Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘I did not even know that the British Empire is dying’

  George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 1936

  The twelfth Earl of Meath looked a bit like Father Christmas. He had a bald head, a red face and an enormous white beard, and by end of the First World War, Reginald Brabazon was over seventy. He had never forgotten how, on a winter’s day at Eton, a schoolmaster had accused his fellow pupils of ‘spinelessness’ for attempting to brush snow off their bare knees. ‘You young worms!’ the teacher berated them. ‘Your fathers are the rulers of England, and your forefathers have made England what she is now. Do you imagine that if they had minded a little snow that Canada would ever have been added to the Empire, or if they had minded heat we should ever possess India or tropical Africa?’ As an adult, Meath determined to ensure that the entire nation never forgot the importance of indifference to snow on knees.

  The earl turned out to be an idiosyncratic imperialist, his career in the British diplomatic service being terminated – at his in-laws’ insistence – when he was posted to the impossibly ‘remote’ mission at Athens. He devoted most of the rest of his life to empire-building in the cities and suburbs of Britain. Meath’s great anxiety was whether the nation – especially the poorer parts – quite appreciated the importance of the empire. Did Britain any longer have the moral fibre necessary to rule the world? Since Britain did not believe in mass conscript armies, Meath founded a Lads’ Drill Association to promote marching and weapons-training, spent seventeen years as commissioner for the Irish Boy Scouts, and served as president of the Duty and Discipline Movement, dedicated to fighting ‘slackness, indifference and indiscipline’. As his lordship put it – and the list of supporters from cabinet ministers and colonial governors to generals and archbishops indicates that he was hardly considered eccentric – the empire was built on the principle that imperialists could dominate others because they allowed themselves to be dominated. ‘Britons have ruled in the past because they were a virile race, brought up to obey, to suffer hardships cheerfully, and to struggle victoriously.’

  This ‘subordination of selfish or class interests to those of the State’ was what Meath and his friends believed had made the empire. As one school text put it at the height of empire, ‘Every time one of us is courteous and civil to a foreigner he is doing his part as a good citizen, for he is helping to make his country liked and respected abroad … remembering that to rule oneself is the first step to being able to rule others.’ It followed that too much sensitivity and independence of mind were a decided liability. All sorts of disciplines might be useful in achieving this subordination of the self to the greater good, including, oddly, folk dancing, because, left to their own devices, the urban working class would just drink, smoke cigarettes and lounge around on street corners. Meath’s anxiety was not at all unusual, for by the early twentieth century much of the British elite was worried that the country might be losing the capacity for ruling the world. In addition to the Boy Scouts and the Duty and Discipline Movement, there was already a National Service League offering camps every summer to prepare the youth of the cities to serve their country, the Boys’ Brigade promoting ‘Christian manliness’, and the Anglican Church Lads’ Brigade promising ‘free discipline, manly games, and wholesome society’. The Commanding Officer of the London Cadet Battalion, Colonel Beresford, echoed the message of the Boy Scouts, explaining that his organization provided for ordinary boys ‘many of the advantages of that Public School training which has so great an effect on moulding the characters of the upper and middle classes’.

  These out-of-school activities complemented the not-very-subtle messages being passed on in the classroom. Without the British Empire, said Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, ‘the greater portion of the world outside Europe would revert to the darkness and barbarism of the Middle Ages’. A School History of England – a collaboration between Rudyard Kipling and the comically reactionary Oxford historian C. R. L. Fletcher* – informed the country’s children that ‘it was on trade the Empire was founded, and by trade it must be maintained. But remember, a great trade needs a great defence by a great fleet and a great army. One gets nothing for nothing in this world.’ The book advised its young readers that they should ‘be prepared to fight at any moment’. It remained in print until 1930.

  But the Earl of Meath’s greatest creation was Empire Day, celebrated across Britain on Victoria’s birthday, 24 May, even though the queen had been dead for fifteen years by the time it received government endorsement. On Empire Day plays were staged about heroic empire-builders like Wolfe, Clive and Livingstone and pageants mounted in which a trident-carrying Britannia was usually the central figure among hordes of blacked-up ‘Sikhs’ or smiling ‘piccaninnies’. Local worthies and retired colonial officials gave talks in schools. There was much singing of the National Anthem, saluting of the flag and eating of Empire Meals. Meath’s message was that empire was the gift of ‘an all-wise and all-knowing Providence’, which had bestowed ‘boundless resources’ and an ‘unrivalled freedom and liberty’. The challenge was merely to get the people of Britain to understand their good fortune.

  The biggest attempt to sell the empire to the citizens of Britain came in 1924. If a Londoner wanted an exotic day out in the jungles or on the prairies, Wembley was the place to be. Here, spread across 200 acres at what was then the edge of the city, the entire empire was on show. Roads had been laid (and christened by Kipling) and uncountable tons of concrete poured, to throw up the biggest buildings of their kind in the world. The most famous of these constructions, the twin towers of the football stadium, remained standing to the turn of the next century, but the other buildings, designed to hold examples of what imperial rule could achieve, succumbed within a few years of the end of the exhibition to the sprawl of the London suburbs. So there is no longer a Palace of Engineering alongside Engineers’ Way, and the beguiling expanse of water which gave its name to Lakeside Way was long ago drained to be built over by a dreary conference centre. In 1924 you might have sauntered down Pacific or Atlantic Slope, and had presented to you ‘the almost illimitable possibilities of the Dominions, Colonies and Dependencies’. (The words are from the official guidebook for the British Empire Exhibition.)

  If you boarded the narrow-gauge ‘Never-stop railway’ trundling around the site, you might, as the train slowed, step out at the Palace of Industry, where you could watch soap, bread, chocolate, carpets or linen being made, see tea being packed, pottery fired and steel cut with a flame. In a Pageant of Empire, to a specially composed theme by the ageing Edward Elgar, Wolfe’s victory on the Plains of Abraham and the conquest of New Zealand were re-enacted and ‘settlers’ sank wells, apparently turning bare earth into orchards and vineyards. A dozen girls gave twice-daily fashion parades showing off fabrics made in Bradford. In the Palace of Beauty there were more live models, posing as some of the most striking women in history, from Helen of Troy to ‘Miss 1924’. At the Australian pavilion you could – inevitably – watch sheep being sheared. The highlight of the Palace of Engineering (the largest concrete building in the world) was a collection of locomotives and carriages and a display of imperial railway routes across the empire. The Ministry of Agriculture had a machine which showed the effects of ploughing and harrowing. The Ministry of Health exhibited a model sewage plant. A Burmese display featured a pagoda in Mandalay. The west African pavilion had a model of a Nigerian walled city. And from Sarawak had come a 30-foot stuffed python, with the outline of the pig it had swallowed moments before death clearly visible inside.

  The style of the exhibition says much about the monochrome pleasures 1920s officialdom imagined would satisfy the masses: in the way of ‘improving’ displays, it was rather less fun than it pretended. Twenty-seven million visitors were lured through the Empire Exhibition turnstiles, though it is unclear whether this figure includes the Indians, Singhalese, Malays, Burmese, West Indians, Hong Kong Chinese, west African
s and three Palestinians described by the Official Guide as ‘races in residence’, their function being to stand around looking colourfully native while demonstrating local crafts. But there are only so many demonstrations of well-sinking a person can take, and the organizers sighed with frustration as they watched the crowds inexorably drift away from the sewage farm to converge on the Giant Switchback, amusement park and dance hall. Highbrows, meanwhile, disdained the whole thing and formed the WGTW (Won’t Go To Wembley) Society. And when Bertie Wooster found himself dragged off to the Empire Exhibition in ‘The Rummy Affair of Old Biffy’, the only congenial place he discovered was the comparatively modest pavilion of the West Indies, a place clearly ‘in certain fundamentals of life streets ahead of our European civilisation’. For it contained a Planter’s Bar, where ‘as kindly a bloke as ever I wish to meet’ mixed Green Swizzle cocktails. ‘If ever I marry and have a son,’ Wooster remarked, ‘Green Swizzle Wooster is the name that will go down on the register, in memory of the day his father’s life was saved at Wembley.’*

  It is hard to believe that visiting the exhibition changed anyone’s life. Indeed, the plodding ambition of the thing had been made clear in King George V’s speech as he opened it that April. ‘We believe’, he said, ‘that this Exhibition will bring the peoples of the Empire to a better knowledge of how to meet their reciprocal wants and aspirations.’ And, just as George had none of Victoria’s sheen, so the 1924 show had none of the pizzazz of the 1851 Great Exhibition. That had been about flaunting Britain’s genius to the world and had seemed to promise a future in which science might solve most of mankind’s problems. The Empire Exhibition was the Great and Good talking to hoi polloi about something they weren’t especially interested in. ‘I brought ’em ’ere to see the glories of the empire,’ says the father in Noël Coward’s This Happy Breed, as he watches his children head for the amusements at Wembley, ‘and all they think about is going on the dodgems.’ The empire had lost whatever sheen it once had – even the steady stream of emigrants setting off from British shores to build Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a worldwide Anglo-Nation had by now fallen away to the point where there were more migrants arriving in the British Isles than there were people leaving. There was nowhere much left to colonize, anyway, and the business of government had passed from colourful empire-builders to dull-minded empire-inheritors, for whom, as H. G. Wells recognized, ‘Empire has happened to them and civilisation has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to keep.’ Sure enough, there was soon an Empire Marketing Board, to try to secure the enterprise by promoting the products of Britain’s scattered possessions to British citizens,* which was followed by a trading doctrine of ‘Imperial Preference’ whereby a country which had sermonized the world on the life-giving virtues of free trade introduced tariffs on goods from countries which had the misfortune not to belong to its empire.

  The 1924 exhibition seemed rather purposeless, a shop-window display laid out by officialdom to try to grab the attention of largely indifferent passers-by. The Canadian exhibit caught things well. It was a life-size equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales carved in refrigerated butter. It was destined to melt just as soon as someone switched the power off.

  The Empire Exhibition was not the first attempt to stage a spectacular event to try to make the British people enthusiastic about their empire. But it was almost the last. As Lord Meath and the others who worried about the moral fibre of the nation had understood, the mass of the people were just not particularly interested in the imperial project. Custodianship, partnership and preparation for self-government were much less exciting ideas for a British audience than discovery, conquest, adventure and profit. By the 1930s a torpor had settled. If the empire wasn’t expanding, what was it doing? No one seemed quite sure. Its face in popular culture became the cartoon character Colonel Blimp, with his walrus moustache, bad temper and fiercely held, stupendously stupid opinions, based upon a flush-faced booby his creator, David Low, had overheard holding forth in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross. Even the way the so-called Mother Country played cricket spoke of a new mood in which the old imperial links meant less and less, with the 1932 England touring team shamelessly attempting to intimidate Australian batsmen with ‘bodyline’ bowling: the Australian reaction was so furious that the tour was very nearly cancelled midway through.* How had what had recently seemed eternal verities withered so quickly?

  The motive force of empire – the impulse to go out and plant the flag – had gone: the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was long over and the business of the British Empire was increasingly administrative. As that great anti-imperialist George Orwell had noticed, technology had changed everything. ‘The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy’, had been in decline for years, he wrote.

  The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative … Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape.

  And it was not merely that the style of colonial administration had been transformed by the speed of communications. By the 1930s, if a Robert Clive had emerged from some Shropshire market town dreaming of wealth and opportunity, he would have been better advised to sit in Britain watching reports from the trading floors of London or Hong Kong than to go to the trouble of travelling anywhere.

  As the twentieth century ground on, the imperial idea lost its apparent glamour and its friends. The empire had become Official Business and the First World War had dulled any reverence for governments, flags, anthems and talk of national destiny. The war had touched every family in the land, and the minority who took an interest in international matters hung their hopes on different ideas of internationalism, in co-operative organizations like the League of Nations. The milk-and-water ideas of a Commonwealth might have better suited the mood of the times, but for the fact that the empire plainly still existed. Increasingly, it was the anti-imperialists who were the romantic figures. In September 1931, when the leader of the Indian independence movement, Mohandas Gandhi, took himself to Lancashire to see the effects of the boycott he had led of British-made cotton goods, even the mill-workers who had lost their jobs because of his actions turned out to cheer him. Of course he was quite as wily as any other politician. But given a choice between the ascetic campaigner in homespun cotton dhoti and Lord Willingdon, the much ornamented British Viceroy at the time (who ordered Gandhi’s arrest after his return to India), it was no contest.* Empire Day still continued to roll around every year and the assiduous head teacher could borrow films and slideshows and gather pupils around a radio to listen to improving broadcasts about what was being done in their name. The children’s reward was a half-day holiday. The BBC dutifully loyally churned out talks about the empire (and every Christmas hired actors like Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud to present more programmes slavishly celebrating it).† But the noisier the loudspeakers of officialdom, the more reverberant the empty echo. In the summer of 1938 a stuttering King George VI opened another Empire Exhibition, this time at Bellahouston Park in Glasgow. Pavilions of engineering and industry appeared again, and imperial produce was proudly displayed. But the weather was worse than usual and an Empire Exhibition Trophy football competition and much promotion of west Scotland manufacturing signally failed to catch the imagination. The official show was also matched by a Workers’ Exhibition in the inner city, which set out to undermine the entire imperial project. The Empire Exhibition might display the products of empire, said one of the or
ganizers, but ‘at the Workers’ Exhibition you will see what it has cost in human blood and sweat and exploitation to turn out these products’. The empire was a capitalist racket designed to exploit workers across the world, and the only beneficiaries were to be found among the board members and shareholders of private enterprise.

  The protest exhibition attracted only a fraction of the visitors drawn to the official show. But it attested to the growing current of opinion which was not merely indifferent to empire but actively hostile to it. Imperial expansion had been the product of an age before proper democracy. It could not survive universal suffrage and the development of class politics. Unless they were willing to resort to racism (and mostly they were not) political leaders on the left could not reconcile possession of an empire with claims to represent ordinary people: where was the difference between the rights of workers at home and the rights of workers abroad? Anyway, the parties they led and the people they represented were more concerned with improving living and working conditions at home than with duties abroad. Empire-building belonged to history: they were concerned with the future.

  Attempts to re-engage the public with the imperial project through events like Empire Day lingered, but proved no rival for football, the seaside or a day at the races. The next big exhibition in the imperial capital, the 1951 Festival of Britain, would be a much more distinctly chauvinistic production, the country’s present and former overseas possessions getting a look-in only through exciting exhibits like ‘minerals from the Commonwealth’.*

  It was the Second World War which really sank the empire. As in the First War, a conflict with strictly European origins drew in races from all over the globe – Australian pilots flew in the Battle of Britain, Canadian sailors braved the battle of the Atlantic, Indians and New Zealanders fought at El Alamein. There was even a flicker of revival of British interest in Empire Day, with the Empire Day Movement’s president talking of a fight against the Powers of Darkness, in which ‘the fate of the Empire, and with it that of civilisation, is at stake’. But it was painfully apparent that the British Empire alone could not defeat the Axis powers: the outcome of the war would be determined by what happened in Russia and what came from America.