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1. Empire Day 2.0
My inbox at work is a nightmare. It currently holds 87,875 unread emails, a reflection not of my popularity (a colleague has more than 200,000), but of the fact that public relations professionals vastly outnumber journalists, and sending anyone they know news of the latest printer/tea bag they’re promoting seems to be part of their job. Intensifying the tedium is that around a third of these messages begin with the greeting: “I hope your [sic] well.” To which I am always tempted to reply “My well what? Never runs dry?” or with a precise description of the well my family actually owns on a farm in India. But most enervating of all is the fact that another third of the messages are marketing some kind of awareness event.
It seems that when you can’t think of any other way of generating attention for your cause, establishing an “awareness day” is always an option. There are thousands of them, from National French Bread Day to National Skipping Day, Nude Gardening Day and National Corn Dog Day. Pointless? Not entirely: I’ve just been inspired by this research to look up corn dogs and am now not only aware of corn dogs but desire a corn dog for my tea. Inane? More often than not. Which makes it even more surprising that nearly two years after I started looking into how imperialism has shaped modern Britain, I find myself wishing a new one into existence: Empire Awareness Day.
Despite a recent surge of interest in British colonial history, with statues being torn down (or defended), concert halls and schools being renamed (or councils refusing to submit to demands) and companies apologizing for past deeds (or trying to ignore it all), the effect of British empire upon this country is poorly understood. Many of us have learned more about British imperialism in a year or two of statuecide than we did during our entire schooling, but there seems to be a view that if you pull down enough statues/change enough names or fight to keep enough statues up/refuse to change names, you can delete or defend British imperialism. But British empire defines us more deeply than these controversies suggest and an Empire Day could help explain how.
Such a thing actually existed for decades in the twentieth century. This half-day school holiday was established by the Earl of Meath, to celebrate the splendor of the empire on 24 May each year, the late Queen Victoria’s birthday, with the aim of creating a bond between imperial subjects and counteracting what Meath felt was lamentable ignorance about its achievements. The story goes that he once asked a bunch of teenagers whether they had heard of the Indian Uprising, a key event in empire history, and, to his dismay, received just one positive response. For a man who, at Eton, was told that brushing snow off his knees was spineless and unimperial, the implications were unconscionable. Convinced that such ignorance was widespread and undermining faith in civilization’s greatest achievement, worried that the British empire might die like most other empires, he started campaigning for the establishment of an annual Empire Day, which had originally been pioneered in Canada in the 1890s.
By 1916, in the middle of the war, when patriotic feeling was at its height, Meath got his way: the British government inaugurated an official Empire Day. He would later claim that his movement had inspired the “rush to the colours” to fight in the First World War, which seems grandiose, but it certainly did become an institution. The BBC promoted it, notably through an Empire Day special in 1929 presented by Sir Henry Newbolt, and at times allocating more than three hours of scheduling space to it. An Empire Day thanksgiving service at Wembley Stadium attracted around 90,000 people. Most British towns marked the annual event, with marches, music, bonfires and fireworks; newspapers published Empire Day supplements; the occasion inspired Empire-themed shopping weeks; the Daily Express organized an Empire Day Festival; celebrations were reported as far away as Australia. And while Empire Day formally died in 1958 when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan announced in Parliament it would be renamed British Commonwealth Day, Empire Day continued to be marked in Protestant schools in Northern Ireland into the 1960s.
I’m not saying it should return in its old form, with children reading about the downfall of previous empires at school in order to learn about “the dangers of subordinating,” receiving a free mug with the news that empire was glorious, saluting the flag, turning up to celebrations in blackface and carrying colonial goods such as tea or sugar. Nor do I envisage Empire Awareness Day having the same aims as Empire Day: the latter focused on sustaining enthusiasm for colonialism, whereas I would want Empire Day 2.0 to explain how the experience of having colonized shapes Britain now. What might it actually involve? Well, as Empire Day is primarily remembered as an annual half-day holiday for most children in most schools, with Meath claiming that the festival was being observed throughout empire in some 55,000 schools by 1909, there would need to be a focus on education. And the simplest thing would be to persuade schools to allocate chunks of the timetable to the cause, with the most obvious candidate being foreign-language lessons.
For one day a year, instead of being taught French or Spanish, the children of Britain could instead be instructed on how the English language itself exists as a living monument to Britain’s deep and complex relationship with the world through empire. More specifically, they could consult the glorious Hobson-Jobson Dictionary, a remarkable 1,000- page “glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms etymological, historical, geographical and discursive” compiled by Colonel Henry Yule and A. C. Burnell in 1886, which provides testament to the enormous number of Indian words that have entered English. Many of the citations function as time capsules into the British Raj. “Dam” originally referred to a copper coin, for example, “the fortieth part of a rupee” and so low in value that it led to Britons in India employing the phrase “I won’t give a dumri,” which in turn led to the popular expression “I don’t give a dam[n].” And “Juggernaut” is a corruption of the Sanskrit “Jagannatha,” “Lord of the Universe, a name of Krishna worshipped as Vishnu at the famous shrine of Puri in Orissa,” the idol of which “was, and is, annually dragged forth in procession on a monstrous car, and . . . occasionally persons, sometimes sufferers of painful disease, cast themselves before the advancing wheels.”
If there is time, or, perhaps, if there is a spare period of English going, it could be dedicated to tracing how the definitions of hundreds of other words in the Oxford English Dictionary illustrate the linguistic influence of empire beyond India. Students could learn, for instance, how “toboggan” was originally a native American word (“A light sledge which curves upwards and backwards at the front, and has either a flat bottom or runners”). And how “Zombie” is of West African origin (“In the West Indies and southern states of America, a soulless corpse said to have been revived by witchcraft; formerly, the name of a snake-deity in voodoo cults of or deriving from West Africa and Haiti”).
Another school lesson that could be usefully hijacked in the name of empire awareness: economics. Many famous enterprises still trading today have their roots in imperial trade, not least Liberty of London, founded by Arthur Lasenby Liberty, the son of a Chesham lace manufacturer who began by selling silks and cashmere shawls from the East when South Asian textiles became popular in the Victorian age. The popularity of South Asian textiles was boosted by the British royal family, with Queen Victoria accepting a shawl from the Maharajah of Kashmir each year, and Kashmiri shawl fabric becoming so important that when the Kashmir Valley was officially annexed to the empire in 1846, the treaty stated that the local maharajah was to pay a yearly tribute of “one horse, twelve shawl goats . . . and three pairs of Kashmir shawls.” In the entry for “shawl” in her 2013 edition of Hobson-Jobson, Kate Teltscher explains that the expense of the genuine article led to the creation of a domestic shawl industry in Norwich and Paisley that “copied Indian designs at a fraction of the price.” Liberty soon moved on to sell oriental goods of all kinds, with records showing that the shop buildings, which were named East India House, were constructed out of more than 24,000 cubic feet of ships’ timbers—one of the ships, which measured the length and height of the Liberty building, being HMS Hindustan.
Then there is Shell, established in the nineteenth century by one Marcus Samuel, who started off selling antiques and importing oriental seashells from the Far East, which were at the time fashionable in interior design, establishing the process for a successful import-export business which eventually morphed into one of the world’s best-known energy companies (after it had merged with Royal Dutch Petroleum, which came out of the Dutch empire in the East Indies). We also have Man Group, one of the world’s largest fund managers, which was founded in 1783 by James Man as a sugar brokerage based in London’s Billingsgate, and the Bass Brewery founded in 1777 by William Bass in Burton-upon-Trent, Staffordshire, England. The company’s distinctive red triangle became the UK’s first registered trademark, and it had become the largest brewery in the world by 1877, with an annual output of 1 million barrels, in part because of the “pale ale” it exported throughout the British empire. India pale ale had originally been developed elsewhere, when the long sea voyage to India was found to greatly improve the taste of “stock” beer— four to five months of being gently rocked by the ship and the gradual introduction of heat as the ship neared India resulting in great depth of flavor—but Bass marketed it brilliantly to the shopkeeperand clerk class, and in the process helped to transform the brewing industry and put Burton at its center.
Admittedly, students who had already had foreign languages, English and economics lessons might have had enough of British empire by this point of the day, but I’m afraid PE or games would offer no respite if I had anything to do with it. Playing football? The perfect opportunity to tell students that “kop,” the colloquial name for rising single-tier terraces at football grounds, originally comes from “Spion Kop,” a hill where, according to the historian Robert Tombs, “British soldiers were picked off by a concealed enemy with Mauser rifles and smokeless ammunition.” Playing cricket? From the nineteenth century, the game became innate to empire, the Imperial Cricket Conference’s efforts to standardize the rules of the game helping to bring the many disparate parts of empire together, while the values of fair play, courage and resilience nurtured on the games fields of public schools were seen as key to developing the imperial ruling race. As the historian John MacKenzie has put it: “Games became . . . an analogue of war which, with cadet corps and rifle clubs, could prepare the nation’s officer class not just for imperial campaigns, but for a global defence against any European rival.”
