Empireland by Sathnam Sanghera

Author:Sathnam Sanghera [Sanghera, Sathnam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241445334
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

10. Empire State of Mind

One of my last outings before the coronavirus lockdown was a reunion at my old school, Wolverhampton Grammar. For the first time since I left, twenty-five years ago, initially for a bleak summer job in a hospital laundry, and then university, I caught up with the people I spent most of my teenage years with, and it was unnerving. Accepting that the most handsome boy in the year was somehow even better-looking at forty-three than he was at eighteen as I increasingly resembled Salman Rushdie was not great for self-esteem. There was the discovery that every other classmate seemed to have gone into medicine and, to be honest, it was hard not to feel frivolous in comparison. But most disorientating of all was the poshness.

WGS had been an independent grammar school for a couple of years by the time I attended, and while it was certainly more pretentious than the comp my siblings attended, many of us were on fully or partially Assisted Places, and it was hardly Harrow. Nevertheless, here we were having a three-course dinner in our old assembly hall before a stained-glass window celebrating more than 500 years of history, singing the school song (in Latin), toasting the Queen and breaking into a spontaneous rendition of ‘Jerusalem’. Had I wilfully forgotten that I had attended the Black Country’s answer to Charterhouse? I guess it explained quite a lot, not least why I had made it on Fleet Street while friends at my state primary at least as clever as me were doing minimum-wage jobs in town.

Moreover, was there a distinct imperial tone to proceedings? By this stage I had spent more than a year immersed in British empire and was wary of the possibility of seeing legacies where there are none, becoming like social networker @cholenacree who tweeted: ‘Do I believe everything happens for a reason? Yes. And the reason is colonialism.’ But the after-dinner speaker, a former pupil and diplomat, repeated a joke about the honours he had received which I’d first read in Niall Ferguson’s book on empire (CMG = Call Me God, KCMG = Kindly Call Me God, GCMG = God Calls Me God)fn1 and which the historian had cited as an illustration of how empire’s administrative hierarchy became increasingly elaborate in the nineteenth century, with ‘no fewer than seventy-seven separate ranks’ in 1881. Standing in the oldest part of the school I was reminded that our assemblies regularly involved the recital of the ‘Founder’s Prayer’ which urged us to ‘answer the good intent of our founder and become profitable members of Church and Commonwealth’. And singing an abbreviated version of the school song, ‘Carmen Wulfrunense’, I remembered it featured a verse which positively gloried in colonialism: ‘Occidens et oriens / Nostram vim sensere / Caelum terras maria / Nostri domuere’ (‘The West and the East / Have felt our force / The skies, the lands, the seas / Our brothers have subdued’). I don’t really see WGS as a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.