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By Root 1317 0

left to their own devices, the urban working class would just drink, smoke cigarettes and lounge around on street corners. Meath’s anxiety was not at all unusual, for by the early twentieth century much of the British elite was worried that the country might be losing the capacity for ruling the world. In addition to the Boy Scouts and the Duty and Discipline Movement, there was already a National Service League offering camps every summer to prepare the youth of the cities to serve their country, the Boys’ Brigade promoting ‘Christian manliness’, and the Anglican Church Lads’ Brigade promising ‘free discipline, manly games, and wholesome society’. The Commanding Officer of the London Cadet Battalion, Colonel Beresford, echoed the message of the Boy Scouts, explaining that his organization provided for ordinary boys ‘many of the advantages of that Public School training which has so great an effect on moulding the characters of the upper and middle classes’.

These out-of-school activities complemented the not-very-subtle messages being passed on in the classroom. Without the British Empire, said Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, ‘the greater portion of the world outside Europe would revert to the darkness and barbarism of the Middle Ages’. A School History of England – a collaboration between Rudyard Kipling and the comically reactionary Oxford historian C. R. L. Fletcher* – informed the country’s children that ‘it was on trade the Empire was founded, and by trade it must be maintained. But remember, a great trade needs a great defence by a great fleet and a great army. One gets nothing for nothing in this world.’ The book advised its young readers that they should ‘be prepared to fight at any moment’. It remained in print until 1930.

But the Earl of Meath’s greatest creation was Empire Day, celebrated across Britain on Victoria’s birthday, 24 May, even though the queen had been dead for fifteen years by the time it received government endorsement. On Empire Day plays were staged about heroic empire-builders like Wolfe, Clive and Livingstone and pageants mounted in which a trident-carrying Britannia was usually the central figure among hordes of blacked-up ‘Sikhs’ or smiling ‘piccaninnies’. Local worthies and retired colonial officials gave talks in schools. There was much singing of the National Anthem, saluting of the flag and eating of Empire Meals. Meath’s message was that empire was the gift of ‘an all-wise and all-knowing Providence’, which had bestowed ‘boundless resources’ and an ‘unrivalled freedom and liberty’. The challenge was merely to get the people of Britain to understand their good fortune.

The biggest attempt to sell the empire to the citizens of Britain came in 1924. If a Londoner wanted an exotic day out in the jungles or on the prairies, Wembley was the place to be. Here, spread across 200 acres at what was then the edge of the city, the entire empire was on show. Roads had been laid (and christened by Kipling) and uncountable tons of concrete poured, to throw up the biggest buildings of their kind in the world. The most famous of these constructions, the twin towers of the football stadium, remained standing to the turn of the next century, but the other buildings, designed to hold examples of what imperial rule could achieve, succumbed within a few years of the end of the exhibition to the sprawl of the London suburbs. So there is no longer a Palace of Engineering alongside Engineers’ Way, and the beguiling expanse of water which gave its name to Lakeside Way was long ago drained to be built over by a dreary conference centre. In 1924 you might have sauntered down Pacific or Atlantic Slope, and had presented to you ‘the almost illimitable possibilities of the Dominions, Colonies and Dependencies’. (The words are from the official guidebook for the British Empire Exhibition.)

If you boarded the narrow-gauge ‘Never-stop railway’ trundling around the site, you might, as the train slowed, step out at the Palace of Industry, where you could watch soap, bread, chocolate, carpets or linen being