White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

Britain Sets Sail for the Past — Old Glories and New Realities

April 5, 2019 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

Confused about Brexit? Then let me tell you about my father. He was born when the British Empire was still in bloom and being British was to inherit a divine state of grace. It was an exceptionalism. You carried the long and varied history of Britain with you. It was your honor and your obligation.

My father was born in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and only visited Britain briefly. But he was quintessentially British and, more than that, English.

He was neither well-lettered nor well-traveled; he earned his living with his hands as a mechanic. But his commitment to “King and Country” was absolute. He believed in Britain as the source of all good things, from justice to innovation.

That’s why when war broke out in 1939, he volunteered immediately for the Rhodesian regiment that was forming. He was rejected because he couldn’t fully straighten his left arm, which he had broken as a child.

No matter. He sold all the family’s possessions and with my mother, my 3-year-old brother and me, just months old, we took a six-day train journey with very little money to the South African port of Durban. He figured that The Royal South African Navy would be less interested in medical status than the infantry. He was right and he went to sea. Hugely important to him: he could serve.

In London in 1962, I worked for Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press lord who had been a big part of the war effort, a close friend of Churchill, and a man violently opposed to Britain joining the precursor to the European Union, the Common Market. My job was to help the effort to keep Britain out with the help of the influential Beaverbrook press — think Rupert Murdoch media — and to mobilize support against anything to do with the nascent European project.

The men and women I met were socially and intellectually far more accomplished than my father, but they had the same flame, the same basic belief in British exceptionalism. They believed in honor, duty, justice, but also that Britain, especially England, had an exceptional role in history: It was chosen. It’s a belief so deep that it’s primal, coming from a far place in the psyche.

The overt arguments we assembled were economic: Beaverbrook said, and I believed, the British farmer would be hurt, British trade would suffer and the precious empire — now in its new non-imperial guise as the Commonwealth — would be imperiled. Beaverbrook was wrong and, of course, I was wrong, and so were the Britain-first people we spoke for and sometimes recruited.

When Britain finally joined Europe in 1973, the farmers, and the economy in general were to bloom. Britain became Europe’s financial hub as well as the point of entry into Europe for global companies. Its own exports to Europe boomed: At one time, and perhaps still, half the pizza shells in Italy were made in Britain.

Now that economic order is to be disrupted, damaged or destroyed. Britain is going back to a glorious place that only existed in myth: the pre-European days when, without glory, it was still recovering from loss of empire and World War II.

When I try to imagine why this is happening, I find the arguments about “sovereignty, freedom and faceless bureaucrats in Brussels” even more empty than Beaverbrook’s fictions that I once peddled. I hear instead the brave music of a distant drum, the echoes of past victories, inventions and achievements, “Rule Britannia” in a minor key.

Winston Churchill said of the Seven Years War, “mankind was not to be spared the rigors of the human pilgrimage.” Neither, alas, it seems, is Britain.

As to my father, he lived many years in the independent African country Botswana teaching his trade and harboring in his home newborn African babies, who were fatherless and whose mothers had to work. He, unlike his sentimental compatriots, realized that times had changed, and that the Britishness of yesteryear was, well, of a time gone by and best left to BBC costume dramas like “Downton Abbey.”

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries

Comments

  1. David alennon says

    April 6, 2019 at 8:44 am

    I say old chap. Hear, hear. Jolly good.

    Reply

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind

PBS Has a Future by Leaving the Past Behind

Linda Gasparello

Over the years, I have often been critical of the Public Broadcasting Service. That in spite of the fact that for 28 years, I have produced and hosted a program, “White House Chronicle,” which is carried by many PBS stations. It is an independent program for which I find all the funding and decide its […]

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

Notebook: Requiem for American Justice

Llewellyn King

I have loads of my words to eat, a feast of kingly proportions. I don’t know when I started, but it must have been back when I was traveling on the speaking circuit. It doesn’t matter. This tale of getting it wrong starts in London, where I was asked to address a conference on investing […]

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

How Crowdfunding Brought a New Wind Technology to Market

Llewellyn King

A California company, Wind Harvest, is in high gear to change the dynamics of wind energy and to vastly improve the economics of wind farms.  But the company wouldn’t be marketing to large energy users and wind farm operators today if it hadn’t used crowdfunding for its recent rounds of financing. Crowdfunding can get a […]

Notebook: Friends Who Share Friends Are the Nicest People

Llewellyn King

I treasure the friends who share their friends. One of those friends, Virginia “Ginny” Hamill, has died.  I met Ginny at The Washington Post in 1969, and we became forever-friends.  Ginny had an admirable ascent from a teleprinter operator to an editor in The Washington Post/Los Angeles Times News Service. She was promoted again to […]

Copyright © 2025 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in