It is easy to forget that while England might have wanted cheap labour, the early immigrants had other concerns, with education not the least of them. Among other blandishments, England had been touted as the land of educational opportunity, yet not all found it so. Russell Profitt found many sympathetic teachers but also a wayward and confusing secondary system. He had come from a culture where education was taken seriously as a tool for self-betterment; where study, not leisure, was the point of schooling. He encountered the new welfare-state approach to education, and racism was not quite the issue:
Most people in senior positions wanted to be helpful, but I don’t think they really understood the emotions I was experiencing, having to come to terms with the racial issue, having to come to terms with an education system that was quite different from the one I’d experienced in the Caribbean, where we were a lot more formal and a lot more structured and set in relation to work that we had to do by certain times. A number of black kids just got lost in the system.
Twenty years later, many mothers of Caribbean origin would be expressing concerns similar to those of Profitt’s mother: ‘My mother hadn’t gone through education in Britain, and so I don’t think she fully appreciated the way the system worked … The pressure was not on in the way I think Caribbean families expected pressure to be on teenagers.’ Baroness Amos recalls being relegated to the bottom of the class as a matter of course:
When I went to school, that was a bit of a shock, because I wasn’t tested before I was put into a class, and I was put into the bottom class, and I found everybody was kind of way behind what I’d been used to. But my parents were very assertive about that and went up to school and ensured that I was given a test, and I was moved. I think the other thing that I found difficulty dealing with was the environment, and the fact that it felt like a much less disciplined society.
She recalls reactions that derived from simple ignorance, an ignorance that was not unkind but inadvertently intrusive. ‘I was in the school choir, we would go and sing in what were then called old people’s homes, at Christmas. And they would all touch my skin and touch my hair, and I was the first black person they had ever seen.’ The empire had been an abstraction to most; now it was made flesh. Englishmen and women had new neighbours, new shoots in their garden, new influences to accommodate. The best in all major parties acknowledged a duty of care to the immigrants, whether because one should pay a debt of reparation to those colonized or because one does not let down old retainers. But no leader could afford to shout out the benefits of a multiracial community.
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 growclass="underline" ‘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.
But such tempests rolled over distant seas; at home, all was calm. Eden, only weeks after Churchill’s resignation, felt ready to call an election. His confidence was vindicated. On 26 May 1955, the Conservatives again won the general election, with 345 seats to Labour’s 277. Among other considerations, the result represented something like a kiss blown to the new prime minister. The mandate was as much personal as political. Eden’s popularity sprang from his modest manner, his lack of overt jingoism and from the fact that he did not appear to be of the old guard. The age of ardent rhetoric and mighty personalities had passed, to be succeeded by that of ardent goodwill and good intentions. People were now ready for relaxed and unstated glamour.