Pax Britannica (31 page)

Lord Elgin, the Viceroy, was frankly bored. He had never much wanted to be Viceroy, and in this he was not alone, for oddly enough eager Viceroys were hard to find. The significance of the office was almost beyond ambition. The Viceroy of India had few peers in Asia. The Tsar of Russia, the Emperor of China were scarcely his superiors, the Shah of Persia and the King of Siam trod carefully in his presence, the Amir of Afghanistan and the King of Nepal were frankly at his mercy, the Dalai Lama would be well advised to respect his wishes and the King of Burma was actually his prisoner.
1
He occupied the throne of Akhbar and Aurangzebe, he stood in the conquering line of Alexander, and he was officially said to
reign
,
like a king in his own right. Yet it was a kind of exile for an Englishman. The most able men generally preferred to pursue greatness at home, living in gentler palaces in greener fields, and few Viceroys had been of the very first rank, as statesmen or even as administrators.

For all that pomp, all that subservient respect, the State balls
and the bodyguards and the obsequies of princes—it was all a kind of charade. The Viceroy was only a temporary Civil Servant, on a five-year term, and would presently go home again. The rules of British India were inescapable, and exact. When a Viceroy sailed out to assume his dignities he was entitled to a grant of
£
3,500, to cover his travel expenses and equipment. When he returned to England at the end of his service he was allowed a ship of the Indian Marine as far as Suez, the limit of his power: but once there, he and his Vicereine were all on their own, could claim no more divine appurtenances, and must seek the help of Thomas Cook’s for their onward travel, paying their own fares.

T
HE New Imperialism was born out of a medley of moods and circumstances, not all of them happy, some of them distasteful. It emerged a boisterous credo, full of swank, colour and sweep. On the face of it the British seemed to be having a marvellous time, bathing in the glory of it all, swathed in bunting and lit up with fireworks. The late Victorians were not half so strait-laced as their reputation was presently to imply. Their young men were full of dash and energy; they revelled in the stimulations of the outdoor life; the pleasures of Empire lay not only in national pride, duty performed and dividends paid, but also in the particular consolations a people could devise for itself, when placed in a position of absolute command in an alien land and climate.

Sport was the first. The British took their games with them wherever they went. Sport was their chief spiritual export, and was to prove among their more resilient memorials. They took cricket to Samoa and the Ionian Islands, and both the Samoans and the Ionians took it up with enthusiasm. They went climbing in the Canadian Rockies, and by 1897 the Canadians had their own Alpine Club. They introduced football to the aborigines of Australia, and wherever in the world the ground was flat enough they seem to have built a tennis court. The highest golf course in the world was made by the British at Gulmarg, in the Himalaya, 8,700 feet high: the highest cricket pitch was near by, at Chail. In Salisbury, Rhodesia, the pioneers were already playing cricket matches between the Public Schools Boys and the rest, and a chief qualification for a job on the administration was said to be a good batting average. The first American golf course was laid at New York in 1888, but the
British had been playing the game at Calcutta since 1829. Boxing was compulsory in the British Army, ‘Open order, march!’ the order ran. ‘Front rank, about turn!
Box
!’

Above all the British took with them everywhere their taste for equestrian sports, inherited as it was among their friends the Indian princes from the warlike tendencies of their forebears. In those days the horse and the gentry still went together, racing and hunting were the passions of the English upper classes, and horsiness was more than a social phenomenon; it was an historical legacy, too. The thoroughbred horse went with them always, and there was scarcely a town in the Empire which did not have its race-course—a scrubby little ring of beaten-out turf on the veldt, or splendid arenas like Calcutta’s or the Curragh in Ireland, with their glittering grandstands, brilliant white rails, club-houses and sprinkled lawns. They used to have race dances at Calcutta, with public breakfasts, and curious alternations of sweepstake and country dance, and at Madras the sportsmen of the East India Company had built themselves a delightful set of assembly rooms beside the track, a tall big-windowed building with fine wide terraces and flagstaffs, and emanations of punch and nosegay. As early as 1891 Lord Randolph Churchill was complaining that his horse had been nobbled at a race meeting at Salisbury, Rhodesia, a charge that rings all too true: and when Queen Victoria sent four envoys from the Royal Horse Guards to visit Lobengula in his kraal, almost the first thing they did was to arrange a race meeting, including the Zambesi Handicap and the Bulawayo Plate.

The race-course at Simla was on the high plateau of Annandale, surrounded by tall pines and deodars, and deliriously secluded. The race-course at Colombo was in the middle of the city, like a bullring in Spain.
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The race-course at Hong Kong was in Happy Valley, separated from the Chinese cemetery only by a fence of bamboos. The Poona race-course was inside the General Parade Ground. The Badulla race-course ran all the way round a little lake. An artillery range straddled the Lucknow race-course. The Darjeeling race-course was said to be the smallest in the world, and the Calcutta race-course was claimed to be the largest. In many parts of the
Empire the climax of the social season was a big race meeting. From every part of Australia the graziers made their way to Melbourne in October, to ensconce themselves and their families in the comfortable old-school hostelries of the city, and show themselves off at the Melbourne Cup: often the whole year was remembered by what happened that day, and Australians would refer to the past as ‘the year Newhaven won the Cup’, or ‘the year Wait-a-Bit lost by a head’.
1
The great day of the Calcutta year was the day of the Viceroy’s Cup race, for a cup given annually by the reigning Viceroy. ‘The grandstand is filled’, wrote G. W. Forrest in the nineties, ‘with noble dames from England, from America and all parts of the world, who have come with their spouses to visit the British Empire. In the paddock is a noble duke, a few lords, one or two millionaires from America, and some serious politicians, who have visited this land to study the Opium Question, and feel ashamed of being seen at a race-course. The air resounds with the cries of the bookmaker, and an eager crowd surges around the totalizer—for on the Viceroy’s Cup day even the most cautious bank manager feels bound to have one bet.’ After the church and perhaps the law court, the race-course was the principal landmark of a British imperial city—as prominent as the amphitheatre of Rome, and with much the same meaning.

When they were not racing the British were likely to be hunting, for wherever they went they scratched together a pack of hounds, reinforced it with the odd terrier, and set off in pursuit of fox, jackal, elk, pig, hare, red deer, hyena, or whatever else was available to be chased. (Everybody in the Empire seemed to possess a fox-terrier, a bullterrier or a spaniel: no group photograph is complete without a dog in somebody’s arms, and in India many imperial households had their own dog-boy, generally the son of a more senior employee.) There were scores of light-hearted hunts in India, and in Africa, so strong was the ethos of the British, even a few Boers took up the sport, and were to be seen authentically costumed in pinks, shouting Tally-ho in Afrikaans. The Montreal Hunt, founded
by British officers in 1826, flourished in the heart of French Canada.
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The Calpe Hunt started with a pair of foxhounds actually on the Rock of Gibraltar, where foxes lived high in the brush among the apes: by the nineties it was one of the smartest imperial hunts, was regularly entertained by Spanish grandees on their estates across the frontier, and once went over to Tangier, ‘where a wolf gave an excellent run of over 40 minutes and a distance of nine miles’.

In India pigsticking, like polo, was pursued with passion, encouraged by immense silver trophies presented by Maharajahs. The Kadir Cup for pigsticking was one of the principal sporting trophies of India (it was won in 1897 by Mr Gillman, Royal Horse Artillery, on Huntsman). This tremendously exciting sport, in which a single man on horseback with a spear was pitted against boars, tigers, buffalo, or even rhinoceri, had been popular among the British since the early days of the East India Company: by the nineties the northwest provinces of India were its headquarters, and on the great day of the Kadir Cup sometimes a hundred spears competed, and the men and their horses settled in gay tented camps upon the Punjab plains, practising their runs with stampeding hoofs and dust-clouds in sunshine, like knights before jousting.

Whatever there was to chase or kill, the British pursued. In those days the reaches of the Empire teemed with multitudes of game, the deer and the zebra roamed Africa in their countless thousands, and conservation was not yet a preoccupation of nature-lovers. Hawkers called ‘hare-wallahs’ used to frequent the Indian cantonments, selling live hares and wild cats to be chased by the soldiers’ whippets, or jackals to be pitted against two or three dogs in a ball-alley. If there was nothing to fish, the imperialists stocked their rivers with trout and salmon from home, so that some of the highland hotels of New Zealand, for example, faithfully reproduced all the tangy pleasures of Scottish fishing inns, with knowledgeable ghillies in attendance, fishing books lovingly kept up, malt whisky before big log fires at the end of the day. No colonial handbook was complete without its
chapter on the blood sports, though when Sir George Scott compiled his admirable Burmese guide he was obliged to observe that the Burmese did very little hunting themselves owing to the ‘mingled pity and dislike’ with which hunters were regarded by Buddhists.

Drink came next—food did not interest them half so much. ‘Diseases Affecting the Whole Empire’, was a heading in Volume VI of the
Oxford
Survey
of
the
British
Empire
, and the very first ailment to be discussed was Alcoholism. It is easy to see why. All classes of the British abroad, Governors to troopers, seem to have drunk terrifically—sometimes to alleviate a grim climate, sometimes because they were lonely, and often because it was part of the general effervescence of life. In the imperial cities the breweries went up almost as fast as the race-courses, and many brewers in England produced beers especially for colonial markets—‘Produced by Brewers’, as was claimed for Wrexham Lager Beer, ‘thoroughly conversant with the requirements of a Tropical Country’. Millers, the Colombo importers, offered a lager bottled for them in Germany, and a malt whisky especially bottled in the Highlands. The sundowner was an institution throughout the tropical Empire—that first delectable drink of the evening, brought to your veranda with glistening paraphernalia of ice-bucket, napkin, carafe, and soda-siphon, by a servant in a long white gown and a crimson cummerbund, a tarboosh or a turban: the custom began, it was said, because it was thought that the moment of sunset was particularly ill omened for malaria, and that a strong drink taken then, perhaps with a shot of quinine in it, was the best prophylactic.

It was the British from Britain who were the heaviest drinkers. None of the colonials could match them. The Australians already had a reputation as beer-drinkers, and they also produced excellent wines—Trollope thought the white wine of the Upper Yarra vineyards, at 6d a pint, the best
vin
ordinaire
he had ever tasted: but their consumption of alcohol per head was hardly more than a third that of the British at home. The Indian breweries were producing rather more than 6 million gallons of beer annually: 3 million gallons of it was
drunk by the British soldiery, who called it ‘neck-oil’, ‘purge’, or ‘pig’s ear’, and who often grouped themselves in ‘boozing schools’, dedicated to the common spending of all available funds on drink. The greatest single problem facing the Calcutta police in the 1890s was the spate of drunken British seamen at week-ends: in the Royal Navy more officers were court-martialled for drunkenness than for any other offence.

Among the moneyed classes, and the gamblers, champagne was the drink of the day. When West Ridgeway, later Governor of Ceylon, marched under Roberts from Kabul to Kandahar, he was haunted throughout by the thought of iced champagne. So terribly did it pursue him that when Roberts ordered him to ride as fast as he could to the nearest railway station, with an urgent dispatch for the Viceroy, the first thing that occurred to him was that at any Indian railway station iced champagne would be available. He telegraphed ahead to reserve a bottle, he rode breakneck for three days and nights—‘and oh! the disappointment: the ice was melted, the champagne was corked, and the next morning I had a head’.

So important was champagne to these men of Empire. One of the many complaints of the Assistant Commissary-General, when Wolseley’s army was having difficulties in the Sudan campaign of 1884, was that the champagne, officially taken for medicinal purposes, was ‘of very indifferent quality, and calculated to depress rather than to exhilarate the system’. Officers’ messes normally carried vast amounts of champagne around with them on campaigns—General Buller, on this same advance up the Nile, used to give seven-course dinners in his tent, washed down with any amount of it—and champagne was ordered as a matter of course for any imperial triumph or venture. ‘Champagne’ Anderson, a jolly old prospector of the Rhodesian nineties, got his name because after selling a claim for a satisfactory profit he ordered himself a hotel bath of champagne, at 25s a bottle. Lord Avonmore set off for the Klondike with seventy-five cases of champagne: unfortunately it froze, and was auctioned off in the main street of Edmonton—it went for 25 cents a case, successful bidders instantly breaking the necks of the good bottles, and drinking them there and then.

It is not surprising that the temperance workers were active in these hard-drinking years of the imperial heyday. The Army had its own Temperance Association, whose canteens in every overseas station sold only soft drinks, cakes and bread and butter; members were given a medal after each six months of teetotalism, and official positions on the association were much coveted, allegedly because good money could be made on the side, to spend on whiskey. One of the most eminent reformers was Thomas Cook, the travel king, who began life running a temperance hotel, and whose first conducted tours were temperance outings. Cook never demanded total abstinence of his clients, as did his rivals, Frames Tours, but he never hid his distaste for strong liquor, however happily the British officers, feet up on the rail, swigged their whisky on his Nile steamers. He was an active teetotaller all his life, and once recorded with satisfaction that there were 5,908 recorded abstainers in the Indian Army. The dangers of contaminating native peoples with alcohol were always alive in the evangelist mind—and with reason, for the Australian aborigines, the Canadian Indians, the Maoris and the Polynesians had all been half-rotted by liquor, when first introduced to it by the British. Sometimes a native ruler saw the point, and proved in his conversion more abstemious than his converters. Khama, the great king of Bechuanaland, not only compelled his entire tribe to turn Christian, but in the 1880s decreed prohibition throughout his domains. In a country several times the size of England the only place where a drink could be sold to anyone, African or European, was the railway refreshment room—that ultimate haven of Empire. Khama called alcohol ‘the enemy of the world’, and wished it could all be spilt into the sea: but he was out of his time, for there has probably been no more effective agency for distributing this particular consolation throughout the world, than the thirsty Empire of the British.