Pax Britannica (32 page)

They liked their creature comforts, and were able to indulge them more luxuriously than they generally could at home, especially in the tropical possessions. With their coveys of servants and their
social privileges, they could live in a class above themselves, elaborated in grandeur as they rose in rank, until at last in their retirement back they went to England, to live in obscurity with a housekeeper and a jobbing gardener, and be known to the neighbours, after ruling a couple of million people for half a lifetime, as having been ‘something in the colonies’. In the early days of Empire they had adopted the sybaritic ways of the natives, dressed themselves in silks and reclined languidly on divans with hookahs: as late as 1859 Samuel Shepheard, founder of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, was portrayed dressed altogether as an Egyptian, feet up on a wide and squashy sofa, with a shallow tarboosh on his head, a parrot at his elbow, and a splendid brass hubble-bubble conveniently at hand. By the nineties the British usually preferred their own varieties of relaxation, and wherever they went they took with them the chintz, the leather arm-chairs, the glass decanters and the potted plants that were the hall-marks of cultivated leisure at home.

The club was pre-eminently a product of this portable décor, barring only the chintz. Insulated against the world outside, barred almost certainly to natives and very likely to females, with its own hierarchy of president, committee and senior members, the club was a comforting enclave of Englishness, its familiar features unchanged whether it was deposited in equatorial heat or near-Arctic cold. It was social centre, library, hotel, town forum, recreation ground all in one. If ever the British community wished to forgather, it would do so ‘up at the Club’: and whenever the wandering Briton wished to find company of his own kind he had only to get himself introduced to a member, and soon he would be standing at the bar as if he owned it, asking his neighbour if he happened to know ‘Tommy’ Oldbourne, who’d been Forest Officer in those parts in the eighties. Some clubs were exceedingly luxurious. The Kimberley Club, in the heyday of Rhodes and his diamond cronies, was as lavish as you might expect: it was a graceful low white building, arcades below, veranda above, with wrought-iron railings, imposing lamp standards, a pair of tall flagpoles and a small projecting balcony, like those on the Doge’s Palace, from which overwhelmingly successful financiers might harangue or encourage the toiling speculators below. It reeked of success, lived by diamonds, and was
frequented by all the flashiest millionaires of the day—Rhodes himself, lounging in his wicker chair on the terrace, the indefatigable Alfred Beit, who dined there every evening, returning to his office after dinner to continue making money till midnight, or Barney Barnato, the ex-boxer from London, who drowned himself by jumping from a ship in Cape Town harbour on Jubilee day.

The club at Madras was described, in
Ivey
’
s
Club
Directory
, as ‘one of the most magnificent clubs in the world, amidst the splendours of tropical vegetation and surrounded by luxuries which Nature and Art combine to offer those who can enjoy spacious apartments, cool colonnades, the grateful sea-breezes wafted across green fields laden with the perfume of roses and mendhim, while ice, fruit and flowers—to say nothing of admirably trained servants—contribute to the snatches of Sybarite enjoyment in which even a soldier may at times be allowed to indulge’. It was in the club at the hill station of Ootacamund in southern India—‘Snooty Ooty’—that a subaltern called Neville Chamberlain, in 1875, first thought of adding an extra coloured ball to the billiards table, and thus invented the game of snooker: it was named after the term given in the British Army to a first-year officer cadet, and the original rules were hung on a wall in the Ootacamund Club, at the start of their phenomenal journey around the world.

In Australia the clubs very early became strongholds of established wealth and dignity in a disrespectful continent. The grandest of them was the Melbourne Club, which had begun indeed as a rip-roaring affair, whose members went in for false fire-alarms, pushing policemen into mud-holes, stealing door knockers or fighting not very deadly duels—they had a special annexe to creep into, to sleep it off or lie low. It had matured into a very bastion of respectability, with handsome renaissance premises in Collins Street, liveried menials and large lace-curtained windows through which the eminent bankers, politicians, graziers and mining men of Victoria could look out upon the life of their metropolis, and deplore the passing of the old days. The Rideau Club in Ottawa had elegant premises directly opposite the Parliament Buildings of the Canadian Confederacy, with balconies allowing members a canopied grandstand view of every ceremonial. The Kildare Street Club in Dublin
was the stronghold of the Anglo-Irish, a fortress of British ascendancy almost as formidable as Dublin Castle itself, and designed by the architect Benjamin Woodward in his most overpowering Venetian Gothic.

Let us visit, for a taste of imperial club life at its most agreeable, the Hill Club at Nuwara Eliya in Ceylon. This little town lay high among the tea estates of the interior, in country which had known the young Samuel Baker among its first British settlers, and the baby Jack Fisher among its residents. It was the principal hill station of Ceylon, and a perfect period piece of the Victorian Empire. Set on a grassy plateau among the hills, immediately below the highest mountain on the island, it was like a model hill station in an exhibition. The British had laid out a park, with a maze and a botanical garden. They had dammed a little lake. They had marked out gentle walks around the surrounding woods, and named them for great ladies of the colony—Lady Horton’s Walk, or Lady McCallum’s Drive. Fir trees flourished, and gave the place a Highland look. There was a big half-timbered Grand Hotel, and a gabled cottage for the Governor of Ceylon, with a pond and a croquet lawn of exquisitely mown buffalo grass. There were the inevitable golf and race-courses, and villas strung about the lake like fishing lodges round a loch; and an English church, of course, and a lending library; and poised most benignly above the plateau, the Hill Club.

It was a low, baronial sort of building with gardens all around it. Its windows were mullioned, and inside it the atmosphere of an English or more properly a Scottish country house was diligently re-created. If the private houses of the British Empire tended towards the suburban, the clubs smacked distinctly of landed gentry.
Blackwood’
s
,
The
Field
, the
Illustrated
London
News
lay on the smoking-room table, and
The
Times
and the
Morning
Post
, not more than a month old, were carefully smoothed in the breakfast room. Glass-enclosed upon the walls were the champion trout of the local hill streams, descendants of those first brought to Ceylon by the British fifty years before. There were rod racks about, landing-nets, somebody’s waders in the back passage, and when a rattle of wheels was heard outside out ran a couple of turbaned servants to help another
sportsman from his tonga, collect his bags and his rod case, his walnut fly box and his boots, and usher him inside for his bath and his sundowner. Service at this club was paternal, or perhaps avuncular. The planting families used it as a second home, and the club servants were like family retainers to them all. The Hill Club had a useful little library, mostly books about Ceylon, but it was chiefly a place for outdoor men. The grave seniors of the Indian Civil Service might not feel at home here: this was the Pax Britannica at its most boyish and breezy, where the bedroom fires flickered in the mountain evenings like nursery memories, and a chap slept like a log.
1

Throughout the length and breadth of the Empire a well-spoken, reasonably well-connected young man, with a few introductions in the right places, and a sufficiently entertaining line in small talk, could travel by himself without feeling the need for an hotel. If he did not stay at clubs, somebody was sure to invite him to stay at a bungalow. Family travellers, though, must depend upon hotels or the official rest-houses which the British erected in most of their Eastern possessions. Then as now the good traveller did not greatly care. Henry Beveridge,
2
a retired Indian Civil Servant on a sentimental revisit to India in the 1890s, happily put up at the Temperance Hotel in Mango Lane, Bombay, where the daily all-in charge was 3s 4d, and the monthly tariff
£
4. Others were less easily satisfied. G. W. Steevens thought there were only four hotels in India that could ‘indulgently be called second-class’, while all the rest were ‘unredeemably vile’. The only country inns in Rhodesia were thatched huts of clay attached to the trading stores, and Kipling paints a compassionate portrait of a British commercial
traveller stuck forlornly in an hotel—‘dark and bungaloathsome’—in one of the sleazier corners of Empire. ‘Isn’t this a sweet place? There ain’t no ticca-gharries, and there ain’t nothing to eat, if you haven’t brought your victuals, and they charge you three-eight a for bottle of whisky. Oh! it’s a sweet place!’

It was only along the great trade routes that the Empire sponsored its own luxury hotels, whose names had entered the vocabulary of travel. Of them all the most famous was Shepheard’s in Cairo. Its new building had been finished in 1890, and it stood in Italianate glory, looking across the Ezbekia Gardens to the Opera House, with Cook’s almost next door. Its original fortunes had been built on the Overland Route to India, before the cutting of the Suez Canal. Now it prospered largely because of the Cairo winter season, which brought hundreds of rich Europeans and Americans to Egypt each year. Shepheard’s wide terrace was the most celebrated of rendezvous, with its carpeted staircase to the street, its vast potted palms, the impassive gold-braided suffragi at its door and the medley of snake-charmers, souvenir-sellers, dragomen, donkey-men, and miscellaneous touts who haunted the pavement outside, sometimes shouting to the toffs above to suggest a trip to the Pyramids, the purchase of a camel saddle or some small expression of
baksheesh.

Everybody knew Shepheard’s. The hotel’s Golden Book was full of fame and royalty, and that welcoming terrace became a mirage-like objective for travellers labouring down the Nile out of Africa. There is a drawing of Stanley arriving there in 1890, after three years in the interior looking for Emin Pasha: he is dressed still in his pith helmet and high boots, and as the manager, in a frock-coat, clasps the explorer’s right hand with both of his own, an Englishman on the terrace waves his hat and raises a cheer, a flounced lady lifts her
lorgnette
, and a porter in a tarboosh looks curiously through the front door of the hotel—‘the fashionables of Cairo,’ Stanley wrote, ‘in staring at me every time I came out to take the air, made me uncommonly shy’. Rudolf von Slatin, escaping from eleven years’ imprisonment by the Mahdi, made for Shepheard’s to write his book
Fire
and
Sword
in
the
Sudan
: he became one of the hotel’s best-known regulars, and a staff with a taste for honorifics loved
referring to him by his full sonorous title—General Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha.
1
It was at Shepheard’s, too, that Gordon had stayed, impatiently waiting for Cook’s to complete the travel arrangements, before he left Cairo in 1883 for Khartoum and his death. Shepheard’s was a legend already, and one of the classic travel experiences of the imperial age was to sit on its terrace on a winter morning, with a Turkish coffee and a sticky cake, watching a parade march by outside—the tarbooshed bandsmen puffing away at their bugles, the British commander ineffably superior on his horse, and in front Shepheard’s own water-man laying the dust with squirts from his leather water-bag, backing away before the advancing military, and chivvied by testy superiors on the pavement.

No other hotel was quite so famous, but several more were as familiar to the travellers of Empire as home itself. There was the Casino Palace at Port Said, with its huge glass-roofed terrace, looking across the mole to where the P. and O. lay coaling, or the Crescent at Aden, which opened directly upon the British Army’s horrible hot parade ground. At Bombay they were building the monumental Taj Mahal, which was to be the most imposing building in the city, outshining even the great structures of Government, and standing flamboyantly striped, turreted and balconied upon the Apollo Bund, the very first thing to greet the new arrival in India. At Colombo there was the G.O.H.—the Grand Oriental Hotel—a huge lumpish hostelry called by
Murray’s
Handbook
‘one of the best hotels, if not the best, in the East’. At Calcutta there was the awful Great Eastern, monumental and morose, at Singapore Raffles’, a delightfully sun-shaded, courtyarded, loose-limbed sort of hotel, famous for its long cool drinks and its food, notorious in those days for its squalid rooms. At Hong Kong the hotels on the waterfront, run on American lines, sent their own launches, house flags at the prow, to meet the liners steaming into harbour. All across Canada, wherever the Canadian Pacific Railway passed, enormous castle-like
hotels sprang up, spaciously called the Château This or That, and sometimes so dominating their cities that the hotel in the centre of Quebec has been popularly supposed, ever since, to be the ancient fortress that was the city’s
raison
d’être.

All these were very grand hotels indeed.
1
They lived by the Empire, had mostly risen with its fortunes, and were now in their plushy, palmed and Electric-Illuminated prime. Perhaps more suggestive of the best imperial pleasures, though, were the houseboats for which the British had a particular fondness. At Aswan, high up the Nile, one could hire a
dahabia
, one of the long-prowed sailing-boats which still provided passenger service down to the Delta for those who could not afford Cook’s steamer fares. This would be exquisitely converted by Cook’s, and equipped down to the last table napkin, and it could be towed more or less where you wished, preferably within reach of one of the better hotels, for tea-dances or tennis. Even more delicious were the houseboats of Kashmir, moored on the celestial lake of Srinagar beneath the Karakoram, and served by floating shops that drifted out from town each morning. These quaint craft were devised because a Maharajah of Kashmir, fearing an influx of retired British officials into his arcardian State, forbade Europeans to own land there. The Europeans took to the water instead, and in about 1875 the first of the Kashmir houseboats were launched. They looked like little Thames-side chalets mounted on hulls, with dormer windows and shingle roofs, the whole slightly orientalized by curving prows: and on their decks the exiled British, gazing across the water towards the white ramparts beyond, took their tea and crumpets, did their embroidery, devised new phrases for their journals in uninterrupted content.