morning inspection, one can see in his very walk the example of Marlborough and Trinity, and hear in his voice—‘Mark you it would all look a bit greener if we hadn’t had such a rotten summer’—unmistakable echoes of the imperial castes.
But gradually the recent and the remoter past became curiously jumbled, as the alien authority dissolved, and loyalties long suppressed came to life again. For a few years all was mixed, tribal taboo with democratic shibboleth, Crown with immemorial fetish. Often the first of the new leaders expressed these paradoxes in their very persons. We have long been used to the spectacle of Gandhi and his disciples talking the most sophisticated language of western political theory, while dressed in loin-cloths and sitting at spinning-wheels. Now the anomalies were to be stranger still. Here the astonishing Ngwenyama Sobhuza of Swaziland, billowing with the plumes and skins of his regality, glaring with a kind of stylized fury all around him, and accompanied by the court functionary called the Eye of the King, passes through the lines of his devoted subjects, all kneeling, or even lying flat on their faces, to open the new session of the Swaziland Legislative Council. Here the Dinkas of the southern Sudan lope nakedly into Juba to cast their votes in the general election—each party being represented for convenience sake, since 98 per cent of the electorate is totally illiterate, by a party symbol, a bicycle, a butterfly, a crowing cock or a companionable pipe.1
