“The hangman of thousands”, a poster dubbed the British empire in Brendan Behan’s 1958 play The Hostage. Expanded for the radical Theatre Workshop from the shorter Irish-language An Giall, Behan’s play caused a sensation on the London stage. Its “lines alleging the brutality of the British in Kenya, in India, in Cyprus”, Harold Hobson wrote in his Sunday Times review, “strike an Englishman across the face like a lash”. The play was not banned only because the censors feared that would only increase its sensation.
Britain tells itself that it was not convulsed by the fall of its empire in the way that France was by the loss of Algeria, or Portugal by its war in Angola. Like the empire itself, the retreat from the colonies is often assumed to have been ordered and mostly peaceful. The colonial “emergencies” are seen as distant from postwar Britain’s domestic history. Beyond the embarrassment of the Suez Crisis, what was happening “over there” was far away. The “great imperial family” of Queen Elizabeth II’s inaugural message happily evolved into the “Commonwealth of Nations”.
Erik Linstrum shows much of that to be a self-serving myth. In recent years, historians such as Caroline Elkins and David Anderson have shown how the fall of the empire was in reality chaotic and horrifically violent, and Linstrum shows that the British public were both aware and deeply affected by that. Through diaries, letters, newspapers, novels and plays, he shows that the colonial dirty wars were “pervasive” in the mind of postwar British society.
Britain had “won” the second World War, but beyond the flag-waving of V-E Day and the fact that the country had not been invaded and occupied, it often didn’t feel like it.“The war is not yet over,” wrote a Lancashire woman in her diary in 1948 after hearing of the violence in the disintegrating British Mandate in Palestine; “it is only a lull.”
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In the same year, imperial rule was ending with perhaps a million deaths in India and Pakistan, while more than a decade of warfare was beginning in Malaya. Within a few years British soldiers were also embroiled in the long and brutal campaigns in Cyprus and Kenya. “The War” had been fought in large part to defend the empire, but all across the globe it was now collapsing in a war seemingly without end. “The war was like a mist”, Graham Greene wrote from Malaya in 1950; “it sapped the spirits; it wouldn’t clear.”
“Colonial violence,” Linstrum writes, “was a fact of life in postwar Britain.” But the government was certainly not open about that fact, not least because imperial “counter-insurgency” tactics in the 1950s were particularly repressive in their use of torture, executions and internment camps. The official narrative of “emergency” was designed to hide the true extent of imperial crimes, and to “keep a deeper crisis at bay” by perpetuating a sense of relative stability at home.
Despite widespread evidence, massacres and other war crimes were routinely denied, and officials relied on ever-finer lines of distinction: “roughness” but not “brutality”, “violence” but not ”torture”, “heavy-handedness” but not “terrorism”. Contrasts (”real, exaggerated, or imagined”) were continually drawn with the French, the Germans, the Portuguese and, most of all, with the “savage” enemy.
The British press were often complicit. Most reporters were appalled by what they were seeing in the colonies and, as one Times journalist put it, “keen on ferreting out misbehaviour”. But a combination of official obstruction – a Times reporter in Kenya decried “a conspiracy of silence” – and editorial caution kept many scandals out of the papers. But the evidence was too overwhelming to silence the press completely. Even the right-wing broadsheets could be critical, with the Daily Telegraph describing summary executions in Kenya as “a mockery of British justice”.
The left-wing tabloids were even more forceful, especially the Daily Mirror, which in 1952 decried Britain’s “sterile policy of brute force and barbed wire” in Africa, saying it was a stain on the country’s reputation. In 1957 the paper ran the headline “Stop this bloodshed now!” about what its reporter called “British cruelty” in Cyprus. Indeed, Linstrum is keen to point out that huge amounts of detail were actually published and widely known, to the extent that it almost became cliche. In Labour MP Maurice Edelman’s cynical 1961 novel The Minister, newspapers splash the death toll of a massacre in Africa “like a cricket score”.
Linstrum is innovative in the breadth his research, trawling the BBC and ITV archives to explore how popular teleplays tried to make sense of endless colonial war. “The television drama”, he writes, “domesticated colonial violence”, with harsh military tactics often portrayed as necessary or justified, such as in 1961′s Negative Evidence, in which a violent and racist officer is exonerated of committing “torture”.
Yet there were critical teleplays too. In Airmail from Cyprus (1958), a mother struggles to accept that her son is a war criminal, while in The Terrorists (1961), it is British soldiers “deranged by brutality” who are the eponymous criminals, not the Malayans they denigrate as “little yellow men” and “animals”. Linstrum delves into the BBC’s audience research to discover the mix of reactions to such plays. While some objected to portrayals of British soldiers with “homicidal tendencies”, others found depictions of the troops’ trauma and something “beyond the orthodox white view” to be rewarding.
Many ordinary people were horrified by what was being done in their name. The letters pages of the Manchester Guardian were filled with criticisms of colonial crimes as “grossly repugnant”, as were letters to the Labour MP Barbara Castle, who made public allegations of brutality in Cyprus in 1958. “I’m ashamed that Britain has sunk so low”, one woman wrote to Castle, asking if the country could now claim to be ”any better than the Nazis” and warning that “people will loathe us all over the world”.
Others, however, were more concerned with the possibility of “defeat” than by excessive force. In 1959 the left-wing historian Raphael Samuel found voters he interviewed preoccupied with the idea of “keeping Britain great”. A machine operator in Stevenage lamented that “these little countries, they just seem to throw us out when they feel like it, whereas one time they wouldn’t have dared do that”. A Lancashire woman told a survey of working-class Tory voters that “the Black countries ... are telling us what to do now”. It is difficult to read Linstrum’s meticulous research without seeing the long shadow of such views in today’s Britain.
This was not a society that had rejected imperialism, and indeed it is a mistake, Linstrum persuasively argues, to assume that official attempts to maintain secrecy implied that the public would not support brutal violence. Indeed, as imperial actions became more extreme, so too did “a popular language of resentment” that rejected dissent and restraint through an “embrace of national greatness and racial prestige as paramount values”. The justifications of past imperial crimes were revived in a “new, existential key” by the prospect of the empire’s collapse.
Such sentiments meant that many demanded even harsher tactics. “Only a war of extermination is likely to clean up the Malayan peninsula,” the Coventry Evening Telegraph wrote in 1951. “If you shot a thousand black men I wouldn’t lose a vote,” one Tory MP commented privately, but the deaths of white settlers in Africa could prove politically disastrous (even if British reporters saw them as racist and greedy). Linstrum argues that “it became an article of faith on the British right that the conduct of the colonial war in the 1950s was being crippled by humanitarian softness”, or, as the Daily Mail put it, “the lunatic fringe of the extreme left”.
Those campaigning for humanitarianism generally did not feel they were achieving very much. Many radicals, such as the historian EP Thompson, worried that the left was more interested in anti-Americanism than in opposing British colonialism, while others felt that the Holocaust, nuclear weapons and the cold war had desensitised people to extreme violence. But while he shows that leftist activists and religious campaigners did more than they thought, Linstrum powerfully argues that that public attitudes cannot be simply explained by apathy or circumstance: “acquiescence in colonial violence was neither universal nor inevitable. It was a choice.”
That choice left scars. The reactionary feeling that the empire had been “lost” due to a lack of conviction contributed to the Conservative Party and the right-wing media’s repetitive obsession with ideological purity and betrayal. Linstrum sees the “authoritarian populism” that has dominated British politics and popular media since the late 1970s as a reaction. The postcolonial grasping for “greatness” can certainly be seen in the Iraq and Brexit misadventures of this century, while colonial racism and cognitive dissonance live on in the current government’s campaigns to “Stop the Boats” and send refugees to the “safety” of Rwanda.
The deepest scars were perhaps those felt on our own island. While Linstrum’s book does not extend deep into the Troubles, Northern Ireland looms large in his conclusion. He notes how in a 1981 BBC TV play, a soldier remarks that “what you see in Ulster is the rear end of the cruelty and exploitation of over 30 colonial wars. The last colonial battlefield. The dog devouring its own tail ... When there’s nothing left to devour we’ll devour ourselves.”
Most of the colonial violence of the postwar decades is now forgotten or buried in Britain. There is, Linstrum writes, “near-total silence of official memory culture on the violence of decolonisation”. British history textbooks have “little or nothing to say” about Malaya, Cyprus, Kenya. The omnipresence of Britain’s “victory” in the second World War relegates the colonial wars to “sideshows” – if they are mentioned at all.
The era of Brexit has revived imperial apologists on the British right. Criticism of colonial crimes is dismissed as judging bygone ages by the standards of the present. But as Linstrum writes, “what makes this history so unsettling is precisely that it does not belong to a distant past”. He concludes that “violence committed by British people, with British arms, in Britain’s name, left its mark on Britain. Colonial violence was British violence.” It is more vital than ever that Britain faces that fact.
Christopher Kissane is a historian and writer, and host of the Ireland’s Edge podcast.
Other Reading
Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire by Caroline Elkins (Bodley Head, 2022)
Elkins – who faced years of abuse for her revelation of “Britain’s Gulag” in Kenya before her work was vindicated by hidden colonial files – details just how violent British rule was across the world. In meticulous detail, she exposes the “legalised lawlessness” with which the empire operated, and the ways that the most brutal personnel and tactics moved across the colonies.
Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera (Penguin, 2021)
This passionate and personal book explores how Britain remains shaped by its imperial past, but also by its steadfast desire to forget and ignore it. Linking Brexit Britain, his childhood in 1970s Wolverhampton, and the empire’s history of violence, racism and plunder, Sanghera argues that Britain can’t understand itself until it understands its relationship with empire.
History Thieves: Secrecy, Lies, and the Shaping of a Modern Nation by Ian Cobain (Portobello Books, 2016)
Cobain reveals how the retreating British empire’s destroyed vast amounts of documents and archives in the 1950s and 1960s to hide material that authorities feared would prove “embarrassing to Her Majesty’s government”. Operation Legacy created a legacy of lies and amnesia that has shaped the British state ever since.
[ Cruel Britannia: The British empire exposed in all its viciousnessOpens in new window ]
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