Pax Britannica (24 page)

‘They walk dolorously to and fro under the glare of jerking electric lamps, when they ought to be sitting in shirtsleeves around little tables treating their wives to iced lager beer.’ So wrote Kipling of Calcutta’s commercial community. By now the merchants of Empire, no less than the governors, were mostly men of habit and convention, conservative men who honoured the proprieties. It was not the thing to smoke in the streets of Calcutta, and in the evening, in that city of slums and emaciation, the richer British box-wallahs emerged in top-hats and frock-coats to promenade the Madan, driving steadily here and there in broughams, hansoms and victorias, exchanging bows and transient assessments. There was, however, much more variety to the unofficial of Empire. They come from a wider range of backgrounds, and from the photographs of the time they glare out at us—for there is often something accusatory to their expressions—with striking suggestions of force and originality.

Let us look at a few faces from the imperial gallery of the nineties, chosen at random from a railway camp, a
Spy
cartoon, an African police station and a settlement of the Australian Outback. Here, for a start, is Ronald Preston, the railhead engineer of the Uganda Railway, then under canvas with his gangs half-way to Lake Victoria from the sea. We see him sitting at the entrance to his tent with his wife Florence, wearing a linen suit and a shirt without a tie, and holding a gun across his knees. He has prominent teeth and large ears, and all around him are trophies of the hunt—zebra skins, antelope horns, tiger hides. He looks lean, loose-limbed, a little sad, as though he has been condemned to live for ever under canvas, building railways and shooting animals: and beside him his wife, in a long skirt, mutton-sleeves and a little black boater hat, gazes forlornly out of the picture into the surrounding wilderness, very faintly smiling
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.

It is the White Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Charles Anthony Brooke,
who returns our stare so urbanely from the
Spy
cartoon in
Vanity
Fair.
What kingly ease of deportment! What perfection of buttoned frock-coat! How exquisitely symmetrical the heavy white moustaches and the curled grey hair above the high forehead! Brooke has prominent white eyebrows, bags beneath the eyes, a wrinkled turtleneck and a bulky cleft jaw, but above all it is the expression of the face that holds our attention—the expression of a man who makes his own rules, in a sphere of action altogether unique, dealing in subjects that we know nothing whatsoever about, and would be wise not to make foolish comments on.

Haughty in a very different kind is ‘Bobo’ Young, an employee of the British South Africa Company in north-eastern Rhodesia, who was previously a private in the Scots Guards, and a cook in the Bechuanaland Border Police, and who policed his tribes with a ferocious sang-froid—he once killed twenty-five natives in a single fight. He is pictured sitting with his arms folded, against a prisonlike background of a brick wall, wearing a high-collared military tunic, and squinting sidelong at the camera, so that his face looks one way and his eyes another: he has a waxed moustache like a drill sergeant’s, his eyes are fiercely gleaming, and his mouth is set in a sardonic, slightly contemptuous smile, such as might shrivel an African chieftain to insignificance, or in another incarnation wither an importunate customer in the cab queue at the Savoy.
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And finally a great lady of Empire, Mrs Daisy Bates. Mrs Bates first set eyes on Australia in the middle nineties, a young Irishwoman of literary leanings and polished manners. She had married an Australian cattle-rancher, but was to spend her life in the service of the aborigines, whose fate as a people she assumed to be sealed, and whose last generations she wished to comfort. She was a woman of truly Victorian resolution, and did nothing by half-measures, living for years alone among the tribes, learning their languages, accepting the squalors of their society, and never passing judgement. In our picture we see her setting off by camel-buggy for a particularly ghastly journey around the Great Australian Bight. Beside the two
camels stands a tall and heavily bearded aborigine, smoking a pipe, with a linen hat pulled down over his ears. On the driving-seat, hung about with baggage, pots and pans, is an aboriginal woman all in black, shaggy matted hair protruding from her bonnet: and immaculate beside her sits Mrs Daisy Bates. Her face is stern, her neck is stiff, her hands lie lady-like upon her lap. She wears a high-collared blouse fastened with a ribbon, a severe black coat and skirt down to her ankles, and a white straw hat with a fly-veil over her face. She seldom, indeed, wore anything else: and if the strength of the White Rajah lay in his facial expression, the power of Daisy Bates was in her posture: high up there on her rickety buggy, with aboriginals for company and camels to tow her, she sits superbly, flamboyantly erect, as if to show that a good British upbringing, with sensible corsetry, could fortify a woman against hell itself.
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Powerful figures all four, full of sap or gristle, who brought to the developing Empire a vigour all too often tamed by red tape and the hope of promotion, in the secretariat buildings up the road.

Among the white settlers everywhere the Englishman had undergone some metamorphosis, making him taller, or broader, or cockier, or coarser, than before. In Canada he was already half an American, neither quite an Englishman nor quite a Yank, and a little conscious of deficiencies in both. In South Africa his accent was beginning to acquire the queerly distorted diphthongs of the Afrikaner. In New Zealand, we read, he was already of a darker complexion, a quicker speech, a livelier manner, a more sociable disposition and a more argumentative turn. In Australia, where he was most conscious of the freedom and freshness of the colonial life, the release from all the old bonds of convention, he was still pre-eminently a man of the open spaces, not yet buttoned by the city ways of the seaboards. Thephysical splendour of the young Australians was already a legend,
and their dialect was rich and beguiling. ‘Where are you off to?’ asks a character in Tom Collin’s novel
Such
Is
Life.
‘Jist as fur back as I can git,’ is the answer. ‘But you’ll stay in Echuca tonight?’ ‘Didn’t intent. But I’d like to have a pitch with you, sposen I wouldn’t be in your road.’

The migrants had taken with them, none the less, old seeds of social consciousness. There were snobs in the colonies too, and in some parts the settlers were evolving class distinctions peculiar to themselves. In New Zealand the English rural hierarchy had suffered a sea-change into orders of a different kind: the gentleman farmer had become the run-holder, the yeoman was the cocky, and yesterday’s yokels were the musterers, shearers and drovers of the South. The
élite
of Canada, especially in the Maritime provinces of the east, was provided by descendants of the Empire Loyalists, those unshakeable Tories who had trekked northwards into Canada rather than remain in the American Republic: they often lived beautifully, in white colonial mansions with negro servants and horses, but were by now more like patricians from New England than from Old. In Australia there was a class awareness of a very different kind. There the people known as ‘exclusives’ were those who had no convicts in their ancestry: among the others, the squalid origins of New South Wales were not often mentioned. ‘It is a sore that is not yet healed,’ one lady told von Hübner. ‘Take care how you touch it: never utter the word “convict”.’ Even in that free-and-easy nation, the normal social ambitions were stirring, too. By the nineties few of the emigrants to Australia were down-to-earth working men, and urban, bourgeois standards were beginning to count: girls arriving in Australia on immigrant ships often found themselves engaged for domestic service by telegram before they even docked.

For the colonists were British still, brought up in a tradition of social respect. Their ingrained deference towards the manners and customs of the English upper classes did not evaporate when they unpacked their bags in Queensland or Manitoba. They knew that the word ‘colonial’ often had pejorative undertones in England—suggestions of hick, bumpkin or even criminal—and some of them were already self-conscious about the inadequacies of the colonial cities, so grand and bustling to local innocents, so provincial to
visiting dudes from the Mother Country. The Australian Arthur Patchett Martin wrote a poem,
My
Cousin
from
Pall
Mall,
about this feeling, describing the arrival in Melbourne of a particularly superior new-comer:

The maverick patrician escaped all this: Lord Henry Paulet with his Salisbury sawmills, ‘Lord Have-One-More’ on the Klondike trail, or Sir Drummond Dunbar, the eighth baronet, whose home at this time was an uninviting shack in Johannesburg. So did the roving company of the imperial bums, those loiterers, beachcombers and scavengers who roamed the Empire from end to end, occasionally pretending to be Americans when the law was at their heels, but generally recognizably British. We meet them everywhere. The sweep of their indigence was marvellously wide, and the same rogue Briton might turn up in Queensland and Borneo, Egypt and Rhodesia, wherever the presence of the Empire gave him some nominal protection and privilege. In the Transvaal, where the protection was most nominal and the privilege non-existent, most of the Uitlanders were British, and a wild lot they were—‘wanglers’, wrote one contemporary observer,
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‘workers of snaps’, ‘fixers-up’, Artful Dodgers and Slick Sams. ‘They bribed, they lied, they
swindled. They lived at the best hotels and drank champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning. When not involved in some sordid financial intrigue, they spent their time making open and indecent love to the maids behind the bars set up at almost every corner.’

In the Yukon that summer hundreds of such adventurers were stumbling over the high passes towards the Bonanza creek, many of them fresh from England, many others from Australia or the older goldfields of British Columbia, and hundreds more were wandering through the Outback or the High Veldt, surviving as often as not by grub-staking—pledging a share of any claim they pegged in return for supplies in the meantime. In India many old soldiers of the East India Company army, still drawing a pension of 1/- a day, wandered from job to job, barracks to barracks, often with half-caste wives. Here and there across the Empire we come across the trail of somebody who has deliberately turned his back on his own kind, an imperial renegade, a mystic. The original of Browning’s Waring became Prime Minister of New Zealand,
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but there were others who really did choose ‘land-travel or sea-faring, boots and chest or staff and script’, and wandered off to be Avatars in Vishnu-land. In a small kraal between King William Town and East London, in South Africa, a blind English lady lived at this time with the Kaffirs, who treated her with kindly courtesy: occasionally they took her into town to beg from the white people, but in the evening she always returned to the kraal, and shared her profits with her hosts. And sometimes the English children of Simla crept up the hill of Jakko, high above the town, to the temple of Hanuman the monkey-god: and there beneath a tree, alone among the monkeys, they would see a young Englishman dressed in the yellow robes of a
sadhu,
with a head-dress made of a leopard skin. He was Charles de Russet, son of a well-known local contractor, who had abandoned his family and his faith to become a disciple of the Jakko fakir. For two years he sat there, all alone. Sometimes an attendant came from the temple, to give him food: and sometimes the children, peering through the brush, would hear the old priest calling his monkey-
children by name to their victuals—
Ajao!
Ajao!—
and
away they would bound, Raja and Kotwal and Budhee and Daroga, helter-skelter through the undergrowth, leaving the Englishman silent and solitary beneath his tree.
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