IN 1972, the BBC produced a 13-part series on the history of the British Empire, Echoes of Britannia’s Rule, the first in co-production with Time-Life of the United States. It was the great era of BBC documentary series, following on from Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation in 1969, and the two subsequent Time-Life collaborations, Alistair Cooke’s America of the same year, and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man in 1973. It cost half a million pounds to produce (£16million in current prices), was narrated by Robert Hardy, and was broadcast alongside a run of glossy magazines.
And yet, it has disappeared.
At the time, it provoked criticism from the establishment and a debate in the House of Lords for its perceived bias against the Empire. Charles Gibbs-Smith, head of PR at the V&A, asked why the BBC only emphasised the ‘so-called past wickedness of British imperialism? Have certain quarters in the BBC decided the time has come, not only to chip away at the nation’s public image, but to erode our patriotism, particularly amongst the young?’ (We can but dream of a senior employee of any of our great museums voicing such a view today.)
A search for the series today will draw a near blank. You can hear the title music here, in a good Imperial style similar to that used a decade later in Granada’s adaptation of Paul Scott’s The Jewel in the Crown. A guide to the content of each of the episodes is preserved here.
Echoes of Britannia’s Rule does however feature in the 2017 BBC programme The British Empire: Heroes and Villains, presented by the Corporation-favoured anti-Imperialist, David Olusoga. The glimpses that we get of the original are intriguing. Olusoga chooses as his first extract General Dyer and the 1919 massacre at Jallianwala Bagh. It is clear that the original is not apologetic towards Dyer’s actions: there are dramatic clips of the scene today (the camerawork is interesting and artfully shot), and the voiceover is at pains to tell us, ‘post-war Britain was liberal, humanitarian in its climate of opinion.’ From the debate in the Lords, an extract from Lord Barnby is voiced as a plummy Turton-Burton, and contextualised by blue-haired popular historian Alex von Tunzelmann (I shall never look at her book on the end of the Raj in the same way again). Later, the sugar plantations of the West Indies are brought up – the easy targets are hit.
Olusoga, wandering the streets of Oxford (why? he’s not associated with Oxford) informs us of the backstage controversy behind the 1972 series. The elderly establishment at the BBC wanted to present an uncritical, glorified Imperial history, but the younger producers, refused, even threatening to resign en masse; youth won the day, of course. Olusoga’s broad historiography is illustrated in clips from two other, more recent BBC productions. The ‘warts and all’ version told in the 1970s, and re-told by Jeremy Paxman in 2012, is now being threatened by a recurrence of Empire apologists; in another programme, Andrew Roberts is allowed to put the case forward before being eviscerated by a panel chaired by Kirsty Wark. The message is clear: re-revisionism of the history of the Empire is in danger of returning, and we must stick to the script and atone for our sins with the benefits of multiculturalism.
But, if this is true, why has Echoes been suppressed?
Maybe we can get an idea by looking at the summaries of the series’s episodes. Here’s the third one, ‘Remember Cawnpore!’:
‘For over a century the world’s second most populous country was run by a commercial firm with headquarters in the City of London – the East India Company. Its merchants first went to India in search of exotic spices, but they ended up by supplanting the mighty Mogul dynasty. The Company built new cities like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Young men like Warren Hastings flocked to India to make an easy fortune. Relations between the races were carefree. Inter-marriage was common. The Company had its own army and fought epic wars to unify the sub-continent. In the hills of Afghanistan, it also suffered one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on a British army. And in 1857, after two and a half centuries, the East India Company was destroyed by the great Mutiny which almost lost Britain her Indian Empire.’
This seems a standard Dalrymplesque retelling of India before the Mutiny, but remember this was aired in the days before Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). We may suspect that the episode included such things as Sir William Jones’ discovery of the common root of Sanskrit, Greek and Latin; or James Princep deciphering Brahmi. Perhaps, it mentions the British tiger-hunting party under James Smith who rediscovered the Ajanta Caves in 1819, or the preservation and restoration of monuments such as Sanchi, which had been long neglected before the British took an interest in them. ‘Official’ historiography of such matters must now be presented under the unquestioning eye of Said. And, of course, we can’t have Madras and Bombay, let alone Cawnpore!
The Great Stupa at Sanchi, 1861
Or, take Episode 7, Scramble for Africa:
‘Africa held two gateways to India – Suez, and the staging post at the Cape – and Britain gained control of both. In holding them, she was sucked into trouble. With Britain’s hands tied at either end of the Dark Continent, other European nations began to grab slices of Africa for themselves. It looked as if they might get the lion’s share until Cecil Rhodes determined at all costs (and he held the monopoly of South Africa’s diamonds) to carve a path for a British Cape-to-Cairo railway. Opposed to Rhodes was President Kruger of the Transvaal. Kruger, the leader of the god-fearing Boer farmers, found himself sitting on most of Africa’s gold. Rhodes’s attempts to win the strategic heartland of Africa, combined with the implacable demands of Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain, culminated in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. British prestige, already tarnished in the eyes of the world, was further diminished as the Boers defied British might. In 1901 Victoria died. An age was over.’
Descriptions such as the Dark Continent would of course attract the ire of the modern Beebocrat; and we can only wonder what even the most progressive young television producers would have said about Africa in 1972. What interests me here is the political angle. What was the seventies view of Joseph Chamberlain, probably the most influential politician not to become Prime Minister? (He was interesting enough for Enoch Powell to write a short biography, where he uses the now-famous phrase ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure.’) And the Rhodes/Milner circle, along with Milner’s ‘Kindergarten’ of followers, were central to the turn-of-the-century drive to an early incarnation of global government.
Reading the transcript of the Lords debate is nothing like Olusoga’s caricature. The debate was requested by Lord Ferrier, who had served in the Indian Army before a career in business and administration in Bombay. The central point of the debate is about whether it was appropriate for the BBC to partner with Time-Life and, if in undertaking commercial ventures, it is in breach of its charter. There are some good moments though, first from Ferrier himself:
‘The series turned out to be so shallow, so trivial and in some respects so sadistic that to those with a real knowledge and respect for the Empire it appeared to be definitely misleading—and more specially so in its omissions, which seemed more striking to me than its errors… Let us recognise that there is widespread talk of the infiltration through the ranks of the BBC of elements dedicated—and here I quote from one of my private letters—to “knock the police, the Army, the Church, the Common Market, to encourage the permissive society, pop music and drugs and the spread of Marxism in education”. The public are beginning to stir in their anxieties about the future of the BBC.’
Lord Gridley refers to the ‘mystical and perhaps even spiritual’ aspect of the Empire, which the series does not convey. Lord Noel Annan, as a historian himself, questions whether it is possible to reduce history to a television series at all, let alone shoehorning the material of the Empire into thirteen episodes (Paxman’s series does even better: it is only five episodes long!). Speakers are at pains to point out that their intent is not ‘BBC-bashing’, but rather to consider whether the Time-Life partnership is appropriate.
As for poor old Lord Barnby (Eton and Magdalen, Oxford), picked out by Olusoga: well, he was indeed a character from another age. He saw action in the Great War and was 87 at the time of the debate. He was a leading member of the Monday Club, where he is reported to have to have said, ‘where would the black African population of Rhodesia have been by now without the civilizing influence of the white population?’
You can see why Olusoga doesn’t like him, but his contribution to the debate is far from how he portrays it:
‘One of the main complaints about the series was with regard to the association of the BBC with Time/Life, and it is natural that any production put out under that aegis would be slanted against imperialism. The advantages of imperialism are one of the things which the United States has consistently, and I would say questionably, opposed. The series seems to have invoked a good deal of criticism for presenting the Empire in an improper form…
‘I am going to make no apologies, as some would do, for the way in which the Empire was built up. It seems now that this tradition of the past is receiving less respect than it should…
‘On the subjects of impartial justice, uncorrupt officialdom, selfless dedication by many whose lives had been spent in the services of the Empire the series was strangely muted. Let us hope that some future producer will produce another series that will show what Britain did in the development of her Empire for the benefit of humanity through the centuries, and what happened on her withdrawal from many places.’
The debate is wrapped up by Lord Gowrie (subsequently Arts Minister under Margaret Thatcher):
‘I personally believe that the Empire was the result of one of the most extraordinary explosions of human energy that the world has known. I believe that our presence around the world set standards and ambitions which, however hard they may be to live up to, however hard we ourselves find them to live up to, nevertheless still remain as standards for more than half of humanity. We must be vigilant on behalf of these standards.’
Olusoga has hardly been the impartial historian here.
Echoes of Britannia’s Rule sounds an intriguing series. The fact that Olusoga uses clips from at least two episodes suggests it has not been ‘lost’, but rather suppressed, in favour of newer ‘official’ histories. It is not appropriate for the taxpayer-funded BBC to withhold history like this. It should be released.
This article was first published on Dogmatic Slumbers and is republished here by kind permission.
