1965 – Empire Officially Reduced to Queue, Kettle, and Vague Superiority

Britain Completes Managed Decline, Requests Credit for Doing It So Politely

Empire Officially Reduced to Queue, Kettle, and Vague Superiority

Britain Completes Managed Decline, Requests Credit for Doing It So Politely

By 1965, the British Empire — that extraordinary, contradictory, world-reshaping enterprise that had at its peak governed roughly a quarter of the earth’s land surface and a similar proportion of its people — had been reduced, through the patient application of political reality, to a collection of islands, a Commonwealth of variable enthusiasm, and an unshakeable national conviction that the British way of doing things was probably, on balance, the correct way of doing things.

This conviction — warm, unexamined, occasionally charming, and completely impervious to contradicting evidence — was the empire’s most durable legacy. The territories had gone. The pink on the map had faded to the beige of independent nationhood. The governors and their tennis courts had been packed up and shipped home, their owners reabsorbing into the English countryside with the slightly dazed air of people who had been somewhere very interesting for a very long time and were not entirely sure what to do on a Tuesday afternoon in Hampshire.

What remained was the queue, the kettle, and the vague superiority. These proved surprisingly resilient.

Winston Churchill and the Closing of an Era

January 1965 provided the empire’s departure with a suitably grand valediction. Winston Churchill died on 24 January, aged ninety, and the nation mourned with the thoroughness it reserves for occasions that feel like the end of something larger than a single life. He was the last figure who could plausibly claim to embody Britain’s imperial self-image — the bulldog on the globe, the orator at the barricades, the man for whom the word indomitable had been coined and who had, for a significant period, made it mean something.

The state funeral was watched by 350 million people worldwide, making it one of the most observed events in television history. World leaders came. Flags lowered. The Thames, with characteristic Thames-ness, provided a backdrop of grey grandeur. His coffin was carried on a gun carriage through streets lined with people who were mourning not just a man but an idea of Britain — capacious, confident, capable of greatness when sufficiently provoked — that many of them sensed was departing with him.

Harold Wilson, who had succeeded to the premiership the previous year on a platform of technological modernity and meritocratic progress, attended the funeral and said the right things. The symbolism was hard to miss: the future paying respects to the past, before getting on with the considerably more complicated business of the present.

Rhodesia: The Empire’s Indigestible Final Course

If Churchill’s death provided 1965 with its elegiac note, Rhodesia provided its operational headache — the particularly British kind of imperial hangover that combines principle, pragmatism, and the uncomfortable awareness that one’s principles and one’s pragmatism are not currently on speaking terms.

Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence on 11 November 1965, a document that managed to be simultaneously an act of imperial nostalgia and an act of imperial defiance — a group of white settlers invoking the language of British liberty and self-determination to resist the British government’s insistence that majority rule was rather the point of the whole exercise.

Wilson’s government faced a genuine dilemma, executed with the decisiveness that a majority-of-four parliament encourages, which is to say with a great deal of discussion and a noticeable preference for sanctions over military action. The African Commonwealth members were not satisfied. The white Commonwealth members were not satisfied. The British public was not sure what to think but suspected that whatever it thought, Rhodesia would continue to be awkward about it.

Rhodesia remained in its unilaterally declared independent state until 1980, which gives some indication of how thoroughly the sanctions resolved the situation. But 1965 was when it began, and its beginning was entirely characteristic of the postimperial predicament: a problem inherited from the empire, managed with the tools of the Commonwealth, producing results that satisfied nobody, at considerable expense, over a very long time.

The Commonwealth: Empire’s Polite Successor

The Commonwealth of Nations had been constructed as the empire’s gracious rebranding — a voluntary association of equal partners who happened to share a colonial history, a legal tradition, a fondness for cricket, and an agreement to meet periodically and discuss things without anyone being in charge in the way that Britain had previously been in charge.

This was, in theory, an admirable arrangement. In practice it was the diplomatic equivalent of a family reunion at which everyone is extremely polite because the alternative is a row about the inheritance. The newly independent members of the Commonwealth had their own interests, their own foreign policies, and their own views on whether Britain’s historical role in their territories deserved gratitude, ambivalence, or something rather more pointed.

Britain, for its part, maintained the Commonwealth with the slightly confused devotion of a person who has given away a large house and then feels responsible for the maintenance of the new owners’ garden. The sentiments were genuine; the power relationship had changed completely; everyone behaved as if the change were less significant than it was, because the alternative was to discuss it directly, which was not the British way.

National Identity in a Post-Imperial Dressing Gown

The more interesting question of 1965 — less reported than the Churchill funeral, less diplomatically vexing than Rhodesia, but more durably important than either — was what Britain was actually for, now that the empire had provided the answer and the answer had been withdrawn.

The question of British identity in the postimperial era was one that politicians preferred not to examine directly, because direct examination tended to reveal that a significant portion of British national self-confidence had been borrowed from imperial scale and would need to be returned. In its place, the culture was developing alternative sources of national pride — the NHS, the BBC, the welfare state, the music, the humour, the literature — that were, in their way, more interesting than the empire had been, and considerably less dependent on governing people who hadn’t asked to be governed.

But the adjustment was not painless and was not complete. Britain in 1965 was a country in the middle of discovering what it was when it wasn’t in charge of a large portion of the world. The process of this discovery would occupy the next several decades, generating considerable political energy and an impressive quantity of nostalgia.

The Queue, the Kettle, and the Persistence of Manners

It is worth defending the queue and the kettle, which this piece has deployed satirically but which deserve a moment of genuine appreciation. The queue is, in its way, a remarkable institution — a spontaneous, self-enforcing system of social fairness that requires no legislation, no enforcement, and no authority beyond the collective disapproval of everyone in it. It is egalitarian in practice if not in theory, and it works because the British have internalised the principle that jumping it is simply not done, which is a more effective regulatory mechanism than most of what Parliament produces.

The kettle is self-explanatory. In a world of increasing complexity, the ability to make tea at moments of national crisis is not a trivial capacity. Britain remains among the world’s highest per-capita tea consumers, a statistic that says something either about comfort, about caffeine dependency, or about the profound human need for a ritual that is simple, warm, and reliably the same regardless of what is happening outside.

And the vague superiority — well. Every nation has its version of this. Britain’s is simply more noticeable because Britain spent several centuries with reasons for it, and the habit of it persists beyond the reasons, like the smile of the Cheshire cat after the cat itself has gone. It is annoying, occasionally, to those on the receiving end. It is also, if one is honest, quite funny — the confidence of a nation that has misplaced an empire but retained the posture.

The empire is gone. The queue persists. The kettle boils. Britain continues, slightly puzzled, entirely itself.

Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!

Winston Churchill died on 24 January 1965, aged ninety, and was given a state funeral watched by an estimated 350 million people worldwide. Ian Smith’s Rhodesian government issued its Unilateral Declaration of Independence on 11 November 1965, prompting British-led sanctions that failed to restore majority rule. Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980 following the Lancaster House Agreement. The Commonwealth of Nations, formally constituted in 1949, had grown to include most former British territories by 1965. Britain’s postimperial adjustment — cultural, economic, and psychological — is a recurring theme in its domestic politics from the 1960s to the present.

ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 24 January 1965 (London, UK)

Alan Nafzger

Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]