Empire & Me

 

During the last week, I watched all three episodes of the BBC/Open University documentary Empire, presented by my favourite historian, David Olusoga (pictured above, with me at Bradford Literature Festival). Those of you who have read some of my earlier blogs will know that I've been grappling with issues of Empire for some time.

But watching this series, I feel I have finally made my peace with the history of Empire and my family's part in it - the good, the bad and the ugly. Empire affects us all, even those ancestors who never left the shores of Britian. So many movements of people around the globe, so many interrelationships. So much impact on societies, language, folklore, music, agriculture, industry, the environment...

And it's complex. You can't just split it into "good" and "bad". We find different "sides" of it within our own family history.

With that in mind, I'd like to walk you through some of my family's history with the British Empire. 

A Well-Travelled Lot

An almost impossible-to-decypher family tree. Thanks, Grandma!

Earlier generations of my family were A LOT more adventurous than me! I have lived all my life (coming up for 52 years next month) in the village of Clayton in Bradford, West Yorkshire, and I am so wedded to the soil and stones that I couldn't possibly flourish anywhere else. 

My ancestors, on the other hand, moved about all over the place. Not just within - and between - Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales, but around the world too. And all this movement was made possible by the British Empire. As David pointed out in the TV documentary, Empire involved mass movements of people around the globe, and shaped the lives of 2.6 billion people. Many of us would not exist had all that movement not taken place.

My Grandma's family in particular really got about. Looking at the super-complicated family tree she left me, her mother's siblings (the Beers) got to Canada, Australia and "Africa" (?!?) as well as England, Scotland and Wales. Her own siblings (the Wyatts) followed in their footsteps. 

These were ordinary, working-class people looking for a better life, taking advantage of better opportunities in "the colonies" than they woud have had at home. This was all part of the push-and-pull of Empire. The Empire-builders wanted to "populate" their acquisitions with British people (in many places deliberately replacing the original inhabitants) and needed hands to keep the machinery of Empire going - labourers, soldiers, administrators, engineers. My family, like millions of others was caught up in this.

Australia

Above all other countries, my family emigrated to Australia. The above, poorly-reproduced photograph, shows a woman and baby in a kitchen with white, wooden walls. Allegedly, Great-Grandmother Rose was taken to Australia as a baby, but the parents didn't settle there and came back to Britain. 

The next generation had better success. Grandma's Aunt Annie went to Perth, Western Australia in 1938. It seems fitting that she go to a place with such strong Scottish connections - I mean, it's named after a Scottish city. (Grandma was Scottish by birth, and there's a fair amount of "Scotland" scibbled on that family tree). 

The photo above shows Annie's husband Bob in the uniform of the West Australian Cameron Highlanders, 16th Battalion. The combination of pith helmet, khaki jacket, kilt and spats absolutely screams British Empire at me. 

A little research has shown me that in WWII, the Cameron Highlanders were mainly involved in the New Britain campaign, trying to contain and confine Japanese troops' advancement into the island of New Britain in Papau New Guinea. It seems this island and its Papuan and Austronesian peoples had been previously "claimed" by Germany, fought over in WWI, and made a "mandated territory of Australia" in 1920. So much fighting...

Annie with her teenage son and daughter, in front of a picket fence

Looking at the history of Perth online, it was "founded" by Captain James Stirling (from Lanarkshire), although the traditional landholders are actually the Whadjuk Nyungar people, who call it Boorloo. It went through an era of convinct transportation and then a gold rush during the 19th century. That's a compicated set of movements right there.

In the third generation, Grandma's younger sister Audrey went to Australia on the post-war Assisted Passage scheme (Ten Pound Poms). And evidently, Grandma or someone considered joining her, because mixed in with the old photos is an application form - not filled in. 

The above picures show Auntie Audrey and her small daughter outside their house at Dandenong (suburb of Melbourne) in 1966, and her husband and children at the airport. 

If you've seen the TV drama Ten Pound Poms, a lot of what is depicted there seem to have been their experience. For example, the wife totally flourishing in a kind of freedom she didn't have in Britain, the husband being bullied at work as a "Pom"and hating it, and the new immigrants being horrified at the treatment of Aboriginal people. (The traditional landholders of the Melbourne area are the Wurundjeri, Bunurong and Wathaurong people). 

In the end, Audrey and her husband separated. She stayed in Australia. The picture underneath is of Grandma visiting Australia in the 1980s, feeding a kangaroo.

                                        

Interestingly enough, my youngest brother's partner is Australian. They met in Europe - because travel goes both ways.

South Africa?

My grandparents aren't around to ask about this, so I don't know the story. But I found two greetings cards from Cape Town with "Everlasting Silver Leaves from Table Mountain". Looking online, these seem to have been a very common type of greetings card, with some examples dating from the Boer War (sent by soldiers to their families). 

Perplexingly, these cards were sent by Annie, Bob, Eric and Betty, the family who emigrated to Australia in 1938. What were they doing in South Africa? Does the mysterious "William - Africa" on Grandma's family tree refer to South Africa? Were the Australian family visiting William? And what was William's story? I don't know.

I'm guessing he was born some time in the 1880s or 1890s, so was a child at the time of the Boer War, when British and Empire troops (including Australian, Canadian, Indian and Black African soldiers) fought the Dutch-descended Boers, after gold was discovered. (That stuff has caused so much suffering around the world!) 

The Boer War and Britain's Empire-building in Southern Africa has had an indirect upon my life. Lord Baden-Powell who became a national hero in Britain when he relieved the 217-day seige of Mafeking, went on to found the Scouting movement, which was part of my childhood and is still part of the life of our village (especially on Remembrance Day). But he was a typical colonial commander in many ways, having an ambivalent attitude towards the Black soldiers in his army, reducing their rations and downplaying their role in breaking the seige. 

That's the Empire. Giving with one hand and taking with the other.

The even more infamous figure of the British Empire in Southern Africa, Cecil Rhodes, was also involved in the war against the Boers. This was the man whose greed for diamonds and other minerals - added to his lust for power - led him to pretty much run his own country, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) as head of the British South Africa Company. He had the most extreme white supremacist views, and treated Black Africans with brutality and contempt.

The school I went to from ages 13-18 was called Rhodesway - because it was on a street called Rhodesway, with another nearby street called Rhodesia Drive. The school, and possibly the houses, dated from the 1950s. All the time I was at school, I had no idea why it was called that; I thought it rhodesia was a flower, like rhodedendron. It was only much more recently, as an adult - probably after becoming aware of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign - that it dawned on me. Presumably, Rhodes was still a hero in the 1950s because he got stuff "for Britian". But at the most terrible expense to other nations.

The school has now been knocked down and rebuilt under the name of Dixon's Allerton Academy, and I have to say, I'm glad. I mean, I go to church with people from Zimbabwe, for crying out loud! But it's another example of how inextricably intertwined with Empire our modern world is.

East Africa

As well as Ten Pound Poms, another thing David Olusoga mentioned in his documentary was the migration of British and Indian people - particularly engineers - to East Africa after WWII, and the ill-fated Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme. 

Grandma's brothers, Charles and Clifford Wyatt, went to East Africa as engineers in that very period. Family memory says they were in business in Niarobi, the captial of Kenya, and that they supplied lighting. (They also somehow got involved in the disastrous Groundnut Scheme, which they complained about afterwards!)

The above image is a screenshot from a page I discovered about the East African Power and Lighting Company. It mentions a "Mr Wyatt" (just the one) coming to East Africa in 1939 as mains engineer of Tanesco, Tanga (Tanzania), being Engineer in Charge, Eldoret (Kenya) 1943-1945, becoming manager of the Nairobi branch in 1953 and general manager of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria in 1957. Nigeria, of course, is in West Africa, and I don't recall Grandma mentioninng it specifically. But the name of Wyatt in association with engineering and lighting seems too much to be a coincidence.

It's hard to know how to feel about this, knowing the horrific things that happened in Kenya in the 1950s during the Mau Mau uprising (like the horrific things that happened during the Boer War). Looking at historic adverts for "Kenya Colony", it seems as if the British were living the high life, while displacing the Kikuyu and other marginalised peoples. My relatives weren't landowners, but I know they had servants (while Grandma and Grandad were living in a back-to-back in Bradford) and that they started another engineering company after returning to Britain. I also know that some of the lights they put up were smashed after independence - probably as a symbol of colonial rule.

Ireland

In another branch of my family, my ancestors were suffering the effects of colonisation. My Dad's mother (who I don't remember, as she died when I was a baby) came from Irish immigrants who arrived in Bradford in the 19th century, following the Great Famine.

I don't think I fully realised until lately just how horrific conditions were during the Famine and the evictions that followed it. And how appallingly the British treated the Irish throughout the years of occupation. There is much similarity between the Irish Famine and the two Great Bengal Famines. And famously, the Choctaw people of North America sent relief money to Ireland in solidarity, sixteen years after they had suffered on the Trail of Tears.

The picture above is the grave (in Bradford) of my great-great-grandparents John and Honorah McNamara, who came from Tralee, County Kerry. The book Bradford: A Centenary City (City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, 1997) says, "By the middle of the 19th century Bradford had ten thousand Irish people, almost a tenth of the population, living in terrible overcrowded ghettos..." (The census of 1901 shows twelve members of the Gorman/McNamara family - comprising three generations - living in a single house). "Many did not speak English, could not read or write and faced religious persecution and prejudice for being Catholic in a Protestant culture. There were anti-Catholic riots in the 1850s and 1860s".

But all that was preferable to starvation and homelessness. "Jesus mercy, Mary help" indeed, as it says on the gravestone.

There are two interesting things that stand out to me from census records. In the 1881 census, John is listed as a "mason's labourer". Irish labourers built a lot of Bradford's architecture in the late 19th century, as it went from a haphazard and lawless boom-town, to a rich and dignified late Victorian city. Famously, the Irish labourers working on City Hall refused to raise the statue to Oliver Cromwell, because of his brutal policy towards Ireland. (I'm surprised if they didn't also refuse to put up the statue to William of Orange - or most of the other kings and queens, to be honest). 

The other interesting thing is that in the 1891 census, as well as their own children, John and Honorah have an adopted son "from Liverpool" in their house. Could this be the son of friends or relatives who made the crossing from Ireland with them, but did not survive very long?

Bradford is now a multicultural city, and many of the families who trace their history from all across the ex-Empire and beyond, will have stories very similar to my own.

It's Complicated

As this blog has repeatedly shown, the story of Empire is complex and messy. My Grandma Clark, seems to have been the first generation of her family to marry outside the Irish diaspora. The man she married was the son of one Henry George Clark, who at the time of his marriage, to Sarah Jane Bottomley on 19th December 1896 at St Peter's, Bradford (now Bradford Cathedral) was a private soldier in the 33rd Regiment - aka the Duke of Wellington's Regiment (West Riding). I presume he was on active service at the time of the 1901 census, as his wife is then at home with the children and his mother - but the husband is absent.

I don't know which battalion he was in, or when he joined, but the above screencap from the regimental website,  we can see that one of the places they were stationed - in the 1880s - was Ireland. This would be during the Land Wars, when secret societies and organisations were waging war against the landowners, pushing back against the stuff that had happened in the 40s and 50s. 

And that's the mixed-up irony of Empire. Just like David Olusoga, at the end of the documentary, shows documents placing his British and his Nigerian ancestors on both sides of colonial fighting in the same place, so my family records do a pretty similar thing.

Charles Clark marries Sarah McNamara on 17th September 1927

We can't undo history. But we can study and remember it, and understand why our world, and our families, are the way they are now.

And finally...

I haven't reproduced this picture very well (it was getting dark when I photographed the photograph) but it shows three sons of my Grandma's Aunt Lizzie, who lived in Swansea and... some other people. Friends? Work collegues? Maybe it's a work's social club outing. (They're all wearing badges, which suggests some sort of club). Anyway, it's the only family photo from this period that shows a Black person. (Third from the left on the back row, with his arm around a white woman I presume is his wife or sweetheart). No one in the family now knows who he was. But it's a reminder that there were Black people in Britain in the early 20th century, especially in port cities like Swansea, because... you know the rest!