The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (64 page)

At this stage Allenby appeared, a commander nicknamed ‘The Bull’ and from whom Curzon expected a display of bullishness which would bring the Egyptians to their senses. Again, the Marquess had miscalculated. Allenby was a pragmatist with enough imagination to appreciate that he could not rule Egypt by force for ever, especially as the men available to him were becoming mutinous because of postponed demobilisation. Egypt needed a civilian cabinet filled with Egyptian ministers who would cooperate with the high commissioner in the old manner. To bring this about, Allenby offered an olive branch in the shape of an end to the banishment of the Wafd’s leaders.

Allenby’s concession began an elaborate political game between himself, his successors and the Wafd. For Britain, the stake was the future security of the Suez Canal, which was now sometimes called the Clapham Junction of the empire. During the early 1920s, British-registered ships accounted for between two-thirds and three-quarters of the tonnage of all the vessels that passed through the Canal. The strategic importance of the Canal became greater than ever after 1935, when Britain had to contend with the Far Eastern pretensions of Japan, and of Italy in the Mediterranean. If and when the Royal Navy had to concentrate against either power, it would have to use the Canal. The safety of the waterway rested on a British garrison and outlying detachments stationed near Cairo and Alexandria but, as Allenby realised, the Canal would be in permanent jeopardy if British forces were continually engaged in crushing Egyptian disorders.

Public opinion would not have tolerated a state of unending emergency in Egypt. Commenting on the need for a lasting Anglo-Egyptian agreement in 1920, the
Daily Mail
claimed:

The British people never had much liking for holding down people in a perpetual state of ‘unrest’… the best way to buttress the Empire for all time is to win the affection and trust of the peoples who have come under our charge.
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Much the same view was expressed in the Liberal
Manchester Guardian, Observer
and
Daily News,
although the
Morning Post
and
Daily Telegraph
echoed the opinions of right-wing Conservatives, who wanted the Egyptians brought down to earth with a bang by a further dose of martial law.

Force was applied periodically to the Egyptians. It had been in 1919 and was again during the political crises in 1924–5 and 1936, when British warships appeared off Alexandria and Port Said and British regiments paraded through Cairo. On both occasions, the British government was indirectly upholding the authority of the Egyptian crown, a valuable player in the game for control of his subjects. The Sultan Fuad (he assumed the title King in 1922) was a patriot after his own lights, and intensely anti-Wafd. This made him pro-British, insofar as he was always amenable to any manoeuvre that would hurt the Wafd. Once, in a state of rage, his words interrupted by a curious bark (the result of a throat wound he had suffered from an assassin’s bullet), Fuad told Allenby that the Wafd’s leaders were ‘a crowd of revolutionaries and cads’.
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What galled Fuad was that the Wafd represented an alternative focus for national sentiment. Its leadership was drawn exclusively from the effendiya class of landowners and professional men, including the father of Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the present Secretary-General of the United Nations. Their wealth qualified them for seats in the Egyptian parliament and provided the wherewithal to finance the Wafd’s organisation. Not surprisingly, the Wafd’s social and economic policies were conservative, but its uncompromising nationalism won it support from trade unionists, students, schoolchildren and the fellahin, although, as British officials rightly guessed, the peasant vote was easily gained through coercion and bribery.
14
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Wafd acted as if it possessed a monopoly of public opinion, and steadfastly refused to compromise its platform of complete independence from Britain. This intransigence was vital if the party was to hold together its various sections and resist pressure from more radical groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood and Misr al-Fatah (Young Egypt) which emerged in the 1930s.

Outside the Wafd was a pool of Egyptian politicians who were willing to come to an accommodation with Britain and from whom King Fuad and successive high commissioners could choose ministers. Holding office wearing a British straitjacket was a hazardous job for there were, on the fringe of the Wafd, small cells of terrorists. They took melodramatic names such as the Black Revolver Gang or the Secret Sacrificers and murdered British officials, servicemen or Egyptians who worked with or for the high commission.

The first round in the game between Britain and the Wafd ended in 1922 when Allenby, exasperated by terrorism and Zaghlul’s inflexibility, bullied Lloyd George into abandoning the protectorate. Churchill was furious with what he saw as a failure of nerve by Allenby, while Zaghlul and the Wafd leadership wanted further measures to give Egypt total freedom from British restrictions. Two years of bickering followed, in which Zaghlul was again exiled, and a new bone of contention emerged in 1924: ownership of the Sudan. Again Britain showed its muscle; the Labour government, anxious to show voters that it could be tough, refused even to consider a change in the Sudan’s status.

The assassination of Sir Lee Stack, the Governor-General of the Sudan, in a Cairo street in November 1924, finally exhausted Allenby’s patience. ‘The Bull’ went wild, accused Zaghlul and the Wafd of instigating the murders and demanded humiliating terms from Egypt, threatening among other things to take and shoot hostages if political violence continued. This was too much for the newly elected government of Stanley Baldwin, which recalled Allenby and replaced him with a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist of supposedly greater tact, Lord Lloyd.

Lloyd idealised British rule in Egypt. A romantic Tory, he imagined that the fellah was a stout-hearted, decent fellow who, at heart, knew the British were his true friends, but had been tricked by wily agitators. Much that was good had been achieved through Britain’s supervision of Egypt’s government; even today Egyptians use the expression ‘the English path’ to denote the way of proceeding fairly and honestly.
15
Lloyd feared, not without reason, that the form of government established in 1922 would bring back the graft and nepotism of pre-1882 days.
16
For this reason he was not a man for ‘cutting losses’, and refused to ‘shelter behind the moral value which a policy of “self-determination” appeared superficially to possess’.
17
In 1929, the new Labour government sacked Lloyd, a man whose views seemed to belong to another age, and sent out a professional diplomat as high commissioner.

The game between Britain and the Wafd drifted into stalemate. Eight formal conferences had been held between 1919 and 1935 to settle the question of ultimate sovereignty in Egypt, without success. During the same period there had been twenty different governments, but the Wafd had not gone away. In 1935 it organised a fresh wave of popular demonstrations and strikes, which had to be taken more seriously than their predecessors because Britain’s position in Egypt was now under an external threat. Mussolini’s brutal consolidation of Italy’s hold over Libya, his dreams of the Mediterranean as ‘mare nostrum’, and his recent ambitions in Abyssinia made it imperative that Britain resolved the Egyptian problem. If it failed to do so, and a crisis occurred between Britain and Italy, it would be impossible to withstand an attack from Libya and at the same time hold down Egypt. The Canal mattered more than prestige and the result was the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936. It was, given the history of the past seventeen years, a diplomatic triumph: Britain retained its garrison and air bases in Egypt, continued to enjoy naval facilities at Alexandria, and entered into an alliance with Egypt, which obtained full independence. The Cairo residency became the British embassy, and the high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, became Britain’s first ambassador to Egypt since 1882.

The months which followed the outbreak of war in 1939 proved Egypt a lukewarm partner in Britain’s struggle against the Axis powers. In September 1939 the Egyptian cabinet refused to declare war against Germany, but pledged that its country would stick to the terms of the treaty and ‘render aid’ to Britain. During the next few months Egypt was a benevolent neutral; diplomatic relations with Germany were broken off, Germans were interned and their property confiscated. Britain went ahead with the transformation of Egypt into a formidable base for the defence of the Canal and the entire Middle East.

The Egyptian government wobbled when Italy entered the war in June 1940, cutting formal relations, but procrastinating over the detention of the 60,000-strong Italian community in Egypt. Lampson suspected, with good reason, that Egypt’s benevolent neutrality was a façade, and that King Faruq and many close to him were hoping for an Axis victory. Faruq had become king in 1936 and there was every reason to imagine that he might follow his father and tow the British line, for he had been trained as an officer at Sandhurst, where it was hoped he had absorbed British values. But 1936 was a bad year for kings; Faruq had inherited his father’s distaste for the Wafd and his ambitions to become a focus for his people’s national aspirations. The would-be patriot king was also a collector of pornography (he had one of the largest collections in the world), a womaniser and addicted to fast cars. His wartime behaviour revealed that his attachment to Britain was as brittle as his moral fibre. He, and many of his senior army officers and ministers, secretly believed that Britain was going to lose the war, an understandable view given the reverses suffered during 1940–41 in the Western Desert, Greece and Crete. Ordinary Egyptians were frightened about invasion and bombing raids (something which Cairo had suffered in 1917) and the upper classes found fascism and Naziism attractive creeds.
18

At the beginning of the war, Lampson had had misgivings about Egyptian loyalty and, if necessary, had been prepared to revive the protectorate.
19
Throughout 1940 and 1941, he and the Foreign Office suppressed their suspicions about Faruq and pursued a policy of vigilant non-activity. They had an alternative government ready if Faruq began intriguing with the Germans or Italians. Ironically, Lampson believed that Britain’s interests would be best served by the Wafd’s leader, Mustafa al-Nahas, who, despite his party’s traditional anti-British platform, was wholeheartedly pro-Allies.

By the end of 1941, the choice between the greater and the lesser evil, Faruq or the Wafd, was forced on Lampson. Faruq was swinging more and more towards the Axis and could no longer be trusted. Lampson decided the time had come either to bring him to heel or secure his abdication. During the night of 3–4 February 1942 a force of British, New Zealand and South African troops with bren-gun carriers secretly approached the Abdin Palace and surrounded it, while a number of tanks were driven to the Abdin Square. At nine in the morning Lampson entered the palace, presented the astonished Faruq with documents appointing al-Nahas prime minister, and demanded he signed it. Faruq complied with extreme reluctance, having, he claimed, protested strongly. He alleged that the paper he was handed was crumpled and grubby and an insult to his royal dignity. Later rumours circulated that a tank had been used to knock down the palace gates, and that two South African aides who had accompanied Lampson had brandished their revolvers at the indignant King.

Lampson had preserved the security of Egypt as a base for British operations. This end overrode all other considerations and he had been prepared to insist on Faruq’s abdication if he had proved stubborn. But this display of force dismayed Egyptians, reminding them that they were still an impotent people with whom the British could do as they liked. ‘What is to be done now that the catastrophe has befallen us?’ asked Nasser, now a junior army officer. If only Egyptians existed who were willing to fight back, he argued, then ‘Imperialism … would withdraw and recoil like a harlot.’ Nevertheless, this demonstration of his people’s continued abjectness, while unavenged at the time, had made a deep impact. ‘That event had a new influence on the spirit and feeling of the army and ourselves,’ Nasser remembered. ‘Henceforward officers spoke not of corruption and pleasure, but of sacrifice and of their willingness to give up their lives to save their country’s dignity.’
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4

The Haughty Governess: The Middle East, 1919–42

Five years before the outbreak of the First World War, the explorer Gertrude Bell began a Middle Eastern pilgrimage. She wanted to discover ‘the Asiatic value of the great catchwords of revolution’, and, after two years of wandering through Syria and Mesopotamia, concluded that ‘fraternity and equality’ were dangerous concepts in a region where different races and religions coexisted uneasily. A complete absence of what Miss Bell called ‘the Anglo-Saxon acceptance of common responsibility in the problems which beset the state’ among the people of the Middle East ruled out their future participation in any form of democracy.
1

Variations on this theme were heard frequently after 1918, most commonly from those, like Miss Bell, who laid claim to an intimate knowledge of the Middle East. Colonel John Ward, a Labour MP and founder of a trade union for navvies, used his experience in the 1884–5 Sudan war to warn the Commons in 1922 that the imposition of European political ideas would prove ‘poison and disaster’ for all ‘Oriental’ people. It was preposterous to imagine ‘that the poor Ryot [Indian farmer], the poor coolie in Colombo or any other port can be treated exactly the same as the educated working man in this country.’
2
A Liberal retorted that it was even more preposterous to assume that ‘we have specific gifts from God to shape the destiny of Orientals’.
3