The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (72 page)

The colour bar was a canker within the empire. It had been experienced, in varying degrees, by black and brown soldiers during the First World War, and had shaken their faith in the empire as a community of equals. The colour of a man’s skin determined whether or not he could settle in Australia, vote in British Columbia, and circumscribed his every activity in South Africa. The British too were tainted. When Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen became ambassador to Persia in 1934, he discovered that, ‘There was a feeling that we had not yet divested ourselves of the “nineteenth-century complex” and were not disposed to treat the Persians as equals.’
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Egyptians, Arabs and Indians shared this sentiment, and detected that behind successive British governments’ stonewalling over increased self-determination for their countries lay a fundamental belief that the non-white races suffered from some inbred incapacity to manage their own affairs. By contrast, political maturity was more easily and quickly attained by white men. For the impatient and the disappointed, the Commonwealth was a white man’s club as racially exclusive as those of Singapore, Nairobi or, for that matter, the Hammersmith Palais de Dance.

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The Bond of One Spirit: The Public Face of Empire, 1919–39

The colour bar was making itself felt during a period when tremendous efforts were being made to promote Commonwealth and imperial unity. The revolution in communications, which gathered pace after 1919, enhanced the prospects for a more closely bonded empire. Long-distance air travel and wireless had the potential to liberate the empire from the fetters of its geography. Aviation was immediately recognised as a cord which could bind together territories scattered at random across the globe. After his epic twenty-day flight from London to Australia at the end of 1919, Sir Ross Smith believed that he had helped ‘bind closer the outposts of the Empire through the trails of the skies’. Another pathfinder, Mrs J.A. Mollinson (Amy Johnson), told a BBC audience in 1932 that the purpose of her latest flight from London to the Cape by way of West Africa had been to ‘keep together in friendship and good fellowship all the scattered parts of our Empire’.
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The government’s response to the challenge of imperial flight was fumbling and unimaginative. At the end of the war, Britain possessed the world’s largest aircraft industry which, in mid-1918, was producing 4,000 machines a month, and a pool of trained pilots.
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Within months of the war ending, the most skilled and daring were making ambitious pioneer flights; Alcock and Brown crossed the Atlantic in May, Sir Ross Smith reached Australia by way of Iraq, India and Malaya, and in May 1920 two South Africans flew from Cairo to Cape Town. These achievements aroused tremendous public excitement, but the government’s approach to imperial civil aviation was timid. Deference to
laissez faire
and free market principles made ministers and civil servants extremely reluctant to invest public funds in air transport at a time when the government was short of money. There were plenty of ideas, like that for a West African air service, but each fell victim to official lassitude. Only in December 1923, and after pressure had been exerted by the 1921 Imperial Conference, did the government decide to take civil aviation seriously.

The result was Imperial Airways which had a share capital of £1 million, a government subsidy of a further £1 million spread over ten years, and a monopoly of imperial and continental routes. It was a case of too little and too late for Britain’s aircraft industry, which was now being overtaken by its German, French and American competitors.
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Far greater imagination and enterprise was shown by the Australians; the Queensland and Northern Territories Air Service (QANTAS) had been founded in 1920, linking the dispersed settlements of the outback, and in 1925 it began regular flights from Brisbane to Singapore. Imperial Airways inaugurated its services to Cairo and Karachi in the same year, against the background of a row with the Egyptian government, which objected to the British company’s monopoly. In January 1932, thirteen years after the first preliminary reconnaissance, regular flights began between London and Cape Town via Paris, Brindisi, Alexandria, Cairo and Khartoum. They were heavily subsidised by the goverenments of the colonies along the flight path, Britain and South Africa, who togethere pledged over £1 million for five years.
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After an experiment with airships, which ended disastrously in 1929 when the R101 crashed on its maiden flight to India, the Air Ministry turned to aircraft for all imperial services. Since all long-distance flights had to be staggered and harbours, rivers and lakes were the most convenient staging-posts, flying boats were adopted for most imperial routes. The result was the development of Short 23, known as the Empire Flying Boat, which came into operation in 1938 and carried eighteen passengers. By then, Imperial Airways was offering an extensive service: there were seven flights a week from England to Egypt, four to India, three to East Africa, and two respectively to East Africa, Singapore, Hong Kong and Australia. Superficially, this appeared an impressive total, but it might have been greater had it not been for the lack of official vision in the immediate post-war years.

Wireless, like flight, had owed its rapid technical development to wartime needs. It was soon converted to civilian uses and was identified as a device which would strengthen imperial links and promote a sense of common identity among the empire’s subjects. ‘Contact with civilisation’ was how an officer serving on the North-West Frontier described the faint signals from the BBC’s Daventry transmitter which he picked up in 1927. Wireless was spreading quickly throughout the dominions; in 1929 there were 299,000 licensed receivers in Australia, 216,000 in Canada, 41,000 in New Zealand, and 16,800 in South Africa. Ceylon had its own station by 1925, but progress in India was slow and haphazard. By 1935, there were transmitters at Bombay and Calcutta, and a programme was in hand to distribute radios to rural villages.

In time, even the most far-flung colonies were able to pick up BBC longwave broadcasts, and local stations proliferated. In 1941 there were 385 wireless receivers in North Borneo among a population of 300,000, who were served by two local stations.
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Their output seems to have had little appeal to the Chinese community, which preferred to listen to popular music programmes from Saigon and Manila. Radio could and did expose the empire’s subjects to other cultures and ideas, not all of them conducive to imperial harmony.

The greatest value of wireless lay in its power to draw people together. It was therefore the ideal device to enkindle a sense of community among the disparate races of the empire; to strengthen the ties of kinship between Britain and the dominions; and, most important of all, to focus the loyalty of all the empire’s subjects on the figure who symbolised imperial unity, the monarch. It was therefore appropriate that on Christmas Day 1933 members of the extended imperial family heard the gruff, fatherly voice of George V speaking from Sandringham. In the first royal Christmas message, the King thanked his subjects for their loyalty, pledged them his continued service, and sent them the season’s good wishes. This brief, simple and warm address had been preceded by an hour-long programme made up of short pieces contrived to convey a sense of familial closeness among the peoples of the empire. There were short live broadcasts from Canadian, Australian and New Zealand towns and cities, Gibraltar, and a ship lying off Port Said.

George V’s 1933 broadcast was an imperial
coup de théâtre.
The airwaves had united the empire in a wonderful and moving manner, and a technically more ambitious programme was prepared for Christmas Day 1934. Again, the themes were kinship and harmony, but the rich diversity of the empire’s people was also explored. A handful were invited to speak about themselves and their daily lives. So, during the prelude to the King’s address, listeners heard, among other things, songs sung by native ‘boys’ on a Cape vineyard, an officer speaking from an outpost on the Khyber Pass, and a few words from a life-saver on Bondi Beach, Sydney. There was an endearing candour about some of the performances. A Tasmanian fisherman drily announced, ‘There ain’t much difference being a fisherman here and a fisherman anywhere else. It’s mostly pretty cold and pretty wet.’ An old Cotswold shepherd remarked, impromptu, that he had a brother in New Zealand who, if he was listening, might take the trouble to write home. At three in the afternoon, the King spoke and praised that ‘bond of one spirit’ which held all his scattered subjects together.

The wireless was also helping the people of the empire to find out about each other. The BBC, then guided by the high-minded principles of Sir John Reith, its director-general, gave time to fifteen-minute talks by experts on different aspects of the empire, past, present and future. Controversial issues were not side-stepped or glossed over; in 1930, the archaeologist Louis Leakey drew on his Kenyan experience to warn that if officials continued to govern Africa ‘in ignorance of native custom’ they ran the risk of accumulated resentment breaking into unrest.
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These broadcasts were reminders of the continual need to inform the public about the empire, what it stood for, and how its existence benefited them. These matters were all touched upon in various ways by the cinema, then enjoying its golden age. Films were the greatest source of public entertainment between the wars: there were 3,000 picture houses in Britain in 1926, a total that had risen to 5,000 by 1940, the year in which 1,000 million tickets were sold.

The cinema therefore offered an unprecedented opportunity to spread the imperial message to the masses. Attention had been drawn to the persuasive power of films during the 1926 and 1930 Imperial Conferences, which called for the expansion of the empire’s film industry, and the encouragement of films that upheld imperial virtues. After the earlier conference, Sir Philip Cunliffe-Lister, the president of the Board of Trade, admitted the political value of films that ‘unconsciously influence the ideas and outlook of British people of all races’ which was why they ought to become the ‘universal means through which national ideas can be spread’. More forceful in tone was General Sir Granville de Laune Ryrie, a sexagenarian veteran of the Boer War and Australian high commissioner in London. He demanded that all the empire’s children should ‘be marched to the cinema in the morning to see wholesome British films depicting what is going on in the Empire.’
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Such uplifting stuff would be a welcome antidote to the deluge of sensational, violent and often openly sexual material which poured from the Hollywood studios. Nine out of ten of the films shown in Britain came from America, and the stiffer elements in society saw them as a source of moral contamination.

The government did what it could to contain this pollution. It also insisted that every film which portrayed the empire or its servants showed both in a flattering light. Defending the celluloid integrity of the empire was the duty of the British Board of Film Censors, founded in 1912, and armed with a list of taboo subjects and scenarios. In theory independent, the Board was always willing to yield to government pressure and did so regularly. In 1925 it refused a licence to D.W. Griffith’s
America
because it showed British soldiers behaving badly during the American War of Independence.

Sexual or potentially sexual relations between black or coloured men and white women were among the prohibited subjects appended to the Board’s catalogue of the forbidden in 1928. This ban was invoked in 1933 on Frank Capra’s
The Bitter Tea of General Yen,
in which an American girl falls in love with a Chinese warlord. Other new interdictions included ‘British possessions represented as lawless sinks of iniquity’ and ‘White men in a state of degradation amidst Far Eastern and Native surroundings’.
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Protection was extended on characters from soldiers to colonial officials whose screen conduct had always to be irreproachable.

There was, in fact, little to fear from Hollywood’s version of the empire. In its widest sense, Britain’s empire, like America’s Wild West, was just a fruitful source of adventure stories. Hollywood’s
Lives of the Bengal Lancers
(1934) was, like other American ‘imperial’ epics, a straightforward tale of derring-do with occasional statements about duty to the king emperor from officers keeping his peace. The villains were Pathans, but they might as well have been Apaches, and not long after the film’s storyline was adapted for a Wild West film. What Hollywood wanted was an exotic background and a dramatic scenario, and attempts at verisimilitude were, therefore, desultory or ludicrous.
Storm over India
(1939) made Kabul the capital of Burma and showed an amazing ignorance of the British army, solecisms which enraged Colonel John Hanna, a former artilleryman who undertook much of the Board’s script vetting. Technical blunders apart, there was little in Hollywood’s picture of the empire to upset official sensibilities. Films like
Lives of the Bengal Lancers
or
Gunga Din
(1939) probably did little to influence public opinion beyond complementing older, Hentyesque images of resourceful and gallant men serving their country on distant frontiers.

British-made imperial films were always more than entertainment. They deliberately presented the empire as a virtuous and benevolent institution, guarded and served by brave, dedicated men of the highest probity. This was what the censors demanded, but it also represented the private sentiments of two of the most gifted contemporary British film-makers, Michael Balcon and Alexander Korda. Each was intensely patriotic and had advised Baldwin on Conservative political films.
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The government acknowledged the value of their work and helped smooth Korda’s path during the location filming of
The Drum
(1938) and
The Four Feathers
(1939). The Indian army provided troops for the battle scenes in the former, and the Sudanese authorities loaned Korda 4,000 askaris and the East Surrey Regiment for the spectacular re-enactment of the battle of Omdurman which marked the climax of
The Four Feathers.
The Sudanese government also assisted in the procurement of large numbers of Hadanduwa warriors (Fuzzy-Wuzzies), who added a striking and authentic touch to the battle sequences. According to a puff for the film which appeared in
Picture Post,
it was difficult to persuade these proud men to ‘die’. One asked, ‘Why should I die? I fought in the real battle of Omdurman and did not die!’ He was eventually persuaded that there was no shame in a screen death and complied.
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