The sons of empire are rarely prodigal

One day in October 1989, in the reading room of London’s Imperial War Museum, the Keeper of Documents handed two boxes to Robert Bickers, a Chinese-speaker, historian, and author of Britain in China. “I think you’ll enjoy these,” he said.

The boxes contained documents relating to the life of Maurice Tinkler, a Briton born in Grange-over-Sands, Lancashire, close to the English Lake District, in 1898. At the age of 21 he took a job in the Shanghai Municipal Police, a post he held for 11 years, resigning in circumstances Bickers is unable to explain. He ended life as supervisor of labor in the Shanghai subsidiary of a UK cotton-printing firm, the China Printing and Finishing Company. During a strike in 1939, partly anti-British in nature, he was beaten up by occupying Japanese troops (who were encouraging the strikers) and died in a Japanese hospital in Pudong the following day.

In opting to write the life of a perhaps representative but nonetheless largely undistinguished servant of empire, Bickers is following a trend to study ordinary people caught up in world events rather than famous political figures. The life of a single such individual will clearly make for good reading, but such an enterprise is only possible if detailed biographical information is available. In Maurice Tinkler’s case just enough of it was.

But there’s more to it than this. Bickers adds a chapter at the end of the book pointing out that he himself, the son of an air force sergeant, was sent to Hong Kong in 1971 and lived there for three years. “I too am a creature of the empire world,” he writes, along with millions of other near-anonymous Britons. It’s their experience he wants to understand, and in this book Maurice Tinkler is made to stand, slightly artificially, as their representative. And because Bickers writes in a notably accessible style, the book has become a popular success, and here appears as a Penguin paperback.

Bickers is no idealizer of empire, and you can’t help feeling Tinkler’s stridently racist opinions and frequently violent outbursts suit his underlying purposes. “His comments were mainstream even if his violence wasn’t,” he remarks. The British Empire, like all empires, depended on force, he insists, both for its establishment and its continuation. “It shattered the societies it subjugated, but it also shattered and disoriented British society.” After their expatriate lives men frequently found they couldn’t return home, unable to face re-integrating themselves into life back in a country from which they had grown distant, and frequently moved on to places even further away.

Tinkler was a policeman in Shanghai’s tiny International Settlement, the extra-territorial district where foreigners enjoyed immunity from Chinese law. He was thus a member of a group more than usually concerned with the enforcement of foreign rule. And as George Orwell wrote (in The Road to Wigan Pier, but referring to his own life in uniform in Burma), in the police “you see the dirty side of Empire at close quarters.”

In attempting the biography of an ordinary man, Empire Made Me inevitably encounters the problem of missing dates. Bickers has no idea what Tinkler did between 1931 and February 1934, for instance, and can only guess, and his speculations are included in a chapter entitled “What We Can’t Know.” Any historian understands that, when looking at the lives of ordinary people, this is often almost everything.