Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (70 page)

In 1837, when Victoria came to the throne, the fact of Empire lay lightly upon Britain. Nobody had been greatly interested in the notion since the loss of the American colonies, and imperial symptoms were hard to find in Britain—only the nabobs and the sugar-kings built their country palaces, and the slave-ship ports flourished on the Triangular Trade. By 1965,
when the last of the great Victorians left the stage, five generations of the imperial experience had changed all that, and the islands were thick with the accretions of imperialism, flavoured everywhere with its memories, tempered by its assumptions. By then every British town had its memorials of the enterprise, even those far from the sea, or on the periphery of political affairs, and every traveller to the islands was aware of the imperial past, embodied in relic, attitude or asset all around him.

Everywhere, ingrained, was Empire! The neo-classical bulks of the High Commissions, towering over Trafalgar Square—the gilded dome of Sezincote in the Cotswolds, that most enchanted of the naboberies—curry at Veeraswami’s, founded to cater for Anglo-Indians on leave—the temple-memorial to Lord Durham, patron earl of Canada, that stood blackened and tremendous above Penshaw Moor. Livingstone of Africa lay in Westminster Abbey, the lady from the next-door cottage devotedly attended the grave of Younghusband at Lytchett Minster, every Australia Day the High Commissioners drove down from London to pay tribute to Admiral Arthur Phillip, first Governor of New South Wales, in his grave at Bath.

Stark but creeper-softened at the end of the Mall stood the Citadel, from whose bunkers the Lords of Admiralty directed the fleets
of Empire in the Second World War, and down the road across the parade ground Clive stood in cocky effigy beside the old India Office. High in the mists of Knock Fyrish in Easter Ross
loomed the great gates Lord Novan had erected to commemorate the capture of Negapatam; beneath the dome which Sir Herbert Baker had built for them in Oxford, surmounted by the mythical Zimbabwe bird, the Trustees of the Rhodes Foundation assembled to distribute the continuing largesse of Kimberley and the Rand.

United Africa Company—Imperial Chemical Industries—Anglo-Transvaal Trustees—Ionian Bank—Bank of the Middle East—across the City of London the brass plates announced the still generous legacies of Empire. In the House of Lords the names of Allenby, Dufferin and Ava, Kitchener of Khartoum, Mountbatten of Burma, Beatty, Strathcona, Napier of Magdala, Methuen, Lawrence, Fisher, Baden-Powell, Cromer, honoured, if only by the chance of hereditary succession, its champions. In Lancashire they still called the grandstand at a football ground ‘The Kop’—two Lancashire regiments had fought at Spion Kop—and the jargon of the British Army was still rich in imperial derivatives,
bint
‚
shuftee,
char
or
bukshee
. Twenty thousand Asian seamen sailed in British merchant ships: a million black and brown immigrants, from Africa, the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent, had settled in the Mother-Country.

And in any street of any city, one could find more intimate relics of Greater Britain. In hundreds of thousands of homes there lay, wrapped in polishing cloth and occasionally threatened with auction sales, the medals of the imperial campaigners—120 were awarded altogether, and if the General Service Medal, 1939–45, cluttered up rather too many drawers, the Waziristan Campaign Medal was, by 1965, becoming rather rare. Curios of bronze or ivory abounded still in drawing-rooms and parlours, Kashmir rugs lay strewn on polished floors, on many a staircase framed groups of imperial sportsmen or soldiers gazed sternly across their moustaches. Sadly, sadly the ageing bourgeoisie of England watched the extinction of their patrimony, as the
Telegraph
chronicled, year after year, the retreat of Empire—‘Taranji Minister of Posts and Telegraphs! He couldn’t stick a stamp on an envelope. As for Jebajwi as Vice-Chancellor, well, words fail me….’ Sometimes they wrote despairing or indignant letters to the editor, deploring the outbreak
of violence in some abandoned province, ‘a part of the world I happen to know well, having served there as Assistant District Commissioner in 1933–6’, and they were not always comforted when, looking out of their windows on summer afternoons, they saw the jet-black children of the immigrants playing exuberant cricket in the park.

But most of them, as in most periods of their history, disregarded it. They did not often think about the Empire. Families whose fortunes had been founded in Madras or Jamaica forgot the reasons for their continuing prosperity, and the great-grandsons of Boer War soldiers, the great-great-grandsons of Mutiny veterans, did not know where Lucknow or Ladysmith were to be found on the map. As the post-imperial generation advanced into middle age, the horizons of the nation contracted. No longer would one go to London to find the greatest living authority on the customs of the Shans, or irrigation problems in central Sudan, and one by one the men who knew all about Jordan, or Burma, or Basutoland, or the Andaman Islands, aged, died and were buried in village churchyards in the rain. The origin of the scimitar above the study door became uncertain—‘Something to do with the Mad Mullah?’

The British preferred to forget it. ‘We believe’, Lord Caradon told the United Nations in 1965, ‘that no nation and no race should be dominated by another. We believe that every nation should be free to shape its own destiny. We believe that colonialism should be ended as rapidly as possible.’ They muffled the subject at schools. They put out of their minds the thought, cogently expressed by Ernest Bevin not so long before, that their own prosperity might be dispersed with the Empire. Their national fortunes slowly declined, their industrial pre-eminence was lost, their status in the world was diminished, but no politician dared blame it upon the loss of Empire.

Had it all been a colossal mistake? The profits had certainly been great. Control of raw materials had enabled the British to influence prices favourably to themselves; the flow of specie had kept the
pound strong; the habit of Britishness, the familiarity of the structure, had given British exporters immense customary markets within the Empire. The possession of ports and coaling stations everywhere, the British dominance of things maritime and communicative, had made the islanders the world’s greatest carriers, insurers and agents. The expertise of all sorts that came with Empire powerfully boosted the ‘invisible exports’ of the City of London, which for so many decades kept the national balance of payments in equilibrium.

But the cost of it all had been stupendous too. Supremacy was a speculative investment—one year might pay, the next show a loss—‘divide the victories by the taxation’. In its prime it had been an economic stimulant, but in its decline it was debilitating, for it made things seem too easy. The British had not really been economically supreme for generations—perhaps since the 1870s, when it first became apparent that Germany and the United States had greater muscle-power, and when, partly in compensation, Disraeli first gave glamour to the imperial conception. The New Imperialism was an attempt to keep a medium-sized island State among the super-Powers, but it had failed: the possession of Empire eased the symptoms, but did not cure the cause—which was not a sickness at all, but merely the reality—the truth that the British were 50 million people more or less like their neighbours, less well endowed than most, and impelled into that century of greatness not by divine favour, but by circumstance and energy.

And by forfeit. Across the continents stood those tombs, from the triumphant mausolea of Anglo-Indian conquerors to the pathetic mementos of defeat, carved in prison workshops in the graveyards of Hong Kong and Singapore. Many expressed pride in death, many more contentment, but often the epitaphists were concerned less with the dead than with the living—

or:

This is because they believed that there were lessons to be learnt from the example of the imperial dead, that the Empire and the world would be a better place because of the manner of their lives, and the penalty of their deaths. Nobody who wandered among the imperial gravestones, though, pondering the sadness of their separate tragedies, could fail to wonder at the waste of it all, the young lives thrown away, the useless courage, the unnecessary partings; and the fading image of Empire, its ever dimmer panoply of flags and battlements, seemed then to be hazed in a mist of tears, like a grand old march shot through with melancholy, in a bandstand by the sea.

The end of it was not surprising. Once the almost orgiastic splendour of its climax had been achieved, once the zest went out of it, it became rather a sad phenomenon. Its beauty had lain in its certainty and momentum, its arrogance perhaps. In its declining years it lost the dignity of command, and became rather an exhibition of ineffectual good intentions. Its memory was terrific; it had done much good in its time; it had behaved with courtesy as with brutality, rapaciously and generously, rightly and in error; good and bad had been allied in this, one of the most truly astonishing of human enterprises. Now its contribution was over, the world had moved on, and it died.

They performed its obsequies, with Sir Winston’s, on a grey London day in January, and for the last time the world watched a British imperial spectacle. Melancholy though the occasion was, intuitively though the British felt its deeper significance, they did it, as Churchill wished, in the high old style. Big Ben was silenced for
the day. Mourning guns were fired in Hyde Park. The great drum-horse of the Household Cavalry, drums swathed in black crêpe, led the funeral procession solemnly through London to St Paul’s, while band after band across the capital played the Dead March from
Saul
,
and the soldiers along the way bared their heads and reversed their arms.

Five Field Marshals, four Prime Ministers, an Admiral of the Fleet and a Marshal of the Royal Air Force were among the pallbearers when the coffin, draped with the flags of the Cinque Ports and of the Spencer-Churchill family, was carried up the great steps into the cathedral. A hundred nations were represented there, and twenty of them had once been ruled from this very capital. A bugle played the
Last
Post
in the Whispering Gallery, another answered with
Reveille
from the west door, and after the funeral service they took the coffin down to the River Thames. There, as the pipers played ‘The Flowers of the Forest’, six tall guardsmen, their cold sad faces straining with the weight, carried it on board a river launch: and away up the London river it sailed towards Westminster, escorted by black police boats. ‘Rule Britannia’ sounded from the shore, fighter aircraft flew overhead, farewell guns fired from the Tower of London, and as the little flotilla disappeared upstream, watched by the great mourning crowd below the cathedral, all the cranes on the riverside wharves were dipped in salute. Everyone knew what was happening, even the enemies of Empire. ‘The true old times were dead, when every morning brought a noble chance, and every chance a noble knight.’

In the afternoon they put the old statesman’s body reverently on a train, for he was to be buried in the family churchyard in Oxfordshire: and so as dusk fell, with white steam flying from the engine’s funnel, and a hiss of its pistons through the meadows, it carried him sadly home again, to the green country heart of England.

I
S that the truth? Is that how it was? It is
my
truth. It is how Queen Victoria’s Empire seemed in retrospect, to one British citizen in the decades after its dissolution. Its emotions are coloured by mine, its scenes are heightened or diminished by my vision, its characters, inevitably, are partly my creation. If it is not invariably true in the fact, it is certainly true in the imagination.

It has taken me ten years to write the trilogy, and I add this epilogue now in the same beloved corner of Wales where I started the work in 1966. During that time everyone’s view of the imperial idea has shifted. Some people have come to think, as Goethe did, that injustice is preferable to disorder after all, while others have recognized for the first time that there was cruelty to the conception even in its kindest forms. For myself, when I began to write the book I thought I was describing something definitive in human history, but I have ended it seeing the imperial story in gentler but nobler terms, as a flicker of the divine progress.

In Canada one day, looking through old newspapers for relevant material, I came across a report of a lecture given in Chantaqua, Alberta, on a June evening in 1928. The lecturer was a Mr Walter J. Millard, and he was talking to a women’s club on ‘The Relation of Energy to Human Progress’. Preceded in the evening’s entertainment by baritone solos and child-impersonations from Miss Jensen, he had chosen to discuss the British Empire as an archetype of historical energy, and at first sight his talk seemed to me an imperialist address in the old convention of duty, privilege and far-flung responsibility. When I read on, though, I found that Mr Millard saw the Empire primarily not as an agency of development, law and constructive order, but as an instrument of personal redemption.
It represented above all, he said, ‘the privilege of every man to find his scrap of truth and apply it to the advantage not of himself, but humanity’.
There
, he thought, lay the truest power of the enterprise.

At once, as I read these words, I found my own views clarified, for I too had lately come to view the Empire less in historical than in redemptory terms. I had been groping around Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of ‘in-furling’—that infinitely slow and spasmodic movement towards the unity of mankind. Teilhard saw love and knowledge as the twin impulses of that progress: Mr Millard, posthumously addressing me from the
Calgary
Herald,
finally persuaded me that the British Empire too was a ripple in some cosmic urge to reconciliation. That ‘scrap of truth’ was all! The arrogance of the Empire, its greed and its brutality was energy gone to waste: but the good in the adventure, the courage, the idealism, the diligence had contributed their quota of truth towards the universal fulfilment.

‘Are we to complain’, wrote Nehru of the Empire, ‘of the cyclone that uproots us and hurls us about, or the cold wind that makes us shiver? The British … represented mighty forces which they themselves hardly realized.’ The wind dies, and is forgotten, but some of the seeds it blows about will be fertile in the end. Whenever I go to evensong in a cathedral of the old Empire, Lahore or Singapore, Auckland or Kingston, it always seems to end with the same last hymn. I am not a Christian really, but it never fails to move me. Often they sing it as the choir and clergy leave their stalls, and an old black verger, perhaps, precedes the Dean down the chancel, while the front-row ladies prepare their gloves for departure, or flowered and white-socked children of the Caribbean sing all the more lustily because supper is near. Night is falling through the slatted windows, jasmine, or magnolia, or tobacco flower hangs upon the air, clumsy black insects flounder about the dust-dimmed lights, or evade the whirring fan-blades.

The hymn was written in 1870 by John Ellerton, and was set to music by Clement C. Scholefield: and just as it ends those distant services upon a mingled note of gratitude and resignation, so I will quote its familiar words now to end my book, remembering
equally all those whose lives may seem to have been wasted in the imperial cause, those who died to create the Empire and those who sacrificed themselves to end it:

1978