The Rise and Fall of the British Empire

by Lawrence, James

  Britain was spared such upheavals; it carefully avoided being dragged into futile wars; its soldiers did not mutiny in protest against decolonisation; and the white settlers of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia did not explode plastic bombs in London streets. In February 1963, an anglophile American sociologist attributed the comparative orderliness of the dissolution of empire to the evolution of enlightened national spirit:

  [The] progressive moral transformation which was expressed in the willingness to renounce the empire has been manifested in the unwillingness to continue with the ancien régime. Respect for the rights of Indians and Africans is of a piece with the aspirations to improve the quality of life, the level of taste, to cultivate the whole capacities of the whole population, to make society more just, more efficient and more humane.1

  This was very satisfying, but not altogether surprising. For at least thirty years, politicians of both parties had repeatedly promised that the colonies were on course for independence, although they were evasive about precisely how and when it would be obtained. The officially-inspired public perception of the empire made it virtually impossible for any government to justify extended wars of repression fought to maintain British rule perpetually. When they proved unavoidable, as in Malaya, elaborate efforts were made to present the conflict in such a way as to reassure the public that Britain had the best interests of its subjects at heart. In the middle of the campaign, against the Malayan Communist partisans, the local commander-in-chief, Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, explained his purpose to Vice-President Nixon:

  What I am trying to do is convince all the native leaders and the native troops that this is their war, that they are fighting for their independence, and once the guerrillas are defeated it will be their country and their decision to make as to whether they desire to remain within the British Commonwealth.2

  It was perhaps fortunate that the state of television technology ruled out on-the-spot coverage of Britain’s final colonial campaigns. The British public did not share the disturbing experience of the American, which, from the mid-1960s, watched Viet Nam operations as they happened. What was shown stunned America, adding immeasurably to the scope and passion of anti-war protests. Ten years before, the British government had sensed television’s potential for swaying public opinion, and camera crews who visited war zones were carefully monitored. Distressing scenes, which might be interpreted as brutality, were excised. After the filming of a BBC documentary on Cyprus in 1958, the governor, Sir Hugh Foot, warned the Colonial Office censors to look out for any sequences which showed villages being cordoned by troops and their inhabitants spread-eagled against walls. Textual revisions were imposed: the opening lines ‘As a crown colony Cyprus jogged along until a few years ago’ were amended to ‘As a crown colony Cyprus went quietly along until a few years ago’. Presumably ‘jogging’ summoned up the image of a casual, unconcerned administration. Throughout the rest of the script ‘terrorists’ (EOKA) replaced ‘the enemy’.3

  The Cold War ruled out handing over power to Communists, although even Conservative ministries were content to make terms with nationalists of a pinkish complexion, as most were. Decolonisation policies were, by and large, bipartisan with Labour tending to favour speeding up the process. The Conservatives had to be more cautious because of right-wing elements in the party which mistrusted nationalists, or were sympathetic towards the white settler communities in East and Central Africa. This group found natural allies among former colonial civil servants who were unhappy about policies which paid too much heed to nationalists and too little to tribal rulers. According to Sir Mervyn Wheatley, an ex-governor of a Sudanese province, only ‘experienced administrators’ could really get inside the heads of ‘unsophisticated tribesmen’ and discover what they really wanted.4

  The behaviour of colonial politicians aroused misgivings and ridicule in equal parts among those of the outer fringes of the right. In 1950, the veteran Tory spokesman on colonial policy, Captain Gammans, was outraged by the substitution of Nkrumah’s name for God’s in the Lord’s Prayer, and for Christ’s in Hymns Ancient and Modern, as they were read and sung in the Gold Coast.5 Peter Simple, the Daily Telegraph’s mordant right-wing columnist, constantly mocked the rum aspects of Africa’s nascent democracy. ‘Spells, witch-doctors and the use of fetishes’ in the 1956 Gold Coast elections caused him great amusement.6 Mirth of another kind was provided by the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954 to defend the empire. Its upper echelons included a bevy of retired high-ranking officers of blimpish frame of mind, who were apoplectic about the decay of everything they had held dear. The nostalgic fantasies of upper- and upper-middle-class men and women who had talked about and thought on England as they sipped gin on colonial verandahs must have been often rudely and swiftly dispelled when they returned home. High blood pressure and enlarged spleens were not, therefore, surprising, and the League catered for both.

  Its programme looked back to a golden age when Britannia had ruled the waves and the world, and was largely negative. It was against Asian and African nationalism, coloured immigration, the United Nations, the present-day Conservative party, Harold Macmillan, Jews, and the United States, but favoured apartheid and getting back the empire. The League saw its tasks as shaking the country out of its liberal complacency, and most of its energies were spent on a series of stunts designed to publicise its causes and embarrass its adversaries. In 1958, League activists disrupted the Conservative conference, and got knocked about, and, in July 1962, interrupted a dinner given by Macmillan for the United Nations Secretary-General, U Thant. Like other fringe right- and left-wing groups, the League was extremely friable, and in time its few hundred members drifted off to embrace other outlandish and hopeless causes. Its farcical exploits achieved no more than a few headlines.

  Harold Macmillan was a constant target for the League, as he is for its mental offspring, the young fogeys of 1990s journalism. Prime minister from January 1957 until October 1963, he considered himself patrician, a believer in ‘one-nation’ paternalist Conservatism, and, on matters relating to the empire and his country’s place in the world, a pragmatic realist. During his term of office the following colonies and protectorates received independence: Gold Coast (Ghana), Malaya (joining with North Borneo [Sabah] and Sarawak to make Malaysia in 1963), Cyprus, Nigeria, Somaliland (with Italian Somaliland as Somalia), Sierra Leone, Jamaica, Tanganyika, Uganda, Kenya and the Gambia. Plans were also in hand for the independence of Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) and Nyasaland (Malawi) and the creation of the West Indian federation. Attlee apart, no other prime minister was responsible for such a sweeping programme of decolonisation.

  Right wingers shuddered. One, a Colonial Office bureaucrat, could not understand why the Conservatives had given way so easily on this issue:

  We could have stood up to the Americans. And we could have stood up to the Russians. And we could have stood up to the Labour Party. What we couldn’t stand up to was the Labour Party and the left wing of the Conservative Party.7

  Interestingly, he failed to mention facing up to local nationalists. What he and many others, especially white settlers in Africa, failed to comprehend was that since Disraeli, Conservatism had always been a flexible and opportunistic creed, free from the shackles of dogma which hampered its rivals. Tories no longer beat the imperial drum because its resonance no longer attracted votes, if it ever did. Following a course first set by Baldwin, the Conservatives lured the electorate with promises of prosperity and home-ownership. Imperial sentiments still crept into election manifestos, but as platitudes. The party’s 1950 manifesto. This Is the Road, spoke of ‘fortifying every link with the nations of our Empire and Commonwealth’, and that of October 1952, We Shall Win Through, proudly announced that, ‘The British Empire and Commonwealth is the supreme achievement of the British people.’ Solid patriotic stuff, but not a clarion call to hold on to the colonies come what may.

  There was a knot of right-wing MPs who, together with the Daily Exp
ress, and to a lesser degree the Daily Telegraph, made jingoistic noises and deprecated the speed with which the empire was relinquished. But Macmillan offered compensations to these disgruntled souls by an ambitious foreign and military policy designed to keep Britain in the front rank of world powers.

  As early as August 1955, it had been painfully obvious that Britain could no longer afford to spend 10 per cent of its gross national product on defence. It was then proposed to reduce the number of servicemen from 835,000 to 700,000 over the following three years. Suez intervened to play havoc with the Treasury’s arithmetic, but in January 1957 Duncan Sandys, the new Minister for Defence, began concocting plans for a far-reaching overhaul of strategy and expenditure. He worked from three propositions: defence was eating up cash which Britain could not afford; the Suez war had exposed the inability of Britain’s conventional forces to react quickly to a crisis, and in any case such adventures were a thing of the past; and it was now vital to have an independent nuclear force with a capability to strike at Russia. Like Labour in 1946, the Conservatives did not trust the United States to support Britain in every emergency, an apprehension which was justified by its conduct during the Suez war.

  Translated into strategy these premises produced a white paper in May 1957 which horrified the service establishment. The army, navy and air force were to be pruned to 375,000 men by 1962, and thereafter national security would rest upon a stock of thermo-nuclear weapons and missile systems to deliver them. The old naval stations in the South Atlantic, North America and the West Indies would be abolished, and forces east of Suez drastically reduced. Henceforward, Britain would simply not have the manpower to wage a large-scale colonial campaign, even if it discovered the political will. In 1959, national service was phased out, to despairing groans from the old guard who imagined that decadence and disorder among the young would now increase at a faster pace than ever.

  Sandys’s ‘new look’ armed forces were greeted with a mixture of rage and sulkiness by the defence chiefs. At one stage in the debate with the cabinet, they revived the idea of finding extra men from the African colonies, which assumed, interestingly, that these territories would remain under British control for many years to come.8 In the end, the service heads gave way and accepted the recall of legions, and with it the rolling up of that map which marked out, in fading ink, the old areas of Britain’s unofficial empire. Token forces would remain in Aden and the Far East until the late 1960s, when another government strapped for money, Labour this time, called it a day. As was so often the case with late twentieth-century cheeseparing, schemes for retrenchment made little impression on the budget; in 1963 the total cost of defence was £1,721 million, about a tenth of the gross national product.

  In May 1957, while ministers, generals, admirals and air marshals haggled over who should have what, Britain’s first thermo-nuclear bomb was exploded at Christmas Island in the western Pacific. Three more were detonated before November, and the government sanctioned the development of a long-range missile, Blue Streak. At the same time, Macmillan busied himself in restoring the old friendship with the United States, imagining, like his predecessors and successors, that the ‘special relationship’ would add a peculiar lustre to Britain’s position in the world. In 1957 Britain agreed to play host to American Thor rocket silos, and, in 1960, to allow USN Polaris-equipped nuclear submarines to use the Holy Loch base on the Clyde. Two years after, Macmillan persuaded President John F. Kennedy to give Britain Polaris missiles; the Blue Streak project having been abandoned as too expensive. The possession of an independent arsenal of hydrogen bombs and rockets kept Britain, and later France, within the great power league. It also provided a valuable electoral bonus for the Conservative party; Labour was split over nuclear weapons with a sizeable CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) faction demanding their renunciation. For a time during the early 1960s, Labour paradoxically found itself arguing for a non-nuclear Britain with old-style overseas commitments with conventional forces.

  So, under Macmillan’s adroit guidance, Britain shed imperial burdens but stayed a great power, theoretically capable of resisting nuclear intimidation by the Soviet Union, so long as America delivered the appropriate gadgetry. On the surface at least, imperial decline had not gone hand-in-hand with a complete loss of standing in the world, and the Conservative right wing could feel satisfied. Voters at large were more concerned with domestic knife-and-fork issues, and here Macmillan made the Conservatives the party of prosperity – and, his enemies would later allege, inflation.

  The late 1950s saw rising living standards throughout the country. ‘The luxuries of the rich have become the necessities of the poor,’ claimed Macmillan, who made it clear that they would get them thanks to his party’s economic policies. His part-patronising, part-exultant phrase, ‘You’ve never had it so good’, had the ring of truth and was a vote-catcher. What had happened at Suez and the likelihood that the empire would disappear did not unduly trouble the voters, nor were their consciences upset by Labour’s charges of oppression in Nyasaland and the brutal treatment meted out to Mau Mau internees at Hola detention camp. In the 1955 general election the Conservative share of the popular vote had been 49.7 per cent (its highest ever since the war), and, in October 1959 it was 49.3 per cent, giving Macmillan a comfortable victory.

  Although it would be hard to quantify exactly, it appears that the mass of British voters were largely indifferent to the loss of colonies whose names were probably best known by stamp collectors. No party had consciously adopted imperialism as part of its ideology. National self-respect had not been diminished by the slow disengagement from empire; rather it had been enhanced, since the process had been undertaken in the name of a higher morality and was being accomplished without excessive bloodshed or recriminations. Sidelong glances at how France and Portugal were managing served as a salutary reminder of the results of a policy of clinging on at all costs.

  There were small groups who regretted the passing of empire, but while sometimes clamorous, they carried little political clout. Few outside some London clubs and service messes were agitated by the knowledge that Britain could no longer lay down the law throughout the Middle East, or that white settlers in East and Central Africa were about to face a future ruled by black men. The settler lobby did, however, have tentacles which stretched into right-wing Conservative circles, and so Macmillan had to tread carefully over African policy if only to secure his base inside the party. One imperial diehard and ally of the settlers, the Marquess of Salisbury, resigned in March 1957 in protest at the return from exile of the Cypriot nationalist leader, Archbishop Makarios. The Marquess was not missed, the party did not fall into disarray, and the Archbishop became Cyprus’s first president in 1960, having agreed to allow Britain a base on the island, and thereafter he dutifully attended Commonwealth conferences.

  No jobs were lost, factories closed or investment opportunities frustrated as a result of the loss of the colonies. Britain’s exports to Commonwealth countries grew fitfully: in 1958 they totalled £1,240 million, in 1962 £1,193 million, and in 1969, £1,419 million. By contrast, exports to the countries of the European Economic Community (EEC) were increasing, standing at £2,634 million in 1969, although Britain had to wait a further four years for full membership. Inside the Commonwealth, patterns of trade were changing rapidly with members seeking new markets and sources of raw materials outside the group. Canada’s exports to the United States rose from £329 million in 1958 to £534 million in 1962. The new states which had replaced the old colonies did not automatically give Britain special trading advantages. In Africa only the Gambia and Malawi (ex-Nyasaland) were offering British importers preferential terms in 1967, together with South Africa which had left the Commonwealth six years before.

  This is not the place to trace the long, arduous and often exasperating route by which Britain found its way into the EEC. The first steps were taken in 1957, and in a sense were an admission that Britain was looking for a new role i
n the world. Imperial and global power would be exchanged for the next best equivalent, the leadership of Western Europe. This was understood by General Charles de Gaulle, who in 1958 had become president of a country which, like Britain, was losing its former international power as well as its overseas empire. He too wanted compensation for lost gloire, and was therefore unwilling to tolerate the presence of what he once called two cockerels in the European hen roost. As a consequence, Britain’s advance into Europe was more painful in terms of national pride than its retirement from empire.

  In some quarters, Britain’s approach to Europe seemed circumspect and half-hearted. The explanation lay in an unwillingness to make a clean break with the past and acknowledge that the Commonwealth, like the empire, was a dead letter. ‘A Conservative’ writing in The Times in April 1964 attempted to brush away the cobwebs by accusing his party and the country of having fallen the victims to ‘self-deception … on a grand scale’ in their appreciation of where real power lay in the modern world. The Commonwealth was ‘undefined and undefinable’ and three of its leaders, Nehru, Nkrumah and Makarios, were parasites: ‘They give nothing: they get any advantage that may be going.’ As for the residual and soon-to-be-redundant bases in Aden and across the Indian Ocean, they were ‘positions enabling us to reach places where we do not need to go’.9 West Germany and Japan flourished without bases and a Commonwealth, and so, presumably, could Britain whose economy now lagged behind both. This hard-nosed realism was too much for the author’s fellow Conservatives, who rallied behind the Commonwealth in the newspaper’s correspondence columns.