The ‘rendition’, as Balfour called it, of Port Edward, may have been the first deliberate act in the rundown of the Empire; the fall of Singapore, that most terrible of wartime blows, showed beyond all doubt that Britain had lost both the Imperial touch and, more important, the Imperial ability. By 1942—the date of the surrender, February 15th, was noted by some latter-day Imperialists as being particularly inauspicious: on the same day twenty-nine years later the Kingdom’s shillings and pence gave way to the beastliness of the decimal currency—Britain was militarily incapable of keeping her Empire going. Singapore’s fall was the beginning of the end.
It had been the axis of the eastern possessions. India, Australia, Borneo, Burma—all the colonial governments and governors had rested their confidence in the knowledge that the fleet was ready, that
Illustrious
, or
Revenge
, or
Indomitable
would sail at a moment’s notice from a dockside only a few days’ steaming away from whatever problem had arisen. Sixty million pounds had been spent after the Great War to turn Singapore into the Portsmouth of the East—the colonies to derive most security from its presence, the Malay States, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong, all contributed towards the cost of pouring concrete and bending iron into the greasy swamp at the eastern end of the great peninsula.
But only two battleships ever stayed in the dockyard, and then for a week before sailing off. The fortress had guns with which to defend itself—but they were firmly bedded in concrete, faced the southern sea, and could not be turned around. So when the Japanese forces entered Thailand, and then overran Malaya, and found the colonial citadel without its Navy and without any effective firepower pointing towards them, they pushed on to victory without a second thought.
The colony’s rulers still could not imagine that the Japanese would succeed; when a worried Churchill cabled that, ‘The City
of Singapore, must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death’, the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, laconically remarked that he trusted the British Army ‘would see the little men off’. They couldn’t, and they didn’t. The Imperial Japanese met the Imperial British across the Johore Strait on 8th February; one week later General Percival sued for peace, and the surrender was signed in the old Ford motor car factory out on the Johore road. Singapore was renamed Syonan, and all the rubber and tin went off to Tokyo.
Never again would the Asians—from the Punjabis to the Cantonese—have full and complete faith in the word, the might or the ability of the British. The mirror cracked, the glass dimmed and the muscle became flaccid; no matter that the war was later won; no matter that Singapore came back into the royal fold in 1945 (after the period when it was officially recorded as being ‘temporarily in hostile Japanese occupation’); no matter that the gin slings were slung at the Raffles Hotel and returned nabobs strutted and swaggered just as they had before and just as Sir Stamford would have wished—that February day was the moment when the Imperial will was challenged, and was found wanting.
Eight months later, and the British Government was to be found officially toying with the idea of running down the Empire. The Atlantic Charter, issued in 1941, had talked of ‘the rights of all people to choose the form of government under which they live’—but when an apoplectic Governor of Burma wired to know if that meant that the Burmese were going to have such a right, he was told that no, of course the Charter did not apply to peoples under the benevolent charge of the British, but to hapless indigents like the Abyssinians who had been jackbooted into submission by less civilised powers, in this case, the Wop. No, no worries, old man—The Atlantic Charter not to be interpreted as end of Empire or any such damn fool idea.
But the next winter, after Singapore had fallen and India looked even more restless than usual and the Burmese Government was itself in exile (up in Simla—very cold in winter, the Burmese aides complained), a new kind of policy began to be conceived. And these words were at its nub:
‘It is therefore the duty of “Parent” or “Trustee States” to guide and develop the social, economic and political institutions of the Colonial peoples until they are able without danger to themselves and others to discharge the responsibilities of Government.’
And how they agonised over it! Mr Attlee and Mr Eden, Lord Halifax and Viscount Cranborne and Lord Stanley argued and dithered, sent copies to the nervous dominions, decided to act out the policy of the entire Declaration (which was a great deal longer), then decided not to, then decided to abandon the whole document and make it secret and pretend it had never happened. But it had: planted in the minds of two men who were later to become Prime Minister, and two others who were to have a long and continuing influence on British foreign and colonial policy, were the seeds of a new scheme of things: after the war India was going to be handed over to the Indians, and then, in an unending cascade, all those other dominions and protectorates and trustee states and protected states and mandated territories and Crown colonies were going to be helped, slowly and surely, to stand on their own two feet, with England looking on, less a weary Titan, more a proud parent.
But the war, and its ultimate result, briefly clouded this new appearance of policy. In victory, Britain seemed to regain her Imperial energies. She had doughtily recaptured all the lost particles of Empire—the West Kents fighting hand-to-hand with the Japanese on the tennis court at Kohima, to win back Burma, and no less a grandee of Empire than King George’s cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, accepting the enemy surrender at Singapore. And the British sphere of influence in Europe and North Africa—particularly on the littoral of what was now truly, it seemed, the British lake of the Mediterranean—had actually increased, tremendously. But it was all an illusion: almost as swiftly as the dreariness of post-war Britain became apparent to her subjects—the rationing, the bitter weather, the bombed buildings, the shoddiness and weariness of it all—so, to the world, did her new and diminished role. She was on the second tier of a new grand alliance of nations that were richer, more powerful, more expansive and more confident than herself; and, fatally for the Empire, she had no stomach for foreign possession,
no enthusiasm for hanging on to much more than the mere trappings by which her glories had been proclaimed, only three decades before, to a humble and obedient world.
If India went, the axioms had it, the end was inevitable. Curzon had foretold of that: ‘If we lose it, we shall step straight away to a third-rate power…your ports and your coaling stations, your fortresses and your dockyards, your Crown colonies and your protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary, or the tollgates and barbicans of an Empire that has vanished.’ But India did go, swiftly and explosively, divided and perhaps cruelly misdirected by those Britons who were determined to get away. And once India had gone, and King George stopped signing his letters with the letter ‘I’ to denote him as Imperator, and once the Union flag that had flown night and day over the Lucknow Residency had been returned to Windsor Castle, so, gradually, and with some pain and not a little sadness, the remaining shards of Empire fell away—they were, it was felt, too costly, too inconvenient, too restive and anyway, in many cases ready (if not always quite able) to stand alone.
Burma and Ceylon were the first to peel away, and then, with consequences still so unhappily evident today, the mandated territory of Palestine. Newfoundland, Britain’s oldest colony (Sir Humphrey Gilbert had taken possession of it in 1583), a place of codfish and pinewoods and where they used dogs for pulling carts, had gone bankrupt before the war; once the fight was over the Bank of England had a look at the Newfies’ account book, pronounced all now well and—such was the fading Imperial spirit—organised a referendum so the loggers and the fishermen could decide what to do next. The first time round half opted to stay colonials, to considerable irritation and embarrassment; they had a second go, and voted to confederate with Canada, and nestle up alongside Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. By January 1949 Newfoundland was out; one more colony down, seventy-odd to go.
There was a last rush of blood to the head in 1953; wet and miserable though that June day dawned, the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth (the first monarch in nearly a hundred years not to be described as ‘Imp.Ind.’, but instead merely as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’) provided an opportunity for the final grand march-past of Empire. Suitably
The Times
announced a final Imperial triumph: Mount Everest had been climbed by a British party (though it was a New Zealander and a Nepali who actually made it to the top); the massed bands and regiments that thumped and clattered through the rain marched with even a little more spring and verve as a result.
There, behind Lieutenant-Colonel G. N. Ross of the Gordon Highlanders (‘attached Royal West African Frontier Force’), were the massed thousands of the colonial contingents—armed police detachments from North Borneo and Trinidad, Air Force detachments from the Aden Protectorate Levies; the Barbados Regiment, the Leeward Islands Defence Force, the Kings Own Malta Regiment, the Malaya Federation Armoured Car Squadron, the Fiji Military Forces, the Somaliland Scouts, 154 HAA Battery, East Africa, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and a dozen more besides. And there were the colonial rulers—the Sultan of Zanzibar sharing a carriage with the Sultan of Perak, the Sultan of Kelantan with the beaming and drenched (for she declined to carry an umbrella) Queen of Tonga. The entire procession, miles long and impeccably drilled, from Colonel Burrows, OBE, TD, of the War Office Staff who led, to the final man of the Fourth Division, the Sovereign’s Escort, who brought up the rear, was a last celebration of Empire—a muted and diminished version of the great jubilee of Queen Victoria, on a warmer and sunnier June morning fifty-six years before.
One by one the colonies departed. Comets and VC-10s and destroyers and frigates brought ever more junior members of the royal family to the rituals of Independence—the lowering of the Union flag, the lament of a piper or the solitary bugle call, the celebration ball and the hopeful speeches, the luncheon at the Government House and the unnoticed departure for London on the morning after. Usually the pomp was perfect, sometimes not—
at the Bahamas ceremonies an awning fell on poor Prince Charles’s head, and the frigate dispatched to help St Lucia on her road to freedom collided with the mole, and all the sailors standing at attention along its decks fell over in a grand confusion.
But via evenings of grand ceremony or amusing bathos, and in the wake of ugly fighting or quiet agreement over lunch at Lancaster House, they went. The Sudan and the Gold Coast, Malaya and Somaliland, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Western Samoa, Uganda and North Borneo, Malta, Basutoland, Aden Colony, Mauritius and Swaziland, Grenada, the Gilberts, the Ellices, St Kitts, St Vincent, Antigua, British Guiana, British Honduras—even the Condominium of the New Hebrides which was jointly run by the British and the French and was so consequently ungovernable that, it was joked, cars would drive on the right on Mondays and on the left on Tuesdays. By the 1980s, when television viewers in England had seen what they assumed had been the last of the flag-lowering and heard the last echoing of the bugles, once Churchill was buried and Suez was relegated to history and no longer embarrassed anyone—by that time the colonial Empire was, it was safely imagined, dead, buried and if not forgotten at least consigned to the past and no longer wished for, if little regretted either. All was gone.
But stay! In truth it was not quite gone. Almost, but not quite. A few colonies did remain, unwilling to let go, or unable to stand alone. A few governors still were appointed each year or so, a few geese still had to be plucked to provide plumes for a few Imperial helmets, a few grand houses still had to be maintained and lawns mowed and servants paid to keep a relic Imperial enginework chugging along. And in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, up a stairway so long and twisting, so dark and unmemorable that newcomers would take a week or so to learn just where they worked and all other workers in more glamorous departments professed ignorance of its whereabouts, even its existence—up in the eaves and among the gurgling radiators and the dusty collections of the registry and the accountants, was an office that ran it all.
I tried to get there once to see the place from where the Empire
was directed. But the Foreign Office is a place without a soul these days, no longer peopled by the clever and the romantic; and I had a dry note from a head of department saying that no, a visit would not be possible, but that perhaps a few questions, if suitably and solemnly written, might be answered in due course. There seemed no point in an arid correspondence, so I gave up this small aspect of the quest—far easier to fly to Cockburn Town, or to sail to Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas than to inspect the heart of Imperial power in London!
In a sense, though, it was a pity. The very reason for my journeying, after all, had been to make a last inspection of the Empire’s remains, to try to see how we were managing these final responsibilities of ours. It might have been instructive to talk to the civil servants whose parishes were the faraway outposts I had seen. I would have liked to ask the lady on the St Helena desk why she took a full month to answer a simple query from the Castle, or to ask the gentleman whose allotted tasks included the daily management of Pitcairn Island just why it was that Mrs Christian’s queries from Adamstown had to proceed across the sea by morse code, and that supplies for the colony were sent by courtesy of a market gardener in south London, who listened out for the plaintive cries from the island on his ham radio set.
I wanted to ask, I think, why it was we seemed to have given up on our last few charges—why, simply because they were so few, so far between, so unpeopled and so wanting in importance, they were of less intrinsic interest than when there had been many, and the Empire had been grand, and full of moment. The ethos of Empire had never been—or never during its accretion, anyway—an ethos that had much to do with global dominion, or the fierce assertion of naked power. We had power, of course, and once possessed power is a difficult thing to relinquish. But our success in making an Empire, in running it, in handing back and in winning the respect and, yes, the love even of those whom we had ruled—our success in all this grand endeavour came in no small part because we
cared
. We felt we had a mission, a divine right. We attended to
the details of the thing. We managed the Empire with men and women of compassion and skill, energy and intellect, and something of a romantic dream about them. Whether they directed, from the Office, or whether they ruled, as members of the Service, the colonial mandarins seemed to be a breed who
cared
. They had no need to do so, these District Commissioners and these Colonial Secretaries and these Governors and Commanders-in-Chief. But they seemed by and large to have done—ambitions and territorial jealousies seemed to run second to fascinations and enthusiasms, as though the colonial officers were pursuing their private and amateur interests, and had come out here, or gone over there, in pursuit of obsessions and hobbies, rather than aggrandisement or Machiavellian intent.