The lure of writing a bestselling thriller which would lead to untold riches, film deals, and tax exile in Ireland (the popular choice for high-earning artists in the Seventies), was stunningly obvious. Journalists knew, or thought they knew, that they could write; former military men who had seen active service and overseas postings felt they had the required background knowledge. Journalists certainly had the confidence to attempt a thriller4, yet the ability to produce a bestseller was not exclusively theirs. As well as Alistair MacLean, Harry Patterson (Jack Higgins) and James Mitchell (the creator of Callan) had also embarked on careers in teaching before they turned to writing fiction, which they did with great success.
The most unusual professional crossovers, however, were those of Brian Lecomber and Ted Allbeury. Lecomber was a flying instructor on Antigua in the Caribbean – just the sort of character likely to appear, say, in a Gavin Lyall thriller – who wrote three successful thrillers with aviation plotlines between 1975 and 1978. He was then given the chance to join the famous Rothmans Aerobatic Team and immediately abandoned thriller writing completely, declaring it ‘boring’ compared to stunt flying. Ted Allbeury served in the Intelligence Corps during and after WWII but, before he became a highly successful and much admired thriller writer, he had dabbled with careers in advertising, in public relations, as a farmer, and in 1964 he embraced one of the icons of the decade by becoming the Managing Director of a pirate radio station! Initially, Radio 390 operated from the decommissioned wartime Red Sands sea fort off the north Kent coast near Whitstable and was the location, in 1966, for the filming of an episode of Danger Man starring Patrick McGoohan. The station then moved out to sea as a ship-board pirate station, renamed Radio 355.
Exotic as some of their work experience was, the one thing necessary for the would-be thriller writer, possibly above all else, was a well-thumbed passport. A solid British thriller delivered danger, suspense, excitement, and possibly an insight into a richer, more privileged lifestyle, but crucially it delivered travel to foreign locations which the average reader could only realistically hope to explore through the printed page.
In the Fifties and Sixties, the majority of secondary school pupils in Britain studying for ‘O’ and ‘A’ Level examinations would be issued with a Philip’s Modern School Atlas in which, on every world projection, the countries of the Commonwealth were coloured pink. Quite why pink was never explained, but every student could see at a glance, and be reassured, that British influence extended from Baffin Island to the Falklands, and from Sierra Leone to New Zealand.
Editions of the same Atlas from before World War II would have displayed even larger swathes of pink, perhaps two-fifths of Earth’s land surface, to designate the British Empire rather than Commonwealth – perhaps that particular shade was called Imperial Pink1 – but the significance of the Empire, in economic and political terms, was fading from the map.
Should it have mattered in terms of the British psyche? After all, Britain had bravely stood alone and had won the war, hadn’t it?
Except of course it hadn’t. There was the perception that Britain had stood alone defying terrible odds from the fall of France and the Battle of Britain in 1940, although even in that iconic engagement, 20 per cent of aircrew defending British skies were non-British (Poles, Czechs, Belgians, French and Irish as well as ‘Empire’ contingents)2 and Britain’s effort in the land war in all theatres had been heavily reliant on troops called in from the Empire. Canadians had fought with great distinction in France, Australians and South Africans in the deserts of North Africa, Indians and New Zealanders in Italy, with many smaller colonies more than pulling their weight for the imperial good. Yet even with that magnificent straining of all the sinews of a global network, only the most die-hard of empire loyalists would seriously claim that Britain and its Empire had won the war. It had fought an outstanding holding action until the manpower of the Soviet Union and the economic and industrial strength of the United States had been brought into play.
In 1939, the British Empire had been the sole world super-power. By 1950 it was clear it was the junior of three super-powers and its imperial building blocks were crumbling away.
The dissolution of the Empire should have come as no surprise as the very ‘jewel in the crown’, India, had been promised independence during the war and achieved it, although far from peacefully, in 1947. Burma and Ceylon followed suit in 1948, and over the following decade (despite some foot-dragging by Conservative governments) the British gave up their interests in Palestine, the Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya. For the Caribbean territories, Cyprus, Malta and most of the African colonies, the political break from the ‘mother country’ came in with something of a rush in the 1960s, when it seemed that hardly a year went by without another country familiar to every schoolboy stamp-collector became a disappearing pink spot on the world map: British Somaliland, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, Kenya, Malawi, Northern Rhodesia, Gambia, Guyana, Botswana, Basutoland – the process seemed, and was, inevitable. The undignified stalemate when Southern Rhodesia adopted a Unilateral Declaration of Independence from the Empire (following the rather more famous example set by certain rebellious American states in 1776) in 1965 was perceived as yet another symptom of international impotence.
The emergence of new nations from their colonial cocoons even impinged, albeit tangentially, on the daily routine of one very special civil servant: James Bond. In On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) Bond is researching for his mission with a visit to the College of Arms, where he is told that the College’s workload has recently increased due to ‘The new African states … Much work has to be done on their flags, the design of their currency, their stamps, their medals …’ Our hero is not, however, unduly inconvenienced.
De-colonization, which may have been caused or hastened by the war, was not a sudden, or violence-free, process but it was inevitable and the majority of Britons accepted the change from Empire to Commonwealth. By May 1959 Empire Day had become Commonwealth Day, and in February 1960 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had delivered his famous ‘Wind of Change’ speech to the South African parliament in Cape Town. The official seal of approval, were one to be needed, came in April 1960 when that arbiter of all things British, The Times, abandoned the term ‘Imperial and Foreign News’ in favour of ‘Overseas News’.
Not everyone accepted the loss of empire with good grace. In 1954 Arthur Chesterton, a former member of the British Union of Fascists and cousin of Detection Club President G. K. Chesterton, started the League of Empire Loyalists as a ‘ginger group’ on the far right-wing of the Conservative party.3 Yet even the most ardent imperialist had to admit that the debacle of the Suez Crisis in 1956, when Britain and France opted for military intervention in the Middle East but were forced by international outrage into ignominious withdrawal, showed that an era had well and truly ended.
To mis-quote (and take out of context) Richard Usborne:
‘England was no longer governess of half the globe. Ius Britannicum did not apply over so many lands of palm and pine. There were fewer – far fewer – Government Houses flying the Union Jack. The Embassies and Consulates that have replaced them cannot summon the gunboats to revenge a British traveller thrown to the sacred crocodiles.’4
The British had to come to terms with no longer being the major world power – and so did its thriller writers. Pre-war fictional heroes such as Richard Hannay, as created by John Buchan, and ‘Sapper’s’ Bulldog Drummond were, it is fair to say, imperialists by both nature and nurture. In the 1950s it seemed that Britain was resigned to giving away its proud imperial heritage, was being out-stripped in living standards by the United States, and was constantly looking