Jan Morris - Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat

FarewelltheTrumpets, though complete in itself, is the third volume of a trilogy evoking the rise and fall of the Victorian Empire. It is the right-hand panel, as it were, of a triptych, and brings the story to a somewhat tattered conclusion to the 1960s, when the British Empire which had once dominated the globe was reduced to a ragbag of islands and an amorphous society of independent States called simply The Commonwealth. I wrote the book, concluding my trilogy, in 1977, when I knew that many of my readers would still remember this decline for themselves, and had perhaps played their own parts in hastening or staunching it; today, two decades on, even the post-imperial generation is passing by, and the mass of the British people know little of their lost Empire, and care still less.

This volume certainly offers no objective picture of its last years. I have been concerned not so much with what the British Empire was or meant, as what it felt like or more pertinently, perhaps, what it felt like to me, in the imagination or the life. For towards the end of the book I become an eye-witness, and immediately less reliable. I do not come from an imperial family, and could write about the nineteenth-century Empire with absolute detachment, but in the first half of the twentieth century few of us were immune to the imperial effects. Even my poor father was gassed for his Empire. Even my poor Uncle Geraint, fresh from his cello at Monmouth School, was whisked away to the Indian Expeditionary Force in France, and never came home again. Even I found myself, for a decade of my life, embroiled in the imperial mesh, as I followed the retreating armies of Empire from one after another of their far-flung strongholds. Most of us were imperialists in the end, however gentle our instincts, and hardly a reader of my generation will feel altogether aloof to this narrative, or impartial to its judgements.

The British Empire really ended when India, the greatest of all its possessions, achieved national independence in 1947, but there was a late coda to the long decline when, just fifty years later, the Crown Colony of Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of China. The ceremonies that surrounded this event in 1997 astonished and intrigued a world to whom the idea of an imperial Britain seemed an almost forgotten anachronism, but to me they seemed curiously unsatisfying. I went to Hong Kong for the occasion, and was disturbed by the sensation that there was nothing nobly conclusive to it: for the first time the British were relinquishing authority not to the inhabitants of a colony, but to a third Power and an unreliable, volatile sort of Power at that. Were they right to go? Had they done their best for the people of Hong Kong? Would their association with the colony be remembered with admiration or with shame? Did it really matter anyway? Nobody really knew what it all portended: it suggested to me an avant-garde movie, when you leave the cinema puzzled and disturbed, not quite sure what the plot is all about.

So when the royal yacht Britannia sailed out of Hong Kong harbour with the Prince of Wales on board past the massed and gleaming ranks of the skyscrapers of the richest of all the British Crown Colonies with the royal standard flying and a warship of the Royal Navy in grey attendance somehow the spectacle failed to touch me. The pipers might skirl a farewell, the soldiers march and Rule Britannia echo among those Chinese hills, but it all lacked the old conviction even the conviction of the long withdrawal. Mine is an aesthetic view of Empire, and there is no denying that as the flare of the imperial idea faded, and the nation lost interest, so its beauty faded too. It had not always been a pleasant kind of beauty, but it had been full of splendour and vitality, and when the Empire lost its overweening confidence, its sense of providential virtue, its forms became less striking and its outlines less distinct. My book, therefore, is sad without being regretful. It was time the Empire went, but it was sad to see it go: and so these pages too, while I hope they are not blind to the imperial faults and weaknesses, are tinged nevertheless with an affectionate melancholy

Formenarewe,andmustgrievewheneventheshade

Ofthatwhichoncewasgreatispassedaway.

The volume begins with Victorias Diamond Jubilee of 1897 and concludes with Churchills funeral. I hope my readers will discover in themselves, between these ceremonial book-ends, at least some of the mingled sensations of admiration, dislike, amusement, pity, pride, envy and astonishment with which I have watched and pictured the passing of the British Empire.

TREFAN MORYS , 1998

Sayfarewelltothetrumpets!

Youwillhearthemnomore.

Buttheirsweetsadsilveryechoes

Willcalltoyoustill

Throughthehalf-closeddoor.