Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (41 page)

Britishness had mutated very differently in Johannesburg, the
casus
belli
of the Boer War and still the fulcrum of South Africa. In 1928 Jo’burg was only forty-two years old, just elevated to the technical status of a city, but it was already a great metropolis. Financially it was still tied closely to the City of London, and the companies that mined and marketed its gold were registered in Britain: but the style of the place was now altogether
sui
generis,
and in its brief life it had developed from a seamy mining-camp in the veld into one of the richest, boldest, most striking and some would say nastiest cities in the world.

Everybody called it Jo’burg, and this somehow raffish nickname, with its suggestion of smoking-room camaraderie, or even confidence trickster, was just right for it. It was an unlovely town, but fascinating, being physically dominated by the yellowish tailings of the gold mines, visible like billious hillocks at the end of almost every street. Jo’burg was literally paved with gold, for its paving stones really were impregnated with gold dust, and since the days of the great Rand rush the mines had grown so large, so overwhelmingly the
raison
d’être
of Johannesburg, that it was impossible
to escape their presence. This was the greatest of all company towns. Monolithically in the centre of it stood the offices of the Anglo-American Corporation, the true power-house of South Africa and  the greatest mining corporation on earth: no need to put a sign on  those portentous offices—40 Main Street was quite enough, and  money-men everywhere called it Corner House.

Around the gold, then, almost as important to the Empire as it was to South Africa, revolved the life of Jo’burg: its shrewd stock exchange, its multitudinous banks, all the offices of its brokers, speculators, usurers, investment advisers, its host of white clerks and overseers, its anonymous army of black serfs, troughed like cattle in the barrack-sheds of the mining companies, or forlornly queuing in the evening light for the trains back to their distant townships. Johannesburg stood nearly 6,000 feet up on the veld, and its climate was brilliant in summer, raw in winter. It was a merciless town, and if President Kruger could have seen it in the 1920s, he would have grunted ‘Man! I told you so!’

For on the surface not much remained of the old Boer tradition. Few Afrikaner names appeared on the roster of the Stock Exchange, or in the membership lists of the Rand Club, brooding behind its brass-ringed pillars in Loveday Street. Still fewer hunted with the Rand Hunt, or watched the Test matches at the Wanderers’ Club. Uitlanders of many kinds, well outside the pale of the Volk, predominated in the pages of the
Rand
Daily
Mail
—Mr Justice Stratford at the High Court, Miss Daphne Kincaid-Smith in beige georgette at the Chambers of Mine Staff Dance, or Mr Sydney Rosenbloom, composer of the foxtrot
Shanghai
Butterfly
, ‘the first successful effort of the kind harmonized by a South African composer’. Edwin Lutyens had come from England to design the new Art Gallery, the Lancs and Yorks Society met on Wednesdays, Owen Nares was playing in
The
Last
of
Mrs
Cheyney
at the Empire.

Physically the city was unlike any other in Africa, and remote indeed from the peaceful market dorp of the Afrikaner preference. It was the second largest on the continent, smaller only than Cairo, and it was built not in the Afrikaner, nor even in any imperial, but in a brash neo-American style. Size and sizzle were its characteristics—big rich buildings, broad streets in an inflexible grid, a railway
passing through the heart of it, crossed by many bridges. Jo’burg was spared the heavy orthodoxies of a capital city—the South African executive buildings were at Pretoria, the High Court was at Bloemfontein, Parliament at Cape Town. This was simply a city of money, and looked like one: already, such was the momentum of its profits, three or four buildings had succeeded each other on some downtown sites.

Like most gold-rush towns, it abounded in anecdote and eccentricity. The sudden bend in Bree Street, so unusual in a city of rectangles, was said to have been caused by an assegai hitting the surveyor’s theodolite: alternatively it was suggested that two men had first surveyed it, a German working in metres, an Englishman in feet. Many of the original pioneers were still about. Mr Pritchardstill lived on Pritchard Street. Mr F. P. T. Struben, one of the two brothers who had first discovered gold on the Rand, was trundled out at municipal functions. Sir Abe Bailey, one of Rhodes’ brotherhood of tycoons, still boasted the telegraphic address
CORINTHIAN
,
JO
’
BURG
. Mrs Marie Decker, whose husband had founded the
Transvaal
Mining
Argus
in 1887, liked to remember being paid for birth and death announcements in turkeys and potatoes.

Strains of boom and shanty-town, too, ran through Jo’burg, and made the old-school Afrikaner, in for the day from the countryside, hasten home aghast to his farm in the evening. Crime was common, and increasing. Many a white man kept his black mistress. The South African Labour Party had its headquarters in the city, and there were frequent strikes. In 1922 one of them had assumed such proportions that the army was used to put it down and 153 people had been killed: it had been organized by a Marxist Council of Action, and even now, on Labour Day, when the Jo’burg workers marched in procession to the Town Hall, predicants and politicians of the Volk were horrified to observe that Communist banners proliferated.

For the Boers had not abandoned Johannesburg. They still thought in terms of Redneck and commando, they knew that Jo’burg was theirs by inheritance, and they planned for the day when Afrikanerdom would take over the city. The Broederbond, the semi-secret society of Afrikaner activists, was busy there already:
and though in this, the biggest city of South Africa, there was no daily paper in Afrikaans, still the Afrikaner population was increasing steadily, year by year—increasing in influence, too, as clerks rose to managerships, as yokels became technicians, and the first Afrikaner investors put their boots tentatively in the door of the Stock Exchange.

Besides, when they surveyed the humming, grasping city, they could reassure themselves with the truth that if its society was alien, many of its philosophies were home-grown. Jo’burg hardly subscribed to the trusteeship ideal of imperialism. Liberal progress was scarcely a preoccupation at the Chamber of Mines, or in the drawing-rooms of the Rand Club. In Johannesburg as in Pretoria or Bloemfontein, the Boer view of race was paramount. By the 1920s South Africa had virtually abandoned any pretence to racial synthesis, and the country was fast moving towards the ultimate negation of the imperial trust, apartheid—the absolute separation of the races, which was seen by its academic progenitors as a philosophical solution to a human predicament, but was interpreted by the populace as a licence for
baaskap,
boss-ship. Nowhere was the idea more welcome than in Johannesburg, for the whole economic and social structure of the city depended upon that vast helot community of blacks: blacks mined the gold, blacks cleaned the houses and watered the gardens, blacks without franchise, without unions, without even the right to move freely about the country, enabled the citizens of Johannesburg to live in the manner to which easy money had long accustomed them.

The Boers had founded Jo’burg, and the Afrikaners saw it still as theirs. The shape they foresaw for South Africa as a whole was already visible in this city of the uitlanders. The Colour Bar Bill, then going through Parliament, would finally separate the races in Johannesburg’s public places; the new Immorality Bill would deprive its citizens of an old imperial privilege, the right to sleep with partners of any colour. Mr Justice Stratford passed four death sentences in one week of 1928, one on ‘a native called Jim’, two on women. The civic authorities of Jo’burg were preparing to celebrate, for the first time, Dingaan’s Day, one of the great festivals of the old Afrikaner republics, which commemorated the Boer
victory over the Zulus at Blood River in 1838, but had nothing whatever to do with the British Empire.

So we see a city not, like Toronto, somewhat neurotically displaying its Britishness, but steadily deserting it. Once more the concentrated folk-will of the Afrikaners was proving too formidable for the flabbier convictions of the British. The Boers were on their way to winning the third and last of the Boer Wars, and Jo’burg had come a long way indeed since Lionel Curtis took office as its first Town Clerk in the brave days of the Kindergarten.
1

So the Dominions diverged, and there was no pretending either that the scattered peoples of the British stock were always in harmony. British Governments at home were at best bored, at worst infuriated by the average Dominion leaders, Haig’s ‘second-rate sort of people’, and often treated them disgracefully, ignoring them in their economic and strategic calculations, imperiously demanding their compliance when needed, and sometimes being downright rude. The only colonial leaders they really welcomed to their homes and councils were the cultivated statesmen of Afrikanerdom, and as the legends of Anzac and Vimy faded the Dominions became ever mistier, ever less interesting in the public mind.

As for the colonials themselves, they viewed the British still with an astonishing ambivalence. On the one hand there remained a profound sentimental loyalty to the
idea
of England, running much deeper than mere snobbery, and constituting even in the 1920s a powerful political energy. The colonials were stirred by England, responding almost despite themselves to its age, its grandeur, its continuity, even its damp and misty climate. Susceptible Newfoundlanders felt a sense of pride even in speaking its name. New Zealanders never out of Ruatoria thought of it still as ‘Home’. ‘If you were to ask any Canadian’, wrote Stephen Leacock, ‘“do you have to go to war if England does?” he’d answer at once, “Oh no.” If you then said, “Would you go to war if England did?”, he’d answer “Oh yes.” And if you asked “Why?” he would say, reflectively, “Well, you see, we’d
have
to.”’ Most of the Governor-Generals were still transplanted English grandees, and few of the colonials objected: they preferred it, feeling that Lord Y, the Duke of C or General Z elevated the tone of the place by his presence and impartiality, even if he
was
a bloody pom or limey.
1

At the same time they were, by and large, more realistic about the state of the Empire than were the policy-makers of the Mother Country. Even the New Zealanders, the most conformist of the colonials, complied with British wishes so obligingly chiefly because they were, economically, hardly more than an agricultural annexe of the United Kingdom. The Australians were often at loggerheads with British Governments over one issue or another. In 1930 their Labour Government even clashed with George V himself, when they insisted upon their own Australian nominee as Governor-General: the Irish had done the same thing, they said, but the King was shocked by the analogy—‘Does Australia, with her traditional loyalty to the Throne, wish to be compared with Ireland, where, alas! a considerable element of disloyalty exists?’

Certainly the politicians of the Irish Free State, who now entered the company of the Dominions premiers, had not abandoned their republican aspirations, while even the most Empire-minded of the South African leaders, even Smuts himself, never forgot their republican origins. And through it all the Canadians doggedly pursued, year after year, their object of absolute independence within the Empire, formal and actual: by 1923 they had signed their first independent treaty with the United States (though the Americans checked with London first, just in case) and by 1927 there was a Canadian Ambassador in Washington.

Their interests differed widely. On race, for instance, while the British fitfully honoured the criterion of equal rights for all civilized men, the Australians and New Zealanders were concerned to keep all Asiatics out of their territories, the Canadians had allowed no Asian immigrants since the turn of the century, and the South Africans denied their vast black majority any rights of citizenship whatever. On defence, while the British were now concentrating their strength in the Middle East, the Australians and New Zealanders saw Singapore as the most important imperial base, while the Canadians looked most anxiously to the Pacific. On economics the British were anxious to balance their own industries with the raw materials of the Empire, while the Dominions were only anxious to industrialize themselves.

The Imperial Conferences which met in London, and once in Ottawa, regularly during the post-war years, though they were commemorated always in dutiful group portraits, wing-collared and pin-striped in the garden of No 10, were in fact full of acrimony and exasperation, some of their participants very much disliking one another. Tact was seldom the strong point of colonial politicians. In 1926 the Prime Minister of Australia, Stanley Bruce, went to Canada: but though he was welcomed with the dignity peregrinating Prime Ministers expect, he did not hesitate to say just what he thought of that Dominion. No proper British subject, he said, could have much patience with the place! Canada called herself independent and self-governing, but when it came to trouble she relied on others to get her out of it! Why, Australia was spending 17/2d per head on naval defence—Canada was spending
8d!
‘How can Canada today’,
asked this pugnacious guest, bidding farewell to his hosts before boarding his ship at Vancouver, ‘possibly maintain that she is the equal of Australia,
my
great country?’