The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  The Cold War was an unwelcome distraction for the Labour government, not least because it acted as a brake on national recovery since sparse resources had to be channelled into rearmament. Labour had won the 1945 election with a visionary programme; its manifesto, Let us Face the Future, was a masterplan for a social and economic revolution designed to create a new Jerusalem. A bountiful state took responsibility for welfare and education, and the economy was to be revitalised through a mixture of public ownership, regulation by Whitehall and private enterprise. The philosophy which underlay this policy dominated British politics until the early 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher started a new and as yet unfinished revolution based upon the values of an unrestricted free market. Her adherents, like Labour’s supporters in 1945, were Utopians, believing that they had discovered a perfect system which would bring universal content and prosperity.

  The empire had been a peripheral issue during the 1945 general election. Labour did affirm that it would give self-government to India, but when George Orwell raised the issue at the hustings, he and it were politely ignored.4 Used to hearing sympathetic noises from Labour politicians, mostly on the left of the party, West African students in Britain threw themselves into the campaign in the hope that a Labour victory would bring nearer their countries’ independence. They were disappointed, and within a few years were finding it impossible to tell the difference between Labour and Conservative colonial policies.5

  This was unfair but understandable. Having set its heart on a new Jerusalem in Britain, Labour was busy setting up smaller Jerusalems in the colonies. This was the principal aim of Labour’s colonial policy which, in practice, differed little from old-style benevolent imperialism. Social justice mattered as much if not more than eventual self-government. ‘There is in Kenya a civilisation of the dominant race, supported by cheap labour, and that kind of society is intolerable,’ announced Creech Jones, although as Colonial Secretary from 1946 onwards he did little to change matters.6 He did, however, frighten white settlers in Africa and they were relieved when the Conservatives won the October 1951 general election.7

  The guidelines for Labour’s colonial policies had been drawn just before and during the war. Social and economic regeneration took precedence over schemes for self-government, although the two were ultimately complementary. The problem was that Britain’s tropical colonies were impoverished and backward. A commission of enquiry which had toured the West Indies shortly before the war uncovered a stagnant backwater: illegitimacy rates were between 60 and 70 per cent, venereal diseases were spreading and malaria was endemic. One in fifteen of the population of Dominica (notable for its cultivation of limes and colourful postage stamps) was infected by yaws, and the average annual income was £15. The remedy for such economic and physical debilitation was the Colonial Development Acts of 1940 and 1945, which offered grants and loans for road and bridge building, clinics, schools and hospitals and waterworks. An efficient infrastructure would, it was argued, prepare the way for economic self-sufficiency. It was axiomatic that the colonies could only govern themselves if they had the means to support themselves. Between 1946 and 1951, £40.5 million was distributed for improvements, but during the same period the Treasury insisted that £250 million earned by the colonies from their export trade was deposited in London to bolster Britain’s sterling reserves.8 It was a crazy situation; the colonies made do on a shoestring of government hand-outs while their real wealth remained idle in London.

  Treasury intransigence was compounded by Colonial Office folly. Grandiose, state-funded plans for the mass production of eggs in the Gambia and groundnuts in Tanganyika came to expensive grief through slipshod preparation and mismanagement. The latter consumed £40 million, for which the Tanganyikans gained 11,000 acres of tillable land, three cattle ranches and a tobacco plantation. Another government-financed venture, the Colonial Development Board, also foundered with no advantage to the colonies and great loss to the taxpayer. Two strands in Labour’s thinking contributed to these disasters. The first was the dogma that private investment in the colonies equalled exploitation, whilst enterprises underwritten by the state did not. Secondly, there was a feeling that carefully planned development of colonial production, particularly of foodstuffs, would save much needed dollars. Britain could import comestibles without using up precious dollar reserves, and colonial exports would augment them. In the end nobody benefited, and in the colonies there was a feeling that their economies were being manipulated solely to enrich Britain. This was true up to a point, but defenders of the government’s colonial enterprises argued that they would in time enrich the colonies involved.

  Business misadventures in Africa coincided with a sequence of domestic and international crises. In 1948 the Cold War entered a new and dangerous phase with the Russian annexation of Czechoslovakia, the blockade of Berlin and the start of the Communist guerrilla campaign in Malaya. Britain and the empire were already committed to supporting the United States, which, by the Truman Doctrine of March 1947, was now pledged to resist further Soviet expansion, whether in the form of direct aggression or conspiracy. A year later, Marshall Aid began to flow into western Europe to succour economies and populations which, if unassisted, could fall to Communism.

  The iron economic and military realities of the post-1945 world relegated Britain to the position of America’s junior partner. After a meeting with President Truman in January 1952, Evelyn Shuckburgh observed, ‘It was impossible not to be conscious that we were playing second fiddle.’9 Filling a supporting role did not come easily to the servants of a nation which had grown accustomed to being at the centre of the stage. They continued to think and act as if they were the policy-makers and agents of a great power. The most striking evidence of their attitude was the decision to proceed with the manufacture of an atomic bomb.

  After the termination of close Anglo-American cooperation in nuclear research at the end of 1945, the government went ahead with the construction of plant for the extraction of plutonium at Windscale on the Cumberland coast, which was judiciously renamed Sellafield after a nearly disastrous accident in 1957. In the meantime, the Air Ministry was mapping out a network of strategic air-routes, criss-crossing the empire and linking twenty-seven airfields built to take extra-heavy bombers.10 On paper, it appeared as impressive as its Victorian counterpart, the worldwide chain of naval bases and coaling stations. One projected aerodrome, at Karachi, was among those earmarked by the Joint Technical Warfare Committee for atom-bomb raids on sixty-seven Russian cities in an exigency plan devised in April 1946.11 The boffins had jumped the gun, for the cabinet had yet to approve the programme for making the bombs.

  Permission was granted the following October by Attlee, a small cabal of senior ministers and their technocrat advisers. The Prime Minister was worried whether at some future date the United States might revert to its customary isolationism, leaving Britain alone to face the Red army. Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, was sore about the condescending attitude of his American counterpart, and was determined to get the weaponry which would qualify him and his successors to speak as representatives of a great world power.12 The atom bomb had become the mid-twentieth century equivalent of a fleet of Dreadnoughts; the symbol of a global power’s determination to hold on to its status.

  Blunt in his speech and John Bullish in his demeanour, Bevin never doubted that he was the foreign minister of a world power, and acted accordingly. The former trade union leader’s common sense, robust opinions and pugnacity were judged sound by military men and diplomats.13 A portrait of George III hung over his desk, and there were times when he appeared animated by the spirit of Palmerston, whom he admired.14 Bevin’s chief task was to cooperate with the United States in the fabrication of a barrier of mutually dependent states in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, strong enough to withstand Russia. The first link, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was in place by 1949, guaranteeing the security of Western Europe.

  Both American an
d British strategists identified the Middle East as a region ripe for Soviet subversion and penetration. Its Cold War significance was twofold. From the end of 1947, America’s war plans depended on Middle Eastern bases for an atomic strike against the industrial heartlands of the Don basin.15 Secondly, the Middle East’s oilfields were taking up the spiralling demand for oil; by 1950–1, and after a period of rapid development, they were producing 70 per cent of the West’s requirements. Britain had traditionally been the dominant power in this region, and during the late 1940s America was prepared to underpin this arrangement for the time being for no other reason than necessity. In 1949–50, the Pentagon’s gurus estimated that, in the event of a global war, no American forces could be spared for the Middle East for at least two years, and so British and Commonwealth troops, ships and aircraft would have to hold the line.

  Whether they could undertake such a responsibility was open to question. During 1946 Attlee had been disturbed by the costs of Britain’s presence in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and he had contemplated a large-scale withdrawal. He was dissuaded by Bevin, who argued that the Russians would take over once Britain had departed. The chiefs of staff threw their weight behind the Foreign Secretary, threatening resignation in the event of any evacuation. Early in January 1947 Attlee caved in.16 Within a year, his government was forced to cut off aid to Greece and Turkey, and pull its forces out of Palestine. The trouble was that Britain could no longer afford a champagne-style foreign policy on a beer income, which was what the country had been reduced to by 1947. Two years afterwards, in the wake of a currency crisis and devaluation, the defence budget had to be cut by £700 million a year.

  Men were as hard to find as money. At the end of the war, there had been 200,000 British and Indian forces stationed throughout the Middle East. About half that number was considered a bare minimum (the Suez Canal Zone garrison was 80,000 in 1948) and that old standby, the Indian army, had disappeared in August 1947, when India and Pakistan became independent. Strapped for manpower, the government vainly tried to hire Pakistani troops.17 Another, more fruitful attempt to compensate for the loss of the Indian army was domestic conscription, something which once would have been considered unthinkable in peacetime. The National Service Act of 1947 corralled all eighteen-year-olds for eighteen months of military service, a period which was extended to two years in 1949 at the onset of the Korean War.

  An Indian barracks could be replaced by an African one. In December 1949, Attlee requested the Colonial Office and his chiefs of staff to explore the possibilities of raising a mass army from the African colonies. Their report took a year to draft, was pessimistic in tone, and reflected the prejudices of its compilers as much as the realities of the situation. It was calculated that Africa might yield 400,000 men, but of dubious quality. The black infantryman was poor value for money since he took longer to train, and could never attain the same level of ‘operational efficiency’ as his white counterpart. The African was also judged incapable of undertaking technical duties in the navy or RAF. Lastly, the deployment of black servicemen in the Mediterranean and Middle East might stir up a racial and political hornets’ nest, and they would have to be kept isolated from South African units.18 A black substitute for the Indian army remained a might-have-been of imperial history.

  The dominions were indisposed to take a share of Britain’s Cold War burden. An appeal for combined defence planning had met a lukewarm reception at the 1946 Commonwealth conference. Henceforward, attempts to hammer out a common and mutually supportive security policy were hampered by the presence of India and Ceylon, which then declared themselves neutral in the struggle between Russia and the West. Both dominions’ delegates were excluded from discussions on global strategy at the 1948 conference, and from the revelations of Britain’s Middle East plans in that of 1951.

  The response of the white dominions for requests for specific assistance were mixed and disheartening. During the 1948 conference, Australia’s Labour government made it plain that whilst it was anti-Communist, it had no desire to become an accomplice to the repression of popular nationalist movements, a line also taken by India. The burden of raising domestic living standards was the excuse given in October 1948 for not sending Australian formations to help fight the Communists in Malaya. The Communist victory in China in 1949 and the start of the Korean War radically changed Australia’s outlook. Menzies, elected in December 1949, offered ground troops for service in Malaya. They were declined, although a squadron of Lincoln bombers was accepted. ‘Australian troops are splendid fighters,’ observed a Foreign Office official, ‘but they tend to give trouble when they are not fighting.’19 Given that the Malayan campaign was based upon the winning of Malay and Chinese hearts and minds, it would perhaps have been unwise to introduce soldiers with a historic reputation for treating native populations roughly.

  The emergence of a Communist threat in the Far East between 1948 and 1950 naturally distressed Australia and New Zealand, although both were soon calmed by the 1950 ANZUS pact, which placed the defence of the Pacific under an American umbrella. This guarantee of local security would, it was hoped in Whitehall, persuade the two dominions to commit forces to the Middle East. They were needed more than ever in 1951, with the Persian oil crisis and the rapid deterioration of Anglo-Egyptian relations. The response was tepid. New Zealand and Southern Rhodesia were willing to lend a hand, with the former offering a squadron of the new Vampire jet fighters.20 In the event of a war, Australia and New Zealand promised in December 1951 to earmark a 27,000-strong force for Malta and Cyprus, but its despatch would ultimately depend on conditions in the Far East.21 Memories of having been left in the lurch in 1942 were obviously still strong in the Antipodes. Canada had nothing to offer, for its armed forces were entirely committed to NATO.

  South Africa’s position was equivocal. The anti-Communist credentials of the extreme right-wing Afrikaner Nationalist party, elected to power in 1948, were flawless, and it wanted American military aid. It was willing to offer Britain aircraft for the defence of the Middle East in an emergency. Nothing more was forthcoming, despite British arguments that Russia’s way into Africa would be through Egypt. The War Office had hoped for an armoured brigade at least, on the grounds that South Africans were temperamentally suited to mobile warfare. ‘They are “trekkers” by nature, and they get easily browned off if they are called upon to carry out the rather more steady and perhaps dull role of infantrymen,’ commented one British general.22 In 1953 Churchill’s government tried to tempt the grandsons of the 1899 kommandos to come north with an offer of the Simonstown naval base in exchange for help in the Middle East, but was unsuccessful.23

  It was left to Britain to man the thinly-stretched Cold War battleline in the Middle East, backed by a pocketful of promises of aid from the white dominions once the shooting started. Dominion units were not included in the exigency plans drawn up for a coup de main in Egypt in 1951, or a similar enterprise against Persia the same year.24 And yet, when Sir Anthony Eden heard the first news of Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in 1956, he took for granted the services of the New Zealand cruiser Royalist, then in the Mediterranean.25

  Between 1945 and 1951, the Labour government had engaged in the Cold War with all the resolution and, at times, bravado that might have been expected of a virile world power. Its conduct of foreign affairs contrasted strikingly with the tergiversation and nervelessness of the Conservatives in the years immediately before the war. Attlee’s ministers acted as they did because they believed that it was right to parry Russian expansionism, and they were prepared to overlook the vast costs incurred. These soared after the start of the Korean War and, it could be argued, seriously impeded the economic recovery which had been gathering pace since 1949.

  Throughout this period, Britain behaved as if it was an imperial power with global interests, even though the effort was back-breaking without the Indian army. Between 1949 and 1953, the Labour government and its Conservative suc
cessor imagined that the African empire might prove a substitute for India as a provider of men and material to sustain British pretensions.

  Above all, there was the new, multi-racial Commonwealth, in which both Labour and the Conservatives made a substantial political and emotional investment. The dividends then and after were scanty. Two non-white dominions, India and Ceylon, refused to become Britain’s allies in the Cold War; Burma left the Commonwealth in 1948, having become a republic, and was followed by Ireland, also now a republic, in 1949. India adopted a republican constitution in the same year but, after some legal acrobatics, remained a member of a Commonwealth whose nominal head was King George VI. The reason for permitting this anomaly was the fear that India, once outside the Commonwealth, might easily slide into the Communist block. Pakistan joined the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact in 1955, not as a favour to Britain, but as a result of having been seduced by America, which had come courting with a gift of military aid worth $25 million dollars. The white dominions had been indifferent to calls to defend the old imperial lifeline through the Mediterranean and across the Middle East. It now mattered less than ever; the safety of Australia and New Zealand was in American hands, as it had been effectively since 1942, and Canada was solely concerned with the Atlantic and Western Europe.

  In a sense the Commonwealth was becoming a surrogate empire. Indeed, when plans for colonial self-government finally matured, it was assumed in London that the former colonies would automatically join the Commonwealth. Whether this body would endow Britain with the same authority, armed strength and prestige it had enjoyed when it ruled a territorial empire and the dominions did whatever London decreed was open to question. And yet, few in mid-twentieth-century Britain chose to examine the nature and function of the Commonwealth too critically. A BBC talk, delivered after the end of the Commonwealth foreign ministers’ conference at Colombo in January 1950, suggested that the Commonwealth might be dismissed as a ‘sentimental, disintegrating club for Blimps’. Then, having said that the Commonwealth lacked both a unified voice on foreign affairs and material strength, the speaker turned a summersault and announced that it ‘has brought us close to the One World idea’.26 If this was the case, the sceptical listener might have wondered why two members, India and Pakistan, were at daggers drawn over Kashmir, and a third, South Africa, in the midst of constructing apartheid, a social order based upon the supremacy of the white race.