When my parents downsized a decade ago, there was a whole attic full of stuff that needed to be sorted out. This included several large tin tea chests full of letters and diaries that my mother had inherited from her mother. In addition, my father had lovingly hoarded the letters written by his father – a man he hardly knew. He died tragically early, when my father was only three. So there was a plethora of correspondence from my grandparents on both sides; family treasures stretching back to the beginning of the 20th century that had been carefully kept. Then there were all the letters, photographs, videos and diaries from my father’s generation. What to do with all this stuff?
Our houses are getting smaller. Our storage space is shrinking. Modern flats don’t have attics. Would two generations of treasured ephemera soon become three, for me eventually to pass on to my children? All this historical material needed to be not just kept, but also ‘dealt with’. So I decided it was my mission to digitise it all – to make a virtual family history archive in the cloud, taking up no physical space. This was the beginning of what I have eventually called the “Imperial Nightfall” series.
When I was at school in the 1970s, a common exam question was this: “Did trade follow the flag, of did the flag follow trade?”. It anticipated a discussion as to whether it was primarily commercial interests or, alternatively, political designs that drove the expansion of the British Empire in the 18th and 19th centuries. Conclusion? It was trade and economic forces rather than some overarching government plan that brought the Empire into existence, eventually encompassing 43 colonies over 5 continents. Britain had acquired the “Empire on which the sun never set” largely by accident.
The Empire peaked around 1910, so the history of the 20th century from a British perspective is one of gradual loss. Looking through all this historic family correspondence, it became clear that the linking theme is the loss of Empire. My grandfather Sir Hilary Blood was a Colonial Governor who was responsible for creating the constitutions of several colonies when they were granted independence. My grandmother on the other side was the headmistress of a school in Rhodesia and observed its gradual transition to it becoming Zimbabwe. My uncle was a colonial administrator in Nigeria who stayed on post independence, a cousin suffered a hellish ordeal when Singapore fell in World War II and another uncle was stationed in Palestine during the unrest that led to the creation of the state of Israel. My father was instrumental in negotiating the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 with the Chinese government – the last piece of the Empire jigsaw, surrendered at the end of the century. My daughter was one of the last children to be born in Hong Kong while it was still a colony. A fact I hope she will amaze her grandchildren with, as one day she points them towards this digital archive. Eventually, the sun did set – an Imperial Nightfall.
If the Empire was acquired by accident, it was not disposed of with similar disregard. The line “nothing became him in life so much as the departing” from Shakespeare’s Macbeth is apposite here. Surveying the history of the end of other empires in the 20th Century, the British did a relatively good job. The ending of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires after the First World War created zones of instability in the Balkans and the Middle East where conflict still rages today. The Belgians left the Congo in a hurry, with no institutions or administrative structures, with the result that Congo DRC became one of the most benighted countries on earth, and Rwanda suffered a horrific genocidal civil war The French attempt to cling on to their colonies in Indochina resulted in the Vietnam war and the horrors of the Cambodian killing fields. The Italian ex-colonies of Libya, Ethiopia and Somaliland have oscillated between brutal dictatorship and appalling internecine bloodshed.
Against these comparators, the British ex-colonies such as Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Kenya, Ghana and India – the worlds largest democracy – are examples of post colonial success. Of course, there have been some disasters too, like Zimbabwe. But bear in mind that country made a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI), granting themselves freedom without any input from the British state. Elsewhere, painstaking work from colonial administrators ensured the relatively smooth transfer of critical institutions and a functioning bureaucracy, upholding key values such as the rule of law, freedom of speech and democracy. Leafing through the mass of letters in my archive, it’s clear that many members of my family were involved in these transitions, sometimes as observers and other times as implementers.
It was an extended family that was spread around the world, and the silken threads that bound them are still there in the letters. The connections have outlasted the nodes. The people are gone, the Empire is gone, the countries’ names have changed. What we have left is the spider’s web of correspondence. They are full of incongruous juxtapositions – of some of the 20th century’s most important historical events mixed with mundane family news. Like this : “26 August. Hitler seizes Sudetenland. Tony got mumps “
This Imperial Nightfall series is not an ordinary history. It doesn’t attempt to explain anything nor does it put forward any argument. It’s a set of primary historical accounts by people who were on the scene, at that moment, expressing their feelings and thoughts, often unaware of the magnitude of the events that were surrounding them. It follows the principal best put in the poem Adlestrop written by Edward Thomas at the beginning of the 20th Century in which nothing seems to be happening but in fact, everything is happening. A poem about how the ordinary is, in fact, extraordinary.
Upcoming titles ….
