Vol. 14 No. 5 · 12 March 1992
page 22 | 2675 words
Cold Shoulders, Short Trousers
Ian Hamilton
- Will this do? by Auberon Waugh
Century, 288 pp, £15.99, October 1991, ISBN 0 7126 3734 6
- Mr Wu and Mrs Stitch: The Letters of Evelyn Waugh and Diana Cooper edited by Artemis Cooper
Hodder, 344 pp, £19.99, October 1991, ISBN 0 340 53488 5
When Evelyn Waugh died in 1966, his son Auberon felt that a ‘great brooding presence’ had been lifted ‘not only from the house but from the whole of existence’. Auberon was in his twenties then, and – as he tells it in his book of memoirs – he had long ago got used to living in the shadow of his famously unpleasant dad. ‘It was many years before I could break the habit of viewing every event with half an eye to the bulletin I would send to my father.’ ‘The strain of living two lives, one on my own, and the other through his eyes, was greatly relieved by his sudden death.’
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Letters
Vol. 14 No. 7 · 9 April 1992
From Peter Cadogan
Where was Ian Hamilton in 1967/70 (LRB, 12 March)? What did he say and do about one of the worst horrors of the century, when the people of Biafra suffered more casualties than Britain did in World Wars One and Two combined? And if he was too young to be around politically at the time, why has he not taken the trouble to catch up? What mandate does he have to be snide about Auberon Waugh’s perfectly straightforward opposition to a genocidal war? May I fill him in?
Wilson’s Government had the support of the Conservative Front Bench, which silenced the argument for a year or more; the BBC, ‘encouraged’ by the Government, banned all radio and TV broadcasting from Biafra; Oxfam and the International Red Cross gave in to political pressure and cut off all aid; every bullet fired by the Lagos army came from British Army stocks; Shell and the City behaved disgracefully; London had a de facto unholy alliance with a Moscow that provided the Nigerian Air Force; the Left, playing the Moscow game, switched off the protest movement; public opinion, baffled, ignorant, insular and cowardly, moved not an inch.
Tiny sections of people behaved intelligently and honourably. Expatriate civil servants, missionaries and other professionals who knew the truth told what they knew; a handful of direct actionists from the dissolving Committee of 100 (I was one) took up the cause from the Committee’s office at 13 Goodwin Street and created the Save Biafra Campaign; and an amazingly mixed collection of distinguished people entered the lists without any label save that of Biafra and common humanity.
The Save Biafra Campaign took over demonstrations from the all-Biafran Biafra Union. The turn-out never exceeded five hundred. We took desperate measures to break the conspiracy of silence. We occupied the Banqueting House in Whitehall, declared it Biafran territory and held it until the Police came through the roof; we interrupted two succeeding Cenotaph ceremonies (after the two minutes’ silence); we took down the Nigerian flag from the front of the Commonwealth Institute, hoisted the Biafra colours and kept them flying until the Police dragged us away; we burnt an effigy of Mr Wilson on the steps of No 10 (the barriers and the present iron gates are a Biafran monument) and we seriously considered kidnapping Mr Wilson’s dog. We backed an international exercise designed to supply Biafra with an air force and advertised in the Times (too late) for volunteers to fight in Biafra.
The FCO stuck to its horrific brief, to maintain the status quo regardless. And what quo was that? In African terms, there is no such place as Nigeria, never has been and never will be. Its politics will always remain impossible. Sooner or later it will go the Yugoslav way. The Biafrans, persecuted and massacred throughout the rest of Nigeria, had no option but to make a start.
Peter Cadogan
London NW6
