Patrick Wall, Julian Amery, and the Death and Afterlife of the British Empire

Nothing New Under the Setting Sun: Patrick Wall, Julian Amery, and the Death and Afterlife of the British Empire by Frank Fazio B.A. in History, May 2018, Villanova University A Thesis submitted to The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts May 17, 2020 Thesis directed by Dane Kennedy Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History Table of Contents 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................1 2. Castles Made of Sand: The Rise and Fall of the Central African Federation, 1950- 1963 .....................................................................................................................................7 3. “Wrapped Up in the Union Jack”: UDI and the Right-Wing Reaction, 1963-1980 ....32 4. Stoking the Embers of Empire: The Falklands and the Half-Life of Empire, 1968- ...57 5. Bibliography .....................................................................................................................77 ii Introduction After being swept out of Parliament in the winter of 1966, Julian Amery set about writing his memoirs. Son of a famous father and son-in-law of a former Prime Minister, the 47-year-old felt sure that this political setback was merely a bump in the road. Therefore, rather than risking offending his once and future peers by writing “with candour,” Amery chose to write his memoirs about his early life and service during the Second World War.1 True to his word, Amery concluded the first and only volume of his memoirs with his election to Parliament in 1950. However, his brief preface betrayed a crucial aspect of how he perceived Britain’s place in the world in the late 1960s. Reflecting on his youth, he wrote that “the Britain of my boyhood…[seems] very far removed from the present age. Our material environment has been transformed. Our social and even our personal values have undergone deep changes. Our role and influence in the world [have] sadly, though perhaps only temporarily, declined.” He thought back wistfully on a “British Empire and Commonwealth” that “ranked as a great power in its own right,” and harshly criticized “the failure of British officialdom to adjust to the realities of a rapidly changing scene.” Even so, he placed his hope in his firm belief that, if Britain’s “leaders gave a strong enough lead, our people would respond.” 2 Amery yearned to return to Parliament and resume his fight for the Britain of his memory. Indeed, Amery was one of a number of British politicians, largely of the Conservative Party, who were devoted to restoring Britain, in attitude if not in fact, to the position of power and influence it had once enjoyed. The work that follows will focus on two of the more distinguished of these individuals: Amery and Patrick Wall. As 1 Julian Amery, Approach March: a venture in autobiography (London: Hutchinson of London, 1973), 16, The Internet Archive. 2 Amery, Approach March, 17. 1 mentioned briefly above, Amery’s father was a distinguished politician in his own right, and a staunch imperialist of the old school. Leo Amery had been Colonial Secretary from 1924 to 1929, and in that position became one of the foremost advocates for a Chamberlainite imperial preference system. Under this system, pioneered by Joseph Chamberlain and fervently adopted by Leo Amery, Britain, its colonies, and the Commonwealth dominions would be tightly bound together by a broad series of tariffs, and a common market, a scheme which resembled in very real ways Leo Amery’s vision for Europe. The younger Amery, educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, inherited his father’s devotion to these causes, and carried on the family’s political mantle.3 After several years of eventful service in World War II, Amery’s life was also shaped by tragedy, as his elder brother John was hanged for collaboration with the Nazis in December 1945. Amery took time out of an ultimately unsuccessful parliamentary bid to go to Spain in an effort to prove John had become a Spanish citizen, thereby trying and failing to save him from execution.4 In the 50 years that followed John’s death, Amery almost never spoke of his brother in public.5 Patrick Wall’s pre-Parliamentary life was not nearly so dramatic. An alumnus of Downside School in Bath, Wall joined the Royal Marines in 1935. Serving during the Second World War with distinction, he received the Military Cross and the US Order of Merit for his wartime service. After 15 years with the Marines, he retired in 1950 as a 3 Wm. Roger Louis, "Leo Amery and the Post-War World, 1945-55," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 30, no. 3 (2002): 78; the younger Amery was sufficiently devoted to the cause of imperial preference that he wrote the last three volumes of a six-volume biography of Joseph Chamberlain. 4 Louis, “Leo Amery and the Post-War World,” 73. 5 George Rosie, "Rear Window: John Amery: The traitor whom Britain politely forgot,” The Independent, February 12, 1995; an unpublished chapter of “Approach March” on John Amery can be found at The Papers of Julian Amery, Churchill Archive Centre, Cambridge, 8/3/48. 2 major, and commenced a political career. Like Amery, Wall was unsuccessful in his first bid for a seat in Parliament, prior to his eventual entrance in 1954.6 The project will closely examine two instances of decolonization in which Wall and Amery held a particular interest. Firstly, Amery was a persistent advocate for the creation of the Central African Federation (CAF). Intended as an exercise in the continuation of British power, its “velvet glove of power sharing” concealed an iron grip on the African majority under its rule.7 Amery, joined by Wall in 1954, did their best to support the Federation, even as it became less and less functional. Ultimately, when it became clear that the CAF no longer pleased any faction under its aegis, Wall and Amery turned their attention to maintaining white minority rule in Rhodesia. Therefore, the second episode of decolonization this thesis will study is the Rhodesian unilateral declaration of independence (UDI). With Britain requiring that Rhodesia have a clear plan to transfer power to the black majority prior to receiving independence, the Ian Smith government, feeling betrayed by their “kith and kin,” declared Rhodesia independent of the United Kingdom on its own authority.8 Amery, Wall, and their allies fought a rearguard action in Britain to, at the very least, smooth Rhodesia’s path towards independence. Wall became so intensely associated with the Smith regime that he was derisively called “The Honourable Member for Salisbury,” and was considered by some to be, as he put it, a “fascist beast.”9 Like the Federation, however, the white Rhodesian 6 Wall, Patrick Henry Bligh, 1916-1998, politician, Papers of Sir Patrick Wall MP, 1890-1992. Hull University Archives, Hull History Centre. GB 50 U DPW. https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/data/gb50-udpw. 7 Wm. Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, "The Imperialism of Decolonization," in Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonization (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 463. 8 J.R.T Wood, 'So Far and No Further!': Rhodesia's Bid for Independence during the Retreat from Empire, 1959-1965 (Bloomington, IN: Trafford, 2012), loc. 23838 of 25856, Kindle. 9 John Major, "Patrick Wall and South Africa," South African Historical Journal 52, no. 1 (2005): 103. 3 cause was a losing one. In 1980, Rhodesia became independent under black majority rule as the newly named Zimbabwe. As senior members of the Party, Amery and Wall then carved out hawkish positions on the Falklands War, the third incident this project will discuss. Britain’s defeat of Argentina, and robust defense of kinsfolk in the South Atlantic, gave Margaret Thatcher the political firepower needed to reshape the Party in her image, even as the notion of British revival she associated with the Falklands victory was more aspirational than factual, papering over “the cracks beneath the surface of British political culture.”10 Nonetheless, the Thatcherite view of Britain’s state, which closely resembled that which Wall and Amery argued for, was infused in the Conservative Party in ways that continue to reverberate. Before delving more deeply into what this thesis will discuss, it would be worthwhile to briefly address two works that were impactful in conceptualizing what follows. Bill Schwarz’s The White Man’s World, the first in a planned series of three volumes, argues that the political crises of the settler-colonies helped to trigger a major ideological crisis in the homeland.11 He explicitly takes a stance against Bernard Porter’s “absent-minded imperialist” theory, suggesting that imperial memory is melded into the metropole in ways both great and small.12 Schwarz’s formulation demonstrates with clarity the surviving connections between the empire and modern Britain. His emphasis on the politics of memory is particularly germane to my treatment of Wall and Amery’s reaction to affronts to their “kith and kin.” 10 Ezequiel Mercau, The Falklands War: An Imperial History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 15. 11 Bill Schwarz, The White Man's World. Memories of Empire, vol. 1(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 25. 12 Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 4 On the subject of “kith

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