Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (40 page)

T
HE Great Government might still be great in the fastness of south Arabia: elsewhere its command of events was less than absolute, and within the white Empire its position was now distinctly equivocal, nobody quite understanding how it worked. Britishness itself had become a debatable condition. In Victoria’sday it had been embodied above all in the Monarchy, the distant, unfailing source of power and justice. The Crown was the gauge by which a man could claim himself to be British. It was the one abstraction that could unite the loyalties of disrespectful Australians, half-American Canadians and distinctly un-English South Africans. It was very, very grand, surrounded by a mystic sheen of tradition: even the Viceroys, Governors, Captains-General and Commanders-in-Chief who represented it in the field were but suggestive reflections of its splendour. When Queen Victoria went to Ireland in 1900, a photographer took a picture of Her Majesty boarding the royal yacht at Holyhead in Wales. It is as though some sacred relic is being conveyed to the other island, so hushed is the scene, so gravely respectful are the admirals, noblemen and ladies-in-waiting, so ethereal does the old lady appear to be, all in black, attended by her turbaned Hindu, as she is conveyed in her chair across the gangplank to the ship.

Now all had changed. The Monarchy was still immensely popular in most parts of the Empire, even in India, even in Ireland, but its mystique had faded. Britishness needed more than a George V to keep it whole, and by now even the most British of the overseas Britons were acquiring identities of their own.

To most Britons at home the colonials were still hardly more than transplanted fellow-countrymen, as English really as the Welsh, say, and to be treated with the same avuncular or schoolmasterly familiarity.
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To most foreigners, too, colonials still seemed to be Englishmen of a sort, linked by obscure constitutional duties toLondon, and subject ultimately, it was generally assumed, to the authority of Whitehall. The colonials themselves were confused in their sensations: some felt themselves truly British still, some considered themselves citizens of altogether new countries, and most, perhaps, felt an awkward ambiguity of loyalties, like the Welsh.

In hindsight one can see that they were, in fact, becoming more and more un-British. In physique, in character, in perceptions, they were becoming something else. The Britishness was wearing off. Even their languages were diverging fast. The Canadians now sounded much more American than English, betraying their imperial origins only by a peculiarly rounded way of pronouncingthe dipthong ‘ou’, and adopting all the latest New York slang only a year or two after it had hit Manhattan. South African English was only just English at all, having been heavily influenced by Afrikaans: its singsong delivery, its distorted vowels, its squashed up syllables, made it peculiarly repellent to English purists, and South Africans who came to London very soon learnt to disguise it, until the more practised of them could easily be taken for Liverpudlians. The Australian language, on the other hand, had acquired a truly noble robustness, its original Cockney long since matured into something altogether antipodean. If it sounded harsh in women’s voices, it could sound glorious in men’s, and it had a historical meaning: for its resolutely working-class tang, like its mordant syntax, were deliberate expressions of the Australian fresh start, with nothing posh or namby-pamby to it.
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Their national characters, too, had developed in different ways, pulled by different magnetisms. The British Canadians, though enterprising, hard-headed and successful, were generally agreed to be a less than stimulating people: living as they did in the shadow of the United States, they were torn between reflex and emulation, and emerged oddly pallid, their history generally anti-climactic, their very achievements, like their interminable landscape, tedious toexperience.
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The British South Africans also suffered from the proximity of a more vital people: though they occupied the most beautiful parts of South Africa, they never did achieve the intense comradeship of the Boers, found their own convictions flaccid before the zeal of the Volk, and lived through the years in a state of ingratiating compromise, seeming always like settlers in the land, never indigenes. The New Zealanders, by contrast, seemed absolutely of their soil: in some ways the most British of all the colonials, and certainly the most loyal to Crown and Flag, in other ways they were the most truly exotic, living as they did socialistically in their remote and beautiful islands, with high Alps to climb like Swiss, and geysers to bathe in like Icelanders, and the Antarctic itself hardly out of sight beyond the southern tip of their territories.

And finally there were the Australians again. They were always last, and generally loudest. Constitutionally the Canadians, since Chanak, had been more than ever the pace-setters of the Commonwealth, but in a subtler way it was the Australians who convinced the world that colonials were no longer so many English alter egos.
The Australian relationship with England had been sweet-sour from the start. Born out of convict transportation, at once envious and resentful of England, sentimental about blood-ties, self-consciously egalitarian, Australia by the 1920s had evolved a national character more pungent and aggressive than that of many much older States. The Australians were a belligerent people, intensely proud of their record in the Great War, and perhaps expansionist too—in 1933 they claimed a third of Antarctica as Australian territory. At the same time they were profoundly anti-heroic and iconoclastic. Suffering as they did from an ancient sense of inferiority, they coped with their own self-doubts partly by virile postures, but partly by a wonderfully dry and self-deprecatory philosophy of life.

Here is an example of it, expressed in a favourite Australian anecdote. There’s this bloke, see, sitting on the cliff up South Head ready to jump. ‘What’s up, digger?’ says the policeman. ‘Everything’, says the man. ‘The wife’s run off with a cobber of mine, the shop’s gone to the pack, the kid’s crook and I’ve lost my false teeth.’ ‘Gow-orn’, says the cop. ‘So I’m going over’, says the man, pulling his coat off. ‘Maybe you are,’ says the cop soothingly, ‘but let’s have a little talk about it first, shall we?’ So they have a little talk about it, and then they both go over.
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By now the greatest cities of the white Dominions were of international stature, richer and more powerful than any in Britain except London. Look for example at Toronto, in 1926 a city of 500,000, growing fast and very pleased with itself on the shore of Lake Ontario. One could not call it a handsome city, but it had a bristly character of its own, partly in assertion against the French-Canadian metropolis of Montreal to the north-east, partly in self-defence against the dynamic American cities to the south, where the
Chicago
Tribune
regarded the British Empire as Anti-Christ, and the Mayor of Chicago promised that if ever King George V came to his city, he would personally punch him on the nose.

The citizens of Toronto were mostly of Scottish extraction, and on the face of it the city was still very British—Union Jacks all over the place, the
Toronto
Globe
reverberatingly imperialist, the Lieutenant-Governor’s mansion rigid with formality. The cathedral was intensely Gothic. The University was ineffably Oxbridge. The policemen wore bobbies’ helmets. The Flag flew bravely from the Armoury, the headquarters of the Ontario Regiment. The presidents of the banks all seemed to be knights, and the shops were full of imperial familiars, Mazawattee Tea, Hovis, HP Sauce, Cash’s Name Tapes for going back to school, Andrews’ Liver Salts for the morning after.

It was ‘a nest’, the local historian Jesse Edgar Middleton suggested, ‘of British-thinking, British-acting people’, and Lord Bessborough, later to be Governor-General of Canada, once said that if there were two things Toronto understood perfectly, they were the British Empire and a good horse. When Royalty came to Toronto, as it not infrequently did, the city burst with loyal excitement: Canadian Scottish soldiers lined the streets in kilts, and the grand ladies of the town competed in the tastefulness of their entertainments. The most loyal citizen of all was one of the richest, Sir Henry Mill Pellatt, as fervently imperialist a financier as Rhodes himself. Casa Loma, Sir Henry’s vast Balmoralesque mansion on the outskirts of the city, was big enough for his entire militia regiment to parade in its cellars, and was intended specifically for the entertainment of visiting kings, queens and princes of the blood.

But there was a falseness to it all. Toronto was not, as visiting sophisticates might suppose, simply a transplanted industrial city of the British provinces, animated by the same parochial rivalries and conceits. It was a city of tremendous drive, made to rival those pulsating giants south of the border. It was much richer than any comparable English city. It had far more cars, it had many more telephones, and its commerce was run with a gusto that was authentically of the New World. The Historical Pageant at the Massey Hall that year was billed as ‘The Most Pretentious Pageant Ever Presented Under Canvas’, while the Royal York Hotel, about to be built on the Front Street, would be the Largest Hotel in the British Empire, with 3,000 bedrooms. The daily wireless programme
of the
Globe
listed sixty-four available radio stations, mostly in the United States: on an average day the paper contained two and a half columns of used-car advertisements, and four of Teachers Wanted.

Innovation, not tradition, was the true meaning of Toronto. It was here that Frederick Banting, working in the meticulously ivied halls of the University, discovered insulin. It was here that five-pin bowling was invented. It was here that Sammy Taft, the haberdasher of Spadina Avenue, designed the wide-brimmed fedora worn by all the best Detroit gangsters.
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The ferries that chugged to and fro across the lake, run by Mr Lol Solomon, were like pioneer steamboats of the West, with their homely names—
Bluebell,
Prim
rose,
Mayflower
—and their nonchalant skippers chewing at the wheel. The vast new station going up by the water-front was resplendent with the names of the western wilderness, Saskatoon, Thunder Bay, Moose Jaw, while Yonge Street claimed to be the longest street in the world, extending as it did from the centre of the city far out into the farmlands.

In short, Toronto was a city of the Americas. It was a self-made city, built on grab and enterprise. Its stock market dealt in mining shares, the pulp industry, wheat and other investments of the forest and prairie. Its first families were mostly local tradespeople made good. When Sir Henry Pellatt, who made his money out of electric light, was building his great castle on the hill, its progress was watched with a not altogether disinterested concern by Lady Eaton, wife of the dry-goods king of Toronto, from her own steepled mansion down the road—and stifled though her chagrin undoubtedly was, for she was thoroughly well-bred, still it must have been galling to have seen those baronial battlements rising ever more largely above the ridge.

Behind the façade of imperial loyalty there was a strongly nationalist impulse. Toronto people liked to boast of their Canadianness—Managed and Operated Exclusively by Canadians, a Canadian Concern, Canadian Conceived—and the more adventurous of the newspaper editorialists looked ahead to a Canada that was a Power in its own right, neither British nor American. To the truest Toronto
Britons this smacked of disloyalty. It was the thin edge of the wedge, and sometimes the traditionalists watched the progress of the city with dismay. Tradition was all-important, Jesse Edgar Middleton thought. ‘When a young man’s great-grandmother helped to embroider the colours of the Third York Militia in 1812, when his grandmother danced with the Prince of Wales in 1860, or when his grandfather was huddled in the square at Ridgeway or stormed the trenches at Batoche, his inner feelings are likely to be governed by his spiritual inheritance….’

The trenches
where
?
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The constant looking back to older forms was in fact the inner weakness of Toronto, as of Canada itself—its half-wayness, its hybrid kind, which flattened the impact of its energies, and blunted its self-confidence. By the 1920s Canada was respected everywhere, but fired no ecstasy. The price of goodness was ennui. It was a country without glamour, wrote John Buchan, presently to become its Governor-General: alive but not kicking, Rupert Brooke once said. ‘A community of moderationists’, is how one Toronto publicist described his city, and that sad to say was half the trouble, for the determined moderateness of the Canadians took the edge off their adventure, and made Toronto seem a more ordinary city than it was.

More insidious still was the feeling that Toronto’s Britishness possessed an air of parody, a Beachcomber touch. There was something comic to a civic aristocracy, rich, titled and consequential, so inescapably bourgeois as Toronto’s. There was something forlorn to the pageantry of the Toronto Scottish, panoplied in all the paraphernalia of their ancestry, but bereft of the true Highland cragginess, too pale, too pudgy. Sir Henry and Lady Pellatt were photographed at a Toronto garden party in the 1920s, and they really do look rather absurd. Behind them is a background of period elitism, a top hat here, a flowered cloche there, the glimpse of a satin shoe, somebody leaning lightly on his cane beside the lawn. Largely in
front loom the First Citizens of Toronto. They are dressed very  imperially, she in silk, feathers, furs and twisted pearls, he in the  truest St James’s uniform, from the bowler hat and the wing collar  to the silver-bound walking stick.

Alas, despite it all they look like cruel caricatures of all they wish to be, so heavy-jowled, so clumsy-looking, so defensive of expression, that they might be figures in some Wodehousian farce of English manners, or cartoon images of Imperialism.
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