Pax Britannica (33 page)

They had developed to a new pitch of finesse the art of living in tropical countries. The specialist outfitters of London offered all kinds of ingenious devices for defeating the equatorial climates—patent ice machines, spine-pads, thornproof linen, the Shikaree Tropical Hat, in white and brown canvas, from Henry Heath’s Well Known Shoppe for Hattes in Oxford Street. The tent of a British Army officer in the tropics was a sight to see, with its portable writing-desk, its canvas camp bath, the gleaming boots laid out on their trees beside the ‘Union Jack’ Patent Field Boot Container, the taut white ‘Up-Country’ Mosquito Net and the ‘Unique’ Anti-Termite Matting on the floor. Private houses, though stuffily packed with the bric-à-brac of the day, were shaded by verandas and cooled by hand-powered fans, worked by invisible servants in the room next door (in the best-ordered households the punkah magically started swaying the moment you showed signs of pausing in a room, to glance at a picture or pin your hair up). Every kind of al fresco activity was popular. The British loved picnics, and camping parties, and boating, and often at Government Houses, if there were too many guests for the bedrooms, great comfortable tents would be erected on the lawn for the overflow.

Even so, the Victorians in their tropical possessions must have been fearfully hot and sticky. Their clothes were so heavy, they were so loaded down with protective devices like puttees (against snakes) and neckpads (against heat-stroke), that a dressy occasion must have been horribly uncomfortable. For the most part to be smart was to be dressed just as you would be at home in England, even though the temperature might be 109 degrees in the shade. Women used to order complete outfits from London, with dress, hat, gloves, bag and shoes to match (or if they could not afford it, at least took great pains to conceal the fact that their dresses had been made by a tailor in the bazaar). When one took a turn on the Maidan at Calcutta one wore a thick frock-coat and a top-hat. Men really did dress for dinner in remote tropical outposts, if only to keep some sense of root and order. The British soldier in the tropics,
though he changed into white uniform, still had his jacket brass-buttoned to the chin—and carefully dandified himself each evening, buttons polished and hair slicked, even if he had nowhere to go but the canteen in the cantonment. As if all this were not enough, a favourite recreation of the British was the fancy dress ball, to which guests often came weighed down with elaborate fineries—when Lord Roberts gave one at Simla in 1887, eighteen officers of the Royal Irish came in a body in long scarlet coats and powdered wigs.

There was an overpowering aura of closeness—one can scarcely speak of sweatiness in such a context—to the whole grandeur of Empire, the epauleted, gold-braided jackets, the heavy silks and long skirts, the dark brown paint of the Government offices. The taste of the late Victorians was ill suited to the administration of a tropical Empire. There is a picture of the Wiltshire Regiment officers’ mess at Peshawar in 1886 which depressingly suggests this portentous clutter. The table is thick with regimental silver, trophies and elaborate oil lamps and sauceboats and pepper-pots and goblets, and the walls seem to sag beneath the weight of antlers. Flags are draped here and there, napkins are impeccably folded, and the sixteen chairs for the officers are packed so rightly together in the midst of it all that there looks scarcely room for the servant to manoeuvre a crested soup plate between them. The homes of the senior civilian officials were just as overloaded with consequence. Government House at Poona, where the Governor of Bombay spent his summers, was built in the château style, like a Canadian hotel, and had an eighty-foot tower, a grotto, a lake and innumerable gazebos, arbours and summer-houses. Inside it was burdened all over with dark wood panelling and chandeliers, festooned with pictures of kings and maharajahs, crammed with gigantic and lugubrious pieces of furniture. It must have been difficult indeed for the Governor, when wearing his sword for ceremonial receptions, to pass from one saloon to another: but he was used to it all—his other palace, in Bombay, had two dining-rooms, one for the dry weather, one for the monsoon.

They enjoyed themselves with tourism. The British, for all their
aloofness, were indefatigable sightseers. The Victoria Falls very soon became a tourist spectacle, and even India was full of the symptoms of the trade—the blackguardly guides, bowing obsequiously, the picture-postcard man at the Taj Mahal, or the chairs with long poles attached to them, in which the trippers from Bombay were carried by coolies up the long steep steps to the caves on Elephanta Island. A team of four guides was considered convenient for sightseers in Madras—‘No 1 to lead, No 2 to see that he does it, No 3 to see that No 2 does his duty, while No 4 supervises the lot’. They habitually called British tourists ‘My Lord’, in the Empire of those days: Kipling says gharry-men in India used to warn off rival carriages by claiming they were ‘rotten, My Lord, having been used by
natives
’.

The British enjoyed themselves with the theatre, too. Calcutta had four professional English-speaking theatres, Melbourne three, and there was even one in Rangoon—though most of them only played music-hall and harmless farce. Sometimes fairly distinguished companies from London undertook a tour of the more urbane imperial centres: Charles Carrington, one of the best
avant-garde
producers of the nineties, spent three years touring India, Australia, New Zealand and Egypt with Ibsen’s
A
Doll’s
House
. Well-known musical companies from London toured the garrison theatres of India, and Thespians in the mellow tradition of ham and fly-by-night often turned up on the frontier stations; like the well-known Professor who was a familiar figure of the Rhodesian veldt, plodding with his sad troupe from one stand to the next, Hamlet to pantomime. Amateur theatricals flourished almost everywhere, and seem to have formed an absolutely essential part of the imperial way. When Kipling wanted to invent a conversation to show the sameness of imperial conversation everywhere, this is what he wrote: ‘And then, you know, after she had said
that
he was obliged to give the part to the other, and that made
them
furious, and the races were so near that nothing could be done, and Mrs —— said that it was altogether impossible.’ The most familiar photograph of social life in the Empire of the nineties, to be found in faded sepia print in picture albums from British Columbia to the Cape, shows Colonel Hampstead, Mrs Rathbone, Miss Susan Walkley-Thomas and the Reverend Arthur Millstead, poised precariously in too much makeup
holding teacups, at a climactic moment of last year’s production of
Caste.
1

And naturally they enjoyed themselves with sex. The late Victorians were, for all their later legend, as full-blooded as any other generation, and the annals of their imperialism are rich in sexual adventure. Frank Richards recalled, in his book
Old
Soldier
Sahib
,
the irrepressible randiness of the British soldier abroad in those days. Commanding officers often established regimental brothels, to cope with it: in Burma the military authorities imported Japanese prostitutes, and most Indian garrison towns had brothels reserved for the white troops, inspected by military doctors for cleanliness and patrolled by military police, who did not hesitate to beat up any native seen approaching the girls. Itinerant whores—‘sand-rats’—habitually followed any British regiment on the march in India, and the pimp’s cry ‘jiggy-jig, sahib’ haunted the British soldier the moment he set foot outside his barracks.

As for the women of Empire, Kipling badly damaged their reputation for purity with his stories of the goings-on in the Indian hill stations. The historical novelist Maud Diver undertook to restore it in a book called
The
Englishwoman
in
India
,
but even she had to allow that the British grass widow in the hills had many temptations to resist. The two most insidious dangers, Miss Diver thought, were military men on leave and amateur theatricals, but many memsahibs fell too for the exotic allure of the East. Dennis Kincaid, an Indian civil servant, reported that they were often much moved by a well-known Pathan marching song called
Wounded
Heart
,
and sometimes asked to be told the words: but unfortunately the least obscene lines in the song, Kincaid said, were those of the final verse, which ran: ‘There is a boy across the river with a—like a peach, but alas 1cannot swim’.
2

One easily detects pathos in these pleasures. These were often people putting a brave face upon it. Some were pretending to be grander than they were. Some were tortured by that cruel and incurable disease, home-sickness. Some were compensating for pleasures that England denied them. Some were just making the best of things, drinking themselves silly, gambling themselves broke. The first-generation emigrant was generally disillusioned, and hung on only for the sake of his children. The expatriate merchant only wanted to make his pile before he hurried home to Guildford or Inverness. Perhaps the only really happy men of Empire were the men of lofty duty: those to whom it was not a spree at all, nor even a passable way of spending a few profitable years, but a vocation. Real happiness emanates from the pages of the missionary journals, with their bright-eyed conviction of Christian opportunity: and they seem to have been genuinely happy men who sat in their tents dispensing justice to the backward peoples, decreeing imprisonment here, waiving a levy there, in the absolute knowledge that the Raj was right.

A
WISTFUL satisfaction of Empire, it seems in retrospect, was the fulfilment of challenge and response. Much of the driving force of imperialism, as of Victorian progress in general, was the energy sparked by man’s struggle with his own environment, and to many of the imperialists the struggle was an end in itself. The notion of a perpetual striving was essential to the morality of the day. Darwin’s strictly biological ‘struggle for existence’ had been given metaphysical overtones by artists and philosophers from Carlyle to W. E. Henley, and now all the best didactic poets dwelt upon Man’s conflict with the inconceivable hostility of Time, or Nature, or Life—‘Say not the struggle naught availeth!’ ‘I am the captain of my fate’, ‘You’ll be a man, my son’—

A puritanical pleasure in hardship was often allied with a boyish delight in rip-roar, the two formidably combining to produce a breed of stoic adventurers, for whom the imperial mission was a larger embodiment of a personal challenge. These instincts were, of course, strongly reinforced by the training of the public schools, with their emphasis on spartan endurance, and we may assume that it was officers rather than men who enjoyed the possibility of sudden death in inaccessible ravines of the Karoo, that district commissioners relished the summer heat more often than expatriate engine-drivers, and that most of those who went gold-digging for the fun of it could afford to do without the gold anyway.

But one of the most enviable advantages of being born an Englishman
in the later years of the nineteenth century was the range of adventure that was offered you. No need then for National Parks or synthetic wildernesses. Half the empty places of the world were a Briton’s for the seeking, and everywhere young Britons were roughing it, fighting it out, taking a chance or living wild, under the respectable aegis of imperialism. This was good for the spirit of the nation. The existence of the Empire opened a man’s horizons, offering him, if only through the vicarious medium of explorers’ narratives or the
Boy’s
Own
Paper
, a release from the daily humdrum; and for men in the field the imperial amalgam of duty, risk and fresh air could provide complete fulfilment. ‘I … have had a hard life but a happy one,’ wrote Robert Sandeman, an Indian administrator of celebrated dash, ‘in the feeling that I have helped men to lead a quiet and peaceful life in this glorious world of ours.’

Quiet and peaceful are not the first adjectives that spring to mind in recalling the imperial adventure, for much of it was straightforward blood-and-thunder, and Sandeman’s own career had been full of knife-edge daring—‘Robert Sandeman!’ his Scottish dominie had said, ‘ye did little work at school, but I wish ye well. And I wadna be the Saracen of Baghdad or the Tartar of Samarkand that comes under the blow of your sabre.’ There was a folk-lore of violence in the British Empire. At Fort St George in Madras they proudly displayed, as a proper memento of the imperial service, a wooden cage in which an officer called Arbuthnot had been imprisoned by the Chinese during some forgotten adventure. He was a huge hairy man with a red beard, and he kept gold coins in his pocket to present to anyone he came across uglier than himself. This was the sort of hell-for-leather eccentric whose example was most cherished, and the memoirs of the imperialists often recall with dry affection really rich specimens of rascaldom or escapade, whether for or against the Empire. In Egypt, for example, young Thomas Russell soon developed a sort of malevolent understanding with the Bedouin cattle thieves of the desert, who often floated their quarry across the Nile by fixing inflatable goatskins to their bellies. In India the last of the Thugs, the hereditary fraternity of stranglers, were sometimes nostalgically visited (a Pass was Required) at the settlement established for their reform at Jubbulpore—the story of
their suppression was one of the great thrillers of Empire, and a trip to Jubbulpore was like taking the children to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.

In Ceylon they revered the memory of Major Thomas Rogers of Her Majesty’s Ceylon Rifle Regiment, who was supposed to have shot 600 elephants, and who found retribution in the end when he was killed by a stroke of lightning—his tombstone at Nuwara Eliya, too, was three times struck by lightning before it finally disappeared. (‘
Lo
these
are
parts
of
His
ways
‚’
said the memorial tablet in Kandy, ‘
But
the
thunder
of
His
power
who
can
understand?
’) Innumerable imperial anecdotes deliberately mix up the comic and the very dangerous, a piquancy always relished by the British. We hear often of the Indian stationmaster’s telegram down the line: ‘
TIGER ON PLATFORM STOP STAFF FRIGHTENED STOP PRAY ARRANGE
’, or its more sophisticated variant from upper Egypt, in which a man on a lonely Nile station was said to have cabled to Cairo: ‘
POST SURROUNDED BY LIONS AND TIGERS
’. Back went the reply from Cairo: ‘
THERE ARE NO TIGERS IN AFRICA
’, and back again went the Empire-builder’s simple ripost: ‘
DELETE TIGERS
’. Above Jamalpur a favourite tombstone wryly commemorated a Welsh imperialist, Gwilym Roberts, ‘who died from the effects of an encounter with a tiger near this place,
AD
1864’.

For a century living dangerously, or alone, had been a way of life for a minority of the British people, to a degree that no other European nation could match, and this experience was by no means ended. There were still pirates to be intercepted in Chinese waters, slave-traders to capture in the Persian Gulf, Nandi tribesmen with poison arrows in East Africa—there was no antidote to the lethal paste they smeared on their arrow-heads, even injections of strychnine proving ineffective. Man-eating tigers had still to be tracked down, and when they built the Uganda Railway they not only had to cope with murderous lions but sometimes scooped the scorpions and ants in bucket-loads from their camp sites. In hundreds of African trading-posts, high up steamy malarial rivers, or all alone
in the immense hinterland of Swaziland, with a hitching-post outside, a few sheep grazing, and a local chief tippling whisky surreptitiously behind the counter—in any such isolated store the traveller might find a perfectly familiar, down-to-earth Yorkshire shopkeeper running his business with an easy-going acumen, not ambitious for fortune nor particularly nostalgic for home, just treating life as it came. High in the hills at Mardan, on the north-west frontier of India, the men of the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides kept perpetual sentry-go on the most turbulent of border areas, their outposts hidden away in the arid hills, their patrols exchanging desultory rifle-fire with the intractable local tribes—a handful of Englishmen with their Sikh, Dogra and Pathan soldiers, perched on the edge of the Empire in permanent emergency.

There were Englishmen commanding sealers that sailed for the ice out of St John’s, training elephants in the Burmese teak forests, dragging logs with ox-teams out of the Canadian backwoods, skirmishing with ungrateful primitives anywhere from the plains of Manitoba to the Irrawaddy basin. The world was a stranger place in those days, and the British often embarked upon these adventures marvellously wide-eyed and innocent. When a young adventurer called Matthew Morton, aged 20, decided to go out to Rhodesia in 1894, he asked at the Castle Steamship Company’s office in Glasgow how to get to Bulawayo. They told him he could probably take a cab there from Johannesburg, and off he trustfully went: but in the event the journey north from the Rand entailed five weeks in an ox-wagon and nineteen days walking with a pack-donkey. And this is how Charles Rudd, Rhodes’s agent in his original dealings with Lobengula, saw the great black king when he first reached his kraal in Bechuanaland: ‘He had his dinner brought to him while we were there, he went back into the wagon and they put a blanket over him and he lay down with his head and arms over the front box of the wagon, and a mass of meat, like the pieces they give to the lions at the Zoo, only as if it had been thrown into a big fire, was put before him, and some kind of bread, he told the slave boy who brought the meat to him to turn it over, and then he began to tear off pieces with a kind of stick altogether very much like a wild beast.’

The
naïveté
of the approach certainly added to the excitement—clearly Mr Rudd was venturing into new worlds—but the dangers were none the less real. The Empire was ornamented everywhere with memorials of sudden death. One of the most striking selections was displayed in the nave of St George’s Church at Madras, a virile sort of structure itself, in a wide ravaged churchyard like a recently fought-over battlefield. Here lay someone ‘cut off by the hand of an unknown assassin at Bellary’, and one who ‘fell by the hands of a band of fanatics’, and one killed in action ‘on the fortified heights of Arracon’, and one who died ‘from the effect of a coup de soleil, while gallantly leading his regiment at the storming of the fortress Chinkeang Foo’. At the battle of Ferozeshah died ‘the last of three brothers who fell for their country on the battlefields of Asia’. Several men were ‘lost at sea while on a voyage to Rangoon with the headquarters of their regiment on board the transport
Lady
Nugent
’‚ one died of jungle fever ‘contracted during a few hours passed on the Yailegherry Hills’, and one simply suffered, saddest of all, ‘a premature and sudden dissolution in a distant clime’.

All this, at the end of the Victorian century, was part of the British experience, and they were proud of it. Joseph Chamberlain approached his duties at the Colonial Office in a mood of pugnacious bravado—the Jubilee celebrations themselves, mounted with such pomp and panache in the face of a bitterly jealous Europe, were a snook cocked at the world. Imperialists abroad often behaved with similar gusto. When the coffee crop failed in Ceylon many of the British planters moved elsewhere, but many more gamely transferred the remains of their capital, their skills and their hopes to a crop that was altogether new to them—tea. When they found gold on the Rand Mr Thomas Sheffield, proprietor of the
Eastern
Star
newspaper in Grahamstown, a thousand miles away, decided the profits would be greater up there. One day in 1889 he published issue number 2,042 of his paper, with the announcement that ‘with this issue the
Eastern
Star
will cease to shine in the firmament in which its first rays were shed, and to move in the orbit which has been its daily round for the last 16 years. But it will rise again in another quarter of this South Africa of ours away to the north, where

Next day he packed the entire equipment of the newspaper on the train to Kimberley, and thence conveyed it by laborious stages of ox-cart across the veldt to the infant Johannesburg. Seven weeks after his departure from Grahamstown, in his new premises on the Reef, Mr Sheffield published issue number 2,043.
1

Into the mystique of every British settlement some particular old adventure had by now been absorbed, and had become familiar to every schoolchild. They mostly seem to have been heroic defeats, and this perhaps reflected the classical education of so many imperialists, conveying the British in spirit to Thermopylae, or to the bridgehead with Horatio—or perhaps in the Eternal Struggle brave failure was somehow more salutary than success. In Australia the origins of the colonies were, owing to a shortage of anything more inspiring, most famously commemorated in a dreadful picture of the discovery by two explorers, Burke and Wills, that a food cache they expected to find in the middle of the Outback was in fact empty, condemning them to another eight months of heroic nightmare. In Canada the picture on the schoolroom wall showed the death of Wolfe at Quebec, fragile and selfless upon the Plains of Abraham, with the army of his gallant enemy silent in the background. In Rhodesia the classic scene was Allan Wilson’s last stand against the Matabele—
There
Was
No
Survivor
. In Natal the eighty men of Rorke’s Drift held out for ever against their 4,000 Zulu attackers, immortalized in scarlet and gunsmoke by the brush of Lady Butler. And in England the Spirit of Empire was perhaps most popularly symbolized by the vision of General Gordon, that Galahad or Gabriel of the later Victorians, standing guileless, unarmed, fresh-faced, almost radiant, at the head of the stairs in his palace at Khartoum, while the ferocious Mahdists in the hall below, brandishing their assegais, prepared to murder him. (There was, as a matter
of fact, another version of the scene, which had Gordon on the landing blazing away with a revolver at the advancing savages: but it was the image of martyred British innocence that most people preferred.)