Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [126]
The 1924 exhibition seemed rather purposeless, a shop-window display laid out by officialdom to try to grab the attention of largely indifferent passers-by. The Canadian exhibit caught things well. It was a life-size equestrian statue of the Prince of Wales carved in refrigerated butter. It was destined to melt just as soon as someone switched the power off.
The Empire Exhibition was not the first attempt to stage a spectacular event to try to make the British people enthusiastic about their empire. But it was almost the last. As Lord Meath and the others who worried about the moral fibre of the nation had understood, the mass of the people were just not particularly interested in the imperial project. Custodianship, partnership and preparation for self-government were much less exciting ideas for a British audience than discovery, conquest, adventure and profit. By the 1930s a torpor had settled. If the empire wasn’t expanding, what was it doing? No one seemed quite sure. Its face in popular culture became the cartoon character Colonel Blimp, with his walrus moustache, bad temper and fiercely held, stupendously stupid opinions, based upon a flush-faced booby his creator, David Low, had overheard holding forth in a Turkish bath near Charing Cross. Even the way the so-called Mother Country played cricket spoke of a new mood in which the old imperial links meant less and less, with the 1932 England touring team shamelessly attempting to intimidate Australian batsmen with ‘bodyline’ bowling: the Australian reaction was so furious that the tour was very nearly cancelled midway through.* How had what had recently seemed eternal verities withered so quickly?
The motive force of empire – the impulse to go out and plant the flag – had gone: the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was long over and the business of the British Empire was increasingly administrative. As that great anti-imperialist George Orwell had noticed, technology had changed everything. ‘The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy’, had been in decline for years, he wrote.
The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative … Well-meaning, over-civilized men, in dark suits and black felt hats, with neatly rolled umbrellas crooked over the left forearm, were imposing their constipated view of life on Malaya and Nigeria, Mombasa and Mandalay. The one-time empire builders were reduced to the status of clerks, buried deeper and deeper under mounds of paper and red tape.
And it was not merely that the style of colonial administration had been transformed by the speed of communications. By the 1930s, if a Robert Clive had emerged from some Shropshire market town dreaming of wealth and opportunity, he would have been better advised to sit in Britain watching reports from the trading floors of London or Hong Kong than to go to the trouble of travelling anywhere.
As the twentieth century ground on, the imperial idea lost its apparent glamour and its friends. The empire had become Official Business and the First World War had dulled any reverence for governments,