Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (45 page)

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Authors: Niall Ferguson

BOOK: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
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No medium was safe. From the pen of G. A. Henty – a product of Westminster, Gonville and Caius, Crimea and Magdala – poured forth countless novels with titles like
By Sheer Pluck
and
For Name or Fame
. Primarily a hack writer of historical fiction, Henty’s most overtly imperialist works were those inspired by relatively recent military campaigns:
With Clive In India
(1884),
With Buller in Natal
(1901) and
With Kitchener in the Soudan
(1903). These were hugely popular: in all, total sales of Henty’s novels were put at 25 million by the 1950s. Almost as voluminous was the torrent of verse inspired by Empire. From the talents of Tennyson to the triteness of Alfred Austin and W. E. Henley, this was the age of ‘high diction’: an era when every second man was a poetaster looking for something to rhyme with ‘Victoria’ other than ‘Gloria’.
The iconography of Empire was no less ubiquitous, from the romanticized battle scenes rendered on canvas by Lady Butler and exhibited in grandiose new museums, to the imperial kitsch that advertised everyday articles of consumption. The manufacturers of Pears’ Soap were especially fond of the imperial leitmotif:
The first step towards lightening
The White Man’s Burden
is through teaching the virtues of cleanliness.
Pears’ Soap
 
is a potent factor in brightening the dark corners of the earth
as civilization advances while amongst the cultures of all nations
it holds the highest place – it is the ideal toilet soap.
 
 
This admirable product was also, so the public were assured, ‘the formula of British conquest’; its arrival in the tropics had marked ‘the birth of civilization’. Others took up the theme. Parkinson’s Sugar Coated Pills were ‘A Great British Possession’. The route taken by Lord Roberts from Kimberley to Bloemfontein during the Boer War supposedly spelt out ‘Bovril’. ‘We Are Going to Use “Chlorinol” [bleach]’, ran one pre-1914 campaign, ‘And Be Like De White Nigger’.
The Empire furnished material for the music hall too, often seen as the most important institution for promoting Victorian popular ‘jingoism’. Indeed, the word itself was coined by the lyricist G. W. Hunt, whose song ‘By Jingo’ was performed during the Eastern Crisis of 1877 – 8 by the music hall artiste G. H. Macdermott. There were countless variations on the theme of the heroic ‘Tommy’, one exemplary stanza of which will probably suffice:
And whether he’s on India’s coral strand,
Or pouring out his blood in the Soudan,
To keep our flag a flying, he’s doing and a dying,
Every inch of him a soldier and a man.
 
The link between this kind of entertainment and that offered by the great imperial exhibitions of the period was close. What had once been intended as international and educational (the prototype was Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition of 1851) were becoming by the 1880s more imperial and entertaining. In particular, the impresario Imre Kiralfy’s extravaganzas – ‘Empire of India’ (1895), ‘Greater Britain’ (1899) and ‘The Imperial International’ (1909) – were designed to make money by offering the public the thrill of the exotic: Zulu warriors in the flesh were an especial hit of his 1899 exhibition. This was the Empire as circus.
But it was above all through the popular press that the Empire reached a mass audience at home. Probably no one understood better how to satisfy the public appetite for ripping yarns than Alfred Harmsworth, later (from 1905) Lord Northcliffe. A Dubliner by birth, Harmsworth learned his craft on the pioneering
Illustrated London News
and made his fortune by importing the style of the illustrated magazine into the newspaper market. Pictures, banner headlines, free gifts and serialized stories made first the
Evening News
and then the
Daily Mail
and
Daily Mirror
irresistibly attractive to a new class of reader: lower middle class, female as well as male. Northcliffe was also quick to discover the price elasticity of newspaper demand, cutting the price of
The Times
after he acquired it in 1908. But it was his choice of content above all that made the Northcliffe titles sell. It was no coincidence that the
Mail
first sold more than a million copies in 1899, during the Boer War. As one of his editors replied when asked what sells a newspaper,
The first answer is ‘war’. War not only creates a supply of news but a demand for it. So deep rooted is the fascination in a war and all things appertaining to it that ... a paper has only to be able to put up on its placard ‘A Great Battle’ for its sales to go up.
 
Another Northcliffe employee regarded ‘the depth and volume of public interest in Imperial questions’ as ‘one of the greatest forces, almost untapped, at the disposal of the Press’. ‘If Kipling be called the Voice of Empire in English Literature’, he added, ‘we [the
Daily Mail
] may fairly claim to [be] the Voice of Empire in London journalism’. Northcliffe’s own recipe was simple: ‘The British people relish a good hero and a good hate’.
From their earliest days, the Northcliffe papers leaned to the political Right; but it was possible to promote the Empire from the Left as well. William Thomas Stead, who inherited the
Pall Mall Gazette
from Gladstone’s ardent votary John Morley and then founded the
Review of Reviews
, described himself as an ‘imperialist plus the ten commandments and common sense’. Stead was a man of many passions. The Hague Peace Conference of 1899 won his backing, as did the idea of a common European currency and the fight against the ‘white slave trade’ (Victorian for prostitution), but his guiding assumption was that ‘The Progress of the World’ depended on the conduct of the British Empire. In the eyes of men like Stead, the Empire was something that transcended party politics.
It also transcended age; for among the most devoted readers of imperialist literature were schoolboys, generations of whom were raised on the
Boys’ Own Paper
, founded in 1879 by the Religious Tract Society. Along with its sister title the
Girls’ Own Paper
, the
BOP
reached a circulation of more than half a million by offering its young readers a steady stream of ripping yarns set on exotic colonial frontiers. For some however, these magazines were not sufficiently overt in their purpose: hence the appearance of
Boys of the Empire
in October 1900, which sought to indoctrinate its young readers more systematically with articles like ‘How to be Strong’, ‘Empire Heroes’ and ‘Where the Lion’s Cubs are Trained: Australia and her Schools’. The last of these can be considered fairly representative in its tone and central assumptions:
The native problem has never been acute in ... Australia ... The Aborigines have been driven back and are quickly dying out ... Australian schools are not half black and half white; nor can the term ‘chess board’ be flung at any of the dining halls of an Australian school, as has been the case in at least one college of the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge.
 
The same edition of the magazine featured a competition run by the Boys’ Empire League
76
which promised:
A Free Start on a Farm out West ... to the TWO boys each year who shall gain the highest marks in an Examination.
The Prizes include FREE KIT, FREE PASSAGE and FREE LOCATION with a selected farmer in North-West Canada.
 
The heroic archetypes of this popular imperialism – and many of its consumers – were not themselves men of the people; rather, they were members of an elite educated at Britain’s exclusive public schools. At most, these schools could accommodate around 20,000 pupils in a given year – little more than 1 per cent of boys aged between fifteen and nineteen in 1901. Yet boys outside the public school system seem to have had little difficulty in identifying with their fictional adventures. This may well have been because, as countless authors of pot-boilers made clear, what made public school products capable of heroism on the Empire’s behalf was not what they learned in the classroom, but what they learned on the games field.
Viewed from this angle, the British Empire of the 1890s resembled nothing more than an enormous sports complex. Hunting continued to be the favourite recreation of the upper classes, but it was now waged as a war of annihilation against game, with bags growing exponentially from the Scottish moors to the Indian jungles.
77
To give a single example, the total bag of the Viceroy (Lord Minto) and his party during 1906 included 3,999 sandgrouse, 2,827 wildfowl, 50 bears, 14 pigs, 2 tigers, 1 panther and 1 hyena. Hunting was also commercialized, evolving in some colonies into a form of armed tourism. Attracting wealthy tourists to East Africa seemed to Lord Delamere the only way to make money from the famously unprofitable Mombasa – Uganda railway.
It was team games, however, that did most to make a reality of the ideal of Greater Britain. Soccer, the gentleman’s game played by hooligans, was of course the country’s most successful recreational export. But ‘football’ was always a promiscuous sport, appealing to everyone from the politically suspect working class to the even more suspect Germans; to everyone, in fact, except the Americans.
78
If any sport truly summed up the new spirit of ‘Greater Britain’ it was rugby, the hooligans’ game played by gentlemen. An intensely physical team game, rugby was swiftly adopted right across the white Empire, from Cape Town to Canberra. As early as 1905 the New Zealand All Blacks toured the Empire for the first time, beating all the home sides except Wales (who vanquished them by a single try). They would probably have gone on to beat all the other white colonies but for the ban imposed by South Africa on the fielding of Maori players.
Yet it was cricket – with its subtle, protracted rhythms, its team spirit in fielding and its solo heroics at the crease – that transcended such racial divisions, spreading not just to the colonies of white settlement but throughout the Indian subcontinent and the British Caribbean. Cricket had been played within the Empire since the early eighteenth century, but it was in the late nineteenth century that it became institutionalized as the quintessential imperial game. In 1873 – 4 the Titan of English cricket, W. G. Grace, led a mixed team of amateurs and professionals to Australia, easily winning their fifteen three-day matches. But when a professional XI returned to play what is usually seen as the first international Test match at Melbourne in March 1877, the Australians won by 45 runs. Worse was to follow when the Australians came to the Oval in 1882, winning the victory that inspired the celebrated obituary notice in the
Sporting Times
, ‘In Affectionate Remembrance of English cricket which died at the Oval on 29th August, 1882, deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances. R.I.P. N.B. – The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia’.
For years to come, the English habit of losing to colonial teams would help knit Greater Britain together. Institutions like the Imperial Cricket Conference, which first met in 1909 to harmonize the rules of the game, were as crucial to the formation of a sense of collective imperial identity as anything Seeley wrote or Chamberlain said.
Perhaps the archetypal product of playing-field imperialism was Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell – ‘Stephe’ to his friends. Baden-Powell progressed inexorably from sporting success at Charterhouse, where he was captain of the First (soccer) XI, to an army career in India, Afghanistan and Africa. It was he, as we shall see, who explicitly likened the most famous siege of the era to a cricket match. And it was he who would ultimately codify the late imperial ethos in the precepts of the Boy Scout movement he founded, another highly successful recreational export which aimed to generalize the team spirit of the games field into an entire way of life:
We are all Britons, and it is our duty each to play in his place and help his neighbours. Then we shall remain strong and united and then there will be no fear of the whole building – namely, our great Empire, – falling down because of rotten bricks in the wall ... ‘Country first, self second’, should be your motto.
 
What that meant in practice is clear from the roll of honour at Baden-Powell’s own school. The walls of the main cloister at Charterhouse are studded with war memorials to half-forgotten campaigns, from Afghanistan to Omdurman, listing the names of hundreds of young Carthusians who ‘played up, played up and played the game’
79
and paid for doing so with their lives.

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