The Drum and Sanders of the River blended adventure yarn with imperial homily. Filmgoers went home with a satisfying belief that their empire represented stability and equity, and was managed by brave, right-minded men who knew what was best for the natives. When the time came for Bosambo’s son and the young rajah to take responsibility for their people, their models would be men like Sanders who had taught them to love justice and truth. Indian audiences reacted differently; when The Drum was screened in Madras and Bombay, they poured out of picture houses and protested in the streets against a film which struck them as crass imperial propaganda. It was quickly withdrawn from circulation.
In retrospect, it is hard to imagine why this advertisement for benevolent imperialism was ever shown in India. In 1938, the Marquess of Zetland, Secretary of State for India, forestalled the making of The Relief of Lucknow, which he believed would inflame local passions. His intervention was discussed during a Commons debate on censorship towards the end of the year, when the Labour MP Emmanuel Shinwell mischievously suggested that the government might consider a blanket ban on all references to the Indian Mutiny in the interests of imperial harmony.11 On a graver note, there were allegations that the government had tampered with newsreels of events before, during and after the recent Munich crisis.
The newsreel and the documentary film were ingenuously believed to be records of fact. Ever since 1903, when the North Borneo Company sponsored a short film about its colony, there had been a steady stream of didactic, imperial documentaries. Many were commercially inspired, like a Cadbury’s promotional film of 1913 which traced the progress of the cocoa bean from a Gold Coast plantation to the chocolate factory at Bournville. As part of the wider promotion of imperial wares, the Empire Marketing Board formed a film unit in 1933 which produced Song of Ceylon and Cargo from Jamaica. These improving and earnest films, like those from the General Post Office and Imperial Airways film units, were loaned free of charge to schools and youth groups. Convincing this audience of the value of empire was very low on the Treasury’s priorities, and the Empire Marketing Board’s film unit soon fell victim to official cheeseparing. Colonial Office officials were secretly rather pleased since they considered the whole business of public relations and ‘selling’ the empire to be vulgar.12
* * *
The empire was ‘sold’ to the public in an unprecedented and unashamed manner by the British Empire Exhibition held at Wembley during 1924 and 1925. It was a splendid show in which the exotic and progressive aspects of the empire were carefully interwoven. The exhibition’s various pavilions and ‘palaces’ were spread across a two-hundred-acre site and were connected by streets with such names as Dominion Way and Atlantic Slope, which had been chosen by Kipling. The total cost of the show was £2.2 million, half of which was provided by a government keen to foster imperial trade. At the official opening of the exhibition in April 1924, the Prince of Wales promised his father, George V, ‘a complete and vivid representation of your Empire’ and an advertisement to the world ‘that the most powerful agency of civilisation had its heart set upon peaceful actions and the good of mankind’. In reply, the King extolled ‘the spirit of free and tolerant cooperation which had inspired peoples of different races, creeds, institutions and ways of thought to unite in a single Commonwealth.’
Twenty-seven million people visited the exhibition. They came away with an impression of a thriving, forward-looking and diverse empire, and memories of glimpses of how some of its more picturesque inhabitants lived. There were huge palaces of art and industry built in the most up-to-date material, concrete. The Australian and Canadian pavilions were in a restrained neo-Georgian style, an elaborately fretted mock pagoda represented Burma, and minarets Malaya. Most awe-inspiring of all was the reproduction of the great fortified gateway of Kano, complete with crenellations, at the entrance of the Nigerian exhibition. These buildings were inhabited: visitors stared at richly robed and bejewelled Asante princes guarded by native policemen in a tarbooshes, and Malay women spinning by a lakeside. West Africans accosted passers-by and offered them medallions inscribed ‘Drink More Cocoa’, for the show was also a massive trade fair.
It was, however, the glamorous rather than the commercial that captivated most visitors. ‘Dusky figures flit about the spot for all the world as if one was actually in Africa, instead of a few miles from Charing Cross,’ enthused one journalist. For all his excitement, he found walking from one pavilion to another rather tiring, and suggested that Zulu rickshaw boys might be provided for the footsore.13 Some blacks felt patronised. The Union of Students of Black Descent felt that their kinsmen were demeaned by being stared at like exhibits in a raree show, and were insulted by references to African sorcery and cannibalism in the exhibition’s guidebook.14
George V and his eldest son were closely identified with the exhibition and its objectives. Their exchange at the opening ceremony was a carefully crafted public statement of the humane and progressive ideals of an empire whose subjects were bound together by mutual goodwill and respect. These were appropriate sentiments, for the monarch had always been a symbol of imperial unity, a totemic figure who commanded affection and loyalty. Abstract bonds had to be strengthened, and so the monarch, or more usually his or her immediate kin, had periodically to reveal themselves to the distant peoples of the empire. This almost mystical concept was charmingly put into words by a Maori bishop, when he hailed the Duke of Gloucester during his tour of New Zealand in 1934: ‘Welcome O son, in whose face we see your royal father, mother and eldest brother, whose Royal and princely footsteps trod the broad billowy waves of Tangaroa…’15
It is unlikely that Indians had recognised much of his august mother in the bearing of the Prince of Wales during his tour of their country in 1877. He traversed the subcontinent, shot tigers, and hobnobbed with rajahs and senior administrators and officers in what was the first official royal tour of the empire. His son, George V, made what was the most magnificent in 1912, when he and Queen Mary, wearing their crowns and coronation robes, received the homage of the Indian princes at a huge durbar held at Delhi.
There was less accent on pseudo-Mughal pageantry and pomp during the post-war royal tours undertaken by the Prince of Wales. The future Edward VIII was sent off on his travels by Lloyd George, who saw the royal peregrinations as an exercise in political showmanship that would entrance the dominions and make their rulers more tractable. ‘The appearance of the popular Prince of Wales might do more to calm the discord than half a dozen solemn Imperial Conferences.’16 Up to a point the Prime Minister was right. The young prince was a decent, affable fellow whose good looks, youthfulness and unstuffy manner made a favourable impression throughout the empire. He had been well prepared for his duties; Churchill coached him in the art of public oratory, and Lord Stamfordham, the King’s secretary, lectured him on the seriousness of his new responsibilities. ‘The Throne is the pivot upon which the Empire will more than hinge,’ he intoned. ‘Its strength and stability will depend entirely on its occupant.’17
With this admonition hanging over him, the Prince embarked for Canada in August 1919. During the next nine years, he successively visited the West Indies, New Zealand, Australia, India, Canada again (in 1923 and 1927), the Gambia, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Uganda. He was fêted everywhere, and received local worthies, inspected guards of honour, opened public buildings and made the appropriate speeches with a cheerful enthusiasm that must at times have been hard to sustain. There were also those concerts of native music and displays of dancing which became commonplace features of all royal tours, and were popular with newsreel cameramen. When he ascended the throne in January 1936, Edward VIII knew more about the empire and its people than any of his predecessors. As Lloyd George had predicted, he had won hearts and had done what he could to ease ethnic and political tensions in Canada and South Africa. Given to occasional radical outbursts at home, the prince revealed himself a reactionary abroad, observing that Indians were unfi
t to govern themselves and openly sympathising with the white settlers in Kenya.18
It would be impossible to calculate what contribution these and other royal tours made to imperial cohesion. Documentaries like 50,000 Miles with the Prince of Wales (1925) and newsreels of his and other imperial progresses showed images of diverse peoples cheering and waving flags, united in loyalty to the crown and, by inference, the empire. It was all very reassuring, as were newspaper reports of facile and emollient speeches of welcome and thanks, which emphasised allegiance and affection on one side and paternal devotion on the other. No chance was missed to reiterate the common values upon which the Commonwealth and empire were based. They lay at the heart of the valedictory message sent to the Prince by Billy Hughes, the Labour prime minister of Australia: ‘The Australian people see in you all that our glorious Empire stands for, that deathless spirit of liberty, of progress, that distinguishes it from all other Empires, ancient or modern…’
A new token of the bond between the crown and the empire was the issue of special postage stamps by each dominion and colony to celebrate George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. The colonial issues shared a standard, dignified design which showed the King and Windsor Castle. A further mass issue marked the coronation of George VI in May 1937. By the uniformity of their designs, these royal stamps reflected the unity of the empire, and, incidentally, boosted the collection of other imperial issues, especially among the young.
Imperial stamps had recently undergone a change in appearance thanks to Sir Ronald Storrs. As governor of Cyprus, he ordered an issue of handsome pictorial stamps in 1928 to commemorate fifty years of British rule and provide ‘that publicity which the colony so sorely needed’.19 It was a brilliant idea; the Cyprus Treasury received a much-needed £20,000 from sales to philatelists, which may have encouraged other colonies to follow suit. In 1933 Sierra Leone issued a set of stamps to celebrate the centenary of the abolition of slavery with designs showing local scenes and, as an acknowledgement of benevolent imperialism, a hospital. Within a few years, every colony had abandoned the old utilitarian stamps that had just shown the monarch’s head, and replaced them with pictorial issues. These illustrated aspects of each colony’s distinctive peoples, culture, economic progress, landscape, transport and natural history. The iconography of imperial postage stamps embraced native huts, canoes, palm trees, tobacco plantations, frigate birds, crocodiles, railway bridges and harbours. Colourful and well-executed, these tiny vignettes of colonial life proved immensely popular with collectors and added considerably to the public’s knowledge of the empire.
Stamps were probably collected by Richmal Crompton’s William and members of his gang of Outlaws, as they were by boys and girls throughout the country at a time when the mature still urged the young to fill their spare time with ‘useful’, that is to say, improving occupations. When encaged in the classroom, the Outlaws endured history lessons crammed with facts about how the empire had been created, a form of indoctrination which failed in the case of William, who was convinced that the horrors of Calcutta’s ‘Black Hole’ had occurred in Blackpool. During geography, he and his fellows would have peered at and handled the empire’s products, neatly laid out in partitioned boxes, which were distributed to schools by the Empire Marketing Board. Birthdays and Christmas were marked by gifts of informative and entertaining ‘Empire’ annuals, one for boys and one for girls. In each, there was a mixture of adventure stories set against an imperial background and informative articles on such topics as Scouting in Fiji.
The empire had now become part of the ritual of British life. Families gathered round the wireless after Christmas dinner to hear the King speak. The seasons were marked by the comings and goings of various cricket and rugby union teams to and from the dominions. Two predominantly English and middle-class games had, from the mid-nineteenth century, gained a considerable following in various parts of the empire. By the 1920s, South Africans considered rugby union to be their national game, and it had also made great headway in Australia and New Zealand and, by a process of sub-colonisation, to Fiji and Western Samoa. Cricket had taken hold in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and the West Indies. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a pattern had been established by which dominion teams toured England during the summer, and in the winter English teams travelled to the dominions. These contests attracted enormous public attention, particularly the intermittent, hard-fought contests between English and Australian cricketers for the Ashes. National pride was deeply involved; when an English XI embarked for Australia and New Zealand in September 1932, the Spectator solemnly announced that they left ‘as Sir John Jellicoe sailed in August 1914, for the North Sea, freighted with the prayers and hopes and anxieties of the whole English people’.20
This comparison of sport and war was unintentionally prophetic. During the third test match at Adelaide in January 1933, Harold Larwood, a Nottinghamshire fast bowler, delivered a devastating sequence of ‘express’ balls at the Australian batsmen’s leg sides. Several Australians were struck on the body and two retired hurt. The 35,000-strong crowd exploded with rage and hurled abuse at the English team. The spectators’ surly mood was shared by the Australian Board of Control which sent a telegram to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) accusing the English team of unsportsmanlike, aggressive tactics. If they were not immediately abandoned, it would ‘upset friendly relations between England and Australia’. The MCC could not understand what the fuss was about, and there were hints in the British press that it was a case of sour grapes, since the English had at last found an answer to Australia’s formidable batsmen. In its reply, the MCC stuck by what was being called ‘bodyline’ bowling and implied that Australian batsmen lacked manliness. As the cricket correspondent of the Sphere noted, ‘Cricket may be a “nasty rough game”, but let’s go on playing it without the sob stuff.’21
Tempers eventually cooled down. Larwood continued to bowl ‘body-line’ balls, England won the Ashes, and the Spectator hoped the ruckus would not jeopardise future test matches, which were a ‘bond of union … between two sensible and friendly partners in the Commonwealth’.22 Those outside the arcane world of cricket were amazed that large numbers of Australians and Englishmen could become obsessed with and overheated by such a trivial matter during the weeks when Hitler took control over Germany and Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States. Whatever else it may have been, the bodyline brouhaha was an occasion when the affairs of the empire, albeit very minor ones, were at the centre of national consciousness.
On the whole, the British public was more familiar with the empire than it had been in any previous period. This is not to say that whenever people gathered in pubs, railway carriages or on the football terraces they fell to talking about the empire. At a time when the ordinary people of Britain were more concerned with knife-and-fork issues such as jobs, the means test and the prospects for industrial revival, such recondite matters as Indian constitutional reform or native policy in Kenya could hardly have been expected to stimulate much public interest. Nonetheless, through the wireless, cinema and lessons in school, more and more people were aware of the empire’s existence. They were also, and this was most important, conscious of the empire as a valuable asset of which the British people could feel proud. Its public face was always a benevolent one, and its subjects appeared to be contented and glad to be British. The collective imperial image projected on the cinema screen or brought into people’s homes by the annual royal broadcast was reassuring and, so to speak, exorcised any feelings of guilt about oppression and exploitation.
At the time, the public knew that the empire was changing for it was, after all, a force for human progress. No one knew how long the present era of transition would last or in what form the empire would emerge. Neville Chamberlain, who became prime minister in 1937, imagined that India would only achieve full independence by 1980 at the earliest. Churchill thought in similar terms and, in 1937, wrote to the Viceroy
, ‘I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.’ The strength and splendour of the empire were there for all to see as they watched newsreels of battleships steaming into Cape Town or Sydney harbours, conveying royal princes to their adoring subjects. But was the empire permanent? Probably not, but its possession was very comforting in a world which, after 1935, had suddenly become mutable and dangerous.
8
No Good Blustering: The Limits of Imperial Power, 1919–36
In 1924, Adolph Hitler called Britain ‘the greatest world power on earth’ and wrote, part in envy, part in awe of ‘British world hegemony’.1 His verdict, reached in a cell in a Bavarian prison and set down in Mein Kampf, was correct in all but one detail; Britain was the only global power in 1924. The pre-war European powers were in disarray: Russia was still recovering from seven years of civil war; France had been debilitated and was at the onset of an extended period of political instability; Germany had been gelded and truncated by the Versailles Treaty; and the Austro-Hungarian empire had been transformed into a patchwork of petty states. The United States, since 1890 the richest power in the world, had voluntarily isolated itself from the affairs of Europe and refused to divert its wealth into the warships, aircraft and armies needed for great power status. It continued to dominate its own backyard, Latin America, in much the same way as Japan, the only industrialised state in Asia, did the Far East. Britain alone had territories and interests everywhere and the means to safeguard them.
The backbone of Britain’s power was its empire. ‘Count the Empire as one, and we need call no other nation master,’ trumpeted the Morning Post in May 1919.2 No one, within or beyond Britain, would have questioned this statement, whose truth had been so recently demonstrated by the empire’s contribution to the British war effort. The empire had given Britain more than men and war materials, it was the essential ingredient in British prestige. ‘Prestige is what makes Great Britain a great power,’ an American analyst observed at the outbreak of the Second World War.3 He did not show precisely how this abstraction worked to Britain’s advantage in international affairs, but then neither did those British statesmen, commanders and diplomats who invoked the word ‘prestige’ whenever crucial decisions had to be made.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 55
