Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (67 page)

So Eden launched the last and most forlorn of all the imperial initiatives, a new and much more disastrous Jameson Raid, the action known euphemistically as the Suez Adventure of 1956. It was
an operation clouded in secrecy, duplicity and irrationality—for as the crisis developed Eden came near to nervous breakdown. It was also a cruel parody of the British imperial style. Eden cast himself as an elegant younger Churchill, saving the world by his exertions. Nasser he portrayed as a Muslim Hitler—‘I want him destroyed!’ cried the Prime Minister to one of his Ministers. The ultimatum that was presented to the Egyptians, requiring them to restore the Canal to its rightful owners, rang with the righteous zeal of 1939. The invasion force that was assembled was like a punitive expedition of old. The Royal Navy mustered its ships and landing craft at Malta, jet bombers of the Royal Air Force were concentrated upon Cyprus, and in the streets of southern England convoys of Army trucks, painted a desert yellow, hastened to the southern ports as in greater days before. Buller at sea in the
Dunnotar
Castle
would have recognized the temper of the time. So would Hamilton leaving Mudros for Gallipoli. Even General Gordon, perhaps, catching his train at Charing Cross for his martyrdom at Khartoum, might have responded to the 1956 theme of self-righteous retribution. The old tag
casus
belli
was knowledgeably quoted in London clubs, and among the ageing imperialists of England the general view was that they had a just one.

But just or no, they were deluding themselves. Britain could no longer punish trouble-makers as she pleased, with a resounding statement in the House of Commons and a brisk expeditionary force. Nothing was so simple now, in the complex world of the 1950s. A plan must be concocted with the French, who were in a similar mood of national frustration, and with the Zionists, who had now established their own State in Palestine, and considered the Egyptians their most threatening enemies. There were the Americans to consider—could they be trusted to help, or would they intervene to hinder? There was the now amorphous Commonwealth, some of its members reliable enough to put in the picture, some more safely left in the dark. There was the United Nations, vociferously anti-imperialist still. There was world opinion in general, as unsympathetic to British imperial causes as ever it was in the Boer War. There was opinion at home, split furiously on the issue. And finally there was Russia, now the greatest imperial
power, which at this fatal moment found itself confronted by a rebellion of its own, among the subject patriots of Hungary.

Through this maze Eden and his advisers moved as in a dream, cunningly. They held secret meetings with the French and the Israelis. They told less than the truth to the Commonwealth, and actually lied to the Americans. While they pretended that they would occupy the Canal Zone only in order to pass the Canal into United Nations care, they really planned the overthrow of Gamal Abdel Nasser himself, the wildly popular leader of the Egyptian people. All was shame-faced and underhand. As the world watched aghast and unbelieving the ultimatum was delivered to President Nasser, requiring him to withdraw his forces from the Canal: almost at the same time the Russians, invading Hungary with overwhelming force, and putting down the rising with infinite cruelty, let it be known that if the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt were not aborted, Russian rocket missiles might soon be falling upon London.

This was another world, beyond the capacity of the imperialists. Of course the invasion was aborted—they had no choice. The invasion force, laboriously assembled and poorly equipped, did indeed invade Egypt, capturing Port Said and advancing down the canal. The Egyptian air force was virtually destroyed by attacks on its airfields, and scurrilous leaflets, ludicrously inciting the Egyptians to rebel against their leader, were dropped in the streets of Cairo. The Israelis occupied the east bank of the Canal, the British and French pushed southwards to occupy the west bank. But in no time the British lost their resolution, as the terrible truth dawned upon them that they could no longer behave imperially. The whole world was against them, even their oldest friends, and even in Egypt it seemed, the most despised of all their dependencies, they could no longer honour their own convictions. Even a Wog had a voice at the United Nations now, and all the splendours of the past, assembled in such pitiful pastiche in the familiar waters of the eastern Mediterranean, could not save the British from ignominy. The invasion force was withdrawn, and the imperial ghosts turned uneasily in their graves.

The British were numbed by this unnecessary disaster, even
those who had most passionately opposed the invasion. They did not like to talk about it, and a veiled reticence fell upon the subject. Eden himself, ill and distraught, retired from public life for ever, handing over to Harold Macmillan. It was as though a developing neurosis, erupting into a moment of schizophrenia, had subsided once again, this time for ever, leaving behind some shattered nerve or atrophy, and never again did the British stand up for their imperial privileges. Before we leave the spectacle of the last retreat, to which this provided a sad, misguided and untypical climax, let us visit Port Said, at the northern end of the Suez Canal, during the brief British occupation, for never again shall we see a distant seaport seized by the forces of the British Empire, or observe the White Ensign dominating the sea routes to the east.

In a way it was like a home-coming. Everyone knew Port Said. Everyone had soldiered there, or sailed by. Everyone had smelt that special smell, that blend of dust, dirt and oil which, reaching the approaching ship far out at sea, before even the first flicker of the lighthouse, told the imperialist that he was nearing the east once more. Generations of memsahibs had wandered around the scents, silks and brass-studded camel-saddles of Simon Artz, taken coffee on its balcony while the ships sailed by, or laughed at the gully-gully men conjuring chickens from their sleeves on the street outside. Almost every British regiment had taken its pleasures here, at one time or another, and hardly a British warship had not refuelled in the roads. The arcaded offices of Eastern Telegraph Company had been there almost as long as the canal itself, and the whole tempo of life at the Casino Palace Hotel was geared to the schedule of the P and O boats, passing so majestically to and from Bombay.

Port Said had never been beautiful, but it was familiar, and in their rough way the British had been fond of it. Awful though it was, pimps, touts, slums and all, still it was part of their heritage. It is like a nightmare to find them back in these familiar streets as enemies. The hush that hangs over the town is a hush of shock. Nobody can quite believe it, but it is true. Offshore lies the invasion fleet, overhead the helicopters and the bombers fly, and sprawled across Port Said is the British Army. A squadron of Centurion tanks lies in the churned-up mud by the airport causeway, their crews
drinking tea to a crackle of static from their radios, and all along the beach soldiers have bivouacked among the beach-houses, sweeping the sands with mine-detectors, hanging out their washing, and sometimes, in a bitter memory of Gallipoli, bathing in the Mediterranean against the background of the silent ships. Infantry patrols wander dustily among the back streets, officers drive about in requisitioned Citroëns, British sailors stand sentry at the dock gates and officers can be seen moving importantly through the domed offices of the Suez Canal Company. Simon Artz is shuttered like the grave; the Casino Palace has been turned into a field hospital, and there is no sign of its courtly tarbooshed manager, who used to ask so fondly after General Hindlesham or Miss Packer, and wonder how the weather had been in Poona. Here and there a shop has been looted, and there is a litter of broken glass and empty boxes on the pavement. The streets are deserted, but for the soldiery, and an occasional scuttling scavenger, and one or two merchants sitting listlessly on kitchen chairs outside their shops.

‘Can it be
real
?’ they say when they recognize you, raising their hands helplessly, palms up, to embrace the whole hideous scene. ‘Never, never would we have expected it of the British.…’ And the British too seem to find it unnatural. They talk in the idiom of all the British wars, but self-consciously, as though they know this is somehow fraudulent: the old jokes ring false—‘Elephant and Castle!’ say the soldiers, as they pile into the three-ton truck, but the quip has no savour to it. The ethos of Empire, as of war, was acceptable to the British when it was backed by convictions of honour—by the belief, false or misguided, that the British were acting rightly, for the good of themselves and the world. Fair play! In most of their wars the British had been so convinced, and there was dignity to the cocky good humour of the soldiers, and true beauty to the unwavering patriotism of the British people.

Now, in Port Said, 1956, there was only pretence—a sham virility, a dubious cause, a nation divided, an army with little verve to its campaigning. Port Said, shattered and appalled, stood as a bitter memorial to the last display of the imperial
machismo
: and beyond the quays the funnels and masts of sunken ships,
blocking all passage through the Lifeline of Empire, ironically illustrated the point.
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I
T was nearly over now. Future historians may well say the British Empire ended at Suez, for there it was finally made plain that the imperial potency was lost. In the 1960s it became clear to the staunchest of the British imperialists that their Empire was gone, and in a frame of mind more bewildered than resentful their leaders half-heartedly set out to find a new role in the world—as mediators between east and west, as Athenians to America’s Rome, as the ageing chatelaine of the increasingly skittish Commonwealth, or, as a last resort, as offshore islanders of a new Europe. Nostalgia set in, and while novelists and playwrights still made fun of the imperial blimps and postures, many other Englishmen looked back with a wistful if puzzled affection at the spectacle of their grandeur, fast dissolving into memory.

After Suez they never resisted again. They recognized the tide of history, and bowed to it—or more pertinently, perhaps, they remembered that politics was only the art of the possible. In January 1960 Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister, set out on a tour of Africa. He was a man of the imperial age. The grandson of a Scottish crofter, the son-in-law of a Duke, the son of an American mother, he was a product of Eton, Balliol and the First World War, and for him the true Britain was still the Britain that had basked so expansively, so genially, in the flowered days of the Edwardian era. It was less than twenty years since he had represented the British Empire, in the last display of its power, as Minister of State in Cairo during the Second World War, or since, standing on the dais at Tunis while the Highlanders appeared over the crest of the road, he had believed the Empire to have the world at its feet.

He was a politician first, though; he had lived through the trauma of Suez to pick up the pieces of Eden’s policy afterwards: and in Cape Town in January 1960 it was he, the twenty-first Prime Minister of Great Britain since the accession of Queen Victoria, who formally recognized, as he might have recognized a new State or a new alliance, the end of the imperial idea. Ever since the end of the Roman Empire, he said, one of the most constant facts of political life in Europe had been the emergence of independent nations. ‘In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation-States of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of a national consciousness in peoples who had lived for centuries in dependence upon some other Power.’

This was, Macmillan implied, something inevitable, something true. It was not the work of agitators or false prophets. It was, he said, in the last of all the truisms, euphemisms, hyperboles and
obiter
dicta
that had enriched the vocabulary of imperialism, only the wind of change.

Let us end the story gently, on a loyal note, for not everybody saw the Empire as wicked—people all over the world admired it still, for all its weaknesses and excesses, as a force for good, a kindly force despite it all, and a shield against those ‘scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics’ whom Santayana foresaw as its supplanters. Even in the 1960s many a possession and dependency preferred to stay within the old fold, remote, dreamy, contented or simply ill-informed, governed still by English gentlemen, and visited sometimes by the spick-and-span frigates of the shrunken Royal Navy. By then Hong Kong, once among the least promising of British possessions, was as heavily populated as all the rest of the Empire put together, and the Colonial Office no longer existed: but Sir Ralph Grey was still Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas,
£
2,800 was the going salary for the Governor of the Falkland Islands, Mr Gribble was still the Government Printer of Fiji, and if you happened to be going to the Turks and Caicos
Islands Geoffrey Guy the administrator there, though it is true his salary was only
£
2,150, would be sure to look after you.

These scattered settlements did not look much on the map, set beside the sweep of the imperial crimson not so long before, but still it was pleasant for the wandering Briton to stumble upon such half-forgotten relics and anachronisms, flotsam on the beach of history, still retaining some air of the imperial reassurance, some promise of relative good manners, some suggestion of punctuality or prospect of fish and chips. Let us then, having inspected so many fortresses of Empire, visited so many great cities, witnessed such scenes of splendour or of tragedy, end our own journey by dropping in upon some of the places which, while the world shifted all around them, seemed to be governed still by Victoria’s presence.

Muscat was one such place, far away at the south-eastern tip of Arabia. It had never actually been an imperial possession, only an ill-defined protectorate, but by the 1960s nowhere was more redolent of the lost empire of the Raj. For a century and more the Sultans of Muscat and Oman had been feudatories of the Indian Empire. A treaty in 1891 had given British subjects (‘and their servants’) extra-territorial rights in Muscat, and gave Muscatis in return the right to enter with their vessels ‘all ports, creeks and rivers in the British Empire’, and to live, trade, travel, possess houses and shops in any imperial territory, except self-governing colonies.
1
By 1903 the Sultan was swearing ‘eternal devotion and fidelity’ to Lord Curzon, beneath the awnings of HMS
Hardinge
in the harbour, and his son was appearing as a loyal feudatory at the Delhi Coronation Durbar for King Edward VII, taking with him a presentation model of a camel and a palm tree, fashioned in Muscati silver. Ever since then the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman had been a British ward—or puppet, if that was the way you saw it. It was subsidized by Britain, its foreign relations were controlled by Britain, and the British had deliberately kept it insulated there
against foreign examples or predations, autocratically governed now by the Sultan Said bin Taimur, and supervised as always by the British Consul-General.

Here British India survived, and the ghost of Curzon still seemed to lean from the rail of the British India steamships, on their weekly visit to the capital. The ships indeed remained Muscat’s only public contact with the outside world. There was no civil airfield, and even the desert hinterland behind, linking Muscat proper with its southern dependency of Dhufar, had only recently been crossed from coast to coast by its first European.
1
No nationalist party had yet arisen to disturb the equanimity of these arrangements—the only subversives were of a thoroughly traditional kind, fractious sheikhs and tribesmen of the interior who were, so to speak, essential to the
genre
. Sailing into the little capital of this almost unknown country really was like sailing back into the eastern Empire.

Two great fortresses, built by the Portuguese, stood sentinel over Muscat harbour, but they had no guns in them, and on the rocks above the anchorage the Royal Navy had, over many generations, left the graffiti of its supremacy in the Gulf. Scores of ships’ names were inscribed there, some faded, some fairly fresh, some of forgotten sloops and gunboats,
Teazer
or
Surprise,
one or two of old familiars like
Hardinge
herself. It was in this harbour, during the Napoleonic wars, that the British frigate
Concord
had captured the French
Vigilante
; Nelson came here as a midshipman on the
Seahorse
; here, during the Second World War, a Japanese submarine sank a British freighter, adroitly aiming its torpedo through a gap in the harbour rocks.

Once inside the anchorage, there was the long water-front of the capital’s twin towns, Muscat and Mattrah, gleaming white buildings in front, a jumble of
suks,
lanes and high-walled houses stretching away to the grey hills behind. Two flags flew bravely over this suggestive scene. Over the palace of the Sultan, gleaming and massive at the water’s edge, there flew the red flag of Muscat: but over the pleasant white residence of the British Consul-General, larger, grander and rather better laundered, there flew the Union Jack. It had an air of indolent arrogance, and the posture of the
house itself, which stood at the end of the water-front, slightly separate from the town, was ineluctably prefectorial. ‘Unquestionably’, wrote the explorer Theodore Bent when he visited Muscat in 1895, ‘our own Political Agent may be said to be the ruler in Muscat’; Curzon observed that Percy Cox, the incumbent in 1903, virtually ran the place; and though the Agency had now been tactfully metamorphosed into a Consulate-Generalship, still the old house remained the source of ultimate decision in Muscat.

It was a lovely house—more than a house, for it had a compound in the truest Anglo-Indian manner, grouped around a gravel courtyard with a huge flagpole in it—upon which to that very day runaway slaves still sometimes threw themselves, to clasp it with their brawny arms and claim emancipation. There was a wide verandah flagged with stone, on which Englishmen in white ducks could still be observed being provided with long cool drinks by silent Indian servants, and there were old prints of Empire in all its corridors, portraits of former Agents, weapons from imperial skirmishes, carpets from the marts of India, relics of Lord Curzon’s visitation or souvenirs of naval occasions.
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Elsewhere in town, too, Englishmen were still living the imperial style. The Sultan had an English Wazir, who had formerly been in charge of the prisons of the Sudan, and was now one of the great men of Muscat. He lived in a magnificent old Arab house in the heart of the capital, and he appeared on ceremonial occasions in a long black Arab robe, wearing a beret and carrying a ciné-camera. The commander of the Sultan’s forces was an Englishman, and around the bay lived the English mercenary officers of his army. Many of them had gravitated into the Sultan’s service from the Indian Army, and had brought with them all the attitudes of Anglo-India, here in its last incarnation. Their messes smelt of metal polish, pipe tobacco, whisky and dogs. English magazines and soldierly books lay all about, there were fat cats and baskets of flowers, and one major in the Sultan’s employ, a former Royal Marine, had taught the mess servants to obey British boatswain’s
calls, whistled between the teeth—‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Cooks to the galley! Hands to muster on the quarterdeck!’

It was all a quaint echo of lost times, and Muscat sheltered these late imperialists kindly. The Sultan preferred to live in the past too, for more than sentimental reasons, and he saw to it that his little capital changed as minimally as possible. This was hardly beneficial to the ordinary Muscatis, who were by now the most backward and deprived of all the Arabs, but it was certainly agreeable for the wandering Briton. How comforting, to withdraw through the harbour mouth into this little Shangri-La of sahib, sultan and respectful servant! How pleasant to find that here, if nowhere else, the Union Jack still commanded the deference of the natives! At night, as if to exclude the fantasy from the real world outside, a big gun was fired from the harbour fort, and the gates of the old city were slammed. Arab levies took their muskets to guard the exits, each gate being the responsibility of a particular tribe, and Muscat went to its beds in the old way—guarded at the gates, beneath the protection of the British Empire, to the lap of the peaceful sea. Perpetual curfew was the rule, and nobody might venture in those streets without a lantern, so that only an occasional flitting of robes, a twinkle of moving lights, the stir of the warriors at the walls, disturbed the shuttered silence of the town.
1

Mauritius was another relic. Here the British authority was more direct, for the island had been a Crown Colony since 1810, but it was no less easy-going. Mauritius had never much mattered to the Empire anyway. Ceded by the French after the Napoleonic wars, its only imperial purpose had been as a convenient and not too disagreeable place of exile—Boers, Jews and the Shah of Persia had all been
sent there at one time or another. Very few Britons knew where Mauritius was, and it was famous in England only as the home of the Dodo,
dodus
ineptus,
who had waddled his last long before the British arrived, and of the Mauritian 2d Blue, issued in 1847 to cover the expenses of a fancy-dress ball at Government House. Because there was a sizeable and cultivated French community there, few Britons were ever needed to run the island, and fewer still chose Mauritius for the making of their fortunes: only the top echelon of Government had ever been British, and even its members were regarded by the local French gentry with a certain condescension.

But it had been a happy enough association, and by the 1960s there was a fragrant, almost festive feel to the British presence on Mauritius. It might not be a very important appointment for a Governor or a Colonial Secretary, but it was very agreeable. The island was beautiful—Darwin described it as ‘elegantly constructed’, and it did possess a quality of graceful disorder that seemed almost contrived, like a landscape garden. Most of it was fine open country, such as the British always loved, with wide reaches of down and moorland, where deer roamed for the hunting, and small lakes lay darkly in the sunshine like Scottish tarns. Most of it was high, too, so that gusts of fresh winds often blew exuberantly off the sea, and the British could build their villas far above the sunburnt coast. Most of the Empire’s tropic islands were essentially ordinary, and the imperialist who had served in one often felt he had governed them all, but Mauritius was an endearingly odd place. Its fauna was odd—unique lizards and otherwise extinct birds—and until the seventeenth century no humans had lived on it at all. Also it had been periodically ravaged by hurricanes, so that all in all there was nothing very old on the island, no aboriginal artifacts or last descendants of forest dynasties, and a sense of inescapable transience gave to exile on the island an air of holiday.