Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [143]
Living among foreign cultures to whom they generally (although not always) believed themselves superior obliged the British to consider who they were and to impose upon themselves a style of life in which some things were done and others were most definitely not done. But is there any real connection between the tourists enjoying their bland cheese sandwiches (white bread, crusts removed) in the spice garden of the world and the men and women who ruled so much of the planet? In 1850, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerston, could dispatch a squadron of Royal Navy warships to blockade the main port of Greece because the government there had refused to meet the exaggerated claims for compensation demanded by a Portuguese Jew, ‘Don’ David Pacifico, for damage done to his property by a mob. Palmerston proclaimed that, since Pacifico had been born in Gibraltar, he was entitled to the protection of the forces of the Crown, then the mightiest military power on earth. The Greek government paid up. Today, when the tourists return to Britain from the Raj Experience, they will find they are not even entitled to special treatment at the frontier of their own country, and must stand in line at UK Border Control, alongside men and women from over two dozen other states, no more special than any other citizen of the European Union, be they Latvian, French or German. Or even Greek.
The real Raj experience ended in 1947, and the empire came home to Britain long ago. When today’s tourists return to England they will pass with hardly a glance the Indian restaurant on their high street, unaware that it was the search for spices to enliven the dreary English cuisine that took merchant venturers to the subcontinent in the first place or that the first Indian restaurant, Veeraswamy’s, was opened by the man who had been official caterer for the Indian pavilion at the 1924 Empire Exhibition. Birmingham, once the manufactory of cheap tin trays for the empire, is now known for a distinctive style of balti (‘bucket’) cooking. Haworth, home of the authors of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, even offers ‘traditional Indian cuisine in the heart of Brontë country’, a vision which would once have been comprehensible only to the talented sisters’ laudanum-addled brother.*
In 1959, my parents took the family on our first foreign holiday. It was a sign, I suppose, that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was right when he claimed that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’. My parents had discovered remarkably cheap tickets on a passenger ship to Vigo in northern Spain. We spent a couple of happy weeks at a fishing village on the Atlantic coast, and then reboarded the vessel in Vigo harbour. The return journey to Southampton was utterly different from the voyage out. It turned out that the ship had been making a modern version of the old ‘triangular trade’. I have no idea what she had carried from Spain across the Atlantic. But by the time the vessel had returned to Vigo for the final leg to England the holds and lower decks were packed with the descendants of slaves. Growing up in rural England I had never seen a black person before: the impression made by this crush of humanity, who had fashioned makeshift bedrooms