Empire Lost - Andrew Stewart [3]
There is also no mention of India or Newfoundland. Along with Burma the first of these had been promised eventual Dominion status by the 1935 Government of India Act which followed on from the Irwin Declaration and its first offer of 'the glittering prize' for Indian nationalists. The country had been treated as 'a proto-Dominion' since the latter stages of the First World War; the war that followed would ultimately and finally remove the historic link.17 The latter was actually a Dominion, Britain's oldest colony, and a member of the original club. It was, however, badly hit by the global economic Depression and the fall in international fish prices, and in 1933 the government was unable to pay the interest charges on its national debt. In place of responsible government it was instead administered by a 'Commission of Government', appointed by a
Royal Commission and consisting of a mixture of British and Newfoundland civil servants, technically making it no longer a Dominion.18
Finally there will be no attempt made to specifically explore the actual events of the military campaigns fought by Britain and its Dominion allies during the war in any chronological fashion. There is already an exhaustive literature examining in vast detail every aspect of the war; the numerous Official History volumes that were produced by all of those involved on the Anglo-Dominion side in the post-war years represent an obvious and comprehensive starting point for anybody so minded. Reference is only made to them where they are directly relevant to the struggles that were contested between the Dominion capitals and what were sometimes viewed from these distant vantage points as the twin terrors of Whitehall and Westminster. Such reference is, however, kept to a deliberate minimum; the emphasis instead is, wherever possible, on the political and diplomatic machinations that sometimes tormented the alliance and proved decisive in determining both its operation and effect.
With so little previously published material focusing on this particular Imperial theme, the records stored at the National Archives in London inevitably proved invaluable. Although there are over 40,000 listed files for the DO, the Whitehall department that was most closely involved, with the passage of the Public Records Act in 1958 a widespread destruction of documents followed. Despite the suggestions of some Dominion historians that there was a deliberate pattern in this, the intention being to hide a variety of alleged intrigues, no evidence has emerged to support such claims.19 While a 1941 defence regulation allowed for the early destruction of sensitive documents, what instead seems to have happened is that owing to constraints of time and space the procedures for reviewing records allowed the individuals involved a great deal of autonomy in the way they conducted their review.20 As a result certain subject areas are well covered with files copied in triplicate; in others there is virtually no saved material. The result is that in some categories and for certain years there are considerable omissions. Although it is impossible to say with any real degree of accuracy just how many files were destroyed, a cursory examination would place the figure in excess of 50 per cent. It should be remembered that many of these could have been of little or no historical value, while some were undoubtedly copies which have been saved elsewhere. Whatever gaps there were in the narrative have been circumvented by examining other government records held in London, along with a wide variety of overseas archives. A large number of personal archives both in Britain and overseas have also been examined and provided an excellent source of information. Together these largely hitherto unexplored wartime records have allowed for a comprehensive reconstruction of events.
I would like to thank the staff of the following