On Clubbing

A theme I seem to come back to a lot is the gap in the English cultural memory when it comes to our own heyday. As I said before, there was a time when the British were extremely capable at administrating large foreign populations, having supreme undemocratic power over a quarter of the world's people for many years. Yet that colossal power, matched in history only by the Romans, the Mongols and the Han, has not grafted itself onto the historical imagination in the way that the other great powers of history clearly have done. Walking down Whitehall today, you have to struggle to remind yourself that the men who once trudged to work in that square kilometre of buildings each day had power of life and death over the tea planter in Bengal, the diamond miner in Johannesburg, the fisherman in Newfoundland. It was a power exercised with little pomp and considerable deference to circumstance, but it was supreme power nonetheless.

Whitehall is not a good fit for the centrepiece of global empire. It tries to ape the grandest of European imperial neo-classicism and might, but almost seems to bottle out in a very English manner: the buildings are large, certainly, but none of them excessively so, the style impressive but never florid, even the course of the street is not straight like a Parisian boulevard but bends like all things to the awkwardness of English property rights. Strangely Washington DC would be better as the centre of such an Empire; there is a city that understands the grand gesture, the concealed fist inside the velvet glove of monument. London just can't give off the sense of threat that a good imperial city needs. No Forbidden City here, no Colosseum, no Carthaginian warship prows displayed as archaeological versions of heads on spikes (Mongols and Timurids didn't really need this kind of grand capital, on the basis that being able to build mountains of skulls was probably better imperial PR than anything you could build out of stone).

Hitler's proposed Berlin would have implied the mountains of skulls rather effectively

The British self-image never really found a way to incorporate the Empire in the same way the other great Empires of history found themselves irrevocably lashed to their own mythos: Rome could never go back to being a city-state after being an Empire any more than the Chinese knew what to do with an Empire that had been humiliated by a few mercantile gunboats that thousands of years had told them should be nothing more than barbaric irritations. But the British never really knew what to do with an Empire they could only justify retrospectively. Perhaps the reason for Britain's lacuna is suggested by Orwell:

 It was not possible that nineteenth-century England should produce a book like War and Peace, or like Tolstoy's minor stories of army life, such as Sebastopol or The Cossacks, not because the talent was necessarily lacking but because no one with sufficient sensitiveness to write such books would ever have made the appropriate contacts. Tolstoy lived in a great military empire in which it seemed natural for almost any young man of family to spend a few years in the army, whereas the British Empire was and still is demilitarized to a degree which continental observers find almost incredible. Civilized men do not readily move away from the centres of civilization, and in most languages there is a great dearth of what one might call colonial literature.

That is to say, the people who might have made something culturally significant of the Empire were in the gentlemen's Clubs of Pall Mall rather than experiencing the colonies first hand. Far easier to build a St Petersburg when you feel that ethnic Russians from across your vast Empire would come to and be awed by its splendour - there would be no point in making London feel like the city that ruled all of India, because how many Indians would ever see London?

All this is in my mind because I visited the Reform Club today as part of London Open House Weekend, and what shocked me was the insouciance of the power which once resided in old Clubland. Our guide was keen to tell us that everything inside was theatrical, essentially for show: Barry had created a strange mix of Italian Renaissance interiors with scagliola pillars and trompe l'oeil ceilings; a fantasy of decadence for gentlemen who had no shortage of it in their home lives but needed a different kind to escape to.

 The men who attended these clubs were stupendously powerful, not just in terms of the political power wielded over Imperial dominions but also in the movement of capital across the globe, and yet unlike other times at which so much power has concentrated in a single ruling class, no style emerges out of it other than the desire for a bit of comfort and decent tea. These weren't the immensely ritualised lives of Chang'an bureaucrats nor the aesthetically refined indulgence of Medici or Ottoman courts. Just enough wealth is conjured by the surroundings to show you're upper class, but it is as thick as a coat of paint. It certainly doesn't imply anyone rules over millions of lives, just as Buckingham Palace is little more than a modest townhouse compared to a Versailles or a Winter Palace.

One of the rooms I saw was a secret room off the main dining area, a small chamber hidden behind a fake wall for more minor gatherings. In here, I was told, Asquith's War Cabinet would frequently meet since they were all Liberals and this was their favourite club. The meaning of this only hit me after leaving. In that tiny room I had just stood in, decisions were made in such horribly convivial surrounding that sent a million men to their deaths on the barbed wire of Flanders. It is at the points where the actual might of Britain and its armed forces meets the silliness of so much of its aristocracy when true horror begins to seep in. When Churchill makes decisions through a fog of cigars, brandy and witticisms, or when Haig is agreed by men in a tiny room in the back of the Reform Club to be a decent sort whose inability to stop the working class being slaughtered doesn't suggest he is incapable.

As a symbol of its time period, then, Clubland is almost completely unsatisfying. To try and touch what made the British Empire the way it was, to find a connection to the period that defines our country today in so many ways is inevitably frustrating. The facts of Empire and the way it was run were so far divorced from each other that the connection between the two is completely unmade in the collective memory, which is why the crimes of colonialism are so apt to be forgot. The Reform Club was built with profits from the Hudson Bay Company, but nothing of Canada exists in the building. At least the Romans had the good grace to bring back bits of Carthaginian ship to remind everyone where the money to build the Forum had come from. But Empire is all but invisible in the heart of London, and the bowler-hatted mandarins doing silly walks remain able to commit atrocities without ever looking like they cared about more than the wax in their moustache.

I suppose that Pall Mall is the closest to the heart of the Empire you can get, and yet I am afraid that nothing really remains of this massive historical fact, since it wasn't real to the people who were involved. The memory of Empire, though, is vital. And my thoughts for some reason travelled, in that place, back to Iraq, and the memories of old empires there. Nothing concentrates the mind quite like the declaration of a new caliphate. Now there's an empire that remembers its own history. The Umayyad Empire is comparable in terms of world population conquered with the British, but it brought its culture with it. Muslims haven't forgotten the caliphate because the caliphate knew how to justify itself to itself; it took the Mongols to wipe out the last true caliph, some six hundred years after the first. 

Walking around that bizarre Disneyland of Italianate Victoriana, I couldn't help but think our Empire a flash in the pan in comparison, a tawdry little imitation Empire keen to forget itself. With China and India on the move and Islam fighting 7th century battles, the remnants of the 19th century West look increasingly prone to slide back into the backwaters of history, their sheepish glory and their buckets of blood and lucre forgiven by the default of cultural amnesia.