The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire

by H. W. Crocker, III

  In Glubb’s view, the best method of British imperial administration was one that maintained order, but leant heavily on the local authorities themselves. He credited British success in Jordan to the fact that the British made a point of rarely intervening. “The British attitude to the Arabs,” Glubb said, “was ‘This is your country! You can have a rebellion if you like. We shall not mind!’ This was not strictly true, but it was highly effective. The TransJordan Government was obliged to exert itself to maintain order.”8 It was the British imperial version of: That government is best which governs least.

  In the 1941 Allied invasion of Syria, of which Glubb’s Arab Legion was a part, many British officers came to believe that Syria independent of France would be a natural ally of Britain. The Syrian Arabs themselves appeared to take a pro-British line, feeling they were back in the heady days of T. E. Lawrence. British officers were not only anti-Vichy—that was their duty—but unimpressed by de Gaulle’s Free French, who wanted to reclaim Syria for the French republic.

  Churchill had pledged his support for de Gaulle’s ambitions, but the Free French were naturally suspicious of their British allies. The British, they knew, were imperialists of a different sort from themselves. As the French General Philibert Collet noted: “Wherever the British have penetrated we meet British officers who believe the Bedouins, the Kurds, the Ghurkhas, the Sikhs or the Sudanese (whichever they happen to command) to be the most splendid fellows on earth. The French do not share this passionate interest in other races—they only praise individuals or communities insofar as they have become Gallicized.”9 At the request of the Free French, Glubb and the Arab Legion were expelled from Syria.

  The success of the Arab Legion raised Abdullah’s prestige, and it was essential that the Legion was maintained, with a British subsidy, when Transjordan gained independence and Abdullah became king in 1946. Glubb, as the Legion’s commander, became the de facto power behind the Jordanian throne, and as such he was the target of both Zionist and Arab nationalist terrorists. Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre capture perfectly the Glubb Pasha (“an unlikely Lawrence”) of this period:Their commander was a complex and complicated man. His face was anything but fierce: a small, unmilitary moustache, plump cheeks, pale blue eyes and graying hair parted neatly in the middle of his head. He had soft, almost feminine hands and a shy, reserved manner. Yet he had a ferocious temper. Once, in a fit of fury, he had beaten a sheik so badly with a camel stick that he had to send him twenty camels the next day to make amends. More than one of his officers had fled his office with an inkwell or paperweight flying past their ears. He was a hard-driving ascetic man who insisted on meddling in every aspect of the Legion’s affairs.10

  As the British mandate in Palestine expired in 1948, the Arab Legion was in an extremely difficult position. Zionists and Arab nationalists were already in a state of undeclared war. The Legion was uneasily in the middle, charged with maintaining order between the contending factions. When the British left Palestine in May 1948, the Arab Legion—by agreement between King Abdullah and the Zionists, approved by the British—was ordered to occupy, as peacekeepers, the western half of the West Bank on a line from Nablus through Ramallah and Jerusalem to Hebron.

  Israel, however, was immediately invaded by Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon, and in the resulting war, the Israeli Defense Forces not only repelled the attacking Arab armies but occupied lands partitioned to the Palestinian Arabs. The Israelis also advanced into Jerusalem, which was supposed to be administered by the United Nations as an international city; Abdullah ordered Glubb to retake it; and the Legion captured East Jerusalem after stiff street-by-street combat. Glubb carefully kept the Legion’s actions purely defensive, avoiding any attacks on areas the United Nations had designated Israeli territory; Abdullah, however, could claim he had joined his fellow Arabs in attacking the hated Israelis.

  In 1949, the war ended with an armistice that divided Palestine between an enlarged Israel, Jordan (which took the West Bank), and Egypt (which gained the Gaza Strip). Glubb bemoaned the exodus of Arab Palestinians into Jordan, where he thought they would be a destabilizing influence. He was right: in 1951 an aggrieved Palestinian, in a plot organized by a former Arab Legion officer and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, assassinated Abdullah.

  An Officer and a Gentleman

  “An officer should never swear, tell vulgar jokes or behave in an undignified manner.”

  Lieutenant-General Sir John Glubb, taken from Sir John Glubb, The Changing Scenes of Life: An Autobiography (Quartet, 1983), p. 35

  King Hussein, Abdullah’s grandson, who ascended to the throne in 1952, was far less tied to Glubb than his grandfather was and made a point of ignoring his advice. He abruptly dismissed him in 1956, ending Glubb Pasha’s career in the Middle East, though Glubb spent the rest of his life writing books and lecturing about the Arabs. His devotion could never have been in doubt. He wrote, “I originally went to Iraq in 1920 as a regular officer of the British Army, seeking fresh fields of adventure.... But when I had spent five years among the Arabs, I decided to change the basis of my whole career: I made up my mind to resign my commission in the British Army and devote my life to the Arabs. My decision was largely emotional. I loved them.”11 It was clear that many of them loved him too, as countless Arabs left him as ward to their children. His wife helped create and support a school for Bedouin orphans and Palestinian refugees. His son, christened with the crusading name of Godfrey, took on the Arab name he had been given by Abdullah, Faris. He converted to Islam and became an activist for the Palestinians. Like his father he fell in love with the Arabs. His father’s image of them had been perpetuated in the Arab Legion—of bandoliered, red-and-white keffiyehed Arab warriors who sang gaily in action. For a certain sort of Englishman, there was little in that image not to like.

  Part VII

  AUSTRALIA AND THE FAR EAST

  Chapter 23

  AUSSIE RULES

  For a country that started out as a penal colony, without much in the way of natural resources—indeed, most of the harsh Australian landmass is unsuited to agriculture and sparsely populated—one would have to say Australia has done remarkably well. It is prosperous (one of the top fifteen economies in the world, with a population of fewer than 23 million people), free (a parliamentary democracy under the British Crown), and a responsible power on the world stage (since World War II, Australia has deployed troops in the Korean War, Malaya, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Afghan War, the Iraq War, East Timor, and elsewhere). And few peoples have a better public image in the United States than the Australians—regarded as a friendly, hardy, sporting, down-to-earth, sort-of-Cockney-accented, surf-friendly cross between H. Rider Haggard’s Allan Quatermain and Owen Wister’s Virginian.

  * * *

  Did you know?

  Captain Bligh was the hero of the mutiny on the Bounty

  Most of Australia’s settlers were not exiled convicts

  There were more British troops than ANZACs at Gallipoli

  * * *

  The British claim on Australia came with Captain Cook in 1770, who christened eastern Australia New South Wales. The idea of Australia as a penal colony developed after Britain lost the thirteen North American colonies. The land seemed of little use for anything else, and the Empire needed a new dumping ground. Nevertheless, most Australians were not sent to Australia as prisoners; they came as settlers; and even those who were transported as prisoners were generally treated tolerably well on the transport ships (known as “hulks” and judged otherwise unseaworthy), despite sensationalist contemporary reports making them out to be seaborne hells.

  Imperial Australia

  As ever, the British were in competition with the French—both possibly eyeing Australia merely to foil the other. But the British, as usually proved the case, won out.1 The first settlement was made by the high-minded Captain Arthur Phillip who hoped to make something of the convicts in his charge, landing first at Botany Bay, then at Port Jackso
n (Sydney Harbor), and finally at Norfolk Island. Phillip, the first governor of New South Wales (1788–95), quickly set about establishing a functioning settlement, even as it was reinforced by new convicts who proved to be an unmotivated work force. The convicts brought in smallpox and other diseases that had the inadvertent effect of knocking dead great heaps of aborigine warriors who might otherwise have attacked the settlement. Phillip, it should be noted, took a forbearing and protective attitude towards the aborigines, and also ensured that slavery was never part of the settlement of Australia. As for reformed convicts, they became free men.

  Hurray for Captain Bligh!

  The real heroes of the mutiny on the HMS Bounty (28 April 1789) were not Fletcher Christian and his colleagues, who were too intoxicated by the favors of the Polynesian women of Tahiti to do their duty, but dear old Captain William Bligh (1754–1815) and his eighteen loyalists who were set adrift in a longboat with a small amount of food and water. Bligh, with a keen sense of fair play (and Royal Naval tradition), divided these rations and anything they caught absolutely equally. He led his men in an open boat over 3,600 miles of water to safety and later became governor of New South Wales, where he again faced a mutiny from corrupt uniformed men. Christian, meanwhile, and eight of his colleagues and their wahines figured the Navy would look for them on Tahiti and so set sail for an uninhabited island. They found Pitcairn Island (today a British Overseas Territory), where a goodly number of folk are named Christian (descendants of Fletcher) and are Seventh Day Adventists (thanks to some persuasive missionaries).

  Australian Idle (the Convict Version)

  “Experience, sir, has taught me how difficult it is to make men industrious who have passed their lives in habits of vice and indolence. In some cases it has been found impossible; neither kindness nor severity have had any effect; and tho’ I can say that the convicts in general behave well, there are many who dread punishment less than they fear labour; and those who have not been brought up to hard work, which are by far the greatest part, bear it badly. They shrink from it the moment the eye of the overseer is turned from them.”

  Arthur Phillip, governor of New South Wales, writing to Lord Grenville, 17 July 1790, quoted in Frank G. Clarke, The History of Australia (Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 27

  Non-convict settler society was naturally always a bit worried about the convict class, especially when it was reinforced with Irishmen. Irish prisoners were more than a trifle rebellious, rising in arms and having to be put down by force. The military units of Australia were themselves not altogether reliable. Sickness forced Governor Phillip to leave New South Wales in 1792. In his absence, the New South Wales Corps took charge. The Corps was made up, in the words of Australian historian Marjorie Barnard, “of the riff-raff of the [British] Army, men who had been in trouble, even mutineers, who were misfits or so useless that their regiments wanted to be rid of them, the officers were either as unsuccessful as those they commanded, or were anxious to leave England for some personal reason, like debt.”2 The convicts were thus overseen by men who but for the grace of God might have been in their place. The Corps expanded the land-holdings of the colony (in order to enrich themselves), were such active importers of rum they became known as the Rum Corps, and even deposed Governor William Bligh (of Mutiny on the Bounty fame) in the Rum Rebellion in 1808. The Corps was disbanded and legitimate rule restored by the British with the arrival of Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821.

  It was Macquarie who transformed Australia from a ruffian’s reform school into a reputable colony. He made a point of giving appointments to former prisoners, in order to show that all Australians were equal under the law whether they came originally as settlers or as convicts; in return he required that former prisoners lead upright Christian lives, which meant church attendance on Sunday. He laid out the street design of Sydney, was the first governor to call the colony Australia, and in general so improved the place that he was recalled to England for his spendthrift ways. He is nevertheless generally regarded as “the Father of Australia,” a phrase engraved on his tombstone in Scotland.

  As proof of its growing muscle, Australia began to add territory. It spread across the continent; South Australia became a free colony—free, that is, of convict labor. Australians crossed the sea to settle New Zealand, which became a separate colony in 1841. Van Diemen’s Land, established originally as another penal colony, became the colony of Tasmania in 1856. But what really got things moving was a gold rush, or rushes, starting in 1851. Gold seemed a quicker way to wealth than Australia’s economic standby of sheep-herding, and immigrants popped up everywhere eager to stake their claim. In 1851, there were 437,665 people in Australia. In 1860 that number had nearly tripled to 1,145,585.

  These were boom times for Australia, lasting until 1890; they were also Australia’s version of the Wild West, including the usual cast of characters from Chinese immigrants (though these were miners rather than laundrymen) to outlaws—the most famous being Ned Kelly, an Irishman needless to say, who wore a homemade suit of armor; but he was no knight, and was hanged. Because Australia had been a penal colony, it was chock full of Irishmen, who did not, as a rule, share the exuberant pro-British imperial sentiment of their fellow Australians. The Catholic Church proved invaluable in keeping Celtic high spirits from spilling over into riot and sedition (though many Australian administrators failed to appreciate this) and was a great anti-statist institution. Unlike Protestant denominations, it refused to shutter its own schools in favor of universal state-provided education in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

  Politically, the Australian colonies were organized on democratic lines—complicated at first by the proportion of convicts in the population—and innovated voting by secret ballot, which was adopted by several of the colonies in 1856. By the end of the nineteenth century (Tasmania being the last Australian colony to sign on), every man who was a British subject could cast a ballot. Perhaps because they wanted to attract more sheilas, New Zealand and Australia were leaders in granting women the right to vote. In Australia, a woman’s right to vote varied by colony and was sometimes limited by qualifications (such as owning property).3 When it came to granting universal suffrage to women, New Zealand struck first—not just in the British Empire in the South Pacific, but in the world—in 1893.

  In 1901, the Australian colonies confederated as the Australian Commonwealth. Australians felt a growing sense of nationhood and recognized—especially because of Chinese immigration during the Gold Rush—that Australia was a British island in an Asian sea. Even with the massive influx of gold-fevered immigrants, Australia remained overwhelmingly British, and was determined to remain so, enacting the “White Australia” policy to discourage non-whites from entering Australia. Because the British would not allow a starkly racial policy, Australian immigration law was based on passing a literacy test in a European language of the Australian immigration officials’ choosing, the choice almost invariably being a language that might stump any non-white would-be immigrant. The restrictions were gradually relaxed, in piecemeal fashion, after World War II, rapidly in the 1960s, and were fully repealed by 1973.

  Australia eagerly took up imperial responsibilities, contributing troops to the Boer War in South Africa (16,000 of them), taking over as a colonial power itself in Papua New Guinea in 1902 (a British protectorate since 1884), and most of all joining the fighting in the First World War—with the Gallipoli campaign becoming part of Australia’s national myth. Out of a total population of 5 million, some 330,000 Australian men served overseas in the Great War and suffered the highest casualty rate of any Western force (65 percent),4 earning Australia its own place at the Versailles Peace Conference, represented by its prime minister, William Morris “Billy” “Little Digger” Hughes, and his deputy and former prime minister Joseph Cook. Hughes was a nationalist, a socialist, and an Empire loyalist: “Without the Empire we should be tossed like a cork in the cross currents of world politics
. It is at once our sword and our shield.”5 He helped ensure that German New Guinea, Nauru, and the Bismarck islands (including the Admiralty Islands, New Ireland, and New Britain) went to Australia and German Samoa went to New Zealand as mandated territories. Australia also gained its own seat at the League of Nations, though Hughes rightly thought the League was a crock.

  The Gripe of Gallipoli

  Chippy republicans eager to sever Australia’s ties to Britain have tried to turn the heroic service of Australian and New Zealand servicemen at Gallipoli—marked every 25 April, the date of the Gallipoli landings in 1915, as ANZAC day, the memorial day of the Australian New Zealand Army Corps—into one great national whine rather than a day of remembrance. Their mythical gripe is that stupid British officers callously threw Australians into Turkish fire and slaughter. In fact, casualty rates were far higher (more than twice as high) on the Western Front than at Gallipoli, most of the troops involved (and most of the casualties) were British rather than ANZACs, and Australian officers commanded the Australian troops. The Australians earned the nickname of “diggers” from their trench work at Gallipoli. It is time for the diggers to bury the myths propagated by anti-British malcontents.

  Great Movies of the British Empire

  The Lighthorsemen (1987), an Australian film—much better than the wildly overrated and axe-grinding movie Gallipoli—trumpets the heroism of the Australian troops at the Battle of Bersheeba (1917) in the Middle East campaign of World War I. Rousing throughout.