Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of ...

104 Anne Deighton
Jon Stallworthy, poet and professor of English Literature, sums this up
succinctly in a recent memoir. As a young New Zealander being educated
in a leading British ‘prep’ school in the 1940s, he realises now, but did
not know at the time,
and our teachers may not have known, that our curriculum had been shaped by
imperial priorities. It was no accident that the expansion of the British public
school in the second half of the nineteenth century coincided with the expansion
of the British Empire: the role of the one was to provide proconsuls for the
other. Rome was the model, and Latin the means whereby its values were transmitted
...Looking back through a post-colonial telescope, it is surprising to see
how determined were the descendants of colonised Britons to remember only the
commendable achievements of the conquerors and colonisers: their laws, their
mosaics, their roads. The reason, of course, was that these achievements of the
Roman Empire were held to justify our own. 9
The conservative nature of British society has, further, enabled traditional
ways of thought and reflexes of action to be sustained over time
within decision-making circles. Well into the post-war period, the dominant
mindset of British decision-makers was still imperial: for example,
London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies was established
to train colonial administrators. The Whitehall machinery of the
British civil service further reflected the conservative, elitist and rather
narrow educational base of the British system, typified by the public
schools and Oxbridge. 10
However, these memories and reflections tend to reflect and reinforce
in the United Kingdom existing images of an imperial past, but alone do
not give a strong clue about the relationship between memories of the past
and actual political decisions. Perhaps the clearest starting point for this
period is none other than Winston Churchill, who, both for the public and
for many decision-makers and politicians of both parties, epitomised success
in war. He was leader of the Conservative opposition between 1945
and 1951, and then prime minister again between 1951 and 1955. He
wrote, gave speeches and personally interpreted Britain’s immediate and
more distant history to a huge audience. Churchill’s public statements,
most notably to the Conservative Party conference in 1948, reflect a continuing
ambition about Britain’s current place in the world. This ambition
9 Jon Stallworthy, Singing School: The Making of a Poet (London: John Murray, 1998),
39–41.
10 Keith Robbins, History, Religion and Identity in Modern Britain (London: Hambledon
Press, 1993); Anne Deighton, ‘British Foreign Policy Making: the Macmillan Years’, in
Wolfram Kaiser and Gillian Staerck (eds.), British Foreign Policy, 1955–64: Contracting
Options (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 3–18; N. Piers Ludlow, ‘All at Sea: the Meaning
of Europe in British Political Discourse’, unpublished paper, London School of
Economics, 2000.