Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (55 page)

For some years of the war Cairo was the military capital of the British Empire. A British Minister of State was in residence there. Dignitaries and celebrities were constantly passing through, Noel Coward to the Duke of Northumberland, ‘Chips’ Channon the diarist to Cecil Beaton the photographer or J. J. Astor the owner of
The
Times,
and in 1943 Churchill, Roosevelt and the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, met in conference at Mena House beneath the Pyramids. In Cairo life was still richly lived. They served French wines and grouse in season at the worst moments of the war, they played polo most days over the river at Gezira, the brothels of Clot Bey flourished exceedingly and military offices, like all others, closed from one till half past five each afternoon.

It was in this crowded and frenetic city, full of power, indulgence and intrigue, that the most traditionally imperialist gesture of the war was made. Britain’s paramountcy in Egypt had always been based on force—acquired by invasion in 1882, consolidated by the perpetual presence in the country of strong British forces. By 1942 the omnipotent British Agent and Consul-General of Cromer’s day, the persuasive High Commissioner of the 1920s, though still
inhabiting the same Residency beside the river, had matured into a British Ambassador in the person of the bluff and overwhelming Sir Miles Lampson. Lampson was a gigantic man, 6 foot 5 inches tall and 18 stone in weight, and since his arrival in Egypt in 1934 he had become an inescapable figure of Cairo life, closeted with Egyptian Ministers, calling on the King, dancing, shooting, riding, gambling at the Mohammed Ali Club, learning to fly at Heliopolis airport, driving from appointment to appointment in the enormous Embassy Rolls, the best-known car in Egypt.

He was an old-fashioned, straightforward, robustly patriotic imperialist, and when war broke out he saw his duties as essentially imperial. Though Egypt was officially neutral, it was absolutely subjugated to the British Empire’s war effort: and though Lampson was ostensibly an Ambassador like many others, he was effectively the Satrap of Cairo. He believed that any means were justified to keep Egypt within the traces. Many Egyptians held different views, and prominent among them was the young King, Farouk, who was twenty-two years old and understandably impatient of British authority. He had been educated, like other kings of Anglo-Araby, to be a puppet: schooled in England and tutored by an Eton master, kept always beneath the eye of the British Embassy, he was only just an independent monarch at all, but held his throne on sufferance. He was, however, far from subservient. His entourage was chiefly Italian, at a time when the British were at war with Italy, he lived a life of louche dissipation in his Abdin Palace in the heart of Cairo, or at Monza beside the sea at Alexandria, and his devotion to the imperial cause was distinctly fragile.

Lampson, who habitually called him ‘the boy’, treated him first with condescension, later with contempt, and the King responded predictably, by snubbing him, deliberately misunderstanding him, or keeping him waiting for appointments. Lampson was enormous, and very strong: the King was smallish, and fat. Lampson was a man of the past, a survivor of an all-powerful Britain; Farouk was a young man of modernist instincts, amoral, materialistic, who had perhaps sensed more quickly than the Ambassador himself the decline of British power. The two men naturally detested each other, with equal reason on either side, and when in 1942 King Farouk determined
to appoint a new Egyptian Government more amenable to his own views, but less acceptable to the British, Lampson decided it could not be tolerated. Rommel seemed about to break through the British positions in the western desert and advance upon Cairo: at such a moment Lampson felt it within his authority to depose the King of Egypt himself, if British interests demanded it.

It so happened that among the British officials in Cairo, working in the propaganda department, was Walter Monckton, the lawyer who had, six years before, drafted the instrument of abdication for King Edward VIII. He was now instructed to draw up a similar document for Farouk, the king of an ostensibly independent Egypt. Farouk was to be sent an ultimatum demanding the appointment of an administration more favourable to the British. He was given until 6 p.m. on the evening of February 2, 1942, to name Mustapha el Nahas Pasha Prime Minister, or else face the consequences—by which Lampson meant that His Majesty would be obliged to abdicate, and would be whisked away by the British Army to be held prisoner on a cruiser in the Red Sea.

Here was a return to form! The British had hardly acted with such peremptory decision since Victoria’s day, and Furse’s men would probably have been appalled. Farouk replied only with a letter, received at the British Embassy a quarter of an hour after Lampson’s deadline, protesting against such a blatant infringement of Egyptian sovereignty, and so there was set in motion one of the last acts of imperial swashbuckle. Shortly before 9 that night, when Cairo was in full spate, the cinemas bright with neon lights, the night clubs opening their velvet-curtained doors, the red-capped military policemen warily patrolling the stews of Boulac, the pavement cafés thronged, the open-air cinemas booming above the traffic—through the bright and noisy city, smelling as always of dirt, jasmine, food and inadequately refined petrol, a convoy of British tanks, armoured cars and military trucks rumbled across town to take up positions around the royal palace.

At 9 o’clock precisely Lampson’s Rolls arrived at the gates, and the Ambassador, accompanied by the commander of the British troops in Egypt and followed by a specially picked posse of armed officers, entered the palace. True to his code even then, Farouk kept 
him waiting for five minutes in an ante-room, but once inside the royal chamber, with the general glowering at his back, Lampson allowed no nonsense. He was the last in the domineering line of Clive or Cromer, with an oriental monarch in his power before him (‘it doesn’t often come one’s way,’ as he wrote in his diary next day, ‘to be pushing a Monarch off a Throne.’)

First he read the unhappy king a statement, very loudly, ‘with full emphasis’, as he later reported to the Foreign Office, ‘and increasing anger’. It accused the King of assisting the enemy and thereby violating his commitments to Great Britain, described his attitudes as unfaithful, wanton, reckless and irresponsible, and said he was ‘no longer fit to occupy the Throne’. Lampson then handed Farouk Monckton’s abdication instrument, and told him to sign it at once, ‘or I shall have something else and more unpleasant to confront you with’. Even as he spoke, they could hear the growl and clatter of the tanks outside the palace gates.

The abdication instrument was simple enough: ‘We, King Farouk of Egypt, mindful as ever of the interests of our country, hereby renounce and abandon for ourselves and the heirs of our body the Throne of the Kingdom of Egypt and all Sovereign rights, privileges and powers in and over the said Kingdom and the subjects thereof, and we release our said subjects from their allegiance to our person.’ It was typed on old British Residency paper from which the letter-head had been removed, and Farouk’s first response was to complain about its sloppiness. He was answered only by an overbearing silence, and after a moment or two of indecision, cowed and frightened he picked up a pen to sign the abdication. But then he hesitated. Would Lampson give him one more chance? The Ambassador agreed, provided that the King immediately complied with the ultimatum. Farouk thereupon submitted, ‘for his own honour and his country’s good’, and the Ambassador and his cohorts stamped away down the corridors of the palace, between the steel-helmeted British soldiers with their tommy-guns at the gates, past the tanks squatting watchful in the street outside, into their cars and back to their great Embassy beside the Nile.

‘So much’, reported Lampson, ‘for the events of the evening, which I confess I could not have more enjoyed.’ Certainly they
seemed to have been successful—‘I congratulate you warmly,’ cabled Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, ‘result justifies your firmness and our confidence.’ Nahas Pasha, summoned to the palace next day, formed a Government that remained loyal to the British connection for the rest of the war, even when the Germans advanced so threateningly towards Cairo that the British Embassy burnt all its secret papers and officers queued around an entire city block to withdraw their money from Barclay’s Bank. What the longer effects of the affair would be, when the world returned to normal, nobody knew or even cared: the imperial instinct now was for survival, and the days of apology were suspended, as the saying was, ‘for the duration’.
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The Middle East never did fall—when the war ended the British military position there was stronger than it had ever been. Nor was the Mediterranean, Mussolini’s Mare Nostrum, ever denied to those British fleets which had frequented it since the end of the Napoleonic wars: and this achievement was largely due to another peculiarly imperial episode of the war, the defence of Malta.

The peoples of the overseas Empire were not,
pace
Churchill, so unanimous in their fidelity as they had been in the Great War. They were rather better informed now, they had other standards to judge by, and they had learnt to question the meaning of the war and the purpose of the imperial connection. Treason to the Crown, so rare in the First War, was not uncommon in the second. The Mufti of Jerusalem, for instance, the leader of the Palestine Arabs, went to Germany and formed a Muslim Army of Liberation. Aung San, one of the most prominent Burmese nationalists, went to Japan and formed a Burma Defence Army. Subhas Chandra Bose,
quondam
president of the Indian National Congress, went first to Germany, 
where he formed an Indian Legion, then to Japan, where he formed an Indian National Army. One in six of Indian prisoners of war joined his forces (which included a Gandhi Brigade and were known to the British as ‘Jiffs’—Japanese Indian forces): Bose declared himself head of an Indian Government-in-exile, and became in the end a national hero.
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On the other hand the loyalty was often touching. Most of the hundreds of thousands of colonial volunteers joined the colours simply out of loyalty, to an idea, a heritage or perhaps a set of values: and this truly Victorian sense of duty was encapsulated best of all in Malta, a small group of islands in the middle of the Mediterranean which assumed not only a high strategic importance in the war, but a symbolic meaning too. As the main base of the Mediterranean Fleet Malta was made untenable when Italy entered the war, but it remained invaluable as a submarine base, from which to harass the enemy supply routes to North Africa, and it became almost indispensable as a propaganda station. Through the long years of setback, when islands fell and British armies retreated everywhere, Malta remained defiant in defence, furious in attack. If it had not been for Malta’s submarines and aircraft, Egypt might well have fallen, and like the defence of Mafeking in the Boer War, the defence of Malta was seen as an earnest of greater things, and of victories to come.

The British made the most of it, immortalizing it in film and propaganda pamphlet, in stirring speech and kingly gesture, but still it was a genuine triumph. The five islands of Malta, with a total area of 125 square miles, lay some 60 miles south of Sicily, 180 miles north of Cape Bon on the North African coast, in so commanding a situation that Rommel himself saw them as the key to Mediterranean
victory—in December, 1941, three-quarters of his supplies were sunk by ships and aircraft from Malta, and one Italian convoy, comprising seven merchant ships and ten destroyers, was completely annihilated. It was inevitable that the Germans and Italians should try first to neutralize, then to capture the islands: and between June 1940, when Italy entered the war, and November 1942, when the British won the Battle of El Alamein in Egypt, Malta was under siege. Some 16,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the islands: during fifteen days of April, 1942, there were 115 air raids.

There was never another imperial siege like this. Though the ships which supplied Malta, and the fighter aircraft which defended it, were all manned by Britons, the beleaguered population was notably
un
-British in everything but citizenship. Catholic, Latinate, speaking a language incomprehensible anywhere else, addled by political, religious and cultural rivalries, the Maltese were notoriously among the more difficult subjects of the Crown. Though since 1921 the colony had been ostensibly self-governing ‘in all matters of purely local concern’, the constitution had been suspended in 1936 because of this continual rumpus, and when the war came the Maltese had no responsible government at all. The British, as we have already seen, viewed the majority of the Maltese as less than absolutely pukkah, and generally looked upon the islands not as anybody’s homeland exactly, but as a dockyard, a barracks and a sailors’ tavern.

Yet the Maltese were to be the acknowledged heroes of the battle for Malta, and the prize examples of colonial loyalty. Though Mussolini had long laid claim to the islands, and though Valletta the capital was less than half an hour’s flying time from Italian air bases, the Maltese never wavered in their faithfulness to the British Empire—or perhaps to the Royal Navy, whose ships had for a century provided a background for every facet of Maltese behaviour. The British got very sentimental about Malta as the war proceeded, and this was one wartime saga that was never discredited. Battered, half-starved, exhausted by noise and sleeplessness, living for the most part in subterranean galleries and dug-outs, the Maltese retained their morale from the very first trial black-out (a word which 
Malta gave to the language) to the last fitful air raid from the retreating enemy. Baden-Powell would have been proud of them.