Abstract
‘In his biography of Geoffrey Clayton, Alan Paton describes with amused admiration the grand ceremony in 1948 with which ‘Galfridus EpiscopusJohnannesburgensis’ was made an honorary Doctor of Divinity by Cambridge University. Also present were the Archbishop of York Cyril Garbett, Winston Churchill and the (recently) ex-Prime Minister of South Africa, Jan Smuts, who was to be installed as Chancellor.1 In his installation address, Smuts spoke of aggression between nations the ‘great ideological bifurcation of our world’, and the battle for the salvation of Europe.2 The future unity of Europe was his theme, yet, o: all the establishment figures gathered on that occasion, Smuts served as a potent symbol of the imperial tradition, a character in a grand narrative that would only begin to unravel from the later 1950s as new and multiple cultural influences began to re-shape Britain. Smuts and Churchill’s credentials as pillars of the imperial establishment need little further elaboration. Yet both were defeated figures, swept aside as popular sentiment appeared to demand new forms of political leadership in the wake of war. Under such circumstances, the illustrious gathering at Cambridge appears to presage the ‘closing of the imperial moment’.
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Notes
A. Paton (1974) Apartheid and the Archbishop — The Life and Times of Geoffrey Clayton (London: Jonathan Cape), pp. 165–6.
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© 2010 Rob Skinner
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Skinner, R. (2010). The Nationalist Challenge. In: The Foundations of Anti-Apartheid. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309081_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230309081_5
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