Pax Britannica (28 page)
Authors: Jan Morris
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Great Britain, #Political Science, #Colonialism & Post-Colonialism, #Modern, #General
Not
from
a
selfish
or
sordid
ambition
Dreamt
he
of
Empires
—
in
continents
thought:
His
the
response
to
that
mystic
tuition,
From
the
great
throb
of
the
universe
caught.
1
There were other exceptional imperialists, of course, waxing or waning in Britain then—politicians like Dilke and Rosebery; future proconsuls like Curzon and Alfred Milner; George Goldie, the Rhodes of the Niger Basin; Frank Swettenham, the Raffles of Malaya—not to speak of the handful of seers and artists and journalists who had given the imperial idea its transcendent glamour. Our twelve celebrities, though, may stand as champions for them all, the stars of the imperial show, a strange and gaudy company of performers, above whose nodding plumes and ruthless ambitions there sat only the one supreme imperial presence, Victoria R.I. The Queen-Empress was the image and summit of Empire, revealing in herself many of the strains of the British imperium—proud and often overbearing, but with an unexpected sweetness at the heart; suburban and sometimes vulgar, sentimental, in old age less beautiful than imposing; girlishly beguiled by the mysteries of the Orient, maternally considerate towards the Natives, stubbornly determined to hang on to her possessions; seduced by high words, dazzling persons, high-arching projects, colours; impatient of things small, meticulous or self-effacing; a formidable lady indeed, but old, very old, and portly in her long dresses, so that when she sat sculptured on her throne, in the public gardens of Aden or Colombo, Kingston or Melbourne, she seemed less a person than some stylized divinity—a goddess inescapable, glimpsed through screens of
banyan trees or rising tremendous above banana groves; goddess oí wealth, age, power, so old that the world could hardly remember itself without her, and an era already bore her name. She
was
the Pax Britannica, and geography recognized the fact, with towns called Victoria in West Africa, Labuan, Guiana, Grenada, Honduras, Newfoundland, Nigeria, Vancouver Island, with Victoriaville in Quebec, the Victoria Nile in Uganda, the Colony of Victoria in Australia, with six Lake Victorias, and two Cape Victorias, with Victoria Range, Bay, Strait, Valley, Point, Park, Mine, Peak, Beach, Bridge, County, Cove, Downs, Land, Estate, Falls, Fjord, Gap, Harbour, Headland and Hill—setting such a seal upon the world, in cartography as in command, as no monarch in the history of mankind had ever set before.
1
Before he died in 1904 he asked to be buried beside Livingstone in Westminster Abbey, but this was refused him, and his grave is in the churchyard at Pirbright in Surrey. It bears his African name, Bula Matari, and a single word of epitaph:
Africa.
1
Eyre, ‘the first of the overlanders’, died in 1901, and is buried at Walreddon, near Tavistock in Devon.
1
Wolseley died in 1913 and is buried in St Paul’s. He is remembered by his admirers as having laid the foundations of the British Expeditionary Force which restored the glory of the British Army in 1914.
1
‘Bobs’, after turning the tide against the Boers in the South African War, became the last Commander-in-Chief of the British Army—the office was abolished in 1904. He spent his last years campaigning for compulsory military service in Britain, and died while on a visit of inspection to the Indian troops in France in November 1914. He is buried in St Paul’s.
1
In South Africa old Afrikaners still accuse him of putting ground glass in the concentration camp porridge, during his laborious and implacable campaign against the guerrillas during the last two years of the Boer War. Kitchener became Commander-in-Chief in India, where he crossed angry swords with Curzon, and on August 3, 1914, was appointed Secretary of State for War. He created the New Armies of 3 million men which made Britain a great military Power once more, and was drowned in 1916 when the cruiser
Hampshire,
which was taking him on a visit to Russia, struck a mine off the Orkneys. He never married, and lies as forbiddingly in death as he lived in life, in an effigy of icy white marble just inside the doors of St Paul’s.
1
If I have dwelt too long on Fisher, it is partly because I love him, and partly because he was in a sense to prove the most important man in the Empire. As First Sea Lord he created the battle fleets which won, or at least did not lose, the First World War. Recalled to the Admiralty in 1914, he quarrelled with Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, over the Dardanelles, and resigned furiously in 1915. When the German Fleet steamed in to its surrender at Rosyth, Fisher, the chief architect of its defeat, was not invited to the ceremony. He died in 1920, and is buried in the church at Kilverstone Hall, near Thetford in Norfolk.
1
Lugard married, in 1902, Flora Shaw, the famous colonial editor of
The
Times,
and reached the height of his fame as Governor-General of Nigeria, by then the largest British Crown Colony. He almost outlived the African empire he did so much to create, for he died, as Baron Lugard of Abinger, in 1945.
1
W. S. Blunt (1840–1922), the son of a Guards officer and the husband of Byron’s granddaughter, began life as a diplomat, but was converted to a career of passionate and artistic anti-imperialism by a visit to India in 1883. He was briefly gaoled for sedition in Ireland, and in Egypt, where he had a winter home, was a well-known scourge of British officialdom. He was buried in a wood, without religious rites, at Southwater in Sussex.
2
Hogarth (1862–1927) was an archaeologist who became Director of the British-organized Arab Bureau in Cairo during the First World War, and helped to sponsor the exploits of T. E. Lawrence. He played an influential part in moulding British imperial policy towards the Arabs, before returning to his peacetime job as Director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.
1
It was completed in 1900, and has been successively heightened since, and provided with hydroelectric turbines. It stands downstream from the High Dam begun by a later ‘Le Grand Ours’, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
2
Cromer remained in Egypt until 1907, and did little else in life beyond writing his magisterial memoirs,
Modern
Egypt,
and fitfully presiding over the commission that inquired into the debâcle of the Dardanelles. He died in 1917.
1
Salisbury stuck out the years of the Boer War as Prime Minister, resigning in 1902 after a total Premiership of thirteen years and ten months. A year later he died, and was buried in the churchyard at Hatfield, where Cecils had lived since 1608—as they still do.
1
When the Government resigned after the Boer War, Chamberlain threw himself into the cause of imperial unity. He died in July 1914, happy to see that young Neville, a leading member of Birmingham City Council, was already on the way to political distinction.
1
To wit, presidency of the B.S.A.C., premiership of the Cape, a baronetcy and membership of the Privy Council. He died in 1917, in England, but after the First World War his remains were transferred to Rhodesia to be buried beside those of Cecil Rhodes in the Matopo Hills. Kipling honoured him with
If—.
2
It survived until 1908, when it was abandoned because of the tsetse fly, and of this original Rhodesia there is now not a trace, on the ground or on the map.
1
Rhodes never overcame the stigma of the Jameson Raid, but in 1899 Oxford, stifling its scruples, awarded him an honorary degree. This he amply repaid by signing a new will, a few days later, which left the University enough funds to establish 160 scholarships for colonial, American and German students. Rhodes died in 1902, and was buried at a site of his own choosing in the Matopo Hills in Rhodesia, which he called The World’s View. There, in a place of silent beauty, he lies with his friend Jameson and the dead of Allan Wilson’s Shangani patrol—all the heroes of Rhodesia, awaiting one fears not the Last Trump but the next régime.
The
sense
of
greatness
keeps
a
nation
great;
And
mighty
they
who
mighty
can
appear.
It
may
be
that
if
hands
of
greed
could
steal
From
England’s
grasp
the
envied
orient
prize,
This
tide
of
gold
would
flood
her
still
as
now.
But
were
she
the
same
England,
made
to
feel
A
brightness
gone
from
out
those
starry
eyes,
A
splendour
from
that
constellated
brow?
William Watson
N
ORTHWARD from the Punjabi village of Kalka a winding and precipitous tonga road ran into the foothills of the Himalaya, the air becoming sweeter, the heat less oppressive as it climbed. There were pines and deodars about, and monkeys. High on a ridge to the east the traveller could see the military sanatorium of Daghshai, two or three barrack blocks and a very English church, poised on a narrow ridge overlooking the plains, and breathing the mountain air from the north. There was the bazaar town of Solon to pass on the way, where the local beer was brewed, and where swarthy hill-men, turbans fluttering, strode with sticks through scented market alleys: and then the road ascended steadily, in loops and double-tracks into the hills. It was a busy road throughout the summer, as the tongas of the British, blowing their horns, clip-clopped smartly through the labouring strings of mules, carts and livestock: and for one period of every year it became the most important road in India. Then, at the beginning of the hot season, the Viceroy himself took it, to escape from the miseries of Calcutta: and with his guards and his secretariat, his private staff and his public attendants, his Army headquarters, his Foreign Office, the envoys of foreign Powers, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, the representatives of the Indian Princes—with an infinity of files, an army of wagons, games and chaises, the memsahibs with their carriage trunks and excited children, hangers-on of every kind, adventurers of every aspiration—bands and flags, foreign correspondents and Tailors By Appointment, military observers, Thomas Cook’s men, bank clerks and estate agents and visiting parliamentarians—with all this caravanserai before and after him, up the Queen’s Viceroy went to Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Empire.
Simla in 1897 was one of the most extraordinary places in the world. It was small, and set delectably in a bowl of the hills, in tiers on the south side of a ridge like an English watering-place, except for the grand mass of the Himalaya behind. From a distance it looked archetypically Anglo-Indian. Scattered among the wooded hills were the chalet-bungalows of the senior officials, and properly on an eminence stood the Gothic tower of Christ Church, with a bell made out of a mortar captured in the second Sikh War. There were pleasant gardens about, and a comfortable esplanade meandered along the ridge, with tea-shops here and there, and Wine, Spirit and Provision Merchants of Quality, and Hamilton’s the jewellers from Calcutta (Established in the Reign of George III), and Phelps and Co., Civil, Military and Political Tailors, in their establishment at Albion House. A little lower a smudge of smoke and shanties marked the location of the Indian bazaar, and the town spilled away down the hillside in diminishing solidity, petering out in huts and shacks, until only the road itself was left threading a way through the trees to the distant plains below. At first sight Simla looked exactly what one would expect of a British hill station—quiet, sedate, and logically laid out.
This was not its style at all. Simla was a very brilliant, savage, ugly little town. The air was electric, thin enough to make you pant upstairs at first, sharp enough off the snows to keep you unnaturally alert and vivacious, almost feverish. No carriages were allowed in the centre of the town, except those of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, so when you arrived there a porter hoisted your baggage on his back and led you stumbling up steep steps and winding lanes to your hotel: and when you strolled out through the lights of the evening for a first look around Simla, somehow the place did not feel quite solid. It was like a stage set, quivering, full of character actors, walking fest and talking hard. There were the British themselves, of course, glowing with the thrill of the move to the mountains, marvelling in their escape from the sultry oppression
of the plains and the sea-coast, looking forward to the balls and parties of the season, and pulling their wraps wryly around their shoulders as the evening chill set in. There were the hill Indians of the north, whom the British loved, warlike and confident people, with beards and gay colours on them, no nonsense about political rights and a steady hand with a rifle. And here and there in the streets, giving Simla a tantalizing hint of unknown places beyond the mountains, there strode groups of swarthy Tibetans—wide-set eyes and perpetual laughing chatter, bottle-green gowns open to the waist, pigtails, entrancing babies on their mothers’ backs and a smell of untanned leather. There was an Italianate fizz to the piazzas of Simla after dark, as the evening crowds swung here and there, the lights shone out from shops and theatre, and down the steps off the Mall the bazaar people moved in silhouette against their flickering fires, in a haze of spice and woodsmoke.
In the morning Simla seemed different again, for in the brilliance of the mountain sun one could see with an awful clarity the monuments of its power. The style the British evolved for their offices in Simla was brutally functional. It depended upon girders. Each huge block, surrounded by open verandas, was held together with iron stanchions, like a bridge. This suggested to different observers, at one time or another, piles of disused tramcars, monstrous toastracks, or the remains of junkyards salvaged by economical military engineers and put together wherever pieces could be found to fit. Stark, square and enormous, these preposterous buildings stood about the ridge with an air of plated aloofness, like armadillos, facing this way and that, with roofs of corrugated iron and complicated external staircases. Physically they cast a blight upon the town: and there was something dismal to the thought of the scribbling hundreds inside them, the cogs of an Empire revolving in so many iron boxes on a hillside.
1
The Mall ran among them, gently undulating, sometimes opening out into a square in the Venetian manner; and sheltering demurely out of the limelight, up garden paths lined with dahlias or lupins, were the houses of the great, with names like Snowdon, Knockdrin, Hawthorne and The Gables. The Commander-in-Chief lived in one, the Foreign Secretary in another, the Manager of the Mercantile Bank in a third, and above and beyond them all, with a private chapel and sundry staff houses, was the Viceroy’s new palace, finished in 1888 and decorated throughout by Messrs Maple and Co., of Tottenham Court Road.
It was a surprisingly long way from one end of Simla to another—from Barnes Court, say, where the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab lived, to the Viceregal estate behind its monumental guardhouse at the western extremity of the ridge. A few old
jhampans
could still be hired—curtained sedan-chairs like four-poster beds, carried by four coolies apiece: but the normal means of public transport was the four-man rickshaw, a wickerwork vehicle on high spindly wheels, which was propelled at dizzy speed through the streets, its crew alternately heaving, braking, swivelling and pushing with the desperation of tobogganers, and reaching a climax in their kinetic energies in propelling the thing fast enough down one hill to get it up the steep slope of the next.
Seven thousand feet up, eighty miles from a railway line, 750 miles from a port, Simla was the oddest and most inaccessible of the world’s great capitals. The mails were conveyed to railhead at Kalka by two-pony tongas, at breakneck speed, but the road was so rough that they sometimes had their springs packed with bamboo wrappings to lessen the jolts, and when the rivers near Kalka were flooded elephants sometimes had to be commandeered, to convey the imperial dispatches across the waters to the Viceroy.
From Simla were directed the affairs of 308 million people—two and a half times the population, by Gibbon’s estimate, of the Roman Empire at its climax—protected by the greatest army in Asia, and forming a pendant to Britain itself in the immense balance of
Empire. The world recognized that India was a great Power in itself. It was an Empire of its own, active as well as passive. Most of the bigger nations had their representatives at Simla, and the little hill station on the ridge cast its summer shadow wide. Its writ ran to the Red Sea one way, the frontiers of Siam the other. Aden, Perim, Socotra, Burma, Somaliland were all governed from India. Indian currency was the legal tender of Zanzibar and British East Africa, Indian mints coined the dollars of Singapore and Hong Kong. The proliferation of India, as we have seen, was represented by hundreds of thousands of her citizens scattered across the oceans, and the Indian Army, too, had seen service in many parts of the world. When Indian troops were sent to Malta in 1878 it aroused a furore in England, and Disraeli was accused of selling the Empire to the barbarians. Since then the use of Indian troops in other parts of the Empire had become a commonplace. In the past half-century Indian soldiers, under British officers, had served in China, Persia, Ethiopia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Egypt and East Africa, and in 1897 they were advancing up the Nile with Kitchener. It was the possession of India that made the Empire a military Power—‘an English barrack in the Oriental seas’, Salisbury had once called it. Its Regular Army was not large—some 160,000 men—but it was all voluntary, and it was recruited chiefly from the martial peoples of the north, Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, whose fighting qualities were celebrated everywhere.
It was from Simla, in the summer-time, that the British supervised the eastern half of their Empire. Upon the power and wealth of India depended the security of the eastern trade, of Australia and New Zealand, of the great commercial enterprises of the Far East. The strength of India, so many strategists thought, alone prevented Russia from spilling through the Himalayan passes into south-east Asia, and the preoccupations of the generals in Simla were important to the whole world. ‘Everything is so English and unpicturesque here’, the artist Val Prinsep
1
wrote during a visit to Simla, ‘that
except the people one meets are those who rule and make history—a fact one can hardly realize—one would fancy oneself at Margate.’
It
was
hard to realize, but it was true. There was substance to the fantasy of Simla. The British did their best to live up to the grandeur of their position, and though the town was commonly known to disrespectful juniors as The Abode of the Little Tin Gods, still a good deal of solid splendour surrounded the arrangements up there. The Viceroy himself was to be glimpsed on Sunday mornings resplendently driving to church in his carriage, a weekly second coming. His palace on the hill was so luxurious that many people thought Indian income tax, introduced in 1886, had been devised to pay for it. Its household staff comprised 300 domestics and 100 cooks, and in one recent season the Vicereine had presided over twelve big dinners (up to fifty guests), twenty-nine small ones, a State ball, a fancy dress ball, a children’s ball, two garden parties, two evening parties and six dances of 250 people each. The guards at the gatehouse, inspired by all this display, used to salute with such a reverberation of small arms that more than once the horses of eminent visitors had been known to turn tail at the clash, and bolt headlong back along the Mall.
In this capital as in any other, the social graces and felinities intensely thrived, and the suburban instinct of Victorian life, fostered so paradoxically by the Queen-Empress, found its strangest expression in Simla. The houses of the Field-Marshals and Foreign Secretaries were not, as foreigners might expect, replicas of great country houses at home, such as might be said to illustrate the patrician flowering of England. Still less did they model themselves upon the palaces of earlier Indian conquerors. They were essentially villas, often done in half-timber and plaster, with decorous gardens and gravel drives, ferns in hanging wire baskets, and gates with their names upon them. With their mullioned windows and the ramblers entwined about their porches, they looked all lavender leisure: except for the swaggering Sikh guards who paced, with scimitars and tremendous beards, up and down outside the threshold.
Brittle, vivid, snobby, like all centres of power Simla seethed with ambition and intrigue. Society was overwhelmingly official—only Army officers and Civil Servants, for example, could be full
members of the principal Simla club—and there was a hot-house feeling to the place. Peliti’s restaurant, beside the bridge at the eastern end of the Mall, was the traditional hotbed of gossip, where an excellent view might be obtained of the current scandal, and the latest handsome arrival from the Frontier, or winsome bride fresh out from Hertfordshire, might be viewed and analysed to advantage. This was the hunting-ground of Kipling’s allegorical Anglo-Indian chatelaines, those
grandes
dames
of Empire, with the adoring young subalterns and civilians at their feet, and their private channels of communication, via Tony or dear Major Lansdowne, direct to the Secretariat itself. Kipling, heightened his effects, but there really was a good deal of philandering, gambling and heavy drinking in Simla: if visitors from England thought it like Margate, to innocents from upcountry, where the nearest thing to vice was often a round of gin-rummy over a hurricane lamp, it sometimes seemed a very Paris.
