The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (74 page)

The empire had now become part of the ritual of British life. Families gathered round the wireless after Christmas dinner to hear the King speak. The seasons were marked by the comings and goings of various cricket and rugby union teams to and from the dominions. Two predominantly English and middle-class games had, from the mid-nineteenth century, gained a considerable following in various parts of the empire. By the 1920s, South Africans considered rugby union to be their national game, and it had also made great headway in Australia and New Zealand and, by a process of sub-colonisation, to Fiji and Western Samoa. Cricket had taken hold in South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India and the West Indies. From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a pattern had been established by which dominion teams toured England during the summer, and in the winter English teams travelled to the dominions. These contests attracted enormous public attention, particularly the intermittent, hard-fought contests between English and Australian cricketers for the Ashes. National pride was deeply involved; when an English XI embarked for Australia and New Zealand in September 1932, the
Spectator
solemnly announced that they left ‘as Sir John Jellicoe sailed in August 1914, for the North Sea, freighted with the prayers and hopes and anxieties of the whole English people’.
20

This comparison of sport and war was unintentionally prophetic. During the third test match at Adelaide in January 1933, Harold Larwood, a Nottinghamshire fast bowler, delivered a devastating sequence of ‘express’ balls at the Australian batsmen’s leg sides. Several Australians were struck on the body and two retired hurt. The 35,000-strong crowd exploded with rage and hurled abuse at the English team. The spectators’ surly mood was shared by the Australian Board of Control which sent a telegram to the MCC (Marylebone Cricket Club) accusing the English team of unsportsmanlike, aggressive tactics. If they were not immediately abandoned, it would ‘upset friendly relations between England and Australia’. The MCC could not understand what the fuss was about, and there were hints in the British press that it was a case of sour grapes, since the English had at last found an answer to Australia’s formidable batsmen. In its reply, the MCC stuck by what was being called ‘bodyline’ bowling and implied that Australian batsmen lacked manliness. As the cricket correspondent of the
Sphere
noted, ‘Cricket may be a “nasty rough game”, but let’s go on playing it without the sob stuff.’
21

Tempers eventually cooled down. Larwood continued to bowl ‘body-line’ balls, England won the Ashes, and the
Spectator
hoped the ruckus would not jeopardise future test matches, which were a ‘bond of union … between two sensible and friendly partners in the Commonwealth’.
22
Those outside the arcane world of cricket were amazed that large numbers of Australians and Englishmen could become obsessed with and overheated by such a trivial matter during the weeks when Hitler took control over Germany and Franklin Roosevelt was sworn in as President of the United States. Whatever else it may have been, the bodyline brouhaha was an occasion when the affairs of the empire, albeit very minor ones, were at the centre of national consciousness.

On the whole, the British public was more familiar with the empire than it had been in any previous period. This is not to say that whenever people gathered in pubs, railway carriages or on the football terraces they fell to talking about the empire. At a time when the ordinary people of Britain were more concerned with knife-and-fork issues such as jobs, the means test and the prospects for industrial revival, such recondite matters as Indian constitutional reform or native policy in Kenya could hardly have been expected to stimulate much public interest. Nonetheless, through the wireless, cinema and lessons in school, more and more people were aware of the empire’s existence. They were also, and this was most important, conscious of the empire as a valuable asset of which the British people could feel proud. Its public face was always a benevolent one, and its subjects appeared to be contented and glad to be British. The collective imperial image projected on the cinema screen or brought into people’s homes by the annual royal broadcast was reassuring and, so to speak, exorcised any feelings of guilt about oppression and exploitation.

At the time, the public knew that the empire was changing for it was, after all, a force for human progress. No one knew how long the present era of transition would last or in what form the empire would emerge. Neville Chamberlain, who became prime minister in 1937, imagined that India would only achieve full independence by 1980 at the earliest. Churchill thought in similar terms and, in 1937, wrote to the Viceroy, ‘I want to see the British Empire preserved for a few more generations in its strength and splendour. Only the most prodigious exertions of British genius will achieve this result.’ The strength and splendour of the empire were there for all to see as they watched newsreels of battleships steaming into Cape Town or Sydney harbours, conveying royal princes to their adoring subjects. But was the empire permanent? Probably not, but its possession was very comforting in a world which, after 1935, had suddenly become mutable and dangerous.

8

No Good Blustering: The Limits of Imperial Power, 1919–36

In 1924, Adolph Hitler called Britain ‘the greatest world power on earth’ and wrote, part in envy, part in awe of ‘British world hegemony’.
1
His verdict, reached in a cell in a Bavarian prison and set down in
Mein Kampf,
was correct in all but one detail; Britain was the
only
global power in 1924. The pre-war European powers were in disarray: Russia was still recovering from seven years of civil war; France had been debilitated and was at the onset of an extended period of political instability; Germany had been gelded and truncated by the Versailles Treaty; and the Austro-Hungarian empire had been transformed into a patchwork of petty states. The United States, since 1890 the richest power in the world, had voluntarily isolated itself from the affairs of Europe and refused to divert its wealth into the warships, aircraft and armies needed for great power status. It continued to dominate its own backyard, Latin America, in much the same way as Japan, the only industrialised state in Asia, did the Far East. Britain alone had territories and interests everywhere and the means to safeguard them.

The backbone of Britain’s power was its empire. ‘Count the Empire as one, and we need call no other nation master,’ trumpeted the
Morning Post
in May 1919.
2
No one, within or beyond Britain, would have questioned this statement, whose truth had been so recently demonstrated by the empire’s contribution to the British war effort. The empire had given Britain more than men and war materials, it was the essential ingredient in British prestige. ‘Prestige is what makes Great Britain a great power,’ an American analyst observed at the outbreak of the Second World War.
3
He did not show precisely how this abstraction worked to Britain’s advantage in international affairs, but then neither did those British statesmen, commanders and diplomats who invoked the word ‘prestige’ whenever crucial decisions had to be made.

Prestige counted most at a local level, particularly among those races in the Middle and Far East who had grown up in a world in which Britain was accustomed to getting its own way. Everyone knew what to expect; if the lion’s path was crossed, it roared, bared its teeth and, when this was not enough, pounced. Prestige always carried with it the threat of force and so, ultimately, it was inseparable from the ability of Britain to square up to its enemies and beat them. Early in 1942, the reaction of Pathans on the North-West Frontier to the news that Singapore had fallen to the Japanese was ‘one of disdain that so grave a reverse should have been suffered at the hands of such foes’.
4
Hitler agreed with them, and wondered if the world had grossly overestimated Britain’s prestige during the past twenty years.
5

Others were not taken aback by this turn of events. In 1934, a Japanese staff officer, reflecting the thoughts of many of his countrymen, stated that, ‘The British empire is already an old man.’
6
His counterparts in American military and naval staff colleges were being encouraged to think in the same way.
7
Some inside Britain also concurred. The feebleness of Britain’s response to affronts suffered by her subjects at the hands of Japanese troops in Tientsin in June 1939 dismayed Admiral Lord Chatfield, the First Sea Lord. Such incidents, he wrote, ‘would have made a Georgian or Victorian statesman issue violent ultimatums’.
8
So they would, had the offending nation been unable to defend itself; but this point, well understood by former practitioners of gunboat diplomacy, was seldom appreciated either by subsequent statesmen or historians.

John Bull was still alive and kicking in those regions where no one was likely to kick back. An Egyptian looking at the line of battleships and cruisers anchored off Alexandria in 1936, while his government haggled over the terms of a new treaty with Britain, would have been in no doubt of this. Nor would the Chinese. In 1928 there were 11,000 British and Indian troops scattered across northern China, guarding British property and investments against the depredations of local warlords.
9
Gunboats still chugged up and down the Yangtze River and handed out condign retribution if British subjects were abused. There was more than a spark of Palmerstonian bravado in Sir Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary, who, in September 1937, proposed to sink the Spanish cruiser,
Canarias
if the Nationalists and their allies persisted in attacks on British shipping. In the end, there was no need for retaliation as the dispute was settled by diplomacy.

There was no question that the Mediterranean fleet could have knocked out a Spanish cruiser without difficulty. What mattered was whether the British government had the nerve to act so drastically. Hitler, whose yardstick for a nation’s political vitality was its willingness to act ruthlessly in its own interests, felt sure in 1924 that Britain’s rulers still possessed the resolution necessary to preserve their empire. Various Indians, Egyptians and Arabs would have ruefully concurred. Later historians were far less certain. Those who have become engaged in tracing the path of Britain’s decline as a global, imperial power have come to regard the inter-war years as a period during which Britain found it harder than ever to uphold its international pretensions.

One possible explanation has been offered to explain this phenomenon. The thesis, advanced by Correlli Barnett, alleges that Britain’s governors were psychologically unfitted to make the sort of decisions that were imperative if the country was to survive as a world power. The fault lay with their moral outlook, which was the product of ideas implanted in them by the public schools and universities of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
10
That blend of evangelical Christianity, chivalric virtues, a sense of fair play, and a faith in man’s ability to solve his problems through reason produced a breed of rulers who were mentally unprepared to face up to, let alone outwit, Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito’s generals and admirals.

Americans recognised few signs of mildness, moderation and a desire to conciliate among British ministers, diplomats and strategists. A 1931 State Department analysis of Britain’s future detected a strong urge to recover lost ground and restore the country to the eminence it had enjoyed in the last century. The methods to be employed included ‘a reversion to the Palmerstonian “damn your eyes” tradition in diplomacy’.
11
The first consultations between British and American staff officers in 1941 left the latter with the impression that they were dealing with an artful, grasping and hard-headed crew. After the conference at Argentia Bay in August, one American officer commented, ‘One point which stood out in the British Papers was adherence to the long-established policy of directly organising other peoples to do the fighting necessary to sustain a mighty empire.’
12
From the President down, Americans knew that their partners could never be trusted. ‘It was always the same with the British,’ Roosevelt observed, ‘they are always foxy and you have to be the same with them.’ What also struck Americans was the chasm which separated Britain’s public image and private conduct in international affairs. It was paradoxical that, in the words of one American minister, ‘the British do not know how to play cricket’.
13

Clearly, the Christian gentlemen who ruled Britain never behaved as if the Queensberry rules could be freely applied to all human activities, nor had their schooling neglected Machiavelli. Even those unaware of his texts would have learned something of his stratagems for survival from the everyday life of their public schools. Whatever these institutions professed in terms of providing moral and spiritual enlightenment, they were microcosms of the outside world, and, like it, were inhabited by the cunning, the vicious and the dishonest. For this reason alone, the men who emerged from public schools could never have been ignorant of the nasty side of human nature nor how to contend with it. As Americans discovered during the war, the British ruling class was a match for anyone when it came to underhand political sparring.