The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (97 page)

Since the war, the columbines had become more and more optimistic about a world which seemed to be moving in the right direction. Imperialism was in retreat, the United Nations was flourishing despite the Cold War, and Britain seemed to be shedding its old domineering ways. Now all this had been changed by Eden. Worse still, the invasion of Egypt had coincided with the final stages of the suppression of the Hungarian uprising by the Soviet army. How could moral outrage at this barbarity be expressed, when the thuggish Russian leader, Nikita Kruschev, could turn round and accuse Britain and France of bullying Egypt?

This loss of the moral high ground was felt most keenly in the United States whose public exposure of Soviet brutality was diminished by its allies’ behaviour in Egypt. When the world should have been concentrating its wrath on Russia, some of the fury was diverted to Britain and France. Even old friends joined in; 3 November was ‘Hate Britain’ day in Pakistan, and the Australian Labour leader, Evatt, denounced Eden’s ‘naked aggression’.

In Britain the raptors, who above all had always counted themselves as realists, were having some nasty shocks. Having agreed to an armistice, the government insisted that Anglo-French units in Egypt should remain, and form part of the United Nations force which would eventually take over the Canal. America stuck out for unconditional evacuation and a brief, one-sided test of wills followed, which brutally exposed Britain’s financial weakness.

In the early days of the crisis, foreign and dominion holders of sterling were extremely jumpy, especially Middle Eastern governments which feared that their assets would be frozen like Egypt’s if they stepped the wrong way. During August £129 million was withdrawn from sterling accounts. The haemorrhage ceased in September, but began again in October when £85 million was removed as the situation worsened. The crash came after Egypt was invaded and £279 million (including India’s deposits of £150 million) was lost by conversion into gold and dollars. By the end of November Britain’s reserves had dropped to £1,965 million, and it seemed possible that the pound’s days as a major international currency were numbered. In desperation, Macmillan appealed to the International Monetary Fund for a $560 million loan. The American government refused his request, relenting only when Britain agreed to pull all its forces out of Egypt. On 10 December, Macmillan heard that $1,300 million had been placed at Britain’s disposal to help shore up sterling. By January 1957 the value of the pound against the dollar returned to its pre-crisis level.

Britain had been undone because of what Macmillan called the ‘inherent weakness of our post-war economy’. This was true up to a point. The disastrous runs on the pound in 1931, 1947 and 1949 were the direct consequences of chronic malfunctions within the economy. That of 1956 was triggered by political fears that Britain would overreach itself and become entangled in a Middle Eastern war which it could not afford.

Even before Macmillan had gone begging to Washington, realists within his party were coming to terms at last with the world as it was. According to Angus Maude MP, the outcome of the Suez War left Britain with no choice but ‘to admit to the world that we are now an American satellite’. Subservience to the United States was, in some ways, harder to swallow than the knowledge that the days of ruling the roost in the Middle East were finally over.

Unofficial empire, as it would have been understood when Wolseley overthrew Urabi Pasha, did not disappear immediately the last British serviceman embarked from Port Said. In February 1957, RAF bombers strafed Yemeni artillery positions on the Aden border in retaliation for recent shelling. Given the present climate of international opinion, punitive bombing of targets in the Yemen was forbidden.
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Soon after, British aircraft were in action again in Oman, helping protect its sultan against his more progressive subjects. Shortly after the 1958 palace revolution which toppled over British client, King Faisal II of Iraq, troops were rushed to Jordan to save his cousin, King Hussain from the same fate. An Iraqi annexation of Kuwait was forestalled in 1961 by the arrival of British units. By Suez standards, all these were small-scale operations, justified by treaty obligations and undertaken with America’s blessing.

Oil and the Cold War meant that there was work for small, often highly-specialised British detachments in southern Arabia. Having lost the centre of its old Middle Eastern sphere of influence, Britain had withdrawn to the periphery where there were nervous Arab autocrats who needed protection from the twentieth-century and its ideas. There was plenty of scope for G. A. Henty-style skirmishes on bare hillsides, camping out under the stars like Lawrence of Arabia, and commanding bands of irregular tribesmen who accepted the old hierarchies and had never heard of Nasser. The modern, and, as it turned out, the last practitioners of old-fashioned imperial soldiering once showed their native levies the film
Zulu.
As expected, it stirred up their fighting spirit and several fired at the charging Zulus on the screen.

Operations in southern Arabia were undertaken for Sultan Taimir bin-Said of Oman, a mediaeval despot who, fortunately for his embarrassed British sponsors, was deposed in 1970 and packed off to exile in the Dorchester Hotel. His son, Qabus, began a programme of reform, using his principality’s oil revenues, and limited modernisation. Unlike Africa or India, Arabia and the Gulf had never felt the weight of Britain’s ‘civilising’ mission, and so local rulers were allowed to maintain old customs, which would have been abandoned elsewhere at the insistence of British residents. Slavery was not officially abolished until 1949 in Kuwait and 1952 in Qatar. It was still common in the antique sheikdoms of the Aden protectorate in the early-1950s and in Oman until 1970. Whether or not rulers in these states and Saudi Arabia meant what they said when they proclaimed an end of slavery and slave trading is still a matter of great contention. Large numbers of Asians, particularly Filipinos, are imported into this region as labourers and domestic workers under conditions which Victorian philanthropists and consuls would have called slavery.

In the post-Suez, Cold War years, Britain needed as many friends as it could get in the Middle East and therefore could not afford to take a high moral line with those it had. Between 1965 and 1975, British forces helped preserve the Omani monarchy against Marxist partisans, and, until 1967, attempted to hold on to Aden and its hinterland. After various political stratagems designed to preserve the local and loyal sheiks, and a guerrilla war in and around the port, the government gave up a base which was now strategically redundant. As the last detachments left, a band played ‘Fings Ain’t What They Used to Be’. After a brief internecine war between the partisan factions the People’s Republic of South Yemen was declared. It did not join the Commonwealth.

5

The Old Red, White and Blue: Reactions to a Dying Empire

The wrangling over the rights and wrongs of Suez gradually ceased once the British army had withdrawn from Port Said. The event passed into history, where its significance was plain: it had been a very prominent signpost which simultaneously indicated a turning point, warned against reckless driving, advised giving way to more powerful vehicles, and announced that from now on the way was all downhill. In other words, Britain had at last to say goodbye to the days when it had been free to do what it liked anywhere in the world. It had come unstuck, and now was the moment to allow the more powerful American car to overtake and speed ahead. Decline in power and status were a fact of life which Britain would have to get used to.

As well as coming to terms with the reduction of their country’s international power and standing, the British people also had to face the disappearance of its territorial empire. In the thirteen years following Suez, nearly all the African; Far Eastern and West Indian colonies received their independence and became part of an enlarged Commonwealth. The trauma, both in Britain and the colonies, was remarkably mild. Outsiders were astonished, the more so since the Algerian war brought about the downfall of the Fourth Republic in 1958, a large-scale mutiny by the French army in 1961, tumults in Paris, and a spate of terrorist outrages undertaken by the Algerian settlers movement, the OAS (Organisation Armée Secrète) during 1961–2. Portugal’s farewell to empire was equally turbulent and bloody: between 1960 and 1976 135,000 Portuguese troops were deployed against nationalist partisans in Moçambique and Angola. There were also repercussions at home with a revolution which overthrew the right-wing régime of President Caetano in April 1974. Within a month of Belgium granting independence to the Congo (Zaïre) in June 1960, the new state had disintegrated into anarchy and civil war with massacres of white settlers.

Britain was spared such upheavals; it carefully avoided being dragged into futile wars; its soldiers did not mutiny in protest against decolonisation; and the white settlers of Kenya and Southern Rhodesia did not explode plastic bombs in London streets. In February 1963, an anglophile American sociologist attributed the comparative orderliness of the dissolution of empire to the evolution of enlightened national spirit:

[The] progressive moral transformation which was expressed in the willingness to renounce the empire has been manifested in the unwillingness to continue with the
ancien régime.
Respect for the rights of Indians and Africans is of a piece with the aspirations to improve the quality of life, the level of taste, to cultivate the whole capacities of the whole population, to make society more just, more efficient and more humane.
1

This was very satisfying, but not altogether surprising. For at least thirty years, politicians of both parties had repeatedly promised that the colonies were on course for independence, although they were evasive about precisely how and when it would be obtained. The officially-inspired public perception of the empire made it virtually impossible for any government to justify extended wars of repression fought to maintain British rule perpetually. When they proved unavoidable, as in Malaya, elaborate efforts were made to present the conflict in such a way as to reassure the public that Britain had the best interests of its subjects at heart. In the middle of the campaign, against the Malayan Communist partisans, the local commander-in-chief, Field-Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, explained his purpose to Vice-President Nixon:

What I am trying to do is convince all the native leaders and the native troops that this is
their
war, that they are fighting for
their
independence, and once the guerrillas are defeated it will be
their
country and
their
decision to make as to whether they desire to remain within the British Commonwealth.
2

It was perhaps fortunate that the state of television technology ruled out on-the-spot coverage of Britain’s final colonial campaigns. The British public did not share the disturbing experience of the American, which, from the mid-1960s, watched Viet Nam operations as they happened. What was shown stunned America, adding immeasurably to the scope and passion of anti-war protests. Ten years before, the British government had sensed television’s potential for swaying public opinion, and camera crews who visited war zones were carefully monitored. Distressing scenes, which might be interpreted as brutality, were excised. After the filming of a BBC documentary on Cyprus in 1958, the governor, Sir Hugh Foot, warned the Colonial Office censors to look out for any sequences which showed villages being cordoned by troops and their inhabitants spread-eagled against walls. Textual revisions were imposed: the opening lines ‘As a crown colony Cyprus jogged along until a few years ago’ were amended to ‘As a crown colony Cyprus went quietly along until a few years ago’. Presumably ‘jogging’ summoned up the image of a casual, unconcerned administration. Throughout the rest of the script ‘terrorists’ (EOKA) replaced ‘the enemy’.
3

The Cold War ruled out handing over power to Communists, although even Conservative ministries were content to make terms with nationalists of a pinkish complexion, as most were. Decolonisation policies were, by and large, bipartisan with Labour tending to favour speeding up the process. The Conservatives had to be more cautious because of right-wing elements in the party which mistrusted nationalists, or were sympathetic towards the white settler communities in East and Central Africa. This group found natural allies among former colonial civil servants who were unhappy about policies which paid too much heed to nationalists and too little to tribal rulers. According to Sir Mervyn Wheatley, an ex-governor of a Sudanese province, only ‘experienced administrators’ could really get inside the heads of ‘unsophisticated tribesmen’ and discover what they really wanted.
4

The behaviour of colonial politicians aroused misgivings and ridicule in equal parts among those of the outer fringes of the right. In 1950, the veteran Tory spokesman on colonial policy, Captain Gammans, was outraged by the substitution of Nkrumah’s name for God’s in the Lord’s Prayer, and for Christ’s in
Hymns Ancient and Modern,
as they were read and sung in the Gold Coast.
5
Peter Simple, the
Daily Telegraph’s
mordant right-wing columnist, constantly mocked the rum aspects of Africa’s nascent democracy. ‘Spells, witch-doctors and the use of fetishes’ in the 1956 Gold Coast elections caused him great amusement.
6
Mirth of another kind was provided by the League of Empire Loyalists, founded in 1954 to defend the empire. Its upper echelons included a bevy of retired high-ranking officers of blimpish frame of mind, who were apoplectic about the decay of everything they had held dear. The nostalgic fantasies of upper- and upper-middle-class men and women who had talked about and thought on England as they sipped gin on colonial verandahs must have been often rudely and swiftly dispelled when they returned home. High blood pressure and enlarged spleens were not, therefore, surprising, and the League catered for both.