Pax Britannica (2 page)

More gratifying still was the tribute of the Empire itself. It is true that somebody had stolen the
£
300,000 diamond intended by the Nizam of Hyderabad as a present for the Queen, and the suggestion that every one of her 372 million subjects should send her a congratulatory telegram was fortunately not pursued: but everywhere in the Empire that day statues were being unveiled, garrisons were being inspected, thanksgiving services were being held in thatch-roofed outposts of the Anglican communion, ships were dressed overall and commemorative horses’ drinking troughs were unveiled. Even President Kruger of the Transvaal, the Queen’s most difficult tributary, obligingly released two obdurate Englishmen held in Pretoria gaol since the Jameson Raid, and in Hyderabad every tenth convict was set free (asked why, one of them said he understood Her Majesty had at last given birth to a son and heir). At Alligator Pond in Jamaica a week’s free food was distributed to poor families. In Baroda there was free travel on the State Railways for twenty-four hours. In Aden the ‘poorer natives’ were feasted at the expense of the British community. There was a grand ball at Rangoon, a dinner at the Sultan’s palace in Zanzibar, a salute of gunboats in Table Bay, a ‘monster Sunday-school treat’ at Freetown, a performance of the Hallelujah Chorus in Happy Valley at Hong Kong.

And into London there poured, to the amazement and delight of all, the gilded emissaries of Empire. As the poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, wrote:

The Colonial contingents for the Jubilee procession were mostly encamped at Chelsea, where curious crowds had been wandering among their tents for days. The Premiers of the eleven self-governing colonies, with their ladies, were put up at the Cecil, the largest hotel in Europe: they were often to be seen driving here and there to official functions, choosing gloves at Dents’ or silk hats in St James’s Street, or alighting at great town houses to take tea with duchesses. Wilfrid Laurier, the Prime Minister of Canada, was knighted on Jubilee morning, and the newspapers recorded approvingly that the Premier of Tasmania, Sir Edward Braddon, was the author of a book about big-game hunting in India—just the speciality the British public expected of a proper Empire-builder.

At the Grosvenor Hotel, the gossip columns reported, was staying ‘Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeeboy, an eminent Parsee’—in whose employment, as principal of a private art school in Bombay, Rudyard Kipling’s father Lockwood had first gone to India. Another eminent guest was James Tyson, who had made a fortune supplying food to the gold-diggers in Australia, and was now reputed to be worth more than
£
5
million. There was an Imperial Fête in Regent’s Park, and an Imperial Ballet at Her Majesty’s Theatre, the Australian prima donna Nellie Melba was singing at the Opera, and all the visiting colonial and Indian officers had been taken by special train to a demonstration in Kent of the new Maxim-Nordenfeldt gun. In the parks, cafés and music-halls of the capital were to be seen princes and sultans, Sikhs and Chinese, exquisite Malay ladies, and West African policemen clumping uncomfortably about in boots, the first they had ever worn.

The British were still astonishingly ignorant about their possessions, and they viewed all this with genial if rather patronizing innocence. Contemporary accounts of the event are full of wonder, precariously avoiding prejudice: were it not for the British uniforms and the Union Jacks, one feels, the responses to these colourful visitors might have been different. As it was, all those strange figures of Jubilee were brothers-in-Empire, and a writer in the women’s page of the
Illustrated
London
News
even suggested that the British male might learn a thing or two from their uninhibited fineries. The British saw the whole celebration as a kind of family reunion, however
vague they were as to the exact origins of the Hausa constables, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council over the protected persons of Basutoland, or even the constitutional status of Western Australia. It was not a sophisticated occasion, the Diamond Jubilee. It was full of sentiment and extravagance, indulgent tears and thumping brass bands, strung about with flags and lavishly illuminated. ‘It may safely be said,’ one commentator wildly claimed, ‘that the Jubilee will be the costliest event in the world’s history.’

The procession itself was a superb display of braggadocio. With its 50,000 troops, it was thought to constitute the largest military force ever assembled in London, and as it marched in two separate columns through the streets of the capital, to converge upon St Paul’s for the thanksgiving service, even the exuberant reporters of the nineties sometimes found themselves beggared of hyperbole. ‘How many millions of years has the sun stood in heaven?’ inquired the
Daily
Mail.
‘But the sun never looked down until yesterday upon the embodiment of so much energy and power.’ It was, wrote G. W. Steevens, ‘a pageant which for splendour of appearance and especially for splendour of suggestion has never been paralleled in the history of the world’.
1
‘History may be searched,’ thought
The
Times,
‘and searched in vain, to discover so wonderful an exhibition of allegiance and brotherhood amongst so many myriads of men…. The mightiest and most beneficial Empire ever known in the annals of mankind.’

One half of the procession was led by Captain Ames of the Horse Guards, at six foot eight inches the tallest man in the British Army, and looking more stupendous still wearing his high plumed helmet, swelled out with breastplate and cuirass, and astride his tall charger. The other half was led by Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, the most beloved of imperial generals, riding the grey Arab,
Vonolel, which had conveyed him from Kabul to Kandahar in his victorious march of 1880.
1
Not far behind Lieutenant Festing rode the Sudanese horse which had taken him to the capture of Bida in West Africa, and cheers of sympathy greeted the empty sleeve of the Honourable Maurice Gifford, wounded during a recent skirmish with the Matabele.

Before, behind and among these champions marched a weirdly imperial force of arms. There were cavalrymen from New South Wales—gigantic soldiers, the papers reported, with an average height of five feet ten and a half inches and an average chest of thirty-eight inches. There were Hussars from Canada and Carabiniers from Natal, camel troops from Bikaner and Dyak head-hunters from North Borneo, wearing bright red pillbox hats and commanded by Captain W. Raffles Flint. The seventeen officers of the Indian Imperial Service troops were all princes, and the Hong Kong Chinese Police wore conical coolie hats. There were Malays, and Sinhalese, and Hausas from the Niger and the Gold Coast, Jamaicans in white gaiters and ornately embroidered jackets, British Guiana police in caps like French gendarmes, Cypriot Zaptiehs whose fezzes struck so jarring a chord that some of the crowd hissed them, supposing them to be Turks, and a jangling squadron of Indian lancers led by a British officer in a white spiked helmet. London had never seen such a spectacle. One of the Maoris weighed twenty-eight stone. One of the Dyaks had taken thirteen human heads. It was a properly Roman sight, a pageant of citizens and barbarians too, summoned from the frontiers to that grey eternal city. The British-bred colonials, said the Golden Issue of the
Daily
Mail‚
printed throughout in gold ink and sometimes breaking into exultant cross-heads, were ‘all so smart and straight and strong, every man such a splendid specimen and testimony to the

that there was not an Imperialist in the crowd who did not from the sight of them gain a new view of the glory of the British Empire’.

Through welcoming banners and fluttering handkerchiefs this allegorical pageant passed, with
Soldiers
of
the
Queen
up the Strand and ‘Three Cheers for India’ at the end of Fleet Street, with applause for the dazzlingly ostentatious uniform of Sir Partab Singh, and a rippling of black and white from the massed clergy outside St Paul’s—through the massed hierarchy of Civil Servants on Constitution Hill, past the survivors of Balaclava assembled at a window on Ludgate Hill—with cheers rolling across London, with the thump of drums and the singing of patriotic songs along the route, with an empress, a crown prince, twenty-three princesses, a grand duke, three grand duchesses, four duchesses, forty Indian potentates riding three abreast and gorgeously decorated, with guns booming and bells chiming, beneath a banner in St James’s proclaiming in English and Hindustani that Victoria was alone the Queen of Earthly Queens, with the Papal Nuncio sharing a carriage with the representative of the Emperor of China, and the Princess of Wales in mauve spangle-trimmed satin, with rajahs glittering in diamonds and their ladies all in gold, and tens of thousands of Union Jacks, flying from towers, draped from windows, merry in the hands of school-children or haughty above the bearskins of colour sergeants. The Queen wore a bonnet with ostrich feathers in it, beneath a white silk parasol, and she was greeted at St Paul’s by her son the Prince of Wales, who was on horseback in a plumed hat, and received her with knightly courtesy.
1

Everybody agreed it was a great success. As an affirmation of national pride it justly expressed the mood of the people, and gave an explicit warning to foreigners that Britain had not lost the taste for greatness. As a tribute to Victoria it was a moving reminder of all that had happened to the British since she had come to the
throne, so long ago that most of the spectators could hardly imagine a Britain without her. As Mark Twain wrote, the Queen herself was the real procession—‘all the rest was embroidery’. Victoria returned to her palace in the evening, exhausted but marvellously pleased, through the blackened buildings of her ancient capital, whose smoke swirled and hovered over the grey river, and whose gas-lamps flickered into tribute with the dusk. At home she found that most of the colonies had already replied to her Jubilee message: their answers were being prepared for presentation to Her Majesty, and for later publication as a Blue Book.