by Jan Morris
One of the first Prime Ministers to take office in Africa was Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, a country which, as soon as he achieved authority, he renamed Ghana after an older empire. Nkrumah was to be seen any session day decorously at his place in the House of Assembly, below the Speaker’s Chair, deftly parrying the opposition in the best Westminster manner, and he had become quite friendly with the last British Governor. People had high hopes for Ghana under this attractive leader, and Nkrumah figured largely in the pamphlets of the British Central Office of Information, and was made much of, with his delightful smile and engaging manners, when he appeared in London for Commonwealth conferences.
The transition, though, was not as straightforward as the propagandists implied. Educated partly in Britain, partly in America, Nkrumah was hardly your natural Parliamentarian. He was a Catholic, but a revolutionary Marxist too. He was a Bachelor of Law, but aspired to mystic brotherhoods, oaths of loyalty, blood-vows. Sometimes he dreamt of uniting all Africa under his presidency, sometimes he saw himself as a divinely appointed Messiah. In London once he was photographed leaning easily against a staircase in the garden of 10 Downing Street exchanging pleasantries with his colleague the Prime Minister of Great Britain: but when he was at home he often summoned magicians and soothsayers to his official residence, and sometimes he made the pilgrimage over the frontier to Kankan, in French Guinea, where the most famous of African oracles advised him how best to defeat the Opposition’s amendments to the Municipal Housing (1954) Enactment Bill, or alternatively how best to obliterate the Opposition.1
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Sometimes sceptically, sometimes indulgently, the British observed all this. Progressives were delighted at the course of events, conservatives were saddened, the mass of the public seemed indifferent. A nation does not watch its power shrivel away, though, without some moments of bitterness, and as the great Empire dissolved a strain of resentment and self-pity fitfully entered the British attitudes. The last retreat might be necessary, even honourable, but it was not much fun.
Only once did it flare into paranoia, as in a last impotent revival of the aggressive spirit the British tried to reverse the course of history. It was in 1956, and the retreat was already precipitate. Anyone, it seemed, could now cock a snook at the British. There was no respect for the Flag any more, no gratitude among the emancipated colonies; angry correspondents to the Daily Telegraph drew bitter conclusions from the decline of Empire, reminded the Editor about the fate of Rome, and reproachfully quoted poems—
We sailed wherever ships could sail.
We founded many a mighty State.
Pray God our greatness may not fail
Through craven fear of being great.
or
Only a dream, I know, and yet it means I must be ill.
One thing a soldier said at last that I remember still.
He said, ‘We went to carry on the work begun by Clive;
If you did not want an empire, we might have been alive’.1
Most people were less coherent: but two decades of change, improvisation and finally withdrawal had left their mark upon the public consciousness, and even those least chauvinist or raucous in their patriotism felt, just the same, a sense of waste, unfairness and helplessness. Was this why they had won the war, simply to subside into the ranks of the minor Powers? Was the whole imperial achievement a deception after all?
Among those most bitterly affected was Anthony Eden, who was born in the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and had succeeded Churchill as Conservative Prime Minister in 1955. Eden had spent his life close to the sources of British imperial power, and he thought of Great Britain ineradicably as one of the arbiters of world affairs. He had stood at the right hand of Churchill, he had experienced that last triumphant exertion of British will which had defeated Nazi Germany, and raised the nation in victory to the moral summit of the world. The idea of a Britain to be defied with impunity by any impertinent sheikh or corruptible politician was not simply repugnant to him, but almost inconceivable. He stood still, posed for ever in his beautiful London suit, at Churchill’s shoulder, next to President Roosevelt, at one of those conferences which had, only a few years before, decided the future of the world.
Eden developed a particular and peculiar antipathy towards one of the most persistent of all the Empire’s opponents, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nasser’s revolutionary movement of army officers had deposed King Farouk in 1952, setting up a republic, and had obliged the British to give up their vast military base in the Suez Canal Zone—60,000 men even in the 1950s. Then by intrigue, propaganda and force of example Nasser had inflamed almost the whole of the Arab world against the British connection, effectively ending British suzerainty in the Middle East. He had established Egypt as the anti-imperialist leader of the Arabs, and everywhere from Mosul to Oman he had turned men’s minds against the British.
In 1956 this ambitious dictator, who had galvanized his own people into a new pride and confidence, nationalized the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, the French company which had run the canal since its construction, and in which the British Government held a substantial share. He then seized the canal, announcing that the Egyptians would henceforth run it for themselves, using the profits for their own national development. The company’s concession was due to expire anyway in 1968, shareholders were promised full compensation, and in principle at least Nasser’s action was not specifically directed against the British. There was no reason why Egyptians should not operate the canal quite capably, or pilot ships through it safely, and strategically it had obviously lost much of its importance for the British, now that their eastern empire was gone. But just as the assumption of British greatness was inherent to Eden’s political thinking, so the Suez Canal remained an inescapable totem of it—‘in some essential sense’, said Lord Hinchingbrooke, MP, ‘part of the United Kingdom’. Suez was ‘the life-line of Empire’, the ‘Imperial jugular’. ‘East of Suez’ was a synonym for British world power. A Suez Canal in unfriendly hands would be, so British traditionalists cried, a Britain that had forfeited not merely her Empire, but her very freedom of action—her independence, in fact!
So Eden launched the last and most forlorn of all the imperial initiatives, a new and much more disastrous Jameson Raid, the action known euphemistically as the Suez Adventure of 1956. It was an operation clouded in secrecy, duplicity and irrationality—for as the crisis developed Eden came near to nervous breakdown. It was also a cruel parody of the British imperial style. Eden cast himself as an elegant younger Churchill, saving the world by his exertions. Nasser he portrayed as a Muslim Hitler—‘I want him destroyed!’ cried the Prime Minister to one of his Ministers. The ultimatum that was presented to the Egyptians, requiring them to restore the Canal to its rightful owners, rang with the righteous zeal of 1939. The invasion force that was assembled was like a punitive expedition of old. The Royal Navy mustered its ships and landing craft at Malta, jet bombers of the Royal Air Force were concentrated upon Cyprus, and in the streets of southern England convoys of Army trucks, painted a desert yellow, hastened to the southern ports as in greater days before. Buller at sea in the Dunnotar Castle would have recognized the temper of the time. So would Hamilton leaving Mudros for Gallipoli. Even General Gordon, perhaps, catching his train at Charing Cross for his martyrdom at Khartoum, might have responded to the 1956 theme of self-righteous retribution. The old tag casus belli was knowledgeably quoted in London clubs, and among the ageing imperialists of England the general view was that they had a just one.
But just or no, they were deluding themselves. Britain could no longer punish trouble-makers as she pleased, with a resounding statement in the House of Commons and a brisk expeditionary force. Nothing was so simple now, in the complex world of the 1950s. A plan must be concocted with the French, who were in a similar mood of national frustration, and with the Zionists, who had now established their own State in Palestine, and considered the Egyptians their most
threatening enemies. There were the Americans to consider—could they be trusted to help, or would they intervene to hinder? There was the now amorphous Commonwealth, some of its members reliable enough to put in the picture, some more safely left in the dark. There was the United Nations, vociferously anti-imperialist still. There was world opinion in general, as unsympathetic to British imperial causes as ever it was in the Boer War. There was opinion at home, split furiously on the issue. And finally there was Russia, now the greatest imperial power, which at this fatal moment found itself confronted by a rebellion of its own, among the subject patriots of Hungary.
Through this maze Eden and his advisers moved as in a dream, cunningly. They held secret meetings with the French and the Israelis. They told less than the truth to the Commonwealth, and actually lied to the Americans. While they pretended that they would occupy the Canal Zone only in order to pass the Canal into United Nations care, they really planned the overthrow of Gamal Abdel Nasser himself, the wildly popular leader of the Egyptian people. All was shame-faced and underhand. As the world watched aghast and unbelieving the ultimatum was delivered to President Nasser, requiring him to withdraw his forces from the Canal: almost at the same time the Russians, invading Hungary with overwhelming force, and putting down the rising with infinite cruelty, let it be known that if the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt were not aborted, Russian rocket missiles might soon be falling upon London.
This was another world, beyond the capacity of the imperialists. Of course the invasion was aborted—they had no choice. The invasion force, laboriously assembled and poorly equipped, did indeed invade Egypt, capturing Port Said and advancing down the canal. The Egyptian air force was virtually destroyed by attacks on its airfields, and scurrilous leaflets, ludicrously inciting the Egyptians to rebel against their leader, were dropped in the streets of Cairo. The Israelis occupied the east bank of the Canal, the British and French pushed southwards to occupy the west bank. But in no time the British lost their resolution, as the terrible truth dawned upon them that they could no longer behave imperially. The whole world was against them, even their oldest friends, and even in Egypt it seemed, the most despised of all their dependencies, they could no longer honour their own convictions. Even a Wog had a voice at the United Nations now, and all the splendours of the past, assembled in such pitiful pastiche in the familiar waters of the eastern Mediterranean, could not save the British from ignominy. The invasion force was withdrawn, and the imperial ghosts turned uneasily in their graves.
The British were numbed by this unnecessary disaster, even those who had most passionately opposed the invasion. They did not like to talk about it, and a veiled reticence fell upon the subject. Eden himself, ill and distraught, retired from public life for ever, handing over to Harold Macmillan. It was as though a developing neurosis, erupting into a moment of schizophrenia, had subsided once again, this time for ever, leaving behind some shattered nerve or atrophy, and never again did the British stand up for their imperial privileges. Before we leave the spectacle of the last retreat, to which this provided a sad, misguided and untypical climax, let us visit Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal, during the brief British occupation, for never again shall we see a distant seaport seized by the forces of the British Empire, or observe the White Ensign dominating the sea routes to the east.
In a way it was like a home-coming. Everyone knew Port Said. Everyone had soldiered there, or sailed by. Everyone had smelt that special smell, that blend of dust, dirt and oil which, reaching the approaching ship far out at sea, before even the first flicker of the lighthouse, told the imperialist that he was nearing the east once more. Generations of memsahibs had wandered around the scents, silks and brass-studded camel-saddles of Simon Artz, taken coffee on its balcony while the ships sailed by, or laughed at the gully-gully men conjuring chickens from their sleeves on the street outside. Almost every British regiment had taken its pleasures here, at one time or another, and hardly a British warship had not refuelled in the roads. The arcaded offices of Eastern Telegraph Company had been there almost as long as the canal itself, and the whole tempo of life at the Casino Palace Hotel was geared to the schedule of the P and O boats, passing so majestically to and from Bombay.
Port Said had never been beautiful, but it was familiar, and in their rough way the British had been fond of it. Awful though it was, pimps, touts, slums and all, still it was part of their heritage. It is like a nightmare to find them back in these familiar streets as enemies. The hush that hangs over the town is a hush of shock. Nobody can quite believe it, but it is true. Offshore lies the invasion fleet, overhead the helicopters and the bombers fly, and sprawled across Port Said is the British Army. A squadron of Centurion tanks lies in the churned-up mud by the airport causeway, their crews drinking tea to a crackle of static from their radios, and all along the beach soldiers have bivouacked among the beach-houses, sweeping the sands with mine-detectors, hanging out their washing, and sometimes, in a bitter memory of Gallipoli, bathing in the Mediterranean against the background of the silent ships. Infantry patrols wander dustily among the back streets, officers drive about in requisitioned Citroëns, British sailors stand sentry at the dock gates and officers can be seen moving importantly through the domed offices of the Suez Canal Company. Simon Artz is shuttered like the grave; the Casino Palace has been turned into a field hospital, and there is no sign of its courtly tarbooshed manager, who used to ask so fondly after General Hindlesham or Miss Packer, and wonder how the weather had been in Poona. Here and there a shop has been looted, and there is a litter of broken glass and empty boxes on the pavement. The streets are deserted, but for the soldiery, and an occasional scuttling scavenger, and one or two merchants sitting listlessly on kitchen chairs outside their shops.
‘Can it be real?’ they say when they recognize you, raising their hands helplessly, palms up, to embrace the whole hideous scene. ‘Never, never would we have expected it of the British.…’ And the British too seem to find it unnatural. They talk in the idiom of all the British wars, but self-consciously, as though they know this is somehow fraudulent: the old jokes ring false—‘Elephant and Castle!’ say the soldiers, as they pile into the three-ton truck, but the quip has no savour to it. The ethos of Empire, as of war, was acceptable to the British when it was backed by convictions of honour—by the belief, false or misguided, that the British were acting rightly, for the good of themselves and the world. Fair play! In most of their wars the British had been so convinced, and there was dignity to the cocky good humour of the soldiers, and true beauty to the unwavering patriotism of the British people.
Now, in Port Said, 1956, there was only pretence—a sham virility, a dubious cause, a nation divided, an army with little verve to its campaigning. Port Said, shattered and appalled, stood as a bitter memorial to the last display of the imperial machismo: and beyond the quays the funnels and masts of sunken ships, blocking all passage through the Lifeline of Empire, ironically illustrated the point.1
1 Next day the Southern Yemen People’s Republic was proclaimed, and the country is now a Marxist State. At the height of the Aden troubles, when the port was in a state of open war, I went for a walk in the hills above the town and stumbled by chance into the garden of the Chief Justice of the colony. His wife, emerging at that moment from the back door, was not in the least perturbed to find me there, but greeted me with a classic imperial inquiry. ‘Good evening’, she said. ‘Are you a visiting MP?’
1 Short-lived emblems—in 1969 all political parties were banned in the Democratic Republic of the Sudan. As for the bold Ngwenyama, he presently became King of Swaziland, and soon doing away with the democratic paraphernalia, assumed all power himself.
1 Which he effectively did in 1964 by declaring Ghana a one-party State, under his own life presidency. He was deposed by the army two years later and took refuge in the Republic of Guinea, whose president sympathetically appointed him a co-head of his State instead: and there he remained, writin
g revolutionary handbooks, until his death from cancer in 1972.
1 The first quotation, one of Curzon’s favourites, is from Tennyson’s ‘Hands All Round’, the second from Lord Dunsany’s ‘A Song in the Ruins’.
1 This is an eyewitness account, and is coloured by the fact that I went to Port Said from Sinai, where I had been watching the Israeli army in the field: the contrast in spirit between the two forces, the ruthless Israeli so brilliantly aggressive, the genial British apparently so half-hearted, powerfully influenced me in the writing of this book.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
