A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  When this all turned bad – strikes and riots in Scotland, a brutal war in Ireland, boycotts, walk-outs and massacres in India – the imperial nation, which Curzon boasted in 1918 had never been so omnipotent, threatened to fall apart. The seams tore open most raggedly at the periphery, where there were outright rebellions. In Ireland, Volunteers – called for not just by Unionists but by John Redmond’s Home Rulers – self-destructed precisely by virtue of their loyal service in Flanders. As they turned into the ghosts of Passchendaele and the Menin road, their deadly rivals, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who in 1914 had been an insignificant group of militants, swelled to the level of a real army. The abrasive – or expedient – gesture of bringing the most unscrupulous and belligerent of the Unionists, Sir Edward Carson, into the coalition government, triggered not just the Dublin Easter Rising of 1916, but, even more damagingly, the sense that the British government would never deliver Irish independence unless forced to do so. In the 1918 elections the remains of the Home Rulers were politically annihilated by Sinn Fein (the political wing of the IRA), committed to an immediate, free republic.

  There was also, for the first time, a serious Scottish Home Rule movement, fuelled in part by astonishingly disproportionate Scots casualties in the war: 26.4 per cent of the 557,000 Scots who served lost their lives, against a rate of 11.8 per cent for the rest of the British army. Ironically, it was the long Scottish tradition of being the backbone of the imperial army – from the American Revolution to the Indian Mutiny – that resulted in them being put in particularly perilous positions, or made the vanguard of some insanely suicidal lurch ‘over the top’ ordained by the likes of Haig or Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. But in Glasgow an eighth of the population was still living in single-room accommodation and the region’s economy was especially vulnerable to retrenchment in the shipyards. As men were demobilized, unemployment rose. The unions responded with demands for a shorter working week, to spread the money available as broadly as possible, and for the retention of wage and rent controls. When they got no joy a 40-hour general strike was called, culminating in a demonstration of 100,000 in George’s Square. A red flag was waved and the baited bull of the police lines charged. The demonstration was declared first a riot and then a ‘Bolshevist’ uprising. Mindful of having been caught by surprise in Dublin at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916, the government sent 12,000 troops and six tanks to occupy Red Glasgow.

  Elsewhere in the empire, despite Curzon’s complacency, all was not especially well. Or, rather, there were two empires, just as there were coming to be two regionally disparate Britains, affected in very different ways and degrees by the ageing pains of the classical industrial economy. Nearly 150,000 white troops from the empire lost their lives in the war. The extraordinary sacrifices made by the white Anglo-dominions – Canadians at Vimy Ridge, ANZAC troops at Gallipoli, South Africans at Delville Wood – may have made the families who suffered personal losses proud of the sacrifice of their sons, but also perhaps not unmixed in their feelings towards the empire that had taken them. After the Gallipoli debacle in 1915 it was understandable that enthusiasm for volunteering in Australia petered out dramatically, and there was intense opposition to conscription. And if it is undeniably true that, collectively, those nations saw their service as a spurs-winning moment on the road to recognition as imperial equals with the mother country, it is equally true that the non-British populations of Canada, and especially of Boer South Africa, were much less ardent in their support. There were recruiting riots in Quebec. In 1915 elections in South Africa demonstrated that, despite General Jan Smuts’s loyalist efforts, more than half the Boers were unreconciled to a war against Germany – a country that they associated with support for Afrikaner nationalism.

  Macaulay’s vision of a confederation of the educated and the self-governing had come true – but for white, English-speaking farmers, bankers and plantation owners. In the off-white empire, this reciprocity of gratitude and shared self-interest was a lot less apparent. Nearly 1 million Indian troops were in service, both in the ‘barracks in the east’ in Asia itself on the Western Front and, during the war, in the ultimately disastrous campaign in Mesopotamia, where General Sir Charles Townsend’s besieged army had ended up surrendering to the Turks at Kut el Amara in 1916. Official estimates of Indian losses were put at 54,000 dead and another 60,000 wounded. At least 40,000 black Africans had served as bearers and labourers with the British armies in France, as well as a larger force fighting in the colonial African theatre; needless to say, their casualty rates are impossible to ascertain, though likely to have been very high.

  At any rate, the African–Near Eastern empire was much shakier in its loyalty after the war than before. In 1918, partly driven by the accumulating momentum of post-Khalifa Muslim nationalism and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, a delegation of Egyptian intellectuals and politicians – the wafd – asked the British authorities to set a timetable for the end of the protectorate that had been in force since 1914. The high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Reginald Wingate, did not dismiss them out of hand but was not optimistic. Even this degree of cooperation was laughed off in London by the likes of Curzon as deeply unwise. When the rejection became known, the Egyptian government resigned and there were strikes and riots – precisely the same kind of demonstrations that occurred in India at the same time, and with even more tragic results. Some 1500 Egyptians were killed over two months of fighting between the British army and the nationalists. As in Iraq, an anti-wafd monarchy of convenience was now established on the understanding that Egypt would be ‘protected’, along with the Suez Canal, by British troops. From this moment of disenchantment and resentment countless evils sprang.

  Before he became colonial secretary in February 1921 Churchill had attacked the spinelessness of anyone compromising with the wafd, whom he clearly thought of as the IRA in tarbooshes. And this Churchill – the jaw-jutting, table-pounding belligerent defender of empire; the warmonger who couldn’t stop fighting; the defender of the Black and Tans’ brutalities in Ireland; the delusional, obsessive anti-communist who spoke of bolshevism as an international infection – is often said to be the ‘true’ Churchill, the aristocratic reactionary, reverting to type after his brief, uncharacteristic fling with social reform. Unionism is said to have flowed in his veins along with his father’s blood, his calls to strangle the Russian Revolution at birth springing from a deep well of sentimental class solidarity with the Russian aristocracy and the tsars.

  But these truisms about the post-First World War Churchill seem to be confounded by the bitter, incontrovertible truths of the rest of the 20th century. Looked at from the viewpoint of 2002, almost all of Churchill’s positions – on Russia, Ireland, the Middle East and even the issue of German reparations and the blockade put in place by Balfour to force assent – seem prophetic or optimistic. Often he would swerve from a hard to a soft line, but those changes were the result of replacing visceral belligerence first by reflection and then by magnanimous second thoughts. Having banged away in Lloyd Georgian vein about making Germany pay through the nose, he then made appeals for greater flexibility and leniency and opposed the blockade. In Ireland it was Churchill who negotiated a two-state solution with the Sinn Fein leaders Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, with whom he struck up a surprisingly positive personal relationship. The outcome was a southern Irish state, with a Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland remaining part of the United Kingdom. If an Irish Free State with dominion status was not Home Rule inside Britain, it represented at least the continuity of some sort of connection. It was an inter-Catholic Irish civil war in 1922 that would break that connection, kill off hope and, for that matter, take the life of Michael Collins.

  It may be that Churchill was reckless as well as tireless in calling for a commitment of men and money to try to reverse the communist revolution in Russia by supporting the pro-Tsarist White Army (certainly no force for democracy). But if he was deliberately goading British socialists
by harping on about the Bolsheviks as a dictatorial conspiracy, it turns out that this diagnosis of what had happened in Russia in October 1917 was exactly right. There was ample reason to feel gloomy about the fate of liberty in the new Soviet Union. By 1919 anyone could see that what had been destroyed was not just the Constituent Assembly but any semblance of multi-party democracy in Russia, although of course the perpetuation of the war gave the revolution’s leader, Vladimir Lenin, the perfect pretext to institutionalize his police state.

  In March 1921, Churchill, now colonial secretary, went camel-riding in Egypt with T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and the orientalist Gertrude Bell. At the Middle East conference in Cairo in March he was, perhaps, captivated by a mirage: the parallel development of Arab and Jewish communities side by side. The mandate that the League of Nations had given Britain for Palestine would, he said, include the setting up of a ‘Jewish national home’ as promised by the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, made a month before General Edmund Allenby’s army had taken Jerusalem from the Turks. But Churchill emphasized, perhaps naïvely, that this would not be an ‘imposition’ on the Arab population. (At Gaza in March 1921 he was delighted to see a crowd of Palestinians shouting support for Britain, but was spared the translation of equally enthusiastically shouted slogans such as ‘Death to the Jews’.) In time, Churchill fondly hoped the Arabs might come to see Jewish settlement as the germ of a modernizing transformation of the entire region. Churchill was unequivocally a Zionist, in that he believed the answer to the hatefulness of anti-semitism was (in time) a Jewish state and that the only legitimate place for it to be was the place that had given both people and religion their identity. His hope was that by establishing monarchies in Iraq and Trans-Jordan he could reproduce something like the de facto partnership, or at least acquiescence, that prevailed in India between princely states and the directly governed British centres of modernity like Bengal and Bombay.

  But that calculation, of course, was coming badly undone in India itself. When he and Fisher had converted the British fleet from coal to oil Churchill had opened the second great Pandora’s box (the first had been Gladstone’s decision to occupy Egypt in 1882). There were now all kinds of reasons to hang on tight in the Middle East – the investment in oil; the strategic protection of the Suez Canal, where a huge new military base had been constructed; the careful management of the post-Ottoman Arab monarchies, to ensure they didn’t fall into the hands of nationalists who might break the lifeline to India or even give support to ‘malcontents’ there; and perhaps Lloyd George’s crudely bullish insistence that, since Britain had won Palestine ‘by right of conquest’, it had the right to stay. The mandate confirmed this, but 40 years of British control would turn out to be neither happy nor particularly glorious.

  In 1922 the coalition, which had been fraying for a long time, finally fell apart. In the November election that year the Liberal party – and especially Lloyd George’s wing of it – virtually disappeared. Churchill himself went down at Dundee by 10,000 votes. Putting a brave face on it, he took himself and Clemmie off to the Riviera. A £42,000 advance for his war memoirs let him take a villa near Cannes, called the Rêve d’Or, for six months. There he padded around, looking at the Mediterranean, painting and writing The World Crisis (1923). He had no political allies to speak of, no party base, no constituency really. But under the umbrella pines, amidst dreams of gold, life, even a life outside Westminster, was not, after all, so very dreadful.

  ‘Bert’ Wells was looking at a very different stretch of water, and writing very different history. In 1918 he was to be found, often, at the semi on Marine Parade in Leigh-on-Sea in Essex that he had found for his lover, the writer Rebecca West, and their baby Anthony. Wells too liked strolls beside the water, but this was the murky, iodine-aromatic Thames estuary where the winkles tangled with the bladderwort and the scummy tidewater ebbed to reveal rust-brown mud. Wells loved this water and the cool grey sea horizon into which it flowed. But his thoughts and his history swept out beyond the edge of Britannia towards a vast oceanic expanse of space and time, the only history now that he thought worth writing: the history of the human species on the planet. The Outline of History, which he began to publish in serial parts in 1919, was subsequently bound into a single volume and, translated into most of the world’s languages, became not just by far the best-selling history of the 20th century but a book that was outsold only by the Bible and the Koran. By the end of 1921, 150,000 copies of the 1300-page, densely detailed book had been sold in Britain, and half a million in the United States. By the end of 1922, when Churchill was poring over his memoirs, Wells had already sold a million in many other languages including Slovene and Japanese.

  The Outline made its author rich, but more importantly it made him a global figure. This must have been deeply satisfying to Wells, who always intended his Outline to be a missionary statement as much as a narrative of world history. By beginning, not with the mists parting over the Channel to reveal to Caesar’s boats the outline of white cliffs, but with a small, apparently insignificant ball of matter spinning in deep space, Wells was trying to rewrite history as biology, geology and archaeology, but did not assume, like Macaulay and Churchill, the ever onwards and upwards progress of civilized humanity, diffusing its blessings to the rest of the world. On the contrary, those disciplines submerged that saga into a much bigger epic of the appearance and disappearance of species, cultures and, not least, empires. The tale that geology and archaeology told was one of illusions of immortality buried in the rock strata or beneath shifting wastes of sand. And for Wells the scientist – connected, as he liked to think, with Darwin directly through his teacher T. H. Huxley – survival, or at least the prolongation of the reign of Homo sapiens after the cataclysm of the war, depended critically on history supplying a chastening sense of limits. By stepping sharply back from the European–Atlantic scene, looking with equally measured gaze at Hittites and Mongols, Mayas and Ottomans, Wells hoped to deliver a sense of shared fate before it was indeed too late: ‘There can be no common peace and prosperity without common historical ideas.’ So in this global perspective Muhammad and his heirs are rewarded with 30 pages; the story of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which filled Macaulay’s volumes and which, in the Whig tradition, defined the point and purpose of British identity, was limited to a single, not very interesting paragraph.

  What was desperately needed now, Wells thought, was a new Enlightenment – a scientifically based, universally recognized common store of knowledge that would transcend the parochial, self-congratulatory mythic histories of kings, states and nations. With this new universal encyclopaedia would also go (since people seemed to need it) a generalized theistic religion: ‘religion itself, undefiled … the Kingdom of Heaven, brotherhood, creative service and self-forgetfulness’. This true, universal religion would make redundant the cruelties and barbarities that faiths like Christianity and Islam, claiming the monopoly of truth, had inflicted on each other. ‘Throughout the world men’s thoughts and motives will be turned by education, example, and the circle of ideas about them, from the obsession of self to the cheerful service of human knowledge, human power and human unity.’ On the basis of these agreed principles would come a new world government, imposed not by accumulators of power but by those who would be sworn to resist them: the disinterested, platonic, intellectual class (like him) whom Wells called, with deliberate inappropriateness, the ‘new Samurai’. He ended his Outline of History:

  War is a horrible thing, and constantly more horrible and dreadful, so that unless it is ended it will certainly end human society. … There are people who seem to imagine that a world order and one universal law of justice would end human adventure. It would but begin it. … Hitherto man has been living in a slum, amidst quarrels, revenges, vanities, shames and taints, hot desires and urgent appetites. He has scarcely tasted sweet air yet and the great freedoms of the world that science has enlarged for him.

  Could one be Bri
tish and think these heady, internationalist thoughts? What would be left of his father’s village cricket and the green on which it was played in Mr Wells’s new world order? Perhaps the young, at least, didn’t care. One of Wells’s old Fabian comrades, Graham Wallas, paid him the compliment he most treasured, that if he were now a ‘sixth form boy of fifteen as I was nearly sixty years ago it [the Outline] would change the whole world for me’.

  And there was at least one Etonian sixth former, Eric Blair (the future George Orwell), who read everything by Wells that he possibly could and who didn’t – for the moment – give a damn what happened to the village green.