The parting of the ways: the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth, 1951–1961
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Since the autumn of 1950 British ministers and civil servants had contemplated the possibility that they might have to choose between their relationship with South Africa and their relationships with the rest of Africa and the world at large. It seemed increasingly obvious that British embarrassment, combined with South Africa's growing disenchantment, might at any time precipitate a ‘parting of the ways’. A Conservative government was faced with precisely that choice in March 1961 at the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' Meeting. Yet more than ten years earlier a significant hardening of attitude towards South Africa had taken place under a Labour government. The Commonwealth Relations secretary, Patrick Gordon Walker, had laid it down that containment of the Union of South Africa was a policy equally important with political advancement for Africans. James Griffiths (as secretary of state for the colonies) had declared apartheid to be ‘totally repugnant’ and, supported by Aneurin Bevan, had foreseen a time when ‘the United Kingdom might have to consider whether she lost more than she gained by her present association with the Union government’. The joint deputy under-secretary at the Colonial Office, Sir Charles Jeffries, was clear before the end of 1952 that Britain was ‘committed to the policy of a particoloured Commonwealth’, and if a choice had to be made, would side with it against South Africa. The high commissioner in South Africa, Sir Percivale Liesching (1955–8), wrote in 1957 that in the longer term the Union's continued membership of the Commonwealth was an open question.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".