Ending in Tears: Britain's Uneasy Relationship with Cyprus

Rachael Gillett is an associate editor of Global Dialogue.

Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus
by tabitha morgan
London, New York, I. B. Tauris, 2010. 302 pages
Hardback: UK £25

You only have to scratch the surface of modern-day Cyprus to find echoes of the days of British colonial rule: the legal system, the civil service, the early closing of shops, the custom of driving on the left, and much more. It is surprising, indeed, to see the extent to which British habits took root there, given that the island was one of the last to be acquired by imperial Britain—in 1878. That the British legacy is so strong is all the more surprising when one learns that colonial rule was seldom comfortable—either for those governed by Britain or the colonialists themselves—and ended in bloodshed. The uneasy relationship between the British and the Cypriots, during the eighty-two years in which the island was occupied, forms one of the main and most interesting threads woven through Sweet and Bitter Island.

The narrative begins with the arrival of British troops in the heat of the summer of 1878, dressed in red woollen jackets, armed with warming pans and bins of coal, which were quickly abandoned on Larnaca beach. The British had not a clue about what they would find in the way of military opposition on Cyprus and clearly knew as little about the climate. There was no opposition when the troops landed because the island had been handed over to British administration in a deal with the Ottoman Porte. With xenophobe and misogynist Sir Garnett Wolseley leading the way, the British occupation of Cyprus began. Ground in the walled city of Nicosia was cleared for tennis courts and, to the bemusement of the Cypriots, a hunt was organised. So began life in another British colony.

The book goes on to describe some of the main events of British rule: the role of Cypriot muleteers in the First World War, the burning of Government House in 1931, Cyprus’s role as an intelligence centre in the Second World War, and the EOKA armed struggle that brought the colonial era to an end in 1960.

As eloquently as these events are related, it is the author’s detailed examination of how the colonisers and the colonised perceived each other that marks out this history of the island. The newly arrived administrators believed that the British presence in Cyprus, after centuries of Ottoman rule, would not only bring prosperity, but would also be redemptive. The island and its inhabitants would be restored, as Wolseley put it, to their “past prosperity that has been destroyed by the Moslems” (p. 8). Or, as another of the new colonists averred, through benign British influence Cyprus would be “raised out of the depths of moral degradation and material bankruptcy into which an unenlightened foreign domination has plunged her” (p. 8). Thus, R. Hamilton Lang, who had been British consul in Cyprus for five years under the Ottomans. This redemptive role was one the British—who saw themselves as the legitimate heirs to the traditions of Athenian democracy and the glory that was Greece—felt themselves uniquely qualified to fulfil. The newly arrived colonists could guide the Greek-speaking element of this debased and neglected people back towards a true understanding of its illustrious past.

This objective, the author argues, was complicated and ultimately left unfulfilled, because of what she convincingly describes as one of the least tangible but most enduring aspects of British rule in Cyprus: a persistent sense of doubt about the nature of Cypriot—in particular, Greek Cypriot—identity, and who exactly Cypriots were. It is a confusion that in many ways characterised British rule in Cyprus. While Turkish Cypriots could, in the colonial mind, be relatively easily categorised as “Orientals”, Greek Cypriots, who should by dint of their linguistic heritage have been the descendents of Pericles and Agamemnon, were always somehow felt to have fallen short, to be woefully inferior remnants of an illustrious past.

This belief that the island and its inhabitants had once enjoyed an illustrious past, an “ancient splendour” as one visitor to Cyprus referred to it, of which “few traces” now remained (p. 14), also underpinned the administration’s approach to the management of the island’s resources. It was not just a question of developing Cyprus, it had to be restored to past glories. Its forests, for example, had to be saved from both “the blighting influence of the Turk” and from its own “careless and indigent peasantry” (p. 107).

But how do you administer a colony where the majority of people speak a version (albeit a transmuted one) of the language of the ancient civilisation that you admire? What should missionaries do when they discover that most of the population is already Christian? What, in short, should the colonialists do with the education system? Within a decade of the British arrival in Cyprus, an answer was given to this last question: Cypriot schoolchildren would continue to follow the Greek education system. The author points to this as one of the defining moments of British rule. It meant that education was always beyond the reach and understanding of the colonial administrators and contributed to the failure of the colonialists to penetrate the consciousness of young Cypriots, inculcated with the nationalist spirit of both Greek education and the Greek Orthodox Church. It could only be a matter of time before that consciousness demanded free expression.

The British administrators, perplexed by who the Cypriots were and how to administer them, did not even have bags of cash to distribute to the islanders to buy them over to the colonialists’ cause. One of the terms under which the island was handed to the British required Cyprus to pay a large annual tribute to the Ottoman Porte. Cyprus was a pitifully poor island and attracted some pitifully poor administrators.

One of the exceptions to this last rule was Sir Ronald Storrs, a classical Greek scholar who became governor in the