* * *
At the same time as Britain was shedding its empire it shed many of its inhibitions. In 1960 gambling was legalised and the crown lost its case against the publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, in 1965 official censorship of the theatre was ended; in 1967 homosexual acts and abortion became legal; and in 1969 divorce became easier to obtain. Britain appeared suddenly to have relaxed and the old imperial capital, London, became a byword for novelty, stylishness and, like the 1960s as a whole, sexual permissiveness. Nothing was more revealing of the collapse of the old order and its codes than long-haired pop stars and their imitators cavorting in jeans and that revered symbol of empire, the British army’s scarlet jacket. This fashion, like others of the period, came and went quickly, but not before there had been some surly comments from the old brigade. Worse followed as another sacred imperial totem, the Union Jack, found its way on to everything from knickers to shopping bags.
This impiety towards the past and its icons was one of many manifestations of the profound change which British society was undergoing. What amounted to a revolution in the ways in which the British people behaved, thought and regarded themselves had begun in the early 1950s. At first, its pace was slow and uneven, and no one could then have foretold either its future tempo or what its end might be. That this transformation coincided with the break-up of empire is important for two reasons. First, it encompassed a radical assault on traditional values and attitudes, many of which were closely associated with the empire and those who had made and ruled it. If their ideals were bogus, then perhaps the institution itself was rotten throughout. Second, as the pace of change quickened and the public, particularly the young, found themselves with more money to spend on diversions, it mattered little that Britain was a declining power. In any case, there were plenty of iconoclasts around to expose the hollowness of past glories.
The first catchword of the revolution in Britain’s habits and morals was ‘anger’, the common bond which united a handful of young 1950s writers whose reaction to the world about them was a mixture of boredom, impatience and rage. For them, mid-twentieth-century Britain was a stagnant society in which every form of human activity and emotion was stifled by an all-enveloping, self-satisfied, philistine conservatism. Respect for the past blighted the present and reduced progress to a snail’s pace.
Discontent was felt most keenly by the young and they, together with some of their elders, responded warmly to writers who articulated their own frustrations. Each new battering of the old order and its shibboleths won over new rebels, many of whom were already embracing those other subversive novelties of the time, American rock ’n’ roll, jazz and their burgeoning, home-grown variations. But in that seminal text of the period, John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, the major protagonist, Jimmy Porter, laments the lack of causes to take up. He is revealingly described as a man who ‘thinks he’s still in the middle of the French Revolution … He doesn’t know where he is or where he’s going.’ Without palaces and châteaux to storm, Porter and his fellows lashed out at the values and totems of the ancien régime. The empire was one. It was both an offshoot and an expression of the social deference and conservatism they despised. Moreover, it had been created and was now run by representatives of that class whose monopoly of power was the principal cause of the country’s present mental arthritis.
A glancing blow was struck against that mainstay of imperial ideology, the innate moral stamina and resourcefulness of the British race, by William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954). Golding’s party of schoolboys stranded on a tropical island do not, in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, hold on to their old standards and master their environment. Rather, they regress to primitive ‘savagery’, and are transformed into those imaginary South Sea islanders who might have been encountered by some young shipwrecked adventurers in a Victorian schoolroom yarn. This parable about the thinness of civilised values soon became a set text in schools, a pessimistic, mid-twentieth-century answer to R.M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island.
A real imperial superhero, Lawrence of Arabia, was assailed by an angry old man, Richard Aldington, in 1955. His biography exposed Lawrence as a fraud who lied to the Arabs, his friends and himself. His mendacity and self-pity therefore qualified him as a hero ‘appropriate … for his class and epoch’. Establishment defenders of Lawrence, his class and the achievement of his epoch denounced Aldington as a cad, and proceeded to discredit him in ways which were extremely caddish. Their stridency strongly suggested that more than one man’s reputation was at stake: by vilifying Lawrence, Aldington had called into question what he had stood for and the values of a country that still honoured his memory.10 It is unlikely that Aldington’s tirade would have had the same impact or response had it appeared after Suez.
The Suez war and the survival of the archaic patriotism which had made it possible are themes of John Osborne’s The Entertainer, first staged in April 1957. The play combined a lament for the old music hall and a jeer at working- and lower-middle-class jingoism. The entertainer of the title, Archie Rice (played by Laurence Olivier), is a broken-down but jaunty comedian, who laces his patter with sentimental songs. His views, like his act, belong to the age when music-hall audiences had roared out the chorus of ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. Rice also has a line in similar ditties:
The Army, the Navy and the Air Force,
Are all we need to make the blighters see
It still belongs to you, the old red, white and blue.
Those bits of red still on the map
We won’t give up without a scrap.
In the Suez ‘scrap’ Archie’s son, Mick, is killed, leaving his father devastated. The play ends with Rice going through his routine which opens with a burst of rock’n roll and is performed in front of a thin gauze screen behind which sits Britannia, unclad save for a brass helmet. Osborne’s empire, like Rice, is tawdry and on its last legs.
Another ‘angry’ playwright, John Arden, used an episode in the war against EOKA as the basis for Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance, which appeared in October 1959. Its setting is the 1870s, but references to ‘terrorists’ and ‘state of emergency’ indicate that the scenario is modern in all save the costumes. Four deserters, carrying with them the skeleton of a comrade, turn up in his home town which, like contemporary Britain, is wracked by industrial strife. The dead soldier had been shot in the back by a guerrilla, and his death had been the occasion of a mass round-up of suspects in which thirty-eight civilians were killed. Armed with a stolen Gatling gun, Musgrave is intent on taking a bizarre revenge on the townsfolk who, indirectly, sent the lad to his death in the name of empire.
The play’s moralising belongs to the mid-twentieth century. Musgrave speaks of having just returned from ‘a colonial war that is a war of sin and unjust blood’, and calls the empire’s enemies ‘patriots’. A parson-magistrate intones about Britain’s special ‘responsibilities’ – ‘They are world wide. They are noble. They are the responsibilities of a first-rate power.’ The words might have been Eden’s. Arden’s empire is a source of corruption, particularly of the working class who end up having to do its dirty work and dying for it.
Much in Sergeant Musgrave’s Dance belongs to the old, anti-imperialist traditions of the radical left. Although Arden and other avant-garde dramatists of the late 1950s and early 1960s hoped to command a working-class audience, those who watched their plays largely came from the middle class. Nonetheless, in the next two decades their works and their ideas entered secondary school classrooms via examination syllabuses. Television formed the staple of working-class entertainment, slowly edging out the cinema.
Imperial problems were aired in topical programmes such as ‘Tonight’ and ‘Panorama’, which often contained on-the-spot footage and interviews. This type of programme made the government uneasy, and at least once it attempted to assert editorial control over coverage of a sensitive colonial issue. At the beginning of March 1959, the governor of Nyasaland declared a
state of emergency in his colony, allegedly to forestall an uprising and attacks on Europeans. Desperate to dispel the idea that Britain was ‘striking against African nationalism’, the Colonial Office asked the BBC’s chairman, Lord Hill, for assistance. It was, the bureaucrats argued, ‘better to choose one’s own ground rather than participate in a programme which must be “balanced” either by a needling questioner or some opposition spokesman.’ In other words the Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, was either to deliver a self-justificatory monologue or else be interviewed from a prepared script. Lord Hill spurned this clumsy attempt to smother open discussion, and Lennox-Boyd was given the same treatment as any other minister whose policies were contentious.11 He put his case in the normal way on ‘Panorama’, and, the next evening, James Callaghan expressed Labour’s view on the matter in ‘Tonight’.
One explosive aspect of the Nyasaland affair had been the shooting dead of twenty demonstrators at Nkata Bay. An incident of the same kind, loosely based on the Amritsar massacre of 1919, but set in the present day, was the subject of the television play Conflict at Kalanadi screened by the BBC in January 1961. It concerns an uprising in a fictional British possession in the Middle East which gets out of hand because of a shilly-shallying official. The local army commander steps in, declares martial law, and his troops fire into rioting crowds, killing and wounding 700. Additional dramatic tension and political debate are provided by the officer’s daughter, just down from Oxford with a head full of fashionable, left-wing anti-colonialism. In the end the officer is dismissed after an official investigation. Serving the empire in the 1960s was a tough business and soldiers who did what they saw as their duty could expect no mercy.
Such fictional excursions into imperial and post-imperial conflicts were uncommon. Where the empire was concerned both the BBC and the independent companies preferred to stick to the safer ground of factual documentaries. After the shooting of sixty-seven blacks at Sharpeville near Johannesburg in March 1960, ITV took the bold step of cancelling the immensely popular ‘Double Your Money’ and replacing it with ‘Divided Union’, an hour-long report on South Africa. Soon after, ITV’s ‘This Week’ paid for the recently released Nyasaland political leader, Dr Hastings Banda, to be flown to London for a live interview on the programme, much to the anger of the Daily Express, which would rather not have had his views broadcast. At the end of the year, Granada offered a documentary on the Boer War as a part explanation of the present conflict in South Africa. It was called, strangely in the light of some of its incidents, ‘The Polite War’.
For the first time in the history of the empire, the British public were brought face to face with its realities. Moreover, at a crucial stage in African decolonisation, all involved were able to address the country directly. It is tempting to speculate on the course of imperial history had this facility been available eighty or a hundred years before.
Post-war film-makers continued to use imperial plots and backgrounds. There were, however, significant changes in tone and approach which suggest that the outlook of audiences had altered during the past twenty years. Out went district officers extolling the virtues of British colonial government, and thankful natives no longer blessed the king emperor. Even stiff upper lips were allowed to quiver occasionally. Nevertheless, the glamour and the action remained.
North-West Frontier (1959) is in many respects a run-of-the-mill tale of derring-do set in Edwardian India. But it contains modern undercurrents: there are religious massacres, racial intolerance and hints of nascent nationalism. A British officer (Kenneth More) rescues a boy rajah and, after a thrilling train chase, brings him to safety. Unlike his counterpart in The Drum, the prince admits that gratitude and shared perils will not make him the friend of Britain. As he grows older, he will be taught to mistrust the British; the forces of history are turning against the raj.
There is plenty of dramatic action in the visually stunning Lawrence of Arabia, (1962) but the hero is tormented by self-doubt, there is a suggestion of his homosexuality, and the script makes it clear that Britain is double-crossing the Arabs. Zulu is perhaps the most spectacular and accomplished of all imperial films. It tells the story of a ‘glorious’ episode of imperial history, the defence of Rorke’s Drift during the Zulu War, but its theme is the grit shown by ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances. The battle is stripped of its romance, and the audience watches the collision between brave men, black and white, who are thrown against each other for reasons neither attempt to understand. The mood is fatalistic: ‘We are here because there’s no one else,’ comments the colour sergeant. He fights, like everyone else, to save the lives of his comrades. No one mentions queen or country.
Winding up the empire was the subject of the taut and prophetic Guns at Batasi (1964) in which Richard Attenborough played a stiff-necked warrant officer training African troops on the eve of their country’s independence. A visiting Labour MP (Flora Robson), the patroness of a local black politician she had known when he had been at university in England, suspects that the NCO is at heart a racist and imperialist. He is, in fact, an unsentimental realist. He tells her: ‘Our good is as good as their good, and their bad is as bad as our bad.’ The atmosphere is sombre with hints of corruption and future military intervention in politics. Its pessimism was justified, for in 1966 an army coup unseated President Nkrumah of Ghana, Britain’s first African colony to receive independence.
The passing of empire witnessed assaults on its moral justification and mythology. Charlton Heston, who played General Gordon in what was the last spectacular imperial epic, Khartoum (1966), realised this was the end of the road for films of this genre. ‘The middle of the twentieth century is not much of a time for heroes,’ he told a BBC interviewer in 1969. ‘It seems that society’s interests are focussed on victims rather than heroes.’12 It was now the time for the underdogs of empire to have their say.
Imperial history from below had its début in 1964 with the first production of Peter Shaffer’s splendid and moving Royal Hunt of the Sun. The play tells the story of Pissaro’s conquest of the Inca kingdom of Peru in the sixteenth century, the overthrow and murder of its ruler, and the subjection of its people to Spanish greed and Catholic bigotry. An entire culture is systematically and pitilessly uprooted in the name of a higher civilisation. That this had occurred in South America was irrelevant, for events there were repeated throughout the world during the next two hundred and fifty years.
There was nothing new in the equation of imperialism with the exploitation of the weak by the strong. What was novel was the suggestion that not only were helpless people plundered, but their societies and cultures were torn apart in the process. As the British empire disappeared, one of its most cherished assumptions came under attack. The so-called superior civilisation which it had offered its subjects was nothing of the sort, and certainly not a justification for the wholesale destruction of other systems. Britain should feel guilt rather than pride for its imperial past. In November 1967, Dennis Potter, the left-wing, iconoclastic television playwright summed up the new orthodoxy: ‘Perhaps the noblest task of the popular historian should be to make us ashamed of our forefathers … now that the hilarious residue of the White Man’s Burden has been chased out of the reading books of schoolboys.’13
It was relatively easy for the post-imperial guilt complex to penetrate the public consciousness during the late 1960s. The image of empire, as daily projected in the television news, was one of iron-fisted coercion in Viet Nam, Moçambique, Angola, South Africa and, from 1972 onwards, Southern Rhodesia. The news from those countries where the Union Jack had been recently hauled down was also bleak and bloody. In 1966, the year of a Commonwealth conference in Lagos, there was a military coup in Nigeria and another in Ghana. 1967 saw the beginning of a three-year civil war in Nigeria and a new wave of military take-overs in Ghana and Sierra Leone. There were military coups in the Sudan in 1969, and two years later the preposterous General Idi Amin seized power in Uganda an
d began a reign of terror. For its former subjects, the inheritance of empire appeared to be political corruption, a succession of praetorian governments and internecine warfare. Not surprisingly, touring companies of British actors found African audiences very responsive to Macbeth, Julius Caesar and Richard III, all of which mirrored political life in their countries. It was natural in the successor states, and in some quarters in Britain, to blame these woes on the empire.
Faced with what appeared to be the failure of its imperial mission, Britain was also undergoing a re-evaluation of the principles which had formerly guided its rulers and empire. From the mid-1950s, social anthropologists had been busy analysing what was called ‘the establishment’. They uncovered and closely examined the world and values of an exclusive network which extended through London’s clubland, politics, the higher civil service, the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, the boardrooms of banks and large companies, the bench of bishops, the judiciary and the commanders of the armed services. Public school and Oxbridge education formed a common bond and had helped to mould a common humane, cautious, conservative outlook. Britain’s rulers were also the empire’s rulers. The establishment saw the exercise of power as a right, and its members had relished governing India and the empire since they had been able to do so without being unduly trammelled by expressions of the popular will.14
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 74
