* An affection which lasted long into post-imperial times: Arabists dominated the Foreign Office for years. Urban, mercantile Arabs were another proposition altogether.
† Such a role has yet to exist, although one of the Sharif’s sons did become king of Jordan and another the king first of Syria, then of Iraq.
* The buildings are now occupied by the United Nations, from where officials of a dozen nationalities gaze down impotently as the city is colonized by Israel.
* Lugard was a true imperial figure. When he died – childless, like a surprising number of empire-builders – his memorial plaque read, ‘All I did was to try and lay my bricks straight.’
* He refused, for example, to let women attend his lectures, and wrote in his School History that democracy was still on trial in England: it would be the duty of the king to dismiss any government which planned to reduce the size of the navy or to give freedom to the colonies.
* I had assumed the Swizzle to be a figment of P. G. Wodehouse’s imagination, until I came across the memoirs of the colonial Governor Sir Hesketh Bell. When serving in Dominica in 1905 he was visited by the Duke of Montrose and a couple of other toffs. ‘I introduced them to the brand of West Indian cocktail usually known as a “swizzle”,’ he writes. Bell describes his version (evidently it came in several colours) as comprising half a wineglass of water and the same quantity of gin, half a teaspoon each of lime juice and sugar, a teaspoon of Chartreuse and a generous dash of Angostura bitters. He counted it one of the greatest blessings of the West Indies that a local shrub provided entirely natural swizzle sticks. ‘This implement, swiftly rotated between the two hands, transforms the cocktail into an icy, pale-pink foam which, when gliding down a thirsty throat on a hot day, seems to give a gleam of Paradise.’ (Bell, Glimpses of a Governor’s Life, pp. 80–81.)
* One of its best-known initiatives was a recipe for an Empire Christmas Pudding, allegedly supplied by King George’s chef. This mighty delicacy required, among other ingredients, 3 pounds of currants, sultanas and raisins from Australia and South Africa, sugar from the British West Indies or British Guiana, cloves from Zanzibar, further spices from India, brandy from Cyprus or Palestine and rum from Jamaica. Britain supplied the flour, breadcrumbs, suet and a pint of beer. The Irish Free State got a look-in as a possible source of the five eggs required.
* When the England manager visited the Australian changing-room on the first day the tactic was deployed, the captain refused to speak to him, saying only, ‘There are two teams out there; one is playing cricket, the other is not.’ It was a very long way from a commitment to ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game.’
* When a reporter asked him about his clothes, Gandhi replied: ‘You people wear plus-fours. Mine are minus fours.’ But was it really appropriate to answer a summons to Buckingham Palace in loincloth, sandals and shawl? ‘The King’, he said, ‘had enough on for both of us.’
† It kept at it for years. At Christmas 1947, for example, the BBC was hailing the Labour government’s foolish scheme to grow groundnuts (peanuts) in Tanganyika as ‘solid ground for hope, hundreds of miles of jungle cleared by science and the bulldozer with a real promise of a better life for African and European’. The scheme turned out to be a fiasco and was abandoned a few years later, at vast cost to the taxpayer.
* The fate of Empire Day testifies to the lack of interest. It limped on after the war, the movement’s publication shrivelling from lavish magazine to leaflet, until even Winston Churchill declined an invitation to write a message for it. In 1958 it was renamed Commonwealth Day, in which guise it still exists, marked by a service in Westminster Abbey each March.
* Many local practices were respected. ‘The Battas are not bad people,’ he once said of a local Malay tribe, ‘notwithstanding they eat each other.’
* At the end of the war, ‘the Tiger of Malaya’ surrendered, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. As the authors of the Oxford Companion to Military History remark, ‘it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that his principal crime was to have so humiliated the white man that his Far Eastern empires became untenable’.
* Or so he later claimed he had remarked. He became the first prime minister of an independent Singapore. The country had been declared a republic but there were some aspects of the monarchical system that never lost their charm for Lee: he kept the post for thirty years. His eldest son became prime minister in 2004, his younger son was a prominent general and wealthy businessman, and his daughter ran the National Neuroscience Institute.
* When a Labour party figure was asked why there weren’t meetings being organized to protest at the conflict in 1950s Cyprus he gave the response ‘Have you ever tried protesting to an empty hall?’
* Laudanum was a diluted form of opium, manufactured in India. Increasingly, many upmarket Indian restaurants try to mimic the style of the Raj – all ceiling fans and sepia photographs. The kitchens of some of the grander establishments have appropriated the abbreviations of empire. A ‘DC’ is a dish cleaner and an ‘OC’ an onion cutter.
Empire Page 40
