I have beside me, on this fine old East India Company desk, a copy of
The Colonial Office List
for 1950. The Empire was just then beginning to wane; the thick pink book was a little less thick than the year before, and the editorials and the essays showed signs—easier to read now, in retrospect, than at the time—that the purpose was indeed faltering, that the steel was showing its fatigue. But there are, at the back of the book, 200 pages that display the human reason for the Empire having been, on so many levels, a force for general good. The pages contain the complete lists of all those men and women in the Colonial Service—all those currently stationed overseas, involved in the daily devotionals of Empire. I take a page at random, and the full complexity of the thing becomes immediately apparent:
William Henry DeLisle, organiser of the anti anthrax campaign on the island of Nevis; Cicely Denly, hospital matron, Mauritius; Arthur Dennier, engineer on the Ugandan telephone service; Thomas Dennison, district magistrate, Kenya; John Denny, superintendent of Police in Singapore; Ronald Derrick, author of
The History of Fiji, The Geography of Fiji, The Fiji Islands
; Lawrence Des Iles, Chief Inspector for Poor Relief, Trinidad; Frederick Deighton, OBE, mycologist, Saint Lucia; Frank Dixey, author of
A Practical Handbook of Water Supply
, now with the Geological Survey of Nigeria; Henry Dobbs, Assistant Secretary to the Western Pacific High Commission and author of
Some Difficulties in Dirac’s Representation Theory
.
They were, in truth, a remarkable body of men and women—Haileybury and Harrow schooled them, Balliol and Caius polished them, the finer ethos of Imperialism motivated them. A disproportionately large number of them came from the manse and the cathedral close—of 200 governors who served during the first sixty years of this century, thirty-five were the sons of clergymen: men of intellect and good sense, Church of England and high traditions, Barsetshire principles sent out to minister to the brown and yellow in the world outside.
Some are still in the traces. The sixteen last relic islands attract the final survivors of the Colonial Service, and they shuttle slowly around the globe, a treasurer here, a secretary there, and finally governor, or administrator, or commissioner at last. They all know each other—Dick Baker in St Helena sends his Christmas card to David Dale in Montserrat, Rex Hunt in Port Stanley writes the occasional letter to Eddie Brooks in the Turks and Caicos Islands; the Tristan Administrator takes up a new job in Hong Kong, the Treasurer in Jamestown takes a ship for Gibraltar and a post at the Convent, and nurtures the fond hope that he’ll be made Governor in Anguilla before the place goes independent.
It would be pleasant to suppose that old colonial hands are still around to manage old colonies. Unhappily, though, there are now more surviving responsibilities than there are old hands to be responsible for them. The
corps d’élite
is winnowed to a very few, all about to retire from the service for all time; the surviving islands are having to be governed, run and—more unfortunately—directed from London—by the lesser men and women in a diplomatic service that has no time for and no interest in what Empire stood for, or what it stands for now. A colony may be lucky—it may still win the attentions of men who feel affection for the idea and the ideal; more usually these days it is unlucky, and its affairs are directed and its people ruled by civil servants who are either young, ambitious, and on their way to better and more exciting things, or by the old, the unsuitable, the drunk and the incompetent who are not able or willing to play in the greater games of major league diplomacy.
A fellow works in some minor capacity in our Embassy, in some
remote country, pushing paper in disconsolate fashion, upsetting no one, inspiring even fewer. His fifty-fifth birthday comes up, and the Personnel Department in London decides he must be given his head-of-mission job before he leaves the service. He can’t go to Khartoum—too tricky, too potentially important; he can’t go to Lima, or Ulan Bator, or even to Fernando Po. But how about, let’s see—Ascension Island, or the British Virgins? No trouble there—parish pump stuff, really, a few cocktail parties in the evening sun. Very pleasant. Fellow ought to be rather glad.
And so off goes the Third Secretary (Commercial) to take up the post of Colonial Administrator; he lives in his lovely old bungalow up in the hills, drives his Ford with the Union flag flying from the bonnet, he invites the island grandees to drinks and ‘At homes’ and—if the entertainment allowance provides—to dinners as well—and keeps his territory out of the public eye for the three years of his posting, and then he leaves. If he ever realised that his job was unimportant, the pleasantness of its routines softened the realisation; he could have made something of it—could have nagged and irritated and cajoled and tried to leave the island in better shape than when he found it. But as like as not he wouldn’t have bothered: too much trouble, London didn’t care for the place, and so, keen for an easy last few years in Diplomatic life, why should he care either?
And in that lies the problem. The islands that remain are not, by and large, places for which London has any time to spare. No one—either those who labour in the bureaucratic labyrinths in Whitehall or, more sad to say, those who find themselves in the Government Houses and colonial bungalows out in the far-flung fragments—has time, or energy, or the inclination to spare to deal with problems that, when set beside the graver matters of the world, must appear so monumentally insignificant. The matter of where to place the petrol storage tanks in St Helena or how to find a ship to take toilet rolls to Pitcairn or what to do when there is a massive rainstorm over Ascension that washes out the road to Two Boats village—all these are, quite reasonably, of almost no significance at all.
But an ailment untreated has a habit of becoming an affliction
untreatable. To ignore the needs—small, insignificant needs maybe, but needs nonetheless—of our remote dominions is to court disaster. The Falkland Islands proved that to all the world—for though there can be no argument that the events of April 1982 sprang as a direct consequence of Argentina’s invasion of the islands, it was Britain’s inability and unwillingness to deal with a nagging colonial problem that led to the frustration that prompted Argentina to make her foolish and fatal move. I hold no brief for the Argentine Government in this matter; nor is this account concerned with the merits of the various claims to those windy islands—that ‘bunch of rocks down there’ as President Reagan liked to call them. But some aspects of the early chapters of the tale are incontrovertible: Argentina had a passion to win the islands back for her own; the British refused to countenance the claim, kept Argentina talking about the claim—and sundry other less momentous matters, too—for nearly two decades, coquettishly hinting at a willingness to discuss the claim, but never doing so. Signals were sent out suggesting that a deal might be possible—the Royal Naval vessel that guarded the islands was to be withdrawn, private exasperation was expressed about the islanders’ intransigence, diplomats talked of the need to consolidate the long-standing friendship between the two great sovereign states on either side of the Atlantic. And yet the years went by, and precisely nothing of any substance happened. The problem was not considered a great one; the men and women who were deployed to manage it, to contain it, were not of sufficient calibre or commitment to realise its potential, nor to devise a means of reaching a solution.
And so a small problem became a large tragedy. Thirteen hundred men died, hundreds more were maimed, thousands of millions of pounds were expended in an unnecessary war over a piece of territory whose only function was as a symbol of power and strength, and had no intrinsic use at all. ‘Like two bald men fighting over a comb,’ Jorge Luis Borges remarked sardonically when it was all over. ‘When will our country realise,’ said Robin Renwick, the then Counsellor at our Embassy in Washington, ‘that we have a duty to solve our old Imperial problems before tackling those in
which we have no direct role? There are more problems than the Falklands out there—and yet we see ourselves as primarily concerned with mediating between Moscow and Washington, or dealing with the Lebanese situation. More attention to the problems that beset us directly might head off such things as the Falklands war.’
In almost every territory I visited there was some stark indication that the mother-country had neither the time nor the energy to waste on correcting an irritation, righting a wrong, recognising an ominous trend, bowing to a subtle need. The Cayman Islands, for instance, was gaining a fearful reputation as a place for ‘laundering’ money from highly questionable sources—did the country that gave us the Bank of England and the highest standards of fiscal propriety care if one of her distant Caribbean colonies became a loose cannon on the decks of the world money markets? It did not—it neither cared, nor cared to interfere. The Turks and Caicos Islands now have a reputation as one of the region’s major centres for drug smuggling—the Chief Minister no less was arrested by the American narcotics authorities a few days after I took tea with him—and yet Britain, a country of supposedly Himalayan moral standards, does no more than emit a benign harrumph! and lets the islands go on their sorry way. In Bermuda there is anxiety as more and more American—and, specifically, American military—influence is brought to bear, and secret plans are announced to station American nuclear weapons on the island in the event of an emergency. The Bermudian people grumble, and make their anxiety known to London—and London does nothing to alleviate their anger or to calm their fears.
We ignore the St Helenians—though we grudgingly pour money into the island economy, priding ourselves on our largesse, while failing to understand that by maintaining the island solely by public handouts we condemn the islanders, who deserve better, to a life stripped of self-respect. We ignore the Pitcairn Islanders, and they drift away on each passing cargo boat, until by the end of the century there are expected to be no Pitcairners left at all, and the colony will, as the Foreign Office would anyway prefer, fade from existence altogether. And we deal—or rather we dealt—with horrifying
callousness with the people of the Indian Ocean, when we evicted them from their homes, transported them to a foreign country against their will, and lied and evaded our responsibilities for years before a writer discovered the scandal, and told it to the world. Of all the events of post-Imperial British history, those of the late 1960s that occurred in the archipelago we customarily call Diego Garcia remain the most shabby and the most mean. No excuses can be made, by politicians of any persuasion: Diego Garcia is a monstrous blot on British honour, and shames us all, for ever.
To illustrate the evident lack of caring, or prescience, or sympathetic understanding that too often seems to characterise Britain’s dealings with her final Imperial fragments, consider those few hundred square miles at the northern end of the Leeward Island chain—square miles in which four foreign powers still maintain dependent territories.
There is the island of Ste Martin—Dutch run in the south, under the Netherland Antillean name of Sint Maarten, French run in the north; there are the United States Virgin Islands; and there are the British Virgin Islands. From Washington, Paris, The Hague and from London, four foreign nations try to direct the affairs of the descendants of their former slaves, and with varying degrees of success.
Ste Martin is an overseas department of the French Republic: she is administered by a prefect, she sends deputies to the National Assembly. The laws of France are the laws of Ste Martin. A
citoyen
of Ste Martin is a citizen of France, able to come and go as he pleases, providing, of course, he can afford the fare. But Air France flights between Paris and the Caribbean departments are well subsidised, and holidays are cheap.
Sint Maarten enjoys much the same privileges as does its neighbour. The laws of Holland apply; the Netherlands Antilles are represented at The Hague; citizenship is mutually exchangeable, regardless of the colour or the background of the particular Dutchman involved.
The United States Virgin Islands are run by a locally elected assembly, with a governor who is elected by the islanders themselves.
The territory sends a representative to Congress, though he has no vote. Citizens of the US Virgins are citizens of the USA, and all American federal laws apply in the islands. To all practical intents and purposes, the Virgin Islands are another American state.
But the British Virgin Islands, once a small department of the great colony of the Leeward Islands, seem isolated by more than geography from its mother-country. True, there is a functioning democracy there, and the island runs itself efficiently enough, and without trouble. The Governor—always white, since he is the representative of the Crown—is appointed by London, with no reference made to the islanders’ wishes. There is no Virgin Islands representation in London, save for one small lobbying organisation that carries out public relations and trade relations on behalf of a number of small West Indian states.
The laws of England apply on the Virgin Islands—but not all of them. Capital punishment is still in use, and there is a law permitting public flogging (it is administered by the Chief of Police, usually to youthful miscreants).
Citizens of the Virgin Islands do not enjoy full citizenship of the United Kingdom—they are entitled to some of the consular protection of the Crown, but they may not settle in Britain, and are treated by the immigration authorities with as much, or as little consideration as if they were Iranians, Venezuelans, or citizens of Turkey.
This, above all, seems the greatest insult. There are five and a quarter million people in all the Empire that remains—five million of them in Hong Kong. They have been, and in the main still are, fiercely loyal to England and all for which she stands. They have fought and in many cases have been wounded or have died for her. They fly the Union flag, they worship at the Church of England, they believe themselves immensely fortunate when, on Christmas Day each year, they hear Her Majesty address them all from Buckingham Palace and remind them they are citizens of that splendidly worthy agglomeration of peoples once, or still, ruled by Britain, the Commonwealth. But let them try to come to London to find work, or fly to Manchester to spend time with their relations, or take a
holiday in Scotland. Then all the loyalty and the feeling of privilege and good fortune counts for nothing. The law—the British Nationality Act—marks them out as suspect visitors; for the inspectors know full well that the only reason a Montserratian or a Pitcairner or an Anguillian comes to Britain is to settle, and thus become a charge upon the parish; and so the inspector harasses and interrogates and demands this and that, certificates and bank statements and return tickets and marriage licences, far more evidence of some legal reason for the visit than would be asked, one suspects, of an American or a man from Dresden or Valparaiso.