When Roy Thomson and I agreed to part, in June 1961, I offered to cancel the long tour abroad, combined with my annual month’s holiday, which I had planned to make that summer, since, although I was contractually entitled to it at the paper’s expense, The Sunday Times was not going to get its long-term benefits. Roy was characteristically generous. “Go right ahead,” he said at once. In fact, since I attended the Sunday Times weekly editorial conferences for the next 23 years, the balance of advantage was not one-sided.
East and Southern Africa, a region hitherto almost unknown to me, was my first objective. It was just beginning to come into focus in major British and international policy. No country there except South Africa was yet independent, but by 1961 most could be seen to be well on the road to independence. The Central African Federation of Northern and Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland (now Zambia, Zimbabwe and Malawi) was still extant, though with doom upon its countenance, thanks to its inherent lack of constitutional, political or racial unity. An East African federation was being keenly pursued by the British Government. The Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya had only just passed into history, and Jomo Kenyatta, after a trial and conviction of dubious validity, was in detention up-country for his alleged complicity in it.
It was my first visit to Africa, apart from calls at seaports round its coasts from Suez to Dakar. Compared with the densely populated countries of Asia that I knew, Africa seemed, as one flew over it, empty. Indeed the figures say so. The combined area of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe almost equals that of India, but India is the home of over ten times as many people as theirs. In my memory East Central Africa is a land of bare soil, red rock, giant anthills, bush country speckled with scrub and trees, here and there a little village of huts. Nairobi, the region’s largest city had then less than half a million inhabitants, and to a visitor it seemed much smaller still, provincial and intimate—but that may have been due to the sharp difference between the ways and places of life of the Europeans and educated Africans and Asians on the one hand, the mass of black people on the other.
My first political impression of Kenya was of the reality of its parliamentary life under colonial tutelage. After spending an afternoon in the gallery of the Legislative Council, I described it as a miniature Westminster, almost absurdly so, with the bewigged Speaker coaxing the Members along like sixth-formers playing at Parliament. I was struck by the friendly relations that obviously ruled among members of all races in the House, and indeed, to all appearance, between members of the two main African parties, Kanu and Kadu. The stability of Kenya since independence has owed great deal to this tuition in the use of parliamentary democracy, just as the lack of it in some other ex-colonial nations has marred their independent careers.
A great deal more is owed, perhaps, to the personality of Jomo Kenyatta. My next strong political impression in Nairobi was of the stature he held in the eyes of whites as well as his own people. Derek Erskine, an Old Etonian member of the Legislative Council, regarded by many whites as a renegade because he supported Kanu and wanted Kenyatta released, called him ‘a wise old bird’ whose mind was always set on larger rather than smaller issues. A right-wing Independent member, Commodore Howard-Williams, told me that his group were going up to see Kenyatta in detention at Maralal. Yes, he said, it was time they made their number with him, and, besides, there were a number of issues like land titles which had to be settled if an independent Kenya was to thrive, and they could not be settled without Kenyatta. (Controversy over land titles was then acute, as between occupying Europeans and land-hungry Africans, the latter having a quite different view of land ownership because they believed that Land as such belonged to the gods, so that no man could own it absolutely, though he could claim a right of occupation and property in his improvements. When I met Oginga Odinga, the stormy petrel of Kenyan politics, he insisted that the land question could not be settled until responsibility had passed to the Africans, who alone could ‘deliver the goods.’)
Sir Walter Coutts, the acting Governor—who oddly enough was to become, like me, a foundation executive, a career which neither the colonial civil servant nor the newspaper editor dreamt of at that moment—gave me a different view of Kenyatta. In a land of minorities, Jomo was distrusted by the majority of Africans because he was a Kikuyu. But, he added, there was no other national leader of status, except Tom Mboya, who was equally distrusted for different reasons. Michael Blundell, accepted spokesman of the liberal Europeans, described Kenyatta as older and wiser than in Mau Mau days, very shrewd, but devious, and, “he thinks like a Kikuyu.” (Which reminded me of those Europeans and Muslims in India who said of Gandhi that he might claim to speak for the whole nation but: “He thinks like a Hindu.”)
So I left Kenya infected with the spirit of optimism that prevailed among most whites as well as Africans as independence approached—“it is wonderful to be here now,” said Sir Humphrey Slade, Speaker of the Legislative Council; “this is Kenya’s finest year.” Even among the Asians hope put anxiety into the shadow. When I suggested to Sir Eebo Pirbhai, leader of the Indian community, that after independence Asians in public employment or in business would suffer from African pressure for jobs, he told me that he did not worry about that risk; Kenya needed all the people of education and skill that it could find. He was soon to be disillusioned. But my own reflection was that in 1960 Kenya had a real chance of building a multiracial society in the heart of Africa.
Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) was a different cup of tea. Here much of the talk was of the British Government’s backtracking, in respect of the franchise and the proportion of seats for Africans and Asians, upon the proposals it had advanced in a White Paper for a new parliamentary (but still dependent) constitution. Europeans as well as Africans complained of the change in favour of whites. Sir John Moffat called it, “a major tragedy,” all the sadder because: “we had been so nearly there,”—‘there’ being an amicable settlement which would ensure transition to multiracial government. Even the Chief Secretary, a discreet official, said that the new constitution: “went too far the other way.”
I was told that, although Kenneth Kaunda (acknowledged to be Zambia’s nearest approach to a Kenyatta) was: “trying to play according to the book,” in the new circumstances he would not be able to control his followers. Kaunda himself, with whom I had a talk on his arrival at Lusaka airport from England and West Africa, was in two minds about the consequences, though not about the cause. His people would have to decide about the new constitution, but it was a choice between: “condemnation, but cooperation,” and: “condemnation, and resistance;” either way there would be trouble. (I heard echoes of that larger and louder storm in India over the constitutional Act of 1935.) He struck me as a sincere young man facing decisions that frightened him, a centrist held in the middle of conflicts more by the repulsion of extremes than by the weight of his own compromises. When I urged him to take a long view, for the Africans would certainly get power in time, he replied that official progress was all going too slowly; in African politics things were moving much faster than British people seemed aware. (That was indeed true: even liberal thinkers about the colonial empire in Britain were taken aback by the force of the wind of change in East and West Africa in the early 1960s.) “How would you like to be me?” Kaunda asked. “I come back to my own country, the leader of my people, and at the airport I am searched, humiliated, my luggage turned out, my private papers taken. How long do you expect us to put up with this treatment?” He had suffered that experience the same day, not at Lusaka, where as I saw he was warmly welcomed, but at Salisbury, Rhodesia, where he touched down en route from Accra and where he ranked as a prohibited immigrant.
The other main topic of discussion in Northern Rhodesia was indeed the social and economic relations, not only the political, between the black and white races. Here was a very different situation from that of Kenya; for the predominant element in the white community consisted of employees of the copper mines, where strict stratification of jobs for blacks and whites had been the rule in the past. Now things were changing fast. I went down the mine at Mufulira, saw the huge opencast pit at Nchanga, and was impressed by the responsible jobs being done by Africans both underground and on the surface. (A quarter of a century later, South Africa has still not come so far.) Residential separation, however, not enforced by law but the invariable practice, was a big obstacle to social equality: the Africans, I was told, showed no desire to live in European areas. All this is interesting in retrospect because it showed what might have happened in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) if integration had been allowed to take its rightful course.
At that time this seemed likely to happen, though a lap behind Zimbabwe’s northern neighbour and still further behind Kenya. A new constitution for Southern Rhodesia, which would have kept the white majority in parliament but extended the black franchise, and which had the nucleus of a common electoral roll, had been proposed from London and was being hotly debated. (It was to avert this far from radical constitution that Mr Ian Smith declared UDI two years later.) Over his customary tankard of beer Sir Edgar Whitehead, the colony’s Prime Minister, a taciturn, introspective character, gave me his opinion that if all went according to plan the reforms would give rise to a genuine multiracial government with a multiracial parliament. Sir Roy Welensky, Prime Minister of the moribund Central African Federation, amid a great deal of bluster, agreed with Whitehead at least on the point that time and opportunity had to be used to break down race barriers. Sir Robert Tredgold, who later became fainéant head of state under UDI, deplored the lack of communication between Africans and the great majority of Europeans: “the trouble with most of our people here is that they live in a deaf world.” Lord Malvern, who as Sir Godfrey Huggins had been Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia for 10 years, and at 77 was as amusing, vigorous and earthy as ever, gave a luncheon party for me. I reminded him that several years earlier, dining with the Round Table Moot, he had likened the mass of Africans in Rhodesia to the London East-Enders among whom he had worked as a young doctor—poor and ignorant, and like children, but as capable as they of education and advance. Did he hold to that? “Yes—and they will grow up just as quickly.”
Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General, was afraid, he told me, that the new constitution did not go far enough to catch up with growing African nationalism. The African franchise ought to be lower, education must be hastened, Europeans and Africans must be brought closer together. He had tried to break down the social barriers between them but it had proved very difficult. Another view of this was given me by Walter Adams, then Principal of University College in Salisbury, later to become the University of Zimbabwe. So far the Europeans in and beyond the college had not reacted to the presence of a 40 per cent minority of African students, but they might when it became a majority. Problems over multiracial housing, swimming baths and so on had been overcome by going cautiously and using common sense as well as tactical ruses. (On housing, I asked the warden of a Victoria League hostel for Commonwealth students in London whether there was any reaction from white Rhodesian inmates to living and mixing with blacks in a colour-blind institution; the answer was: “None at all; outside their own country they take racial equality as normal.”) Lord Alport, British High Commissioner to the Federation, stressed, as others had done, the need to use time to hurry the pace of African advance and break down barriers between the races. He and Welensky were among the few who stood firmly for continuance of the federation in some form; without it, said Alport, its constituent countries would sink to the level of a Ghana, a Congo or a Mozambique.
I spent the best part of a day with Winston Field, leader of the Dominion Party (later to be absorbed into the Rhodesia Party), the colony’s last Prime Minister before Ian Smith, on his farm not far from Salisbury. On the way there my African driver lost his way and we enquired at a house, obviously European, down a sandy lane miles from anywhere. There appeared a faded elderly lady in a floppy hat who might have walked, with her dachshund, straight out of a Hampshire manor house. It made me realise how many British settlers in Rhodesia had tried to make not an African nation but another England, in a tradition fast-disappearing at home, with black servants and labourers to replace the docile retainers of the English nineteenth century. The Fields’ place was very different, comfortable but architecturally austere, the buildings put up in true pioneer fashion, as they were needed, using local timber and bricks home-made from anthill slag. The African workers’ houses reminded me of Indian servants’ quarters, sufficient for sleeping and cooking in a simple way but without direct water supply or sanitation. There were plenty of them. When so many Africans wanted work, and when unskilled wages were only about 6 pounds a month, there was no point in mechanisation. The rural African, Winston Field told me, had not altered much in his lifetime; urbanisation might hasten change, though when the African went back to his village from the town he became a tribalist again. The further from home, the better the African worked. (That could be said of other people.) The Africans would certainly achieve political power, and before long, but it must come about on the right lines, namely, progressively extending the franchise on a common roll. Many of his party members would not agree with him, but it would be no bad thing to get rid of people who refused to mix with Africans, or share power with them. What, I asked, did “before long” mean? How soon did he think there would be African majority rule? “Not in my lifetime,” Field replied, “probably not for another thirty years.” “In these days,” I said, “things always move twice as fast as one expects. Would you think that period might be halved, to fifteen years?” “Yes, it might,” said Field. Fifteen years, one reflects, would have brought majority rule to Rhodesia by 1976, the crucial year in the emergence of “armed struggle” as the arbiter of the country’s future. If only the white Rhodesians had followed Winston Field or some other wise and moderate leader instead of the fatal pied-piper Smith!
Already the cloud of violent revolt was beginning to gather on the horizon. I recall a luncheon party in Salisbury at which a newspaper editor, an ardent liberal by white Rhodesian standards, declared: “You can never have one-man-one-vote here.” “Why not?” asked Nathan Shangerero, editor of a white-owned newspaper for Africans. Familiar reasons were adduced—the ignorance of the masses, their consequent exposure to corruption and their susceptibility to crowd emotion. “That may be true of the half-educated in the towns,” replied Shangerero, “but not of the people in the reserves, who are pretty shrewd though they may be poor. No, I’ll tell you why we can’t have one-man-one-vote here—because the Europeans won’t stand for it.” The obverse of this appeared in a talk I had with Joshua Nkomo, then leader of the National Democratic Party and regarded as the most important African nationalist in the colony. Only force, he said, would compel a change in Rhodesia. The new constitution proposals mattered not a fig. Fifteen African seats in the legislature? Forget them. The politicians and the people had grown too far apart to come together by evolutionary process. No privileged minority had ever given up its privilege without being forced to do so. Nkomo said he welcomed economic recession because it weakened the Europeans even though it hurt Africans. The Africans were now interested only in power. Without it they could never gain advancement. They had the skill to take over the land and industry if only they were trained, but the whites denied them training. When the Italian contractors left the Kariba dam not a single African had been trained to carry on the operation. How much support had he, I asked. Even more in the country than in the towns, Nkomo said; Africans on the land were virtually slaves, and they would rise to break their bonds. “Frightening,” I called that interview, but looking back it appears more realistic than most of my talks with white Rhodesians or with conformist blacks. Nkomo was an impressive figure who knew what he wanted and the only means by which he believed he could get it.
Johannesburg was my real introduction to South Africa, which I had previously known only from brief calls at Cape Town and Durban en route to and from India during the war. I found it equally frightening, in a different way. On my first day there I was taken to see Soweto, the then recently-built African townships, by the chairman of the housing committee of the Johannesburg municipal council and his deputy manager for African housing, both whites of British stock who confessed to feeling the strain of working for two masters, the Afrikaner politicians and their own black clients; they told me that some of the apartheid rules simply could not be applied in the conditions of the city. On the way I saw the bulldozed ruins of Sophiatown, a former shanty town whose people had been removed to Soweto; also an industrial area in which many of the houses reminded me of poorer urban quarters in India. Who lived there, I asked. “Mostly coloureds and Asians, but they will all have to go because the area is scheduled as white.” “Isn’t it better to leave people living near their work?” “Not according to the Nationalists, who want to remove all non-Europeans as far as possible from the whites.”
As we gazed over the vast spread of Soweto from its central tower, a landscape painfully ugly, treeless and inhuman—uniform rows of little houses punctuated by grim electric railway lines and bare mounds of mine tailings—I thought it one of the most terrible expressions of the industrial and urban age, even worse than England’s industrial slums must have been in the eighteen-forties. Yet from the whites’ point of view it was a great achievement of enlightened housing policy. Still more depressing than that eye-tormenting scene, as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual helotry, was the sight of Soweto’s bachelor dormitories, segregated in walled compounds away from the family dwellings, and of the municipal beer hall, the only drinking-place permitted, where scores of hunched African men (no women) sat swilling sour Kaffir beer, living ‘proles’ from Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty Four.” This traumatic experience has haunted me ever since. At the time it no doubt contributed to a sickness that overtook me in the next few days, eventually diagnosed by a doctor in Cape Town as travel weariness for which the prescription was complete rest for 48 hours. Its symptoms of uncontrollable racking hiccoughs, and inability to keep food down spoilt much of the pleasure of those days, including two delightful dinners in Harry Oppenheimer’s house, surrounded by his fine collection of French Impressionist pictures.
At one of those dinners I sat next to Helen Suzman, the sole Progressive Party MP, as courageous, admirable and untypical as Oppenheimer himself. Neither had any illusions about the likelihood of change. “You know,” said Oppenheimer, “you can hear liberal talk like this wherever you go among intelligent business people,”—we had been discussing advancement of Africans through industry and commerce—“but it won’t alter anything.” The Opposition lacked leadership, and the Nationalists would always hold together, because they were determined to preserve all that they had won. Mrs Suzman, as attractive a woman as she is spirited, spurned the United Party politicians who thought that “back to 1936,” (before the Nationalists came to power) was as much reform as South Africa could take. Since there was no hope of progressives getting power for a long time ahead, the vital need, she said, was to keep the flag flying for a non-racial policy to which the country must come in the end.
The United Party view was given me in Cape Town by its leader, Sir de Villiers Graaf, a pleasant man but politically, I thought, a small one. He delivered himself thus. South Africa is entering an era of great change. In new industries and offices, men are getting used to working alongside natives. Many natives and coloureds are now well off. Colour barriers are bound to break down. All this goes better if South Africa enjoys economic prosperity. When it has a depression, natives and coloureds are the first to lose their jobs. Here, the black man cushions the white against the effects of economic depression. It would have to be very severe indeed to squeeze the people whose minds must be changed if there were to be any real advance. His policy was restoration of the coloured vote, white representation of the Bantu in parliament and effective local councils in Bantu areas, with “racial federation” as the ultimate ideal. “What does racial federation mean,” I asked. “Almost anything you can make it mean,” said Sir de Villiers with a smile. He mooted some vague ideas about redrawing boundaries and federating native provinces. The United Party “solution” seemed to me no more than whitewashed apartheid, intellectually inferior to the Nationalists’ stark version.
More constructive and penetrating ideas emerged at a luncheon given for me to meet a group of newspaper editors in Johannesburg by General Sir Frederick de Guingand, who had become chairman of a manufacturing concern and of the South Africa Foundation, a body set up chiefly by business men to propagate a more favourable image of the Republic than apartheid had given it in the Western world. He struck me as a man of energy and goodwill rather out of his depth in high politics. With one exception, everyone present was a ‘liberal’ in a country where to be liberal often means little more than to dislike manifest oppression; but much the most interesting contribution came from the editor, not of an English-language paper like the Rand Daily Mail but of the Afrikaans paper Dagbrecht, Willem van Heerden.
The best future for South Africa, he said, lay with a federation of racial areas. First, the coloured people should have the vote on a common roll, for it was essential that they be integrated with the whites. The Cape peninsula, the western Cape, the Orange Free State and the southern Transvaal should be states controlled by whites plus coloureds. Natal and South-West Africa (Namibia) should be multiracial states. The eastern Cape, the northern Transvaal, the Ciskei and Transkei territories, should be African states. The federation, essentially multiracial, should be restricted to the minimum of subjects and powers. People of all races should be allowed to live and work in any constituent state, but would have a vote only in the racially appropriate state.
It was also an Afrikaner, another newspaper man, Piet Cillie, who over lunch in Cape Town offered a variant on the same theme in at least one respect more radical. The Bantustan idea, which at present, he said, was just a safety-valve, must be made a reality. The black territories would have to be given white capital, white skilled workers, everything needed to make them viable. He doubted that Natal, with its 9 to 1 black and coloured (including Asian) majority, would remain white-governed. What about Durban, I asked. It would have to be included in the Bantu-majority state. Bantu aspirations, Piet Cillie went on, were understandable; South African natives could not be expected to remain satisfied when on every side they saw African presidents and cabinet ministers and parliaments (this was in 1961, when no country in southern or east Africa was yet independent); they meant to have them in South Africa. The Republic, where whites and blacks had been living together for three centuries, could put up a better government of Africans than any other country in the continent south of the Sahara.
Even now, 23 years later, such ideas seem to me still the most constructive line of progress in South Africa. Straight majority rule over the whole nation, I believe can never come about without a blood-bath, perhaps a succession of blood-baths, which would ruin the country for blacks and whites alike; whereas a fair, balanced geographical apartheid would enable political apartheid to become equitable, and social apartheid to fade as much as it ever will. Fairness and balance imply that the blacks must be allotted large, economically viable areas where they are a substantial majority. To van Heerden’s list I would add Natal and a few more minor regions, but would exclude Durban as a free port under a multiracial regime. The more complicated problem is that of the urban blacks in the designated white regions, especially in Johannesburg and the mining towns, but some of its difficulty would be relieved by political equality; for in the scheme suggested everyone of whatever race would have a vote in the state in which he was permanently resident, the whites and coloureds still having a substantial majority in the white-governed states. Each state would start from a status of formal independence, but it would obviously be to the advantage of all that they should enter into some kind of federation for common purposes, including foreign policy. Those who nail their colours to the mast of one-man-one-vote majority rule over South Africa as a whole seem to me as blind to realities as those who entrench themselves behind apartheid and white supremacy.
Of course I heard the latter opinion too, and not only from Afrikaners. How often was I told that the South African native enjoyed a higher standard of life than the people of any other African country! Businessmen of British stock emphasised the economic advance of African professionals and skilled workers, often through deliberate ignoring of apartheid rules, and the works of moral uplift and physical care done by white-owned companies. Officials of either European stock were often devoted to African interests in a paternalistic way. But behind progressive and charitable themes I felt there always to lie acceptance of the status of the African as a dependant, an inherently second-class person, as if his race was a congenital handicap, like deafness. When the different races just did not talk with one another, how could they understand each other? At Freddie de Guingand’s lunch party I asked ingenuously whether there was any place where I could have such a free and easy exchange of opinions as we had carried on there, but with coloured and black people as well as whites—not sponsored ‘representatives’ but intelligent people of different races trying to grapple with a common problem. No direct answer was forthcoming; but I suspect that the only answer could have been under the auspices of one of the Christian churches. Today, when things have moved on, it might perhaps be in one of the universities.
How far apart the races were at their extremes I realised on a trip to the Transkei, at that time the most advanced of the embryo bantustans. Chief Kaiser Mutanzima, then chairman of the Transkei bunga or council, later president of the ‘independent’ state, seemed to me to echo much of the elitist ideology of his white superiors. What shook me was to see, on a long drive to visit an experimental farm growing formium tenax as a new cash crop, a couple of sledges laden with rough timber being drawn by teams of fourteen oxen each and leaving deep scars on the grassy uplands. (“These people never had the wheel,” explained a companion.) Even to an inexpert eye, soil erosion enhanced by the felling of trees was the land’s worst enemy, yet here these primitives were exacerbating it in two ways at once. Not far off we came upon a group of near-naked youths, their faces whitened and their bodies streaked with paint, performing some slow ritual. They were undergoing tribal initiation, said an official of the Department of Native Affairs, after which they would be accepted as men for whom their women would till the soil, though nowadays a second initiation, in the shape of a spell of work in the mines, was thought necessary to make a boy a man. The work in the mines I had seen at first hand, descending to the 7,500 foot level in the President Brand mine at Welkom. The conditions were well ordered and as clean (and presumably as safe) as underground tunnelling and blasting allow, but very hot—up to 126 degrees Fahrenheit—at some of the working faces. Above ground, I was shown a new intake of labour doing aptitude tests, and was fascinated to see some of them baffled by tests which a backward child of six could do in England. It seemed to me that issues of political rights and equality were but the head of froth on the deep tankard of poverty, ignorance and imprisonment in a primitive life-cycle.
Although I had enjoyed much kindness and hospitality in South Africa and had seen and heard many things of the greatest interest, as a country I found it threatening and distasteful, though much less so at the Cape than inland, and I was thankful to board a plane flying from Johannesburg to Perth in Western Australia. In those says the flight had to make two intermediate stops, at Mauritius and the Cocos Islands, its middle section across the waist of the Indian Ocean being then the longest scheduled flight over nothing but water, in the world. The Cocos, tiny coral atolls, the largest barely big enough for a runway, surrounded by hundreds of miles of unbroken ocean at every point of the compass, lapped by blue and white surf, gave me a wonderful sense of freshness and freedom after the taut oppressiveness of the African atmosphere. Descending there for breakfast after the night’s flight, I recalled the tale told me before the war, with its great advances in aviation, by Captain PG Taylor, the Australian flying pioneer who had navigated for both Kingsford Smith and Ulm, about his initial attempt to fly, for the first time ever, much the same route from Australia to Africa. On the first leg he could not find the Cocos islands, a speck in the ocean, where he calculated them to be. His fuel tank gave him several more hours of flight. Kingsford Smith, he told me, would have gone on looking for the islands until his fuel was exhausted, and unless he was lucky would have perished. Taylor reckoned exactly how long he could afford to spend searching—something like half an hour—and still have enough fuel to make an alternative landfall, and with his tank all but empty he managed to land on Timor. At the next attempt at the ocean crossing he succeeded. This was typical of the practical sense that made him the great survivor among the brave men who pioneered the intercontinental air journeys which we now take for granted.
Australia was immensely welcoming as it always is. My wife and our youngest son (who then, aged 6, went to school in Sydney) had flown there from London when I went off to Africa, and we rented a house on Bellevue Hill. Frank Packer, that tough newspaper tycoon with a warm heart under his retired bruiser’s exterior, generously lent us a motor car—his own, with the registration number FP One—and pulled my leg by saying in a loud voice at a cocktail party: “Harry, I don’t mind your using my car but I do object to your leaving it all night outside a brothel;”—which, to anyone in the know, meant the address of his alleged mistress. Everywhere—in Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, the country—we received overflowing hospitality. Australians have a warmth and freedom of affection which makes us English people seem icy and austere. Although the country was passing through a minor depression—engineered by the Government, so its critics said, in fact following an early and wise attempt to check incipient inflation, generated largely by a big inflow of capital—everyone spoke cheerfully of its exciting promise. Australians, they said, harshly schooled over the generations by droughts and floods, and by fluctuations in the price of wool—the staple of Australia as it had been of England in the Middle Ages—from a penny to a pound a pound-weight, were inured to ups and downs, and always pulled through because they kept their eyes on the future. That is true, though immigration, industrialisation and urbanisation have made the countryman’s outlook less typical, and Australia’s economy, in its business fluctuations, much more like our own.
The country’s economic condition nevertheless still depends essentially upon the land and those who work on it, dwindling though their relative numbers are. A question that must occur to many people is why Australia with its vast areas of uncultivated or under-cultivated land does not grow more and more food for a hungry world. The answer is not only climatic—thin soil and scarce water—but economic. Early on that trip Sir Ernest Fisk, a leading business man, told me had read a paper to the Rotary Club propounding a solution to the water problem by excavating transcontinental canals and setting up desalination plants. “But with or without such imaginative schemes where would you sell the output?” I asked. “I can’t believe,” he replied, “that it can be wrong to develop food production when the experts tell us that the world’s population will double by the year Two Thousand.” “But,” I said, “we are not living in a world governed by a benevolent dictatorship: those underfed millions have little to offer in exchange for food, and giving food away won’t pay for the cost of producing it, let alone make Australia rich.”
My wife and I had the good fortune to see one vast scheme for making the most of available water, the Snowy Mountains system. The Snowy Mountains—Australia’s splendid skiing playground—are part of the watershed between the Murray river—“the Nile of Australia,”—which with the Darling and other tributaries waters much of the most fertile land in New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia, and the shorter, swifter rivers flowing south and east. The central object of the Snowy scheme was to divert the headwaters of the perennial, fast-flowing and largely unutilised Snowy river from east to west into the Murray. This required a vast enterprise of tunnelling under the mountains as well as a system of dams, pumps and power stations. The main construction contract was let to an Italian firm and much of the labour came fresh from Europe. Every contract, we were told, was completed ahead of schedule. In some cases British firms had declined to tender because the time allowed for completion was too short. However, we saw plenty of British equipment in the power stations and the spectacular underground works. “Had there been any labour problems,” I asked Sir William Henderson, director of the Snowy Mountains Authority. “None,” he said. “Three-quarters of the work-force were ‘New Australians’; all were good workers because slackers would not stay the course of a 48-hour week plus overtime—with correspondingly high wages. Though they all belonged to unions, there had been no union trouble, no demand for spreadover of work to create more jobs. He was lucky,” said Sir William, “to have got his labour force going in a time of low unemployment; lucky, too, in that the scheme had been launched by a Labour Government and continued by their Liberal-Country successors, so both sides of politics took a pride in it. The New Australian was not only a good worker himself; he had also raised the standard of the Australian workers, who used to think, ‘We’re all right, why worry?’ but now realised that they had to compete with newcomers who wanted to make money, and were prepared to work hard for it.”
My general impression, from many visits to Australian factories and other places of work, is that the typical Australian worker, whether ‘new’ or a fourth generation ‘digger’, works hard when he is on the job but does not like working too long. Work is necessary to get money for the more important part of life—sport, the sun, the surf and beer, and a good home of his own and a patch of land. The determination of Australians to own their own separate house and garden has caused immense urban sprawl. Even twenty years ago it took as long to drive out of Sydney at a weekend as to drive out of London, though the ratio of their populations was one to three. My barber in Melbourne told me that when he had driven from his home in Essendon, to the west, to visit relatives in Frankston, to the east, the journey had been 35 miles, entirely through town.
To the outsider, the most conspicuous way in which the New Australians had changed the national way of life was in respect of food and catering. For a meal in a country town there used to be no alternative to the pub, with its overcooked meat and two veg, and its rough-and-ready amenities. Now excellent cafés, restaurants and guest houses were springing up; main-street shops included good greengroceries and delicatessens; hotels of intercontinental standard were rising in the cities. What a contrast with that typical pub at Jindabyne on the Snowy, the traditional frame shed with the bar in the middle, where the chief wall decoration was an advertisement for a popular beef essence, reading: “Best of the lot, Good and hot, for Dad and Mum, Bonox and rum;” or that hostelry on the New South Wales coast where the only overnight accommodation was a five-bedded room, and the huge breakfast of bacon and eggs was floating in bacon fat. I don’t say that Australians in the country discriminate between hock and moselle or eat continental breakfasts of croissants and cherry jam, but their standards rose spectacularly as the immigrant Italians, Greeks, Hungarians and other Europeans showed them the way.
Australia is a land unto itself, quite different from any other that I know. Its people range from the crudest to the most cultivated. It lives its own good life in its own way, and thinks about its own affairs much more than other people’s. Its press, by comparison with ours in Britain, is parochial in its interest. I made a note of the splash headlines on the front page of the Sydney Morning Herald, the top-class newspaper of New South Wales, over five consecutive days in September 1961. One referred to a split in the ACTU, the equivalent of our TUC, one to industrial action at a local car factory. The other three were: “North Side University Needed by 1965, says Committee;” “Federal Government to Extend Church School Aid;” “Gross Overcrowding at Callan Park, Judge Reports,” Callan Park being a local mental home. This at a time of crisis in the cold war, acute tension in Berlin, turmoil in Africa and critical negotiations precedent to Britain’s first move to join the EEC. It was not about these international problems that conversation at dinner tables flowed, but about the Test matches, the weather and a revolt against the old guard on the committee of the Australian Jockey Club.
Naturally, as a newspaper editor I spent a good deal of time talking press business with men like Warwick Fairfax, proprietor of the Sydney Morning Herald, whom I had known since 1935 when he took me to see one of the notorious body-line bowling Test matches, Frank Packer, proprietor of the (Sydney) Telegraph, which he sold much later to Rupert Murdoch, EK Sinclair, editor of The Age in Melbourne, at that time the best newspaper in Australia, and Rupert Murdoch, whose spectacular career as a newspaper tycoon had just begun with his ownership of The Mirror in Sydney. The older press bosses then thought his incursion a flash in the pan which would probably expire. I found him enthusiastic, confident and restless, with a determined ambition to construct a newspaper empire covering all Australia. He has come a long way since.
Most Australian newspapers are not committed to national political parties or leaders. The Sydney Morning Herald, though conservative, reflected in its editorial opinions a long-standing personal feud between Warwick Fairfax and Robert Menzies. I was regaled with both sides of this enmity. Warwick attacked the Australian Prime Minister’s public statement after Duncan Sandys’ visit to explain Harold Macmillan’s policy towards Europe; “it sounded as though he were opposed to Britain’s talks about entry to the Common Market taking place at all, and that must be wrong, besides being none of our business.” That in fact was not Menzies’ personal attitude, as Fairfax would have known as well as I did if the two had been on good personal terms. Warwick also said of Menzies that this was the first time in his experience that a Government had deliberately engineered a slump—a charge which was also made, many years later, against Malcolm Fraser when he applied a cooling-down policy in much more inflationary circumstances. Menzies was equally scathing about Fairfax. “I could write tomorrow’s leader in The Sydney Morning Herald now,” he said; “it will be against me.” Hugh McClure-Smith told me this story. When he was editor of The Sydney Morning Herald he met Menzies by chance on the platform at Albany, where in those times one had to change trains between Melbourne and Sydney or Canberra because of the different rail gauges in the two states. “Tell Warwick,” said Menzies, who was out of office and popular favour, “that I don’t mind his criticising what I say, but need he urinate on my political grave?”
Before I became editor of The Sunday Times the editorship of The Sydney Morning Herald could have been mine. I was strongly pressed to take it by Rupert Henderson, the general manager and Warwick Fairfax’s right hand. I was much tempted because I love Australia, where my wife would be restored to her home country, her family and her dear friends, who became equally mine. Two things deterred me. As to the job itself, everyone knowledgeable told me that the editor was not much more than the chief leader-writer and selector of articles. Everything else that Fleet Street called editorial, including the news service, was under Henderson’s thumb, and even in his own restricted sphere the editor was not really free. So I told Henderson, in a talk in London, that I would not consider the proposition unless as editor I had control, as I would have in Fleet Street, of all the news and features and of the whole journalistic staff. He did not think that possible. My other reason was the pain of uprooting my family from the England that I loved even more, particularly our sons who were being brought up as Englishmen. The latter reason was even stronger when the same possibility was mooted again in 1961; for we now had four sons, one at Eton, one about to go there, another at the same preparatory school as his elder brother and the last just beginning his school education. [The last sentence is nonsense, for the ages of the sons in 1961 were 27, 24, 17, 6.] Looking back, I think I was probably wrong in nursing that concern about the two oldest in the late 1940s; they would have grown up to a good life in Australia, which would have suited the first of them particularly well. But might-have-beens are a futile exercise.
It was the Common Market which occupied much of my conversations with Australian politicians and other key people. Bob Menzies (not yet Sir Robert), in two long private talks in Canberra, let his hair down. Britain’s entry into Europe, he thought, was “inevitable.” His own concern was to protect Australia’s interests; the country was sufficiently developed to be able to suffer the injury to its markets—not so New Zealand, which in a paternalistic way he thought would have to shelter under Australia’s economic wing. The adverse effect in Australia would be concentrated on certain areas such as dried fruit and dairy farming. “The trouble is that our dairying is terribly inefficient; for political reasons we had to support poor farming on poor lands.” (This was confirmed by countrymen whom I knew: returned soldiers had been set up on too little land, often ill-watered, without know-how or even readiness to withstand the hardships of country life, and in the process good properties had been spoilt by piecemeal expropriation.) Might not the impact be politically harmful for him, when a general election was due in a few months? Menzies said Harold Macmillan had been well aware of that risk and had assured him that the real negotiations could not possibly begin until the New Year. (In the event, of course, they were baulked by de Gaulle’s “No.”)
He overflowed, however, with resentment about the explanatory visit which had just been paid to Dominion Governments by Duncan Sandys, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Affairs. Bob Menzies called him “a second-class figure.” “Whom would you have called first-class?” innocently asked my wife, who was present, and received no direct reply; I got the impression that for Menzies none less than the British Prime Minister himself was worthy of treating with him, already a long-serving Prime Minister and an elder statesman of the Commonwealth. The first thing Duncan Sandys had to learn, he said, was not to treat Australians as schoolboys. Instead of visiting Australia first he had come on from New Zealand, where they were pretty unsophisticated, (“You can never talk to a New Zealander for five minutes about anything outside New Zealand.”) and ready to take Britain’s word for everything. When Sandys had tried to swing the same tactics on Australia I’ve never seen a man so set back. It is fair to Lord Duncan-Sandys, as he now is, to say that I had a totally opposite account from Sir William Oliver, the UK High Commissioner, who had shared in the talks with Menzies and his Ministers. The Secretary of State had been ‘superb’, a model of what a British negotiator should be, unruffled and persistent in fate of fierce criticism, and thoroughly versed in his brief. “The smaller boys all yapped loudly, to make sure they were on the right side of Menzies.” Undoubtedly, Sir William said, there had been an element of staking out a bargaining position for future negotiations. His own impression from talking with Australian businessmen, pastoralists and others had been that they thought if entering the EEC was good for Britain it would in the end be good for Australia. That was my belief too.
We heard Menzies make a speech on the Common Market in the House of Representatives that same evening. For me its most telling passage came at the end when he talked about a political consequence, as he thought, of Britain’s entry, the weakening of the Commonwealth. Privately, to me he said: “It’s all very well to talk about the changing Commonwealth: one day you may wake up and find it has changed so much that there is nothing left.” He was obviously deeply offended by his experience at the last Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ meeting, which had witnessed the departure of South Africa. He had been isolated and felt let down by Macmillan, who had given him to understand that he (Macmillan) would make the running by putting the United Kingdom view from the chair at the start of the debate; instead he had “given the antis their head.” Diefenbaker of Canada—“a man without a sense of humour,”—had been the worst, but in the closing stages Nehru had made the most trouble, threatening that if South Africa remained he would raise the issue of apartheid on every occasion. Menzies’ view of the Commonwealth came out most plainly when he told me how he had managed to choke off a motion by Prime Minister Holyoke of New Zealand welcoming Western Samoa as a prospective independent member. “What nonsense it is!” he exclaimed. “These countries,”—meaning Ghana, Sri Lanka and other ex-colonial territories—“have nothing in common with the rest of us and have no intention of contributing anything to the Commonwealth. As far as I can see, the only thing to do is to have private talks with the people you can do business with, and let the formal conference spill its hot air. In the end I would not be surprised if we got back to the old Commonwealth, with the others dropping off.”
Bob Menzies was a great man whom I am happy to have known as a friend. Statesmanlike in public, he was utterly frank in private. He was, too, as my talks with him on several occasions showed, a cunning politician: his long sway was due not only to his unique personal stature and his sound policies for Australia, whose national spirit and ambition he loved to play upon, but also to clever political manoeuvring (when it failed him he lost) and exploitation of the divisions among his opponents. He had a sharp tongue which sometimes rasped friends as well as foes, and made him enemies on his own side. When he came to England early in the war he held a conference with us senior officials of the Ministry of Information, and in the course of it made a slighting remark about the record of his predecessor as Prime Minister of Australia, Lord Bruce, who was sitting beside him in his capacity as High Commissioner in London. It was inexcusable; for Bruce, as a civil servant and in the presence of the rest of us, could only hold his tongue.
Menzies once confessed to me that part of his political strength was that his foe, the Leader of the Opposition, Arthur Calwell, really had no stomach for becoming Prime Minister. When I talked with Calwell himself about the Common Market and other matters he left much the same impression on me. He showed no sign of exploiting the situation for party advantage, but took the same view of Britain’s entry as Menzies: Britain “had no alternative.” “We must do our best for Australia,” he said, “but that is only one of many difficulties she faces.” Towards Menzies personally his attitude was friendly and sympathetic. He well understood, he said, how hurt Menzies must have been at the Prime Ministers’ meeting. This led to a discussion of the notorious ‘White Australia’ policy. Its basis was economic, said Calwell, and they ought to be frank about it. Britain herself would surely have to curb immigration from the West Indies sooner or later (the phase of massive Asian immigration had not yet begun). Since that time, of course, the White Australia policy has been relaxed in favour of skilled and educated Asians, but not African or Caribbean people. In 1961, the most that far-sighted people like Dick Casey (then a distinguished former Minister of External Affairs, later to become Lord Casey and Governor-General of Australia) were prepared to say was that Australia should allow a small quota of immigrants from Asia as a token of non-racialism. I detected an awakening bad conscience. Now, as then, many Australians who are not racists and generally take liberal views still defend the traditional policy. Australia, they say, has enough problems without importing the risk of inter-racial conflict. Thank God, they exclaim, we have not gone the road of Britain.
Australia is a marvellous country. I love it for its people, their open hearts, their humour, their frankness, their independence, their courage. I admire it for its energy and self-confidence. I envy it for its vast natural resources, and the opportunities it opens for the enterprising and those who are prepared to work hard and take the knocks as well as the successes as they come. Australians do not like work any more than any other sons of Adam, but speaking generally they earn the high standard of life they enjoy. “Any man who isn’t a fool,” I remember a Sydney friend of mine saying, “can earn 30 pounds a week here;” that was in 1961, since when inflation and economic growth would have raised the figure to 200 pounds a week in British money of 1984. A German-Canadian businessman, who had become a devoted Australian, said: “Anybody in this country who doesn’t drink a dozen beers a day can build a solid business and a good income for his family if he has one good idea, and is prepared to work ten per cent harder than the next man.” That bit about one idea came back to my mind when I met a young Englishman, a Cambridge graduate, who with a friend of like background was running a successful business driving a refrigerated van loaded with meat and other chilled foods round the country districts of central New South Wales. Who in England, coming down from a prestigious university in the 1960s, would have set up as a butcher?
After all the love and hospitality and fascinating experiences that I had enjoyed I was sad to leave Australia after six weeks. I felt that if I stayed longer—which in any case I could not do—I would be putting down roots which it would become harder and harder to tear up. And I had an equally fascinating trip ahead of me.
From Sydney I flew to Singapore where I was to stay with Lord Selkirk, a Balliol contemporary who was then Commissioner-General for South-East Asia. On my first evening he gave me a run-down on the local political situation. Lee Kwan-yew, who had become Prime Minister in 1959—and has stayed in office ever since—was brilliant, ruthless and determined to keep power. Anti-communism was the theme that held the governing party together. Because he (Selkirk) had invited Opposition leaders to dinner at Eden Hall, his official residence, Government figures declined all invitations and he was openly accused of being pro-communist. What Singapore needed, he believed, was good government, not necessarily democracy. A municipal set-up would really be more suitable than all the paraphernalia of Parliament and Cabinet. The Chinese, who were the great majority, didn’t give a damn for democracy; all they wanted was to make money. There might be as many as a thousand Chinese dollar millionaires in Singapore, some of whom had started life as coolies.
Another, grass-roots, view of the Chinese was given me by a British dock agent who as part of his services to the Commission-General drove me to the airport on my departure. “I employ Malays, Chinese and Indians,” he said, “and there is not much to choose between them as workers on the job. The difference is this. If I have an urgent job of loading or unloading a ship at the weekend and ask my Malay workers to do some well-paid overtime they say: ‘No, tuan, Saturdays and Sundays are times when we are with our families and enjoy our sport and the open air. The money doesn’t matter; we have enough for our needs.’ But the Chinese will come and ask if I couldn’t find some overtime work for them at the weekend, because they want the extra money.” Who is to say that one attitude is better than the other? The urge to make more money all the time is part of the economic-growth complex, to which the whole world appears to be committed. If people are prepared to make the necessary efforts and sacrifices to get ‘growth’ for themselves and their countries, well and good; if they are not, but still expect more money and a rising standard, the pursuit of growth is illusory and leads only to inflation.
On the morning after my arrival I spent an hour with Lee Kwan-yew himself. I put to him the suggestion that it was mainly the communist issue that divided the Government and the Opposition. “That’s too simple,” he replied; “it is a combination of communism and Chinese chauvinism.” The appeal of ‘Great China’ was powerful even upon those whose economic interests were anti-communist. Against this force one could count—but only for the present—the Malays, the Indians and the English-speaking Chinese, together about 40 per cent of the population. Then how, I asked, had he won and kept power on an anti-communist platform? He smiled. “At the last general election we worked a trick, by forming a party alliance against a Government which had made itself unpopular. But that can’t be done again.” Today, 25 years later, Lee Kwan-yew is still in power. The trick that he has worked has been different. Partly it has been the draconian suppression of opposition and control of the press and other media, partly an incessant playing upon the threat to Singapore’s peace and prosperity of importing the kind of strife and destruction that overwhelmed Vietnam and the rest of Indo-China, partly plain economic success. The Cultural Revolution in China must have been a great help to him, for that was the last sort of thing the Singapore Chinese wanted.
Geordie Selkirk was right in his description of ‘Harry’ Lee. The brilliance, the exceptional sharpness of mind, has been as necessary to his achievement as the ruthlessness. He has no overt, effective opposition, not only because he has seen to it that there is none, but also because no rival can match his political skill; and, perhaps more surely still, because he has presided over an immense expansion of Singapore’s economy, which is what matters most to nine-tenths of its citizens. Talking with me, Lee made no bones about his scorn for the one-man-one-vote theory of democracy. The roadsweeper, he said, could not know about politics. Weightage should be given not only to educational and professional qualifications, but also to property-owning.
At that time, in 1961, Lee Kwan-yew was all for union with Malaya. In principle, he told me, he favoured a complete merger, but people in Singapore were afraid that if a united Malaysia got hold of education it would put an end to state aid for Chinese schools; so he wanted what he called a ‘Northern Ireland’ solution (an unfortunate analogy). Singapore would keep control of education and labour, and its franchise would be determined by its own citizenship laws. But it was difficult bring the Tungku (Tunku Abdul Razak bin Dato) to the point. He was too timid, “a feeler, not a thinker.” It was vital to act now, while the Malaysian army and police were reliable; later they would be infiltrated by communists. The communists were being foolish in “playing it rough,” and frightening the Malays and many others. If they “played it softly,” the prestige of Great China would win people over, the services could be undermined and the way cleared for Chinese domination of the peninsula. Britain should not be so preoccupied with the Soviet Union, or with Africa, not to perceive this. “Malaysia must be united. Singapore is its natural capital. Union will happen peaceably or by force. We must choose the way of peace while we can.” (Two years later, Singapore did join the Malaysian federation, but, scared by its experience, seceded in 1965.)
Of Soekarno, President of Indonesia, Lee Kwan-yew said: “He is a bad man. He thinks he can stay on top for ever by playing the communists against the army, but sooner or later one or other will swallow him up.” How prescient this was! In 1965, after the defeat of Indonesia’s confrontation with Malaysia—a triumph of counter-guerrilla warfare whose lessons, if they had been learnt by the United States, could have saved millions of lives in Vietnam and changed the course of history—an attempted communist coup in Djakarta, in which six army generals were killed, was swiftly crushed and ushered in the anti-communist regime of General Soeharto, who for a while kept Soekarno as a puppet President.
During my three-day visit to Singapore I met many other interesting people—complacent Chinese businessmen, charming Indians, critically detached British traders and journalists—either alone or at two large dinner parties which the generous Selkirks gave at Eden Hall. But the talk was mostly about local and topical problems of no great moment at this distance, and the episode which fills more of my memory was a visit to the Nanyang Press, publishers of a Chinese daily newspaper with a circulation larger than any other outside China, in the company of Lien Shih Sheng, one of its editorial writers. What is Nanyang’s policy, I asked. “It is for the Government,” said Mr Lien. “This Government, or any Government?” “Whatever Government there is.” The attitude seemed to me typical of the Chinese in Singapore. I had always been curious to know how Chinese characters, which of course are basically ideograms expressing whole words or even ideas, are set in type in the bustling hurry of newspaper production. The composing room was no bigger than a manager’s office, and very different from anything in Fleet Street: no linotype machines, no clatter of keyboards, just half-a-dozen compositors busily handsetting type which they picked from racks in the middle of the room and round the walls, each slug carrying a character or sometimes a group of characters. One set of racks, Lien told me, contained 1,700 common characters which any compositor could set; the others housed 7,000 rarer characters which required special skill to identify them. I never made out how they were arranged, the alphabetical system being obviously irrelevant. After ten years’ practice, I was told, a compositor could be called skilled, and could set half a column (running across the page, not up and down) in an hour. He would be earning 300 dollars a month (55 pounds, about half a Fleet Street compositor’s weekly earnings at that time). Someone had told me the same day that the driver of a school bus would be paid 400 dollars a month, whereas in England such an employee would earn much less than a compositor. Were their compositors paid relatively too little, or ours paid relatively too much? In terms of genuine skill, the latter possibility was undoubtedly true, and I had no doubt, after seeing that composing room, that the former was true also.
After smart, clean, modern Singapore, Dum Dum airport at Calcutta seemed dirty, decrepit and disorganised. In the lavatory a wretched old sweeper held out his hand for a couple of annas. Baffled by my having changed some money while waiting in the customs hall, a Sikh customs officer, bound by a rule book which said that the import of Indian currency was illegal, had to refer the problem to higher authority, argued at length with the Bengali superintendent, and demanded a formal signed declaration before he would admit me with the 100 rupee note I had just bought. I had an hour to wait; the restaurant was grubby, the humid heat was relieved only by whirling punkahs, and nothing to drink was on offer except horrible sweet pop. So one was plunged at once into the poverty, dirt, untidiness and job-multiplying bureaucracy of India, a country which nevertheless has won my abiding affection, as it has that of so many British people.
My happiest experience of that trip to Delhi was meeting two of my former staff in the Reforms Commissioner’s office, my friends Ganesan and Subramaniam, who had been respectively superintendent and chief clerk. Both had risen far in the civil service, and so too, they told me, had my one-time confidential stenographer, Jaganathan—all three Madrassis and good men. They had been thoughtfully invited by my hosts, Sir Paul Gore-Booth, then UK High Commissioner, later head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Service and a life peer, and his charming wife Patricia. We chawed over the ‘might-have-beens’ of the years when we were all concerned with India’s constitutional progress under the British raj. If Lord Linlithgow had succeeded in his first enthusiastic thrust for Federation under the 1935 Act, they thought, transition to independence would have been easy, but he had met frustration and had lost heart. The last chance, in their view, of holding India together as one nation upon the transfer of power had been the Cripps Mission of 1942, which Gandhi and the Congress had thwarted.
With Jawaharlal Nehru himself I had a long talk in his office in the Ministry of External Affairs. Characteristically—for despite his rhetorical skill and his occasional outbursts of voluble passion, Nehru was essentially a reserved intellectual—he responded slowly to questions or conversational openings, and our exchanges were punctuated by intervals of his silent thought. We talked of the international crisis, centred on Berlin, which was straining the nerves of the whole non-communist world. Everyone was impressed, I said, by the role he was playing in trying to calm the stormy waters. After a pause he replied: “There are sometimes situations in which it seems the events themselves take charge.” Yet, I said, the crucial decisions will actually be taken by a few particular men; it was the threatening Khrushchev whom I had in mind. “I have the strong impression,” said Nehru, who only a week earlier had talked with the Soviet leader in Moscow, “that Khrushchev is completely in command. I don’t think anyone is pushing him. Things seem to be going pretty well in Russia; there is no pressure on Khrushchev to cover up a domestic disaster. Nor did I see any sign of pressure from the Chinese, who have their hands full with their own troubles.” I threw in the thought that sometimes the crisis seemed unreal, a stage play, which we could almost ignore as an affair of the politicians and professionals. “How?” he asked sharply. Well, it was impossible to believe that anyone would deliberately start a nuclear war. Nehru agreed, but I had to fill the long pause that followed. In that situation, I went on, possession is nine points of the law. Again Nehru assented; Khrushchev certainly had the possessive advantage in Berlin, where there was nothing much the Western allies could do. (Those facts did not, in the event, prescribe the outcome.) Did Nehru not agree that Khrushchev was deliberately raising the stakes in the hope of squeezing the West out of the poker game? The Soviet resumption of nuclear tests had been a provocative act, not urgently required on technical grounds and damaging for Russia in world opinion, so it must have been prompted by some powerful tactical motive. Khrushchev had initiated the Berlin crisis in November 1959 with a six-months ‘ultimatum’, which had expired without anything happening; after nearly two years of fruitless threats he was so deeply committed that he had to try to frighten the West into a compromise. “You may be right,” said Nehru. And he added: “You know, the Russians are really afraid of the Germans, perhaps more afraid than they are of the United States. It is the rearmament of Germany that they most hate.”
Our conversation switched to the Chinese encroachment on Indian territory. This was before China actually invaded north-east India, breaching the mountain defences with ease and exposing all Assam and Bengal to her armies; the issue to which I was referring was China’s construction of a military road through Ladakh in the far north-west. Nehru explained that in the 1950s the Chinese had built that road through a salient of Indian territory to link Tibet, which they had lately absorbed, with Sinkiang. “It was the sneaky way they did it that was so bad,” said Nehru. “We knew nothing of what was going on. If they had asked us for leave to build and use the road we would probably have granted it.” He seemed to accept passivity and non-resistance as the only policy for India. Nothing could be done, he said, to rectify the situation, which could last indefinitely without getting worse. I could not refrain from observing that the same could be true of the Berlin situation. As things turned out, I was right about the Western crisis and Nehru was wrong about the crisis in Sino-Indian relations, which have been at least uneasy ever since, after flaring into war in October 1962.
My days in Delhi were crowded with fascinating conversations, with journalists both Indian and British, with business men, diplomats, academics (“The Indian student today,” said Dr TKRV Rao, ex-Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, “is far more job-minded and far less idealistic than he was thirty years ago, studying to get a qualification rather than to enlarge his knowledge or to serve a cause,” though India, I reflected, was packed with causes for reform), with a militant Sikh leader passionately demanding a Sikh state (1984 casting its shadows ahead), with Chimanlal Trivedi, the tough, cigar-smoking chairman of the Planning Commission (“In spite of our putting into the new five-year plan the most optimistic figures for internal accumulation of capital and external investment, we are still three million jobs short of providing employment for the increase in the working population,”) and my old friend VP Menon’s son-in-law General Misra, who had commanded the troops in Nagaland in the north-east, a place always high in my interest because my father had started not only his ICS career there but also his ethnological career, as the first anthropologist of the Naga tribes. Misra loved the Nagas, he said, a very likeable people who had deserved well of India in the war. Nehru had been generous in giving them local autonomy in the previous year and only a few fanatical irreconcilables remained. Their leader, Phizoo, had been a spy and a stooge for the Japanese, whom he had guided to Imphal and had joined the Japanese-formed Indian National Army. “It’s not done to talk about the INA nowadays, but believe me we soldiers feel very strongly about it.” Putting the so-called primitive tribes constitutionally under the Centre, Misra said, had been effective in withstanding pressure and erosion from the banias and land-hungry peasants of the plains—an observation which specially pleased me because this was precisely the course that as Reforms Commissioner I had recommended as the only way in which, upon India’s independence, we could leave the balls on the table in the best position to protect these simple people whom we had taken under the shelter of the British Crown, and whom we would be leaving exposed to their historic invaders.
So ended a journey through three continents which had immensely widened my knowledge and the horizons of my thought.
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