The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  Not only was the old imperialism discredited and out of fashion, but its champions were revealed to have had feet of clay. The wartime strategic and tactical decisions taken by those imperial warriors who held high command came under critical scrutiny, and were found wanting. Haig, who had sincerely imagined himself destined by God to save the British empire in its time of extreme peril, was toppled from his pedestal. Yesterday’s heroes and prophets became today’s figures of ridicule. In his Eminent Victorians (1918), Lytton Strachey poked fun at, among others, Gordon of Khartoum. Collectively and in unflattering form, the living old guard of empire were embodied in the stout figure of Colonel Blimp, a walrus-moustached retired officer with diehard Tory views, created in 1934 by the Australian cartoonist, David Low.

  There were plenty of Blimps around between the wars, and they had much to say about such matters as holding on to India but, wisely, the Conservative party distanced itself from them and their opinions. The Conservatives no longer chose to beat the imperial drum, preferring instead to court the electorate through policies of low taxation, the extension of earlier welfare legislation, and home-ownership.1 The mixture worked; the Conservatives were in power throughout most of this period, and dominated the Lloyd George coalition and the 1931–5 national government. On the whole, imperial issues were pushed into the background by more pressing matters such as the economy and the quest for international security. When they were the subject for debate, party leaders went to considerable lengths to secure a crossbench consensus. All parties were consulted on the Montagu-Chelmsford proposals for India; Stanley Baldwin concurred with MacDonald’s Indian policy despite backbench Conservative growls; and the 1935 Government of India Act received all-party support.

  Many Conservatives were infuriated by these developments. In February 1931, Churchill expressed outrage at the sight of ‘Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a faqir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the Viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the King-Emperor.’ This and subsequent protests against the extension of self-government in India struck a chord with many Conservatives, and up to sixty MPs were willing to back Churchill in his campaign to reverse official policy. His efforts were to no avail, but they were reminders that, then and later, there was a vociferous minority on the right of the Conservative party for whom the empire was impartible and could somehow be maintained indefinitely.

  History could not support this view of empire. It had always been protean, undergoing frequent alterations in its composition and purpose. Public perceptions of the empire also changed. Addressing the Commons during a debate on the colonies in 1938, Ernest Evans, a Liberal MP, contrasted the popular view of the empire in his youth with that of the present day. Born in 1885, his boyhood had been a time ‘when the idea of Empire in the minds of the people was associated with the spirit and practice of flag-waving’. Now, the temper of the country was very different: there was a deeper knowledge of the empire, regret for some of the exploits of the past, and a sincere desire to develop the colonies for the benefit of everyone.2

  This selfless view of Britain’s duty towards its subjects was not new. It owed much to those late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelical and liberal idealists, who had believed that it was Britain’s mission to uplift, morally and physically, ignorant and backward races. To some extent, this vision of an essentially benevolent empire had been lost sight of during the aggressive expansion of the 1880s and 1890s, when empire-building had been a competitive activity in which economic and strategic advantages were the prizes. And yet, even when the jingoes roared the loudest, imperialism had not shed its moral principles. They continued to flourish, although their application was confined to the white dominions which enjoyed the freedoms of the mother country and, ultimately, achieved home rule.

  The post-war world was more receptive to this traditional concept of empire as an agency for regeneration and progress. Unselfish, paternalist imperialism had been revived by the League of Nations when it introduced the mandate system in 1920. Britain received former German East Africa, renamed Tanganyika, the Cameroons, Iraq, and Palestine, while New Zealand and Australia shared Germany’s Pacific colonies. Each nation solemnly promised to devote itself to ‘the well being and development of colonial races’ that had been placed under its charge. How these aims were being fulfilled throughout the empire was explained by William Ormsby-Gore, the Colonial Secretary, in a BBC broadcast in May 1937. His department was responsible for forty crown colonies and mandated territories with a combined population of 55 million. Their future depended upon their people mastering what he called ‘the art and practice of civilised administration’ through instruction and example. In time, ‘a native Civil Service completely and finally responsible for administration’ would emerge and step into the shoes of its British predecessor. This was both inevitable and welcome for, as Orsmby-Gore concluded, ‘even the best and most enlightened external rule is in the long run no satisfactory substitute for self-government in accordance with the traditions and local characteristics of one’s own people.’3

  The quality of British colonial administration was the source of justifiable pride. ‘The peoples of the colonies are not merely content to be His Majesty’s subjects,’ boasted Malcolm MacDonald, Colonial Secretary from 1938 to 1940, ‘they are positively happy to be his Majesty’s subjects.’4 This was how they appeared in the popular press. In April 1939, readers of Picture Post saw photographs of keen Indian schoolboys clustered round a blackboard in an open-air school. A month later the magazine showed pictures of chiefs from the Cameroons being taught how to govern justly, alongside a text that contrasted the humane enlightenment of the present British administration with that of Germany, which had ruled the colony before 1916.5

  The chiefs’ lessons were part of what MacDonald had called ‘an evolutionary process’ that was underway throughout the colonial empire. Official policy towards Africans was: ‘“to teach them and to encourage them always to be able to stand on their own feet”. That love of ours of freedom not only for ourselves but for others, inspires policy right through the Colonial Empire.’ Turning this principle into action would take time, and he added pointedly that Nigeria, then one of the most advanced colonies, was ‘not ripe for self-government’.6 In the words of one contemporary commentator on imperial affairs, ‘In relation to the European the African is still a schoolboy.’7 This was, at least, a marginal improvement on the childlike ignorance and wilfulness which had characterised him fifty years before.

  * * *

  When the black and brown races of the empire moved forwards, it was tacitly assumed they were also moving upwards. Mankind’s progress towards civilisation was still seen as the steady ascent of a mountain. Europeans had climbed most rapidly and were now close to the summit, if not astride it, while other races had not passed the foothills. This perception of the nature of human progress, together with the recent theories of social Darwinism, gave Europeans a powerful sense of racial superiority. While they may have adapted well to their environments, the peoples of Asia, Africa and Australasia manifestly lacked the scientific and technical skills which had propelled Europeans forward and, during the nineteenth century, made them masters of most of the world. By contrast, so-called backward or primitive peoples had been held back by an irrational attachment to absurd, even dangerous shibboleths. Hence the references, still common in the inter-war years, to Hindu practices as a brake on India’s advancement.

  The taboos and observances of African animists were commonly represented, particularly by missionaries, as obstacles to moral and physical improvement. For those at its centre, the heart of darkness often appeared impossible to illuminate. In 1921, a Kenyan missionary lamented the power which pagan beliefs still exercised over the minds of young natives. ‘A girl’, he wrote, ‘is a chattel under the care of her heathen mothe
r whose ideas of sex and relaxation appear unspeakably vile in the light of Christian teaching.’8 Just what he had in mind was described by a Kenyan magistrate who witnessed a female circumcision ceremony in 1944. Afterwards he wrote, ‘The whole business was fanatical and diabolical and left me wondering whether we were getting anywhere with the Africans.’9 Such experiences convinced even the most liberal-minded that the redemption of Africa was a sisyphean undertaking which would require many decades to accomplish.

  Popular travel literature emphasised either the backwardness of Britain’s colonial subjects or the quaintness of their customs and dress. An account of a journey through Nigeria in 1925, dedicated to shooting its wildlife, contained this revealing aside: ‘Here is manhood fully attained in respect to physical development, but possessing a mind still in the process of evolution, cognition being present to a limited degree.’ The author considered this state of affairs as the consequence either of ‘laziness’ or ‘incomplete brain development’.10 More usually, writers about Africa and Australasia concentrated on the exotic and, through a combination of condescending prose and glamorous photographs, portrayed the tropical empire as a sort of human menagerie inhabited by creatures who wore picturesque clothes or sometimes none at all. Material of this sort appeared regularly in the Illustrated London News and The Sphere, often in connection with a royal tour which made newsworthy an otherwise obscure colonial backwater.

  Popular anthropology of this kind was one of the mainstays of the American National Geographic Magazine, which produced features on Britain’s remoter colonies. These articles were lavishly illustrated and accompanied by texts that were largely anecdotal and written in a chatty journalistic style. In between accounts of tussles between the authors’ motor cars and rhinoceroses, the native population appeared, usually smiling and in their gala finery. Their qualities were described in a patronising manner and their place in the scheme of things was clearly defined: ‘The Baganda are a pleasant and courteous people, and quick to emulate the white man in clothing and ways of living. They train easily, whether as domestic servants, scouts, or seamstresses.’11

  Another familiar stereotype of the period was the comic black man of the stage and humorous magazines. He appeared frequently during the late 1930s in the Punch cartoons of Charles Grave, which were usually set against a West African background. These burlesques relied upon the appearance of the characters, who often wore travesties of European dress, and their pidgin dialect. In one, a stevedore working on a dockside encounters a rather swell-looking African in an ill-fitting white suit, battered homburg and wing collar, who is wearing sunglasses. The caption reads: ‘Why you wear dem dark glasses? Is der somethin’ wrong wid yo’ eyes?’ ‘No; but dey go wed me face.’12

  Images like this and the portrayals of native peoples in more serious books and magazines were indirect reminders that there was still a racial hierarchy within the empire. Those at the bottom of the pile were there because of a variety of shortcomings, mainly moral. They were, however, free to elevate themselves if they dropped values and customs abhorrent to their rulers and accepted their guidance. And yet when they took this course they were liable to ridicule and could not expect automatically to achieve equality with the white man and enter his society.

  Was the effort worth it? Thomas Birley, the Bishop of Zanzibar, whose diocese extended across Tanganyika, wondered in 1920 whether a black man was ultimately the loser when he attempted to transform himself into a ‘base imitation’ of the white. ‘Becoming conscious of what Europeans despise in them’, negroes ‘seek to “camouflage” themselves by feeble imitations of the “higher race”’.13 Those whose outlook was being changed through a Western education were also perplexed by what was happening to them, particularly their alienation from their roots. In 1916, the Lagos Daily Record suggested that educated Nigerians might learn something from the recent history of Japan, a nation that had absorbed much from Europe, but which had not jettisoned its indigenous religion, ethical codes and styles of dress.14 Such an appeal was understandable once black men began to find themselves frozen out of the company of whites who, in terms of accomplishment, might be considered their equals.

  The West Indian writer C.L.R. James thought they should, and explained why in a talk broadcast by the BBC in May 1933. It was the centenary of the abolition of slavery, and James, the descendant of slaves, described how his family had advanced itself through education. Listeners were reminded that the West Indian cricket XI that had toured Britain in 1931 contained teachers, businessmen, a cashier and a sanitary inspector, who represented the growing middle class of the islands. And yet the whites still argued that blacks were unready for self-government. West Indian loyalty to the empire was very strong, as had been proved in the First World War and would be again in the Second, but, James argued, ‘People who are governed from abroad often feel that they are considered in some way inferior, backward or immature, and that many of us resent.’15

  According to James, the West Indies’s future lay in the hands of its young men, who were then going to Britain to study. Some would have experienced a frosty welcome. None, whatever their qualifications, would have been allowed to study at St Mary’s Hospital, London, since its dean, Churchill’s doctor Lord Moran, had an aversion against all blacks.16 Black men were also debarred from enrolment at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.17 These were outstanding examples of what was then called the ‘colour bar’, a lattice fence of individual prejudices which excluded black and brown people from lodgings, hotels and places of public entertainment, notably dance halls, across Britain.

  The depth and violence of British racism had been revealed in the Liverpool and Cardiff race riots of June 1919. Both cities possessed unusually large black populations made up of seafarers, and recent arrivals who had come seeking wartime work on the docks and in factories. The experience of Irish and Jewish immigrants during the previous century had shown that tension was always worst in areas where they had congregated in great numbers, and where the struggle to find work was always intense. These circumstances applied in Liverpool and Cardiff as discharged servicemen entered the labour market, and they added to racial antipathy.

  In Liverpool, where the black population was estimated at about 5,000 a coloured men’s boarding house was attacked by a 2,000-strong mob. Many blacks fled in terror to the protection of Toxteth police station; one was arrested carrying an iron bar and a banner inscribed ‘Down with the White Race’, and others pleaded that they were British subjects and therefore entitled to justice. In Cardiff, where there was a community of negroes, Arabs and Somalis, the trouble started with a brawl between groups of black and white men close by the Labour Exchange. This led to a large-scale riot during which gangs rampaged through what the locals called the Nigger Town district, close to the docks. Mobs stormed black people’s homes, and some owners defended themselves with revolvers. An Irishman and a negro were killed. Reports of these disorders mentioned that very considerable animus was shown against black men who had married white women.

  This revelation aroused Ralph Williams, a former administrator in Bechuanaland, to a pitch of fury. He wrote to The Times and asserted that ‘intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror’ to every white man in the tropics.18 Sexual anxieties and jealousies were close to the heart of British, and for that matter American racism. For centuries, negroes were believed to possess a peculiar sexual energy, part animal and part on account of that legend which endowed them with larger penises than white men. No such sexual envy or accompanying animosity was directed towards the men of the Far East or the Maoris, who were thought not to measure up to Europeans, which may explain New Zealand’s fine record of racial harmony.19 Unease about the black man’s alleged sexual powers lay behind the laws in those parts of southern Africa that had been colonised by Europeans, such as South Africa’s 1927 Immorality Act, which forbade casual sex between the races. British actors who travelled to South Africa for the
making of the film Zulu in 1962 were lectured on the country’s sexual interdictions, which prompted Sir Stanley Baker to remark that several hundred Zulu women extras represented at least a thousand years in prison. Mixed marriages were allowed in South Africa until 1949, but those who contracted them faced ostracism and, for white women, the contempt of their own race. In 1915, when the Rajah of Pudukota married Miss Molly Fink, an Australian girl, he faced the combined disapproval of Austen Chamberlain, the Secretary of State for India, George V and Queen Mary, and forfeited any chance of ever being presented at court.20 Interestingly, at this time thirty out of forty-eight American states banned mixed marriages.

  It was axiomatic that the life and virtue of a white woman were sacrosanct throughout the empire, at least as far as the natives were concerned. The murder of a British woman and the abduction of her daughter by Pathans on the North-West Frontier in 1923 convinced one senior officer that Indians no longer respected British power.21 Convention did not extend the same protection to black and brown women. ‘Europe embraces the African woman, and calls the African man “a damned nigger”,’ was how Bishop Birley of Zanzibar described the distinction.22 It was also evident in that contemporary practice by which it was permissible for respectable publishers to illustrate books with photographs of bare-bosomed, scantily-clad African and Australasian women, but not near-naked white women. Needless to say, unclad black men were always coyly posed.