Pax Britannica (34 page)

But there was to this great communal exploit, this epic dispersal of a people and its power, a poignant meaning, too. Not everybody died heroically, leading their men at Chinkeang Foo. The challenge of Empire must have seemed bitter enough to many a poor wife, condemned to unhealthy exile for most of her life, her children far away at school in England, her complexion slowly crumbling in sun and humidity, her one pitiful ambition a cottage with a bit of garden somewhere quiet in the West Country. At a time when Europeans could seldom bring themselves to mix socially with coloured people she must often have been terribly lonely: only five women were present when the White Rajah of Sarawak entertained the entire European community to dinner in 1887. Many a district officer, too, no doubt regretted his vocation as he opened his precious letters from home in the desolation of veldt or jungle.
My
mother’s
writing
!
(as one of them wrote)

Emigration, spirited and hopeful though it sounded, was often only the last resort of the unutterably dejected, for whom home seemed to offer no chances. ‘If crosses and tombs could be erected on the water,’ it was said of the transatlantic migrations of the Irish, ‘the whole route of the emigrant vessels … would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery.’ Emigrants often ended up in doss-house or institution—there were generally at least a dozen destitute Britons in the Bombay workhouse—and all too often arrived in the colonies utterly ignorant of what to expect. A writer in the
Oxford
Survey
of
the
British
Empire
, recording the case of a farm labourer who returned to England after a single Canadian
winter because he found it too cold, commented severely: ‘Perhaps he had lacked, not through his own fault, that schooling in imperial geography which should be an integral part of imperial education.’

The tropical climate was a terrible hazard, in the days when the mystery of malaria had not yet been solved, and the very science of tropical medicine had only just been born. The inescapable miseries of dysentery had a different wry nickname in each possession—Gippy Tummy, Poonaitis, Karachi trotters. Nervous disorders in India were called by the soldiers ‘the Doo-lally tap’, after a notorious transit camp at Deolalie, near Bombay, in which generations of Britons awaiting a ship home had found their nerves cracking under the strain of heat and boredom. West Africa had been killing or wrecking Britons for 300 years, and it is said that by 1897 there were 1½ million British graves in India. In 1880 the mortality rate among British troops there had been 24.85 per thousand, and an astonishing number of the most distinguished imperial soldiers died in their early thirties. ‘We’ve got cholera in the camp’, runs one of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian laments: 

It was popularly supposed that cholera travelled about in a small invisible cloud of germs, two or three feet above the ground, and soldiers sometimes preferred to sleep on the floor, in the belief that the cloud would harmlessly over-fly them.

‘Two monsoons are the life of a man’, ran an old Anglo-Indian saying, and even Bryce, who was no alarmist, wrote: ‘The English race becomes so enfeebled in the second generation by living without respite in the Indian sun that it would probably die out, at least in the plains, in the third or fourth generation.’ The most familiar imperial epitaph was ‘Died At Sea On the Way Home’, and many a regimental roll contained more deaths from sickness than from
enemy action. The big Indian trains carried coffins as a matter of course, in case any passenger succumbed
en
route
from heat stroke or cholera;
Murray’s
Handbook
is full of cautious advice about hygiene and infection—‘the traveller must bring food with him’, is the book’s dark advice on a visit to Bijapur, ‘as well as insect powder’. ‘Life at sea-level in Jamaica’, we are told, ‘is a deadly trial to the unacclimatized European’.

Time and again whole families were destroyed by cholera and typhoid. Three little English children—Alice Daniell, 4; Lindsey Daniell, nearly 3; Georgina Daniell, nearly 2—lay beneath parallel slabs, each a different size, outside the English church at Pusselawa in the highlands of Ceylon. It was a haunting spot. The church was a little grey and whitewashed building, with a corrugated-iron roof, wire-netting windows, and dark-leafed tropical trees beside the gate to simulate the churchyard yews of home. There was a Hindu shrine in the next field, and on the other side of the church was the graveyard of the Christian Tamils, their epitaphs scrawled in indecipherable red paint that had sometimes dripped off the wooden crosses to the makeshift plinths below. Crows squawked in the trees above, cocks crowed from the hovels on the hillside, the gardener’s brush swished lazily in the sunshine, sometimes a shrill chatter of women’s voices rose suddenly from the village below, to end in laughter or angry squabble. The churchyard smelt of dust and scented foliage, the church of hassocks and candle-grease.

Few visitors, I suspect, bothered to inspect the gravestones of the little Daniells, which were tucked away at the back of the church, and there were no Daniells left in Ceylon to care for them: but those who scratched away the forty years’ mould from their slabs would find that all three children died within two days in September 1866, and had been brought up here for burial from their father’s tea estate down the hill. It was thought at the time that they had died because there was viper grass in their rhubarb tart, but they all really died of cholera. Their broken-hearted parents abandoned the imperial adventure at once, and went home to England, where Mr Daniell sadly took Holy Orders.

I
T was by their buildings that earlier Empires were most arrestingly remembered. Storks upon a Roman viaduct, proud towers in an Andean plaza, the squat menace of the Pyramids, seen small but alarming from the Mokattam hills—any of these could instantly suggest to an unlettered visitor the age and power of a lost dominion. The British in their imperial heyday had evolved no style so absolute as the Roman or the Egyptian, if only because they were members of a wider civilization, sharing a culture with the rest of the Western world.
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Buildings would not be their chief memorials: but across their Empire, nevertheless, they had left architectural imprints that were recognizably their own, to remind posterity with a gable or a clock-tower that the Raj had passed that way.

In their earlier years of Empire they had scattered through their possessions buildings in the Queen Anne and Georgian styles, reflecting the ordered security of society at home, and now commonly called Colonial. Much of the best was in the lost colonies of the United States, where the Americans had given the style subtleties of their own, and in the old parts of the Empire there were many good examples too, stabled and impeccable in Nova Scotia, or wilted by heat and humidity in the estates and merchant settlements of the tropics. They gave a sense of continuity to the British presence, linking the plantations of the old Empire with the Chartered Companies and railway workshops of the new: but far truer to the spirit of the imperial climax, and much more widely admired by the British, was the heterogeneous collection of idioms loosely called the High Victorian. The characteristic form of the imperial prime was romantically picturesque, loosely derived from Gothic or Byzantine models, and ornamented all over with eclectic variety. It
was not how one imagines an imperial style. It was not exactly imperious. But in the elaboration of its hybrid forms, the towering exuberance of its fancy, its readiness to accept a touch of the exotic here and there, its colossal scale and its frequent impression of enthusiasm wildly out of hand—in all these things the style truly reflected this high noon of imperialism. In Canada the British adopted mansard roofs and château turrets, in India they built railway sheds of Saracenic motif, and in British Columbia, looking westward across the Pacific, they built a Parliament with pagodas. But beneath all these alien veneers the authentic British showed, in the red brick and the mullion windows, the wrought iron and the commemorative medallions, or just in a true-blue inscription, recording the cost of it all, commemorating an occasion, or honouring, like the text on the Simla telegraph office, prefectorial values:

Supreme in every imperial city stood the house of God, on a hill if there was one about, and generally Gothic. Sometimes it was a princely pile. On a hundred improbable imperial sites, encouched in buffalo grass or dripped about by frangipani, there stood a genuine Anglican cathedral, with a Bishop’s Palace somewhere near and a flutter of surplices in the Sunday trade winds. Even more than the mansions of colonial governors, these stately buildings expressed a sort of hook-nosed and scholarly assurance, and gave the traveller from England an uncanny sense of
déjà
vu
. There was one very like Hereford in the Punjabi town of Ambala, on the road from Delhi to Kalka.
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There was one rather like Lincoln down the road from the Renaissance-style Post Office, the Classical Town Hall, the Byzantine market and the Tudor Government House in Sydney. The cathedral at Calcutta used to look like Salisbury, until the 1897
earthquake knocked its spire off.
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The cathedral at St John’s, Newfoundland, started by George Gilbert Scott in 1844, was burnt out in a fire in 1892, and now stood portentously, a vast humped shell, high above the clapboard streets of the port.
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The cathedral at Lahore was by Scott, too, and was all layered in the brown dust of the Punjab, with a baked brown close, a few brown stringy trees, and a catechism echoing across the Mall from the brown cathedral school across the way. The cathedral at Fredericton, New Brunswick, was modelled originally on the parish church at Snettisham in Norfolk, and completed according to the advice of the Ecclesiological Society of Cambridge. The cathedral at St Helena was described by one Governor of the island, R. A. Sterndale, as being ‘utterly devoid of architectural beauty outside or in’.

If there was not a cathedral, there was certainly a parish church. There it stood in splendid incongruity on heathen strand or far-flung waterfront, and not only Anglicans were moved to find it there, for like those Mounties at the head of the White Pass, it spoke of order and authority, meals at the proper time, clean sheets and punctual trains. Any of a thousand would serve us for examples, but let us choose the church of St John which stood in a fine wide churchyard above the waterfront at Hong Kong. St John’s was in the very best part of town. Government House was its neighbour one way, Flagstaff House the other, and within convenient walking distance were the barracks, the parade ground, the cricket ground and the public gardens. Behind rose the steep streets of the Peak, the most fashionable residential area. In front was the waterfront, looking across the marvellous harbour to Kowloon. Easily, benignly, the tower of St John’s presided over those varied scenes. The waterfront buildings in those days were vaguely Italianate in style, in a kind common to all European settlements in China, and the quaysides themselves were picturesquely Chinese, all coolie hats and sampans. The slab of the Peak behind was tawny and brown, except where the taipans had planted their lush gardens, and the general colour of the scene was a bleached grey, as though all the paints had slightly faded. The stance of St John’s, however, was unaffected by
it all. It stood there precisely as it might have stood in Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells, assimilated into the scene by sheer force of character. Like the minaret of a mosque, it represented more (or less) than a faith: it was the emblem of a society, expressing temporal as well as spiritual values, and clearly built upon the assumption that if God was a church-goer at all, he was obviously C. of E.

Next to the home of God, the home of the Empire-builder. The domestic architecture of the Victorian Empire was everything that it was at home in England, with tropical overtones. There was no class or style of contemporary British housing that you could not find, lifted bodily, somewhere in the overseas possessions. Even the mean terrace houses of industrial England were reproduced in the cities of Australia, where a British proletariat existed to occupy them; the Australians also favoured a peculiarly froward kind of bungalow, with grey-washed walls and lead-coloured iron roofs, which they disguised with an acacia or a couple of Norfolk pines to look like a week-end cottage. The English suburban villa, as we have seen, was broadcast throughout the Indian hills, and the first thing any conventional colonial magnate did, when he had made his pile in Parramatta or Kimberley, was to build himself a really lurid Gothic mansion, just as urned, terraced and carriage-swept as any his contemporaries were erecting in the environs of Manchester. Even the odd folly appeared in the Empire, honouring the traditions of English eccentricity: the Astana, the palace of the White Rajahs of Sarawak, had a Gothic tower and high-pitched roofs of wooden shingles, and was supported on white-washed brick arcades.

Often these replicas of home were absurdly ill suited to their setting—if not in looks, at least in comfort. Even in England those florid piles were scarcely functional, and when one added to their original disadvantages all the hazards of tropical life, from termites beneath the hall floor to troops of servants’ babies in the stable-yard, they must sometimes have made the memsahib’s heart sink. But there were exceptions, even in the heyday of High Victorian. The English settlers in South Africa were building some very
agreeable homesteads, trim with trees and fences like Kentucky stud-farms, and far more comfortable than the shambled farms of their neighbours the Boers. The tea-planters’ houses of Ceylon, with their immensely tall narrow corridors and their outdoor kitchens, were often surrounded by admirable lawns of coarse mountain grass, upon which the planters’ ladies enviably sat, buzzed about by harmless insects and salaamed by passing serfs.

The archetypical Anglo-Indian bungalow was an uninspired compromise. In the beginning it was simply a box, for living in, with a veranda all around it to keep it cool. When British families began to go to India a second storey was placed upon the box, and on top of it again a sleeping platform was often built, with a ladder to reach it from the roof on the very hottest nights of the hot weather. Cool creepers were encouraged to grow over and around the veranda, and sometimes it was covered with an aromatic screen, moistened with running water by coolies outside, and smelling sweetly fresh and herbal. Behind was the compound, in which the servant community lived, and all around was sprinkled garden, acting as insulation against the hot dust of street or desert. Upon this basic form every sort of change was rung, and in its grander versions the bungalow had anything up to twenty rooms—a dining-room and a drawing-room downstairs, bedrooms and a family sitting-room above.

Such a house stood for imperial sense. For imperial sensibility we will pay brief calls upon two very different possessions. At Zomba, in Nyasaland, the British Consul accredited to ‘the Kings and Chiefs of Central Africa’ had built a Residency that was a model of its kind, beautifully set upon the slopes of a forested mountain (the home of Rider Haggard’s People of the Mist) and surrounded by delicious half-wild gardens. It had conical towers at each end, to fortify it against savages, and verandas upstairs and down, and was proudly claimed to be the finest building in East Africa north of the Zambesi: with its steep roof and big low rooms, the mountains behind and the wide lush valley in front, it looked genuinely indigenous to Africa, a sensitive synthesis of sun and shade, ruling and ruled.

The houses on the Savannah at Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad, offered sensibility of a more distracted kind. There architectural
clairvoyants could peer behind the composure of Victorianism into its wild reality. The Savannah was a wide green park, perhaps a mile across, preserved more or less in its natural state. There was a bandstand and the usual race-course, and on the grass groups of negro and Indian boys, scattered across the green, played interminable games of cricket, occasionally bursting into impromptu carnival. Trees ran down to the edge of the grass, and the whole was encircled by an electric tramline. Around this wide expanse a staggering gallimaufry of mansions surveyed the scene. Some were domed, some were stained-glassed, some had turrets, some had gables. There was half-timbering, and pictorial tiling, fenestration ranging from the medieval to the Georgian, spikes and pagodas, weathercocks everywhere, casement windows as of faery lore, bobbles and battlements, mullions and ornamental ironwork, silhouettes of Rhenish castle or Loire château—all in esplanade on the edge of the Savannah, in mad embodiment of the imperial variety.
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Public buildings of the most august elaboration honoured the Queen, the Arts and Sciences or the principle of imperial Government. Town Halls were scarcely less imposing than Parliament buildings, and clock towers were ubiquitous—the one in the middle of Colombo had a lighthouse on top, and the one at Aden was much the most prominent structure in the colony, standing high on a bare hill overlooking Steamer Point. Many of these enormous buildings were designed by soldiers, others by celebrated English architects of the day, but so vastly overwhelming was the spirit they represented that it was very difficult to tell the Captain of Engineers from the new Palladio. It was the spirit of Art for Empire’s sake. We read that when a wealthy south Indian philanthropist decided to found a boarding-school in Madras ‘his attention was directed not only towards improving the results at the University Examinations but also the construction of an artistic pile of buildings
with a tower in the middle’. The tower-in-the-middle impulse informs many of the great buildings of the Pax Britannica. Their purpose does not seem to matter, and is seldom clear. They may be railway stations, libraries, ladies’ colleges, covered markets. All are heavily clothed in symbolic ornament, and come to blur indistinguishably in the mind, a general mass of pomp strewn across the world in the Queen’s name.

Probably the most daunting group of official buildings in the Empire was in Bombay. It stood like a massive palisade in parallel with the sea, separated from the beaches only by an expanse of brownish turf, a railway line, and a riding-track called Rotten Row. Here in three great blocks the Establishment of the Bombay Presidency was concentrated, celestially removed from the chaos which, out of sight beyond Esplanade Road and the Victoria Terminus, ran indescribably away to the north. Side by side stood the Secretariat, the University, the Library, the Clock Tower, the Law Courts, the Public Works Department, the Post Office and the Telegraph Office—a group of public buildings worthy of a great capital, and unmatched for scale in any English city outside London. It was a heady parade. Some was Venetian Gothic, some French Decorated, some Early English, and the Post Office, so the guidebook says, was simply ‘medieval (architect, Trubshawe)’. Enormous palm-mat awnings shaded the windows, and high on their vast balconies dignitaries of the Raj could sometimes be seen strolling in white suits, discussing sewage costs with underlings or interviewing contractors. Nothing could be more unbendingly official than these buildings. They looked as though never, in all their years of dignity, did a lady drop a scented handkerchief upon their stairs, or a small boy prop his hoop against the porter’s lodge. The Secretariat alone, designed by Captain H. St Clair Wilkins, Royal Engineers, had taken seven years to build, and a notice inside recorded with approval that whereas the estimated cost was Rs 1,280,731, the actual cost was only Rs 1,260,844.
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