Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat

Farewell
the
Trumpets
, though complete in itself, is the third volume of a trilogy evoking the rise and fall of the Victorian Empire. It is the right-hand panel, as it were, of a triptych, and brings the story to a somewhat tattered conclusion – to the 1960s, when the British Empire which had once dominated the globe was reduced to a ragbag of islands and an amorphous society of independent States called simply The Commonwealth. I wrote the book, concluding my trilogy, in 1977, when I knew that many of my readers would still remember this decline for themselves, and had perhaps played their own parts in hastening or staunching it; today, two decades on, even the post-imperial generation is passing by, and the mass of the British people know little of their lost Empire, and care still less.

This volume certainly offers no objective picture of its last years. I have been concerned not so much with what the British Empire was or meant, as what it felt like – or more pertinently, perhaps, what it felt like to me, in the imagination or the life. For towards the end of the book I become an eye-witness, and immediately less reliable. I do not come from an imperial family, and could write about the nineteenth-century Empire with absolute detachment, but in the first half of the twentieth century few of us were immune to the imperial effects. Even my poor father was gassed for his Empire. Even my poor Uncle Geraint, fresh from his cello at Monmouth School, was whisked away to the Indian Expeditionary Force in France, and never came home again. Even I found myself, for a decade of my life, embroiled in the imperial mesh, as I followed the retreating armies of Empire from one after another of their far-flung strongholds. 
Most of us were imperialists in the end, however gentle our instincts, and hardly a reader of my generation will feel altogether aloof to this narrative, or impartial to its judgements.

The British Empire really ended when India, the greatest of all its possessions, achieved national independence in 1947, but there was a late coda to the long decline when, just fifty years later, the Crown Colony of Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of China. The ceremonies that surrounded this event in 1997 astonished and intrigued a world to whom the idea of an imperial Britain seemed an almost forgotten anachronism, but to me they seemed curiously unsatisfying. I went to Hong Kong for the occasion, and was disturbed by the sensation that there was nothing nobly conclusive to it: for the first time the British were relinquishing authority not to the inhabitants of a colony, but to a third Power – and an unreliable, volatile sort of Power at that. Were they right to go? Had they done their best for the people of Hong Kong? Would their association with the colony be remembered with admiration or with shame? Did it really matter anyway? Nobody really knew what it all portended: it suggested to me an
avant-garde
movie, when you leave the cinema puzzled and disturbed, not quite sure what the plot is all about.

So when the royal yacht
Britannia
sailed out of Hong Kong harbour with the Prince of Wales on board – past the massed and gleaming ranks of the skyscrapers of the richest of all the British Crown Colonies – with the royal standard flying and a warship of the Royal Navy in grey attendance – somehow the spectacle failed to touch me. The pipers might skirl a farewell, the soldiers march and ‘Rule Britannia’ echo among those Chinese hills, but it all lacked the old conviction – even the conviction of the long withdrawal. Mine is an aesthetic view of Empire, and there is no denying that as the flare of the imperial idea faded, and the nation lost interest, so its beauty faded too. It had not always been a pleasant kind of beauty, but it had been full of splendour and vitality, and when the Empire lost its overweening confidence, its sense of providential virtue, its forms became less striking and its outlines less distinct. My book, therefore, is sad without being regretful. It was time the Empire went, but it was sad to see it go:
and so these pages too, while I hope they are not blind to the imperial faults and weaknesses, are tinged nevertheless with an affectionate melancholy – 

The volume begins with Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and concludes with Churchill’s funeral. I hope my readers will discover in themselves, between these ceremonial book-ends, at least some of the mingled sensations of admiration, dislike, amusement, pity, pride, envy and astonishment with which I have watched and pictured the passing of the British Empire.

TREFAN MORYS
, 1998     

Q
UEEN Victoria of England went home happy on her Diamond Jubilee day, June 22, 1897. History had humoured her, as she deserved. The sun had shone all day—‘Queen’s weather’, the English called it—and there was nothing artificial to the affection her people had shown during her hours of celebration. She had passed in procession through London intermittently weeping for pleasure, and studded her diary that evening with joyous adjectives: indescribable, truly marvellous, deeply touching.

It was more than a personal happiness, more even than a national rejoicing, for the British had chosen to commemorate the Diamond Jubilee as a festival of Empire. They were in possession that day of the largest Empire ever known to history, and since a large part of it had been acquired during the sixty years of Victoria’s reign, it seemed proper to honour the one with the other. It would mark this moment of British history as an Imperial moment, a Roman moment. It would proclaim to the world, flamboyantly, that England was far more than England: that beneath the Queen’s dominion lay a quarter of the earth’s land surface, and nearly a quarter of its people—literally, as Christopher North the poet had long before declared it, an Empire on which the sun never set.

So the day had been a proud, gaudy, sentimental, glorious day. This was
fin
de
siècle
. The public taste was for things theatrical. Statesmen and generals were actors themselves, and here was the brassiest show on earth. Through the grey and venerable streets of the capital—‘the greatest city since the ruin of Thebes’—there had passed in parade a spectacle of Empire. There were Rajput princes and Dyak headhunters, there were strapping troopers from Australia. Cypriots wore fezzes, Chinese wore conical straw hats. English
gentlemen rode by, with virile moustaches and steel-blue eyes, and Indian lancers jangled past in resplendent crimson jerkins.

Here was Lord Roberts of Kandahar, on the grey Arab that had taken him from Kabul to Kandahar in his epic march of 1880.
1
Here was Lord Worseley of Cairo and Wolseley, hero of Red River, Ashanti and Tel-el-Kebir. Loyal slogans fluttered through the streets—‘One Race, One Queen’—‘The Queen of Earthly Queens’— ‘God Bless Her Gracious Majesty!’ Patriotic songs resounded. Outside St Paul’s Cathedral, where the Prince of Wales received the Queen in her barouche, a service of thanksgiving was held, with archbishops officiating and an Empire in attendance.

That morning the Queen had telegraphed a Jubilee message to all her subjects—to Africa and to Asia, to the cities of the Canadian West and the townships of New Zealand, to Gibraltar and Jamaica, to Lucknow and Rangoon, to sweltering primitives of the rainforests as to svelte merchant princes of the milder tropics. The occasion was grand. The audience was colossal. The symbolism was deliberate. The Queen’s message, however, was simple. ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people’, she said. ‘May God bless them.’

‘My people’. If to the Queen herself all the myriad peoples of the Empire really did seem one, to the outsider their unity seemed less than apparent. Part of the purpose of the Jubilee jamboree was to give the Empire a new sense of cohesion: but it was like wishing reason upon the ocean, so enormous was the span of that association, and so unimaginable its contrasts and contradictions. Some of its constituents were complete modern nations, the self-governing white colonies in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Some were Crown Colonies governed, in one degree or another, direct from London. Some were protectorates so isolated and naive that the very idea of Empire was inconceivable to most of their
inhabitants. At one extreme was India, a civilization in itself: at the  other was Ascension, a mere speck in the South Atlantic, uninhabited  by any kind of vertebrate until the British arrived. Every faith was  represented in the British Empire, every colour of skin, every  philosophy, almost every branch of human history. Disraeli had  called it the most peculiar of all Empires, and so it was, for it was a  gigantic jumble of origins, influences, attitudes and intentions.

The inhabitants of Tristan da Cunha (for example) had no government at all, and no written laws either. In India 1,000 British civil servants, protected by 70,000 British soldiers, ruled 300 million people in a sub-continent the size of Europe. In Cairo the residence of the British Agent and Consul-General was known to Egyptians as
Beit-al-Lurd
—House of the Lord. On Norfolk Island in the South Pacific citizens saluted each other with their traditional greeting ‘Whataway you!’ On Pitcairn the descendants of the Bounty mutineers were governed by their own President of Council.

In Mauritius that year crops were threatened by the plant pest
Cordia
macrostachya,
brought there in 1890 from British Guiana. In Zanzibar the entire economy depended upon the cultivation of cloves, taken there in 1770 from Mauritius. Scottish gorse thrived on St Helena, Irish donkeys in South Africa, English stoats, hedgehogs, rooks and mice in New Zealand. The descendants of Canadian convicts, transported to Australia, still lived in Sydney. Mr Dadabhai Naoroji was Member of Parliament for Finsbury. In Aden the Parsees had their Tower of Silence, in Cape Town the Malays had their mosque, in Calcutta race-horses were habitually called Walers because they came, with their jockeys, from New South Wales. The bubonic plague had recently been introduced to India, by rats on board a ship from Hong Kong.

When Major Allan Wilson and thirty-two of his men were trapped on a river-bank by Matabele tribesmen in Rhodesia in 1893, they sang ‘God Save the Queen’ as they mustered back to back to defend themselves.
1
When the gunboat HMS
Wasp
approached Tory Island off western Ireland to collect rates in 1897, the islanders revolved maledictive stones, and pronounced curses upon the vessel.
2
When the Bishop of Gibraltar was received in audience by
the Pope, the Pontiff remarked: ‘I gather I am within your Lordship’s diocese.’
1

If there was one characteristic diffused throughout this bewildering gallimaufry, it was an almost feverish enthusiasm. The mood of Empire in 1897 was
bravura
—‘an attempt’, as the painter Constable once defined it, ‘at something beyond the truth’. The British Empire was a heady outlet for the imagination of a people still in its prime. Its subjects were of all races: its activists were nearly all British. Through the gate of Empire Britons could escape from their cramped and rainy islands into places of grander scale and more vivid excitement, and since the Queen’s accession at least 3 million had gone. By 1897 they were everywhere. There were Britons that year commanding the private armies of the Sultan of Sarawak, organizing the schedules of the mountain railway to Darjeeling, accepting the pleas of runaway slaves in Muscat, charting the China Sea, commanding the Mounties’ post on the Chinook Pass in the Yukon, governing the Zulus and the Wa, invading the Sudan, laying telegraph wires across the Australian outback, editing the
Times
of
India
, prospecting for gold in the valley of the Limpopo, patrolling the Caribbean and investigating the legal system of the Sikhs—all within the framework of Empire, and under the aegis of the Crown.

All this the Diamond Jubilee reflected. It was truly the Empire in little, as its organizers intended: a grand and somewhat vulgar spectacle, reflecting a tremendous and not always delicate adventure, and perfectly expressing the conviction of Cecil Rhodes, the imperial financier, that to be born British was to win first prize in the lottery of life.
2

The origins of the British Empire, like the form of it, were random. There had been British possessions overseas since the days of the
Normans, who brought with them title to the Channel Islands and parts of France, and who presently seized Ireland too. Since then the imperial estate had fitfully grown. Sometimes possessions had been lost—the thirteen colonies of America, for instance, or the ancient possessions of the French mainland. Often they had been swapped, or voluntarily surrendered, or declined. Tangier, Sicily, Heligoland, Java, the Ionians, Minorca had all been British at one time or another. Costa Rica had applied unsuccessfully for a British protectorate, and Hawaii was British for five months in the 1840s.
1
During Victoria’s reign the expansion of the Empire had been more consistent. ‘Acquired in a fit of absence of mind’, the historian J. R. Seeley had said of it in a famous phrase, but in fact its piecemeal development had been conscious enough. Each step had its own logic: it was the whole resultant edifice that had an absent air.

Essentially most possessions were acquired for profit—for raw materials, for promising markets, for investment, or to deny commercial rivals undue advantages. As free traders the British had half-convinced themselves of a duty to keep protectionists out of undeveloped markets, and they were proud of the fact that when they acquired a new territory, its trade was open to all comers. Economics, though, must be sustained by strategy, and so the Empire generated its own extension. To protect ports, hinterlands must be acquired. To protect trade routes, bases were needed. One valley led to the next, each river to its headwaters, every sea to the other shore.

To these material, if often misty impulses were added urges of a higher kind. At least since the start of the nineteenth century the British Empire had regarded itself as an improvement society, dedicated to the elevation of mankind. Raised to the summit of the
world by their own systems‚ the British believed in progress as an absolute, and thought they held its keys.
AUSPICIUM MELIORIS
AEVI
was the motto of the imperial order of chivalry, The Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George—‘A Pledge of Better Times’. The British way was the true way, free trade to monarchy, and it was the privilege of Britons to propagate it across the world. Through the agency of Empire the slave trade had been abolished, and on the vehicle of Empire many a Christian mission had journeyed to its labours.

The desire to do good was a true energy of Empire, and with it went a genuine sense of duty—Christian duty, for though this was an Empire of multitudinous beliefs, its masters were overwhelmingly Church of England. Sometimes, especially in the middle of the nineteenth century, their duty was powerfully Old Testament in style, soldiers stormed about with Bibles in their hands, administrators sat like bearded prophets at their desks. By the 1890s it was more subdued, but still devoted to the principle that the British were some sort of Chosen People, touched on the shoulder by the Great Being, and commissioned to do His will in the world.

And of course, as in all great historical movements, the fundamental purpose was not a purpose at all, but simply an instinct. The British had reached an apogee. Rich, vigorous, inventive, more than 40 million strong, they had simply spilled out of their islands, impelled by forces beyond their own analysis. In this sense at least they were truly chosen. Destiny, an abstraction the imperialist poets loved to invoke, really had made of them a special kind of nation, and had distributed their ideas, their language, their ships and their persons uniquely across the world.

They were uniquely selected: were they uniquely qualified? Certainly by the end of the nineteenth century the British had fallen into an imperial posture, an imperial habit perhaps. Technically they were as well fitted as any to govern a quarter of the world. Their own country had escaped the social convulsions that shook the rest of Europe, to provide a model of liberal but traditional
stability. Their original mastery of steam, and all that came from it, had given them a technological start over all other nations, an advantage they put to imperial uses. The flexibility of their unwritten constitution was handy for an expansionist State. The semi-divine nature of their monarchy gave them a mystic instrument that was often useful. Being islanders, they knew more about the world than most of their neighbours: they possessed more ships than all other nations put together, and there were few British families who had not sent a man abroad, if not to settle, at least to sail a vessel or fight a foreign war. They were an immensely experienced people. Compact, patriotic, paradoxically bound together by an ancient class system, theirs had been an independent State for nearly a thousand years, and this gave them punch and phalanx.

Over the years they had, too, created an imperial elite to whom Empire was a true vocation. Everybody knew its members. They were products of those curious institutions, the English public schools. Within the last century the traditional schools of the landed gentry, Eton, Harrow, Winchester, had been widely copied, until all over England were the cricket pitches, the tall chapels, the cloisters and the dormitories of the Old School, whose friendships, slangs and values often lasted a man through life. These were the nurseries of Empire—as Sir Henry Newbolt wrote of his own school:

They taught a man to be disciplined, tough, uncomplaining, reserved, good in a team and acclimatized to order. The prefect system, in which boys exerted much of the school’s authority, gave a man an early experience of command. The cult of the all-rounder taught him to put his hand to anything. The carefully evolved code of schoolboy conduct told him when to hold his tongue, when a rule was made to be broken, and even something about the nature of love—for love between men, generally platonic but often profound,
was an essential strain of the imperial ethic. The stiff upper lip, the maintenance of appearances, the sense of inner brotherhood, the simple code of fair play—all these provided a potent ju-ju for the few thousand Englishmen who, in the 1890s, ruled so much of the known world.