Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (69 page)

Here and there they tried to stem the tide. The Maltese and the Seychelloise unsuccessfully proposed integration with the United Kingdom itself, while the Falkland Islanders steadfastly preferred the rule of London, personified by a genial Governor whose official car was a London taxicab, to the rule of the Argentine,
personified as often as not by dictatorial criminals and military thugs. The Sultan of Brunei clung to his British protectorate when all about him were losing theirs. The Protestants of Northern Ireland were as ready now as they had been in 1914 to defy the Catholics by force of arms—a favourite banner of the Orange Order in the 1960s showed Queen Victoria presenting a Bible to two kneeling black men, above the motto ‘The Secret of England’s Greatness’. While the white leaders of Southern Rhodesia plotted once more to break away from the Empire and maintain their own supremacies for ever, the black leaders looked to Britain still to impose a fair solution. When the Gibraltarians held a referendum to decide whether to stay British or join Spain, 44 voted for Spain, 12,158 for the Empire: the Governor of the Rock was still a serving officer of the British Army, the apes flourished, and every night in the Ceremony of the Keys, at the Main Guard, the sentries bawled out their imperial catechism: 

But the passion was spent, for or against Victoria’s Empire, and so, except for these quaint or adamant anachronisms of loyalty, it came to an end calmly and almost apathetically, like an old soldier pacified at last by age, pain and experience. The last garrisons were withdrawn from the distant fortresses. The great fleets were no more. The British, turning their backs upon the great adventure, made themselves once more a European nation. Abroad the emancipated peoples soon adopted new styles and philosophies of government, or even acquired new overlords: at home a generation came of age which had never heard the trumpets.

I
N the winter of 1965 Sir Winston Churchill, aged, beloved, hazed by brandy and long campaigning, died at his home in London. He had by then passed beyond the bickerings of party politics, and had become the living examplar of British glory. Loathed and reviled in earlier life, he was to be calumniated again after his death, in the way of legends: but for the moment, as he lay massive on his bed in death, ninety-one years old and the most universally honoured man on earth, he was beyond criticism. He was a dead spirit of grandeur, and for a day or two not only his own nation, but half the world paused wondering and reverent to mourn him. It was like that moment of antiquity when, the wild god Pan having died, strange music sounded and spirits moved from one end to the other of the classical world. Churchill had gone, and a sigh, part regretful, part wry, part sentimental, went around the nations.
1

In him the lost Empire of the British, bad and good, had found its fallible embodiment—brave, blustering, kind, arrogant, blind in many things, visionary in others, splendid but often wrong, lovable but frequently infuriating. For seventy years Churchill had lived the experience of Empire more intensely than any other man, through six reigns and many wars, from the brazen climax of the old Queen’s jubilee to the melancholy disillusionments of Suez. He had forced the Malakand Pass in ’98. He had argued with Thorneycroft on the path up Spion Kop. He had conjured the
fearful beauties of Gallipoli. He had been Colonial Secretary, Secretary of State for Ireland, First Lord of the Admiralty, Prime Minister. He had soldiered for the Queen as a subaltern of cavalry, for the King as a colonel of Fusiliers, and it was he whose edict had sent Fisher’s Grand Fleet to its war stations at Scapa Flow, ‘like giants bowed in anxious thought’.

In his rhetoric, his humour and his rotund prose Churchill had expressed the best and worst of imperial attitudes. After Amritsar he had spoken nobly of ‘the British way’, which did not include public murder as a deterrent, yet Gandhi he could describe only as ‘a miserable old man who has always been our enemy’. His unerring opposition to Indian independence sent him into the political wilderness between the wars: yet when Nehru called upon him after independence Churchill saw him to the door in tears—‘we put that man in gaol for ten years, and he bears us no malice. I could not have been so magnanimous.’ His was the Empire that was to last a thousand years, but the Statute of Westminster he described as ‘a repellent legalism’. For half a century he sent
£
2 every month to the Indian servant of his military youth, but he displayed no jot of sympathy for the patriotism of the coloured peoples, nor any fellow-feeling for subject leaders who sought to do for their own countries just what he wished to do for England.

Churchill was only half English, his mother being American, and devoted as he was to the British tradition, touchingly proud of his forebear the Duke of Marlborough and his father Lord Randolph Churchill, still intellectually he was more an internationalist than an imperialist. In this he illustrated one of the recurring paradoxes of Empire—the wider it spread its frontiers, the more parochial it became. Churchill was much more at home with Americans than with Australians or Canadians. He was bored from the start by the provincial hierarchy of Anglo-India (‘a third-rate watering-place’, was his image for the garrison town of Bangalore, ‘out of season and without the sea’). Imperial economics meant nothing to him, colonial diplomacy was dull beside the grand sweep of global activity which was his true metier, and he surprised King George VI by the sang-froid with which, when the time came, he adapted to the inevitable conclusion of the Raj.

Yet to another half of him the fact of Empire was the truth of Britain’s greatness. He loved the colour, the majesty, the idiom of it—its ‘valiant and benignant force’, its ‘fortress-islands’, its ‘scattered family of the Crown’. He was an aesthetic imperialist. Holding no very strong moral views about it, believing as most of his generation did that British rule was probably better than any other, while he was no heady imperial idealist, he was no reformist either. The detail of Empire bored and sometimes repelled him. It was the idea of it that he found exciting, the spectacle of that immense estate enhancing the grandeur of England. Churchill was an Anglo-American diplomatically, a European instinctively, an Englishman cerebrally: but emotionally he was an imperialist in the classic High Victorian mould, loving Empire for its own sake, for the swagger and the allegory.

Of all the charges of Empire, this simple dynamic had been the most consistent. Economics, strategy, world politics had all contributed to the British expansion, but the taste for glory had underpinned them all, degenerating down the years into a hunger for prestige or self-esteem, but still recognizable in 1965 as the same atavistic tribal pride that animated the Diamond Jubilee at the apogee of Empire.

Because it was fantasy, it was not unreal. To an astonishing degree the world had been changed by its drive. The rise of the Victorian Empire had acted as a gigantic prod or catalyst, stirring dormant energies across the continents. It had been the principal agent of an immense historical evolution, the distribution almost everywhere of industrial civilization—which, having had its beginnings in western Europe, was implanted in Africa and Asia principally by this Empire. If it had not been done by the British, it would have been done by somebody else: but still a combination of chance, energy and geographical fact really had given to the
British people, as they liked to imagine during their evangelical years, a providential duty to perform. They really had been Chosen. That they fulfilled the mission with a mixture of motives and methods was irrelevant: they were simply the instruments of history or perhaps of biology, like the birds and beasts which, attracted by the gaudy appurtenances of sex, unwittingly perpetuate their species: there was never a mating dance like the dance of Empire, or plumage so seductive to its participants.

Some of the imperial achievements were indestructible, like the roads, railways and telegraph systems which provided the basis of the new industrial society, and which, though they would presently be superseded by more modern techniques, would leave their heritage of usefulness for ever. Others, often dearer to the British themselves, were less permanent. The Empire had not been a missionary venture, in the sense that it seldom tried to impose a religion upon its subject peoples, leaving them by and large to their own theological preferences. It did, however, diligently propagate a faith—faith in parliamentary democracy of the Westminster pattern, steady, evolutionary, rooted in the Rule of Law and the importance of the individual. Nothing gave the more earnest imperialists greater satisfaction than to observe their subjects honouring this vision in their turn. What nobler, they thought, than to see the ancient traditions of English life, hammered out so painfully over the centuries, translated to the distant dependencies of the Crown? Lionel Curtis saw the process as the grandest fulfilment of Empire, and his magnum opus
Civitas
Dei
, published in 1938, envisaged it as the foundation of a true world order, a successor to
all
Empires and the predecessor of Paradise.

There seemed a time indeed when the emergent British Commonwealth might really become a community of cultists, dedicated to this creed. India was frequently boasted of, after independence, as the World’s Largest Democracy, and Nigeria was said to be a very model of democratic rectitude. Kenya treated its white minority with perfect fairness, Ceylonese tea planters reported that nothing had much changed in the happy uplands of Nuwara Eliya. The faith soon shrivelled, though, and in a few years the ideology of the British Empire, such as it was, collapsed. The rule of law proved
transitory when the imperial policemen were withdrawn, and tyrants more fierce than any colonial governor swept away the baubles of democracy. Nations gently nurtured into statehood fractured themselves in civil war, or were curdled in corruption. The fragile democratic flower soon wilted in climates like the Sudanese or the Zanzibari, and the principles of Common Law were tossed aside, as the subject peoples reverted to older standards, or devised new systems altogether.

Soon the old colonial empire had little more in common with Britain than with America or Soviet Russia—in great matters at least. In smaller ways the association proved more resilient. They still played cricket on the dust patches of Pakistan, among the Caribbean frangipani, or behind the yam-stores of New Guinea.
1
The Fiji Rugby XV still made its regular tour of Wales, and at the Commonwealth Games, so old imperialists liked to think, a recognizably higher standard of sportsmanship prevailed than at the Olympics. The huntsmen of Ootacamund, as of Montreal, still wore pink.
2
The regimental messes of the Indian Army still cherished their regimental silver, tarnished a little with the years perhaps, but still commemorating ancient triumphs of the imperial arms. In many a store and office the merchants of Empire survived, immensely rich in Hong Kong or Singapore, proud but seedy in Calcutta, astutely adapting to the times in Lagos, Mombasa or the Cayman Islands.
3

A manner of thought survived here and there, and revived gracefully upon the arrival of a visiting Briton, when afternoon tea was poured in memory of the old days, a game of tennis was proposed, and the English slang of another generation was resuscitate
—‘What a jolly nice surprise to see you! You’re a brick to come all this way!’ Among the Pathan soldiers of the Pakistan Army the command to stand at ease was still rendered ‘Sundlies!’, as the British had obligingly simplified it long before: among the soldiers of the Southern Yemen People’s Republic the word ‘dismiss’ still meant ‘screwdriver’—something that turns to the right, like a parade dismissed. One often felt, rather than actually identified, the traces of Britishness, when the flag had long been lowered and a generation had grown up who never knew the Empire: in the stance of a building, in a style of printing, in the posture of a sportsman, or in the echo of military music, half strange, half familiar among the teak trees or the deodars.

Victoria’s Empire had created three nations more or less in the image of England, brought into being almost from scratch by the genius of the British, and faithful still to their doctrines. It left behind two universal achievements: the end of slavery, the freedom of the seas—the rules of the sea were imperially conceived, the slave trade was imperially abolished. It had given to the world its own language, English, one of the mightiest of all instruments of human intercourse. It had kindled the latent energies of many a people temporarily stagnant: ‘he that wrestles with us’, as Burke said, ‘strengthens our will, and sharpens our wits—our antagonist is our helper.’ It had done something, as Matthew Arnold said, to ‘humanize men in society’—to curb the worst cruelties of primitives, and introduce people trapped in superstition and tradition to the idea that a man was a man for a’ that. For a century it had sustained, as Carlyle said, ‘a mighty Conquest over Chaos’. Here and there among the millions it had left, as Curzon hoped, ‘a spring of patriotism, a dawn of intellectual enlightenment, or a stirring of duty where it did not exist before’. Through many generations, in many countries, it had been the peace-keeper and the law-maker, generally fair by its own standards, generally humane, and except in its own interests, which were always paramount, as impartial as a judge ever is. Now that it was gone, people often unexpectedly missed it.

Churchill died, and it died with him. It had lasted too long anyway: the subject peoples had outgrown its tutelage, and would progress much faster without it. For the British it was more of a wrench than they knew, for though by now the imperial idea seemed as antiquated as steam trains or antimacassars, the existence of Empire had impregnated all their lives. England without an Empire, Joseph Chamberlain had once said, would not be the England its people knew: and sure enough, when the imperial dimension was removed from the English national structure, nothing was ever quite the same again.

The British Empire had been haphazardly acquired, it had been hastily and sometimes sloppily discarded, but it had given the British people, seventy-odd years before, one brief moment of dazzle. The climax of Empire at the time of the Diamond Jubilee had come to the great mass of the citizenry as a revelation. It had seemed to them the greatest thing that ever happened to any nation, the duty and privilege of ruling a third of the world. Never mind the true motives and methods of imperialism—in the days of their imperial supremacy the British genuinely believed themselves to be performing a divine purpose, innocently, nobly, in the name of God and the Queen. The imperial dimension gave them a sense of scale and potential, and made them feel grand.

As Younghusband was permanently changed by his moment of ecstasy outside Lhasa, so the British were to be stamped with the stigmata of that passing conviction. It soured some of them, as they gradually realized it to be illusory. It matured many more, as they paid for it in blood and unhappiness. It confused them in the end, as rival visions overlaid their own. It made some of them proud in retrospect, some of them ashamed. It left its long trail of racial arrogance, so that long after Great Britain had retreated into the second ranks of the nations, the good-natured British people still sneered at blacks and laughed at foreigners. It gave them a cynical distaste for worldly power and influence, so transitory and treacherous. It embittered them a little, when they found there was
nothing left to fire their hearts or their imaginations, that they were only another European people after all. But it made them, for better or for worse, a special people, one of those few peoples which, in the centuries of the nation States, were able to alter the face of the world—one of those peoples whose dust is left like a cloud in the air, as the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno put it, when it goes galloping down the highroad of history.