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‘At school every year, there was “Empire Day”. Empire? What was that all about? I’ve heard of it, of course. Oh yes, wasn’t it Africa, where we Brits invented the concentration camp?’

Raymond Briggs, ‘Empire Day and all that’, in The Oldie magazine, 297, July 2013.

In this quote Raymond Briggs, a leading English cartoonist, illustrator and writer, remembers his schooldays in what he calls ‘a remote historical time’. Empire Day, the 24th of May, commenced in 1902 and was celebrated annually in schools in Britain and in many parts of the Empire for more than fifty years, until it disappeared in 1958 with the decline of British imperial power. It was intended to stimulate patriotic pride in the heroic achievements of Empire. Politically left-wing and anti-war, for Briggs, who was born in 1934, a personal memory of Empire Day in 2013 was an occasion to mock the pretensions of British imperialism, and to recall a particularly unsavoury part of its past.