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Sir Richard
Gordon Turnbull
Every serious nation, in the
course of history, loses a war here and there.
You hope it's there rather than here somewhere
far away, a small conflict in a distant land,
not central to your country's sense of itself.
During America's ''Vietnam era,'' Britain
grappled with a number of nasty colonial
struggles. Some they won Malaya and others
they lost Aden or, at any rate, concluded
that the cost of achieving whatever it was they
wanted to achieve was no longer worth it. No
parallels are exact, but the symbolism of the
transfer of power in Aden is not dissimilar to
the fall of Saigon.
On Nov. 29, 1967, the Union
Jack was lowered over the city, and the High
Commissioner, his staff and all Her Majesty's
forces left. On Nov. 30, the People's Republic
of South Yemen was proclaimed the only
avowedly Marxist state in Arabia.
A couple of years earlier, the
former High Commissioner, Sir Richard Turnbull
(21 Dec 1964 - 22 May 1967), had remarked
bleakly to Denis Healey, the British Defense
secretary, that the British Empire would be
remembered for only two things: ''the popularisation of Association Football [soccer]
and the term "f--- off.'"
Sir Richard was being a little
hard on his fellow imperialists, but those two
legacies of empire are useful ways of looking at
the situation when the natives are restless and
you're a long way from home: Faraway disputes
you're stuck in the middle of aren't played by
the rules of Association Football, and it's
important to know when to "f--- off.'' Aden had
been British since 1839: that's 130 years, or 10
times as long as America was mixed up in
Vietnam. And yet in the end the British shrugged
it off. Just one of those things, old boy. Can't
be helped.
Sir Richard Gordon
Turnbull (b.1909-d.1998) served as High Commissioner
from 21 Dec 1964 - 22 May 1967
High Commissioners:
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