One Fine Day – Pictures – Matthew Parker

Phosphate mining on Ocean Island left a barren, sterile wasteland but provided vital fertiliser for Australia and New Zealand.
Banaban dancers. Banabans had lived on remote and arid Ocean Island for 1500 years. In September 1923, they faced expulsion from their ancestral home.
By September 1923 a huge campaign was underway to attract British migrants to Australia. Increasing the population there was seen as vital to counter the threat of Japan. The experience seldom lived up to the idyllic pictures painted by the promotional material.
US doctor Sylvester Lambert administering vaccines in the Pacific New Hebrides. Sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, medical aid was seen as the perfect way to drive American commercial and political penetration of the European empires.
Hugh Clifford as a young man in Malaya. His conflicted attitude to the British Empire there would shape his long colonial career.
Loke Yew, one of the pioneering Chinese entrepreneurs who made a fortune from tin mining in Malaya. By late 1923, the British had relegated the large Chinese population to second-class status.
E.M. Forster with his friend Syed Ross Masood. In September 1923 Forster was writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India, with its depiction of India’s British population as at once arrogant and fearful.
Militant Buddhist U Ottama. He would die in a British prison in Burma, and is now considered one of the fathers of Burmese independence. As George Orwell discovered, there was perhaps nowhere in the empire where the British were so hated.
A ‘punitive expedition’ in Kenya with British officers, Sudanese troops and Masai warriors. From its earliest days, the Kenya colony was established as a place of violence against its black population.
Harry Thuku, leader in Kenya of the Young Kikuyu organisation. When asked if he had a message he wanted sent to Britain, he replied, ‘Ask the King of England to stop the European settlers using the kiboko [rhino hide whip] on their Africans.’
A. M. Jeevanjee, founder of the East African Indian National Congress, stalwart campaigner for Indian interests in Kenya and the colony’s richest man by some distance.
Herbert Macaulay, the ‘organising genius’ behind West Africa’s first political party. Although a critic of the colonial government in Nigeria, he remained a fervent supporter of the empire as a whole.
Adelaide Casely Hayford, who on 29 September 1923 was opening her Technical School for Girls in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was a project as ground-breaking and extraordinary as Casely Hayford herself.
Norman Manley wearing the artilleryman uniform in which he fought in the British army during the First World War. He was fond of quoting a British official who said, ‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’