Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (64 page)

The nonconformist strain of Labour thinking was easily translated into an imperial earnestness, not so far from the idealism of Exeter Hall in the previous century, and so in the late 1940s the British colonial empire found itself not hastily jettisoned, as Tories had prophesied, but temporarily rejuvenated. Not since the heady days of the New Imperialism had an administration approached colonial affairs with such positive intentions, and Arthur Creech-Jones was the most enthusiastic Colonial Secretary since Joe Chamberlain himself. He believed the Empire had a purpose still—to prepare the subject peoples economically for political favours to come: to abandon the task would be ‘to betray the peoples and our trust’. There was nothing transcendental to this view. It was a purely materialist, Benthamite approach, and little was done to influence the native peoples politically. Socialists though they were, hearty singers of ‘The Red Flag’ at party conferences, the Ministers of the Labour Government looked on the colonial Empire, as Chamberlain did, as a property in need of development.

Much of it was derelict. It had been British policy always that each Crown Colony must pay its own way. The passing of the wartime Colonial Development Act, as much a propaganda gesture as a change of attitude, had been the very first time metropolitan Britain had agreed to pay for the economic and social progress of the colonies. By now most of the tropical possessions were in a sorry
state, many of them never having recovered their prosperity since the abolition of slavery, others never having achieved any prosperity to recover. The sagging verandah, the peeling façade, the beggars touting on the quayside, the slow cycle of malnutrition and disease, the scourges of crown-worm or tsetse fly—these were the images which, in every traveller’s mind, were summoned by the British tropical colonies then. Bathurst, in the Gambia, was likened by a visiting academic in 1937 to ‘a water-logged sponge floating in a sea of its own excreta’. ‘General impression of Trinidad’, noted the novelist Evelyn Waugh during a Caribbean journey, ‘that I don’t want to see it again. General impression of Georgetown that I don’t mind how soon I leave it.’ The war had brought a specious revival to some of these unlovely dependencies, but they had soon relapsed into indigence, while many of their citizens, returning to their humid huts or dilapidated shanties from war service abroad, for the first time looked around them with open eyes, and made their first dismayed comparisons.

The Labour Government, surveying this baffling preserve, resolved to give it order. It became an Empire of planners, developers and economic theorists. In 1947 the Colonial Development Corporation came into being, publicly funded and charged with the creation of public utilities in the colonies—the roads, power stations, water supplies and irrigation works which would be the foundation of their progress. The Colonial Office itself burgeoned as never before. Its staff tripled, its expenses were quintupled, and thousands of new young men, mostly wartime officers, were recruited to its ranks. For so long the fusty club of a few gentlemanly and detached administrators, the old institution had never seen anything like it, and the economic satirist Northcote Parkinson was inspired by its explosive expansion to devise his own theoretical interpretation, Parkinson’s law, which postulated that a bureacracy would grow as fast as there were desks to accommodate it.

Every month, it seemed, a new commission was established, a new inquiry was instituted, a new committee was assembled to discuss health services, legislative reform, educational priorities, the possibility of growing sugar-beet on Ascension Island or the incidence of bilharzia in Dongola. Team after team went out to Africa, the
Caribbean or the Far East, and each territory was invited to produce a comprehensive development plan for its own development. Many an old imperial anomaly was weeded out—never again would a Brooke rule in Sarawak, a chartered company govern an African tribe, or a wandering English adventurer raise an eponymous regiment: down on the Embankment the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who had been in existence since 1833, were busier than ever concluding contracts, engaging staff, ordering postage stamps or investing funds on behalf of all the separate colonial governments, wherever they were.

Never had the colonies been so elaborately governed. Everywhere local establishments were vastly increased, sometimes tripled. In five years 6,500 new men were sent out to the colonies, six times as many as had administered the whole of British India in the heyday of Empire. Even the smallest and most neglected colony, a St Helena or a St Lucia, found itself suddenly invaded by technical experts and advisers, nearly all expatriate Britons—in Mauritius Mr Kenneth Baker, former president of the English Fire Brigade Union, was attached to the Governor’s staff as Adviser on Trade Unions. It was the age of town-planning, and scarcely a colonial town escaped its inspection by disciples of Sir William Holford or Sir Patrick Geddes, nearly all of whom had grandiose ideas for plazas, ring roads and housing estates, and almost none of whom ever saw their plans implemented.

Money was poured into the estate out of Britain’s denuded treasuries, and for the first time since Chamberlain’s day the British tried to apply to their colonial empire the latest devices of technology. The Colonial Development Corporation, with its sibling the Overseas Food Corporation, poured cash, men, tractors, test-tubes, bulldozers, specialists and technicians into many a desolate tract of Empire, providing jobs for thousands of Britons otherwise difficult to employ in the officer-like circumstances to which they had become accustomed, and plunging hosts of tribesmen bewilderingly into the deep end of western method. Some of these activities were successful, some were famous fiascos, like the Groundnut Scheme for Tanganyika which sold not a single groundnut, or the Egg Scheme for Gambia which exported not an egg.

Earnest but over-sanguine, too, were the several schemes by which the British hoped to group their colonies into more rational political entities, ready to graduate in time into the ranks of the Commonwealth. They all made sense in theory. The West Indian islands, for example, could surely be united in a federation as a prelude to independence—they shared a common history, a common language, common customs and common problems: and so they were, Trinidad and Jamaica, Barbados and the Windwards, all with a common Assembly in Trinidad, and a smiling Governor-General in Jamaica. In East Africa Lord Delamere’s old federal dream was revived, and Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika were placed under a single East African High Commission.
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Further south the plan was that Southern Rhodesia, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland should federate: the whites of Southern Rhodesia would supply the skills and the capital, the blacks of the other territories the labour and the mineral resources—a partnership, breezily suggested the Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Godfrey Huggins, like that between a rider and his horse. Another federation was planned for south-east Asia, coalescing the various States of Malaya with Singapore, Sarawak and north Borneo, while in south Arabia the British hoped that fusion with the reliable rural protectorates might temper the potentially subversive urban society of Aden colony. Even among the ostensibly independent Arab States to the north, the British tried their methodological best: for it was they who first dreamed up the Arab League, a last muffled attempt at an indirect Viceroyalty of the Middle East.

All this was order! More and more complex constitutions were devised for the colonies, rdported
in
extenso
in
The
Times,
as they progressed towards responsible Government: unabated came the flow of pamphlets and encouraging statistics from the presses of the Colonial Office. The official policy towards the colonies was perfectly clear: ‘It is’, said Command Paper 7533, ‘to guide the colonial
territories to responsible self-government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom from aggression from any quarter.’ Yet now as always, it seemed, the British, even the most liberal of the British, did not really believe that the objective would ever be reached. It was simply an article of faith, ritually repeated. The young men still went out in the hope of a life’s career; the theorists presupposed at least a couple of generations for their projects to mature; all those brave federal schemes had as their object some continuance of the old order, some maintenance of British influence or supervision, or at least the survival of Britishness. Even promotion to the Commonwealth seemed to many Britons no more than a confirmation, enabling fledgling States to enter into a fuller state of grace, for while intellectually the British might see the truth about their colonial empire, emotionally they clung still to the old illusions, and hoped it might somehow be induced, by all these infusions of energy, cash and calculation, to last more or less indefinitely.

Almost opposite Westminster Abbey, in one of the finest sites in Europe, a German bomb had created a large empty space, where the Westminster Hospital used to stand. There the British, in the last decades of their Empire, decided to build a new Colonial Office. The India Office had gone, absorbed so thoroughly into the Foreign Office that already very few Londoners could say where it had functioned—even its library, that incomparable repository of oriental knowledge, had been shifted somewhere east of Temple Bar. But in a last hallucination of imperial hopes, these late imperialists determined to erect themselves a headquarters worthy of their history. It would be in the neo-Georgian mode, the predominant style of the declining Empire, eight floors high, with the royal crest large above its symbolically decorated doors, twin flagstaffs on its roof and a façade facing across the square to the ancient purlieus of the Abbey.

Here, passing through the pillared entrance hall, one would find the general staff of the rejuvenated Empire, its Under-Secretaries and its Deputy Secretaries, its legal officers, its information officers, the editor of
Corona
Magazine
—the librarians and archivists, the code and cipher clerks, the radio specialists with their transmitters
on the roof. High on the top floor would be the Colonial Officers’ Club, conveniently next door to the Treatment Room, and the ground floor would contain comfortable guest quarters designated on the architectural drawings simply as ‘Visiting Governor’. It is true that the plan allowed for a Tea-Making Room rather larger than the office of the Controller of Overseas Communications, but still, standing as it would directly opposite to Westminster Abbey itself, in rational antithesis to that mysterious shrine it would represent everything frank and enlightened in contemporary colonial government, urban sewage to female education, seal farming in the Falklands to East African Federation. As Sir Alan Burns, a former Governor of the Gold Coast, wrote in his book
In
Defence
of
Colonies
in 1957, ‘Many years ago Britain undertook the gigantic task of helping the people of various under-developed territories to overcome the handicaps imposed on them by nature and environment…. In many parts of the world the task has not yet been completed, and it is inconceivable that we should abandon it half-done.’

It never happened of course. ‘It will clearly be some time’, wrote Sir Charles Jeffries, KCMG,
apropos
of that new headquarters, ‘it will clearly be some considerable time—though, one may hope, not forty years in the wilderness—before the Office can move into the promised land.’ But the more time passed, the remoter the promise, until at last even Sir Charles, even Sir Alan, were obliged to admit that the day of the Empire was over, the task must be abandoned uncompleted after all, and the Office never would reach Abbey Square.
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For the last rally of colonial enthusiasm in the 1940s and I950s was one of history’s more endearing misjudgements. To almost everybody but the British activists themselves, all the signs and arguments were against it. Colonialism was excoriated in every corner of the world, and the growing power of African and Asian nationalism, openly backed now by the Soviet Union and certainly
not discouraged by the Americans, was apparent for all to see. One did not need to be a George Curzon to realize how insubstantial the imperial structure had become, now that the grand mass of India had been removed. The tide of history, irresistible and one would think unmistakable, was sweeping the imperial idea irrevocably out to sea.

So that brave new building was never even started, and the structural reforms of the colonial empire, too, were mostly aborted or abandoned. It made no difference that throughout the 1950s the Conservatives were back in power. The Empire crumbled nonetheless. The West Indians, being far less homogeneous than they looked on the map, and far more ambitious to be their own Prime Ministers, soon deserted their Federation and split into petty autonomies. The East Africans, being of many different tribes, several different religions and three different colours, never were persuaded into unity. The blacks of the Central African Federation, rightly surmising that it would mean their indefinite subjection to white minority rule, demolished it as soon as possible. Singapore was rejected by the rest of the Malaysian Federation, to set itself up in dudgeon as a City-State on its own. The subversive Adenis, far from being disciplined by the loyal sheikhs of south Arabia, subverted the sheikhs instead, while the Arab League, instead of being a bastion of British influence in the Middle East, soon became the principal organ of Arab anti-imperialism. The hopeful departments of colonial development were dropped by the reference books one by one, converted into organs of foreign aid, or silently dispersed. Soon the Colonial Office itself, still in Great Smith Street after all, would seem a quaint anachronism, and its functionaries would find their way to more contemporary offices of State, like the Ministry of Social Security, or the Totalisator Board.

Let us then, since it is almost our last chance, take a walk through Westminster, one morning in the later 1950s, in search of
homo
imperialis
. It is a relatively prosperous moment of British post-war history, the nation standing for the moment between economic crises, and the civil servants hastening from the St James’ tube station look, for the most part, well-dressed, well-fed, ordinary kind of people—not so very different from Belgians, say, or Norwegians. Up on the morning train from Beckenham or Guildford, they are
settled into the mould of western urban man, and want nothing much more than a quiet life, a television set and an annual holiday, with pension rights assured. Among them, it is true, are more colourful figures to remind us, even now, that London is a world capital—black men in white robes and curious hats, an Arab or two, Malays or Chinese, a few huddled Indians: but then in a world now encircled by the jets one may just as easily meet a sheikh in Zurich, a Jamaican waiter in Manhattan or a Nigerian doctor completing his training in Düsseldorf. It is a cosmopolitan crowd, but in the middle of the twentieth century any great city is cosmopolitan, and London looks scarcely more imperial than Stockholm.