Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [88]
There was the occasional slip-up in the festivities, of course – one of the more notorious being the disappearance of a massive diamond brought as a gift for Victoria by the nizam of Hyderabad – and there were those who found the whole spectacle distinctly unappealing: the first Independent Labour MP, Keir Hardie, pointed out that people would have been cheering just as lustily if they were celebrating the installation of a British president, while in Dublin a coffin draped in the skull-and-crossbones flag was carried towards the castle, the seat of British power in Ireland, to the beat of a muffled drum. But even the earnest socialist Beatrice Webb admitted to her diary that ‘imperialism is in the air, all classes drunk with the sightseeing and hysterical loyalty’. The celebrations continued with choral concerts and fêtes, garden parties, Royal Navy vessels dressed overall (with all their flags flying), military reviews, the unveiling of statues, banquets, Sunday-school galas and a march-past of 4,000 public schoolboys. Free food was given to the poor in the West Indies, convicts were set free in India – and in Britain there was the usual gallimaufry of tatty souvenirs (although the golden-jubilee bustle that played ‘God Save the Queen’ every time you sat down did not make a reappearance, perhaps because each time it sounded everyone around felt they had to stand up).
Running this vast enterprise was now Britain’s main international preoccupation. But the empire seemed to require ever more land to make it function, a policy not of ‘What I have, I hold’ but of ‘What I have requires me to have more.’ Or, as one dissident tartly put it, ‘patriotism, conventionally defined as love of country, now turns out rather obviously to stand for love of more country’. The thing had been intellectually incoherent from the start: there had never been a strategic plan to hold sway across the globe. What had developed in its place was the strange product of ruthless opportunism and earnest idealism, courage and smugness, confidence and anxiety. Was it because they knew that at one level the whole thing was really a confidence trick that the British behaved as they did, ready to meet the calculated rebuff or the off-hand slight with ruthless ‘teach them a lesson’ force? Because by the time Victoria celebrated her sixty years on the throne there had been no fewer than seventy wars, expeditionary campaigns or punitive raids fought in her name, everywhere from New Zealand to Canada. In the year of her jubilee parade alone, British troops sacked Benin in reprisal for the king’s reluctance to be colonized, were fighting on the North-West Frontier and were advancing on the capital of Sudan to avenge the death of General Gordon. No one was to be allowed to take Victoria’s empire lightly. In August of the previous year the Royal Navy had fought the shortest war in history, when the sultan of Zanzibar died and his twenty-nine-year-old nephew had the temerity to declare himself successor without first seeking the approval of the British Consul on the island. When the young man refused a British ultimatum to quit the palace, the three British warships in the harbour opened fire. It was two minutes past nine in the morning. By 9.40 it was all over. The British had fired around 500 shells and about 5,000 rounds from their machine guns and rifles. Five hundred Zanzibaris were dead or wounded, for one wounded British petty officer.