Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (66 page)

Elsewhere the withdrawal of British power, as in India, as in Palestine, left bloodshed behind. Hardly had the last aircraft withdrawn from the bases of Iraq than the young Harrovian king, with all his family, was murdered by the rebellious mob, and the Prime Minister Nuri es Said, a friend and ally for thirty years, was cut in pieces and dragged through the streets of Baghdad. And in Aden, the very first acquisition of Queen Victoria’s Empire, the British left shooting to the last. Step by step they withdrew from the city to the harbour and the airfield, and while Royal Marines kept the indigenes at bay, a stream of aircraft flew off the last of the imperialists. Offshore two carriers, a depot ship and a submarine waited;
helicopters clanked heavily around the harbour; at the airfield transport planes arrived in a ceaseless flow from Cyprus, refuelled again and took off with their loads of refugees. Gradually the British perimeter contracted, closer and closer to the shore, while outside it rival groups of Arab guerillas sniped, looted and skirmished. The High Commissioner flew off in a helicopter to the carrier
Eagle.
The last commandos raced for their helicopters. The last flag was lowered. The last flotilla of the Royal Navy, its crews smartly lining their decks, its radars twirling, sailed away from Steamer Point into the Red Sea.

Behind them the guerillas fell upon the abandoned stores and barracks, swarmed up the steps to Government House, and shot at each other from rooftops.
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Far more often, though, the sequence of farewell was peaceful, and rather touching. The happiest of the imperial exits were stage-managed by Furse’s protégés of the 1930s, now the Governors and Chief Secretaries of their colonies, and they were characterized by the same tolerance and guileless optimism that Santayana had admired in them in their youth.

The band that played out the Raj on the Bombay waterfront was to perform often again, as colony by colony the Empire was dismantled. Down came the flag, out rang the last bugle, and once again, until they got tired of the performance, the heart-strings of the British were momentarily tugged. The procedure became almost standard, like an investiture. The chief nationalist leader, lately released from detention and propelled into fame, wealth and power, found himself greeted by the retiring British Governor with a
comradely new bonhomie, and was saluted by white guards of honour as he arrived, dressed in his own ethnic fineries, at the Independence Day parade. Out from England had come some scion of royalty; and there was an Independence Day ball, at which the new Prime Minister danced enthusiastically with Her Royal Highness; and there were sundry ceremonies of goodwill and fraternity, a message from the Queen, a presentation of maces, or crests, or Speaker’s Chairs, and an editorial from
The
Times
quoted in the local paper, and lots of stamping of boots and quivering salutes by British military men determined to demonstrate their loyalty to the new regime (for if they often had doubts about the ability of coloured people to rule themselves, they were not generally averse to appointments as Chiefs of Staff or even Commanders-in-Chief of emergent armies).

These ceremonies impressed everyone, even in most cases the patriot leaders themselves, and they were quoted all over the world as examples of British liberal good sense. How civilized it all was! With what good grace Her Royal Highness went in to dinner on the arm of a tribal politician of Marxist leanings until recently imprisoned with hard labour in a desert penal camp for subversive activities against the Crown! How moving it was to see the rituals of Westminster and the Inns of Court translated so faithfully to that tropic setting—the Speaker of the new House, preceded by his brand-new mace, attended by his solemn Serjeant-at-Arms—the judges and barristers of the new Supreme Court, authentically wigged and tabbed—the black colonels in their gleaming Sam Brownes and red tabs—the black bishops fluttering in starched canonicals—even perhaps a black naval officer or two, caps tilted at the proper Beatty rake, from the harbour defence launch down at the harbour. Just for the moment they all meant it, and it seemed hardly more than a passing of tradition from one hand to another, or a coming-of-age.

One by one they went, all through the 1950s and into the 1960s, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, the Sudan, Uganda, even the never-to-be-abandoned
Cyprus. Sometimes they changed their names with independence, confusing older imperialists and infuriating cartographers, but generally the moment of transition was smudged. Most of the new nations passed into the Commonwealth, that limbo of Empire, and anyway manners, methods and even people lingered from the old regimes, and gave an impression of continuity. Sometimes the Governor himself remained, by request of the new Government, to represent the Head of the Commonwealth, and as his political responsibilities declined, so his geniality flourished, and he was often to be seen slapping the backs of former terrorists, or laughing at old tribal jokes.

In the House of Assembly, too, as likely as not, one or two Britons would sit, representing planters, or commercial interests, and generally looking, set in their pale tropical suits against that vivid polychromatic parliament, urbane but unmistakably impotent. Up at the regimental mess Major Carruthers still presided over his orderly room, clipped and expressionless, with crossed assegais replacing the lances upon his cap badge, and beside the swimming pool at the club Mrs T and Mrs Z agreed that, though one could not of course resist progress, and though neither of course was in the least colour conscious
as
such,
still one could not help noticing that the ladies’ room was distinctly messier since, well, since independence and all that.

And for a year or two, in gently falling cadences, the systems of Empire survived. The British constitutionalists, for ever devising more perfect forms of Government to leave behind, seemed to suppose that their inventions were actually organic, more than mere artificial formulas, and for a time the new arrangements did seem to have self-generative powers. The Common Law was upheld in all its dignity. The Westminster rules were faithfully honoured. Captain Abdullah Khan’s handbook for young officers of the Pakistan Army suggests that just as the proof of being a gentleman should always be discernible in an officer’s moral standards and mannerisms, so he should not as a general rule carry an umbrella on parade. In the Sudan, when the black District Commissioner puts on his pith helmet with its gay feathered tuft, and strides out of his hut for morning inspection, one can see in his very walk the example of
Marlborough and Trinity, and hear in his voice—‘Mark you it would all look a bit greener if we hadn’t had such a rotten summer’—unmistakable echoes of the imperial castes.

But gradually the recent and the remoter past became curiously jumbled, as the alien authority dissolved, and loyalties long suppressed came to life again. For a few years all was mixed, tribal taboo with democratic shibboleth, Crown with immemorial fetish. Often the first of the new leaders expressed these paradoxes in their very persons. We have long been used to the spectacle of Gandhi and his disciples talking the most sophisticated language of western political theory, while dressed in loin-cloths and sitting at spinning-wheels. Now the anomalies were to be stranger still. Here the astonishing Ngwenyama Sobhuza of Swaziland, billowing with the plumes and skins of his regality, glaring with a kind of stylized fury all around him, and accompanied by the court functionary called the Eye of the King, passes through the lines of his devoted subjects, all kneeling, or even lying flat on their faces, to open the new session of the Swaziland Legislative Council. Here the Dinkas of the southern Sudan lope nakedly into Juba to cast their votes in the general election—each party being represented for convenience sake, since 98 per cent of the electorate is totally illiterate, by a party symbol, a bicycle, a butterfly, a crowing cock or a companionable pipe.
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One of the first Prime Ministers to take office in Africa was Kwame Nkrumah of the Gold Coast, a country which, as soon as he achieved authority, he renamed Ghana after an older empire. Nkrumah was to be seen any session day decorously at his place in the House of Assembly, below the Speaker’s Chair, deftly parrying the opposition in the best Westminster manner, and he had become quite friendly with the last British Governor. People had high hopes for Ghana under this attractive leader, and Nkrumah figured largely in the pamphlets of the British Central Office of Information, and was made much of, with his delightful smile and engaging manners, when he appeared in London for Commonwealth conferences.

The transition, though, was not as straightforward as the propagandists implied. Educated partly in Britain, partly in America, Nkrumah was hardly your natural Parliamentarian. He was a Catholic, but a revolutionary Marxist too. He was a Bachelor of Law, but aspired to mystic brotherhoods, oaths of loyalty, blood-vows. Sometimes he dreamt of uniting all Africa under his presidency, sometimes he saw himself as a divinely appointed Messiah. In London once he was photographed leaning easily against a staircase in the garden of 10 Downing Street exchanging pleasantries with his colleague the Prime Minister of Great Britain: but when he was at home he often summoned magicians and soothsayers to his official residence, and sometimes he made the pilgrimage over the frontier to Kankan, in French Guinea, where the most famous of African oracles advised him how best to defeat the Opposition’s amendments to the Municipal Housing (1954) Enactment Bill, or alternatively how best to obliterate the Opposition.
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Sometimes sceptically, sometimes indulgently, the British observed all this. Progressives were delighted at the course of events, conservatives were saddened, the mass of the public seemed indifferent. A nation does not watch its power shrivel away, though, without some moments of bitterness, and as the great Empire dissolved a strain of resentment and self-pity fitfully entered the British attitudes. The last retreat might be necessary, even honourable, but it was not much fun.

Only once did it flare into paranoia, as in a last impotent revival of the aggressive spirit the British tried to reverse the course of history. It was in 1956, and the retreat was already precipitate. Anyone, it seemed, could now cock a snook at the British. There was no respect for the Flag any more, no gratitude among the emancipated
colonies; angry correspondents to the
Daily
Telegraph
drew bitter conclusions from the decline of Empire, reminded the Editor about the fate of Rome, and reproachfully quoted poems—

or

Most people were less coherent: but two decades of change, improvisation and finally withdrawal had left their mark upon the public consciousness, and even those least chauvinist or raucous in their patriotism felt, just the same, a sense of waste, unfairness and helplessness. Was this why they had won the war, simply to subside into the ranks of the minor Powers? Was the whole imperial achievement a deception after all?

Among those most bitterly affected was Anthony Eden, who was born in the year of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, and had succeeded Churchill as Conservative Prime Minister in 1955. Eden had spent his life close to the sources of British imperial power, and he thought of Great Britain ineradicably as one of the arbiters of world affairs. He had stood at the right hand of Churchill, he had experienced that last triumphant exertion of British will which had defeated Nazi Germany, and raised the nation in victory to the moral summit of the world. The idea of a Britain to be defied with impunity by any impertinent sheikh or corruptible politician was not simply repugnant to him, but almost inconceivable. He stood still, posed for ever in his beautiful London suit, at Churchill’s shoulder, next to President Roosevelt, at one of those conferences which had, only a few years before, decided the future of the world.

Eden developed a particular and peculiar antipathy towards one of the most persistent of all the Empire’s opponents, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Nasser’s revolutionary movement of army officers had deposed King Farouk in 1952, setting up a republic, and had obliged the British to give up their vast military base in the Suez Canal Zone—60,000 men even in the 1950s. Then by intrigue, propaganda and force of example Nasser had inflamed almost the whole of the Arab world against the British connection, effectively ending British suzerainty in the Middle East. He had established Egypt as the anti-imperialist leader of the Arabs, and everywhere from Mosul to Oman he had turned men’s minds against the British.

In 1956 this ambitious dictator, who had galvanized his own people into a new pride and confidence, nationalized the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, the French company which had run the canal since its construction, and in which the British Government held a substantial share. He then seized the canal, announcing that the Egyptians would henceforth run it for themselves, using the profits for their own national development. The company’s concession was due to expire anyway in 1968, shareholders were promised full compensation, and in principle at least Nasser’s action was not specifically directed against the British. There was no reason why Egyptians should not operate the canal quite capably, or pilot ships through it safely, and strategically it had obviously lost much of its importance for the British, now that their eastern empire was gone. But just as the assumption of British greatness was inherent to Eden’s political thinking, so the Suez Canal remained an inescapable totem of it—‘in some essential sense’, said Lord Hinchingbrooke, MP, ‘part of the United Kingdom’. Suez was ‘the life-line of Empire’, the ‘Imperial jugular’. ‘East of Suez’ was a synonym for British world power. A Suez Canal in unfriendly hands would be, so British traditionalists cried, a Britain that had forfeited not merely her Empire, but her very freedom of action—her independence, in fact!