The History of England Volume VI: Innovation by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd [Ackroyd, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador

34

An old world

On 6 February 1952, the king died, and, quite by accident, an Elizabethan age was established. Another herald was the establishment of the Conservative government in 1951. Domestic duties were no longer considered as inevitable as they had been, and the status of nursing and teaching rose proportionately. Women were no longer merely duchesses, mistresses, housewives or labourers, but teachers of mathematics and gymnastics. It had taken the carnage of the world wars to illuminate that. There were complaints, as at all times of social change. Surely it was not proper to train women as doctors in a world where cuts in services were continually threatened?

The coronation of the young queen was, if anything, more panoplied and pearled than that of her father. For those with ears to hear it, however, a new and sombre note had been struck. The new monarch of Great Britain was not the Empress of India; she was proclaimed simply as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. Her declared devotion to ‘our great Imperial family’ was celebrated, but she understood her new place.

The preceding year had been marked by the Festival of Britain. If it could not match the opulence of its Victorian model, then that was its glory. The times were quieter, pockets shallower and the people less inclined to triumphalism, but the bunting fluttered and the beer flowed. The Festival inaugurated, too, the establishment of the ‘South Bank’ as one of London’s cultural centres. There were jarring moments, of course. One of the exhibits was a collection of printed rayon cloths, and the king was invited to inspect them but had no notion of their purpose. When enlightened, he was heard to mutter: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wear those.’ Despite all outward gestures to popular sentiment, the royal family could not fully share the shared experience. Their role during the war years was revealed as an anomaly.

The empire was in fact on the brink, though few cared to recognize the fact. India had gone in 1947, lost, according to political legend, by the condescension of the middle-class English rulers. In truth, the efforts of Gandhi, Congress and the Muslim League had done much to convince the British that they had outstayed their day. The government was presented with a choice: the nation could afford an empire or a welfare state, but not both. The princes of the subcontinent were warned by Lord Mountbatten that if they resisted integration into the successor states of India and Pakistan they would be cut adrift, with neither dominion status nor a place in the Commonwealth. Independence came at midnight on 15 August 1947, and with it partition. Although none had foreseen this, some 14 million people were displaced as a consequence and countless lives lost. The line dividing India from Pakistan was drawn by the British, with scant regard for local realities or feelings.

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