Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [180]
* There were two official languages and two police forces, but joint punitive expeditions when the natives got restless. The courts contained British and French judges, but to ensure fair play the presiding judge was appointed by the king of Spain.
* ‘England without an empire! Can you conceive it?’ he asked in his last speech. ‘England in that case would not be the England that we love … It would be a fifth-rate nation, existing on the sufferance of its more powerful neighbours. We will not have it.’
* Coincidentally, the first shot fired by British land forces in the war had been in west Africa, by a sergeant of the Gold Coast Regiment, who had been part of a patrol sent into the German protectorate of Togoland to try to silence a powerful German radio transmitter there. The Germans surrendered within three weeks.
* ‘Getting a Blighty’ came to mean getting a wound serious enough to have you returned home without endangering your life. Such wounds were desirable enough to be sometimes self-inflicted.
* That was the least of his titles: at one point in the war he commanded a squadron of Inniskilling Dragoon Guards which had occupied the little tin-roofed settlement at the Sheba gold mine. This made him, he said, king of Sheba, and his wife the queen of Sheba.
* In Port Said, Egyptians celebrate the spring holiday of Sham el-Nessim with a bonfire. Rather like Guy Fawkes Night in England, it involves the burning of a dummy, often dressed up as the villain of the day. The festival is called Harq Allenby – the burning of Allenby.
† When the inevitable honours came, he chose to be Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, a perhaps unexpected pairing, but no odder than Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspall, which married the capital of a million square miles of Africa to a Suffolk village with a population of fifty-two, or Horatio Nelson, who became Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe (population 396).
* An affection which lasted long into post-imperial times: Arabists dominated the Foreign Office for years. Urban, mercantile Arabs were another proposition altogether.
† Such a role has yet to exist, although one of the Sharif’s sons did become king of Jordan and another the king first of Syria, then of Iraq.
* The buildings are now occupied by the United Nations, from where officials of a dozen nationalities gaze down impotently as the city is colonized by Israel.
* Lugard was a true imperial figure. When he died – childless, like a surprising number of empire-builders – his memorial plaque read, ‘All I did was to try and lay my bricks straight.’
* He refused, for example, to let women attend his lectures, and wrote in his School History that democracy was still on trial in England: it would be the duty of the king to dismiss any government which planned to reduce the size of the navy or to give freedom to the colonies.
* I had assumed the Swizzle to be a figment of P. G. Wodehouse’s imagination, until I came across the memoirs of the colonial Governor Sir Hesketh Bell. When serving in Dominica in 1905 he was visited by the Duke of Montrose and a couple of other toffs. ‘I introduced them to the brand of West Indian cocktail usually known as a “swizzle”,’ he writes. Bell describes his version (evidently it came in several colours) as comprising half a wineglass of water and the same quantity of gin, half a teaspoon each of lime juice and sugar, a teaspoon of Chartreuse and a generous dash of Angostura bitters. He counted it one of the greatest blessings of the West Indies that a local shrub provided entirely natural swizzle sticks. ‘This implement, swiftly rotated between the two hands, transforms the cocktail into an icy, pale-pink foam which, when gliding down a thirsty throat on a hot day, seems to give a gleam of Paradise.’ (Bell, Glimpses of a Governor’s Life, pp. 80–81.)
* One of its best-known initiatives