Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (39 page)

Poor Edward? Well, Lady B is no fool. She has watched India changing since the war, she went to the pictures last night and saw Rudolph Valentino in
The
Sheikh
, she senses the shifting attitudes at home—even among her own people, my dear, even among people who should know better!—and she doubtless sees in her husband’s provincial grandeur some element of pathos or even despair. Poor Edward! He will go no further: how far has he come?

But she will never admit the question, even to herself, and so as she passes through the gilded doors, between the flunkeys, her face is set in its usual expression of resolute hauteur, tinged with the querulous. It is not a happy face. It looks disdainful, but defensive too. It is creased by many emotions, none of them very becoming, and it mirrors the narrow conventions of imperial society. Does Captain C call his napkin a serviette? She always knew his origins were suspect, even if he was a Bengal Lancer. Does Mrs T speak rather too familiarly? She should remember her husband is only in Public Works. Surely that wretched man from Reuters has not been invited here? Oh dear, here comes Dr Chatterjee, one must put on a cheerful face one supposes, but really
what
a bore Indians can be—
‘Oh Dr Chatterjee, how nice to see you! Leila is here too? And how are those sweet children of yours?’

Yet she is a nice woman really, kind at heart, not arrogant by nature. The Empire has made her what she is: and so she is loyal to the system, sticks to its guide-lines and conforms to its preferences. If she ever has doubts about it all, she stifles them for Edward’s sake. She curtsies to the Viceroy as to her own household god, for her lares and penates are truly the deities of Empire itself: she knows no other, and if there is something unnatural to these attitudes and beliefs, if she is not really being herself at all, as she accepts without a word or a smile the footman’s offer of champagne—if Lady B is a totally different person from the Penelope Arabella Honoria hidden away behind that satin corsage and velvet sash, well, that is because by the 1920s the Empire itself is not altogether organic, and it is why those sour little lines of discontent show at the corners of her mouth, even when dear Edward, clearing his throat and bending creakily from the waist, introduces her to his old friend and valued colleague, that little bounder Arwal Mukkerjee of Justice.

They never gave up! Milner died in 1925, but his disciples lived on, and
Round
Table
, the magazine of his cult, still diligently pursued his several chimerae. A steady stream of imperial propaganda still emerged from the London publishers: books not so flamboyant as their prototypes of the New Imperialism, but still decorated with the crests of Dominions and Colonies, with chapter headings like ‘The Thread That Binds Our Race’, with maps to illustrate the variety of minerals within the British Commonwealth, with fanciful colour plates of Rhodes choosing his burial place in the Matopos, or Gordon serene above the black spearmen on his palace steps. Schoolchildren from Eton to Hackney Primary got a half-holiday on Empire Day. Boy Scouts still wore wide-brimmed hats derived from the Boer War, crouched around camp-fires murmuring incantations from Kipling, and shared a motto, Be Prepared, with the South Africa Police.
1
At Oxford the Rhodes Scholarships, financed by
Cecil Rhodes’ will, supposedly indoctrinated a constant stream of hefty young colonials in proper modes and values.
1
There survived, too, many of the institutions around which the New Imperialism had assembled before the turn of the century. The Royal Colonial Society had become the Royal Empire Society, but still had its great library of imperial books, its club rooms of Uganda
mvuli
or Australian jarrah, its enormous paintings of colonial occasions, its bedrooms decorated by the generosity of Colonel Wakefield of Montreal, or the Honourable T. Biggs of Adelaide. The British Empire League was active still, and the Victoria League, and the British Empire Union, and the Patriotic League of Britons Overseas, and the Empire Day Movement. There were active federationalists still about, like Lord Willingdon, Irwin’s successor as Viceroy of India, who hoped for ‘a great Imperial Federation, when we can snap our fingers at the rest of the world’. When, in 1933, the devastating ‘body-line’ bowling of Harold Larwood threatened to sour relations with Australia, the Dominions Secretary himself intervened to get him dropped from the England cricket team.
2

Most insistently of all, there was the Conservative popular Press, which had built its original fortunes upon jingoism, and remained shrilly faithful to the theme. The
Daily
Express
in particular, owned by the Canadian Presbyterian Lord Beaverbrook,
né
Max Aitken of New Brunswick, made an Empire Crusade the basis of its editorial policies, and very nearly split the Conservative Party itself. Beaverbrook’s panacea was fiscal. He wanted to turn the British Empire into a self-contained Free Trade area, surrounding it with tariff walls against the world outside, but allowing absolute freedom of commerce among all its constituent parts. The British were, with progressively less conviction, still wedded to the idea of universal free trade which had made them rich a century before: even in 1930,
83 per cent of imports paid no duty at all. Beaverbrook’s plan, which after all honoured
half
the old dogma, was accordingly very persuasive. It would not only restore the prosperity of the British, it was argued, it would give the Empire new meaning, and perhaps make of it at last the economic super-Power Joe Chamberlain had imagined. Immensely vigorous, infectious, with powerful friends and heaps of money, Beaverbrook founded his own splinter-party, the United Empire Party, and plugged his theme incessantly, until the phrase Empire Free Trade, if not its meaning, was familiar in every British household, and the impish face of the millionaire, remarkably like some whiskered rodent of the lumber camps, became the face of contemporary imperialism.

It never happened. Economically the Empire did help to cushion Britain’s decline, and trade with the Dominions and colonies increased in the post-war decades. Many of the great British corporations were now investing more money than ever in the tropical colonies: 70 per cent of New Zealand’s exports, more than half Australia’s and South Africa’s, came to Britain. The Dominions welcomed the idea of limited trade preferences—in particular they wanted Britain to put higher duties on foreign food and raw materials, lower ones on Empire produce, and in 1932 this came about. Anything so grandiose as the Empire Crusade, though, which really went far beyond economics, smacked to them of imperial centralism, relegating them to perpetually second-class status—how could their own infant industries, they reasoned, compete with Britain’s long-established factories?

Only the British themselves stood to gain by such imperial devices; and they were certainly no Crusaders, in the years of the Great Depression.
1

Still the Empire proceeded, by the force of old momentum. Most Britons still considered it, all in all, a force for good in the world,
and only a minority could conceive of its actually coming to an end. The diligent District Commissioners still went their dusty rounds, presiding earnestly as ever over their courts, accepting family appeals and settling tribal quarrels, attending to irrigation rights, school-book requirements, the state of the Kasungu road or the latest damned questionnaire from the Colonial Office. The fleets and armies were still disposed around the world: in 1934, of Britain’s 1,008 military aircraft, 580 were at home, 175 at sea with the Navy, 96 in India, 60 in Egypt, 51 in Iraq, 28 at Singapore, 12 at Aden and 6 at Malta.
1
In Singapore they had started work on a new base for the Royal Navy, to be the main centre of defence for the eastern and southern Empire, with dry docks for the greatest battleships, protecting batteries of 15-inch guns and an ancillary air base. The colonial careerists still looked forward, eagerly as ever, to their just rewards of CMG, KCMG or GCMG.
2
There were still colonial wars—against Arabs and Jews in Palestine, against Yemenis in Arabia, against Afghans, against Iraqis, against the Mad Mullah of Somaliland and a Burmese monk who claimed to be able to fly.
3
‘I am so glad that your son Kenneth is happy as Tetrarch of Galilee,’ wrote the King’s Private Secretary to Mrs Harry Blackburne in 1936, ‘and I only hope that he will not have such a difficult time as the only one of his predecessors in office with whose name I am familiar.’
4

The Empire even expanded still, and it was not until 1933 that it
reached its ultimate limit, the greatest expanse of territory ever presided over by one ruler in the history of mankind. The first acquisition of Victoria’s Empire had been the port of Aden, at the south-western corner of the Arabian peninsula: now, almost a century later, it was from Aden that the last imperial frontier was reached. Even in the 1930s southern Arabia was almost insulated from the rest of mankind—the world, suggested a local schoolboy in an examination, ‘consists of four parts, Aden, Ma‘ala, Hedjuff and Tawahi’. Among foreigners, only the British knew much about it, for in the course of the past century they had steadily extended their influence outwards from Aden. In Spheres of Influence, in Treaty Relationships, in Protectorates, they had gradually become masters of the south Arabian littoral, and established their suzerainty over its astonishing gallimaufry of petty sheikhdoms and sultanates—who until then, obsessed as they habitually were with feud and pedigree, had been generally convinced, like the schoolboy, that to all intents and purposes the world was them.

Perhaps the last true expression of High Empire was the system of treaties by which the British, in the 1930s, pacified the last refractory chieftains of the Hadramaut. It imposed at last a universal peace upon a part of the world where incessant warfare had been for centuries part of everyday life, where tribes fought tribe, village fought village, and even neighbours, animated by obscure hereditary vendettas, battened their houses against each other. The truce was conceived and concluded by a single British political officer and his wife. The British imperial manner was not greatly admired among the proud and wilful chieftains of South Arabia: they called it
kibr
Ingles
, English condescension, and they strongly resented its assumptions of superiority. Harold Ingrams and his wife Doreen, though, were of the new imperialist
genre
. He had fought in the war, she was an adventurous woman with a genuine empathy for other peoples and cultures. Posted by the Colonial Office to Arabia in 1934, when they were in the field the Ingrams lived as the Arabs lived. They wore Arab clothes, they ate Arab food, they laughed at Arab jokes, they responded to Arab poetry. Nothing could be more excruciating to your conventional Empire-builder, to whom all such conduct smacked of Soapy Sam or Going Native, especially when a
memsahib was involved: but the Ingrams really meant it, and by these means, in 1937, they brought peace to the Hadramaut.

Some 1,300 leaders signed the truce, from the rulers of powerful tribes to the brawl-leaders of village factions, and life in the Hadramaut was transformed by it. In one particularly argumentative hamlet a man emerged from his own house for the first time in eighteen years, and another, walking a few yards down the street, met his own sister for the first time since 1916. ‘Shut up,’ quarrelsome children were now alleged to tell each other in the street, ‘or I’ll tell Ingrams’, and so impressed were the chiefs by the potency of the peace-maker that several of them pressed their daughters upon him in marriage. (‘He doesn’t want your dirty daughters’, was the official interpreter’s habitual frank response.)

The origins of Ingrams’ Peace were soon to be forgotten, but still this was, in the afternoon of Empire, an achievement worthy of its noonday—worthier, perhaps, for it was done without bluster, with only a minimum of punitive bombardment, by a single servant of Empire and his wife. This is how the chiefs of the Al ’Alawi greeted this late demonstration of the Pax Britannica: