Outposts_ Journeys To The Surviving Relics Of The British Empire Part 11

And this time-for such are the ways of today's Imperialist mind-the Foreign Office stopped short, and began to think very seriously about Mr Ratliffe and his money. Every Empire builder, it seems, has his price.

For a while-and particularly during those rainy summer days when I would go and see him at his desk in Frog Level-old Smiley was able to dream. He drew up the most elaborate plans-men would be s.h.i.+pped into Henderson by landing craft, and would have the airfield built in six months; then there would be dairy herds and a piggery and Smiley's gun collection and his thousands of cowboy videotapes, and his new mansion built and his girlfriends brought over...two years, maybe, and paradise would be ready for him. Lord Belstead, the Foreign Office man who was considering the case, had told Parliament itself, no less, that the Government was seriously considering the matter. Optimism reigned at Frog Level, and Smiley would drive his Silver Wraiths down the country lanes at a furious pace, scattering the chickens, singing southern songs and giving a war-whoop of victory as he sensed the imminent realisation of his life-long ambition.

But it was not to be. The World Wildlife Fund reminded the world that Henderson Island was a repository for great natural treasure. It wrote a report for the Foreign Office. 'The Island remains largely in its virginal state. It supports ten endemic taxa of flowering plants, four endemic land-birds (including the Henderson Rail, known to ornithologists as the Black Guardian of the Island), various endemic invertebrates, a colony of fifteen species of breeding seabirds and extensive and virtually unexplored fringing coral reefs.' There was a special breed of snail, a fruit-eating pigeon and a parrot that sipped nectar. Mr Ratliffe chewed tobacco, and could not under any circ.u.mstances be allowed to settle on Henderson, the Fund declared. Moreover, the island should be protected from settlement by any member of the human species, and left entirely for the world of animals and birds. Her Majesty's Government, the Fund concluded, 'has a profound moral obligation to take immediate steps to protect Henderson Island...'

Mr Ratliffe received his letter a few days later. So sorry to have indicated there might be cause for optimism, really cannot permit settlement, unique natural heritage, taxa here, taxa there, nice of you to offer such generous terms, great pain to have to decline kindness, no need to enter into correspondence on the matter, infinite regret, yours respectfully. And down in Frog Level that night there was much chewing and hawking, and sounds of disgust rattled around the Appalachian hills as Smiley Ratliffe unburdened himself of yet more invective, and prepared to begin his search once again, for a place where there were no drugs, no psychiatrists, no rock stars, no Commies and, particularly, no officials of the British Foreign Office. They, in Mr Ratliffe's view, were the worst of the lot of them. 'h.e.l.l, they were gonna sell me the G.o.ddam lease. They didn't give one tuppenny d.a.m.n for the place. They jes' saw it as a way of making a million bucks-until them critturs weighed in on the side of some pesky little ol' snail, and some dingbat of a parrot, and the British realised they wouldn't look so good to a bunch of parrot-lovers. d.a.m.n hypocrites, you Britis.h.!.+ Just d.a.m.n hypocrites.' And I left Frog Level forthwith, and have not spoken to Mr Ratliffe since.

On Pitcairn Island the news was received with sullen dismay. The islanders wanted the money, and the ferry, and thought an airfield on Henderson would be a good idea. Mrs Christian could have had a doctor flown in from Tahiti, they said. When we have a problem here someone could fly in, they said. Who cares about fruit-eating pigeons, and birds called Rails, they said.

The Foreign Office said it was moderately sympathetic. Glynn Christian, a young man related to most of the island families, and who now lives in London demonstrating cooking for early morning BBC television viewers, planned to lead an expedition to go to Pitcairn in 1989 and study the animals and birds. It would leave behind its boats and its buildings for the bicentenary the following year of Fletcher Christian's arrival; a royal visit would take place then as well, he hoped. Pitcairn would be put back on the map.

His idea was, essentially, to rescue the colony from extinction. He, and those few friends of Pitcairn to be found in Britain, are convinced the Foreign Office wishes the island to be depopulated totally-the last few islanders should go to New Zealand, or to Norfolk Island, and live a better life. If the trend of the last two decades continues, no one will be left on Pitcairn by the end of this century, and the rocky islands of this tiny and remote group will be left to the wind and the waves, the pigeons, the parrots and the snails.

But lately one additional argument is finding official favour: it concerns the strategic importance of the Pacific Ocean. The argument is simple. The sovereign sea area that surrounds the four islands of Pitcairn is vast. There are said to be dark forces-the very forces Mr Ratliffe so despises-who would dearly like to fill any Imperial vacuum that might be created in what President Reagan called 'the Ocean of the twenty-first century'. The depopulation of Pitcairn might create such a vacuum: the argument for trying to retain at least token inhabitation, a small band of colonists set down in the silver sea, is more powerful than can be influenced by mere considerations about ecology, or sentiment, or the bicentenary of an event that official Britain would prefer, in any case, to forget.

The decision not to visit Pitcairn was difficult. I felt no particular regret, however, at keeping away from both South Georgia and the British Antarctic Territory: neither has a population, neither has a resident administrator (though the chief official of the Antarctic Survey acts as magistrate and British Government representative should any problems arise-such as the illegal landing of the Argentine sc.r.a.p men at Leith harbour in March 1982). The scenery, of course, appears to be stunning; but such architecture as the Empire has left is the gimcrack wreckage of scientific stations and whaling factories, and only the memorial cross to Shackleton on a snowy hillside above Grytviken appears to have a trace of the Imperial feel about it.

When I began the journey, and mentioned to friends that I was wandering around the world looking at the remaining British colonies, most would look puzzled. 'Do we have any left, then?' they would ask. Not a few, though, would a.s.sume a more sophisticated att.i.tude. 'Places like the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands, that sort of thing?' And in the early days I grimaced inwardly, and gritted my teeth, and said that no, these were not colonies, not part of the Empire, not abroad, you see...

Technically, though, they were right to suggest these most British of Isles for inclusion. (And it is perfectly correct to call the Channel Islands British Isles. The word 'Britain' refers to two places-that wedge-shaped island comprising England, Wales and Scotland on the one hand; that duck's-bill of a peninsula known as Brittany on the other. The latter was always known as 'Little' Britain, the former 'Great' Britain. The Channel Islands, belonging to both, may have the sound of Gaul about them, but are British through and through.) Both they, and the Isle of Man, are true dependencies of the Crown. They are not a part of the United Kingdom. They have their own laws, parliaments, taxes and customs. They have a British governor, the representative of the sovereign to whom they own their allegiance and their loyalty. They are willing colonies, their citizenry colonials, in every sense the same as those in Bermuda, on Grand Turk, or up on the Peak in old Hong Kong.

But I did not go there. I decided not to for the most prosaic of reasons, though one tinged with a kind of logic. They are not, in the accepted sense, abroad. You don't have to have a pa.s.sport to go there. They are not within the remit of the Foreign Office. They have not been within the remit of the Colonial Office. They do not appear in the histories of Empire, nor in the directories of dependent territories. Their governors were not chosen from the select lists of the Colonial Service, but from the same loyal rolls as came the lords lieutenants of the counties.

Their a.s.sociation with England, whatever the technicalities of their status, was far more intimate than the relation between, say, the United States and Guam, or between France and Martinique. In those latter cases the word 'colony' can, with some degree of literal truth, still be fairly applied; in the case of Man, in the cases of the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, and of Alderney, Great Sark, Little Sark, Brechou, Lihou, Jethou and Herm, not even the most fervent apologist would suggest that an Imperial foot was placed against a colonial neck, and that any subjugation or inequality still obtained. These may not be part of the Kingdom; but nor are they part of the Empire, nor have they been for many centuries past.

And then, finally, I cast logic and good reason to the winds, and went back to Ireland.

The British had held Ireland for longer than any other people on the face of the earth. The First Empire-that of France, and of America-had come and gone; the great Imperial adventure, of which these three years of wandering may be a final journey, grew, reached its zenith, and began its decline. And yet still there was Ireland; the flag flew over Dublin Castle, the soldiers drilled in the parks and the squares, the police were still royal, the Viceroy still ruled a sullen and unforgiving people. For the Irish hated it, they resented it, and they were the first to throw the British out.

Conventionally the British think that the first colonies they lost were those in America; but that irruption of nationalism and violence did not spell the end of an Imperial att.i.tude, merely the closing of one Imperial phase, and the dawning of another. When the Irish rose, with all that wonderfully misguided valour at the General Post Office, the writing was truly on the wall for the Empire of the English. I have taken the common view that, in strict colonial terms, it was Weihaiwei in China that was the first real loss to the Empire; but the first wound was struck in 1916, the first grave and fatal blow was struck with Home Rule, the inst.i.tution began to crumble from within-if not yet without-from the moment the Pale, eight long centuries old, ceased to exist in the Ireland of modern times.

True, there was the Act of Union: Ireland was not a colony, in the same strict technical sense that decided me to leave out journeying to Douglas or St Peter Port. But it felt like one. It felt like one to the Irish. And the English behaved as though it were one. There was a distinction drawn, and the Gael was on the distaff side of it, always.

And, what's more, so was the Planter, too. The English cared as little for the Protestants of Ulster as they had for the Catholics of Leinster, Munster and Connaught. The colonial mind ruled in the northern six counties too, even when the Free State had been born, and the North had been legally subsumed into the United Kingdom, and made to feel, const.i.tutionally, part and parcel of and wholly equal to the motherland across St George's Channel. The republicans and the nationalists in the mean streets of Belfast and Derry belted it out as a slogan-'Ulster-England's last colony!' and they were right, in a strange, indefinable sort of way, righter than they knew.

So I spent the last hours of the journey in the town of Hillsborough, in County Down, at the great stone mansion they called Government House, and where the symbol of Ireland as part of Empire had come to rest after being chased out of Dublin by the heroes of the rising and the architects of Home Rule. It had been called Hillsborough House back then-the family house of the man who had been England's first Colonial Secretary, and a man who believed pa.s.sionately in Union with Ireland, and the denial of independence to the Americans.

In 1921 the family gave the house to the Crown-with provision that they might have it back should the Crown ever decide it had no need for it. The first of the five Governors moved in-to sign bills, to affix the great seal of Ulster to legislation, to hold invest.i.tures in the throne room, to hold garden parties on the lawn, to open fetes, present awards, dress in full Imperial raiment on the sovereign's birthday, on Armistice Day, on the State Opening of Parliament at Stormont, and the delivery of the speech from the throne.

They were said to stand for no side, these men; and yet all were Protestant, all were loyal to the Crown, all stood for the very ant.i.thesis of what fully one-third of the people they ruled were said to want. In this way more than any other the Governors of Northern Ireland seem now to have been truly colonial-for like the viceroys of Ireland in Dublin Castle, they stood, to some extent, for subjugation and rule, rather than as a pleasant symbol of a universally accepted a.s.sociation.

There was the Duke of Abercorn, who had a decorative embellishment of soldiery at Government House, changing the guard each noon and night, to remind the pa.s.sing people that the Crown ruled this corner of the island. Next the Fourth Earl Glanville, gruff, intemperate, unloved-but married to the sister of the Bowes-Lyon Queen, and thus beloved by a.s.sociation, if loathed by virtue of his person. Lord Wakehurst of Ardingley, come to Ireland from Governor-Generalling in New South Wales, a man so given to nocturnal excursions that his official portrait was painted with an open fly, and the newer paint ordered to conceal the white silks below is still visible to even the casual eye.

And then Lord Erskine of Rerrick, who was chased away by the beginnings of the Troubles, a man said by his biographer to have been tortured by his bewilderment of Ireland-not the first, and a.s.suredly not the last to be so.

Finally, Lord Grey of Naunton, who arrived to govern at Hillsborough after governing both British Guiana and the Bahama Islands. I remember him-a jaunty man with a white moustache and a twinkle in his eye, one of the few dashes of style and colour in a country that, during the five years he held office, was collapsing in a miasma of blood and dirt and misery.

The British told Lord Grey to go in 1973. His butler, Albert Harper, who had b.u.t.tled for all five Excellencies and their ladies, remains puzzled at the way they made him go. They tried, he told me one afternoon as we walked down the endless carpet of the throne room, they tried to make him take the ferry home, and said there was no Queen's Flight for him; they tried to stop a soldiers' guard of honour for him; and they made him go in his civilian clothes, without his swan's-feather plumes, or his great sword, or his fine blue uniform.

But in the end Ralph Grey of Naunton left in style. There was a detachment of Scots Guards in the Square; there was a Heron of the Queen's Flight; there was a final salute. But he did go in his black suit, and the final wave, as he stepped from the North of Ireland and into his English plane, was not with a plumed hat, but with a black bowler.

There was a dinner at Hillsborough the night I last saw Albert Harper. The menu read 'Hillsborough Castle'-the name 'Government House' had long since gone. The silver knives were each an exact one inch from the table edge; the freesias were fresh from the garden; the servants were briefed, the fires were lit, the whisky gla.s.ses had been polished, the kitchen staff was at the ready.

But it was all a sad pretence. Where the Governor once sat, there was now but a Secretary of State, a mere politician, and usually one of little note, and with little reason to be noted. The footmen had long gone. The portraits of former Governors and Irish Viceroys triggered no memories, no conversations. The great seal of Ulster had been officially defaced with two great scratches of a knife, and the man who sat at this table's middle signed no bills, affixed no sign manual, had no role that was not dictated by a political superior in London.

The argument by which we called Ireland part of the Empire must apply, right or wrong, to the remanent six counties of today. This is, in a way, a colony still. But since Lord Grey waved that bowler hat down from the Heron that June afternoon in 1973, Ulster has just not had, for me, the feel of Empire any more. Nor for Butler Harper. He sat down at the long table, and gazed down over the lawns, to where a policeman stood with a machine-gun crooked under his arm. 'It was grand here in those days, right enough. But now-the Empire, if that is what we were part of, has vanished. Into thin air.'

And he stood up wearily and stretched his back. He opened the great door of Government House, and let me out into the afternoon sun and the fresh shower of rain. And as I walked away I heard him turn the great key in the lock, shutting himself in with a fine Imperial memory, while all outside the Empire had, as he realised, just vanished clear away.

12.

Some Reflections and Conclusions

And what an Empire it had been! These little sun-bleached bones, scattered around the world in silent memorial to it all, stir some sadness and a lot of pride. It is a Sat.u.r.day morning in St Helena-I came back for a second visit, early one recent southern autumn-and this could be an England of 6,000 miles away and a hundred years ago.

Before me, through the uneven gla.s.s windows of this East India Company mansion, a long garden slopes down towards the sea. There is a border of roses and marigolds; a row of fig trees, cow parsley hedges, a small jungle of banana palms, jacaranda trees and a magnificent magnolia. The sea sparkles in the warm morning, touched by a faint grey haze. There are a score of boats at anchor, including the Royal Mail boat the RMS St Helena St Helena from Bristol which came in last night, bringing me back to this speck of Imperial memories. from Bristol which came in last night, bringing me back to this speck of Imperial memories.

It is very quiet. If I stand still I can just hear the bells of St Paul's Cathedral ringing in m.u.f.fled celebration: the servant girl says there is a wedding this morning, a friend of her sister's marrying a boy from Sandy Bay. Yes, there is a child already-a 'spare', she calls it, laughing-born a year ago. No one exactly certain who the father was. The girl, whose name is Annie, wants to go to England to be 'in service' the Government will not allow any girl to leave the island until she is twenty-three, so she has another four years to wait until she sees her first bus, or train, aeroplane, television programme or daily newspaper. Until then she is happy to clear away the Weetabix and Hoover the bedrooms and earn a few pounds to put away in the savings bank. She yearns to know what the outside world is like. She met a girl from Tristan once, who came to St Helena and left in great confusion, unable to cope with the frantic pace of life in Jamestown-she was frightened by what she called the rush hour in the island capital, when perhaps ten cars leave for the hillside, and ten shops all shut at the same hour. 'They tell me that England's pretty busy when compared with us,' observed Annie, gravely. 'I often wonder what happened to little Jessica when she got up to London. I wonder what I will think, too. It's so quiet here-so very peaceful.'

The s.h.i.+p's arrival had, as always, caused great excitement. We carried tourists, wealthy Americans who were pa.s.sing through to the Cape, and who fell upon the old streets of Jamestown with locust-like zeal. But we carried some Saints, too, and as they stepped from the dinghy through the great swirls of the rollers, there were tears and hugs and hoa.r.s.e greetings, people who hadn't seen each other for months, even years, in touch and view again.

There was a Saint Helenian soldier, a man who had joined the Royal Engineers twenty-three years before and who had never been home. He had a young wife now, a frightened little girl from Liverpool, who, for days before our arrival, would scan the horizon ahead for the first glimpse of her new home. Her husband had promised to return, and she had agreed to come with him, to give up the rainy streets of Toxteth and the grey waters of the Mersey for a tiny island 700 miles from the nearest land. But on the morning we made our landfall and she had seen the low and ragged outline beneath the clouds, she retreated to the p.o.o.p deck and silently smoked a cigarette while gazing at our wake, and back towards her old abandoned home. From time to time her husband, his eyes s.h.i.+ning with his own excitement, would walk back through the s.h.i.+p to find her. But each time, seeing her staring into the distance, he would back away and leave her, understanding, no doubt, how she must have been feeling. I met him in the street next morning, his hand being pumped by an a.s.sortment of grizzled pa.s.sers-by. His wife had been spirited away within minutes of the boat docking: her new in-laws had taken her home for tea, and by the time he caught up with her 'it was as though she had been living here all of her life'. He knew it would be all right, he said. The Saints 'are an awful nice bunch of people'.

The Empire had, on its better days, been both run by and peopled by 'a nice bunch of people' such as these. These places I had journeyed to and through were, by and large, good good places-organised kindly, directed along traditional and well-meaning ways, peopled by men and women whose days moved to the comfortable English routines-from Weetabix to Ovaltine, from Sunday communion to the Friday knees-up, from Christmas and Boxing Day to the Queen's birthday and hot cross buns. They took their 'O' levels and their Royal School of Music examinations, listened to the BBC relay broadcasts, sent their telegrams from Cable and Wireless, dispatched their letters by the Royal Mail and learned to call the man in the big house on the hill 'Your Excellency'. They committed few crimes, stirred up little trouble, kept the Queen's peace and collected coloured pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Di. And they were, on a small scale, reflections of the larger, grander Empire-that vast a.s.semblage of nations upon which the sun never set (though the original remark-'the sun never sets on my dominions' was written in German by Schiller for Phillip II of Spain, and had nothing to do with Britain at all). places-organised kindly, directed along traditional and well-meaning ways, peopled by men and women whose days moved to the comfortable English routines-from Weetabix to Ovaltine, from Sunday communion to the Friday knees-up, from Christmas and Boxing Day to the Queen's birthday and hot cross buns. They took their 'O' levels and their Royal School of Music examinations, listened to the BBC relay broadcasts, sent their telegrams from Cable and Wireless, dispatched their letters by the Royal Mail and learned to call the man in the big house on the hill 'Your Excellency'. They committed few crimes, stirred up little trouble, kept the Queen's peace and collected coloured pictures of Prince Charles and Princess Di. And they were, on a small scale, reflections of the larger, grander Empire-that vast a.s.semblage of nations upon which the sun never set (though the original remark-'the sun never sets on my dominions' was written in German by Schiller for Phillip II of Spain, and had nothing to do with Britain at all).

And so here I sit, in an East India Company room, looking down across a Royal Naval fortress, at a Victorian harbour and a Regency town. It is easy to slip into a fine Imperial reverie, and remember how we came to possess only morsels like these as the parting gift from our days of world dominion. Consider how once, from Aden to Zanzibar, from the ice-bound rocks of Arctic Canada to the bone-dry ovens of the Kalahari, from groves of Malayan durian trees to the apple orchards of Tasmania, from the 'friable and spongy rocks' of Malta to the granite peaks of Mount Kenya, and, most gloriously of all, from Kashmir to Kannayak.u.mari, northern bastion to southern tip of India, Great Britain was, as the New York Times New York Times happily conceded on the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 'so plainly destined to dominate this planet'. Endless tracts of land, a quarter of the world's peoples, every race and creed, from Ashantis and a.s.samese, Zeptiahs and Zulus, from Buddhists to Zoroastrians, fell under the seemingly eternal paramountcy of London. happily conceded on the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria, 'so plainly destined to dominate this planet'. Endless tracts of land, a quarter of the world's peoples, every race and creed, from Ashantis and a.s.samese, Zeptiahs and Zulus, from Buddhists to Zoroastrians, fell under the seemingly eternal paramountcy of London.

True, some of the possessions were not possessed at all, as such: the self-governing colonies, Newfoundland, Cape Colony, Natal, New Zealand, Canada and the six Australian colonies made their own rules and deferred to London only rarely; India, a splendid law unto herself, above and beyond what she and her servants would have regarded as the undignified rabble of mere colonies; and the protectorates-Somaliland, Nyasaland, the Solomons and that part of Aden between Muscat and Yemen-which were, strictly, foreign countries, whose citizens may have been subject to but not necessarily of the British Crown, and were thus not ent.i.tled to the kind of amiable treatment supposedly handed down in the colonies themselves. There were other genera in the Colonial Office menagerie-protected states, trust territories, and a b.a.s.t.a.r.d tribe that included such forgotten ends of the earth as Starbuck Island and Vostok Island, and which were lumped together under the heading 'Miscellaneous islands and rocks'.

The Crown colonies, as varied in governmental form as they were in governed peoples, were at the centre of it all. Some had parliaments, some had appointed a.s.semblies, some gave the vote to all, some to a few (to one-eighteenth of the population of Malta, for example), some had no laws at all. Some, gigantic and complicated, had all the trappings of independent states-the Gold Coast enjoyed the attentions of an administration that included a cinema technician, a tug master and a grade one foreman platelayer (in 1950 Mr Blackwood, Mr Stewart and Mr Reynolds, all s.h.i.+pped out from Britain); others had only the rudiments-Tonga, for instance, had just one British Minister (of Finance) and was otherwise run by colonial servants a thousand miles away in Fiji.

This immense and majestic collection of peoples and places was administered by the men of the Colonial Office. They were unhurried folk, bureaucrats of splendid aloofness and determined superiority who were encouraged to pursue any private field of endeavour or research for which they cared, rather as though the office was an out-station of All Souls. One note records that a Mr Darnley of the West Indian Department had a keen interest in whales, and spent much of his time before the fire contemplating, instead of the possibilities of a putsch in Jamaica, the complexities of ambergris and the relative blubber thickness of Fin and Sei.

The clubbability of the place led, perhaps inevitably, to a certain smugness. In 1956 Sir Charles Jeffries, Deputy Under-Secretary for the Colonies (and a contributor to Punch Punch and the and the Listener Listener), was content to declare that, 'The Colonial Office will still have immense continuing responsibilities for as long as any planner can usefully look ahead.'

It might have been useful had he looked ahead just ten short years; or he might perhaps have been a little suspicious that he and his colleagues had laboured for so long in temporary quarters of Sanctuary Buildings, Great Smith Street, and that the marvellous structure they had been promised just after the war had taken so long to materialise. That structure was never built; by 1966 the Colonial Office suffered the indignity of merger, subsumed into the Commonwealth Relations Office; a mere six months later, on 7th January 1967, it disappeared altogether. The existence of a Colonial Office meant the perpetuation of the colonial mind in an age that, quite suddenly, had developed a loathing for such things. And, in any case, most British colonies had disappeared: Aden had, and Zanzibar; not one of the protectorates was still protected, nor any trust territory, nor any protected state. India had gone, and Australia, Canada and her dominion colleagues were standing proud and alone. Yes, most of the colonies had gone. Most, but not quite all.

Historians of Empire will still argue over the reasons for Britain's Imperial decline. Was it deliberate, or did it happen by accident? Was the gathering of Empire deliberate, indeed? Did this greatest accretion of power and influence the world has ever known come about as a consequence of a sustained fit of absentmindedness? Theses for Doctorates of Philosophy and Bachelors of Letters-and books, of course-will continue to stutter from the typewriters and the word-processors for years to come. This book will certainly not attempt to answer the question. Before we take our final look at the stranded hulks of the Imperial adventure, though, it might be useful if, briefly, we pa.s.s by the way-stations of the great decline, if only because so many of the stations themselves bear a remarkable similarity to the fragments that remain.

Where did it all begin? The loss of the American colonies, of course, brought to an end one phase of the adventure; but the Treaties of Utrecht and of Paris had by then been signed, and the growing dominance of Great Britain within Europe was about to ensure that a new British Empire was about to rise from the wreckage of the old. It was the scuttling of that second Empire that was the long and painful affair which only today seems to be coming to an end.

The Indian Mutiny-or the First War of Indian Independence, as it is known today by every schoolchild from Amritsar to a.s.sam-sent the first whisper of concern around the London clubs. The mutineers had been subdued, naturally, but not at all easily, and that came as a shock. Compared with the succession of easy victories that had secured most Imperial territories, India was proving, as they might have said in the gymkhana clubs over a not-so-chota peg or two, 'deucedly tricky'.

Then there was the Boer War, so hard fought and so hard won, often so humiliating in its losses and eventually so Pyrrhic in its triumph, a ma.s.sive force of Britain's mighty army ranged against, and often punished by, a ragged ma.s.s of distempered Boer farmers. If the mutiny had checked the hubris, the events at Magersfontein and Spion Kop interrupted, then slowed, and finally stopped the progress. Sure, the aggressive temper could still be called up-Younghusband's invasion of Tibet, with its accompanying ma.s.sacres that were, in truth, rarely committed by British empire-builders, took place in 1903, after the events in South Africa; but then there was the Great War, the Dardanelles and Gallipoli, and it could safely be said the Empire had reached and pa.s.sed its apogee, and never would be quite the same, nor as powerful, nor its masters as confident again.

The first piece of property that was actually let go-if we forget Heligoland (which Lord Salisbury swapped for Zanzibar) and the Balearic Islands of Minorca and Majorca, which were ceded to Spain under the Treaty of Amiens in 1802-was a tiny corner of China known as Weihaiwei. It was a port, on the southern side of the Gulf of Po Hai, and had long been regarded as strategically important, as well as having-a rare thing, in China-an extremely pleasant climate. The Chinese were accustomed to having it s.n.a.t.c.hed away from them (the j.a.panese had occupied it in 1895, and destroyed the Chinese Imperial North Ocean Fleet at anchor, much as they were to do with the Americans in Hawaii-another station that was briefly in British hands-forty-six years later) and when the British demanded it, acquiesced, in 1898. The British wanted the port as a summer station for the Royal Navy China Squadron, and to provide some Imperial balance to the Russian occupation of the port on the northern side of the Gulf. (And the knowledge that the Germans also wanted Weihaiwei provided a final argument for Lord Salisbury to raise the Union Jack there.) The Russian acquisition was called Port Arthur; Britain renamed Weihaiwei Port Edward, and as such it remained for thirty-two pleasant years, most of them under the benign governors.h.i.+p of 'the charming, plump and unctuous' James Stewart Lockhart, who was said to have been a 'scholar-administrator in the Confucian sense'.

But American influence in the world had begun to grow; new arguments were interfering with the geopolitical a.s.sumptions that had emanated from Downing Street during the heyday of Empire; and when, at a conference in Was.h.i.+ngton in 1921 it was suggested that Britain might give up Port Edward, voluntarily, and leave China to run her own port at her own whim and leisure, Britain's Ministers agreed. Not without a grumble-Winston Churchill made a forceful argument that to abandon Weihaiwei would mean a ma.s.sive loss of prestige for Britain in the Far East, and newspapers in London complained that the Government was knuckling in to pressure from an upstart rival to world dominion. But the nerve had gone, the purpose had faltered, the need for territory seemed to be on the wane. Britain gave up Port Edward, the famous sanatorium where unnumbered matelots had recovered from malaria and gazed out at the sea and the mountains of Shantung was handed over to the Chinese Navy, and the fleet sailed away, for ever. (Eight years after the British left the j.a.panese moved in again, and the place did not become properly Chinese until 1945. Since then it has been one of the very few Chinese cities where the population has actually fallen: Port Edward had 100,000 inhabitants, today there are only a tenth as many.) The 'rendition', as Balfour called it, of Port Edward, may have been the first deliberate act in the rundown of the Empire; the fall of Singapore, that most terrible of wartime blows, showed beyond all doubt that Britain had lost both the Imperial touch and, more important, the Imperial ability. By 1942-the date of the surrender, February 15th, was noted by some latter-day Imperialists as being particularly inauspicious: on the same day twenty-nine years later the Kingdom's s.h.i.+llings and pence gave way to the beastliness of the decimal currency-Britain was militarily incapable of keeping her Empire going. Singapore's fall was the beginning of the end.

It had been the axis of the eastern possessions. India, Australia, Borneo, Burma-all the colonial governments and governors had rested their confidence in the knowledge that the fleet was ready, that Ill.u.s.trious Ill.u.s.trious, or Revenge Revenge, or Indomitable Indomitable would sail at a moment's notice from a dockside only a few days' steaming away from whatever problem had arisen. Sixty million pounds had been spent after the Great War to turn Singapore into the Portsmouth of the East-the colonies to derive most security from its presence, the Malay States, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong, all contributed towards the cost of pouring concrete and bending iron into the greasy swamp at the eastern end of the great peninsula. would sail at a moment's notice from a dockside only a few days' steaming away from whatever problem had arisen. Sixty million pounds had been spent after the Great War to turn Singapore into the Portsmouth of the East-the colonies to derive most security from its presence, the Malay States, the Straits Settlements and Hong Kong, all contributed towards the cost of pouring concrete and bending iron into the greasy swamp at the eastern end of the great peninsula.

But only two battles.h.i.+ps ever stayed in the dockyard, and then for a week before sailing off. The fortress had guns with which to defend itself-but they were firmly bedded in concrete, faced the southern sea, and could not be turned around. So when the j.a.panese forces entered Thailand, and then overran Malaya, and found the colonial citadel without its Navy and without any effective firepower pointing towards them, they pushed on to victory without a second thought.

The colony's rulers still could not imagine that the j.a.panese would succeed; when a worried Churchill cabled that, 'The City of Singapore, must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death', the Governor, Sir Shenton Thomas, laconically remarked that he trusted the British Army 'would see the little men off'. They couldn't, and they didn't. The Imperial j.a.panese met the Imperial British across the Joh.o.r.e Strait on 8th February; one week later General Percival sued for peace, and the surrender was signed in the old Ford motor car factory out on the Joh.o.r.e road. Singapore was renamed Syonan, and all the rubber and tin went off to Tokyo.

Never again would the Asians-from the Punjabis to the Cantonese-have full and complete faith in the word, the might or the ability of the British. The mirror cracked, the gla.s.s dimmed and the muscle became flaccid; no matter that the war was later won; no matter that Singapore came back into the royal fold in 1945 (after the period when it was officially recorded as being 'temporarily in hostile j.a.panese occupation'); no matter that the gin slings were slung at the Raffles Hotel and returned nabobs strutted and swaggered just as they had before and just as Sir Stamford would have wished-that February day was the moment when the Imperial will was challenged, and was found wanting.

Eight months later, and the British Government was to be found officially toying with the idea of running down the Empire. The Atlantic Charter, issued in 1941, had talked of 'the rights of all people to choose the form of government under which they live'-but when an apoplectic Governor of Burma wired to know if that meant that the Burmese were going to have such a right, he was told that no, of course the Charter did not apply to peoples under the benevolent charge of the British, but to hapless indigents like the Abyssinians who had been jackbooted into submission by less civilised powers, in this case, the Wop. No, no worries, old man-The Atlantic Charter not to be interpreted as end of Empire or any such d.a.m.n fool idea.

But the next winter, after Singapore had fallen and India looked even more restless than usual and the Burmese Government was itself in exile (up in Simla-very cold in winter, the Burmese aides complained), a new kind of policy began to be conceived. And these words were at its nub: 'It is therefore the duty of "Parent" or "Trustee States" to guide and develop the social, economic and political inst.i.tutions of the Colonial peoples until they are able without danger to themselves and others to discharge the responsibilities of Government.'

And how they agonised over it! Mr Attlee and Mr Eden, Lord Halifax and Viscount Cranborne and Lord Stanley argued and dithered, sent copies to the nervous dominions, decided to act out the policy of the entire Declaration (which was a great deal longer), then decided not to, then decided to abandon the whole doc.u.ment and make it secret and pretend it had never happened. But it had: planted in the minds of two men who were later to become Prime Minister, and two others who were to have a long and continuing influence on British foreign and colonial policy, were the seeds of a new scheme of things: after the war India was going to be handed over to the Indians, and then, in an unending cascade, all those other dominions and protectorates and trustee states and protected states and mandated territories and Crown colonies were going to be helped, slowly and surely, to stand on their own two feet, with England looking on, less a weary t.i.tan, more a proud parent.

But the war, and its ultimate result, briefly clouded this new appearance of policy. In victory, Britain seemed to regain her Imperial energies. She had doughtily recaptured all the lost particles of Empire-the West Kents fighting hand-to-hand with the j.a.panese on the tennis court at Kohima, to win back Burma, and no less a grandee of Empire than King George's cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, accepting the enemy surrender at Singapore. And the British sphere of influence in Europe and North Africa-particularly on the littoral of what was now truly, it seemed, the British lake of the Mediterranean-had actually increased, tremendously. But it was all an illusion: almost as swiftly as the dreariness of post-war Britain became apparent to her subjects-the rationing, the bitter weather, the bombed buildings, the shoddiness and weariness of it all-so, to the world, did her new and diminished role. She was on the second tier of a new grand alliance of nations that were richer, more powerful, more expansive and more confident than herself; and, fatally for the Empire, she had no stomach for foreign possession, no enthusiasm for hanging on to much more than the mere trappings by which her glories had been proclaimed, only three decades before, to a humble and obedient world.

If India went, the axioms had it, the end was inevitable. Curzon had foretold of that: 'If we lose it, we shall step straight away to a third-rate power...your ports and your coaling stations, your fortresses and your dockyards, your Crown colonies and your protectorates will go too. For either they will be unnecessary, or the tollgates and barbicans of an Empire that has vanished.' But India did go, swiftly and explosively, divided and perhaps cruelly misdirected by those Britons who were determined to get away. And once India had gone, and King George stopped signing his letters with the letter 'I' to denote him as Imperator, and once the Union flag that had flown night and day over the Lucknow Residency had been returned to Windsor Castle, so, gradually, and with some pain and not a little sadness, the remaining shards of Empire fell away-they were, it was felt, too costly, too inconvenient, too restive and anyway, in many cases ready (if not always quite able) to stand alone.

Burma and Ceylon were the first to peel away, and then, with consequences still so unhappily evident today, the mandated territory of Palestine. Newfoundland, Britain's oldest colony (Sir Humphrey Gilbert had taken possession of it in 1583), a place of codfish and pinewoods and where they used dogs for pulling carts, had gone bankrupt before the war; once the fight was over the Bank of England had a look at the Newfies' account book, p.r.o.nounced all now well and-such was the fading Imperial spirit-organised a referendum so the loggers and the fishermen could decide what to do next. The first time round half opted to stay colonials, to considerable irritation and embarra.s.sment; they had a second go, and voted to confederate with Canada, and nestle up alongside Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. By January 1949 Newfoundland was out; one more colony down, seventy-odd to go.

There was a last rush of blood to the head in 1953; wet and miserable though that June day dawned, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth (the first monarch in nearly a hundred years not to be described as 'Imp.Ind.', but instead merely as 'of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith') provided an opportunity for the final grand march-past of Empire. Suitably The Times The Times announced a final Imperial triumph: Mount Everest had been climbed by a British party (though it was a New Zealander and a Nepali who actually made it to the top); the ma.s.sed bands and regiments that thumped and clattered through the rain marched with even a little more spring and verve as a result. announced a final Imperial triumph: Mount Everest had been climbed by a British party (though it was a New Zealander and a Nepali who actually made it to the top); the ma.s.sed bands and regiments that thumped and clattered through the rain marched with even a little more spring and verve as a result.

There, behind Lieutenant-Colonel G. N. Ross of the Gordon Highlanders ('attached Royal West African Frontier Force'), were the ma.s.sed thousands of the colonial contingents-armed police detachments from North Borneo and Trinidad, Air Force detachments from the Aden Protectorate Levies; the Barbados Regiment, the Leeward Islands Defence Force, the Kings Own Malta Regiment, the Malaya Federation Armoured Car Squadron, the Fiji Military Forces, the Somaliland Scouts, 154 HAA Battery, East Africa, the Northern Rhodesia Regiment and a dozen more besides. And there were the colonial rulers-the Sultan of Zanzibar sharing a carriage with the Sultan of Perak, the Sultan of Kelantan with the beaming and drenched (for she declined to carry an umbrella) Queen of Tonga. The entire procession, miles long and impeccably drilled, from Colonel Burrows, OBE, TD, of the War Office Staff who led, to the final man of the Fourth Division, the Sovereign's Escort, who brought up the rear, was a last celebration of Empire-a muted and diminished version of the great jubilee of Queen Victoria, on a warmer and sunnier June morning fifty-six years before.

One by one the colonies departed. Comets and VC-10s and destroyers and frigates brought ever more junior members of the royal family to the rituals of Independence-the lowering of the Union flag, the lament of a piper or the solitary bugle call, the celebration ball and the hopeful speeches, the luncheon at the Government House and the unnoticed departure for London on the morning after. Usually the pomp was perfect, sometimes not-at the Bahamas ceremonies an awning fell on poor Prince Charles's head, and the frigate dispatched to help St Lucia on her road to freedom collided with the mole, and all the sailors standing at attention along its decks fell over in a grand confusion.

But via evenings of grand ceremony or amusing bathos, and in the wake of ugly fighting or quiet agreement over lunch at Lancaster House, they went. The Sudan and the Gold Coast, Malaya and Somaliland, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, Tanganyika and Western Samoa, Uganda and North Borneo, Malta, Basutoland, Aden Colony, Mauritius and Swaziland, Grenada, the Gilberts, the Ellices, St Kitts, St Vincent, Antigua, British Guiana, British Honduras-even the Condominium of the New Hebrides which was jointly run by the British and the French and was so consequently ungovernable that, it was joked, cars would drive on the right on Mondays and on the left on Tuesdays. By the 1980s, when television viewers in England had seen what they a.s.sumed had been the last of the flag-lowering and heard the last echoing of the bugles, once Churchill was buried and Suez was relegated to history and no longer embarra.s.sed anyone-by that time the colonial Empire was, it was safely imagined, dead, buried and if not forgotten at least consigned to the past and no longer wished for, if little regretted either. All was gone.

But stay! In truth it was not quite gone. Almost, but not quite. A few colonies did remain, unwilling to let go, or unable to stand alone. A few governors still were appointed each year or so, a few geese still had to be plucked to provide plumes for a few Imperial helmets, a few grand houses still had to be maintained and lawns mowed and servants paid to keep a relic Imperial enginework chugging along. And in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London, up a stairway so long and twisting, so dark and unmemorable that newcomers would take a week or so to learn just where they worked and all other workers in more glamorous departments professed ignorance of its whereabouts, even its existence-up in the eaves and among the gurgling radiators and the dusty collections of the registry and the accountants, was an office that ran it all.

I tried to get there once to see the place from where the Empire was directed. But the Foreign Office is a place without a soul these days, no longer peopled by the clever and the romantic; and I had a dry note from a head of department saying that no, a visit would not be possible, but that perhaps a few questions, if suitably and solemnly written, might be answered in due course. There seemed no point in an arid correspondence, so I gave up this small aspect of the quest-far easier to fly to c.o.c.kburn Town, or to sail to Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas than to inspect the heart of Imperial power in London!

In a sense, though, it was a pity. The very reason for my journeying, after all, had been to make a last inspection of the Empire's remains, to try to see how we were managing these final responsibilities of ours. It might have been instructive to talk to the civil servants whose parishes were the faraway outposts I had seen. I would have liked to ask the lady on the St Helena desk why she took a full month to answer a simple query from the Castle, or to ask the gentleman whose allotted tasks included the daily management of Pitcairn Island just why it was that Mrs Christian's queries from Adamstown had to proceed across the sea by morse code, and that supplies for the colony were sent by courtesy of a market gardener in south London, who listened out for the plaintive cries from the island on his ham radio set.

I wanted to ask, I think, why it was we seemed to have given up on our last few charges-why, simply because they were so few, so far between, so unpeopled and so wanting in importance, they were of less intrinsic interest than when there had been many, and the Empire had been grand, and full of moment. The ethos of Empire had never been-or never during its accretion, anyway-an ethos that had much to do with global dominion, or the fierce a.s.sertion of naked power. We had power, of course, and once possessed power is a difficult thing to relinquish. But our success in making an Empire, in running it, in handing back and in winning the respect and, yes, the love even of those whom we had ruled-our success in all this grand endeavour came in no small part because we cared cared. We felt we had a mission, a divine right. We attended to the details of the thing. We managed the Empire with men and women of compa.s.sion and skill, energy and intellect, and something of a romantic dream about them. Whether they directed, from the Office, or whether they ruled, as members of the Service, the colonial mandarins seemed to be a breed who cared cared. They had no need to do so, these District Commissioners and these Colonial Secretaries and these Governors and Commanders-in-Chief. But they seemed by and large to have done-ambitions and territorial jealousies seemed to run second to fascinations and enthusiasms, as though the colonial officers were pursuing their private and amateur interests, and had come out here, or gone over there, in pursuit of obsessions and hobbies, rather than aggrandis.e.m.e.nt or Machiavellian intent.

I have beside me, on this fine old East India Company desk, a copy of The Colonial Office List The Colonial Office List for 1950. The Empire was just then beginning to wane; the thick pink book was a little less thick than the year before, and the editorials and the essays showed signs-easier to read now, in retrospect, than at the time-that the purpose was indeed faltering, that the steel was showing its fatigue. But there are, at the back of the book, 200 pages that display the human reason for the Empire having been, on so many levels, a force for general good. The pages contain the complete lists of all those men and women in the Colonial Service-all those currently stationed overseas, involved in the daily devotionals of Empire. I take a page at random, and the full complexity of the thing becomes immediately apparent: for 1950. The Empire was just then beginning to wane; the thick pink book was a little less thick than the year before, and the editorials and the essays showed signs-easier to read now, in retrospect, than at the time-that the purpose was indeed faltering, that the steel was showing its fatigue. But there are, at the back of the book, 200 pages that display the human reason for the Empire having been, on so many levels, a force for general good. The pages contain the complete lists of all those men and women in the Colonial Service-all those currently stationed overseas, involved in the daily devotionals of Empire. I take a page at random, and the full complexity of the thing becomes immediately apparent:

William Henry DeLisle, organiser of the anti anthrax campaign on the island of Nevis; Cicely Denly, hospital matron, Mauritius; Arthur Dennier, engineer on the Ugandan telephone service; Thomas Dennison, district magistrate, Kenya; John Denny, superintendent of Police in Singapore; Ronald Derrick, author of The History of Fiji, The Geography of Fiji, The Fiji Islands The History of Fiji, The Geography of Fiji, The Fiji Islands; Lawrence Des Iles, Chief Inspector for Poor Relief, Trinidad; Frederick Deighton, OBE, mycologist, Saint Lucia; Frank Dixey, author of A Practical Handbook of Water Supply A Practical Handbook of Water Supply, now with the Geological Survey of Nigeria; Henry Dobbs, a.s.sistant Secretary to the Western Pacific High Commission and author of Some Difficulties in Dirac's Representation Theory Some Difficulties in Dirac's Representation Theory. They were, in truth, a remarkable body of men and women-Haileybury and Harrow schooled them, Balliol and Caius polished them, the finer ethos of Imperialism motivated them. A disproportionately large number of them came from the manse and the cathedral close-of 200 governors who served during the first sixty years of this century, thirty-five were the sons of clergymen: men of intellect and good sense, Church of England and high traditions, Ba.r.s.ets.h.i.+re principles sent out to minister to the brown and yellow in the world outside.

Some are still in the traces. The sixteen last relic islands attract the final survivors of the Colonial Service, and they shuttle slowly around the globe, a treasurer here, a secretary there, and finally governor, or administrator, or commissioner at last. They all know each other-d.i.c.k Baker in St Helena sends his Christmas card to David Dale in Montserrat, Rex Hunt in Port Stanley writes the occasional letter to Eddie Brooks in the Turks and Caicos Islands; the Tristan Administrator takes up a new job in Hong Kong, the Treasurer in Jamestown takes a s.h.i.+p for Gibraltar and a post at the Convent, and nurtures the fond hope that he'll be made Governor in Anguilla before the place goes independent.

It would be pleasant to suppose that old colonial hands are still around to manage old colonies. Unhappily, though, there are now more surviving responsibilities than there are old hands to be responsible for them. The corps d'elite corps d'elite is winnowed to a very few, all about to retire from the service for all time; the surviving islands are having to be governed, run and-more unfortunately-directed from London-by the lesser men and women in a diplomatic service that has no time for and no interest in what Empire stood for, or what it stands for now. A colony may be lucky-it may still win the attentions of men who feel affection for the idea and the ideal; more usually these days it is unlucky, and its affairs are directed and its people ruled by civil servants who are either young, ambitious, and on their way to better and more exciting things, or by the old, the unsuitable, the drunk and the incompetent who are not able or willing to play in the greater games of major league diplomacy. is winnowed to a very few, all about to retire from the service for all time; the surviving islands are having to be governed, run and-more unfortunately-directed from London-by the lesser men and women in a diplomatic service that has no time for and no interest in what Empire stood for, or what it stands for now. A colony may be lucky-it may still win the attentions of men who feel affection for the idea and the ideal; more usually these days it is unlucky, and its affairs are directed and its people ruled by civil servants who are either young, ambitious, and on their way to better and more exciting things, or by the old, the unsuitable, the drunk and the incompetent who are not able or willing to play in the greater games of major league diplomacy.

A fellow works in some minor capacity in our Emba.s.sy, in some remote country, pus.h.i.+ng paper in disconsolate fas.h.i.+on, upsetting no one, inspiring even fewer. His fifty-fifth birthday comes up, and the Personnel Department in London decides he must be given his head-of-mission job before he leaves the service. He can't go to Khartoum-too tricky, too potentially important; he can't go to Lima, or Ulan Bator, or even to Fernando Po. But how about, let's see-Ascension Island, or the British Virgins? No trouble there-parish pump stuff, really, a few c.o.c.ktail parties in the evening sun. Very pleasant. Fellow ought to be rather glad.

And so off goes the Third Secretary (Commercial) to take up the post of Colonial Administrator; he lives in his lovely old bungalow up in the hills, drives his Ford with the Union flag flying from the bonnet, he invites the island grandees to drinks and 'At homes' and-if the entertainment allowance provides-to dinners as well-and keeps his territory out of the public eye for the three years of his posting, and then he leaves. If he ever realised that his job was unimportant, the pleasantness of its routines softened the realisation; he could have made something of it-could have nagged and irritated and cajoled and tried to leave the island in better shape than when he found it. But as like as not he wouldn't have bothered: too much trouble, London didn't care for the place, and so, keen for an easy last few years in Diplomatic life, why should he care either?

And in that lies the problem. The islands that remain are not, by and large, places for which London has any time to spare. No one-either those who labour in the bureaucratic labyrinths in Whitehall or, more sad to say, those who find themselves in the Government Houses and colonial bungalows out in the far-flung fragments-has time, or energy, or the inclination to spare to deal with problems that, when set beside the graver matters of the world, must appear so monumentally insignificant. The matter of where to place the petrol storage tanks in St Helena or how to find a s.h.i.+p to take toilet rolls to Pitcairn or what to do when there is a ma.s.sive rainstorm over Ascension that washes out the road to Two Boats village-all these are, quite reasonably, of almost no significance at all.

But an ailment untreated has a habit of becoming an affliction untreatable. To ignore the needs-small, insignificant needs maybe, but needs nonetheless-of our remote dominions is to court disaster. The Falkland Islands proved that to all the world-for though there can be no argument that the events of April 1982 sprang as a direct consequence of Argentina's invasion of the islands, it was Britain's inability and unwillingness to deal with a nagging colonial problem that led to the frustration that prompted Argentina to make her foolish and fatal move. I hold no brief for the Argentine Government in this matter; nor is this account concerned with the merits of the various claims to those windy islands-that 'bunch of rocks down there' as President Reagan liked to call them. But some aspects of the early chapters of the tale are incontrovertible: Argentina had a pa.s.sion to win the islands back for her own; the British refused to countenance the claim, kept Argentina talking about the claim-and sundry other less momentous matters, too-for nearly two decades, coquettishly hinting at a willingness to discuss the claim, but never doing so. Signals were sent out suggesting that a deal might be possible-the Royal Naval vessel that guarded the islands was to be withdrawn, private exasperation was expressed about the islanders' intransigence, diplomats talked of the need to consolidate the long-standing friends.h.i.+p between the two great sovereign states on either side of the Atlantic. And yet the years went by, and precisely nothing of any substance happened. The problem was not considered a great one; the men and women who were deployed to manage it, to contain it, were not of sufficient calibre or commitment to realise its potential, nor to devise a means of reaching a solution.

And so a small problem became a large tragedy. Thirteen hundred men died, hundreds more were maimed, thousands of millions of pounds were expended in an unnecessary war over a piece of territory whose only function was as a symbol of power and strength, and had no intrinsic use at all. 'Like two bald men fighting over a comb,' Jorge Luis Borges remarked sardonically when it was all over. 'When will our country realise,' said Robin Renwick, the then Counsellor at our Emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton, 'that we have a duty to solve our old Imperial problems before tackling those in which we have no direct role? There are more problems than the Falklands out there-and yet we see ourselves as primarily concerned with mediating between Moscow and Was.h.i.+ngton, or dealing with the Lebanese situation. More attention to the problems that beset us directly might head off such things as the Falklands war.'

In almost every territory I visited there was some stark indication that the mother-country had neither the time nor the energy to waste on correcting an irritation, righting a wrong, recognising an ominous trend, bowing to a subtle need. The Cayman Islands, for instance, was gaining a fearful reputation as a place for 'laundering' money from highly questionable sources-did the country that gave us the Bank of England and the highest standards of fiscal propriety care if one of her distant Caribbean colonies became a loose cannon on the decks of the world money markets? It did not-it neither cared, nor cared to interfere. The Turks and Caicos Islands now have a reputation as one of the region's major centres for drug smuggling-the Chief Minister no less was arrested by the American narcotics authorities a few days after I took tea with him-and yet Britain, a country of supposedly Himalayan moral standards, does no more than emit a benign harrumph! and lets the islands go on their sorry way. In Bermuda there is anxiety as more and more American-and, specifically, American military-influence is brought to bear, and secret plans are announced to station American nuclear weapons on the island in the event of an emergency. The Bermudian people grumble, and make their anxiety known to London-and London does nothing to alleviate their anger or to calm their fears.

We ignore the St Helenians-though we grudgingly pour money into the island economy, priding ourselves on our largesse, while failing to understand that by maintaining the island solely by public handouts we condemn the islanders, who deserve better, to a life stripped of self-respect. We ignore the Pitcairn Islanders, and they drift away on each pa.s.sing cargo boat, until by the end of the century there are expected to be no Pitcairners left at all, and the colony will, as the Foreign Office would anyway prefer, fade from existence altogether. And we deal-or rather we dealt-with horrifying callousness with the people of the Indian Ocean, when we evicted them from their homes, transported them to a foreign country against their will, and lied and evaded our responsibilities for years before a writer discovered the scandal, and told it to the world. Of all the events of post-Imperial British history, those of the late 1960s that occurred in the archipelago we customarily call Diego Garcia remain the most shabby and the most mean. No excuses can be made, by politicians of any persuasion: Diego Garcia is a monstrous blot on British honour, and shames us all, for ever.

To ill.u.s.trate the evident lack of caring, or prescience, or sympathetic understanding that too often seems to characterise Britain's dealings with her final Imperial fragments, consider those few hundred square miles at the northern end of the Leeward Island chain-square miles in which four foreign powers still maintain dependent territories.

There is the island of Ste Martin-Dutch run in the south, under the Netherland Antillean name of Sint Maarten, French run in the north; there are the United States Virgin Islands; and there are the British Virgin Islands. From Was.h.i.+ngton, Paris, The Hague and from L