Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [181]
* When the England manager visited the Australian changing-room on the first day the tactic was deployed, the captain refused to speak to him, saying only, ‘There are two teams out there; one is playing cricket, the other is not.’ It was a very long way from a commitment to ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game.’
* When a reporter asked him about his clothes, Gandhi replied: ‘You people wear plus-fours. Mine are minus fours.’ But was it really appropriate to answer a summons to Buckingham Palace in loincloth, sandals and shawl? ‘The King’, he said, ‘had enough on for both of us.’
† It kept at it for years. At Christmas 1947, for example, the BBC was hailing the Labour government’s foolish scheme to grow groundnuts (peanuts) in Tanganyika as ‘solid ground for hope, hundreds of miles of jungle cleared by science and the bulldozer with a real promise of a better life for African and European’. The scheme turned out to be a fiasco and was abandoned a few years later, at vast cost to the taxpayer.
* The fate of Empire Day testifies to the lack of interest. It limped on after the war, the movement’s publication shrivelling from lavish magazine to leaflet, until even Winston Churchill declined an invitation to write a message for it. In 1958 it was renamed Commonwealth Day, in which guise it still exists, marked by a service in Westminster Abbey each March.
* Many local practices were respected. ‘The Battas are not bad people,’ he once said of a local Malay tribe, ‘notwithstanding they eat each other.’
* At the end of the war, ‘the Tiger of Malaya’ surrendered, was convicted of war crimes and hanged. As the authors of the Oxford Companion to Military History remark, ‘it is difficult to suppress the suspicion that his principal crime was to have so humiliated the white man that his Far Eastern empires became untenable’.
* Or so he later claimed he had remarked. He became the first prime minister of an independent Singapore. The country had been declared a republic but there were some aspects of the monarchical system that never lost their charm for Lee: he kept the post for thirty years. His eldest son became prime minister in 2004, his younger son was a prominent general and wealthy businessman, and his daughter ran the National Neuroscience Institute.
* When a Labour party figure was asked why there weren’t meetings being organized to protest at the conflict in 1950s Cyprus he gave the response ‘Have you ever tried protesting to an empty hall?’
* Laudanum was a diluted form of opium, manufactured in India. Increasingly, many upmarket Indian restaurants try to mimic the style of the Raj – all ceiling fans and sepia photographs. The kitchens of some of the grander establishments have appropriated the abbreviations of empire. A ‘DC’ is a dish cleaner and an ‘OC’ an onion cutter.