The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (61 page)

Those of a conservative frame of mind like Balfour searched for a single guiding intelligence behind these repeated assaults on the established order. The Ulster Unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, declared to the Commons in July 1920 his belief that there existed a ‘conspiracy to drive the British out of India, and out of Egypt’.
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Another Ulsterman of strong opinions, Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, was more specific. He listed the causes of national and imperial disaffection as: ‘Sinn Feiners and Socialists at our own doors, Russian Bolsheviks, Turkish and Egyptian Nationalists and Indian seditionists’.
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He did not say whether their activities were coordinated, but his intelligence department identified Russia as the ultimate source of all anti-British movements in the Middle East.
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Sir Maurice Hankey, successively secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence and to the war cabinet, blamed President Wilson’s fourteen points which, by their promotion of nationalism and self-determination, ‘struck at the roots of the British Empire’.
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The theory that all expressions of popular discontent in Britain and throughout the empire owed their origins to covert Communist agitation appealed to those on the right and in intelligence circles, and proved remarkably durable. Its persistence owed much to the anti-colonial rhetoric which poured out of Moscow after 1917, and Russia’s offer of sanctuary and support to militant nationalists, particularly from India. Likewise, the Communist International (Comintern), founded in 1919 to propagate world-wide revolution, aimed to develop the revolutionary consciousness of all colonial peoples. This was, however, a secondary objective, for the Comintern’s attention was principally focussed on the already organised industrial working classes of Europe and America, who were more susceptible to Communist propaganda than the politically unawakened peasantry of Asia and Africa.

Where they existed, colonial trade unions were a natural target for Comintern agents. British and Indian Communists were sent to India during the 1920s with orders to penetrate and convert local trade unionists. These agitators made little headway, thanks in large part to the counter-subversion measures adopted by the Indian Criminal Investigation Department.
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Precautions against the infiltration of trade unions were taken in Egypt in 1920, when specially chosen native police officers were sent to England to undergo a course in ‘anti-Bolshevist’ surveillance techniques.
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Elsewhere, colonial police departments kept an eye on local Communist parties. That established in Palestine in 1921 proved no danger to the state for, according to a police report, its subsequent history was ‘little more than a dreary and uninspiring tale of doctrinal bickerings and fiercely waged disputes involving no more than a handful of obscure men and women in back rooms in Tel Aviv and Haifa’.
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Such details did nothing to allay the fears of British intelligence. In 1927, Field-Marshal Lord Milne, the Chief of Imperial General Staff, summed up an analysis of Communist activities in India with the observation that Soviet subversion was ‘the gravest military menace which faces the British Empire today’.
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This claim rested on reports that Soviet agents, drawing on experience gained in China, were preparing to subvert the Indian nationalist movement. What is striking about this information is what it reveals about the official mentality of the time: both Milne and his staff automatically assumed that the Indian national movement would easily succumb to Communist pressure and accept an ideology far different from that of most of its leadership and rank and file. More alarming was information which indicated that the Russian government was resuscitating Czarist expansionist policies in Afghanistan. During the brief Third Anglo-Afghan War of 1919, intelligence discovered that the Afghans were seeking Russian aircraft and pilots, and two years later Afghan aviators were being trained in Russia.
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Old ghosts reappeared in the corridors of Delhi and plans for the defence of Afghanistan against a Russian invasion were brought out and updated.
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Even in 1943, when Britain and Russia were allies, military intelligence was disturbed by accounts of Soviet agitators at work among the tribesmen of the North-West Frontier.
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The ‘Red Menace’ fitted neatly with the conspiracy theories which began to circulate in 1919 and provided a satisfying explanation for the plague of restlessness which was spreading through Britain and the empire. A coherent and terrifying pattern was imposed on this global phenomenon by the publication in 1919 of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which were given much prominence by the right-wing press, most notably the
Morning Post.
Fabricated by Russian anti-semites during the twilight of Czarist rule, this document outlined a plot hatched by Jews to secure world domination through subversion. The Russian Revolution and Communist agitation throughout the world were part of this plan, which had as one of its goals the overthrow of the British empire. Among the converts to this cock-eyed theory was Rear-Admiral Barry Domville, whose work for naval intelligence supported his conviction that the empire was endangered by a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy masterminded by Moscow. The exposure of the Protocols as a forgery in 1920 did nothing to shake his faith nor that of other
fantasistes
who, from the mid-1920s onwards, joined various British fascist movements. All were pledged to defend the empire from its shadowy adversaries, who were invariably Jews or Communists or both.

The search for a common source for all the problems facing Britain and the empire was reflected in the thrillers of John Buchan and ‘Sapper’. Both relied on their audience’s willingness to accept a world in which secret intrigues flourished and a handful of determined men could seriously devise schemes to overthrow governments or destabilise whole societies. The villains were creatures of immense resource, utter amorality and were, almost to a man, aliens. Their machinations were always frustrated and the civilised order of things was preserved. That the readers of such fiction believed that the basic structure of their country and empire was so brittle suggests a flagging confidence in both.

It was arguable that the war had left the established order weakened and therefore vulnerable to the epidemic of protest and disorder that appeared in 1919. It was also politically convenient for defenders of that order to dismiss all assaults upon it as the products of a gigantic but ill-defined conspiracy. Doing so ruled out any suggestion that the assailants’ grievances might be real or even justifiable.

Such attitudes, usually combined with an intense fear of Communism and its capacity to create mayhem everywhere, were prevalent among Britain’s ruling class at this time. There was, therefore, a tendency, most common among soldiers, to classify dissidents of whatever complexion as either dupes or cunning men who manipulated the ingenuous and fundamentally decent masses to further their own ends. Such an explanation of the causes and manifestations of discontent often made it difficult for politicians and commanders to examine their sources dispassionately.

At the same time, conventional political wisdom made it very hard for Britain’s rulers to comprehend the emotions which impelled their adversaries to extremes of stubbornness and, at times, violence. For most of the nineteenth century, and certainly during the lifetimes of the men who governed Britain in 1919, their countrymen had been learning to put their faith in reasoned debate between rational men as the best method of settling political differences. Given goodwill and flexibility, a solution could always be found to any problem. Contemplating the unquiet state of Ireland in May 1918, Walter Long, a Wiltshire squire and Unionist MP, expressed the faith of his generation and class in the processes of political dialectics. ‘I feel’, he wrote, ‘that it cannot, must not, be beyond the power of statesmanship to avert the awful disasters with which we appear to be threatened.’
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Disaster had, in fact, already overtaken Ireland. Its Gaelic, Catholic majority no longer had any confidence in those essentially British ways of bringing about political accord. The failure of two Home Rule bills to be passed, and of a third to be implemented, convinced them that they could no longer rely upon the British parliament to provide them with what they wanted. Their salvation now lay in their own hands, and after 1914 many disappointed nationalists turned towards the Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) party, which called upon Irishmen and women to seize freedom for themselves even at the price of their own lives. Drawing heavily on the idealism of the Italian nationalist, Mazzini, Sinn Fein encouraged the Irish to discover their own sense of national identity which would give them the fixity of purpose and inner strength necessary for the inevitable struggle against Britain.

Sinn Fein gave an inspiring example of the sort of self-sacrifice that would be needed if Ireland was to free itself on Easter Day 1916, when its members attempted an armed coup in Dublin. It failed, and the leading insurgents were court-martialled and shot at the orders of the local commander, General Maxwell, who had learned how to treat the empire’s enemies in the Sudan, and who justified his actions on the grounds that traitors could expect no mercy in wartime.

The Easter Rising had been greeted with indifference by most Irishmen, but the courage of the ‘martyrs’, and exasperation with an alien government which showed scant interest in Irish opinion drove more and more towards Sinn Fein. British influence over southern Ireland dissolved slowly, unnoticed by a government whose attention was focussed on winning the war against Germany. Bit by bit, the administration in Dublin Castle lost its grip over the remoter parts of the country and, when conscription was introduced in April 1918, it was thought prudent not to enforce it, given the present humour of the Irish.

The test, both of public support for Sinn Fein and the authority of the British government, was the general election of December 1918. Seventy-six Sinn Fein MPs were returned (forty-seven were in gaol), together with twenty-six Unionists, and six old-style Home Rule nationalists. The Sinn Fein MPs gathered in Dublin in January 1919, formed the Dáil Eireann and proclaimed Ireland a republic. There were now two governments in Ireland, each claiming legality and denouncing its rival. One, under the Viceroy, Field-Marshal Lord French, occupied Dublin Castle, and the other, headed by President Eamon de Valera, was busy creating its own administrative apparatus and a defence force, the IRA. With the confidence provided by this force, believed to number 100,000 volunteers, the Dáil outlawed the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and demanded the immediate evacuation of all British troops.

The chief objective of Sinn Fein was to prove to the British government that the authority of Dublin Castle had been superseded by that of the Dáil, which was soon running a shadow administration. The first phase of what soon came to be known as the ‘Troubles’ began during the early summer of 1919, when the IRA launched a systematic campaign against the RIC. The murder of policemen, lightning raids against police stations and burning of police barracks were designed to intimidate and finally destroy the principal instrument of Dublin Castle’s control over Ireland. By the end of the year, the police were in disarray and, most importantly, their intelligence-gathering apparatus had fallen apart.

The British government had faced and overcome terrorist campaigns in Ireland during the 1880s, and had coped with massive civilian unrest and rebellion in 1798, the late 1820s, the 1840s and 1860s. There was, at least from the perspective of Whitehall, no reason why the methods which had worked in the past, a mixture of political concession and coercion, would not prove successful again. Until midsummer 1919, the minds and energies of ministers were concentrated on the negotiations that preceded the signing of the Versailles Treaty. This accomplished, the cabinet turned to Ireland and the concoction of a political panacea which would cure its sickness, and keep it within Britain’s orbit. While the remedy was being applied, every effort would be made to isolate and destroy Sinn Fein by force and resume the everyday government of Ireland.

For the next two years, the cabinet more or less accepted Lloyd George’s comparison of the situation to that in the United States in 1861, when the southern states had seceded from the Union. Ireland was part of the United Kingdom and the empire and could never be detached. Nevertheless, the events there during the first half of 1919 indicated a degree of popular dissatisfaction that had to be remedied. It was taken for granted that Sinn Fein were a small group of fanatics whose power rested on terror alone, and that most Irishmen would welcome a compromise.

The cabinet had, in fact, mistaken the temper of the great majority of southern Irishmen. A further obstacle to a settlement was the widespread contempt for the Gaelic, Catholic Irish, which was the legacy of two hundred years of religious and political propaganda. The Irish were, in English eyes, a fickle, childlike race, unable to subdue their wilder passions. For generations,
Punch
cartoons had portrayed ‘Paddy’ as a wide-eyed, simian-featured clown brandishing his shillelagh and looking for a fight. This stereotype and all that it implied clouded ministerial judgements. Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, considered the Irish ‘an inferior race’ and Lloyd George once quipped, ‘The Irish have no sense of humour, and that is why they make us laugh so much.’
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As the terrorist campaign intensified in Ireland, British anger found an outlet in racial abuse. A letter which reminded readers of the
Saturday Review
how Britain had held Ireland in what was tantamount to slavery, provoked this outburst from a furious correspondent: ‘Slaves have been made to work, and no one – not even Mr Ford, the great maker of motor-cars – has ever been able to make an Irishman work. The only thing the Irish have done consistently well throughout their history is murder; murder is the national pastime of the Irish.’
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