History of England 1-6

Just as the controversy concerning race rose higher and sharper in the Houses of Parliament, in clubs and in private homes, the very notion of racial supremacy was given its quietus. On 25 April 1953, Watson and Crick revealed the existence of DNA. With this discovery, our inheritance was shown to respect neither persons nor ideologies. ‘Racial’ origins might exist, but they determined nothing that might lead one group to consider itself superior to another. The lesson was to take many decades to filter down, and such affirmation would certainly be needed.

35

The washing machine

On 5 April 1955, Churchill retired as prime minister. He had had enough of his post, of parliament and even of power. For some years, anecdotes had circulated about his decline. He had known, and adapted to, more worlds than any of his generation, yet he could never reconcile himself to the loss of empire. His younger years had been spent fighting for it, and his later years maintaining it. Even his belief in a united Europe was born in the conviction that the Continent should take care of itself; Britain had an empire to govern. His successor would have agreed.

Anthony Eden had been the heir apparent for some time and could not always hide his frustration. Chafing at Churchill’s intransigence, he once dropped a hint about retirement. Churchill was heard to growl: ‘Don’t worry; it’ll be yours soon.’ There was little in Eden’s character to suggest that he would be anything less than a credit to his party. He had won laurels on every field: academic, military and diplomatic. And it doubtless helped that he was handsome and with a gentle charm. But there were worrying signs. Eden showed himself to be a foot-stamper, raging when he could not get his way. And it was unkindly suggested that he ‘bored for England’. Nor was the impression Eden gave of unassuming sincerity always borne out by events.

Eden distrusted his predecessor’s Atlanticism, but equally disapproved of any involvement in the nascent European Communities. His position was perhaps that of a latter-day Salisbury: unemphatically imperialist, but emphatically Tory. He was often accused of a lack of conviction but maintained that the preservation of peace was his lodestar. In any case, his conviction and resolve were soon to be tried. As the decade progressed, it was as if the submerging empire sought to whirl him down in its wake. The British state left its possessions with many backward glances of longing and not a little brutality, though the British people themselves had other concerns. And while it has been suggested that India had become unmanageable and even uneconomical by 1947, that Gandhi and Congress were ‘pushing at an open door’, many other colonies were restive.

Kenya was one such. If India was the jewel in the diadem of empire, East Africa was the string of pearls binding it. But British rule in Africa had left many communities at odds with each other. The Kikuyu had been the dominant tribe in the Kenyan highlands before the arrival of Europeans. During the Thirties they were expropriated, the final insult. The largely abandoned houses of ‘Happy Valley’, the supreme symbol of decadent Britishness in the colony, fell to the torches of the Mau Mau in the Fifties. Bloodletting became familiar on all sides, with colonial authorities resorting to the methods that might brand them as ‘imperialists’, and the Mau Mau to those techniques that would confirm them as ‘savages’. The death toll was vast. The Mau Mau outlasted the death of their leader in 1959, and four years later came independence. In the case of Kenya, the grievances were at least clear. Far less clear was the case of Cyprus.

On 1 April 1955, Britain’s most peaceable colony received a violent calling card from a new guerrilla group, EOKA. It seemed inexplicable to the mandarins of Nicosia, let alone to those of Whitehall – Cyprus had no obvious economic problems and its people were renowned for their lack of political ardour. When EOKA attacked a police station in Limassol, the initial reaction was one of bafflement, but the complaint of the assailants was simple. Why would the British not surrender their claims on Cyprus and let it join with Greece? In his memoir Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell found that his sympathies lay with the authorities: ‘as a Conservative, I saw their point. If you have an empire, you do not simply give it away.’ It was the presiding spirit, and at the time it still seemed an obvious and immutable law.