No Time for Tears

The disappearance of a British colony has always been marked by the pomp and panoply of Britain's imperial traditions. A member of the royal family usually flew out to hand over the articles of independence. The governor general was on hand in his gold-braided uniform and cocked hat. Tribal dancers exploded in bare-breasted ecstasy. Then, promptly at midnight, bullnecked district officers wept openly as a bugle sounded and the Union Jack came down.

Last week, with the fall of the ultimate symbol of Britain's once great empire, there was no bugle, no ceremony, no tears. Workmen simply replaced the sign on the Colonial Office's old headquarters near Whitehall with one reading "Commonwealth Office."

Colonial Reminder. At the zenith of Britain's imperial power in the late 1800s, the Colonial Office ruled more than 100 colonies in every quarter of the globe. It might, in fact, have ruled more, but the office got off to a bad start. It was created in 1660 as the Council of Foreign Plantations to supervise British settlements in the Western Hemisphere. After the American colonists revolted--partly in protest against the unenlightened policies of Colonial Secretaries--the Colonial Office was abolished for nearly 75 years, and its functions reverted to other ministries. When the Colonial Office was formally re-established in 1854, a portrait of George Washington was whimsically hung over the fireplace in the Colonial Secretary's office as a reminder of the mistakes of his predecessors.

Not all Colonial Secretaries could keep track of their far-flung charges. A lady at a London banquet in 1852 once asked Colonial Secretary John Pakington where the Virgin Islands were. He is supposed to have replied imperiously: "As far as possible, my dear lady, from the Isle of Man." A President of the Orange Free State in South Africa reported his experience in 1876 with another Colonial Secretary who "unfolded a pocket map and begged that I would point out to him where the Orange Free State was."

The job itself has less glamour--and more administrative headaches--than most Cabinet posts, but a few men used the Colonial Office as a steppingstone. Gladstone was a Colonial Secretary when the job was still under the War Office. Winston Churchill was Under Secretary from 1906 to 1908 and steered through Commons a bill granting self-rule to the recently defeated Boers in South Africa. Reginald Maudling served as Colonial Secretary before he became Harold Macmillan's Chancellor of the Exchequer. The present Secretary is Fred Lee, 60, who last week was in the Southwest Pacific on a trip to British territories that no other Colonial Secretary had ever before visited.

Out of Business. While the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretaries made the sweeping decisions that extended the British realm, the Colonial Office minded the less dramatic chores of the empire. It set up the famed London School of Tropical Medicine, waged successful wars against malaria and the tsetse fly. Under its direction, Britain became the first modern nation to extend developmental aid to backward areas of the world, and its officers helped train a substantial segment of the world in methods of administering government and running essential health, educational and financial services.

Unquestionably, the Colonial Office's finest job was the efficient way it put itself out of business. Since 1947, when Britain began dismembering its empire, the Colonial Office has helped 20 countries write constitutions and attain independence. Now with only 30 mostly minor colonies left--and twelve of them scheduled for independence within two years--the Colonial Office has surrendered its functions to the Commonwealth Office, which will oversee the fate of the last vestiges of what was once the greatest empire in history.

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