Outposts (43 page)

But I did not go there. I decided not to for the most prosaic of reasons, though one tinged with a kind of logic. They are not, in the accepted sense, abroad. You don’t have to have a passport to go there. They are not within the remit of the Foreign Office. They have not been within the remit of the Colonial Office. They do not appear in the histories of Empire, nor in the directories of dependent territories. Their governors were not chosen from the
select lists of the Colonial Service, but from the same loyal rolls as came the lords lieutenants of the counties.

Their association with England, whatever the technicalities of their status, was far more intimate than the relation between, say, the United States and Guam, or between France and Martinique. In those latter cases the word ‘colony’ can, with some degree of literal truth, still be fairly applied; in the case of Man, in the cases of the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, and of Alderney, Great Sark, Little Sark, Brechou, Lihou, Jethou and Herm, not even the most fervent apologist would suggest that an Imperial foot was placed against a colonial neck, and that any subjugation or inequality still obtained. These may not be part of the Kingdom; but nor are they part of the Empire, nor have they been for many centuries past.

And then, finally, I cast logic and good reason to the winds, and went back to Ireland.

The British had held Ireland for longer than any other people on the face of the earth. The First Empire—that of France, and of America—had come and gone; the great Imperial adventure, of which these three years of wandering may be a final journey, grew, reached its zenith, and began its decline. And yet still there was Ireland; the flag flew over Dublin Castle, the soldiers drilled in the parks and the squares, the police were still royal, the Viceroy still ruled a sullen and unforgiving people. For the Irish hated it, they resented it, and they were the first to throw the British out.

Conventionally the British think that the first colonies they lost were those in America; but that irruption of nationalism and violence did not spell the end of an Imperial attitude, merely the closing of one Imperial phase, and the dawning of another. When the Irish rose, with all that wonderfully misguided valour at the General Post Office, the writing was truly on the wall for the Empire of the English. I have taken the common view that, in strict colonial terms, it was Weihaiwei in China that was the first real loss to the Empire; but the first wound was struck in 1916, the first grave and fatal blow was struck with Home Rule, the institution began to crumble from
within—if not yet without—from the moment the Pale, eight long centuries old, ceased to exist in the Ireland of modern times.

True, there was the Act of Union: Ireland was not a colony, in the same strict technical sense that decided me to leave out journeying to Douglas or St Peter Port. But it felt like one. It felt like one to the Irish. And the English behaved as though it were one. There was a distinction drawn, and the Gael was on the distaff side of it, always.

And, what’s more, so was the Planter, too. The English cared as little for the Protestants of Ulster as they had for the Catholics of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. The colonial mind ruled in the northern six counties too, even when the Free State had been born, and the North had been legally subsumed into the United Kingdom, and made to feel, constitutionally, part and parcel of and wholly equal to the motherland across St George’s Channel. The republicans and the nationalists in the mean streets of Belfast and Derry belted it out as a slogan—‘Ulster—England’s last colony!’ and they were right, in a strange, indefinable sort of way, righter than they knew.

So I spent the last hours of the journey in the town of Hillsborough, in County Down, at the great stone mansion they called Government House, and where the symbol of Ireland as part of Empire had come to rest after being chased out of Dublin by the heroes of the rising and the architects of Home Rule. It had been called Hillsborough House back then—the family house of the man who had been England’s first Colonial Secretary, and a man who believed passionately in Union with Ireland, and the denial of independence to the Americans.

In 1921 the family gave the house to the Crown—with provision that they might have it back should the Crown ever decide it had no need for it. The first of the five Governors moved in—to sign bills, to affix the great seal of Ulster to legislation, to hold investitures in the throne room, to hold garden parties on the lawn, to open fetes, present awards, dress in full Imperial raiment on the sovereign’s birthday, on Armistice Day, on the State Opening of Parliament at Stormont, and the delivery of the speech from the throne.

They were said to stand for no side, these men; and yet all were
Protestant, all were loyal to the Crown, all stood for the very antithesis of what fully one-third of the people they ruled were said to want. In this way more than any other the Governors of Northern Ireland seem now to have been truly colonial—for like the viceroys of Ireland in Dublin Castle, they stood, to some extent, for subjugation and rule, rather than as a pleasant symbol of a universally accepted association.

There was the Duke of Abercorn, who had a decorative embellishment of soldiery at Government House, changing the guard each noon and night, to remind the passing people that the Crown ruled this corner of the island. Next the Fourth Earl Glanville, gruff, intemperate, unloved—but married to the sister of the Bowes-Lyon Queen, and thus beloved by association, if loathed by virtue of his person. Lord Wakehurst of Ardingley, come to Ireland from Governor-Generalling in New South Wales, a man so given to nocturnal excursions that his official portrait was painted with an open fly, and the newer paint ordered to conceal the white silks below is still visible to even the casual eye.

And then Lord Erskine of Rerrick, who was chased away by the beginnings of the Troubles, a man said by his biographer to have been tortured by his bewilderment of Ireland—not the first, and assuredly not the last to be so.

Finally, Lord Grey of Naunton, who arrived to govern at Hillsborough after governing both British Guiana and the Bahama Islands. I remember him—a jaunty man with a white moustache and a twinkle in his eye, one of the few dashes of style and colour in a country that, during the five years he held office, was collapsing in a miasma of blood and dirt and misery.

The British told Lord Grey to go in 1973. His butler, Albert Harper, who had buttled for all five Excellencies and their ladies, remains puzzled at the way they made him go. They tried, he told me one afternoon as we walked down the endless carpet of the throne room, they tried to make him take the ferry home, and said there was no Queen’s Flight for him; they tried to stop a soldiers’ guard of honour for him; and they made him go in his civilian
clothes, without his swan’s-feather plumes, or his great sword, or his fine blue uniform.

But in the end Ralph Grey of Naunton left in style. There was a detachment of Scots Guards in the Square; there was a Heron of the Queen’s Flight; there was a final salute. But he did go in his black suit, and the final wave, as he stepped from the North of Ireland and into his English plane, was not with a plumed hat, but with a black bowler.

There was a dinner at Hillsborough the night I last saw Albert Harper. The menu read ‘Hillsborough Castle’—the name ‘Government House’ had long since gone. The silver knives were each an exact one inch from the table edge; the freesias were fresh from the garden; the servants were briefed, the fires were lit, the whisky glasses had been polished, the kitchen staff was at the ready.

But it was all a sad pretence. Where the Governor once sat, there was now but a Secretary of State, a mere politician, and usually one of little note, and with little reason to be noted. The footmen had long gone. The portraits of former Governors and Irish Viceroys triggered no memories, no conversations. The great seal of Ulster had been officially defaced with two great scratches of a knife, and the man who sat at this table’s middle signed no bills, affixed no sign manual, had no role that was not dictated by a political superior in London.

The argument by which we called Ireland part of the Empire must apply, right or wrong, to the remanent six counties of today. This is, in a way, a colony still. But since Lord Grey waved that bowler hat down from the Heron that June afternoon in 1973, Ulster has just not had, for me, the feel of Empire any more. Nor for Butler Harper. He sat down at the long table, and gazed down over the lawns, to where a policeman stood with a machine-gun crooked under his arm. ‘It was grand here in those days, right enough. But now—the Empire, if that is what we were part of, has vanished. Into thin air.’

And he stood up wearily and stretched his back. He opened the great door of Government House, and let me out into the afternoon
sun and the fresh shower of rain. And as I walked away I heard him turn the great key in the lock, shutting himself in with a fine Imperial memory, while all outside the Empire had, as he realised, just vanished clear away.

And what an Empire it had been! These little sun-bleached bones, scattered around the world in silent memorial to it all, stir some sadness and a lot of pride. It is a Saturday morning in St Helena—I came back for a second visit, early one recent southern autumn—and this could be an England of 6,000 miles away and a hundred years ago.

Before me, through the uneven glass windows of this East India Company mansion, a long garden slopes down towards the sea. There is a border of roses and marigolds; a row of fig trees, cow parsley hedges, a small jungle of banana palms, jacaranda trees and a magnificent magnolia. The sea sparkles in the warm morning, touched by a faint grey haze. There are a score of boats at anchor, including the Royal Mail boat the RMS
St Helena
from Bristol which came in last night, bringing me back to this speck of Imperial memories.

It is very quiet. If I stand still I can just hear the bells of St Paul’s Cathedral ringing in muffled celebration: the servant girl says there is a wedding this morning, a friend of her sister’s marrying a boy from Sandy Bay. Yes, there is a child already—a ‘spare’, she calls it, laughing—born a year ago. No one exactly certain who the father was. The girl, whose name is Annie, wants to go to England to be ‘in service’ the Government will not allow any girl to leave the island until she is twenty-three, so she has another four years to wait until she sees her first bus, or train, aeroplane, television programme or daily newspaper. Until then she is happy to clear away the Weetabix and Hoover the bedrooms and earn a few pounds to put away in the savings bank. She yearns to know what the outside world is like. She met a girl from Tristan once, who came to
St Helena and left in great confusion, unable to cope with the frantic pace of life in Jamestown—she was frightened by what she called the rush hour in the island capital, when perhaps ten cars leave for the hillside, and ten shops all shut at the same hour. ‘They tell me that England’s pretty busy when compared with us,’ observed Annie, gravely. ‘I often wonder what happened to little Jessica when she got up to London. I wonder what I will think, too. It’s so quiet here—so very peaceful.’

The ship’s arrival had, as always, caused great excitement. We carried tourists, wealthy Americans who were passing through to the Cape, and who fell upon the old streets of Jamestown with locust-like zeal. But we carried some Saints, too, and as they stepped from the dinghy through the great swirls of the rollers, there were tears and hugs and hoarse greetings, people who hadn’t seen each other for months, even years, in touch and view again.

There was a Saint Helenian soldier, a man who had joined the Royal Engineers twenty-three years before and who had never been home. He had a young wife now, a frightened little girl from Liverpool, who, for days before our arrival, would scan the horizon ahead for the first glimpse of her new home. Her husband had promised to return, and she had agreed to come with him, to give up the rainy streets of Toxteth and the grey waters of the Mersey for a tiny island 700 miles from the nearest land. But on the morning we made our landfall and she had seen the low and ragged outline beneath the clouds, she retreated to the poop deck and silently smoked a cigarette while gazing at our wake, and back towards her old abandoned home. From time to time her husband, his eyes shining with his own excitement, would walk back through the ship to find her. But each time, seeing her staring into the distance, he would back away and leave her, understanding, no doubt, how she must have been feeling. I met him in the street next morning, his hand being pumped by an assortment of grizzled passers-by. His wife had been spirited away within minutes of the boat docking: her new in-laws had taken her home for tea, and by the time he caught up with her ‘it was as though she had been living here all of
her life’. He knew it would be all right, he said. The Saints ‘are an awful nice bunch of people’.

The Empire had, on its better days, been both run by and peopled by ‘a nice bunch of people’ such as these. These places I had journeyed to and through were, by and large,
good
places—organised kindly, directed along traditional and well-meaning ways, peopled by men and women whose days moved to the comfortable English routines—from Weetabix to Ovaltine, from Sunday communion to the Friday knees-up, from Christmas and Boxing Day to the Queen’s birthday and hot cross buns. They took their ‘O’ levels and their Royal School of Music examinations, listened to the BBC relay broadcasts, sent their telegrams from Cable and Wireless, dispatched their letters by the Royal Mail and learned to call the man in the big house on the hill ‘Your Excellency’. They committed few crimes, stirred up little trouble, kept the Queen’s peace and collected coloured pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Di. And they were, on a small scale, reflections of the larger, grander Empire—that vast assemblage of nations upon which the sun never set (though the original remark—‘the sun never sets on my dominions’ was written in German by Schiller for Phillip II of Spain, and had nothing to do with Britain at all).

And so here I sit, in an East India Company room, looking down across a Royal Naval fortress, at a Victorian harbour and a Regency town. It is easy to slip into a fine Imperial reverie, and remember how we came to possess only morsels like these as the parting gift from our days of world dominion. Consider how once, from Aden to Zanzibar, from the ice-bound rocks of Arctic Canada to the bone-dry ovens of the Kalahari, from groves of Malayan durian trees to the apple orchards of Tasmania, from the ‘friable and spongy rocks’ of Malta to the granite peaks of Mount Kenya, and, most gloriously of all, from Kashmir to Kannayakumari, northern bastion to southern tip of India, Great Britain was, as the
New York Times
happily conceded on the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, ‘so plainly destined to dominate this planet’. Endless tracts of land, a quarter of the world’s peoples, every race and creed, from Ashantis
and Assamese, Zeptiahs and Zulus, from Buddhists to Zoroastrians, fell under the seemingly eternal paramountcy of London.

True, some of the possessions were not possessed at all, as such: the self-governing colonies, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, Natal, New Zealand, Canada and the six Australian colonies made their own rules and deferred to London only rarely; India, a splendid law unto herself, above and beyond what she and her servants would have regarded as the undignified rabble of mere colonies; and the protectorates—Somaliland, Nyasaland, the Solomons and that part of Aden between Muscat and Yemen—which were, strictly, foreign countries, whose citizens may have been subject to but not necessarily of the British Crown, and were thus not entitled to the kind of amiable treatment supposedly handed down in the colonies themselves. There were other genera in the Colonial Office menagerie—protected states, trust territories, and a bastard tribe that included such forgotten ends of the earth as Starbuck Island and Vostok Island, and which were lumped together under the heading ‘Miscellaneous islands and rocks’.

The Crown colonies, as varied in governmental form as they were in governed peoples, were at the centre of it all. Some had parliaments, some had appointed assemblies, some gave the vote to all, some to a few (to one-eighteenth of the population of Malta, for example), some had no laws at all. Some, gigantic and complicated, had all the trappings of independent states—the Gold Coast enjoyed the attentions of an administration that included a cinema technician, a tug master and a grade one foreman platelayer (in 1950 Mr Blackwood, Mr Stewart and Mr Reynolds, all shipped out from Britain); others had only the rudiments—Tonga, for instance, had just one British Minister (of Finance) and was otherwise run by colonial servants a thousand miles away in Fiji.

This immense and majestic collection of peoples and places was administered by the men of the Colonial Office. They were unhurried folk, bureaucrats of splendid aloofness and determined superiority who were encouraged to pursue any private field of endeavour or research for which they cared, rather as though the office was an out-station of All Souls. One note records that a Mr
Darnley of the West Indian Department had a keen interest in whales, and spent much of his time before the fire contemplating, instead of the possibilities of a putsch in Jamaica, the complexities of ambergris and the relative blubber thickness of Fin and Sei.

The clubbability of the place led, perhaps inevitably, to a certain smugness. In 1956 Sir Charles Jeffries, Deputy Under-Secretary for the Colonies (and a contributor to
Punch
and the
Listener
), was content to declare that, ‘The Colonial Office will still have immense continuing responsibilities for as long as any planner can usefully look ahead.’

It might have been useful had he looked ahead just ten short years; or he might perhaps have been a little suspicious that he and his colleagues had laboured for so long in temporary quarters of Sanctuary Buildings, Great Smith Street, and that the marvellous structure they had been promised just after the war had taken so long to materialise. That structure was never built; by 1966 the Colonial Office suffered the indignity of merger, subsumed into the Commonwealth Relations Office; a mere six months later, on 7th January 1967, it disappeared altogether. The existence of a Colonial Office meant the perpetuation of the colonial mind in an age that, quite suddenly, had developed a loathing for such things. And, in any case, most British colonies had disappeared: Aden had, and Zanzibar; not one of the protectorates was still protected, nor any trust territory, nor any protected state. India had gone, and Australia, Canada and her dominion colleagues were standing proud and alone. Yes, most of the colonies had gone. Most, but not quite all.

Historians of Empire will still argue over the reasons for Britain’s Imperial decline. Was it deliberate, or did it happen by accident? Was the gathering of Empire deliberate, indeed? Did this greatest accretion of power and influence the world has ever known come about as a consequence of a sustained fit of absentmindedness? Theses for Doctorates of Philosophy and Bachelors of Letters—and books, of course—will continue to stutter from the typewriters and the word-processors for years to come. This book will certainly not attempt to answer the question. Before we take our final look at the stranded hulks of the Imperial adventure, though, it might be
useful if, briefly, we pass by the way-stations of the great decline, if only because so many of the stations themselves bear a remarkable similarity to the fragments that remain.

Where did it all begin? The loss of the American colonies, of course, brought to an end one phase of the adventure; but the Treaties of Utrecht and of Paris had by then been signed, and the growing dominance of Great Britain within Europe was about to ensure that a new British Empire was about to rise from the wreckage of the old. It was the scuttling of that second Empire that was the long and painful affair which only today seems to be coming to an end.

The Indian Mutiny—or the First War of Indian Independence, as it is known today by every schoolchild from Amritsar to Assam—sent the first whisper of concern around the London clubs. The mutineers had been subdued, naturally, but not at all easily, and that came as a shock. Compared with the succession of easy victories that had secured most Imperial territories, India was proving, as they might have said in the gymkhana clubs over a not-so-chota peg or two, ‘deucedly tricky’.

Then there was the Boer War, so hard fought and so hard won, often so humiliating in its losses and eventually so Pyrrhic in its triumph, a massive force of Britain’s mighty army ranged against, and often punished by, a ragged mass of distempered Boer farmers. If the mutiny had checked the hubris, the events at Magersfontein and Spion Kop interrupted, then slowed, and finally stopped the progress. Sure, the aggressive temper could still be called up—Younghusband’s invasion of Tibet, with its accompanying massacres that were, in truth, rarely committed by British empire-builders, took place in 1903, after the events in South Africa; but then there was the Great War, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, and it could safely be said the Empire had reached and passed its apogee, and never would be quite the same, nor as powerful, nor its masters as confident again.

The first piece of property that was actually let go—if we forget Heligoland (which Lord Salisbury swapped for Zanzibar) and the Balearic Islands of Minorca and Majorca, which were ceded to
Spain under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802—was a tiny corner of China known as Weihaiwei. It was a port, on the southern side of the Gulf of Po Hai, and had long been regarded as strategically important, as well as having—a rare thing, in China—an extremely pleasant climate. The Chinese were accustomed to having it snatched away from them (the Japanese had occupied it in 1895, and destroyed the Chinese Imperial North Ocean Fleet at anchor, much as they were to do with the Americans in Hawaii—another station that was briefly in British hands—forty-six years later) and when the British demanded it, acquiesced, in 1898. The British wanted the port as a summer station for the Royal Navy China Squadron, and to provide some Imperial balance to the Russian occupation of the port on the northern side of the Gulf. (And the knowledge that the Germans also wanted Weihaiwei provided a final argument for Lord Salisbury to raise the Union Jack there.) The Russian acquisition was called Port Arthur; Britain renamed Weihaiwei Port Edward, and as such it remained for thirty-two pleasant years, most of them under the benign governorship of ‘the charming, plump and unctuous’ James Stewart Lockhart, who was said to have been a ‘scholar-administrator in the Confucian sense’.

But American influence in the world had begun to grow; new arguments were interfering with the geopolitical assumptions that had emanated from Downing Street during the heyday of Empire; and when, at a conference in Washington in 1921 it was suggested that Britain might give up Port Edward, voluntarily, and leave China to run her own port at her own whim and leisure, Britain’s Ministers agreed. Not without a grumble—Winston Churchill made a forceful argument that to abandon Weihaiwei would mean a massive loss of prestige for Britain in the Far East, and newspapers in London complained that the Government was knuckling in to pressure from an upstart rival to world dominion. But the nerve had gone, the purpose had faltered, the need for territory seemed to be on the wane. Britain gave up Port Edward, the famous sanatorium where unnumbered matelots had recovered from malaria and gazed out at the sea and the mountains of Shantung was handed over to the Chinese Navy, and the fleet sailed away, for
ever. (Eight years after the British left the Japanese moved in again, and the place did not become properly Chinese until 1945. Since then it has been one of the very few Chinese cities where the population has actually fallen: Port Edward had 100,000 inhabitants, today there are only a tenth as many.)