Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (32 page)

Colonialism was important not for what it was but for what it was not. It bred grandiose illusions and unjustified grievances. The first had a major impact on events up to 1945; the second thereafter. If the French Empire seemed to transform a declining and exhausted France into a vigorous Samson of a hundred million, Britain’s Commonwealth appeared to make her a superpower – a notion that Hitler, for instance, carried with him to his bunker. Again, it was the visual aspect which determined such perceptions. In the 1920s, the great military roads, public buildings and European quarters which Lyautey had commanded for Morocco were taking shape: formidable, durable, austerely magnificent, as indeed they still are. Simultaneously, Sir Edwin Lutyens’s government quarters in Delhi, the finest of all the twentieth century’s large-scale conceptions, was being completed. Significantly, both had been conceived in Edwardian times; both were made flesh only after the first of Europe’s civil wars had already undermined the empires they adorned. Architecture is both the most concrete and the most emblematic of the arts. Public buildings speak: sometimes in false tones. Lutyens’s splendid domes and cupolas used two voices. To most of the British, to most foreigners, to most Indians above all, they announced durability; but to the military and economic experts they increasingly whispered doubt.

A case in point was the imperial currency system. From 1912 Britain divided her empire into regional currency areas, regulated by a British Currency Board according to the Colonial Sterling Exchange Standard; from 1920 colonies had to hold 100 per cent cover (in bullion or gilt-edge bonds) in Britain for their fiduciary issue. It produced a great many complaints among the nationalists, especially in India. In fact it was a sensible system which gave most of the Commonwealth the very real blessing of monetary stability. It also worked very fairly until after 1939, when the exigencies of British wartime finance and her rapid decline into total insolvency rendered the whole system oppressive.
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There is a vital moral here. Britain could be just to her colonial subjects so long as she was a comparatively wealthy nation. A rich power could run a prosperous and well-conducted empire. Poor nations, like Spain and Portugal, could not afford justice or forgo exploitation. But it follows from this, as many British statesmen had insisted throughout the nineteenth century, that colonies were not a source of strength but of weakness. They were a luxury, maintained for prestige and paid for by diverting real resources. The concept of a colonial superpower was largely fraudulent. As a military and economic colossus, the British Empire was made of lath and piaster, paint and gilding.

Hence the curious sense, both of heartlessness and of extravagance, but also of fragility and impermanence, which the between-the-wars empire evoked in the beholder. Malcolm Muggeridge, at Simla in the
early 1920s, noted that only the Viceroy and two other officials were allowed cars, and that the roads were so steep that all the rickshaw coolies died young of heart-failure. Watching a fat man being pulled along he heard someone say, ‘Look, there’s one man pulling another along. And they say there’s a God!’
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In 1930 in Kenya, Evelyn Waugh came across ‘a lovely American called Kiki’, whom a rich British settler at Lake Navaisha in the White Highlands had given ‘two or three miles of lake-front as a Christmas present’.
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Yet Leo Amery, the most ambitious of the inter-war Colonial Secretaries, found his plan to have a separate Dominions section thwarted because the Treasury would not spend an extra £800 a year in salaries.
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When Lord Reading was made Viceroy in 1921, the political manoeuvrings which surrounded the appointment made it clear that, in the eyes of the British government, the need to keep Sir Gordon Hewart, a good debater, on the Front Bench as Attorney-General, was much more important than who ruled India.
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Three years later, the great imperialist editor of the
Observer
, J.L.Garvin, ‘thought it quite possible that within five years we might lose India and with it – Goodbye to the British Empire’.
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The same elegiac thought occurred to a young British police officer in Burma who was called upon, at exactly that time, to shoot an elephant to impress ‘the natives’: it was at that moment’, George Orwell wrote, ‘that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd – seemingly the leading actor in the piece. But in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind.’
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Running an empire was in great part a simple matter of determination. Years later, in 1962, Sir Roy Welensky, premier of the Rhodesian Federation, was to say ‘Britain has lost the will to government in Africa’. It was not yet lost in the 1920s and 1930s, or not wholly lost. But it was being eroded. The Great War had shaken the self-confidence of the British ruling class. Losses from the United Kingdom were not so enormous: 702,410 dead. They were comparable with Italy’s, which bounded with vitality in the 1920s. But of course Italy’s population was still rising fast. Moreover it was widely believed that the products of Oxford and Cambridge and the public schools had been particularly heavily hit. Some 37,452 British officers had been killed on the Western Front, 2,438 killed, wounded or missing on the first day (1 July 1916) of the Battle of the Somme alone.
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From this arose the myth of the ‘lost generation’, in which slaughtered paladins like Raymond Asquith, Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke, many of them in sober fact misfits or failures, were presented as irreplaceable.
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The myth was partly literary in creation. The war poets were numerous
and of high quality: Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon, Herbert Read, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Maurice Baring, Richard Aldington, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Gibson and many others; in the final years of the war they became obsessed with death, futility and waste.
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Their poems haunted the early 1920s; later came the prose: R.C.Sherriff’s play
Journey’s End
, Blunden’s
Undertones of War
, Sassoon’s
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man
, all in 1928; Aldington’s
Death of a Hero
the following year. It was a literature which, while not exactly defeatist, was unheroic and underlined the cost of defending national greatness.

In the minds of the upper class, moreover, the loss of life, which they exaggerated, was directly linked to the crisis of the old landed system of traditional gentry agriculture, which had been in deep trouble since the arrival of transatlantic grain in the 1870s and was now on its last legs. Pre-war legislation had been designed to protect tenant-farmers against landlords. Lloyd George, who hated the landed aristocracy, capped the system with his Agriculture Act (1920), which brought in secure tenancy; and a further act in 1923 destroyed restrictive tenancy agreements and legalized ‘freedom of cropping’. The result was the break-up of thousands of estates, big and small. ‘England is changing hands’, wrote
The Times
, 19 May 1920. ‘From 1910 onwards,’ H.J.Massingham claimed, ‘a vindictive, demagogic and purely urban legislation has crippled [the landlord], good, bad or indifferent, responsible or irresponsible.’
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In February 1922 the
Quarterly Circular
of the Central Landowners’ Association estimated that 700,000 acres of agricultural land was changing hands every year. The previous year a single firm of auctioneers had disposed of land equal in area to the average English county. The former Liberal cabinet minister, C.F.G. Masterman, in a much-read book published in 1923, complained: in the useless slaughter of the Guards on the Somme, or of the Rifle Brigade in Hooge Wood, half the great families of England, heirs of large estates and wealth, perished without a cry …. There is taking place the greatest change which has ever occurred in the history of the land of England since the days of the Norman Conquest.’
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The price of land continued to fall, agricultural debt increased and millions of acres went out of production. The
Daily Express
cartoonist, Strube, featured a lanky and famished wastrel labelled idle Acres’. J.Robertson Scott, editor of
The Countryman
, gave a striking picture of rural desolation in a series of articles in Massingham’s
Nation
, which became a lugubrious best-seller under the ironic title
England’s Green and Pleasant Land
(1925). In Norfolk in 1932, the writer-farmer Henry Williamson noted, ‘a
farm of nearly a square mile, with a goodish Elizabethan house and ten or a dozen cottages, sold for a thousand pounds’.
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It is hard to exaggerate the effect of this untreated and ubiquitous decay at the heart of England’s ancient system of governance.

The evidence of industrial decay was omnipresent too. After a brief post-war recovery, the fundamental weakness of Britain’s traditional export industries – coal, cotton and textiles, shipbuilding, engineering – all of which had old equipment, old animosities and old work-practices, combining to produce low productivity, was reflected in chronically high unemployment. This was attributed in great part to the decision of Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer to return Britain to the gold standard in 1925. Keynes argued fiercely against it as a form of ‘contemporary mercantilism’. We were ‘shackling ourselves to gold’. Churchill replied we were ‘shackling ourselves to reality’, which was true, the reality of Britain’s antiquated industrial economy.
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The effects of the move balanced out: higher export prices, cheaper imported food and raw materials. As Churchill said, it was primarily a political move, designed to restore Britain’s financial prestige to its pre-war level. It was necessarily deflationary and so had the unforeseen effect of making it easier for the government to defeat the General Strike, the ultimate weapon of the Sorelians, talked about since 1902, which finally took place in May 1926. There had been dress-rehearsals in 1920 and 1922, from which the Tory Party had profited more than the union leaders. When it became inevitable, Stanley Baldwin craftily manoeuvred the leaders of the transport, railway and mining unions into fighting the battle at the end instead of the beginning of winter. It collapsed ignominiously after a week, it was as though a beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented danger and slunk back to its lair.’
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Neither going back to gold nor the breaking of the general strike weapon had any effect on the unemployment figures which (given as a percentage of the labour force) remained on a grievous plateau even before the end of the Twenties boom. From 1921–9 they were as follows: 17.0; 14.3; 11.7; 10.3; 11.3; 12.5; 9.7; 10.8; 10.4.
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For the workers, then, the problem was not one of a ‘missing generation’. No gaps were observable in their ranks. There were not too few of them; too many, rather. Yet their plight helped to increase the erosion of will among the ruling establishment by radicalizing the Anglican clergy. The Church of England had had a bad war. It had blown an uncertain patriotic trumpet. It had been exposed by the Catholic clergy as amateurish in its trench-ministry. It had done no better in the munitions factories.
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It had lost ground during a supreme moment; and it was uneasily aware of the fact. During the
Twenties its more eager spirits developed a new evangelism of peace and ‘compassion’. Some went very far to the Left. Conrad Noel, vicar of the spectacular fourteenth-century church of Thaxted in Essex, refused to display the Union Jack inside it on the grounds that it was ‘an emblem of the British Empire with all the cruel exploitation for which it stood’. He put up the Red Flag, for which he quoted biblical authority: ‘He hath made of one blood all nations.’ Every Sunday posses of right-wing undergraduates would come over from Cambridge to tear it down, and would be resisted by ‘Lansbury Lambs’, a force of radical ex-policemen who had been sacked for striking in 1919.
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This battle of the flags convulsed establishment England, a shocking new form of entertainment.

More significant was William Temple, Bishop of Manchester from 1920 and later Archbishop of York and Canterbury, by far the most influential Christian clergyman in interwar Britain. He was the first of the Anglo-Saxon clergy to opt for progressive politics as a substitute for an evangelism of dogma, and was thus part of that huge movement which, as Nietzsche had foreseen, was transforming religious energy into secular Utopianism. Temple was a jovial, Oliver Hardy figure, with an appetite not merely for carbohydrates but for social martyrdom. In 1918 he joined the Labour Party and announced the fact. In the Twenties he created
COPEC
, the Conference on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, prototype of many such bodies from that day to this. At its 1924 meeting in Birmingham he announced: ‘With the steadily growing sense that Machiavellian statecraft is bankrupt, there is an increasing readiness to give heed to the claims of Jesus Christ that He is the Way, the Truth and the Life.’
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His actual interventions in social politics were ineffectual. Thus, the General Strike took him by surprise and caught him at Aix-les-Bains trying to cure his gout and reduce his obesity. Puffing home, he directed an intervention by churchmen which, by persuading the miners’ leaders they had the whole of Christendom behind them, had the effect of prolonging the coal strike from July to December 1926, by which time the colliers and their families were destitute and starving.
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Nothing daunted, Temple soldiered on in the progressive cause. To George Bernard Shaw a socialist bishop in person was, he gleefully exclaimed, ‘a realized impossibility’. In fact Temple was a portent of many more to come; and it was a sign of the times that his views assisted, rather than impeded, his stately progress to the throne of St Augustine.