Empire Lost - Andrew Stewart [1]
In 1939 there were six fully self-governing member states of the Empire: Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Eire and Britain. Attempts to define what is now sometimes referred to as the Dominion 'concept' or 'idea', the link that bound them all together, have offered an enduring source of fascination both at the time and long after they became no more than an historical footnote.3 A typical view was that of one post-war writer who claimed that Dominion status was something which 'white men had invented in the 1920s for other white men, in the style and practice of a gentlemen's club'.4 This is as good a definition as any, the difficulty was though that the members were loathe to pay their contributions; during the inter-war years spending on defence made by each of them was far from proportionate to their wealth or population size and when war returned to Europe in 1939—and two years later the Pacific—they were unprepared. In fairness much the same could also be said about the central tenet of this organization. British foreign policy during the inter-war period can rightly be said to have been 'bedevilled by illusion, naïveté, unreality and folie de grandeur', with successive leaders at the mother of parliaments in Westminster failing to recognize that the world was changing and British power was no longer guaranteed; as one historian has put it 'the policy-makers behaved likes ostriches in sand dunes'.5 As a consequence, just three years after German forces had marched into Poland 'the British Empire appeared to be tottering on the edge of an unimaginably deep precipice'.6 The danger was ultimately evaded and the alliance held fast. With the critical support it received from a former member of the original Imperial club, the United States, and the other allies fighting the twin Nazi and Japanese peril, in due course this British Commonwealth alliance triumphed. In victory, however, there followed defeat. Despite the assertions of celebrated post-war British writers, it is actually difficult to argue that the Second World War did not in fact speed up the erosion of the Empire's unity. The very thing which the political leadership in London had claimed it was most seeking to safeguard against, it actually helped precipitate.7
This book considers this 'alliance within an alliance', examining what has been an oft disregarded strand of the vast system that was the British Empire. In one of the many wartime debates that focused on Imperial themes it was said of the Dominions that they were 'not conscripted allies like the satellites of Germany', but had come into the war of their own free will and could have left at any time. The idea that they had chosen 'the nobler part of sacrifice and determined to be what Wordsworth called "the bulwark in the cause of man"' made for excellent wartime propaganda.8 It was also typical of the florid, often overly romantic prose delivered by a generation brought up on Kipling-centric ideals. For all this it was undeniably true that this was a functioning alliance, one that prevailed over determined and ruthless foes. It is the manner in which it operated throughout the Second World War and the pressures and challenges that it faced that will be the focus of this study. Or as Lord Balfour, who played such an important evolutionary role, put it in words found on his desk after his death in 1936, 'Whence comes the cohesion of the Brit[ish] Empire?' His view was that it had drawn its basis on various factors, patriotism, loyalty, custom, religion and race being but a few.9 What this book will question is whether such an assessment remained true in the climatic years that followed his death. In so doing it does not attempt to add directly to the undoubtedly significant debate about 'Britishness' which has developed in recent years. Bookshelves and magazine racks carry the weight of polemic—some convincing in its tone and evidence, others less so—about the British national character and the relationship with Empire. How