"How then was the Admiralty to find a fleet for Singapore, as had been repeatedly promised (though with waning conviction) to Australia and New Zealand before and since the outbreak of war with Germany and Italy? It went far deeper than a mere question of naval strategy and deployment. As Sir Samuel Hoare, the then First Lord of the Admiralty, had remarked to the 1937 Imperial Conference, "the very existence of the British Commonwealth as now constituted" rested on the ability of Britain to send a battlefleet to Singapore. But this in turn posed an even more profound question about Britain's very own existence as the centre of this oceanic empire, the immediate practical implications of which were so starkly confronting her leaders in the summer and autumn of 1941. For in retrospect it can be seen that it was an illusion for the British to believe that the Commonwealth and the Empire made Britain a great world power. Rather the strategic and economic balance sheet in 1941 demonstrates that the Commonwealth and Empire (with the notable exception of Canada and perhaps South Africa) were not an asset, but a net drain on Britain's strength; a predicament. For the imperial pink splashed across the map of the world in British atlases did not represent strength, as the British romantically believed, but one of the most outstanding examples of strategic overstretch in history."