Pax Britannica (23 page)

It was all bits and pieces. There
was
no System. The Mother Country was an audacious euphemism, applied to such immense and ancient organisms as India or Nigeria, and the whole terminology of Empire had become so confused that often the New Imperialists could not even use the word ‘nation’ without an explanatory footnote. ‘When we have accustomed ourselves’, Seeley had written, ‘to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it England we shall see that here … is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.’ Such saws of ancient prophets only confused the issue further: Seeley could not have foreseen the imperial assault on Africa in the eighties and nineties, and he thought in terms of a white Greater Britain with a single docile dependency, India.

In fact the very essence of this Empire was its formless improvisation, its stagger. Four million people of British stock lived in the six self-governing colonies of Australia. British settlers had been there for rather more than two hundred years, and the organization of affairs was entirely theirs. They had started from scratch. The six colonies had six different sets of tariffs, mainly directed against each other. They had six separate postal and telegraph services, and six
uncoordinated defence forces. The judicial processes of one colony could not be enforced in another. The railways were built to different gauges. If an inventor took out a patent in Queensland, it did not protect him in Victoria.

All six, that Jubilee summer, sent their Premiers to London, where they basked in the effulgence of the New Imperialism, kissed the hand of the Queen-Empress, and made many well-received speeches about Imperial unity, historical fraternity, and the advantages of British method.

W
HEN Kipling first went east from India, he noted that though the stinks of Lahore and Calcutta had something in common, the stink of Burma was different: he was struck by the numberless energies of the Chinese, and the startling vigour of Japan: but wherever he went in the eastern Empire he observed that the British appeared to be exactly the same. ‘It was just We Our Noble Selves’, he wrote sardonically of a party in the barracks above the botanical gardens at Singapore. ‘In the centre was the pretty Memsahib with light hair and fascinating manners, and the plump little Memsahib that talks to everybody and is in everybody’s confidence, and the spinster fresh from home, and the bean-fed, well-groomed subaltern with the light coat and the fox-terrier. On the benches sat the fat colonel, and the large judge, and the engineer’s wife, and the merchantman and his family after their kind—male and female met I them, and but for the little fact that they were entire strangers to me, I would have saluted them all as old friends.’ They were just the same people as he knew in India, except that they were pale from the Singapore climate, ‘and the veins on the backs of their hands are printed in indigo.’

Nobody, of course, runs so true to type as that. The subaltern probably cherished a passion for the poetry of Baudelaire, the spinster spoke fluent Cantonese, the merchant and his kind were Seventh Day Adventists. To the stranger nevertheless the British in their Empire do seem to have been instantly familiar, whether they were the stiff, pomaded or parasoled representatives of the gentry or irrepressible soldiers of the line. Britishness was very strong in Victoria’s later years, and British people were unmistakably British.

For the most part they were bigger and fitter than other Europeans. A prosperous century had made even the poorer classes so, and several hundred years of success had filled out the gentry: according to Florence Nightingale, London was the healthiest city in Europe. The tall stature and upright bearing of the English gentleman was proverbial, and is confirmed in every old photograph of regiment, First XV or Union committee. Five members of Lord Salisbury’s patrician Cabinet were more than six feet tall. Salisbury himself was six feet four inches, and Henry Chaplin, his President of the Local Government Board, weighed 250 lb.
1
The average height of Army recruits in 1897 was five feet seven inches and their average chest measurement was 34 inches—substantially bigger than the conscripts of the Continental armies. It was a time of British athletic supremacy; only the Americans could compete. The public school idea of
mens
sana
in
corpore
sano
was percolating, in a desultory way, into the upbringing of the masses, and no other people in Europe was so keen on sport—sportsmen on the Continent merely copied what the English did.

These physical advantages were sustained by a detachment of bearing. The most rabid of the New Imperialists were quite proud of the fact that the British were not liked: certainly it was no part of the national ambition to be loved. The British were aware that of all the peoples of the earth they were the most commonly resented, but a shell protected them, composed of pride, duty, shyness and a sense of membership. An Austrian traveller in Egypt at about this time describes the remote composure of a young Cook’s official, when a German threatens to sue the company for the loss of his trunk—wildly valued at
£
200. The Englishman instantly guarantees to pay
£
200 compensation if the trunk does not show up within an hour. Ten minutes later it arrives, the German is all abashed, and the Austrian ruefully compares affairs in his own Empire: ‘How
many underlings and how many Councillors of the Imperial Court would have been needed to register and deal with such a complaint, and how big their file would have grown within six months, and how sure we are that, even six months later, that claim would not be settled!’ G. W. Steevens, travelling to Egypt in 1897, describes the all-British company on the mail train to Brindisi: ‘Fair-haired, blue-eyed, spare-shouldered and spare-jawed, with puckered brows and steadfast eyes that seemed to look outwards and inwards at the same time, they were unmistakably builders—British Empire builders.’ Can one not imagine them, this trainload of bronzed aliens, sharing their private jokes, exuding their particular smells of tweed, tobacco and lavender, as they presented their hand baggage to the customs officials at Modane? It is as though they were encapsuled there, snug in their own ways, honouring their own club rules and rolling securely across Europe to catch their P. and O. Foreigners and subject peoples alike recognized this separateness, and it was essential to the character of the Pax Britannica. This was not so much a haughty Empire as a private one.

The aristocracy of Empire was the official class, together with the landed gentry of British planters: in Crown Colonies the two classes often intermarried (in Mauritius and Guiana, so Royal Commissions reported, a prime cause of bad laws and harsh administration). It was not a very aristocratic aristocracy. Viceroys and Governors were often noblemen, and their wives Society beauties—Lady Horton, wife of a Governor of Ceylon in the 1830s, was the subject of Byron’s
She
Walk
In
Beauty
Like
The
Night.
British regiments posted overseas contained their quota of young bloods. But the great mass of the imperial service, like the officer corps of the colonial forces, was pre-eminently upper middle class. The English aristocracy played no great part in the everyday running of the Empire, having greener dominions of its own at home, and Eton was low on the list of schools that educated the imperial administrators. ‘
Here’s
their
ground
’,
Kipling wrote of India’s British rulers:

They were the children of a unique culture, that of the English public schools, with its celibate discipline, its classical loyalties, its emphasis on self-reliance, team spirit, delegated responsibility, Christian duty and stoic control. One did not cry when one said good-bye to Mama at Paddington station. One did not, as a general rule, wish to appear too clever, or too enthusiastic. One loyally upheld the prefectorial system, while realizing that certain rules were made to be broken. The public schools, greatly expanded in the second half of the century, and ever more dedicated to their own code of conduct, lay somewhere near the heart of the imperial ethic. ‘It would be terrible to think of what would happen to us’, wrote Eustace H. Miles, amateur tennis champion of the world, ‘if our public school system were swept away, or if—and this comes to very much the same thing—from our public school system were swept away our Athletics and our Games.’ A man’s best proof of fitness to rule in India, Miles thought, was to have been a captain of games, and certainly the public school system was well suited to the imperial needs. It produced men of high spirits, courage and assurance, ready to rough it and unafraid of responsibility. If it was intellectually narrowing and chauvinist, well, this was an Empire that survived by the separateness of its rulers, their conviction that what they did was right, and that all else was second best. The public school man was generally able to see the other person’s point of view, provided it reflected his own values—civilized values, he would say. His inability to grasp the aspirations of Indians, Africans or Malays stemmed from his absolute certainty that their whole manner of thought or way of life was, through no real fault of their own, misguided. At his worst the public school man was a snobbish hearty: at his best he combined authority with Christian kindness and what he would have called
grit
:
the rarest of his virtues was human sympathy, the rarest of his vices cowardice.

And the most irritating of his traits, at least in the imperial context, seems to have been smugness. From the memoirs of the imperial Civil Services there generally breathes an air of conscious rectitude—disguised often in jollity and boyish dash, but seldom altogether absent. The Empire-builders were very pleased with themselves. ‘No country has ever possessed a more admirable body of public servants than the Civil Service of India’, wrote Sir John Strachey, a distinguished Indian Civil Servant himself. ‘How is it’, another Anglo-Indian asked of himself and his colleagues, in a rhetorical question addressed without a blush to his fiancée, who must have loved him dearly—‘how is it that these pale-cheeked exiles give security to a race of another hue, other tongues, other religions which rulers of their own people have ever failed to give? Dearest, there are unseen moral causes which I need not point out.…’
1
G. W. Forrest, another Indian Civil Servant, once observed how difficult it was for a stranger to disentangle the different social sets of Calcutta—their laws of procedure, their jealousies and their relations with each other. The Official set, however, was easily recognizable: their position was ‘by Royal enactment assured’, and their wives ‘viewed from an eminence’ the Mercantile circle below. The imperial protocol was strict and all-embracing—in India, sanitary commissioners and inspectors-general of jails shared seventy-sixth place in order of precedence—and von Hübner tells us that if ever ‘members of the lower classes’, other than grooms, showed up in Singapore, the Government found means of returning them to Britain, if necessary at its own expense. White prestige must be maintained, and caste was in the air of Empire.

People of grander imagination often disliked these official airs. Bryce thought the average Indian Civil Servant pretty boring—‘a good deal of uniformity … a want of striking, even marked individualities … rather wanting in imagination and sympathy … too conventionally English’. Kitchener infuriated the Official ladies of Egypt by his preference for the society of glamorous Levantines.
Winston Churchill, who was in India in 1896 and 1897, did not at all take to Anglo-Indian society. ‘A lot of horrid Anglo-Indian women at the races. Nasty vulgar creatures all looking as though they thought themselves great beauties. I fear me they are a sorry lot…. Nice people in India are few and far between. They are like oases in the desert…. I have lived the life of a recluse out here. The vulgar Anglo-Indians have commented on my not “calling” as is the absurd custom of the country. I know perhaps three people who are agreeable and I have no ambitions to extend my acquaintance.’

Poor Anglo-Indians! Twenty-one and very new to the country, Churchill was applying to their provincial attitudes the standards of his own background, glittering with the wealth and genius of London and New York. Life in the official circles of Empire may not have looked exciting to him, but it pursued a staid and comfortable course, much in the tennis-party tradition of the lesser British gentry at home. The scale of things was often grotesquely swollen, though, so that a married couple in India might easily have a staff of twenty-five servants, imposed on them by a caste system even more rigid than their own: bearer, children’s nurse, cooks, table-servers, a tailor and a laundryman, a water-carrier, gardeners, grooms and grass-cutters. In camp, if a fairly senior official took his wife on tour, the establishment might grow to fifty or more dependants. Living in what was virtually a private village with this immense
ménage,
the imperialist forfeited any kind of privacy—the servants knew everything—and the manner of life remained supremely orthodox. The planting community of Ceylon, for example, formed as serenely exclusive a community as any county society at home. Planters nearly always married into one another’s families, when they returned from their education in England, and they lived a well-ordered country gentry’s life. People were normally At Home once each week, and there were frequent calls, and dances at the Queen’s in Kandy, and golfing week-ends at Nuwara Eliya, and the bungalows were lofty and cool and lapped in lawns, and there was an English vicar at the church
up the road, and all seemed changeless, useful and very agreeable.

The family tradition was strong in the imperial service. The same names appear repeatedly in the honours lists and church memorials, and fathers’ footsteps were loyally followed. The two Napier brothers in the Indian Army were the sons of Lord Napier of Magdala, who had served in the Mutiny and virtually created the hill station of Darjeeling. General Henry Rundle, Kitchener’s chief of staff in the Sudan, was the son of Joseph Rundle, who had first planted the British flag on Aden soil in 1839.
1
Generations of Stracheys had served in India, and there had always been a Skinner in the 1st Bengal Lancers, since Colonel James Skinner
2
founded the regiment as Skinner’s Horse in 1803.

This imperial
élite
was, as conquerors go, well behaved. Its values were solid. Its rules were mostly sensible. Corruption was rare, and what Churchill thought vulgar was often no more than a dogged determination to stick to the habits and traditions that gave the Empire its stability.
Fin-de-siècle
London was rich in scandals of fraud and bankruptcy—the Mundella scandal, the Hooley scandal,
3
the disreputable failure of the Liberator Building Society. Few such disgraces marred the recent record of the overseas Empire. The graft was almost always petty, and there are worse sins to a ruling class than thinking yourself more beautiful than you are.