Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [123]
The fact that Ireland was geographically so close and had been an integral part of the British state for so long meant that not everyone appreciated how significant a split this was. But if a land proclaimed to be part of the very Mother Country could become independent, then what message was being sent to the rest of the empire? As one of the Irish nationalist leaders put it thirty years later, ‘if today India, and Burma, and Egypt are free Nations, they owe it primarily to our example and our softening effectiveness’.
Chapter Twelve
‘I did not even know that the British Empire is dying’
George Orwell, ‘Shooting an Elephant’, 1936
The twelfth Earl of Meath looked a bit like Father Christmas. He had a bald head, a red face and an enormous white beard, and by end of the First World War, Reginald Brabazon was over seventy. He had never forgotten how, on a winter’s day at Eton, a schoolmaster had accused his fellow pupils of ‘spinelessness’ for attempting to brush snow off their bare knees. ‘You young worms!’ the teacher berated them. ‘Your fathers are the rulers of England, and your forefathers have made England what she is now. Do you imagine that if they had minded a little snow that Canada would ever have been added to the Empire, or if they had minded heat we should ever possess India or tropical Africa?’ As an adult, Meath determined to ensure that the entire nation never forgot the importance of indifference to snow on knees.
The earl turned out to be an idiosyncratic imperialist, his career in the British diplomatic service being terminated – at his in-laws’ insistence – when he was posted to the impossibly ‘remote’ mission at Athens. He devoted most of the rest of his life to empire-building in the cities and suburbs of Britain. Meath’s great anxiety was whether the nation – especially the poorer parts – quite appreciated the importance of the empire. Did Britain any longer have the moral fibre necessary to rule the world? Since Britain did not believe in mass conscript armies, Meath founded a Lads’ Drill Association to promote marching and weapons-training, spent seventeen years as commissioner for the Irish Boy Scouts, and served as president of the Duty and Discipline Movement, dedicated to fighting ‘slackness, indifference and indiscipline’. As his lordship put it – and the list of supporters from cabinet ministers and colonial governors to generals and archbishops indicates that he was hardly considered eccentric – the empire was built on the principle that imperialists could dominate others because they allowed themselves to be dominated. ‘Britons have ruled in the past because they were a virile race, brought up to obey, to suffer hardships cheerfully, and to struggle victoriously.’
This ‘subordination of selfish or class interests to those of the State’ was what Meath and his friends believed had made the empire. As one school text put it at the height of empire, ‘Every time one of us is courteous and civil to a foreigner he is doing his part as a good citizen, for he is helping to make his country liked and respected abroad … remembering that to rule oneself is the first step to being able to rule others.’ It followed that too much sensitivity and independence of mind were a decided liability. All sorts of disciplines might be useful in achieving this subordination of the self to the greater good, including, oddly, folk dancing, because,