New World Orders

This chapter focuses on the most immediate and visible change of the post-war era: decolonization and the slow disintegration of the underlying imperial structure of the honours system. In India and Pakistan nationalist movements agreed that the honours system was an undesirable relic of empire, even as British officials tried to make the new states keep it in 1947 in order to maintain connections and power in the subcontinent. The process of decolonization of honours was slower, more partial, and complex in other parts of the world, reflecting complicated balances between loyalty and pragmatism. At the same time, within Britain a wide variety of people—including members of the royal family, Colonial, Dominions, and Commonwealth Office officials, honours recipients, newspaper columnists, and politicians—criticized the growing incongruity of the name of the Order of the British Empire. However, the administrators of the honours system staunchly defended the growing anachronism. In order to make the honours system work for Britain, the state and the public had to forget that the Order of the British Empire was not just of, but for, the empire.

Ordering Empire and Democracy, 1902–1921

This chapter examines the creation of new orders at the beginning of the twentieth century, which was the culmination of a prolonged period of “unprecedented honorific inventiveness” starting in the late nineteenth century. In Britain the new Order of the British Empire was branded the “Order of Britain’s Democracy” in recognition of the fact that it extended far deeper into non-elite classes in British society than any previous honour. Between 1917 and 1921 more than 20,000 people in Britain and throughout the British Empire were added to this new Order. This was an unprecedented number, orders of magnitude larger than honours lists in previous years. While the new Order was successful in reaching a wider, more middle-class audience than the honours system before the war, which was socially narrow, there was a substantial backlash to what was widely perceived by elites to be an excessive (and diluting) opening-up of the “fount of honour.” This backlash was connected to political controversies about the sale of honours that eventually helped bring about Lloyd George’s downfall. This chapter also contains a brief description of all the components of the British honours system at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The Re-enchanted Hierarchy, 1970–2004

At the end of the twentieth century there were major reforms to the honours system. These were connected to larger processes of social change following the political and social shifts of the 1980s and 1990s. In 1993 the honours system was revised by John Major and civil servants concerned about its reputation as class-based and automatic for civil servants. The lower ranks of the Order of the British Empire (which make up a majority of total honours given out) were reoriented towards voluntary service and away from professional state service. Honours became a way of paying volunteers to do work once done by the state using social capital rather than money. This chapter also details the relationship between these changes and the role of the monarchy in British society. After 1948, all British recipients of honours at the level of MBE and above were entitled to visit Buckingham Palace and receive their award from a royal personage. Autobiographical writing suggests a set of characteristic experiences and feelings. Many who recorded their experiences not only celebrated their encounter, but also expressed empathy with the monarch, affirming both the normalcy of the royal family and also their special status. John Major’s reforms (and similar ones that followed them in the early 2000s) thus reintegrated two functions of the monarchy—its role as the affirmer of national merit through the honours system and its status as the leader of the voluntary sector in Britain.

People’s War, People’s Heroes? 1939–1945

This chapter examines the changes, controversies, and continuities of the Second World War. Unlike the honorific revolution effected by the creation and wide use of the Order of the British Empire in the First World War, the Second was a time of careful control and continuity in the British government’s use of honours. The honours system focused on rewarding technocrats over volunteers, while also being careful to selectively integrate unions and Labour politicians rather than resisting their increased importance. In terms of certain social institutions, including honours, the Second World War was a period of continuity rather than change. Intuitively, the period between 1939 and 1960 seems revolutionary for Britain because of decolonization and the rise of the welfare state. However the “ideological apparatus of the state,” of which honours were an important part, was left intact during the wider “transwar” period, leading to continuities as well as breaks in the power of established institutions.

My Neighbor’s Honour, 1921–1939

This chapter examines the aftermath of the expansion of the imperial honours system through the experiences of those social groups who had been newly included in the system: especially the broad, insecure middle classes. Groups who continued to be marginalized by the system, such as professional women, clamored for increased recognition or argued that the system was rotten to the core and needed to be removed. In the empire critiques of honours crystallized around nationalist causes, while elites who were willing to exchange loyalty for status enjoyed the greater variety of honours available to them, doubling down on their commitment to the empire-wide system of hierarchy and distinction that defined them against nationalists. Official honours policy and the behavior of those who had been included in the “democratization” of 1917–1921 sought to defend a status quo rather than continue the inclusion of the years at the end of the war. The Treasury retrenched, reducing the number of honours distributed throughout the empire, and narrowed the range of people who could receive them, focusing on honouring state servants rather than the wider public in Britain. At the same time, recipients of the Order also sought to defend its honour against people in lower ranks of society by policing in minute detail the use of the privileges of holding honours. The honours system thus defined a form of proximity to social and political elites within and outside Britain. This definition prioritized state service, thus creating a connection between hierarchy and state expansion that would continue through the century.

Introduction

The introduction discusses existing literature on honours systems around the world and, in particular, in Britain. It draws attention to some of the ways in which people have obscured or downplayed the centrality of honours to important social and political processes in Britain and the British Empire. It also briefly compares the British system to other international honours systems and how scholars have analyzed them. It discusses in some detail the relationship between party politics, the civil service, colonial governments, the monarchy, and civil society institutions in nominating people for honours.

Conclusion

The conclusion discusses two recent cases of people who have been stripped (or who people tried to strip) of their honour: Fred Goodwin and Jimmy Savile. Using them and other examples, it poses questions about the successes and failures of the honours system to adapt to rapid social changes at the end of the century, and to the legacy of empire in Britain. In contemporary politics, the honours system continues to raise tensions between ideological positions about the relative public worth of different forms of service, the meaning of citizenship in Britain and the former British Empire, and the interactions between social and economic hierarchies. In a globalized, rapidly-changing Britain, honours may seem incongruous or obsolete with their pseudo-medieval imagery; however, they are as important in the twenty-first century as in the twentieth because they reinforce hierarchies, and provide a means of debating these tensions.

Drawing Together? 1945–1979

This chapter explores how the honours system in Britain adjusted to post-war challenges to the legitimacy of established institutions in British social and cultural life in a slow and difficult process that was in certain ways made possible by the divorce of the imperial and domestic honours systems discussed in Chapter 4. It charts attempts at reform and reorientation of the honours system in the 1960s and 1970s that were only partly successful in moving it away from its focus on direct state service as the most worthy service. Harold Wilson, in particular, sought to modify honours to be more populist and socially broad but was hindered at every turn by civil and royal servants. At the same time, the honours system continued to broaden in that it recognized state service—especially in medicine and education—beyond Whitehall to a much greater extent in the 1950s through to the 1970s. A wider range of professions became accustomed to and invested in being included in honours lists and, therefore, in the hierarchies that honours lists enacted.