Sir Richard Gordon Turnbull (b.1909-d.1998) served as High Commissioner from 21 Dec 1964 - 22 May 1967 /
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.'"
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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.''
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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.