EMPIRE

By Jeremy Paxman
A TASTE FOR POWER

It was the empire on which the sun never set, or, as some said, on which the blood never dried.
At its height, Britain ruled over a quarter of the world's population.
Many convinced themselves it was Britain's destiny to do so.
Much of the empire was built on greed and a lust for power.
But the British came to believe they had a moral mission, too, a mission to civilise the world.
The builders of empire were bold, they were adventurous.
Some were ruthless and some were just a bit unhinged.
The sheer expanse of British rule was breathtaking.
It stretched from the wilderness of the Arctic to the sands of Arabia and the islands of the
Caribbean.
There was a time when Britannia really did rule the waves and it's a memory which has never
wholly faded.
Once, the Navy imposed blockades, sank enemy vessels at will, suppressed slavery, mapped the
world's uncharted oceans, and generally forced Britain's will onto foreign governments.
That heritage helped Britain to believe she's still entitled to a place at the top table in world
affairs.
How did such a small country get such a big head? So much that shaped the extraordinary story
of the British Empire was born here, in the complex, timeworn expanse of India.
It was here the British learned the art of imperial power.
Yet it was a treaty signed thousands of miles away that determined the fate of India.
In February 1763, the great European powers were meeting in Paris to end years of war and to
divide the world between them, from Canada to the Philippines.
Britain's representative at the peace talks was the Duke of Bedford, a stubby, arrogant little man
who'd never been to any of these places.
In fact, his gout had made it difficult enough for him to get to Paris.
But the Bedfords did pretty well out of the summit.
The Duchess was given an 800-piece porcelain dinner service by the King of France, and the
Duke? The Duke got India for the British.
The technologically advanced countries of Europe were eying up foreign lands for future
conquest, and Britain had a head start.
India was decisive.
It gave Britain the resources, the markets, the manpower and the prestige to build a worldwide
empire.
And in the years to come, they worked feverishly to secure that prize.
First, Britain took control of the Mediterranean, then they took the Cape of Good Hope at the
bottom of Africa, then Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, then Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, of course,
and finally, Singapore.
A web of strongholds right across the globe.
This was the beginning of Britain's time as the undisputed top dog of the world.
Yet the whole thing was built upon something decidedly fragile.
A small island like Britain couldn't, by itself, find the manpower to hold on to this vast new
territory.
So they came up with a system that would become a cornerstone of empire.
They paid local soldiers to fight for them.
British officers would now lead Indian troops.
The colonised would provide the fighting force of colonialism for centuries to come.
The Madras Regiment, founded in 1758, is the oldest in the Indian Army.
It spent most of its existence fighting not for independent India, but for Britain.
It doesn't bother Captain Dilip Shekhar that his regiment helped to build the empire.
These are the battle honours we've won under the British.
On the left you can see these are outside India.
China, Afghanistan, Burma - Kilimanjaro? - Yes.
That's in the First World War, in East Africa, isn't it? Yes.
And then all these are battles you've fought Yeah, these are within India.
Sure, but three quarters of your battle honours are - when you were part of the British Army.
- Yes.
- What do you think about that? - That's great.
You were on the wrong side then, from an Indian Nationalist point of view.
- You were fighting for the British.
- We were soldiers, and a soldier does not know whose region it is for he's fighting.
Tomorrow I have a fight with any other country, I'm told to fight with that country, I don't have
any personal Do you think the British being here was a good thing or a bad thing or what?
Whatever happened in history is history.
But still, we should not be going into that.
But yes, they have done good for us, and even bad.
It was that way.
But it's a good thing they're not here, isn't it? Yeah.
But all the troops you could hire could never control such a huge country.
The British needed a political system to keep them in power, and they found it in the Indian
princes.
In the mid-1800s, the British invaders signed a treaty with the local ruler here, the Maharaja of
Jodhpur.
They promised him he could go on running his kingdom just as before, but he'd have to pay them
for the privilege.
This protection racket would be repeated all over India.
Fantastic goal there by Menenkhar.
They have finally woken up, ladies and gentlemen In time, the ruling classes of the two peoples
would become entwined.
British customs and British dress became part of the trappings of Indian court life.
The present Maharaja is the product of both cultures.
This is the family palace, designed for them by a British architect.
Understated little place.
Morning, sir, welcome to Taj Umaid Bhawan Palace.
Good morning.
Good morning.
But as the British extended their grip on India, they tore up the treaty they'd made with the
Maharaja's ancestor.
They stripped the maharajas of their power, but let them keep their palaces.
This way.
- This is your drawing room, is it? - This is my drawing room, yes.
We've tucked ourselves into a little corner of the palace.
And all these chaps on the walls are your ancestors, are they? - Yes, that's my father behind you.
Mmm-hmm.
That's my great-great-great-grandfather.
- Great-great-great-grandfather.
- Hmm.
Splendid beard.
I suppose the first question is what should I call you? - Baapuji.
- What does that mean? Everyone calls me baapuji.
Baapuji is a term of endearment as well as a term of respect.
But what does it mean? Literally it means baap, which means father, and "ji" is like an honorific.
But even as a child you were called baapuji.
Yes, absolutely.
Your own involvement, of course, in Britain is considerable, isn't it? Since the age of eight.
You were sent away to school in England then? Prep school, yes.
Prep school, to Cothill.
Then Eton, then Oxford.
14 years in all.
So you were really brought up as an English child.
English Indian boy.
- Was that good? - But I would switch being what I was.
Being an Englishman and then becoming Indian when I came home.
When you look back at that original treaty, how do you feel about the British reneging on it? My
ancestor at that time, he was very unhappy, first of all, to have signed that treaty in the
beginning, but he had no option left.
It was self-preservation.
Then he was very unhappy with it.
Until the period came when we learned how to use that presence to our advantage, get the best
out of the system.
And at that point it becomes unclear who's pulling whose strings, doesn't it? - Yes.
- Quite tricky.
At the heart of British authority was a gigantic confidence trick.
It worked for as long as the illusion could be maintained.
Take Government House in Calcutta.
It was the seat of British power in India.
It's still the headquarters of the regional government today.
When it was built in 1803 there were fewer than 6,000 British officials nominally ruling over
some 200 million Indians.
As one British Governor-General who lived here put it, "If each black man were to take up a
handful of sand and by united effort, "throw it upon the white-faced intruders, "we should be
buried alive.
" And that's the reason for the scale, the grandeur, the sheer boastfulness of this place.
The idea being, if you look like a ruler the people will treat you like a ruler.
It helps to explain that arrogant, self-satisfied look you see on the faces of so many British
imperialists.
But the appearance was an enormous bluff.
It could only be a matter of time before that bluff was called.
Lucknow, in the mid-19th century was, according to visitors, an enchanting place.
The British here enjoyed a life of luxury and tranquillity.
But in May 1857, all that changed.
Fired by decades of resentment, Indian troops rose up and killed their own officers.
Indian servants murdered British families.
The Indian Mutiny, or First Indian War of Independence, had begun.
It reached its climax at the British headquarters in Lucknow.
Here, the myth of imperial power was shaken to the core.
Three thousand British and loyal Indians were trapped inside and surrounded by 8,000 rebels.
A terrifying siege was about to begin.
I think these must have been the servants' quarters or the kitchen or something, they're too small
to be formal rooms.
But the amazing thing about it is that this place was just obviously built to impress the local
Indians and it ends up this scene of complete, terrified squalor.
At the height of the siege, there were 10 Europeans dying every day.
Just here.
And these must be the marks of some of the cannon balls that struck the building.
These ones didn't actually go through, but in other places you can see the balls have just gone
straight through the wall.
And that down there, I think, is what was the banqueting hall.
But during the course of the siege, became used as the hospital.
And was absolutely packed with the wounded obviously, but also, the sick 'cause inevitably what
happened was that all the latrines filled up and overflowed and there were corpses rotting in the
heat everywhere.
So, cholera broke out.
And it was the job of many of the small children to wipe the flies off the faces and the wounds of
the injured inside the hospital there.
It must have been an absolutely appalling scene.
After four and a half months, British relief forces arrived.
As they fought their way into the stinking ruins, they showed no mercy.
In the story of empire, rebellion always met with savage retaliation.
One British commander alone executed 6,000 men.
Elsewhere, he flogged suspected mutineers, made them lick blood from the slaughterhouse floor
and then hanged them.
In other cases, mutineers were tied to the ground, branded with hot irons, told to run for their
lives, and when they did so, were shot dead.
It was not enough merely to punish, an example had to be made.
The psychological impact of the conflict was massive.
Each side now knew how very thin was the veneer of civilised co-existence - that with the right
provocation, they could unleash hell on each other.
Two thousand men, women and children had perished in the siege.
The pretence of British rule had been shattered, the bluff called.
And when peace returned, British attitudes hardened.
The poet Rudyard Kipling called it, "Wearing knuckle dusters under kid gloves.
" The British would soon find a new way of showing who was boss.
Shukriya.
This bleak patch of waste ground outside Delhi was once the setting for a series of extraordinary
spectacles.
They were called "durbars," the Indian word for a meeting between ruler and ruled.
It was less a meeting than a ceremonial show of strength.
One Indian called it, "Terror in fancy dress.
" Presiding over each of these gaudy ceremonies was the British ruler in India, the Viceroy.
One of them understood the power of extravagant display better than any other.
"Lord George Nathaniel Curzon" went the rhyme, "was a most superior person.
" He liked to assemble his magnificent uniforms including assorted foreign decorations, from
various places, one of them being a London theatrical costume shop.
Magnificent events like this were meant to dazzle the country into submission.
A few old statues in the corner of this foreign field are all that's left.
Even the caretaker of this peculiar place isn't much interested.
- Hello.
- Hello.
Can I ask you some questions? What do you think of all the statues just down here? Oh, I'm
afraid we're some of the occasional white men.
But do you know what happened here? Not very interested.
There's one relic of the British Raj that still exerts something of its old magic.
Like the Taj Mahal, the Victoria Memorial is a shrine to a woman.
A British queen in the heart of Calcutta.
In the person of Queen Victoria, the British liked to believe the empire had achieved human
form.
They cooked up the resonant but meaningless title of Empress of India for her.
But she was more than a title.
Victoria was Empress, mother, virtual god.
In the years following the mutiny, over 50 statues of her were commissioned and shipped out
from Britain.
The Maharaja of Baroda for example, paid £15,500 for a solid marble statue.
And at the feet of it, flowers were regularly laid and every week it was given a shampoo to keep
the old queen looking spruce.
Victoria had plenty to smile about.
A mix of enterprise and cunning, brutality and pomp, had turned India into the biggest, richest
and most significant colony in the empire.
By the closing years of Victoria's reign, India formed the heart of an empire that stretched from
Canada in the west, to Australia in the east.
It was time to celebrate.
Victoria's diamond jubilee on the 22nd of June, 1897, was the grandest showing off of empire
Britain would ever see.
If the Indian durbars were designed to cow the empire's subjects, the jubilee was a piece of
theatre meant to fire the British public with imperial fervour.
A vast cavalcade made its way across the capital to the so-called "parish church of empire", St
Paul's Cathedral.
Thousands of troops had been summoned from all over the empire.
Canadian Hussars, Indian lancers, Cypriot policemen wearing fezzes, Jamaicans in white gaiters.
There were Hong Kong policemen, Australian cavalry men, Diachs, Maoris, Rajas and
Maharajas.
In the midst of all this frenzy rode the matriarch of empire.
She allowed herself an occasional tear.
The day was marked by celebrations throughout her colonies.
The Daily Mail brought out a special edition in gold ink to mark the occasion.
As the procession passed, its star reporter was quite overcome.
"You begin to understand, as never before, what the empire amounts to.
"Not only that we possess all these remote, outlandish places, "but that we send out a boy and he
takes hold of savages "and teaches them to obey him.
And to believe in him.
"And to die for him and the Queen.
" But not everyone shared this sense of wide-eyed amazement.
There were some who looked at the spectacle and wondered.
They remembered the splendour of the Roman Empire and how that had fallen.
How could an empire that wouldn't stop growing be sustained? And, in particular, how could the
great prize of India be secured? The answer to that had already taken the British to some pretty
unexpected places.
One morning in September 1882, the Egyptian people woke up to find they were not alone.
A British army had landed and was advancing on the capital.
Egypt was never part of the empire, you may say, and indeed, formally, you'd be right.
Egypt was an emergency, an anomaly, an experiment, and, for a while, a bit of a success.
No sooner had British troops landed here than the British government announced they'd be
leaving.
In fact, they stayed for 70 years.
What on earth were they doing here? The reason could be found just across the desert.
The Suez Canal.
This 120-mile slice through Egyptian territory was the lifeline of the empire, dramatically cutting
sailing time to India.
Most of the ships passing through it were British.
They brought tea and cotton and jute from India and beyond to Britain.
They could take troops back to quell another mutiny.
Trouble near the canal might spell trouble for Britain.
And trouble had been brewing in the streets of Cairo.
Egyptians were angry about foreign influence in their country.
When riots broke out in the city, the British grew nervous.
The Cairo riots triggered a classic piece of imperial footwork.
The pattern goes like this.
British people or British interests are threatened, British forces are sent to protect them and they
never leave.
In Egypt, they didn't leave because they hardly admitted they'd arrived.
Much of the British occupation of Egypt was passed off as little more than a spot of armed
tourism.
- Good morning.
- Welcome.
Thank you.
For many years, Egypt was run quietly from this building, now the British Embassy.
And this was the man who ran it.
Ruling Egypt for over 20 years and perfecting the strange machinery of British power in the
Middle East.
Sir Evelyn Baring.
Officially he was just Consul-General, rather than Colonial Governor, but with 6,000 troops
stationed next door, there was no doubt who was in charge.
It wasn't just his size that gave him the nickname "Over-Baring".
Baring was an imperialist through and through.
He regarded the Egyptians, and indeed, most foreigners, as children.
And he treated them accordingly.
With occasional concern and permanent disdain.
It earned him their profound resentment.
Baring allowed the Egyptian elite to imagine they were still running the country.
"The British are easy to deceive," said one Egyptian politician, "but when you think you've
deceived them, "they give you the most tremendous kick in the backside.
" Baring was a man who liked to exercise power behind the throne.
He did not give commands, but, it was said, "Advice which had to be taken.
" Here, the workings of empire had become almost invisible.
The British found a word for it.
Egypt was not a colony - it was a protectorate.
Baring allowed himself two hours each evening to exercise at the Gezira Sporting Club.
As they did all over the empire, British officials in Cairo repaired to the club at the end of the
working day.
You can be so mean in croquet, can't you? - And it is in many countries now.
- It is in many countries, yes.
Have you been a member here a very long time? In the club? Yes, about more than 50 years.
55 years.
55 years! Do you remember when the British were here? Yes.
And what did you think? I think they were forbidding any Egyptian to enter this club, unless they
take a licence.
- Really? - Yes.
- Were you glad to see the English go? - For sure.
- We weren't all bad, were we? - Huh? - We weren't all bad? - All kinds of imperialism is bad.
Was there nothing good that the British did here? Nothing was good.
All the time they were here, 70 years, and it was all - 70 years, more than 70 years.
- Yes, did they do nothing good? I think, no.
Nothing.
How many times did you come to Egypt? - I've been three or four times.
- Four times? - Yes.
I think.
- You are most welcome here.
Well, it's very nice of you.
Thank you very much.
- Yes.
- Particularly in light of our history.
This is one of the good things British did in Egypt.
There you are, you've found one thing.
The temporary intervention in Egypt, the bit of Empire that never was, would last into the middle
of the 20th Century.
Baring himself, the invisible man, left in 1907 to retire to Bournemouth.
Baring's last carriage journey from the British headquarters to the railway station, was marked by
what one witness called, "a chilly silence.
" I don't suppose he'd have cared that much, he wasn't here to be loved.
But I wonder what he'd have made of the fact that, even generations later, there were Egyptians
travelling to England to spit on his grave.
As the 20th Century dawned, Britain's sense of its role in the world had given it dangerous
delusions about what it could do.
World war and its aftermath would expose these delusions in a merciless fashion.
The First World War stretched far beyond the mud and trenches of northern Europe.
It reached into the streets and deserts of Palestine and the Middle East.
Once again, Britain feared for its key strategic asset, its lifeline to India, the Suez Canal.
It had to be protected.
The region was ruled by Britain's war enemy, Turkey.
In their desert conflict with the Turks, the British needed allies.
The Bedouin tribes of the Arabian Desert knew this arid land and they knew how to survive in it.
If they could be encouraged to rise against the Turks, they might prove invaluable.
But who could unite them? This is the edge of the Sinai Desert.
It was here that a young man came on a secret mapping mission for the British Army.
It was disguised as an archaeology field trip.
And it was the beginning of a long love affair with the desert and with the Arab people.
That love affair created one of the most romantic figures in the history of the British Empire,
Thomas Edward Lawrence.
Lawrence of Arabia.
Lawrence, the illegitimate son of an Irish baronet - scholar, archaeologist, linguist - was just the
man to charm and inspire the Arabs into a desert revolt.
The story of an Englishman leading an exotic army across the desert caught the public's
imagination.
In contrast to the mud and murder of the Western front, here was a sweeping campaign fought in
blazing sunlight.
And here, too, was a different kind of imperialist.
Romantic, idealistic, dashing and slightly nuts.
Lawrence had a passion for the Arabs and their way of life.
His ability to live like them impressed them.
So did the gold from the British treasury he brought to pay them.
And he gave them something more, a belief in themselves as an Arab nation.
As his masters in London had hoped, he coaxed them into fighting with the British, with the
promise of their freedom once the war was over.
- Do you think he was a good man? - Yeah.
Why? He was a real man.
Yeah.
Do you think that the promises that he made were ever kept? Lawrence promised his Arab
fighters freedom from foreign rule.
They believed Palestine would be theirs.
There would be many more promises made, and just as many broken.
The war in the desert finally brought Britain a string of heady victories.
Imperial troops from India, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Britain, swept across the
region.
By the winter of 1917, the ultimate prize was within their grasp.
The Holy City itself.
And so was born the dangerous conviction that the interests of the British Empire and the will of
God, might be one and the same.
For Christians, Jerusalem was sacred as the site of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, venerated
as the place where Christ's body was laid.
But Jerusalem was sacred to other faiths, too.
A thousand years before Christ, it was the capital of the Jews.
Sharing the city with the Jews in relative peace, were the Arabs, for whom Jerusalem was one of
the holiest cities in Islam.
For the British prime minister, Lloyd George, the empire now began to feel like a divine mission.
Most British political leaders had been brought up on the Bible.
They were steeped in its geography, and as for its history, well, Lloyd George claimed that, as a
boy, he knew the names of the kings of Israel long before he knew the names of the kings of
England.
At noon on December the 11 th, 1917, British forces entered Jerusalem.
In a show stage-managed from London, for this imperial victory the trappings of power were
discarded.
Commander-in-chief General Edmund Allenby dismounted from his horse and entered the city
on foot.
To a watching world, Allenby was proclaiming that he came not as a conqueror, but as a pilgrim.
Behind him, in borrowed army uniform, was a jubilant Lawrence.
But his joy would prove short-lived.
On the walls of the city, Allenby ordered a solemn proclamation from the British government to
be read out.
He knew, he said, that the place was sacred to three great religions, that its soil had been
sanctified by prayer and pilgrimage.
And he promised to preserve it.
But for all his fine words, Allenby had been handed a ticking time bomb.
For back in London, the British government had just gone even further.
The Jews of Europe, scattered for centuries, had been made a remarkable offer.
In the Balfour Declaration, the British foreign secretary committed Britain to helping the Jews
make a home in Palestine.
Playing God in the Holy Land was an astonishing gesture.
The British had come to feel they were agents of destiny.
They had become powerful enough, and you might say, well-meaning enough to believe they
could solve the problems of the world.
The Promised Land had now been promised once too often.
Over the next decade, as more and more Jews arrived in Palestine, tension between them and the
Arabs rose.
It came to a head at the Wailing Wall, in the heart of old Jerusalem.
In 1929, riots broke out here, at the site sacred to both Jews and Arabs.
The riots spread.
And later, Arabs murdered Jews in their homes.
The British police were completely outnumbered.
And the British authorities decided that, from now on, all Arab outrages would be met with real
aggression.
The British want peace at any price.
They try to restore order, search everybody.
They act as if both sides are equally guilty.
To the Arabs, the British had broken the promise of freedom made to them by Lawrence.
Instead, the Arabs were having to give up their land to the Jews.
The Jews felt the British were failing to honour the terms of the Balfour Declaration and the
promise of a national home for them.
Both sides made their case with gelignite.
Both sides committed appalling atrocities.
Palestine became a posting from which many never returned.
The Protestant cemetery on Mount Zion is full of British graves.
Many belong to soldiers, policemen and civilians who died trying to keep apart two peoples who
had previously lived relatively peaceably together.
After a while, you begin to notice one date keeps reappearing.
The 22nd of July, 1946.
It was in the wing on the right of the picture that the terrorists placed their explosive.
The hotel housed the British Army headquarters and the Palestine government offices.
And casualties were very heavy.
Ninety-one people were killed, including 41 Arabs, 28 British, and 17 Jews.
Sara Agassi was 17 at the time.
She was a member of the team of militant Jews who bombed the King David Hotel.
Pretending she was just attending a dance, she scouted the hotel for the terrorists, deciding where
the bomb should be placed.
So they came down here with the bombs, and then what? To the To the place where No, it's not
here.
- There.
Let's go.
- Through there? - It was open.
- Do you recognise it? Yeah, of course.
We came from here.
This was the place that you had been looking at - when you came dancing that day.
- Yes.
Here.
Here was the bar and here was the orchestra.
And all this was very big and it had a lot of chairs and tables.
Beautiful lamps and everything was very beautiful.
Now, where were the bombs put? Into these columns.
This is one of the columns that supports the whole hotel, I guess.
- Or this corner of it.
- Yes, yes.
It's not one.
One, two, three But four, five.
Five columns, five bombs.
What was your reaction when you heard the bomb go off? - What did you think? What did you
feel? - We were satisfied.
- You were satisfied? - Yes.
It was a mission.
You've never been worried about what you did? Of course I was worried.
To succeed.
But your sense of morality, your conscience, - hasn't bothered you since? - No, no.
We fight for our To do something against the British.
What do you think about it after all this time? This is over 60 years ago now.
Have your views changed? No.
No.
Do you not feel any thanks at all to the British? I mean, without the Balfour Declaration, there
would have been no Jewish homeland in this part of the world.
The motive is neither here nor there.
I mean, whatever the motive was, do you not think that the Balfour Declaration, the right of the
Jews to have a homeland in Palestine It was a good start.
- That was a good thing, wasn't it? - Yes.
And are you not grateful for the British for that? It was now a lot less like the Promised Land,
than hell on Earth.
"Tommies go home," someone daubed on a wall.
And beneath it, a despairing squaddie wrote, "I wish we fucking well could.
" What Lawrence called the British love of policing other men's muddles had proved a disaster.
The British Empire is gone from the Middle East but everyone still lives with the consequences
of Britain's presence in Palestine.
Divided peoples and a divided land.
The Middle East taught the British a lesson that all empires had to learn sooner or later.
That though you may begin with ambition, and come to believe you will last forever, one day,
you will have a head-on collision with reality.
In the end, and there is no disguising this fact, the British ran away.
It was May, 1948.
One departing official commented bitterly, "It is surely a new technique in our imperial mission
to walk out, "and leave the pots we placed on the fire "to boil over.
" The bluff of British omnipotence had been called.
It would be called again and again over the next few decades.
The empire that had lasted more than 200 years would be dismantled in scarcely 20.
The British were beginning to lose interest.
The battered country that emerged from the Second World War was more concerned with
bettering the lives of its citizens than anything else.
An American politician later remarked that the British people had decided they preferred free
aspirins and false teeth to a role in the world.
But it hasn't entirely turned out that way.
In fact, we've done anything but climb into the back seat.
The empire may be over, but imperial habits linger on.
In the last three decades, Britain has embarked on seven foreign wars.
There were arguments aplenty for fighting any one of them.
But you can't help wondering if, without the memory of empire, Britain would have plunged in
quite so readily.
It's as if we can't quite let go of who we once were.
MAKING OURSELVES AT HOME

1 JEREMY PAXMAN: It was the greatest empire the world had ever seen.
At its height, Britain ruled over a quarter of the world's population.
Everywhere they went, the men and women who built the empire created a home away from
home.
From the wastes of Canada to the fertile highlands of Africa and the hill stations of India.
They took with them what they saw as the spirit of Britain.
And they spread the British way of doing things right across the globe.
But as we made ourselves at home in strange and faraway lands, the question was always, "How
do we live with the people we rule?" The answer would shape their countries, but it would also
shape our own.
The story starts here, on the east coast of India, in the early 1600s.
The first British people arrived not as invaders but as traders.
Their attitude to the peoples they encountered would be very different from those who followed.
These pioneers of empire actively embraced an Indian way of life.
One of these early traders was Charles Stuart.
He worked for the East India Company, which traded in cotton, silks and spices.
Most mornings, Stuart could be seen joining the locals as they bathed in Calcutta's Hooghly
river.
Charles Stuart is the sort of person who upends easy prejudices about the empire.
The caricature is that it was all run by arrogant racists suppressing downtrodden natives.
And like all caricatures, there is a degree of truth in that.
But Charles Stuart belongs to an early generation of the British in India who were seduced by the
place.
For Charles Stuart, India was neither alien nor forbidding.
It was intoxicating.
Imagine coming across this, if the most exotic thing you'd ever seen was the stained glass in your
parish church window.
Most people would have been absolutely intimidated, I think.
(BELLS CLANGING) In this unfamiliar world, Charles Stuart saw holiness, order and
civilisation.
So enchanted was he with India, he soon became known as Hindoo Stuart.
(WORSHIPPERS CHANTING) He encouraged his fellow Europeans to adopt Indian customs.
He called on British women to abandon their dull dresses and wear colourful Indian saris, and on
British men to grow what would become that trademark of empire a luxuriant moustache.
Indian style.
Hello.
Can I talk to you about your moustache? Yes? Good, can I come in? - Yes.
- Now, how long have you had it? (SPEAKING BENGALI) Do you think it makes you more
manly? Do you think I'm a bit of a girl for not having a moustache? That's a relief! The traders of
the East India Company liked to mix business with pleasure.
Relaxing with the locals was an everyday affair.
To judge from their clothes, you often couldn't tell one from the other.
This was the empire making up the rules about the appropriate relations between the races as it
went along.
In fact, there weren't really any rules at all yet.
Many British traders took Indian mistresses known as "bibis".
But there were more serious and lasting relationships too, leading to marriage and families.
Many men of the East India Company left their possessions to Indian wives or children.
(HORN HONKING) (MAN SHOUTING) The practice of interracial sex and interracial
marriage extended to the very highest British officials in the land.
This monument was erected originally to honour Sir David Ochterlony.
One of the great spectacles of his time as British Resident in Delhi was the sight of him taking
the evening air, attended by his 13 Indian wives, each on her own elephant.
Ochterlony liked nothing more than to repair to his residence for a quiet evening in with his
harem, dressed in full Indian costume, his shisha pipe at his side.
The offspring of these mixed-race marriages became known as Anglo-Indians.
Today, there are an estimated 150,000 of them in India.
(CHRISTMAS SONG PLAYING) It's Christmas in Chennai, formerly known as Madras.
It's a big occasion in the Anglo-Indian calendar.
Anglo-Indians tend to marry within the community, so the term now means having some British
blood, often several generations back.
(CROWD CHEERING) PAXMAN: You're all Christians? MAN: Yeah.
And you're all - Got some British blood, somewhere.
- Yeah.
But, you know, you can't I couldn't tell you from any other Indian.
But my name says it.
And I know my roots.
- That is it.
- What does it mean to you? It means something nice, because I feel proud to be an Anglo-
Indian.
- That's it.
- But you're a visible reminder of the fact that this country was a colony.
Yeah.
Well, a lot of people wouldn't like that.
That's that's history.
That's all.
You just take it as a part of history.
And like every country has its history, this is our history.
It obviously has some big pull for you, doesn't it? Yes, it does.
One, my family.
The roots are very deep and I am proud to be who I am here.
I have both worlds to enjoy.
Enjoy the West, as well as I've enjoyed the East.
You don't feel any resentment against these men who came over here and fathered children and
then either died or disappeared? - No, not really.
- No.
We don't resent.
No.
You sound, actually, as if you are rather proud of it.
- We are, actually.
- We are, because we like to keep in touch lf, if the situation You'd better be careful, next you'll
be asking to be colonised again.
Everybody here seemed rather to celebrate the fusion of two cultures.
But in Victorian Britain, these relationships were seen as subversive, even dangerous.
The country was in the grip of a religious revival.
The British were adopting a new, more puritanical Christianity, and they wanted the rest of the
world to do likewise.
(BIRDS CHIRPING) That shift would soon be felt on the far fringes of empire.
(TRAIN ENGINE CHUGGING) It wasn't long before Victorian values arrived in India.
They were brought not only by missionaries but by wives sent out from Britain, who were
arriving in ever-increasing numbers.
They were known as "memsahibs".
They hadn't the slightest interest in local culture.
One memsahib, wrote of Indian holy men as, "Horrible objects with their wildly rolling eyes,
"long, tangled hair, "and every bone visible in their wretched bodies.
" Another arrived in India and wrote home "There's such a lot of everything.
" (HORNS BLARING) (BELL TOLLS) (BIRDS CHIRPING) No wonder the memsahibs ran for
the hills.
They had very different ideas about how to make themselves at home in India.
The days of easygoing tolerance were now over.
In their place came a culture war, a never-ending battle to maintain the British way of life in the
face of foreign temptation.
The British strongholds in this battle were the places they came to escape the summer heat.
Hill stations, like Ooty.
The Indians called it Ootacamund.
But that was too much of a mouthful for most of the British.
As soon as they discovered the place, they began to turn it into a version of Surrey.
In places like this, a particular idea of Britishness was forged.
Tea on the lawn.
A certain reserve, order, formality, unbelievable stuffiness.
It is an idea that some people still have a soft spot for while others have been laughing at it for
decades.
What tends to be forgotten though is that it was forged initially as a defence against something.
In this case, as a defence against India.
Bungalows sprouted like little forts all over the hills.
Bungalow is originally an Indian word, meaning a house in the Bengali style.
But the buildings it came to describe were very British indeed.
The great empire writer, Rudyard Kipling, talked about them as models of "shut-upness".
Enclosed within their own little compound, rigidly ordered within, they really were about the
separation of us from them.
Of course, the great shift in attitudes was shared by men and memsahibs.
But as mistresses of the house, it was the women who were on the front line.
For a young woman, arriving in this alien land after weeks on a boat from England must have
been a truly daunting experience.
Fortunately though, help was at hand.
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, by Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, is an
intriguing window into the mind of British India.
It tells you absolutely everything, from how much to pay the cook's assistant to the best way to
divide up the family possessions when you're moving house by means of 11 camels, to how
many coolies it takes to carry a piano.
The answer to that one, if you're interested, is 16.
The kitchen was the principal battleground.
Here, there were terrible warnings.
"The kitchen is a black hole, "the pantry a sink.
"The only servant who will condescend to tidy up "is a skulking savage with a reed broom".
The book is astonishingly rude about the Indians themselves.
"The Indian servant" this bit here says, "is a child in all things save age, and should be treated as
a child; "that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness.
" It was these women's duty to introduce their native servants to the British way of doing things,
and to teach them their place as decent, dutiful inferiors.
The book is obsessed with what it calls, "the native's capacity for uncleanness".
Of course, this isn't just dirt.
It's also foreign contamination.
And one particularly telling passage in the book advises not to worry too much if the house you
rent at the start of the season is a bit grubby because it is English people's dirt, not entirely
natives'.
(THUNDER RUMBLING) Yet, for all their apparent self-confidence, these were women who
lived in a state of fear - fear that the climate and conditions in India might actually kill them.
Saint Stephen's Church was one of British Ooty's first buildings.
Its graveyard is full of British women and children whose stay in the new country didn't last
long.
"In memory of Mary, wife of RC Lewin of the Madras Civil Service.
"June 10th, 1858.
"Aged 28", that one.
Death and disease ravaged the British in India.
Among soldiers' wives and children, the mortality rate here was three times that back home.
"Sacred to the memory of Issabella Frances Etheldred.
"Fourth daughter of the late Lieutenant Colonel Havelock, "14th Light Dragoons, who died June
18th, 1851, "aged 17 years, "2 months and 3 days.
" How precisely they'd measured their loss.
Along with the snobbery and self-righteousness went a certain fortitude and courage as well.
Maybe they passed themselves off as the master race because deep down they knew that they
were an endangered species.
But adversity seemed merely to spur the 19th-century British onto further expansion across the
globe.
One of their greatest success stories began life as a swampy tropical island in the South China
Sea.
Modern Singapore is a creation of empire.
It was founded by Britain as a trading post in 1819.
It was Thomas Stamford Raffles who saw its potential at the crossroads of East and West.
The British established free trade and the rule of law, and turned a pestilential island into a
commercial metropolis, which drew in Malays, Indians and Chinese.
In this colonial melting pot, the British were determined to remain distinct.
As one old colonial put it to a new arrival, "If you want to be happy in Singapore, "don't admit
you're living in an oriental country.
"Live as nearly as possible as you would in Europe.
" And the British did this all over the empire.
Central to this concoction was the club.
This is Singapore Cricket Club.
It's been here since 1852.
If the bungalow was the place the British ran away to, the club was where they came together.
Inside, the club was designed to reassure, a piece of foreign soil that was forever England.
(CLASSICAL MUSIC PLAYING) It's open to all races now, but it was founded as a haven
where British expats could retreat from the fact that they were abroad.
At the heart of club life was a very British passion.
Sport.
There were cricket clubs.
Golf clubs.
Hockey clubs.
Badminton clubs.
Tennis clubs.
Hunting clubs, where there were neither hounds nor foxes.
And a yacht club in the middle of the desert.
The natives grieve when the white men leave their huts Because they're obviously, definitely
nuts Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the
midday sun Do you play golf every evening or No, not every evening.
As often as one can do, one does, one likes to.
It's a good form of relaxation.
But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday Out in the midday, out in the midday Out in
the midday, out in the midday sun It was the done thing to ignore the stifling heat and humidity.
As one member put it, "At the end of every game, "you wrung out your shirt and shorts, "then
had a large glass of salt and water "before settling down to the serious drinking.
" As well as sports, there were amateur theatricals - solid British fare like Gilbert and Sullivan or
the latest West End smash.
There were Burns' Nights and bridge evenings, dances and fancy-dress parties galore.
And of course, tea on the terrace.
The club served British comfort food.
Sausage and mash, or pies from Melton Mowbray.
When one member of the Singapore club asked for fresh papaya, he was served tinned apricots
on the grounds that "the club does not serve native food".
As tins preserved food, so the club was meant to preserve a particular sense of national identity.
Too much mixing with the locals was frowned upon.
What is it you guys like about this club? It's home.
- Home? - It's home to me.
I've got so many friends here.
I came 36 years ago and I play sport.
Do you remember what the club used to be like? On this side here, the men's bar was on that
side.
The men's side of the club, it was retained there.
There was this lovely sign there that said, "No women, children, and dogs beyond this point.
" And that used to annoy my mother immensely.
Also the dogs complained about it.
Well, they would, wouldn't they? I mean, it would be a natural thing for them to complain.
Anyway, Dad would be bring me in here for lunch and I spent my whole life here.
And my wife is a Columbian and she said, you know, "If it wasn't for the men's bar we would be
divorced a long time ago.
" Because she knew when I was in the men's bar, I was safe, 'cause there was nothing else I was
up to.
'Cause Singapore is a terrible place for getting up to a bit of Yeah, the odd There's a few
distractions.
This is my sanctuary.
So, if I didn't have this, I think I'd probably go back home.
PAXMAN: I wonder if, looking at chaps like you, a couple of Uh, I don't care, I might as well be
frank about it, a couple of old fossils in a club in Singapore.
- Very much so.
- Clinging on to our colonial past.
PAXMAN: You sort of belong in the You do belong in the past, don't you? We do.
We've lost it.
I have.
He's lost it completely.
(ALL CHUCKLING) PAXMAN: But there was more than one kind of empire.
The British arrived on foreign soil not only as traders or rulers, but as settlers, determined to
make a new and permanent home for themselves in the empire.
(WIND HOWLING) They found plenty of thinly populated, if inhospitable places, in which to
do it.
In 1831, a young Scottish lawyer was travelling across the wild and snowy lands of British
Canada.
His name was Adam Fergusson.
He'd come all the way from Perthshire to look for a suitable spot to build a new town for Scottish
immigrants.
Adam Fergusson was just one of vast numbers of British people who saw the empire as an
opportunity to make something of themselves.
Throughout the 19th and well into the 20th century, millions upon millions of British people left
home for somewhere in the empire.
There can hardly have been a family in the land who hadn't said goodbye to somebody.
The Scots in particular left their homeland in vast numbers.
They would play a huge role in the building of empire not only as settlers but as soldiers,
missionaries, engineers, and pioneers.
Fergusson and his companions eventually found a site in a sheltered valley sixty miles from what
is now Toronto.
There was water to power a mill, and wood and stone for building in a harsh climate.
It was tough going at first.
They built themselves log cabins like this, they survived on whatever bears or deer they could
kill.
And in winter, it was so cold that the wheat froze, which made the scones pretty chewy.
In only a few years, a handful of huts had become a thriving little town.
Modestly, Fergusson named his new town after himself, Fergus.
Settlements like Fergus sprang up all over the empire from Canada to Australia.
The settlers built in the style they knew, from the houses they lived in to the churches where they
worshipped and the pub where they gathered in the evening.
Always striving to hold on to a sense of home.
Fergus was a little bit of Scotland transplanted to the other side of the world.
People here formed pipe bands and curling clubs.
They wore kilts and celebrated Hogmanay.
They even had their own highland games.
- Hello.
- Hello.
- I'm Jeremy.
- Hello, Jeremy.
Thanks for coming to my shop.
I'm Heather.
- You're Heather? - I'm the owner of the shop.
Yes.
- Nice to meet you.
- Nice Scottish name, eh? - HEATHER: Welcome.
- What do you sell in a Scottish shop? HEATHER: Well, we sell all things Scottish.
We sell all the sweets and the cakes, and the drinks and the crisps, and all the stories.
- All the connections - Stories? All the stories.
People like to come and tell us their stories, and their Scottish connections.
And all their memories from their past Got any deep-fried Mars bars? Oh, no, I haven't.
I do have the Mars bars.
- Meat pies? - I do have meat pies.
I have Scotch pies and bridies and steak pies and - Haggis? - Black pudding, haggis.
Oh, yes, I've got the haggis and the sausage, and Good stuff.
God, I didn't even know they still made Camp Coffee.
We've got the Camp Coffee, and Do people buy this stuff? Yes, they just love that we carry all of
these products that they grew up with.
So, your customers are mainly people who've moved here from Scotland? They are mainly
people who have moved here.
And the fact that there is a connection here to their past is fabulous.
- That seems to be the big draw.
- PAXMAN: Hmm.
- Gosh, what fun! - HEATHER: Blast from the past.
Bring back all the memories of childhood.
(TRADITIONAL MUSIC PLAYING) PAXMAN: The Scots who settled in Fergus wanted a
better life than the one they were leaving behind.
But in their new homeland they clung tenaciously to the customs of the land of their birth.
English-speaking former colonies like these are one of the empire's most enduring legacies - a
network of countries linked to Britain by tradition, family and history.
The growth of this successful community was a pretty peaceful affair.
But in some colonial settlements it was a very different story.
Native peoples were forced off their land.
Many people were tricked into signing it away.
Others had their populations devastated by famine and diseases introduced by settlers.
The biggest land grab of all was still to come.
(TRUMPETING) What became known as the "scramble for Africa" saw the great European
powers carve up millions of square miles as they wrestled over the land and its peoples.
British settlers started coming here to Kenya in the early 1900s.
Then it was a vast, thinly populated region of mountains and forests, huge plains and wild
animals.
The settlers liked what they saw.
West Africa was full of swamps and diseases and things, but here here the land was fertile, the
climate was glorious - like England on the very nicest kind of summer's day.
But there was one problem.
The best land was already occupied.
Local tribes such as the Kikuyu were bribed or bullied into making way for the new arrivals.
In return for six months' labour, they were allowed to become squatters and to grow crops on
land that had once been theirs.
It was an uneasy arrangement.
Tension led to violence on both sides.
Some Kikuyu villages witnessed dreadful scenes.
One morning in the early 1900s, a young British lieutenant in the King's African Rifles received
orders to find out what had become of a white settler.
He described what he found.
"In the middle of the village, on the open ground, "was a sight which horrified me.
"A naked white man had been pegged out on his back, "mutilated and disembowelled, "his body
used as a latrine by all who passed by.
" Revenge was instant and it was savage.
"We burned all the huts," he said.
"We razed the banana plantations to the ground, "and every soul was either shot or bayoneted.
" The English class system made sure different kinds of settlers ended up in different kinds of
colonies.
Toffs came to Kenya.
No one without plenty of cash was allowed in.
They proved themselves good at growing new crops like coffee, wheat and sugar cane.
Or tea.
Surrounded by their estates, they built grand houses in the English style.
A taste of Edwardian England in the so-called Dark Continent.
Some stayed on after independence in the 1960s.
Jeremy, nice to meet you.
Very pleased to meet you.
Thank you for having us.
Tony Seth-Smith's grandparents came to Kenya in 1904.
That's the first animal I've recognised today.
SETH-SMITH: That's my uncle's first house.
It's a grass hut.
It's just a grass hut, and some mud walls.
The zebra skin on the wall probably stopped the draught going through a crack in it.
And then he progressed to a rather smarter house made of corrugated iron up on stilts to stop the
white ants getting at the floorboards.
Transport, there you are PAXMAN: That's a huge oxen train, isn't it? SETH-SMITH: Train of
oxen.
Sixteen was generally a typical span of oxen.
- Sixteen oxen for one cart? - Sixteen oxen for the one cart.
And then, of course, during the night you'd have a little thorn enclosure which you kept the oxen
in.
And probably a lion would come around and roar upwind of it and poof! All your oxen had gone
and the lion's nailed two of them in the dark, you know.
But it was I suppose that was a part of the fun, wasn't it? You know, it was exciting.
PAXMAN: That's a great picture.
- This is your father, is it? - That's my father.
- PAXMAN: With a dead lion.
- With a dead lion.
You know, these lions, they didn't sit around like you see them in a park nowadays.
The lions in those days knew how to look after themselves and there wasn't a park.
PAXMAN: But even the lions aren't what they were, eh? SETH-SMITH: No, no, no,
everything's fallen by the wayside.
PAXMAN: Do you think this policy of trying to attract enterprising people with a bit of money
to invest, do you think it worked for this country? SETH-SMITH: I think it worked in the long
term.
Because, unlike today, where much of the developing world is developing as a result of aid and
packages of money, the donor thing There were no donors.
The country was developed on the backs of the settlers.
People like my father.
PAXMAN: Which one of these is your father? SETH-SMITH: That's my father.
They came out and they brought all their family money out and it was all sunk into this country.
PAXMAN: Do you think they had a sense of what the purpose of the British Empire was? Or
were they just concerned with getting on with their lives? I think there was a quite a lot of that.
Englishmen were proud of having an empire, being a part of it.
And I think that every family in England round about that time had a member of it who was
serving, or doing development somewhere in the empire.
Be it an administrator in India, or a policeman in Nigeria, or a farmer in Kenya, or a gold miner
in South Africa.
Everyone had a member of the family, and so they were all very aware of of, uh, Britain's
empire, and they were proud of it then.
Are you proud of it? Yes, there's nothing to be ashamed of.
Nothing to be ashamed of.
PAXMAN: One African writer dismissed the white farmers as "Parasites in paradise, "living off
land they had taken from others.
" Whatever the justice of that remark, the white settlers of Kenya felt they had a right to the land
they were developing.
This was their home now.
It would be half a century before this tension found a bloody resolution as the country stumbled
towards independence.
It was the British who created the country's capital, Nairobi.
The city still has plenty of the rough and ready feel of the early days.
Not much more than a century ago, this was just a strip of swampy ground.
No one planned Nairobi as a capital city, it just happened.
It happened because it was a railway stop on one of the most ambitious lines in the entire British
Empire - the Lunatic Line.
(HORN BLARING) For the empire in 1900, making yourself at home meant building a railway.
The line ran 600 miles from the coast, through Nairobi, all the way to Lake Victoria.
It was built to bring British goods to the interior and raw materials out to ports on the coast.
It would encourage British farmers to come out here and settle.
There was plenty to merit the title, Lunatic Line.
There was the cost, £534 million in today's money.
There was the engineering required to allow a train to climb from sea level into the mountains,
and then to plunge down into the great Rift Valley.
And to construct 1,200 bridges on the way.
But it wasn't the British who built the railway, it wasn't even the Africans.
This remarkable feat was the work of 32,000 labourers, craftsmen and engineers brought in by
the British from India.
They knew how to build railways there.
(HORN BLARING) Soon the Lunatic Line was carrying coffee and tea, sisal and wheat from the
settlers' farms to the coast.
The building of the railway was a staggering feat, but it came at a staggering cost in human life.
Two-and-a-half thousand workers were killed during its construction by malaria, accidents, or
man-eating lions.
What was the attraction for someone like your great-grandfather and his brother when they came
here? Well, I mean, to be honest, uh I don't think we were very well off back at home, okay?
'Cause I mean, why would you want to leave the comfort of your home to come into this
wilderness - harsh African conditions, vegetation, a strange land to them.
Uh, it wasn't very easy 'cause water was scarce, especially when they were going across the Taru
desert toward Tsavo.
They didn't have water for showering for, like, weeks.
You know, they would just get enough water just to drink.
And what my great-grandfather told me is, when the carriage would come for their drinking
water, they would pretend to be clumsy about drinking their water 'cause basically they'd go and
scoop it out.
And they'd pretend to be clumsy about it and in the process have a little shower, you know, like,
literally throw the water on them.
And dangerous, dangerous, dangerous, isn't it? Yes, wilderness, wild animals are often Tsavo.
- Tsavo is a place? - Yes, man-eaters.
I've read accounts of these attacks by the man-eating lions.
And they talk about men being dragged from their tents and their colleagues being able to hear
them as they're eaten alive - by the lions.
- Yes, yes.
Horrifying, isn't it? Let me ask you a political question.
The fact that you and your community are now a very, very long way from where, naturally, you
came from and you're in this alien culture, was what the British did in bringing you here a good
thing or a bad thing? Um That's a good question.
To be honest I have no regrets for being here.
And uh, when people ask me, you know, "Who are you? Where are you from?" You know, I say,
"Kenya is my home.
" And I have no regrets for coming here.
PAXMAN: The Indian workers who built the Kenya railway were part of a bigger empire story -
the shifting of populations around the globe to meet the empire's need for labour.
In the 18th century, Africans were taken as slaves to the sugar plantations of the West Indies.
Their descendants now people those islands.
In the 19th century, Tamils from South India were sent to pick tea on estates in Sri Lanka, or tap
rubber in Malaya.
All had to make new homes in Britain's ever-growing empire.
The world still lives with the consequences of these great population shifts.
In the 20th century, Indians came to play a vital part in the Kenyan economy as shopkeepers and
professionals.
(PEOPLE CHEERING) Then, on the 12th of December, 1963, Kenya gained independence from
Britain.
(CHANTING) Now, Indians in Kenya were seen as unwelcome relics from the days of British
rule.
Many of them feared for their future and turned to their former colonial masters to provide a new
home.
NEWSREEL: The Asian community prepared to leave, Britain was their destination.
The Kenya government had not pulled its punches in telling the British-passport-holding Asians
they were not wanted.
Asian shopkeepers were left with little alternative but to wind up their businesses and seek new
roots.
The airport was jammed with those lucky enough to get flight tickets to Britain.
PAXMAN: Though not everyone in Britain was happy about it at the time, the empire was
coming home.
Many Kenyan-Asians chose to settle in the Midlands, in cities like Leicester.
In the process they transformed the face of urban Britain.
Today, over a quarter of Leicester's population is of Asian origin.
They've worked hard and done well, as in Kenya, specialising in running shops and businesses.
(HINDI SONG PLAYING) - Oh, you must be Rameela.
- Welcome, Jeremy.
- Come on in.
- Thank you.
Thank you.
Rameela Shah came to Britain from Kenya when she was 14.
She's now a Labour councillor in Leicester.
Jeremy, I would like to introduce you to my husband, Suresh.
How do you do? Hello, I'm Jeremy.
Her husband Suresh was also brought up in Kenya.
That's my mother-in-law.
How do you do? Very good to see you.
His mother brought the family over in 1968.
His sister, Madhu, was 18 when she left Kenya and went to India.
But she didn't feel at home there and followed her family to England.
SURESH: That's the model of our shop in Kenya.
PAXMAN: That was the family business, was it? Yeah.
That's me.
PAXMAN: Oh, you're the little boy, yeah.
- That's my elder brother.
- Uh-huh.
- SURESH: That's my dad at the back.
- Mm-hm.
That's my mum at the back.
- So, this is Grandma over here? - SURESH: Yeah.
- When slightly younger, eh? - (WOMEN LAUGHING) Must have taken all of you some getting
used to.
- Come from the warmth of East Africa - MADHU: It's so cold here.
At that time I think not many people even had central heating, - and used to use charcoal fires -
RAMEELA: Or paraffin heaters.
- There were no bathrooms.
- PAXMAN: No bathrooms? No, people had to go public bath at that time.
When we stayed at my aunt's house, she says, "You won't have "You can't have a bath like you
used to have twice a day in Kenya.
"It'll be once a week now, we'll have to go city centre to the public baths.
" Public bath, yes.
PAXMAN: You must have thought we were really dirty people, did you? It must have been very
strange.
No bath, no toilet.
- Toilet we had.
- No, we didn't.
- Toilet - Outside.
- Outside.
- Outside.
PAXMAN: When you think about the British Empire, most people, as far as I can see in this
country, have a pretty black-and-white view about what the British Empire was.
And what they're taught very often is that it was pretty much a bad thing, imposing your rule on
somebody else.
What do you guys think about the empire? In one way, I think we thank the British Empire, you
know, for - PAXMAN: You thank the British Empire? - Yeah, thank them, because where we
are at the moment and what we have and everything MADHU: We have a job Yeah, and it's
because of that, you know, everything what we've achieved and we are.
So, we got to thank the British Empire.
Do you know how politically incorrect you are? When I came here, there was a job, if you want
to work.
You can go to college, study.
I think wherever British people were and they went, and whichever country they ruled, the
country was good.
You know, it was ruled good and it was better.
And there was no corruption, nothing.
That's what my feelings are.
As soon as the British left any country, I think they just went downhill.
That's my own feelings about it.
(CELEBRATORY MUSIC PLAYING) PAXMAN: It's Diwali night in Leicester.
The festival of lights.
ALL: Happy Diwali! Over 35,000 people come here each year for the biggest Diwali celebration
outside India.
(LAUGHTER) For better or for worse, the empire changed the world.
But it changed Britain too.
For many of the peoples who were colonised, home is now here.
A land utterly different from the one the empire builders left behind.
PLAYING THE GAME

The British Empire lasted over 300 years.

It made Britain the most powerful nation in history.
It also shaped a fundamental part of the British character.
The empire offered the inhabitants of a grey, damp island in the North Atlantic, the prospect of
limitless adventure.
You might discover a diamond field and become unimaginably rich or you might perish in a
malarial swamp.
Either way, the thing to do was to "play up, play up, and play the game.
" Wherever the flag was planted went a passion for sport.
And the spirit of fair play.
Yes, yes, yes, yes! But sport was about more than just good clean fun Hey! it was an entire way
of looking at the world.
And it was one of the foundations of the empire.
In its wide-open spaces, a particular kind of British hero was born, exploring the unknown places
of the Earth, hungry for glory and adventure, courageous, intrepid and ruthless.
For the builders of empire, it was how you played the game that mattered more than victory,
mattered more than life itself.
To Britons in the mid-19th century, the heart of Africa was as mysterious and unexplored as the
dark side of the moon.
It proved a magnet for Victorian adventurers.
They were drawn by an obsession to get there first, and to put new names to new places.
On the 17th of June, 1857, two Englishmen arrived in East Africa.
Their names were Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke.
They dreamed of finding what had eluded explorers for millennia.
"Where did the most famous river in civilisation begin? "What was the source of the Nile?" The
two men could hardly have been more different.
Burton was 36 and already famous as a charismatic adventurer, a man who'd smuggled himself
into Mecca disguised as an Arab, a man known for liking to charm snakes and wrestling
alligators, a man who would eventually learn to speak 29 languages.
He had a slightly sinister expression to his face, which wasn't helped by a scar on each cheek,
where a javelin had pierced right through his face.
But it was the eyes that everyone remembered.
One poet described them as having a look of unspeakable horror.
His companion was his complete opposite.
John Hanning Speke was clean-living with a taste for tweed suits.
But he shared with Burton, the cast of mind that made the early pioneers of empire - an
obsessive, often foolhardy determination.
The pair came to loathe each other and would become bitter rivals.
Together, they travelled over 1,500 miles through swamp, desert and jungle.
For two years, they journeyed into the interior, battling dysentery, fever and wild animals,
scorched by the tropical sun.
You get a sense of how heroic this expedition was when you look at this 19th-century map of
Africa.
They had landed on the east coast and various places around here, Madagascar, Zanzibar,
Mozambique and so on.
They are known.
But inside Africa, the whole heart of Africa, is just marked "Unknown Parts".
Thousands upon thousands of square miles.
But somewhere in there was the source of the Nile.
When Burton went down with malaria, Speke pressed on alone.
And on the morning of August the 3rd, 1858, a year after they had set out, John Hanning Speke
looked out on a vast expanse of water, which he immediately, of course, named Lake Victoria,
and which he believed to be the source of the Nile.
"I no longer felt any doubt,"he wrote, "that the lake at my feet gave birth to that river, "whose
source has been the object of so many explorers.
" It was no more than a hunch, though, as it later turned out, he was right.
Despite the fact his evidence was really pretty thin, Speke hastened back to camp and six weeks
later was reunited with Burton.
"I've found the source of the Nile," he told him.
To which Burton replied, "Oh, no, you haven't.
" The two men agreed it would just be safest not to talk about it any more.
And for the remainder of their time in the jungle, they maintained a frosty, English silence on the
subject.
Victorian explorers like Speke and Burton were the pathfinders of empire, fanatical not for
power, but for knowledge and excitement.
And they helped to create the image of the classic British hero.
Their accounts of their travels inspired tales of adventure for a British public hungry for
excitement.
King Solomon's Mines was published in 1885 and was a huge bestseller.
Filmed many times since, it tells the story of three British adventurers who play the game to the
hilt.
Together, they cross Africa in search of the lost diamond mines of an ancient civilisation.
King Solomon's mine.
Its author, Henry Rider Haggard, was an old colonial.
He'd spent seven years in southern Africa.
The British public devoured his thrilling tale of danger and exploration.
It came complete with a map of his hero's journey into the unknown.
It's written in blood, a very good start, on a strip of fabric torn from a dying man's shirt.
And it shows the routes you have to take across the Kalekawe River, avoiding the bad water
between a couple of mountains called Sheba's Breasts, to the idols guarding the cave where the
treasure is.
In this quiet country house in Norfolk, Rider Haggard produced rip-roaring yarns for generations
of schoolboys to read under the bedclothes, as well they might.
His massively popular tale, She, comes with a powerful dash of Victorian male fantasy.
She, or "She who must be obeyed'", is an African goddess, white as it happens, made immortal
by killing her lovers.
The narrator is at last allowed a peep at her extravagant charms.
"For a moment, she stood still, her hands raised high above her head "and as she did so, "the
white robe slipped from her, down to her golden girdle, "bearing the blinding loveliness of her
form.
" This is enough to burst the buttons on your Victorian waistcoat, but what it does point up is the
way in which the empire opened up the possibility of all sorts of intoxications that were quite
unknown in respectable old England.
For Rider Haggard's heroes, the empire was a vast playground for a particular kind of British
male.
He's a fellow with a stiff upper lip, athletic and unpretentious.
He is fair, he is honest, and he's steady.
He's an amateur and you can find him all over the empire from Khartoum to Calcutta to Cape
Town.
If you needed three words to sum him up, "A decent chap.
" The decent chap was a contradiction.
Sturdy and self-reliant, yet ready to obey orders without hesitation.
He was nurtured in a place far removed from the heat and dust of the colonies, The English
public school.
The public school's heyday was the height of the Victorian era.
Schools like this took boys and turned them into the governing class of empire, the future
prefects of the colonial world.
They couldn't expect an easy ride.
Life in a Victorian public school was specifically designed to work against the comforts of
family life.
"The chief thing to be desired", said one headmaster, "is to remove the child from the noxious
influence of home.
" There was a good reason for this strict regime.
"It was to make the boys Christian gentlemen, "manly and enlightened, "finer specimens of
human nature than any other country could furnish.
" The words of Rugby's celebrated headmaster, Thomas Arnold.
This is the room known as Upper Bench, where Dr Arnold taught some of the sons of the
wealthier Victorian middle class.
But from what they were taught, you would never guess that Victorian scientists, engineers,
architects and explorers were about to forge the modern world.
It was rather the ancient Romans who provided the model.
Victorian headmasters and politicians didn't look forward but back to the classical world, in
which civilisation was spread at the point of the sword.
This is a timetable from 1899 and it shows that if you were a 16-year-old in the upper middle
part of the school, this will be what you'd study.
Divinity, Classics, Classics, Classics, Classics, Classics, Maths, Natural Science, Classics,
Maths, Classics, Classics, Classics, Classics, Classics, French, History, French, Maths, Classics,
Classics, Classics, Maths, Classics.
Small wonder, that is, one visitor to another public school remarked, not one boy in ten could tell
him where Birmingham was.
But a public school education wasn't really about learning where Birmingham was.
A particular idea of Christian values, discipline, respect for rules and ritual, these made up the
public school's true mission, the moulding of character.
But there was something else fostered here that would prove an even more powerful builder of
empire.
The British public school practised two religions - Christianity and sport.
No! According to one Victorian headmaster, sport was the rock on which Britain's greatness was
built.
Well played, son! "Englishmen," he said, "are not superior to Frenchmen or Germans "in brains
or industry or the science or applications of war.
"In the history of the British Empire, it is written that "England owes her sovereignty to her
sports.
" The values of organised games were said to express the values of empire.
Physical courage, team spirit, and, er, having a go.
And it was the game of cricket which gave rise to one of the most famous of all famous empire
poems.
"There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night "Ten to make and the match to win "A bumping
pitch and a blinding light "An hour to play and the last man in "And it's not for the sake of a
ribboned coat "Or the selfish hope of a season's fame "But his Captain's hand on his shoulder
smote: "'Play up! Play up! And play the game!"' Oh! Beautiful shot! In the poem, the scene shifts
from the cricket field to a bloody battle in the African desert.
The schoolboy is now a soldier, his comrades in arms dead or dying all around him.
But then his spirits soar as he hears his captain's voice calling, "Play up! Play up! And play the
game!" It's majestic and it's idiotic at the same time, to our eyes at least, because war isn't a
game.
And yet the fact that the poem could be written in that way tells us something rather profound
about the way that the British viewed their empire.
The battle which had inspired the poem was fought by British troops in the biggest country in
Africa, Sudan.
In such remote outposts, the heroes of empire achieved sometimes mythical status.
In 1884, the empire found a hero who played the game with a passion that bordered on madness.
He was a soldier who showed that heroic failure could be even more inspiring than victory.
Charles Gordon was a maverick, a general who disobeyed orders and wrote his own.
He became an imperial martyr in one of the strangest episodes in the history of empire, the Siege
of Khartoum.
The capital was surrounded by thousands of Islamic warriors, followers of a religious leader,
sworn to end British rule.
He called himself "the Mahdi'", "the Expected One".
The man sent from Britain to stop the Mahdi, roared on by the London newspapers, was already
a legendary soldier and a fervent Christian.
General Charles George Gordon was an extraordinary man.
He was thin, he was 51, he was unmarried and he had blue eyes with a faraway look in them.
Other places, they'd just have called him a crank, but as it was, the British public, whipped up by
the press, came to share his unshakable self-belief.
General Gordon could save Khartoum.
Gordon's orders weren't to fight, but to evacuate the British force there.
But Gordon himself had something rather more heroic in mind.
From the governor's palace, he announced he'd hold out against the Mahdi until reinforcements
were sent.
The siege of the city began.
The British government, furious with Gordon's disobedience, refused to act.
The press were outraged at this treatment of their hero.
"Gordon had been deserted!" they cried.
"He must be rescued.
" General Gordon was a hero, not just because he was a remarkable human being, but because he
seemed to express Britain's moral purpose.
The newspapers twigged that in a way that the prime minister William Gladstone didn't.
Gladstone didn't want a war, but the press and public opinion forced his hand.
The army hastily assembled a relief force, but by now it was too late.
After ten months under siege, every scrap of food in Khartoum had been eaten.
The dead lay in the streets, the Mahdi's men were at the gates.
The water level of the Nile, protecting the city, dropped further every day.
Holed up in the governor's palace, Gordon was relishing the part he'd given himself in this
imperial tragedy.
He lit candles in his rooms, almost offering himself as a target to the Mahdi snipers.
A companion begged him to stop.
"When God was portioning out fear "to the people of the world," he told him, "at last it came to
my turn and there was no fear left to give me.
"Go tell all the people of Khartoum that Gordon fears nothing.
"Because God has created him without fear.
" When the attack came, it was unbelievably savage.
The siege had lasted 317 days.
It ended in a bloodbath.
Gordon was killed in the battle.
The Mahdi's followers brought him Gordon's head as a trophy.
The General's body was never found.
Khartoum and the Sudan belonged to the Mahdi.
The Mahdi's great-grandson still lives in the city.
Ah! Good morning, good morning, good morning.
Good morning, Imam.
Good morning.
- Welcome to Sudan.
- Thank you for having us.
And you are most welcome.
What sort of a man was your great-grandfather? The Mahdi was a world-denying figure.
Although he wanted to change the world, he really wanted to change it in favour of the next
world.
So, actually, he was world-denying.
Almost the aspirations of a mystic.
Whatever kingdom he had in mind is a kingdom in heaven, not here.
When you think about it, they're really pretty similar individuals, aren't they? I mean, they're
both religious, they were both ascetic men.
Yes, yes.
Gordon, too, was a man who mortified the flesh and denied the world.
Indeed.
And he was a great hero in Britain in the way that the Mahdi was a popular hero here.
That's why there is this tragedy, that there was this conflict between people, who, in a world
differently organised, could have been very close friends.
What do you feel about General Gordon? He had no business combating people who were
asserting themselves.
The whole basis is that power corrupts.
And if you have power, it's very difficult for you to accept other human beings as your equal.
Because you feel that the very powerful situation makes you some kind of God.
Then you make the rules.
Then you make the Everything.
You decide everything.
And this, of course, is a great human failing.
If General Gordon had only done as he was told and evacuated Khartoum, he'd never have
become the imperial hero he immediately turned into, even though he would have saved
thousands of lives, his own included.
The people of Britain didn't much care whether or not Sudan was in the British Empire, but this
wasn't about a place, it was about an idea.
That idea was summed up in the famous painting Gordon's Last Stand by George W.
Joy.
Gordon waits at the top of the steps, careless in the face of death.
He makes no attempt to defend himself.
His pistol hangs loosely in his hand, his sword remains sheathed.
He looks his killers in the eye.
"Do what you have to do.
" This wasn't the death of an imperial conqueror, this was a martyrdom, sanctifying the empire
with heroism and personal sacrifice.
The memory of Gordon's solitary end refused to fade.
Even after the death of the Mahdi, the British public and the British press continued to thirst for
revenge.
The task fell to a man of a very different kind from Charles Gordon.
Even by his own men, Sir Horatio Herbert Kitchener was often described as a man with no soul.
The Daily Mail dubbed him "the Machine of the Sudan".
On the 1 st of January 1897, a meticulously organised force left Egypt for Khartoum, over 600
miles to the south.
The British force advanced steadily across the desert, laying a railway line behind it at the
amazing rate of a mile and a half a day.
On the train which followed came guns and troops and supplies.
And three gunboats which had been built on the Thames, disassembled and shipped up here to be
put back together on the banks of the Nile.
It was a relentless progress.
This was a new kind of warfare, the moment the empire entered the Machine Age.
Waiting in Khartoum were the Sudanese warriors, the dervishes, sometimes known as "whirling
dervishes" after their ecstatic religious dance.
Dervishes still gather on holy days in Khartoum to pray, celebrate and dance.
The great poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling, wrote about them in the imagined words of an
ordinary British soldier, who recognised that in some strange, foreign way the dervishes, too,
"played up, played up and played the game.
" Kipling's soldier raises an imaginary glass to his fearless foe.
"So 'ere's to you, Fuzzy-Wuzzy at your 'ome in the Soudan "You're a pore benighted 'eathen but
a first-class fightin' man" The dervishes might play the game in the old-fashioned way, but the
empire had moved on.
Kitchener would rely on rather more than fighting spirit to win in battle.
The British like to think of their military history in events like the Spanish Armada or the Battle
of Britain, when, outnumbered and outgunned, Britain survive by virtue of guts and ingenuity.
But the truth is that in most of Britain's empire wars, Britain's inventiveness in science and
industry had simply given it much better ways of killing people.
On Kitchener's desert train had come machine guns and thousands of rounds of ammunition.
At Omdurman near Khartoum, the stage was set for one of the bloodiest battles in the history of
empire.
The British forces were drawn up down by the Nile over there and the Mahdi's men held the high
ground.
Winston Churchill was a young officer with Kitchener and he described coming out one morning
and seeing the entire hillside moving.
Thousands upon thousands of dervishes advancing on a front he reckoned was four miles wide
under innumerable banners, and with the sun glinting on the tips of their spears.
Spears against machine guns.
The result was never in doubt.
Kitchener was watching the battle from horseback.
At about 11:30, so five hours after the fighting began, he put his binoculars away and remarked
that the enemies seemed to have been given "a good dusting".
They then broke for lunch.
The casualties were about 10,000 Sudanese dead to 48 British.
The body of General Gordon's foe, the Mahdi, was dug up and thrown into the Nile.
Kitchener was presented with the Mahdi's skull as a trophy of war.
The story went that he planned to use it as an inkstand.
Queen Victoria was not amused.
Ornamental skulls weren't her idea of fair play, even if Kitchener had added a million square
miles to her empire.
Where Gordon had failed, Kitchener had succeeded spectacularly.
But it wasn't Kitchener, the Machine of the Sudan, who became the empire's romantic hero.
That role belonged to Charles George Gordon.
Idealistic, reckless and slightly deranged.
And, now, very dead.
That was how the empire really liked their heroes.
Heroic disaster always seemed to stir British hearts quite as much as victory.
Whether it was the explorer Captain Cook, killed by Hawaiian islanders in 1779.
Or Sir John Franklin, frozen to death trying to find the Northwest Passage through the Arctic.
Or the Charge of the Light Brigade, riding fearlessly and pointlessly into enemy cannon fire in
the Crimea.
They all played up, played up and played the game.
Tales of heroism provided spectacular stories for the citizens of what was soon calling itself "the
Mother Country".
Publishers were churning them out well into the 20th century.
One of the main outlets for this kind of material would have been the market of Sunday school
prizes.
Um, giving things as gifts to good spellers in class.
"The Romance of Colonization.
" Wouldn't be a title of a book you'd see today.
I don't think you would see that very often, no.
Whoa, there are loads of them.
I think it very much reflects the way that people saw the world and, you know, one of the major
elements is, of course, Britishness, patriotism, excitement in the empire.
I think that the striking thing is certainly the message of the text, which is, this is all about
bringing civilisation to benighted parts of the world.
But, then, just the glorious and alluring images.
Society was awash with this kind of comic or cigarette card collection, annuals.
A lot of people would find all this stuff unspeakable now, wouldn't they? Ghastly racist
propaganda.
I think it tells us a lot about the world view of the time.
It's also interesting in magazines like Chums, there were so many of these Chums! What a great
name.
- Dozens and dozens - At the mercy of the witch doctors.
This one, of course, is full of militaristic heroism of the British Armed Forces.
And, of course, the standard themes about English history.
And the wider world in the empire.
"A fight with the Zulus.
" Um, here, for example, there are copies of The Wide World, which, to all intents and purposes,
are very much the same stuff yet again.
When you start looking in the magazine and you get adverts for Canadian Club Whisky or
Burlington belt trusses or briar pipes that you realise the target audience.
Chap who needs a truss is going to be damn-all use in some of these situations! Such tales might
satisfy the armchair imperialist at home.
But out in the colonies, playing the game was something to be done more energetically.
For the British, sport was part of the civilising mission of empire the gift of the Mother Country
to her colonies, whether it involved chasing a ball, smashing it with a racquet, or whacking it
with a club.
The sporting gospel was carried to the farthest flung corners of the empire.
Hong Kong's life as a British colony began in the 1840s as a trading post for nearby China.
Even here, there was always a place for one of the emire's great obsessions, horseracing.
They used to say that when the French took a colony, they built a restaurant.
When the Germans took one, they built a road.
When the British pitched up, they built a racecourse.
Happy Valley Racecourse in the heart of Hong Kong is a legacy of the days of empire.
Over 20,000 people come here every Wednesday night.
It was the British who developed the razzmatazz of the modern turf.
Today's inhabitants are such enthusiastic gamblers that bookies here take as much money in one
night as in the whole of Ascot Week.
I am going with Number 7, Something Special, in the next one.
Let's find out what the minimum bet is.
Can I have $10? It's about a pound, I think.
$10 on Something Special, Number 7, in the 8:10.
- $10 on Number 7, right? - Number 7, Something Special.
Hey! Whoo! I can't believe it! That is amazing! I won! I won! It's amazing! I won! First time!
$36, which is about just over three quid.
We're not even gonna get a round of drinks out of it! Wherever in the empire sport was played, it
was supposed to bind subject peoples to their colonial masters.
But the spirit of fair play and the interests of empire would eventually clash head-on.
The West Indian island of Jamaica had been a British colony since 1655.
Yes, yes, yes, yes! The British introduced cricket to Jamaica in the 1830s.
Ooh! It soon seemed to enter the bloodstream of the island.
He's got a good eye, that boy in the yellow shirt, hasn't he? - How old are you? - Ten.
Ten? You play much cricket? Who's the best cricketer here? - You are! - No, him! Who's the
best? You're the best cricketer, are you? - Me.
- You're the best one.
- And him.
- And me.
You're the two champs.
But there was a problem here.
How could a game, which prided itself on fairness work in an empire divided between rulers and
ruled, and, therefore, very obviously unfair? Cricket in the West Indies would become not a
unifying force, but a symbol of oppression.
In 19th-century Jamaica, whites owned the land, blacks worked on it.
While cricket was supposed to be good for subject races, at that time, black and white rarely
played together.
It's a practice day at Sabina Park, the home of Jamaica's Kingston Cricket Club.
When it was formed in 1863, it was a place for white men to play the game.
Even when black and white began to play on the same side, racial tensions in the game remained.
No black player was ever selected to captain the national team.
Whites were chosen to bat, while blacks were relegated to bowling or fielding.
It wasn't quite the done thing for white men to do a lot of running around in the tropics.
And besides which, there was a distinction between brawn bowling - and brains - batting.
Batting was for white men.
Change had to come.
It arrived in the person of Frank Worrell, who, in 1960, became the first black player to captain
the West Indies team for an entire series.
When Worrell brought his team to England, they showed they could play the game rather better
than their hosts.
The Oval will have never have known a scene like this.
Victory in the series by three matches to one confirmed the West Indies as the most powerful
side in the world.
It was generally felt that here is the right person at last to lead a West Indies team.
Because I think before there wasn't that unity based on who was appointed captain, who was
appointed vice-captain.
Now, it was just felt that the players have a captain they can fight for.
So I think it was greeted with cheers throughout the entire Caribbean.
And I think many people are saying, "At last we have the right man to lead.
" It was like a Mandela moment.
It certainly was.
That's why I said that.
- Free at last, free at last.
- Free at last, at last, at last! Students now become the teachers.
England taught the West Indies cricket.
And it was a grand opportunity for the students, now, to reverse that process.
And in the mind of many of the West Indian players, this was, you know, the turning point, I
think, for everyone.
Sort of like sweet revenge.
In the end, the British idea of fair play undermined the very notion of empire itself.
If a black cricket captain, why not a black prime minister? In 1962,Jamaica became the first
Caribbean island to gain independence.
And through the 1960s all over the empire, from the West Indies to Fiji, the Union Jack came
down.
As the empire crumbled, so did reverence for the things and attitudes it held dear.
The uniforms, the flag, the moustaches This wasn't playing the game, this was having a laugh.
A laugh at military valour.
At sporting prowess.
At the thrill of adventure and exploration.
The empire was gone.
The only way to cope with its loss was to see its absurdity.
Well, ladies, shall we retire? We'll be in to spank you later, you firm-buttocked young Amazons,
you.
I'm terribly sorry.
I don't know what came over me.
All right, Morrison, I think you know what to do.
Yes, of course, sir.
I apologise to you all.
Pity, really, he seemed a nice enough young man.
Now, why are these Why is it funny? Because I think it's such an absurd thing that they're doing.
And yet they all take it absolutely seriously.
And that's what the empire was all about, really, wasn't it? Doing very, very strange things
absolutely seriously.
Clive, what are you doing? I say, Cooper, what's going on? Oh, er, it's nothing really, sir.
He was just explaining I was passing the port from left to right.
This whole thin veneer of control, of which passing the port is one, being gallant about ladies is
the other.
You know, if that starts to crack, the whole thing just collapses.
And I think it's just because of the formality of it.
And, of course, the fact they go and shoot themselves, which is the kind of ultimate logical end
to letting down the empire.
Where did the idea of Ripping Yarns come from? Well, really from all those books.
It was a literary idea.
It was all those books that were written sort of in the '20s and '30s.
And maybe before the war, even, which I vaguely knew about, which are all stories of pluck,
heroism, courage, duty.
So why did you find it funny? Was it just because you were young and truculent? When I started
to think about this, with a sort of clear light of the '60s upon us all.
I mean, suddenly we were free to talk about anything we wanted to.
Um, I suddenly thought that, yes, it was, it was really absurd.
And it was a rich vein.
And a lot of people, kind of, obviously shared that, that literary upbringing and understood quite
Understood what we were on about.
What's funny is being funny in a place where you're not supposed to be funny.
So is all that's left of empire just a bit of a joke? Not entirely.
Hello, you boy in the corner there.
You ought to be a Boy Scout.
You're a fine-looking fellow, and I know you'd make a jolly good backwoodsman, by the look of
you.
You're ugly enough, anyway.
Robert Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts in 1907.
This die-hard imperialist wanted to enlist ordinary British boys to the service of the empire, not
just the officer class of the great public schools.
He gave them military-style uniforms and funny rituals, so these boys, too, could play up, play
up and play the game.
Ah, good.
Today the Scouts are going as strong as ever.
Hey! Here at an annual camp in Norfolk, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts learn about living in the
wild Oh, good.
staying healthy, and becoming more confident.
Okay, wait, next time Baden-Powell had toyed with the idea of calling his organisation, "Young
Knights of the Empire".
But by the time I joined it, it had nothing to do with empire.
What it fed on and continues to feed on is young people's appetite for adventure, for sleeping out,
for cooking under the stars, for cleaning your teeth with a twig in a stream.
Can I join your breakfast? - Yes.
- Sit down.
Good! What do you learn in Scouts that you wouldn't learn somewhere else? It's just like some
things you learn in school, like English and Maths, but, like, you don't learn that in Scouts.
It's like other things, like adventure and A lot of other things that just might come in handy in
life.
- Do you still do knots? - Yeah, we do knots.
- Yeah.
- Who's got a bit of a rope? You can all demonstrate your knots.
- Put your hand in there.
- Okay, go on.
That's it.
Very good! Get me out.
And do they still have that, you know this What was it called? The Scout Oath or the Scout
Promise? - Promise.
Yeah.
- And how does it go? "I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and to the Queen, "to help
other people and to keep Scout Law.
" Do you have a good deed every day? No? Aren't you supposed to help little old ladies across
the road? No, they can do it themselves.
The Scout movement now numbers over 41 million boys and girls from North America, to
Europe, to Africa.
The Scouts were set up to protect the empire from the fleshy corruption which Baden-Powell
saw threatening it.
But they've turned into something entirely different.
International and inclusive, while still fostering the same spirits of self-reliance and public
spiritedness.
And here's to 'em, I say.
MAKING A FORTUNE

JEREMY PAXMAN: Welcome to one of the most densely populated places on Earth.
When Britain took Hong Kong in 1842, it was just a cluster of fishing villages.
In a few decades, they had made it one of the busiest, richest trading posts in the world.
The British Empire wasn't just about conquest and government, and chaps in shorts telling
foreigners what to do, it was also about money and profit.
It began with a few unscrupulous adventurers and it grew into a vast network that spanned the
globe from Britain to Australia, from Calcutta to Jamaica, from Australia to Hong Kong.
Off the coast of China, British traders made fortunes from ships freighted with addictive drugs.
And they helped themselves to the riches of ancient India.
Money flowed to Britain from piracy in the Caribbean.
And from estates worked by slaves taken from Africa.
Empire trade and empire theft helped make Britain a world capital of money it still is today.
On a hot afternoon in September 1668, a fleet of nine ships sailed home to harbour in the
Caribbean.
There was wild celebrating on board, for these "Brethren of the Coast", as they called
themselves, were returning from a smash-and-grab raid on the Spanish town of Portobello in
Central America.
They had stolen a staggering 25,000 pieces of eight, that's the Spanish dollar minted in pure
silver.
It was worth about £10 million at today's prices.
Leading the so-called "Brethren" was Henry Morgan, a ferocious, hard-drinking Welshman from
Monmouthshire, who made his living by theft and violence.
Men like Morgan were the founding fathers of the British Empire, for it began not in trying to
rule other countries, but in robbing them.
But this was piracy with a twist.
It even had a different, more respectable name - privateering.
It worked like this.
The government licensed merchant ships to attack and rob the country's enemies.
And in exchange, the government got a share of the stolen goods.
This was empire building on the cheap.
The freelancers took the risk, the government took the money.
The pirates' victims were Spanish ships.
These were laden with gold from their colonies in the Americas.
Morgan's base was a place that had recently been seized from the Spanish.
The island of Jamaica.
The British set up a new capital here - Port Royal in the south of the island.
With its vast number of taverns, brothels and rowdiness, it quickly earned the name "The Sodom
of the New World.
" Then all that came to a sudden end.
Peace was declared between Britain and Spain.
But Jamaica stayed in British hands.
Henry Morgan saw the way things were going and decided to diversify.
He hung up his cutlass and bought 4,000 acres of land on which he built a second fortune.
The empire had been conceived in robbery, but it grew fat on the cultivation of sugar.
Theft was the past, trade was the future.
The British at home had developed a lust for sugar, to sweeten the novelties arriving from the
tropics - coffee, chocolate and tea.
The British were already becoming a nation of sugar addicts.
Sugar from Jamaican plantations could satisfy their sweet tooth.
But the island's population was tiny, and the plantations needed vast amounts of labour.
The answer to the problem lay in the traffic of human beings from Africa.
The slave trade.
The British didn't introduce slavery to the Caribbean, but they took to it with enthusiasm.
Traders bought slaves in Africa, and then shipped them thousands of miles across the world.
Many died in the packed, filthy, airless cargo decks.
Sugar was a back-breaking crop to harvest.
The cane had to be cut down and then stripped of its foliage, and then transported to the mill
often in intense, blazing heat.
The plantations devoured slaves.
Within three years of their arriving here, a third of them would be dead.
By 1775, a million and a half men, women and children had been forcibly transported from
Africa to the British West Indies.
Their descendants now people these islands.
Treating human beings as beasts of burden made the owners of sugar plantations rich.
This is the planter's house on the Good Hope Estate, built in 1755.
Its owner was 23 when he bought it.
He became the wealthiest man in Jamaica, owning over 10,000 acres of land and 3,000 slaves.
The sugar planters, known as the plantocracy, enjoyed enormous power.
Each estate was its own little tyranny.
And since slaves enjoyed no rights, the planters were free to behave as dictators.
One was Thomas Thistlewood.
He'd been a farm-worker in England.
Slavery turned him into a man of means.
He fancied himself a man of letters too and kept a diary.
Even though we all think we are familiar with the routine horrors of the slave trade, when you
read what some of these slave owners did, it really does make your stomach heave.
Here are three accounts of punishments meted out by Thistlewood in three months in 1756.
"Derby catched eating canes.
"Had him well flogged and pickled, then made Hector shit in his mouth.
"Rubbed Hazat with molasses and exposed him naked to the flies all day, "and to the mosquitoes
all night.
"Flogged Punch well, "and then washed and rubbed in salt pickle, lime juice and bird pepper,
"made Negro Joe piss in his eyes and mouth.
" Thistlewood kept a tally of what was known as "nutmegging," the rape of female slaves.
Something he did, by his own reckoning, on 3,852 occasions.
He would allow his guests to do the same.
When these slave owners went to church on a Sunday, they doubtless did so believing they were
good Christian folk.
They behaved as they did because they didn't regard their slaves as fellow human beings, but as
their property to do with as they pleased.
More than two centuries later, the memory of slavery hasn't faded.
How long ago did your family originally come to this country? In 1760.
According to my grandmother.
And how did they come here? The first one in that lineage, they remembered, in 1760, when they
came over, was that actually he was taken from the Gold Coast, in Africa.
- As a slave.
- As a slave, yes.
And he ended up in Jamaica.
I think on a good old plantation.
And a lot of times, when my grandmother talked, she would actually cry.
Because even, like We would stand here in a mill like this, they would put the cane in one hand,
- and a horse would be - A horse.
Yes, would be turning it, turning the mill.
And when they turned it, this part would take in the cane, and squeeze it, squeeze the juice out.
The juice comes out of the funnel? The juice now would come out from At the front of it here.
And so when they were working as slaves, and they were working for 12 hours, and he would
fall asleep.
He would have to have an axe here.
That if his hand, if he falls asleep on it, and he made a mistake, and his hand go in here, he would
have to chop it off.
PAXMAN: Yeah.
You know, when Someone in my extended family, probably was involved in bringing your
ancestors over here as slaves.
- Yeah, um - Doesn't it make you feel furious? No, I think, for now, we are past that in this
generation.
But let's be realistic.
You were, as slaves, being used as beasts of burden, - essentially.
- Yes, yes, it's hard to understand why some people would want to do that to other people, or
want to say, "You should work for me for all of your time, for generations, "and I'm never going
to pay you.
" I hope that Britain one day, will look at us here in Jamaica and say, "Jamaica made us rich,
Jamaica was the sugar capital of the world.
" PAXMAN: Eventually, the people in Britain became so outraged by what was happening in the
Caribbean, that the slave trade was abolished in 1807.
But the wealth of the fledgling empire didn't come from slavery alone.
There were riches of a different kind to be found on the other side of the world.
In the 18th century, this was the home of India's ruling dynasty.
The first British visitors were awestruck by what they found.
Places like this must have been absolutely amazing to encounter.
You'd arrive from somewhere cold and bleak in the northern hemisphere, and one can only
imagine what effect it must have had upon some young lad on the make.
There was a throne somewhere in here.
The Emperor's throne, the Peacock Throne.
Which was encrusted with jewels, including the Kohinoor diamond.
An inscription on the wall Oh, that's it up there.
In Arabic, which says, "If there be paradise on Earth, this is it.
" The effect must have been astonishing.
The earliest Britons in India were traders, men who had gone there for spices, cotton, calicos and
indigo.
The East India Company, which soon dominated trade, raised its own army of local troops.
In 1744, a young man arrived in India to work as a clerk for the company.
His name was Robert Clive.
Ambitious, short-tempered and impatient, Clive could see that wielding a sword was a faster
route to riches than pushing a pen.
Clive taught himself to be a soldier.
He learned, for example, that the best way to repel troops mounted on elephants, should you ever
need to know, is to fire a volley of shots at the animals until they stampede.
But his greatest talent of all was, in his own words, for politics, chicanery, intrigue and the Lord
knows what.
At the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Clive outwitted the ruler of the state of Bengal, a man who had
dared to challenge the power of the East India Company.
Clive then walked into the prince's treasury, and coolly helped himself to a fortune.
He then shipped it in a fleet of 75 barges to the company's headquarters in Calcutta.
Soon afterwards, a new word entered the English language.
It was a Hindi word - "Loot".
When Clive returned to England, he was met with the characteristic British disdain for men who
make their money in a hurry.
But when hauled before Parliament, he simply said, "An opulent city lay at my mercy.
"Its vaults were thrown open to me alone, "piled on either hand with gold and jewels.
"Mr Chairman, at this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
" With wealth came power.
The East India Company gradually took control of huge swathes of the land.
The Company men were the new princes of India.
They built themselves great palaces in the British style on Calcutta's main street.
Many of them still stand today.
As for Clive, he became Governor of Bengal.
So what had begun in plunder, had ended in government.
And so it was to prove right across the world.
It was the greed of Robert Clive and men like him which built Britain an empire.
(CROWD CLAMOURING) Oh, what's that? - What is this? - Tamarind.
- Tamarind.
- Ah, tamarind.
18th-century India provided Britain with a spectacular array of goods.
Sheer variety.
I mean, of course, I have no idea what most of these things are.
There's an awful lot of this yellow stuff.
I wonder what it is.
It was the spice trade that had brought early travellers to India.
Chillies, pepper, even turmeric, are familiar tastes now, but in the early days of empire, they
were an exotic luxury.
Pretty good.
Crikey! It is quite strong.
India offered Europe a whole new world of taste and colour.
Must be the pepper.
And it wasn't just spices, but fabrics and furniture too.
A network of global commerce was bringing the cultures of distant lands closer together.
Mind you, uh A bit of a traffic jam here.
Sorry.
It's no surprise to us now that spices come from India, but there was one Indian product that
became so familiar, it's hard to believe it didn't originate in England.
Chintz.
Good morning.
How do you do? - Niranjan.
He's the king of chintz.
- Niranjan, very good to see you.
- And that's Morolina.
- And you're a princess of chintz.
Okay, good.
Excellent.
Chintz is calico cloth that's been painted or printed with a wood block.
Here on the outskirts of Calcutta, they've kept the traditional way of making it alive.
They're still using techniques pioneered centuries ago.
I'll be honest with you, chintz has a very bad image in my mind.
It's this sort of thing It's the sort of thing grannies have on their sofas.
- Yes.
- I mean, that's not just what chintz is.
No, no, no.
This is what has been, in later times, adapted to the taste of the British people, - and has been
done on the screen - Oh, it's our fault! Yeah, it's screen-printed.
So, therefore, if you go back to approximately the 16th, 17th century, this is what is the original
Indian chintz, which is sprinkled, sprayed, hand-painted, and hand-block-printed fabric.
So, it's a drawing with the pen, and using natural dye process to fill in the various colours.
Britain first fell in love with chintz in the 17th century.
Nothing that Britain produced then could match the rich patterns and colours of this Bengali
textile.
Astonishingly labour-intensive, isn't it? Yes, it is.
- You need more patience.
- You certainly do.
The worst thing is you can't make a single mistake ever.
So, you put all the colours on like this and what's the finished product? - I have pieces, I will
show you.
- Okay.
These are the final products.
- PAXMAN: This is your work, is it? - Yes, sir, this is my work.
- This is a traditional pattern.
- It's a traditional pattern.
So is this the sort of thing that would have been shipped to Britain and to Europe? Yes.
They're brilliant colours and a brilliant design.
Thank you very much.
You can see why people went crazy for it.
Thank you, sir.
At one time, chintz made up three quarters of India's exports.
It became so popular that British cloth-makers protested.
In 1720, it was actually banned in Britain.
And after that, the British started making their own.
For more than three centuries, it was trade, not conquests, which brought new colonies into the
empire, though it was often trade at the end of a gun or a sword.
Private companies run by speculators and the odd crook, took over huge chunks of foreign
territory.
They ran them as they liked, raising armies, doing deals with local rulers.
The East India Company was the grandest of them.
Canada was opened up by the Hudson's Bay Company, which traded in skins and furs.
And the African Lakes Corporation bought and sold the bounty of swathes of Africa.
Most were accountable to men sitting in offices thousands of miles away.
At the heart of empire was the City of London, the centre of a spider's web of global trade.
This was where money was made, goods bought and sold.
At the London Metal Exchange, they've been doing business in this way for over 200 years.
It all looks utter chaos down there, with people shouting and making strange gestures, and
talking into two or three telephones at the same time.
But behind it all is an important clue about why Britain became such a powerful force in the days
of the empire.
On floors like this, traders speculated on tin from Malaya, cotton from India, wool from
Australia, gold from South Africa.
From the 17th century, Britain took the lead in global banking, finance and insurance.
City bankers and merchants made London the pivot of the world's entire commercial system.
And London held that lead well into the 20th century.
By the end of the 19th century, more than half the world's trade was financed in British pounds.
Victorian investors grew rich trading in things on the other side of the world, things they never
saw, or perhaps never wanted to see.
The Merchant Banking House of Anthony Gibbs and Sons made their fortune trading in a very
unglamorous commodity - bird poo.
It was called guano, and it was collected from some islands off the coast of South America.
Hence it was said, "The House of Gibbs made their dibs, "by selling the turds of foreign birds.
" Guano was gathered off the coast of Peru and sold as fertiliser.
It made a fortune for British businessmen.
The Gibbs family made so much money from guano they were able to bankroll much of the
Peruvian economy.
Victorian Britain, in effect, had two empires.
One run by politicians, the other by money men like Gibbs.
In South America, British banks supplied governments with credit.
British companies built railways across Argentina.
British settlers bought huge ranches and raised cattle.
But the real killing to be made in Queen Victoria's empire was from something far more
pernicious than bird droppings.
And it made some Britons rich beyond their wildest dreams.
The former British island colony of Hong Kong is so densely packed with banking and trading
firms, it's known as the world's most vertical city.
The place lives, eats, and breathes money.
The story of how Hong Kong came to be British reflects the empire's often ruthless pursuit of
profit.
It's an extraordinary story, even if it is one of the most shameful in British history.
And yet this dark episode began innocently enough.
It was born from the English passion for a cup of tea.
PAXMAN: Hello! MAN: Hello.
Hello.
PAXMAN: How many types of tea do you have? Mainly it's all the Chinese tea we have.
- PAXMAN: All of them? - Yes.
PAXMAN: Oh, that smells lovely, doesn't it? - Would you like to have a cup of tea? - Oh, I'd
love to have one, yes.
- This way, please.
- Thank you.
PAXMAN: In the early 19th century, China was virtually the only place tea was grown.
But there was a problem.
For three centuries, China had severely restricted trade with the West.
The British were desperate, and even sent a delegation to China.
They begged the emperor to open up his country and take some British products in exchange for
tea.
They presented him with all sorts of trinkets - games and curiosities, scientific instruments and
toys.
But he remained resolutely unimpressed.
"We possess all things," said the emperor.
"I set no value upon things strange or ingenious.
"And I have no use for your country's manufactures.
" But to get the tea they craved, the British had one thing to trade that many Chinese craved even
more.
Opium.
The drug was illegal in China, though the ban was widely ignored.
There were an estimated 12 million peasants addicted to opium.
The authorities there called it "A deadly poison ruining the minds and morals of our people.
" The British grew opium poppies in India.
There they processed it in factories on a colossal scale.
Finally, it was shipped to China and sold to smugglers.
With the profits, British traders bought Chinese tea.
Two men in particular made a handsome profit out of opium.
One was William Jardine, the son of a Scottish farmer.
The other was his business partner and fellow Scot, James Matheson.
From boats moored off the Chinese mainland, they sold industrial quantities of opium to be
trafficked into China.
At the time, selling opium wasn't illegal in Britain, nor did it cause them any moral qualms.
Jardine himself said that "Trading in opium "was the safest and most gentlemanly speculation
I'm aware of.
" And his partner Matheson thought it no more than morally equivalent to selling brandy or
champagne in Britain.
Business was just business.
In 1839, the Chinese emperor decided he'd had enough.
He ordered more than 1,000 tons of British-supplied opium to be seized and destroyed.
The British government was outraged.
It invoked a sacred and very convenient principle - the principle of free trade.
Britain had to be allowed to trade what and where she liked, especially in the case of opium.
Opium was making Britain rich.
It soon accounted for over a fifth of the income of the government of India.
Two mighty empires, each convinced of their own superiority, were now set on collision course.
The Opium Wars were about to begin.
Britain's first ocean-going iron warship, the Nemesis, built in Liverpool, was sent out to take on
the emperor's navy.
It helped destroy much of it in a single afternoon.
This was the modern world confronting an ancient one, sailing junks against steam-driven
gunboats.
The Chinese had no choice but to surrender and to open five ports to British trade.
China had been forced to enter the modern global economy.
Hong Kong was one of Britain's prizes from the Opium Wars.
Close to the Chinese mainland, it was perfect for trading with the newly opened Chinese Empire.
Matheson moved his headquarters to Hong Kong in January 1841.
Profits from the opium trade doubled.
So, this most bustling of British colonies was built on a drug which stupefies people.
Even more remarkably, the British continued to ship opium into China until well into the 20th
century.
Hong Kong grew at an astonishing rate.
A new bank was founded to service the China trade, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank.
We know it as HSBC.
Today, Hong Kong is a hothouse for global finance.
But what about the company that played such a large part in founding Hong Kong's prosperity,
Jardine, Matheson & Co? Well, they're still here, and still doing very well.
These are the modern headquarters of Jardine Matheson.
The round windows have earned it the local nickname, "The building of a thousand orifices.
" At least, that's the polite version.
Doubtless, somewhere in the foundations are buried the consciences of its founders.
In 1997, more than a century and a half after the Opium Wars, Hong Kong was returned to
China.
(PLAYING FANFARE) ANNOUNCER: The Union flag will now be lowered.
And the national flag of the People's Republic of China will be raised.
(APPLAUSE) MAN: All the important people in Hong Kong greet the first sight of their new
flag.
PAXMAN: When the British finally quit Hong Kong in 1997, they did so boasting they were
handing on a territory intimately wired into the world economy, the shameful origins of British
colonial presence here conveniently forgotten.
But China has never entirely forgotten how a foreign power forced it, at gunpoint, to allow
millions of its citizens to be turned into drug addicts.
The spoils of empire made Britannia rich.
From the colonies came gold and silver and spices.
Even plants.
And so vast was her empire, Britain could choose to grow them where she liked.
Tea bushes could be planted for the first time in India and Ceylon, tobacco planted in southern
Africa.
And there was a particular seed that made a very rich empire even richer.
In the summer of 1877, a large packing case arrived here in Singapore's Botanic Gardens.
Inside the case were 22 seedlings of rubber trees, collected by British plant hunters in Brazil.
These trees are descended from those original seedlings.
Inside them is a milky fluid called latex.
You make rubber from it.
The director of the Botanic Gardens, Henry Ridley, was a man with a vision.
He saw the truly massive potential of rubber, and launched a crusade to convince every planter in
the region to grow it.
Ridley stuffed the planters' pockets with rubber seeds, he lectured them on how to protect their
plants, he waved specimens of processed rubber under their noses.
He was a man obsessed.
They called him "Rubber Ridley".
That was to his face.
Behind his back they called him "Mad Ridley".
ELANGO VELAUTHAM: Most people associate his madness to his passion.
He was a great visionary of his time.
A keen scientist.
And he's responsible for most of what we see here in the rubber industry today.
Now, Ridley came up with a new way of tapping rubber trees, didn't he? Yeah, the methods used
were pretty harsh before that.
They would hack into the rubber tree, injuring the vascular cambium, which is necessary for the
tree's survival.
And what actually happened was he experimented with various trees that were in existence in the
Singapore Botanical Gardens.
He found a way to tap the rubber by exposing the vessels that produce the latex without harming
the vascular cambium.
- And the tree carried on living.
- Yup.
So you could tap it again and again and again.
Yeah, for up to five years on one side.
And once you're done on one side, you can actually let it heal while you tap the other side for
another five years.
Basically, it is cut in an angle.
PAXMAN: So, this white That's latex, is it? VELAUTHAM: That's latex, yes.
There's a bowl or something down here to collect it.
Yes.
PAXMAN: God, it's really prolific, isn't it? It's sticky, isn't it? Pair of rubber gloves there, or
something, maybe.
Yeah.
(CHUCKLING) PAXMAN: Ridley was so excited because he knew just how much rubber could
be worth to the British Empire.
Rubber was the plastic of the 19th century.
It could be made into just about anything.
Rubber boots, rubber hoods, coats, hats, hose pipes, rubber raincoats.
British manufacturers wanted as much as they could get their hands on.
Millions of rubber trees were planted in Singapore's neighbouring British territory, Malaya.
And thousands of workers were brought in from another colony, India, to work on the vast new
estates.
It transformed the country.
By the 1930s, three-quarters of the world's rubber was coming from here.
British companies produced most of it.
All over the empire, British ships sailed home with cargoes of rubber, or cotton, or bananas.
They went back to the colonies loaded with things manufactured in Britain.
Teapots, saucepans, knives, even cloth caps.
But one product would put Britain and its most important colony on a collision course - cotton.
British factories took raw cotton from India, and spun it into cloth.
By the 1920s, Lancashire's cotton mills dominated the world market.
By contrast, the once flourishing Indian cloth trade had virtually collapsed.
They had to rely instead on cloth woven in Britain.
For many Indians, it was the final insult.
The leader of the Indian independence movement, Mahatma Gandhi, burned his suit and adopted
the dress of an Indian peasant.
He took the spinning wheel as a symbol of Indian freedom and told his countrymen to stop
buying British cloth.
(INDISTINCT) The effect of Gandhi's boycott was felt 4,500 miles away in the heartlands of
Lancashire's weaving industry.
Lancashire had done well out of the empire.
At one time, almost two-thirds of its manufactured cotton had been sold back to India.
But now, times were hard.
No fewer than 74 of the mills had closed and angry unemployed mill workers blamed Gandhi for
his boycott of British cloth.
In towns like Darwen, whose mills were used to weaving cloth for the empire and beyond, there
was frustration and despair.
(HORN BLOWING) Then came extraordinary news.
Gandhi was coming to Britain and would visit Lancashire.
He was entering the lions' den, coming to see for himself the effect the Indian boycott was
having on textile workers here.
MAN: Then came a little man, still scantily clad, but with an extremely wet blanket around his
tiny frame.
I'm sure he must have been frozen - we were in thick overcoats.
The local paper praised Gandhi's celebrated sympathy for the poor.
Surely his heart would soften at the sight of so many hundreds of unemployed weavers.
The peace and simplicity of the place, the Lancashire air, it was hoped, would soothe what it
called "deep differences of opinion.
" Gandhi arrived in Darwen on September the 26th, 1931.
Crowds turned out to wonder at, and to welcome him.
(CHEERING) For those with eyes to see, this was a hugely significant moment.
The charisma, the excitement, belonged not to a defender of empire, but to a would-be
dismantler of it.
GANDHl: I am thankful that I got this opportunity of being surrounded by these happy children,
and seeing the homes of the poor.
Mill workers took their children to see this remarkable visitor.
Some of them still remember it.
Hello, you must be Ruth.
I'm Jeremy.
Hello, how do you do? - Can I come in? Thank you.
- Certainly.
What did your mother tell you you were going to do when you set off that day to go and see
Gandhi? Well, she just said, "We're going to see a very important man from India.
"And he's going to make things better, we think, "with the cotton trade.
" Which I didn't understand what he was talking about what she was talking about because I was
only seven at the time, you know.
And I remember all the people there and where I stood, you know.
And this little man came on and I looked at me mother and I said, "Which is Gandhi, Mother?"
She said, "It's that little man there.
" And I said, "But he's not an important man," I said, "He's a poor little man.
He has no clothes on.
" He had sort of a white-type cloth between his legs.
Well, it looked like a big nappy.
- Yes, it did, to be honest.
- It looked like that.
And this thing round his And it was hugged around him like that.
And he had nothing on his feet.
Only a pair of sandals.
And I was horrified because I said, "He's no shoes on, Mother.
" You know, I was really disappointed.
But he obviously had amazing charisma that you two remember him so vividly.
- It's still with us.
Yes.
- Oh, yes.
- Yes, it is.
- PAXMAN: Eighty years after the event.
- Yes.
- Eighty years.
(CHUCKLING) PAXMAN: Gandhi had not come all the way from India to call off his boycott.
He had a far bigger vision - to make the workers of Britain sympathetic to the plight of the
Indian people and to the cause of Indian independence.
For Gandhi it wasn't his boycott that was to blame, but the system of empire itself.
The workers had been hoping that when Gandhi saw their plight, he'd call off the boycott.
Well, Gandhi listened but he didn't budge.
And when someone said, "But we have three million unemployed," he just replied, "I have 300
million.
" The boycott and others like it helped inspire many of those 300 million to protest against
British rule.
They would demand and eventually get independence in 1947.
JAWAHARLAL NEHRU: At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will
awake to life and freedom.
PAXMAN: Well over half a century has passed since that historic moment.
Britain has still not escaped its imperial past and neither, in many ways, has India.
(COW MOOING) I'm waiting to meet a group of people who devote much of their lives to
celebrating one of empire's more curious remnants.
The Royal Enfield motorcycle.
(PUNJABI MUSIC PLAYING) These classic bikes have been close to Indian hearts since before
the Second World War.
Once they were made in Worcestershire, but production stopped around the time the empire ran
out of steam.
By then, Indians were building them for themselves.
(MAN SINGING) MAN: Enfield Bullet - You're bored too, aren't you? - (HORN HONKING)
The Royal Enfield motorcycle has become as much a feature of Indian roads as painted trucks
and wandering cows.
Thank you for coming.
The cow would like to thank you, too.
Now, who's the chief here? You're the chief.
You're Amit, are you? - Yeah.
- Excellent.
Good.
I want to ask you about what is it your club They're the - Royal Riders Club.
- The Royal Riders Club.
- Hi, I'm Jeremy.
Hello.
- Hi, Amit.
- And how many members have you got? - 70 members.
- 70? What you got half of them here? - DHAR: Yeah, half of them are here.
PAXMAN: And what is it, that you only ride Royal Enfields? DHAR: Yeah, only.
PAXMAN: How many of these are Bullets? They're all Bullets, are they? DHAR: They're all
Bullets.
PAXMAN: That was the great slogan, wasn't it? "Built like a rifle, goes like a bullet.
" DHAR: Yeah.
And why do you like Why do you like the Royal Enfield? - It's for the man.
- It's for the man! - It's a masculine thing.
- A masculine bike.
- Yes, obviously.
- Don't you let girls ride it? (BOTH CHUCKLING) - On the back seat.
- Only on the back seat.
I see.
MAN: This is the symbol of freedom.
- PAXMAN: Symbol of freedom? - Symbol of freedom.
When we ride this bike, we feel that we are free.
- You say it's a symbol of freedom.
- Yes.
But isn't it a symbol of the British Empire, too? No, because we take the best part of the regime
and not the worst part.
That is why we say this is the symbol of freedom.
We have taken the best part and thereafter now we are free.
Good.
You've got a big head too.
I feel more virile already.
This great, old-fashioned machine, invented in Britain, now made in India, seems to sum up the
changing fortunes of the two countries, their long, troubled marriage and their divorce.
DOING GOOD

1 It's the early 19th century.

In India's north-eastern states, more than 400 women a year are burned alive on the funeral pyres
of their dead husbands.
This Hindu ritual is known as sati, and for years it's been tolerated by the country's British rulers.
But no longer.
In 1829, the British decide it has to stop.
When some Hindus protest to a British general, he says to them, "You say it is your custom to
burn widows.
"Very well.
We also have a custom "that when a man burns a woman alive, "we tie a rope around his neck
and hang him.
"You follow your custom, and then we shall follow ours.
" For many British people, the empire was all about doing good.
By force, if necessary.
Some believed they had a duty to bring light into the world.
Others, that they had a right to rule it.
We really did know best.
Both beliefs fundamentally changed the nature of the modern world and they changed our sense
of Britain's place in it.
In the second half of the 19th century, the British Empire reached from Canada in the west to
Australia in the east.
The last phase of expansion was about to begin, and many of these empire-builders believed their
work was ordained by God.
In the summer of 1861, a small party of white men found themselves travelling up the river Shire
in what is now Malawi.
To Europeans at that time, Africa was simply the Dark Continent, a place of ignorance and
superstition.
They had come here to change that.
The men sang hymns as they travelled.
Lead, Kindly Light was a particular favourite.
Their leader was already a legend in Britain, a man who had come to embody the Victorian
purpose in Africa.
His name was David Livingstone, a dour, fanatically determined Lowland Scot.
He was the first white man to have crossed the continent of Africa.
He had come here as a missionary to save African souls for Christ, but what he found appalled
him.
Britain had abolished slavery in the empire decades before, but Livingstone found Africans still
being captured and sold to Arab and Portuguese slavers all over East Africa.
Now he and his companions dreamed of sowing the seeds of a new world here.
One based not on African superstition and slavery, but on two Victorian obsessions - Christianity
and free trade.
This river would become God's highway into the heart of Africa.
Down it would come African cotton and wheat and ivory and ostrich feathers, and up it, in
exchange, would go clothes and tools and machinery made in Glasgow or Manchester.
Livingstone had a slogan for it, "Christianity and commerce.
" This would be the empire's new civilising mission.
Bible in hand, he was going to unlock the Dark Continent.
Such was the dream.
The reality was different.
The place chosen by Livingstone to build his mission turned out to be hostile and dangerous, a
malarial death trap.
- Perfect.
Thank you very much.
- You're welcome.
Thank you.
One by one, Livingstone's followers succumbed to hunger and disease.
And this is all that remains.
It's the grave of one of the missionaries, Henry de Wint Burrup.
His name's even misspelt on his tombstone, poor chap.
He died of exhaustion and diarrhoea in February 1862.
An eyewitness said that he had shrunk to half his normal size and had turned a horrible shade of
yellow.
One of his last acts had been to write a letter to the rowing clubs of Oxford and Cambridge,
asking them to raise money to buy a steamer to go up the Shire River to stop slavery.
Then, in 1865, after years of exploring the interior, the most famous missionary in the world
vanished.
Nothing was heard from him for an entire three years.
It was a worldwide mystery.
The New York Herald sent a journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, to Africa.
"Find Livingstone," were his orders.
"By any means necessary.
" Very strong man, eh? Very strong! And find him he did, in what would become one of the most
celebrated encounters of the Victorian age.
Stanley was a chancer, so we must take his account of the meeting with a pinch of salt, but here's
what he says happened.
"As I approached, I noticed he was pale.
"He looked weary.
"I would have embraced him, but he being an Englishman, "I wasn't sure how he would receive
me.
"So I walked up to him deliberately, "took off my hat, and said, "'Dr Livingstone, I presume?"'
But Livingstone was still in the grip of a passion to explore.
For almost two years he drove himself on, sick with cholera and dysentery.
He'd even extracted his own teeth.
He died in Africa.
He was alone, thousands of miles from home.
They found him in his hut, kneeling, it was said, in prayer.
Two faithful servants, one of them a former slave freed by Livingstone, gathered up his body and
carried it all the way to the coast.
There they loaded it onto a ship bound for London.
His heart, though, was buried in Africa.
On the 18th of February, 1874, a great outpouring of grief gripped London.
The mourners stood on the streets thousands strong, many of them weeping to watch the body of
David Livingstone pass by.
His funeral would be held at the resting place of Britain's elect, Westminster Abbey.
This was no ordinary mortal they were burying.
David Livingstone had become more than an explorer, more than a missionary.
He had become a myth.
His brave life and lonely death reassured a people busy conquering the world that the empire was
about more than greed and domination.
It was about sacrifice and justice and doing good.
All around the Abbey were elaborate monuments to the great conquerors of empire.
Livingstone's memorial was a more modest affair.
"For 30 years his life was spent in an unwearied effort "to evangelise the native races" It's a
simple slab of stone, but it lies right at the heart of Westminster Abbey because to many British
people, what David Livingstone was trying to do lay at the heart of the British Empire.
The tears of the nation had hardly dried when Livingstone's diaries were published, heavily
edited to remove evidence of his frequent failures.
In his entire life, he's said to have made only a single convert.
But the diaries would help him become almost a patron saint of empire.
Where Livingstone blazed a trail, other missionaries followed, though in slightly more comfort.
Well into the 20th century, thousands of them set out across the empire to bring Christianity to
the heathen.
They often brought with them education and modern medicine.
When Africans came to demand freedom from their colonial masters, they dismissed much of
this foreign do-gooding as destroying native culture.
Yet almost 100 years after Livingstone, much of the missionary legacy is alive and well.
Very good, class.
Now say, "Management.
" Management.
- Again.
- Management.
- Again.
- Management.
As I am here, I'm managing this class.
Everybody is quiet because I'm here, I am managing the class.
Today, the work started by Church of Scotland missionaries has, as all over Africa, become a
local, African activity.
More? Another? Yes? The Nkolokoti Primary School was founded in 1935 in what was then the
British colony of Nyasaland.
The school now has almost 8,000 pupils.
Some walk for hours to get here.
Such is the demand, they have to be taught in shifts.
Missionaries have come in for a lot of stick for providing an excuse for flag-planting and land-
grabbing.
But the fact of the matter is that without missionaries, this school wouldn't exist.
And so 8,000 children would get no education, and come to that, no breakfast either.
Mine's thicker than yours.
Today, the school is funded by the Malawi government, although the porridge comes courtesy of
a Scottish charity.
You know, we start very early in the morning.
Some leave very early without eating.
When they come here, they find porridge, they fill their stomachs.
Yes.
Now, what do you feel about the missionaries who started this school? They did a great job.
And they assisted this area very much.
Just imagine, it was established in 1935.
Up to now, we are still benefiting.
Is it a religious school? It is a religious school.
- So you teach them about Christianity.
- Yeah.
We have a subject, Bible knowledge.
Mmm-hmm.
- Yeah.
What do you hope they will learn in your school? Uh, they learn to be good citizens.
We teach them to love each other, respect each other, respect elders, that's what we teach them.
David Livingstone's vision of Christianity and commerce was, in a sense, fulfilled.
Where the missionaries led, the traders followed.
They came to grow coffee or tobacco or cotton.
Their African workers, so went the plan, would be influenced towards Christianity.
This was the headquarters of the African Lakes Company, set up in 1882 to trade in ivory and
cotton.
To many Victorians it seemed a marriage made in heaven, but too often, commerce and
Christianity turned out to make extremely unhappy bedfellows.
In 1893, a Scotsman came out to manage a huge cotton estate outside Blantyre in Malawi,
named, incidentally, after David Livingstone's birthplace.
The manager, William Jervis Livingstone, was a distant relative of the missionary.
But this Livingstone had rather different ambitions.
He was here to make money.
Like other settlers, William Jervis Livingstone ran a harsh regime on the plantation.
Floggings were said to be common.
Resentment ran high.
But then one man decided he wasn't going to take it any more.
And here he is on the Malawian 100 kwacha bank note.
He's also on the 500 kwacha, in fact he's on every Malawian bank note, because the Reverend
John Chilembwe is a national hero.
He wasn't then, of course.
To the colonial authorities, he was nothing but a dangerous nuisance.
John Chilembwe had been educated in a Christian mission.
He'd even been ordained a Baptist minister.
And he liked to dress like a European gentleman.
But John Chilembwe's upbringing had given him radical, even subversive, ideas.
The notion, for example, that all humanity was equal before God.
His mission church, next to Livingstone's estate, became the centre for a movement which took
as its motto, "Africa for the Africans".
On the afternoon of Friday, January the 22nd, 1915, John Chilembwe announced, "The time has
come at last to fight back against our oppressors.
"You go out to fight as African patriots for the whole black race.
"Freedom is the cry of Africa.
Our blood will mean something at last.
" Chilembwe hoped to unleash a new kind of race war, black Christians against white settlers.
One of his chosen victims was his neighbour, William Jervis Livingstone.
What was your grandfather growing here? He was growing tobacco, coffee, cotton, rubber.
Deirdre Livingstone is the granddaughter of William Jervis Livingstone.
What was this room? This was my grandparents' bedroom, and this is where they slept.
The bed was just about there.
And they would go out on the veranda and have all their parties next door, in the dining room.
Tell me what happened that night.
The 23rd of January, 1915, that was the night when Chilembwe's men decided to rise up against
the white man.
My father was a tiny little baby, six months old, being bounced on the bed, and my grandmother
was actually in the bath, having her evening bath.
It was about 9:00, so it was a completely normal family scene at night.
And then suddenly armed men with spears, the natives came in and rushed into this room.
They went to attack my grandfather and speared him.
Where was he speared? What part of his body? He was speared here.
So she went over to try and get some port wine or brandy, the usual things that they resuscitated
people with in those days, and then suddenly the other natives came in and the whole bunch of
them literally came in and they cut off his head in front of her.
- They cut his head off? - They cut his head off.
What was absolutely desperate was my father, at six months old, was obviously just lying on the
bed.
And then I had my Aunt Nyasa, who was five years old, she was seeing the whole scene, because
she was actually sprayed with the blood from the severed head of my grandfather.
It was an absolutely desperate scene.
On the Sunday morning, John Chilembwe preached a sermon in his church.
He told a packed congregation that better times were ahead.
"The kingdom of God is at hand," he said.
"You will hear the bugles sounding.
" Beside him in the pulpit, as proof, was the head of William Jervis Livingstone.
The revenge of the British authorities was, as so often, swift and merciless.
Chilembwe's church was dynamited.
As for Chilembwe himself, he was hunted down, shot, and buried in an unmarked grave.
Today, his hometown is a shrine to the struggle against the British.
But his missionary message still rings out from his rebuilt church.
Like many Malawians, the congregation of the church he founded looked on John Chilembwe as
a hero.
John Chilembwe wanted to establish a church with African origins, but yet with a Western
education.
But to kill someone, to cut their head off, this is not the sort of behaviour you expect from a
religious minister, is it? It is a terrible thing.
But when you look at the killing side, we also look at the other side.
What did it do for him to kill? Because there is a cause to everything.
You can kill, too.
When you reach a certain stage, say, when I want to take your family, I want to kill your family,
you can kill too.
So we don't know what happened.
- It's just a mystery.
- And you admire him? Yes, we do admire him in Malawi.
But we admire him because of his teaching when he established his church.
Because he wanted people to be self-sustaining.
Work hard.
He brought that idea.
The march of the white race, led by Britain, across the globe in the late 19th century, was
astonishing to behold.
So astonishing that people began to search for explanations.
An idea took hold among some people that this must be a scientifically pre-determined destiny.
In 1863, the members of the Anthropological Society of London gathered to hear what was billed
as a scientific lecture.
It was a momentous and, as it turned out, hugely controversial occasion.
The speaker was the president and founder of the association, Dr James Hunt.
The title of his paper was, "The Negro's Place In Nature".
"I propose to discuss the physical and mental characteristics of the negro, "with a view to
determining not only his position in nature, "but also the station he should occupy.
"I shall also dwell on the analogies between the negro "and the anthropoid apes.
" What followed was over an hour of racist nonsense, dressed up in the pseudo-technological
language of scientific observation.
"His skull is very hard and unusually thick, "enabling negroes to fight or "carry heavy weights on
their heads with pleasure.
" There were hisses and boos from the audience.
Some considered he was justifying slavery, which the British were proud of having abolished.
But his ideas struck a chord among more fanatical empire builders.
Because the empire had been such a huge success story, they began to talk about how they had,
and this phrase was pretty widely used, "a genius for empire".
But what was this genius? It got muddled up with Charles Darwin's ideas about evolution.
The champions of empire argued that the British had evolved naturally to rule over others.
So that they were now, in fact, a superior race.
"Everywhere we see the European as the conqueror and the dominant race, "and no amount of
education will ever alter the decrees of nature's laws.
" David Livingstone had preached that colonisers had a duty to help the unfortunate.
But what was the difference between unfortunate and inferior? A conviction took hold that
helping meant ruling.
One man who felt this new aggressive sense of mission more keenly than any other, came to
southern Africa in 1871.
His name was Cecil Rhodes, and you'd need a fistful of adjectives to describe him.
He was bold.
He was buccaneering.
He was brilliant.
But he was also brash, brutal, and bigoted.
He added great tracts of Africa to the empire on the principle that, as he put it, "We are the first
race in the world, "and the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race.
" The empire was built, or stolen from others, by mavericks.
And Rhodes was the mavericks' maverick.
He did as he pleased, and only told the politicians in London afterwards.
He made war.
He created colonies off his own bat.
Rhodes called the English, "God's chosen instrument in carrying out the divine idea.
" It could almost have been David Livingstone talking.
But where Livingstone saw his duty as being to serve, Rhodes had other ideas.
"Africa lies ready for us," he told his supporters.
"It is our duty to take it.
" Livingstone's treasure was in heaven.
Rhodes's was on earth, or under it.
He made his fortune in a diamond town.
Today it's been recreated to give a flavour of what it was like in the 1880s.
A place of high hopes and low living, where desperate men came to get rich, or die trying.
Then it was known simply as New Rush.
The colonial secretary, Lord Kimberley, thought the name New Rush was altogether far too
vulgar, and as for the Dutch name, Vooruitzigt, well, frankly, it was just about unpronounceable.
So a grovelling official said, "Would the name Kimberley be acceptable?" "Most acceptable,"
said his Lordship.
Rhodes's power base was the Kimberley Club, where southern Africa's business elite gathered.
They said you could find the five richest men in Africa at this bar.
But Rhodes was actually less interested in money than he was in power.
And specifically in realising what he called, "My idea".
That idea, he said, was the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule.
And he knew his own part in it.
Rhodes sketched out his dream on this very map.
It is of British territory running right down the spine of Africa.
In pencil he drew the proposed course of a railway line that began at the cape at the tip of
southern Africa, up through South Africa, through what is now Zambia, on into Uganda, into
Sudan, and then to Cairo on the Mediterranean.
He believed that this would create a territory fit for white men, that would be bigger and more
populous than the United States.
Here in the Kimberley Club, Rhodes planned the next stage of the conquest of southern Africa.
And he would be its leader, not as a soldier, but as a businessman.
His irregular army of so-called pioneers were sent north in search of new territory.
"Take what you can," said the British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, "and ask me later.
" Rhodes's aim was, as he put it, "To set up mining companies, "cultivate the land, and preserve
peace and order.
" In other words, to invade.
Through a combination of treaties, which later turned out to mean not quite what they seemed to
mean at the time, bribery, and liberal use of the machine gun, they carved out a huge swathe of
Africa, now known as Zimbabwe, but then named Rhodesia, after their leader.
If ever there was a country founded on blood and greed, Rhodesia was it.
Rhodes would become Prime Minister of the Cape Colony, later South Africa, the nation that
gave the world apartheid.
"These are my politics,"he announced.
"The native is to be denied the vote "and treated as a child.
" This was what Rhodes's great dream, the duty of the white race to civilise the earth, came down
to.
Rhodes's triumphalist vision of empire was partially fulfilled.
By the end of the 19th century, the lion's share of Africa belonged to Britain.
But the business of actually running the world's untidiest empire was a rather more humdrum
affair.
Well into the 20th century, huge areas were governed by handfuls of white men, thrown in at the
deep end and told to get on with it.
A British District Officer.
For much of the year, he's on tour, visiting the remote villages of his district.
His arrival at a village is a great occasion.
Elders and councillors come down to the water's edge to meet him.
A Mr Todd, although only 24, rules over some 20,000 people with far greater authority than that
wielded by any civil servant here at home.
They were called district officers, but they usually had dozens of jobs.
Magistrate, tax collector, coroner, chief of police.
In the 1930s, the population of British Africa was reckoned at about 43 million.
It was administered by a mere 1,200 officials.
One of those officials, looking around and seeing how one young man with perhaps six native
soldiers, might be in charge of 100,000 people, remarked, "Britain's entire position rests upon
bluff.
" One of the ways this enormous bluff worked was through a rather British invention called
indirect rule.
All over the empire, local rulers were persuaded, bribed, or threatened into throwing in their lot
with the British.
The British pulled the strings from behind the scenes.
And if there wasn't a ruler, they just invented one.
District officers in Africa were, therefore, supposedly ruling alongside the local chief.
It could be a lonely job, but then, you weren't supposed to hang around at home very much.
You had to be out and about in the hills and farms and villages, sorting out trouble with a handful
of locally recruited police officers.
As for preparation, well, if you could survive a British public school, you could survive
anything.
"I was head of my house," recalled one young district officer.
"I was deputy head of school, I was captain at rugger, "I was Sergeant Major in the Officer
Training Corps.
"So when, eventually, I found myself alone in the bush, "I wasn't afraid in the slightest.
" Quite often it worked pretty well.
One European writer travelling through British Africa was certainly impressed.
"Never, since the days of Ancient Greece, "he said, "has the world been ruled by such sweet,
just, boyish masters.
" Right, thank you.
Will you ask the defendant what he has to say about it, please? One of them still lives just
outside Nairobi, in Kenya.
Though, inevitably, no longer quite so boyish.
- Jeremy.
- How do you do? - Very good to see you.
- Come in.
- Thank you for having us.
- You're more than welcome.
When you look at it, there were such small numbers of people making the empire work.
How did they get away with it? I think it's fair to say they trusted us.
And we trusted them.
Mutual.
Mutual respect, mutual trust.
And they did what was required of them.
We did what was required of the government.
You say you would do what was required of you, and they would do what was required of them,
but what right did you have to require them to do anything? They were the heads of their tribes,
the government needed to exist.
I think we all agree, governments, good or bad, are necessary.
And they found it probably as satisfying as we did.
Did you ever wonder what you were doing, "What am I doing here?" Well, our basic raison
d'être, if you like, was to maintain law and order.
But, of course, in the face of lots of armed well-armed and large gangs, it wasn't so easy.
Did you ever question what the empire was for? No.
It was there and one accepted it.
Some people say the empire was an unjustifiable mistake, an imposition on the rest of the world.
What would you say? In order to maintain safety for trade, it needed government.
So one followed the other.
It had to.
- Did you think you were doing good? - Yes.
There was a great deal of satisfaction in getting advancement, you know, schooling and public
health, health centres.
They may not have liked us.
I'm I still To this day, when I go down to Kilifi, where I have a little house on the beach, they'll
sometimes see me in the town and greet me very warmly.
So, um it can't all have been bad.
But good or bad, by the middle of the 20th century, there was a new force abroad.
The world had turned against the very idea of imperialism.
Nowhere would the struggle for freedom be more bitter than in Kenya.
It sparked a conflict that would shatter the empire's claims to moral authority.
White settlers in Kenya had done well for themselves farming the fertile highlands.
They developed the country, they felt they had a claim to it.
Many native Kenyans, especially those Kikuyu who'd been displaced, felt otherwise.
The issue was land.
As one Kikuyu explained to a visiting British politician, "When someone steals your ox, "it's
killed and roasted and eaten, you can forget.
"But when someone steals your land, you can never forget.
"It's always there.
Its lakes, its streams, it's a bitter presence.
" The division of the spoils in Kenya was not exactly equal.
A mere 3,000 white farmers occupied 12,000 square miles of prime land.
By contrast, over a million Kikuyu lived on just over 2,000 square miles.
But the settlers were tough characters and they were in no mood to compromise.
Are you afraid of what might happen to the settlers' position if the Africans move more towards
self-government? No, I don't think so.
We've always stood on our feet before, I think we can do it again.
Do you think your property is likely to go? Do you think you'll be in a difficult position? Not
without being fought for.
- Would you fight? - Definitely.
I've done it all my life.
Soon came rumours of a secret Kikuyu resistance movement called Mau Mau.
Their goal was freedom from British rule, and they were prepared to use terror to achieve it.
Mystery and fear were part of what the Mau Mau were about.
Deep in the forests of the Aberdare mountains, they conducted initiation ceremonies in which
naked young people drank goat's blood and swore to drive out the white invader.
In European circles, these became known as orgies in which babies were torn from their mother's
womb and eaten alive.
One colonial official even claimed to detect the horned shadow of the devil himself.
This Mau Mau is a lawless and savage organisation.
Of course, the situation in Kenya is still full of danger.
The stage was set for a violent showdown.
Native Kenyan troops working for the British were drafted in to confront their own people.
Some settlers decided to get out while they could.
But while the whites felt under threat, the people who really suffered were other Kikuyu.
Those who chose to stay loyal to the British.
On the night of March the 26th, 1953, the area of Lari, here on the edge of the Great Rift Valley,
was attacked by the Mau Mau.
The people here were largely loyal to the colonial government.
It was the middle of the night, so most of the villagers were asleep.
The Mau Mau came to their huts, blocked the entrances, set fire to them, and then went to work
with axes and machetes.
These pictures arrive from Kenya.
They show the charred remains of the village of Lari, only 30 miles from Nairobi, where over
120 loyal Kikuyu were massacred by Mau Mau terrorists.
Men, women, and children perished in a night of savagery almost beyond description.
An entire village was turned into a smouldering funeral pyre.
Alice Wanjiru Kimani, or General Alice, as she then was, lead the Mau Mau raid on Lari.
She's now aged 81 and still lives and farms near the village.
Good morning.
Come.
You're Alice.
- Hello.
Oh! God.
- Nice to meet.
That's a heck of a handshake.
Thank you.
Did you kill anybody? Was there no other way to get your freedom other than killing? What do
you think about the British now? What do you think about the time that the British were here in
Kenya as the colonial government? Would the country have been better if they hadn't been here?
Talk about a mixed verdict.
But imperialism's time had passed.
The struggle for uhuru, freedom, grew more intense.
The authorities rounded up Mau Mau suspects thousands at a time, herding them into vast
internment camps.
Nearly 500 suspects were detained for questioning.
Over a hundred of them were identified by survivors as having taken part in the massacre.
Will you ask her, Inspector, why she pointed this man out? He is the one who killed my mother.
Imprisonment, torture, massacres.
Somehow this temperate paradise had become a sort of hell.
The world looked on and wondered, was this the empire that claimed to be doing good in the
world? Britain was losing the stomach for empire and the ability to sustain it.
Much to the disgust of many farmers in the white highlands, Kenyan nationalist leaders were
summoned to London for negotiations.
Uhuru was finally within their grasp.
At the Uhuru Stadium, the articles of independence were handed by the Duke to the country's
Prime Minister.
Joyful citizens of the new state celebrate their independence in the most African of all ways, by
dancing till they're ready to drop.
As the 1960s dawned, one colony after another demanded and got independence.
The sun had most definitely set on the empire.
It had taken centuries to accumulate, it was gone in a couple of decades.
The empire brought blood and tears and dispossession to millions of people.
But it also brought roads and railways and education.
There is no simple judgment to be made on three turbulent centuries of history.
Once, the official line was that, apart from the odd blip, the empire was a good thing.
Not just for Britain, but for the world.
But the British grew ashamed of the empire and tried to wipe it from the national memory.
The empire was certainly cruel, unjust, and unjustifiable if you were a slave on a plantation in
the 18th century.
But it was benign and humane if you were rescued from a slave ship by the Royal Navy in the
19th century.
For good or ill, much of the world is as it is today because of the empire.
From the way it looks, to the sports people play, from the religion they practise, to the language
they speak.
It has changed the very genetic make-up of Britain.
If only we can look at it clear-eyed, it can tell us a lot about who we are.
It's a story that belongs to all of us.
We've been through pride, we've been through shame.
Mostly nowadays we seem to be in denial.
If we really want to understand who we are, it's time we stop pretending the empire was nothing
to do with us.