These are complicated questions with which so many of the British prefer not to grapple. Ignorance is profound, with much of the population aware, perhaps, that IPA beers were originally India Pale Ale, brewed in England for consumption in the subcontinent, but unaware of the reason why the British were there in the first place. Even British schoolchildren are not obliged to study the story of what their ancestors created. Perhaps in the dark recesses of a golf-club bar some harrumphing voice mutters about how much better the world seemed to turn when a great-uncle in baggy shorts ran a patch of Africa the size of Lancashire. But, by and large, no one has much to say about empire. Judgement has been passed and the case is closed. This, surely, is one of the peculiarities of our age. Just as the high-pomp imperialists assumed that the sun would never set on the empire, so the post-imperial age wallows unreflectingly in the assumption that the prejudices of its own generation will last for ever. Even Kipling could see through the pomp of his time.
At Ootacamund, in the Nilgiri mountains of southern India, the Indian owners of one of the bungalows built by the British offer a ‘Raj Experience’ – B&B, with English food presented on clumsy English furniture. The rack-and-pinion railway still climbs improbably up from the sweltering plains to the cool of the town they called ‘the queen of hill stations’. A church, botanical gardens and golf course, half a dozen well-regarded schools with names like St Jude’s and Laidlaw Memorial, all offer evidence of the colonial inheritance. The rich red soil of the terraced fields in the blue hills around the town is thick with ‘English vegetables’ – carrots, cabbages and cauliflowers. But ‘Snooty Ooty’ is now officially known by its Tamil name of Udhagamandalam, and many of its bungalows slowly succumb to the pleasant damp of the hills, the English flowers planted by the settlers long run to seed. The maharajah’s summer palace struggles on as a hotel, its vast, galleried ballroom now little used, although if you ask nicely the manager will find you a cue for the snooker table up there. (The game was perfected one rainy afternoon, beneath the buffalo heads hanging high on the walls of the Ootacamund Club.) But most visitors prefer modern hotels, and the new businesses – manufacturing and pharmaceuticals – are what matter to the town now.
Most of the customers for the Raj Experience weekend in Ooty are British. There are other places, too, where they can also play at being harmless imperialists – among the stuffed-animal trophies at the Hill Club in Sri Lanka’s hill station Nuwara Eliya, on the terrace at the mock-Tudor Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, or by ordering a sickly Singapore Sling in the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel. Those who play this game know that that is all they are doing, in much the same way that visitors to stately homes in England gawp and wonder what it must have been like to live the life they see on display, and then hurry off to the comfort of the centrally heated suburbs. It is the British Empire as theme park, and the tourists no more believe in it than they believe in telekinesis or a flat earth: the Raj is gone, and gone for good. In that it resembles just about every empire which has presumed its permanence, whether Greek or Roman, Babylonian or Phoenician, Spanish, French or Portuguese. The Thousand Year Reich exists only in the minds of lunatics.
Living among foreign cultures to whom they generally (although not always) believed themselves superior obliged the British to consider who they were and to impose upon themselves a style of life in which some things were done and others were most definitely not done. But is there any real connection between the tourists enjoying their bland cheese sandwiches (white bread, crusts removed) in the spice garden of the world and the men and women who ruled so much of the planet? In 1850, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, could dispatch a squadron of Royal Navy warships to blockade the main port of Greece because the government there had refused to meet the exaggerated claims for compensation demanded by a Portuguese Jew, ‘Don’ David Pacifico, for damage done to his property by a mob. Palmerston proclaimed that, since Pacifico had been born in Gibraltar, he was entitled to the protection of the forces of the Crown, then the mightiest military power on earth. The Greek government paid up. Today, when the tourists return to Britain from the Raj Experience, they will find they are not even entitled to special treatment at the frontier of their own country, and must stand in line at UK Border Control, alongside men and women from over two dozen other states, no more special than any other citizen of the European Union, be they Latvian, French or German. Or even Greek.
The real Raj experience ended in 1947, and the empire came home to Britain long ago. When today’s tourists return to England they will pass with hardly a glance the Indian restaurant on their high street, unaware that it was the search for spices to enliven the dreary English cuisine that took merchant venturers to the subcontinent in the first place or that the first Indian restaurant, Veeraswamy’s, was opened by the man who had been official caterer for the Indian pavilion at the 1924 Empire Exhibition. Birmingham, once the manufactory of cheap tin trays for the empire, is now known for a distinctive style of balti (‘bucket’) cooking. Haworth, home of the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, even offers ‘traditional Indian cuisine in the heart of Brontë country’, a vision which would once have been comprehensible only to the talented sisters’ laudanum-addled brother.*
In 1959, my parents took the family on our first foreign holiday. It was a sign, I suppose, that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was right when he claimed that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’. My parents had discovered remarkably cheap tickets on a passenger ship to Vigo in northern Spain. We spent a couple of happy weeks at a fishing village on the Atlantic coast, and then reboarded the vessel in Vigo harbour. The return journey to Southampton was utterly different from the voyage out. It turned out that the ship had been making a modern version of the old ‘triangular trade’. I have no idea what she had carried from Spain across the Atlantic. But by the time the vessel had returned to Vigo for the final leg to England the holds and lower decks were packed with the descendants of slaves. Growing up in rural England I had never seen a black person before: the impression made by this crush of humanity, who had fashioned makeshift bedrooms in the fug of the holds, was astonishing. As time passed, I grew bolder and began to spend more time down in the bowels of the ship, where wide-eyed black men fired eager questions about Britain. Was it cold? Did it rain all the time? Were there lots of jobs? Had I met the queen?
The last question was the only one I could answer definitively: I had not. But the most baffling question was ‘Is it true that the whites beat the blacks with bicycle chains?’ I was nine years old and had no idea what my questioner – a smiling, avuncular figure with, he said, a son about my age – was talking about and assumed it was something to do with cycle racing, of which I knew nothing, rather than the weapon of choice for racist gangs. So I answered as nonchalantly as I could, ‘Sometimes, I think.’ What impact this must have had on the group of men travelling thousands of miles in hope of a better life is still the stuff of an occasional bad dream.
His question must have been set off by the reports of the previous year’s rioting in Notting Hill and Nottingham, when gangs of young white racists had rampaged through immigrant areas, attacking anyone with a black skin. Macmillan made many of the appropriate noises, condemning the riots and asserting the right of all British subjects to walk the streets, regardless of their skin colour. But the disturbances had shown how very empty were the claims which had been made by kings, queens and colonial governors that the empire was some sort of far-flung family. Within a couple of years Macmillan’s government was proposing radical steps to tackle not the readiness of young white men to take up chains and knives, but the fact that so many people of a different colour were arriving in Britain.
The flow of immigrants had been made possible by one of the final gestures of imperial grandiloquence. The 1948 British Nationality Act had promised free entry to the so-called Mother Country for all Commonwealth and colonial subjects, evidence of the growing belief that an association created by
force might be turned into something more congenial. When 492 passengers and a dozen or so stowaways debouched from the Empire Windrush at Tilbury in June 1948 they came from Caribbean islands where children bore the first names of English heroes like Nelson and Milton and from schools where many had learned to sing ‘There’ll always be an England’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. One of them was a calypso singer, Aldwyn Roberts, who performed under the stage-name of ‘Lord Kitchener’.
During the 1950s they were followed by many thousands more and the first black communities had soon been established in the big cities. But, as the race riots demonstrated, the immigration encouraged by government was triggering social tension: minds narrowed as the empire shrank. The immigrants’ perfectly reasonable retort ‘We’re here because you were there’ made plain the double-standards, and when the 1961 total of migrants exceeded 130,000 – a much larger number than had been anticipated – the government buckled. The charming idea of equality between the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of a fast-disintegrating empire was abandoned. Macmillan’s Home Secretary blustered that the effect of the 1948 law had been to entitle one-quarter of the entire world population to enter Britain. (Did anyone ask quite how this had escaped the attention of the all-knowing officials in Whitehall, when the extent of British rule had been the boast of empire for the best part of a century?) A new 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act would now create a clear distinction between ‘authentic’ Britons and those whose skin was a different colour, its unambiguous intention being to stop new arrivals and to encourage those already here to go back whence they had come.
Like just about every other piece of immigration legislation dreamed up since, the law failed to curb mass immigration. Current United Nations forecasts project a UK population of over 70 million by 2050: when the 1962 Act was passed, it stood at about 53 million. The presence of significant numbers of people from one-time imperial communities has completely changed parts of Britain. The empire is not behind the British, it is living within them, for it has changed their very genetic make-up.
But the British have not found their one-time imperial identity at all easy to deal with. When the end of empire came, the easiest response for the British was to laugh at it. Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye and – with That Was the Week That Was – even the one-time imperial megaphone, the BBC, were delighted to oblige. Many of the leading perpetrators of the 1960s satire boom had been at schools intended to produce people to run the empire – Peter Cook claimed to have considered following his father into colonial officialdom in Nigeria, until he discovered that ‘Britain had run out of colonies.’
In one sketch Cook interviewed Jonathan Miller as the Duke of Edinburgh, returning from attending Kenyan independence celebrations:
PRINCE PHILIP: I was there in a symbolic capacity.
INTERVIEWER: What were you symbolising?
PRINCE PHILIP: Capitulation. Mind you, of course, I was very well received. Mr Kenyatta [first leader of post-colonial Kenya] himself came to the airport to greet me and shook me very warmly by the throat as I got off the plane.
INTERVIEWER: Of course, Mr Kenyatta was at one time imprisoned by the British, wasn’t he?
PRINCE PHILIP: Yes, well, that was when we thought he was a Mau-Mau terrorist. Now, of course, we realise he was a freedom fighter.
The satirists were lashing out at a world for which they had been told they had been educated, but which demonstrably no longer existed. They had breached a dyke, and pretty soon you could make any joke you liked about empire. Too many awkward questions otherwise.
It was coincidence that the withdrawal from empire marched in step with the increasing influence of the mass media. Could the concept of imperial rule have survived the scrutiny of the mass-media age? It seems unlikely. It was essentially a project which belonged to the ruling class, and the central ideological pretence of the electronic media is their claim to empower the masses. For sure, the empire glorified chancers, from pirates of the Caribbean to Henry Wickham, the ‘father’ of the colonial rubber trade: those who did well became rich and were garlanded with medals and knighthoods. But the tone of empire – the importance of the Crown, the significance accorded to local princes and tribal chiefs, the imperial honours system, the hierarchies of command and the very language of power – fixed it in a time before true democracy. It had been driven by a mixture of motives – greed and need, plan and accident, racial prejudice and missionary hope, strategic ambition and cynical calculation. But, however and whyever it grew, its subversive flaw was that, while the British boasted of their own long-held independence, the empire was built upon denying that very thing to others. As Lord Salisbury, the Conservative Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Secretary of State for India, once remarked, ‘if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made’. In that sentence he encapsulated the moral problem at the heart of imperial history. It promised freedom by denying it, and claimed to promote good government by rejecting self-determination. When in its later years it attempted to refine its purpose as a mere exercise in trusteeship, the British Empire acknowledged the seeds of its own irrelevance.
In the growing indifference of the early twentieth-century British to their empire, one senses how they had seen through the whole thing. At the end of the Second World War – a war fought ‘for freedom’ – they were given the opportunity to express a view on the empire and decided that they were simply not interested in continuing with it, thank you. In 1968, when Harold Wilson’s Foreign Secretary told the US Secretary of State that Britain could no longer afford to maintain a military presence east of the Suez Canal, the American was appalled. He could not, he said, believe that the British people had decided that ‘free aspirins and false teeth were more important than Britain’s role in the world’. But that was exactly what they had decided.
And yet the creation, protection, extension and use of their empire had been the preoccupation of the British for generations. The question of what duty we owed to those we colonized was one of the determining issues in forging modern politics. In some ways, the whole imperial experience shaped the British as much as it shaped the places to which they took their flag, determining not merely how they looked at the world but how they saw themselves, helping to define the Englishman and woman, setting the tone of the educational system, restructuring the armed forces, broadening (and narrowing) the horizons of their statesmen, consolidating the monarchy and creating a worldwide diaspora. It is true, but not particularly helpful, to remark that if it had not been the British doing the colonizing, it would almost certainly have been somebody else: it remains a fact of life that the strong abuse the weak. Some of the British behaviour was appalling and some of it was admirable, but if you had to live under a foreign government, it was better than many of the other possibilities. The British Empire had begun with a series of pounces. Then it marched. Next it swaggered. Finally, after wandering aimlessly for a while, it slunk away.
The British have spent the years since then alternately embarrassed and ashamed. The Germans seem to have managed to forge a new purpose for themselves, even though in recent history they have twice visited Armageddon on much of the world. An alternative route for Britain might have been for the country to throw in its lot with much of the rest of western Europe, in the organization which has now mutated into the European Union. After centuries of unhappy relations with continental Europe it would have required an astonishing conversion. But the timing was all wrong, anyway. When Winston Churchill first called for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’ in 1946, Britain had not even quit India. When the foundations of the Union were laid in 1951, the country still ruled much of Africa. By the time that Harold Macmillan applied to join the Community, President de Gaulle repaid British wartime sanctuary by excluding Britain: the excuse he gave in his memoirs was that he was haunted by the 1898 Fashoda incident (when he had been all of eight years old).
Had Britain joined the
European enterprise then, it might have developed into something more respectable than it has become. But to do so would have required the recognition that the British were little different to the neighbours. Instead the British have been cushioned from reality by the fact that, as the country has become a decreasingly significant figure in the world, its people have been able to live more and more comfortable lives. It clearly cannot last. Did the British allow their economic enfeeblement because, for so long, their empire gave them so many comforting illusions about their place in the world? Instead of recognizing that national wealth is born of work and enterprise, they basked in some stupid sense that they were born to rule – it is not so far from a sense that the world owed them a living. As their colonies slipped away, they had nothing with which to replace a vanishing sense of national purpose. And their openness to the rest of the world made the carcass of the Industrial Revolution easy pickings for others. They had entered the twentieth century in command of world trade. They began the twenty-first century struggling to compete and producing very little they could realistically call their own. Their car industry had more or less vanished, they had sold their electricity industry to anyone who would buy it, and even the water mains and sewers laid down by Victorian visionaries were now minor items on balance sheets produced in office blocks in the Ruhr. Even the great imperial sport of cricket, once governed by the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), is today run by a committee in Dubai.
The empire was Britain’s main international preoccupation for a very long time. But instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it. It is perhaps possible that this collective amnesia has nothing whatever to do with the country’s lamentable failure to find a comfortable role for itself in the world. But it seems unlikely. The most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again. If only the British would bring a measure of clarity to what was done in their country’s name, they might find it easier to play a more useful and effective role in the world.
Empire Page 31
