Pax Britannica (15 page)

It is curious to see how low in the social or technical scale these prejudices applied. In Canada, Indian pilots were employed on the St Lawrence River, but in India the Bombay and Calcutta pilots were all very British—important men with substantial salaries, some of them from old Indian Army families, bronzed and moustached in their blue uniforms, and often awe-inspiring to the less assertive masters of small ships from minor maritime nations. In the technical branches of the Indian railways the white cadre went down as far as signalmen and platelayers. A European mail driver of the East India Railway in the nineties was paid 370 rupees a month (rather more, incidentally, than the Viceroy’s aide-de-camp): his Indian colleague, confined to shunting engines and petty branch lines, earned 20 rupees a month. In Johannesburg the newsboys of the
Transvaal
Mining
Argus
were all tough and gay little white urchins, wearing floppy hats like cricketers at English preparatory schools. In the West Indies a class of poor whites had, since the emancipation of slaves, replaced the black men in the most menial office jobs. In the Gold Coast, where a sizeable class of educated Africans existed, it had been decreed in 1893 that a third of the doctors should be Africans, but the system was soon abandoned—it was ‘pretty clear to men of ordinary sense’, Chamberlain himself commented, that British officers could not have confidence in native physicians.

The white inhabitants of Salisbury, in 1891, had sent a petition to the Administrator demanding that no further contracts should be given to Kaffirs while white artisans were unemployed: the Administrator accepted the argument at once, declaring that he ‘fully recognized the prior claim for consideration of the white population’.
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In most British colonies there was little hope of a coloured employee, however educated, becoming anything more than a junior clerk: sooner or later he was confronted by a defensive barrier which no amount of push or ability would enable him to surmount—the barrier of self-interest (which, having probably come from a society in which the hierarchical divisions were much more rigid than anything in Britain, he perfectly understood). The most notable exceptions occurred in West Africa, where a ghastly climate kept European numbers down, and many Africans held responsible commercial jobs.

In their older possessions the British were still able to depend upon Europeans for many of the services of life. In Calcutta, which the Empire had virtually created, there was a sizeable British
petite
bourgeoisie
,
down to English shop assistants in the more delicate departments of the big stores. The principal boarding-houses were those kept by Mrs Walters, Mrs Pell, Mrs Monk, Mrs Baily and Mrs Day—some of them Eurasian ladies, some authentic lodging-house British. There were two English lady doctors in the city, and at least six English tailors, besides dressmakers, opticians, photographers, hoteliers, house agents, dentists, chemists, lawyers, booksellers, jewellers and gunsmiths.
1
It was settlers, rather than transient rulers, who chiefly supported this expatriate Englishness. Settlers all over the Empire fought hard to keep their own little Englands intact, and were often at odds with the imperial authorities, whom they considered ‘soft’ on race. In 1883, when Lord Ripon
was preparing a reform—the Ilbert Bill—which would give Indian judges the right to try European accused, the Assam tea-planters were so infuriated that they hatched a plot to kidnap the Viceroy, and opposition in Bengal was so intense that the Bill was drastically modified.
1

During their Jubilee visit to London the Colonial Premiers discussed the free circulation of British subjects throughout the Empire, but they did not reach agreement. They knew that their electorates would never tolerate the free entry of Indians, Africans or Chinese into the temperate colonies. The Canadians had already passed their own legislation to prevent the immigration of Asians, and the Australians were even alarmed by the numbers of Lascar seamen on British ships putting into Australian ports. How did those digger troopers feel, one wonders, 5 feet 10½ inches and 38 inches round the chest, when they found themselves marching through the imperial capital with such a pack of brown, black, and yellow men?

A vassal could qualify for respect, if not for power or promotion, if he possessed certain specific qualities the British admired. East was East and West was West, and never the twain would meet— 

There were certain subject peoples who habitually showed these qualities to advantage, and were always favourites of their rulers. In particular the streak of romantic chivalry in the British, fortified perhaps by the immense popularity of Tennyson’s
Idylls
of
the
King‚
induced them to cherish a brave enemy. They admired the magnificent Zulus of Natal, who had fought with such lordly skill in the
wars of the 1870s, and the chivalrous Maori of New Zealand—‘Keep your heads down, Sikkitifif’, came a voice across the battlefield to the 65th Regiment, during one engagement with those stalwart enemies, ‘we’re going to fire!’
1
They respected the manlier Indian tribes of Canada, and liked the strapping Sudanese, whose killing of General Gordon had been despicable indeed, but whose soldierly gifts surely showed that a Christian education would redeem them.
2
They had an overwhelming affection for the tough little mountain peoples of the Himalaya, and the fighting tribesmen of the Punjab—those swaggering Sikhs in turbans and whiskers, those irrepressible Pathans and Afridis of the North-West Frontier, rogues always worth the fighting, whose Nelsonic dash and quixotic generosity were all the British liked to imagine in themselves.

The British recognized the strength of the Chinese. Even in Australia, Baron von Hübner reported, the Chinese were admitted to be ‘the best gardeners, the best agricultural labourers, the best workmen of every sort, the best cooks and the most honest and law-abiding people’. Kipling was astonished, when he first visited Singapore, at the extent to which the Chinese ran the colony—yet ‘England is by the uninformed supposed to own the island’. The British worked well with the Parsees of Bombay, Zoroastrians of great business acumen who seemed to think more or less in the European manner, and were the first natives of India to play cricket: Parsees had even built ships for the Royal Navy, and so impregnable
was their social eminence in Bombay that the British themselves found it hard to buy houses on the Ridge at Malabar Hill, where the Parsee patricians lived. The Burghers of Ceylon, half-caste Dutch left behind by a previous Empire, were liked for their solid, unassuming good sense. In South Africa and Canada the British much respected the German, Slav and Scandinavian communities which had also settled there under the Flag: the only numerous marriages between Britons and subjects of other races were those with the Swedes and Ukrainians of western Canada.

Of course they also cultivated useful allies. In India they were generally friendly with the princely caste, if only because its members were grand, rich, powerful and often educated in England. They were sometimes overawed, indeed, by the horsy opulence of the Rajahs, who carried Englishness to unapproachable extremes: but they generally preferred Muslim to Hindu princes, because the Muslim creed offered a code of conduct that seemed not so very far from their own ideal of Godly cleanliness and courage. Feudatories of this kind were often buttered up with high-sounding imperial decorations, Grand Crosses of the Star of India, Victorian Orders or Orders of St Michael and St George, and were honoured guests at governors’ tables, polo matches and jubilee processions. In the field the anglophile subject was often an irritation: in England he was always fêted, and the most popular visitor to London that summer, one of the very few whose faces were generally recognized, was Wilfrid Laurier, the conciliatory French Canadian Prime Minister of Canada.

Clearly the British responded most warmly to what they would think of as Nordic qualities. In several parts of the Empire they also worked closely with Jews. In South Africa Jewish capitalists and speculators were eager allies of the British in their bid for the Transvaal goldfields, and in India one of the most celebrated of Anglo-Indian families sprang from the Persian-Jewish clan of the Sassoons, great men in Bombay: in the very heart of the Poona cantonment, just down the road from the club and the Anglican church, stood the high pinnacled tomb of David Sassoon, its sarcophagus elaborately carved by Samuel of Sydney Street, Mile End Road, with the crest of the Sassoons at its feet, and the Poona
synagogue respectfully outside the window. The Jews of other countries remained Jews, observed the
Jewish
Chronicle
apropos of the Jubilee celebrations. The Jews of the British Empire became true Englishmen.

On the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta a grand and curious monument stood, across the road from the equestrian statue of Lord Napier, and within sight of Fort William’s glowering redoubts. It was an oblong pavilion of Ionic columns, a little thicket of pillars above a jetty, severely classical in origin, but given an oriental flourish by its shaded profusion of columns. Behind it the ships steamed up and down the river, and passengers arriving at Calcutta sometimes disembarked at its landing-stage, to take a gharry into the city. In a capital notable for its monuments to generals, proconsuls, engineers and great administrators, many people assumed this memorial, too, to honour some man of imperial steel. In fact Prinsep’s Ghat commemorated the young Anglo-Indian who, in the 1830s, first translated the rock edicts of Asoka: James Prinsep, who died in his forty-first year after twenty-two years in the Indian service.

It would be unfair to end a chapter about British racial attitudes with the implication that all was arrogance or condescension. Even in that glaring noon of Empire, much generosity and respect still gave nobility to the Pax Britannica. We have been speaking of the general: the particular was often far more attractive. The Liberal party was out of power, but the liberal instinct was still alive, and the higher motives of the imperialists were not all humbug. The Colonial Office in London consistently stood for fair play towards the subject races, often against bitter criticism from white men on the spot. The Indian Civil Service still recruited men of compassionate integrity—there were even a few multi-racial clubs in India. The liberal intelligentsia fought every overbearing gesture with honourable zeal, and there were still men of all political parties, undazzled by the flash of the New Imperialism, who thought of the Empire as a trust—support for settlers in distant lands,
protection for innocent primitives, a guarantee of honest government.

Countless individual acts of kindness had entered the legends of Empire. In Australia aborigines still remembered how Sir George Grey, when Governor of South Australia, had been recognized by an old woman of the Bibbulmum tribe as the spirit of her dead son, and had gently and smilingly allowed her to embrace him crooning the words,
‘Boonoo,
Boonoo!
Bala
ngan-ya
Kooling!’
—‘It is true, it is true, he is my son!’
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In the Punjab a sect called the Nikalsaini actually worshipped the memory of John Nicholson, ‘the Lion of the Punjab’, one of the great men of the North-West Frontier before the Mutiny. If few such reputations were being established at our particular moment of the imperial history, at least there lay beneath the cant and gasconade older and gentler traditions of Empire. Queen Victoria herself was their living symbol, and stood recognizably in the line of Wilberforce and Livingstone, maternally caring for the coloured peoples. She detested the Boers, because they were so cruel to black Africans. She thought it unfair that in the casualty lists of frontier wars British soldiers were named, but seldom natives. She very much wished the Zulus could be allies rather than enemies—not only were they honest, merry and brave, but they did not smoke. She often felt for the Queen’s coloured enemies as much as she did for the Queen’s white men. She kept an eagle eye on Kitchener’s armies that year, as they fought their revengeful way up the Nile,
2
and when she was once told that the fierce Afridis were again about to attack her soldiers on the North-West Frontier of India, her first response was to wonder
why: ‘I fear that the poor people are suffering from the necessity of supplying horses and ponies and cattle to us … which comes heavily upon them after their famine and plague.’

She was an outspoken admirer of Indian art, too—some might say ostentatious, for she had one room at Osborne fitted out entirely as a Durbar Room, with murals by Rudyard Kipling’s father. Despite the disregard for Asian and African cultures which was ingrained in the nature of British imperialism, there were always individuals to cherish the conquered civilizations: Prinsep’s Ghat was paid for by public subscription among the British of Calcutta. It was not a fault of the British to destroy alien cultures for the sake of mere uniformity. Their innate respect for tradition, bred by so many centuries of continuity at home, obliged them to tolerate most native ways, unless—like human sacrifice, suttee, or infanticide—such ways offended the conscience even of the humanist. Throughout the British presence overseas there had been scholars and artists eagerly devoted to the laws, the religions, the art, the folk-lore of the east. Once, when Lord Napier invaded Ethiopia with an avenging army in 1867, the British deliberately tried to emulate Napoleon, attaching savants of several specialities to their armies, and producing the most thorough studies till then of the Abyssinian civilization—at least 500 precious manuscripts were taken home to England.
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The Ajanta Caves, those prodigies of Buddhist art, were first appreciated in modern times by British soldiers of the Indian Army,
2
and it was the British Archaeological Department of Ceylon which rescued from the jungle the stupendous temples of Anuradhapura. The officers’ mess of Queen Victoria’s Own Corps of Guides, perched on a high ridge at Mardan, near the Afghan frontier, was decorated with a remarkable series of Graeco-Buddhist sculptures, reminders of Alexander’s conquests in those regions: they had been found during the digging of the Swat Canal, and were lovingly preserved by the soldiery.