1919, the fall of empire and its legacy in our honours system - Matt Downie
The British Empire ruled over hundreds of years and millions of people. But it was not until the final, shameful throws of Empire that it became the symbol of our honours system.
On 13th April 1919, a crowd of unarmed civilians gathered in the Jallianwala Bagh garden in the Punjab city of Amritsar. They were there to celebrate the Sikh and Hindu festival of Baisakhi. Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer didn’t like this. Accounts of the time report his fear of the crowd containing dissenters, activists against British rule. Dyer decided to block the main entrance and exit from the garden, and to order 50 gunmen shoot at will from an elevated position, killing upwards of 379 people, injuring many more, and preventing medical help for those wounded.
For many, this atrocity marked the end of any moral authority for Britain in India. Churchill damned the killings as ‘monstrous’, Ghandi spoke of the British ‘force of evil’ in Amritsar, and the MP J.C. Wedgewood declared that it ‘damns us for all time’.
The massacre is seen by some as the symbolic end of the British Empire, or at the very least as marking the moment that signalled its demise. It helped trigger the very thing Dyer feared, the unstoppable independence movement in India.
Five weeks after the massacre, the birthday honours list for King George V was announced in London. The list was an important moment to mark the contribution of so many military and civilian contributions towards victory in the First World War. More than 10,000 people received a medal that summer.
More than half of these medals were appointments to the recently conceived ‘Most Excellent Order of the British Empire’. These medals offered a new opportunity for “recognition of the manifold services, voluntary and otherwise, rendered in connection with the war”. As so began the honours system we most recognise today, with KBE/DBE (Knights and Dames), CBE, OBE and MBE medals awarded to recognise civic efforts and achievements.
It is hard to fault the thinking of the powers that be, in ascribing the honours system a new role in recognising civil society achievement. The choice to recognise people in the name of Empire was however, much less logical. It established a dilemma for those who are offered an honour that only grows more difficult with each passing year.
As more light is shed on the truth of the British Empire, it becomes harder for people to justify a civic ritual that evokes such pain, suffering and injustice. Of course, there were positive elements the 300-400 years of this period in our history, but can we overlook executions, slavery, segregation, subjugation? Surely not.
Over time there have been some political attempts to remove the link with empire within the honours system. Prime Minister Harold Wilson was asked in 1966 to consider removal of the word empire and declined to do so. In 2001 the Wilson Review recommended replacing the ‘Order of the British Empire’ with an ‘Order of Britain’. In 2005 a select committee report then recommended replacing empire with ‘excellence’. These latter two proposals were both opposed by the Blair government.
Today, 102 years on from 1919, we must confront this dilemma once and for all. People working for social justice should not have to choose between the honour of their efforts, causes, and organisations being recognised, and the dishonour of our colonial history.
I chose to accept my MBE because of what it means for the fight against homelessness, and the recognition of work done by my amazing colleagues too. I very much hope that one day soon we can all be unreservedly proud of these awards, as an inclusive celebration of excellence.