One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink, by Matthew Parker
This well-researched and riveting book exposes how vastly different the world was just a hundred years ago. Before World War I, Parker tells us, “imperialism had been the familiar form of government for much of the globe.” After it, “the future seemed to belong to alternative forms of government — the nation state, democracy, communism, fascism. In Britain itself, 1918 had seen the ushering in of (almost) mass democracy for the first time, with a universal male franchise and votes for most women over thirty.”
By the end of WWI, anti-colonial feelings and forces were running high. Though the US never joined the League of Nations, President Woodrow Wilson exacerbated these by praising ‘self-determination’ at Versailles in 1919. The Paris peace conference gave rise to a new, more nuanced form of empire — the League of Nations mandate system. “Although in many ways a fig-leaf for an imperial land grab” of ex-Axis imperial territories, the principle was trusteeship: League mandate “territories were to be administered for the benefit of their populations with the express goal of moving them towards self-government.” Soon applied to the British Empire as a while, this new idea led to the “reluctant granting of political reforms in India, Burma, Ceylon, Nigeria and elsewhere.”
At its apogee in 1923, the British Empire “covered incredibly diverse parts of the world” and “took many forms: Crown colony, protectorate, mandate, sphere of influence.” Many colonies contained “different and often conflicting religious, social, military, civilian and business interests.” The author scrutinizes the propaganda that extolled ‘the unifying influence of the crown,’ (with its accompanying Royal Tours) along with often spurious claims around “Pax Britannia, the rule of law, medicine, education and development.” On the ground, “the issue of race — and racism — dominated the empire.”
Parker quotes Jamaica’s first Prime Minister, Norman Manley, who wrote that ‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’ He also quotes Jawaharlal Nehru, saying “how ‘surprisingly most of us accepted it as natural as natural and inevitable’ that Indians were second rate.” West Indian political philosopher Frantz Fanon explained colonialism as “a systematic negation of the other person,” that forces the dominated to constantly question who they are.
Inevitably, WWI dealt a heavy blow to white prestige and the confidence of the rulers. How, colonized peoples wondered, “could Europe continue with its claim of a ‘civilizing mission’ when it could not contain its own barbaric violence?”
When the Imperial Conference took place in London in 1923, “troubles and unrest in India, Iraq, Egypt, Ireland and elsewhere had abated or been crushed.” The newly professed trustee idea, along with new notions of racial equality, “promised a glorious and more humane future in a consensual empire, now increasingly being referred to as the British Commonwealth.” Nobody seemed to foresee that the empire was “on the brink of a precipitous decline.”
In 1923, Britain had a powerful army, air force and navy. A “vast fleet guarded the five key points of the empire: Dover, Gibraltar, Suez, the Cape of Good Hope, and Singapore, supported by additional oil storage facilities and other naval infrastructure at Hong Kong, Kingston, Malta, Aden, Port Said, Freetown, Rangoon and Colombo. British army garrisons had also been established in India, Malta, Gibraltar, Egypt, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Jamaica.
While the 1923 Imperial conference went on, the RAF “had 43 squadrons, of which eight were on imperial duty in Iraq, six in India and four in Egypt and Palestine.”
As a brutal demonstration of Britain’s new air power and “to stimulate public enthusiasm” for the RAF, an annual tournament at Hendon offered visitors the spectacle of aircraft dropping “incendiary bombs on a model of an African village.”
Though I remember the days when my own country was called the Dominion of Canada, I remained unaware of the origin of the term until I read this book. In 1907, the white-dominated parts of the empire were dubbed Dominions.
At the 1917 Imperial War Conference, after calamitous losses on the Western Front. Prime Minister Lloyd George summoned the Dominion leaders to London to plead for more men. “He got what he wanted, but at the cost of promising the Dominions further freedoms from the empire. In effect, their massive wartime contribution was, for these countries, a proxy ‘war of independence.’ This would be formalized by the Statute of Westminster, signed in 1931. Thereafter, the Dominions would and did decide whether to declare war on their own.
Parker briefly alludes to the cost at home of Canada’s loyalty to the empire in 1917. The first conscription crisis bitterly divided English and French Canadians. World War II saw a similar situation develop. Some argue that the historic distrust sown during the two wars helped fuel the strong separatist sentiment that followed the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s in Quebec.
Australians, like Canadians, objected vociferously to the notion of London overruling the Australian parliament and ordering Australians to go to war again. As communist ideas spread, students and teachers in New Zealand and Australia were required to salute the flag and swear loyalty to king and empire. Objections to these measures were ongoing.
The book contains innumerable fascinating and detailed glimpses into pivotal moments in many locations. As was the custom, High Commissioners were moved around the Empire. During the 1923 conference, Cambridge graduate Sir Cecil Hunter-Rodwell had responsibility for a vastly spread out territory: the Solomons, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the New Hebrides, Tonga and Pitcairn. Five years later, this veteran of the Boer War was at a different posting, in Southern Rhodesia. When a Jesuit missionary asked him for funds for a hospital for the black community, he refused, flippantly commenting that there were “‘too many natives in the country already.’” A young man called Robert Mugabe remembered this unforgivable comment ever after.
When Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King arrived in England for the Imperial conference, he deemed it a “great privilege” to confer with the British Prime Minister and the Prime Ministers of the other dominions to discuss and "‘safeguard the permanence of the empire,’” assuring the assembled journalists that in this effort, Canadian loyalty could be taken for granted, since the empire stood for “‘peace, justice and good will among men.’”
South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts, “who had moved from Boer general in the war against Britain to ardent imperialist, was delighted by the British gains from Germany that had at last created the ‘all-red’ route from the Cape to Cairo, what Smuts called a ‘great white Africa along the eastern backbone.” He touted the empire as the greatest power in the world. Indeed, with the rival empires of Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans recently collapsed, this idea was self-evident, first, with Britain’s vast territories home to 460 million (Russia being second at 15 million, then the US with 112 million and France with a mere 93 million).
Enormous access to trade arose from the empire controlling the lion’s share of the world’s busiest ports including Hong Kong, Singapore, and Liverpool. London, the world’s largest city, was the “unrivalled centre of global business and information, a shipping and cable hub communicating news, opinion, values and ideas across the world.”
The book begins and ends with the tragic tale of the Ocean islanders, whose phosphate-rich homeland was literally mined out from beneath them by a private company with the collusion of the colonial office.
Not all those who participated in the running of the empire were bad, and some tried conscientiously to carry out the rather self-contradictory goal of ruling the native population for their own good. “When, at the end of 1923, Colonial Secretary the Duke of Devonshire slapped down Fiji High Commissioner Rodwell’s plan to force the Banabans off Ocean Island and hand it over to the British Phosphate Commission (BPC) the action had echoes of his declaration earlier in the year about ‘native paramountcy’ in Kenya. Devonshire had insisted that on Ocean Island ‘Native interests cannot be sacrificed in order to secure any advantage financial or other.’”
Sadly, the story did not end there. When the pressure from BPC resumed, Arthur Grimble, known and trusted by the Banabans from years before, was put on the spot to deal with the problem. Now ill and feeling isolated from his family, he decided that to avoid being shipped off to a “punishment posting in the Falkland Islands,” he would have to persuade the Banabans to sign a deal to relocate. “In short,” Parker tells us, “he was not going to allow Banaban interests to jeopardize his career.”
With Australia and New Zealand (who wanted the fertilizer from the phosphate) pressuring the Colonial office along with BPC, Grimble betrayed the Banabans by threatening them into a bad bargain. They were moved 1600 miles from Ocean Island to a very different sort of island. Decades later, a court case launched by the Banabans failed on a technicality. A 1977 documentary about the situation shows “a dessicated moonscape of white dust and rock — extractive colonialism at its most literal.”
Parker’s book is an edifying walk through the history of the past century. It gave me a strong sense of what the world was like after World War 1 and provided rich context for certain things I recollected from growing up in the mid 20th century — like saluting the flag in elementary school in Alberta and playing with a red, white and blue rubber ball labelled Viceroy Rubber.
Studying at UBC in the late sixties, I swam regularly in the Empire Pool. For a few years, I drove an Austen Somerset Coupe de Ville, one of several band new powder blue convertibles brought over for the parade of the Empire Games in 1954. Empire Stadium at the Pacific National Exhibition Grounds dates from those same games.