The All-Red Route

CXII

Most people attribute the quote, “The sun never sets on the British Empire” to J. Rudyard “Jack” Kipling (1865-1936), poet, storyteller, and British imperialist nonpareil, but the truth is that the remark likely predated Kipling’s adulthood. From approximately 1860 to 1960 it was a truism, even if cynics quietly appended to it, “because God would never trust an Englishman in the dark.” 

Jack Kipling in his booklined study, smoking his beloved pipe. He also liked to say, “A woman is just a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

The vastness of British imperial dominions at their height was intimidating. The Union Jack flew over every continent, even Antarctica. Every language in the world was spoken beneath that flag, and every god worshiped. Every shade and shape of human being could claim to be a British subject. Vast stretches of the earth’s surface --- from the mouth of the Nile to the Cape of Good Hope in Africa, and a realm reaching from the Strait of Hormuz to the Malacca Straits in Asia --- were British. Historians now posit that of the 200-plus nation states now currently in existence, the British Empire exerted direct influence in all but nine. 

The British Empire, circa 1930. Besides the “pink bits” Britain also dominated the foreign policies of Saudi Arabia, Persia (Iran), Afghanistan, Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet. There was a fairly large and influential British expat community in Argentina as well

The color of the Empire was a color later tagged Imperial Red, dating back to the “redcoat” soldiers of the Eighteenth Century. Nineteenth Century cartographers drew their world maps with a surfeit not of Imperial Red, but of a color soon named Empire Pink. It was explained: 

Pink is supposed to be the colour of the Tudor rose of the English monarchy. Goes back to the War of the Roses, Henry Tudor reunited the houses of York, symbolized by the white rose, and Lancaster, symbolized by the red rose. The new House of Tudor was symbolized by the combination of the two, a pink rose. The Tudor Dynasty and the Tudor Rose came to be strongly identified with "Englishness" (I suppose it probably had something to do with the last of the Tudors, Elizabeth I, being succeeded by a Scot, James I).

A more prosaic explanation for the choice of Empire Pink is that it was simply easier to read black-printed place names on maps against the softer pastel background color of pink. Whichever it was, the map was covered with what the British fondly called their “pink bits.”  

  

It was an insufferably bourgeois Empire. People from “the Home Islands” of Great Britain and Ireland, particularly educated Middle Class professionals and skilled laborers, left Home and spread out across the remote stretches of the Empire seeking opportunities. A shop clerk in London might become a business branch manager in Sarawak, and a Liverpool carpenter might become a construction foreman in Natal. 

Yet, the people from the Home Islands remained strangely insular. Throughout their Empire they tended to live in “cantonments” segregated away from the local inhabitants. Natives were considered tolerable servants and a source of cheap labor in need of close supervision.  Stodgy cultural habits imported from Home became well-nigh the marks of one’s very Britishness --- cricket matches were played in the torrid heat of Singapore, and afternoon teas with “bikkies” were an expected part of daily life in Jamaica. 

Britishers who stepped beyond of the invisible but very real bounds set by cantonment society were suspected of “going native.”  Likely, far more British went native to some degree than the Imperial histories want to remember. 

For all its reach, the British Empire was a fragile one. Every one of the numerous political subdivisions of the Empire was managed differently. Throughout the Empire, British traditions of democracy, free speech, and justice lived in an uneasy imbalance with what the British perceived --- often inaccurately --- as local conditions. The Europeanized lands of Australia and Canada were given Dominion status, essentially acting as independent nations under the British Crown. Yet Ireland was held to the Empire by force. Palestine, a Mandate awarded by the League of Nations, was militarized, and to keep ahold of the Mandate the British empowered, divisively, the most radicalized leaders of the local Arab and Jewish communities who worked against each other, creating issues that have now in the 21^st Century far outlived any real meaning they might have once had. The Indian Empire --- an empire-within-the-Empire --- was deemed too backward and self-divided for Home Rule. When Indians attempted to forge their own future, they were suppressed, often violently, and the colonial administration exploited tensions between Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist and Sikh to prevent their almost one billion Indian subjects from presenting a united front. It took the Satyagraha --- the Love Force --- of Mahatma Gandhi to change the trajectory of Indian history, and that with the partition of great India into several mutually-antagonistic nations. 

For two centuries Great Britain had relied on sea power to hold its Empire together, but as the Twentieth Century progressed forward-thinking Britons realized that to sea power must now be added air power. 

During World War I, Great Britain had become, in numbers, the air power of the world. With the return of peace, Britain, oddly, shucked off this mantle. There was a brief, disastrous flirtation with airships --- the destruction of the luxurious R-101 on its maiden voyage in 1930 ended the era of British ocean liners in the sky before it began --- but there was virtually no new British innovation in heavier-than-air-craft well into the 1930s. What records were set, what inventions were tested, were always carried out with modified World War I-era planes. During the 1920s, any large British plane was called, generically, a Handley-Page, after the biggest bomber aircraft of that war.  

 

An early ad for Imperial Airways flying boats. Note the biplane configuration

As late as 1935, British aircraft designers were still building wood–and-canvas biplanes, albeit big multiengine ones. These aircraft simply couldn’t compete --- nor did they try to compete --- with the aircraft being turned out in France, Germany, and the United States. Airplanes still had severely restricted ranges in the 1930s, but they were poised to overtake airships as long-distance carriers. That was the theme, but Britain seemed oddly disinterested in adding its voice to that chorus. 

In part, British resistance to change came from its anomalous relationship with the North Atlantic Ocean, which was dominated by the British-flagged Cunard-White Star Lines. Unlike the French, Germans, and the Americans (particularly Juan Trippe who wanted an air route to London so badly he’d have eaten clotted cream to get it) the British saw no reason to look west and build an airplane with transatlantic capabilities. 

Instead, the British looked southeast of the Home Islands, toward their possessions in Africa and Asia. They developed what they called the “All-Red Route” that hopscotched from one British colonial possession to the other:

Southern Britain → Gibraltar → Malta → Alexandria → Port Said (after construction of the Suez Canal) → Suez → Aden → Muscat (and access to the Persian Gulf) → India → Sri Lanka → Burma → Malaya → Singapore (branching out into the Pacific Ocean towards Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and other British colonies).

 

Imperial Airways’ All-Red Route

Except for the furthest reaches of the All-Red Route, long-distance aircraft were an unnecessary frippery. To maintain British control over British skies, the Air Ministry propounded “Provision H” a weirdly vague law stating that a non-British competitor could not operate on a British air route unless a British-flagged air carrier could operate there with a “substantially similar” plane. Exactly what a “substantially similar” plane might be was never answered. Did it mean that Pan American (or any other carrier) was limited to using wooden biplanes? Did it mean the planes had to have the same number of engines, or the same load-to-tare, or the same fuel capacity, or the same number of crew?  Answers were never forthcoming from the British Air Ministry, and so the North Atlantic remained “locked out” for several years until longer-range planes obviated the necessity for staged flights from one pink bit to the other.

The first Hawker Hurricane just before its 1935 inaugural flight

The British aircraft industry was awakened from its torpor in 1935, when a new generation of modern fighter planes --- the Hawker Hurricanes and Supermarine Spitfires of World War II legend --- were ordered up. It belatedly occurred to British observers that Germany --- now Nazi Germany --- was rearming in secret, building passenger transports that could be converted to bombers and private planes that could be converted to fighter aircraft. Britain, it was decided, must reclaim its rightful place as the world’s leader in aircraft production. 

First introduced in 1936, and one of the greatest fighter aircraft ever built, the outnumbered Supermarine Spitfire (together with the Hawker Hurricane) defeated the German Luftwaffe decisively in the 1940 Battle of Britain, the first military campaign waged entirely in the air

It was also recommended that the wooden biplane transports used by civilian airlines be junked. In their place, Imperial Airways (the precursor to BOAC and British Airways) received the Short S.23, which it dubbed the Empire Class flying boat. The S.23 was succeeded by the S.26 and then by the S.30. 

The Imperial Airways flying boats were the winged equivalents of the R.M.S. Mauretania and the R-101. At their largest, these planes had triple decks, lushly-appointed private suites, Grand (though spiral) Staircases, and galleys capable of serving up Continental fare. At best, they might fit twenty passengers. 

The Short  Aircraft Corporation’s  S.30 Empire C-class flying boat Connemara on the River Medway near Rochester in Kent. Note the triple deck arrangement

It didn’t matter. Built not for competition but for the idea of Empire, these planes reflected the best that Britain could offer. 

Outfitted with mahogany fittings and broadloom carpeting, they were airworthy, though slow and heavy aircraft (with a ridiculously inefficient load-to-tare of 25:75) that droned their way across the only world that mattered to their creators --- the one that was painted pink.