by Jan Morris
Some of the imperial achievements were indestructible, like the roads, railways and telegraph systems which provided the basis of the new industrial society, and which, though they would presently be superseded by more modern techniques, would leave their heritage of usefulness for ever. Others, often dearer to the British themselves, were less permanent. The Empire had not been a missionary venture, in the sense that it seldom tried to impose a religion upon its subject peoples, leaving them by and large to their own theological preferences. It did, however, diligently propagate a faith—faith in parliamentary democracy of the Westminster pattern, steady, evolutionary, rooted in the Rule of Law and the importance of the individual. Nothing gave the more earnest imperialists greater satisfaction than to observe their subjects honouring this vision in their turn. What nobler, they thought, than to see the ancient traditions of English life, hammered out so painfully over the centuries, translated to the distant dependencies of the Crown? Lionel Curtis saw the process as the grandest fulfilment of Empire, and his magnum opus Civitas Dei, published in 1938, envisaged it as the foundation of a true world order, a successor to all Empires and the predecessor of Paradise.
There seemed a time indeed when the emergent British Commonwealth might really become a community of cultists, dedicated to this creed. India was frequently boasted of, after independence, as the World’s Largest Democracy, and Nigeria was said to be a very model of democratic rectitude. Kenya treated its white minority with perfect fairness, Ceylonese tea planters reported that nothing had much changed in the happy uplands of Nuwara Eliya. The faith soon shrivelled, though, and in a few years the ideology of the British Empire, such as it was, collapsed. The rule of law proved transitory when the imperial policemen were withdrawn, and tyrants more fierce than any colonial governor swept away the baubles of democracy. Nations gently nurtured into statehood fractured themselves in civil war, or were curdled in corruption. The fragile democratic flower soon wilted in climates like the Sudanese or the Zanzibari, and the principles of Common Law were tossed aside, as the subject peoples reverted to older standards, or devised new systems altogether.
Soon the old colonial empire had little more in common with Britain than with America or Soviet Russia—in great matters at least. In smaller ways the association proved more resilient. They still played cricket on the dust patches of Pakistan, among the Caribbean frangipani, or behind the yam-stores of New Guinea.1 The Fiji Rugby XV still made its regular tour of Wales, and at the Commonwealth Games, so old imperialists liked to think, a recognizably higher standard of sportsmanship prevailed than at the Olympics. The huntsmen of Ootacamund, as of Montreal, still wore pink.2 The regimental messes of the Indian Army still cherished their regimental silver, tarnished a little with the years perhaps, but still commemorating ancient triumphs of the imperial arms. In many a store and office the merchants of Empire survived, immensely rich in Hong Kong or Singapore, proud but seedy in Calcutta, astutely adapting to the times in Lagos, Mombasa or the Cayman Islands.3
A manner of thought survived here and there, and revived gracefully upon the arrival of a visiting Briton, when afternoon tea was poured in memory of the old days, a game of tennis was proposed, and the English slang of another generation was resuscitate —‘What a jolly nice surprise to see you! You’re a brick to come all this way!’ Among the Pathan soldiers of the Pakistan Army the command to stand at ease was still rendered ‘Sundlies!’, as the British had obligingly simplified it long before: among the soldiers of the Southern Yemen People’s Republic the word ‘dismiss’ still meant ‘screwdriver’—something that turns to the right, like a parade dismissed. One often felt, rather than actually identified, the traces of Britishness, when the flag had long been lowered and a generation had grown up who never knew the Empire: in the stance of a building, in a style of printing, in the posture of a sportsman, or in the echo of military music, half strange, half familiar among the teak trees or the deodars.
Victoria’s Empire had created three nations more or less in the image of England, brought into being almost from scratch by the genius of the British, and faithful still to their doctrines. It left behind two universal achievements: the end of slavery, the freedom of the seas—the rules of the sea were imperially conceived, the slave trade was imperially abolished. It had given to the world its own language, English, one of the mightiest of all instruments of human intercourse. It had kindled the latent energies of many a people temporarily stagnant: ‘he that wrestles with us’, as Burke said, ‘strengthens our will, and sharpens our wits—our antagonist is our helper.’ It had done something, as Matthew Arnold said, to ‘humanize men in society’—to curb the worst cruelties of primitives, and introduce people trapped in superstition and tradition to the idea that a man was a man for a’ that. For a century it had sustained, as Carlyle said, ‘a mighty Conquest over Chaos’. Here and there among the millions it had left, as Curzon hoped, ‘a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty where it did not exist before’. Through many generations, in many countries, it had been the peace-keeper and the law-maker, generally fair by its own standards, generally humane, and except in its own interests, which were always paramount, as impartial as a judge ever is. Now that it was gone, people often unexpectedly missed it.
3
Churchill died, and it died with him. It had lasted too long anyway: the subject peoples had outgrown its tutelage, and would progress much faster without it. For the British it was more of a wrench than they knew, for though by now the imperial idea seemed as antiquated as steam trains or antimacassars, the existence of Empire had impregnated all their lives. England without an Empire, Joseph Chamberlain had once said, would not be the England its people knew: and sure enough, when the imperial dimension was removed from the English national structure, nothing was ever quite the same again.
The British Empire had been haphazardly acquired, it had been hastily and sometimes sloppily discarded, but it had given the British people, seventy-odd years before, one brief moment of dazzle. The climax of Empire at the time of the Diamond Jubilee had come to the great mass of the citizenry as a revelation. It had seemed to them the greatest thing that ever happened to any nation, the duty and privilege of ruling a third of the world. Never mind the true motives and methods of imperialism—in the days of their imperial supremacy the British genuinely believed themselves to be performing a divine purpose, innocently, nobly, in the name of God and the Queen. The imperial dimension gave them a sense of scale and potential, and made them feel grand.
As Younghusband was permanently changed by his moment of ecstasy outside Lhasa, so the British were to be stamped with the stigmata of that passing conviction. It soured some of them, as they gradually realized it to be illusory. It matured many more, as they paid for it in blood and unhappiness. It confused them in the end, as rival visions overlaid their own. It made some of them proud in retrospect, some of them ashamed. It left its long trail of racial arrogance, so that long after Great Britain had retreated into the second ranks of the nations, the good-natured British people still sneered at blacks and laughed at foreigners. It gave them a cynical distaste for worldly power and influence, so transitory and treacherous. It embittered them a little, when they found there was nothing left to fire their hearts or their imaginations, that they were only another European people after all. But it made them, for better or for worse, a special people, one of those few peoples which, in the centuries of the nation States, were able to alter the face of the world—one of those peoples whose dust is left like a cloud in the air, as the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno put it, when it goes galloping down the highroad of history.
In 1837, when Victoria came to the throne, the fact of Empire lay lightly upon Britain. Nobody had been greatly interested in the notion since the loss of the American colonies, and imperial symptoms were hard to find in Britain—only the nabobs and the sugar-kings built their country palaces, and the slave-ship ports flourished on the Triangular
Trade. By 1965, when the last of the great Victorians left the stage, five generations of the imperial experience had changed all that, and the islands were thick with the accretions of imperialism, flavoured everywhere with its memories, tempered by its assumptions. By then every British town had its memorials of the enterprise, even those far from the sea, or on the periphery of political affairs, and every traveller to the islands was aware of the imperial past, embodied in relic, attitude or asset all around him.
Everywhere, ingrained, was Empire! The neo-classical bulks of the High Commissions, towering over Trafalgar Square—the gilded dome of Sezincote in the Cotswolds, that most enchanted of the naboberies—curry at Veeraswami’s, founded to cater for Anglo-Indians on leave—the temple-memorial to Lord Durham, patron earl of Canada, that stood blackened and tremendous above Penshaw Moor. Livingstone of Africa lay in Westminster Abbey, the lady from the next-door cottage devotedly attended the grave of Younghusband at Lytchett Minster, every Australia Day the High Commissioners drove down from London to pay tribute to Admiral Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales, in his grave at Bath.
Stark but creeper-softened at the end of the Mall stood the Citadel, from whose bunkers the Lords of Admiralty directed the fleets of Empire in the Second World War, and down the road across the parade ground Clive stood in cocky effigy beside the old India Office. High in the mists of Knock Fyrish in Easter Ross loomed the great gates Lord Novan had erected to commemorate the capture of Negapatam; beneath the dome which Sir Herbert Baker had built for them in Oxford, surmounted by the mythical Zimbabwe bird, the Trustees of the Rhodes Foundation assembled to distribute the continuing largesse of Kimberley and the Rand.
United Africa Company—Imperial Chemical Industries—Anglo-Transvaal Trustees—Ionian Bank—Bank of the Middle East—across the City of London the brass plates announced the still generous legacies of Empire. In the House of Lords the names of Allenby, Dufferin and Ava, Kitchener of Khartoum, Mountbatten of Burma, Beatty, Strathcona, Napier of Magdala, Methuen, Lawrence, Fisher, Baden-Powell, Cromer, honoured, if only by the chance of hereditary succession, its champions. In Lancashire they still called the grandstand at a football ground ‘The Kop’—two Lancashire regiments had fought at Spion Kop—and the jargon of the British Army was still rich in imperial derivatives, bint‚ shuftee, char or bukshee. Twenty thousand Asian seamen sailed in British merchant ships: a million black and brown immigrants, from Africa, the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent, had settled in the Mother-Country.
And in any street of any city, one could find more intimate relics of Greater Britain. In hundreds of thousands of homes there lay, wrapped in polishing cloth and occasionally threatened with auction sales, the medals of the imperial campaigners—120 were awarded altogether, and if the General Service Medal, 1939–45, cluttered up rather too many drawers, the Waziristan Campaign Medal was, by 1965, becoming rather rare. Curios of bronze or ivory abounded still in drawing-rooms and parlours, Kashmir rugs lay strewn on polished floors, on many a staircase framed groups of imperial sportsmen or soldiers gazed sternly across their moustaches. Sadly, sadly the ageing bourgeoisie of England watched the extinction of their patrimony, as the Telegraph chronicled, year after year, the retreat of Empire—‘Taranji Minister of Posts and Telegraphs! He couldn’t stick a stamp on an envelope. As for Jebajwi as Vice-Chancellor, well, words fail me….’ Sometimes they wrote despairing or indignant letters to the editor, deploring the outbreak of violence in some abandoned province, ‘a part of the world I happen to know well, having served there as Assistant District Commissioner in 1933–6’, and they were not always comforted when, looking out of their windows on summer afternoons, they saw the jet-black children of the immigrants playing exuberant cricket in the park.
4
But most of them, as in most periods of their history, disregarded it. They did not often think about the Empire. Families whose fortunes had been founded in Madras or Jamaica forgot the reasons for their continuing prosperity, and the great-grandsons of Boer War soldiers, the great-great-grandsons of Mutiny veterans, did not know where Lucknow or Ladysmith were to be found on the map. As the post-imperial generation advanced into middle age, the horizons of the nation contracted. No longer would one go to London to find the greatest living authority on the customs of the Shans, or irrigation problems in central Sudan, and one by one the men who knew all about Jordan, or Burma, or Basutoland, or the Andaman Islands, aged, died and were buried in village churchyards in the rain. The origin of the scimitar above the study door became uncertain—‘Something to do with the Mad Mullah?’
The British preferred to forget it. ‘We believe’, Lord Caradon told the United Nations in 1965, ‘that no nation and no race should be dominated by another. We believe that every nation should be free to shape its own destiny. We believe that colonialism should be ended as rapidly as possible.’ They muffled the subject at schools. They put out of their minds the thought, cogently expressed by Ernest Bevin not so long before, that their own prosperity might be dispersed with the Empire. Their national fortunes slowly declined, their industrial pre-eminence was lost, their status in the world was diminished, but no politician dared blame it upon the loss of Empire.
Had it all been a colossal mistake? The profits had certainly been great. Control of raw materials had enabled the British to influence prices favourably to themselves; the flow of specie had kept the pound strong; the habit of Britishness, the familiarity of the structure, had given British exporters immense customary markets within the Empire. The possession of ports and coaling stations everywhere, the British dominance of things maritime and communicative, had made the islanders the world’s greatest carriers, insurers and agents. The expertise of all sorts that came with Empire powerfully boosted the ‘invisible exports’ of the City of London, which for so many decades kept the national balance of payments in equilibrium.
But the cost of it all had been stupendous too. Supremacy was a speculative investment—one year might pay, the next show a loss—‘divide the victories by the taxation’. In its prime it had been an economic stimulant, but in its decline it was debilitating, for it made things seem too easy. The British had not really been economically supreme for generations—perhaps since the 1870s, when it first became apparent that Germany and the United States had greater muscle-power, and when, partly in compensation, Disraeli first gave glamour to the imperial conception. The New Imperialism was an attempt to keep a medium-sized island State among the super-Powers, but it had failed: the possession of Empire eased the symptoms, but did not cure the cause—which was not a sickness at all, but merely the reality—the truth that the British were 50 million people more or less like their neighbours, less well endowed than most, and impelled into that century of greatness not by divine favour, but by circumstance and energy.
And by forfeit. Across the continents stood those tombs, from the triumphant mausolea of Anglo-Indian conquerors to the pathetic mementos of defeat, carved in prison workshops in the graveyards of Hong Kong and Singapore. Many expressed pride in death, many more contentment, but often the epitaphists were concerned less with the dead than with the living—
O! ye in the far distant place,
O’er the infinite seas;
When ye think of the sons of our race,
Think deep upon these!
or:
When you go home, tell them of us and say
For your tomorrows we gave our today.1
This is because they believed that there were lessons to be learnt from the example of the imperial dead, that the Empire and the world would be a better place because of the manner of their lives, and the penalty of their deaths. Nobody who wandered among the imperial gravestones, though, pondering the sadness of their separate tragedies, could fail to wonder at the waste of it all, the young lives thrown away, the useless courage, the unnecessary partings; and the fading image of Empire, its ever dimmer panoply of flags and battlements, seemed then to be hazed in
a mist of tears, like a grand old march shot through with melancholy, in a bandstand by the sea.
5
The end of it was not surprising. Once the almost orgiastic splendour of its climax had been achieved, once the zest went out of it, it became rather a sad phenomenon. Its beauty had lain in its certainty and momentum, its arrogance perhaps. In its declining years it lost the dignity of command, and became rather an exhibition of ineffectual good intentions. Its memory was terrific; it had done much good in its time; it had behaved with courtesy as with brutality, rapaciously and generously, rightly and in error; good and bad had been allied in this, one of the most truly astonishing of human enterprises. Now its contribution was over, the world had moved on, and it died.
They performed its obsequies, with Sir Winston’s, on a grey London day in January, and for the last time the world watched a British imperial spectacle. Melancholy though the occasion was, intuitively though the British felt its deeper significance, they did it, as Churchill wished, in the high old style. Big Ben was silenced for the day. Mourning guns were fired in Hyde Park. The great drum-horse of the Household Cavalry, drums swathed in black crêpe, led the funeral procession solemnly through London to St Paul’s, while band after band across the capital played the Dead March from Saul, and the soldiers along the way bared their heads and reversed their arms.
