Empire Lost - Andrew Stewart [120]
Britain had lost its Imperial position and the unquestioned leadership of the Empire and, in his mind, if this could not be regained it would now have to look to Europe to demonstrate it still maintained a strong global role. This would not be a challenge Churchill would have to face, but instead would be one for Attlee and his new Labour post-war government. It would quickly discover that the Anglo-Dominion alliance had in fact seen its best days.
Conclusion: Brave New World
War had come again in September 1939, and once more the call had gone out to the Empire's scattered millions. The Australian Minister Richard Casey was reportedly fond of G. K. Chesterton's remark that Commonwealth members were like passengers on a London omnibus; as a rule they ignored one another until such time as there was a crisis, when they all pulled together.1 On this occasion the same was once again true, leaving London overrun with 'bold-eyed Canadians with a slouch and a swagger, New Zealanders with overcoats hanging untidily, Australians often with girls', an 'invading armies of irresponsible younger brothers' who, according to the observer who was working in Canada House, 'the English soldiers looked at not unkindly but with a sober ironic air -puppies and old hound dogs'.2 Speaking at a lunch of the United Wardens of the City of London in February 1942, Attlee had reminded his audience that 'in the dark days of 1940 after the fall of France when Hitler's blow fell on Britain, Britain was not alone because she had with her the British Commonwealth and Empire'.3 They had come not to fight a war of survival, as many seemed to think, but as a demonstration of their loyalty to a far greater cause. This fortitude was shared by a Colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps, writing in May 1940 before Dunkirk, who did not feel his Empire was threatened by ultimate defeat. The idea had never entered his head because the British Empire, what he termed as 'the domination of the world by the English-speaking nations in consultation', was in fact in its infancy.4 This all seems at odds with the recent research which, by examining British society and cultural trends, has sought to demonstrate that there is little evidence to suggest that public opinion necessarily still held such views. None of this is a new argument: to some 'the Empire penetrated the emotions of millions'; to others 'the British Empire vanished quietly and almost imperceptibly'.5 This is perhaps today most obviously to be seen in the debate on 'Britishness' and the commonly perceived national ignorance about British history and the country's origins that exists among contemporary society.6
Undoubtedly at the war's end a reflective period had begun, examining the wartime alliance for clues about what it had achieved and it started even before the Japanese emperor's final agreement to restore the conquered British Imperial territories to their pre-war suzerainty. Another Australian by birth, Professor Hessel Duncan Hall was another of the pre-war historians who had dedicated themselves to unravelling the secret of the Dominions. He had worked at the League of Nations and spent the war years at the British Embassy in Washington, from where he published an article in the highly respected Foreign Affairs entitled 'The British Commonwealth as a Great Power'.7