Pax Britannica (49 page)

The New Imperialism was too new, and too sudden, to have changed the look of London. The public had only recently acquired its passionate interest in Empire, and Waterloo and Trafalgar still
meant far more than any number of far frontier skirmishes. The Imperial Jubilee was mostly froth, whipped up for the occasion by Press and politicians.

Yet in quieter colours, not to be observed by the casual visitor, the imperial experience did form a strand in the national tapestry. Among the middle classes especially thousands of families cherished imperial souvenirs, or aspired to imperial décors: Benares brass and trinkets from the Gold Coast, lengths of Indian silk waiting to be made up, a line of ebony elephants on the mantelpiece, a group of suntanned officers posed in careful asymmetry outside a sun-bleached bungalow, coloured shells from the orient cemented to a summer-house.
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In many a sewing desk were kept young Harry’s letters, sent home faithfully month by month, telling dear Mama and the girls all about last week’s soirée at Government House, and the trouble he was having choosing curtain materials for the bungalow, and what a ripping time he had upcountry, and affectionate regards to dear Papa from their Ever-Loving Son.

Here we may eavesdrop, through the study door, upon Uncle James explaining to his brother the rector just how much money young Bob will need, if he really wishes to enter the Indian Army—he can live on his pay in a Mountain Battery, perhaps, but he must realize that the Cavalry would be
quite
beyond his means. Here dear little Miss Cartwright, who has always seemed so unlikely a spinster, confides in us at last, while we await the gentlemen after dinner, that were it not for a certain person she had been, well
particularly
fond of—in the Mutiny—he was buried, she believed, somewhere near Meerut—but there, all that was long ago, and we must tell her all
our
news….

This house seems to be African all over, prints of kraals and jungle caravans, masks and shields and monkey-skins; this seems to smell faintly of spices or perhaps incenses, and a tinkle of temple bells comes from its garden, near the bird-table, and those gourds on the butler’s tray have a Polynesian, or Malayan, look to them—
Burma Forestry, do you think, or could he have been British Guiana? And sometimes, in the list of recent wills in
The
Times,
there appears a name dimly and not always enthusiastically remembered from the past—‘Great God, that’s Hawkins the rubber man, a perfect pest, treated his natives like dirt and never stopped complaining about port dues—eighty thousand he left, bless my soul—a perfect blackguard.’

Half without knowing it, the British had picked up thousands of words from their subject peoples, and enriched their own language with them. A few were South African Dutch (
laager,
veldt,
trek
) and at least one was Red Indian—
toboggan
: but most of them came to England out of the East. Perhaps the most delightful imperial book of all was
Hobson-Jobson,
a dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases compiled by Sir Henry Yule in the 1880s.
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There were at least sixteen other Anglo-Indian glossaries, but this instantly became the most famous, and there was no Englishman with Indian connections who would not know what you meant, if you said half a minute, I’ll look it up in
Hobson
-
Jobson.

‘Considering the long intercourse with India,’ wrote Arthur Burnell, who expanded the book after Yule’s death, ‘it is noteworthy that the additions which have thus accrued to the English language are, from the intellectual standpoint, of no intrinsic value. Nearly all the borrowed words refer to material facts … and do not represent new ideas.’ This was perhaps because so few Englishmen, under the influence of Macaulay and his school, had taken the native civilizations seriously: the word
Hobson-Jobson
itself, a flippant Anglo-Indianism for any sort of native festivity, was taken from the terrible wailing cry of the Shia Muslims—
Ya
Hussein,
Ya
Hassan!
—when they grieve for the death of Ali’s sons at Karbala.

Many Anglo-Indian words—caste, cuspidor, mosquito—had been inherited by the British from their Portuguese predecessors in the East. When the planter bawled ‘
Boy!
’ sending an indignant shiver down the spine of the visiting liberal, who was generally not quite outraged enough, all the same, to forgo his chota-peg for his principles—when that hunting-cry of sahibs went up in the club, the thirsty imperialist was really only shouting, as the Portuguese had before him, ‘
Bhoi!
’—the name of a Hindu caste of palanquinand umbrella-bearers.
Char,
the British soldier’s name for tea, reached the army via the East India Company, but really originated in Japan, where the early British merchant venturers transcribed the Japanese word for tea as
tcha.
Rickshaw came via India from Japan, too, and was originally
jin-ri-ki-sha
—‘man-force-car’, the name the Japanese gave to a conveyance invented for them by an ingenious missionary, W. Goble, about 1870. The word gymkhana appears to have been coined by the British in Bombay, and was based upon the Hindustani
gend-khana
or ball-house—what the Indians called an English squash court. The word catamaran was simply the Tamil for ‘tied trees’, and the original Juggernaut was Krishna, the eighth avatar of Vishnu, who was dragged in hideous image through the streets of Puri in Orissa, its devotees throwing themselves beneath its wheels to be crushed. British soldiers in India had their own cheerful use of Hindustani. A thief was a loose-wallah, a nail-wallah was a manicurist, the Good Conduct Medal (‘for 20 years of undetected crime’) was called the Rooty Gong, meaning the Bread-and-Butter Medal. Old India hands pride themselves on their ability to ‘sling the crab-bat’—swear in the vernacular.

An astonishing number of Indian words had slipped into the language without anybody much noticing, as the following self-conscious sentence shows: ‘Returning to the
bungalow
through the
jungle,
she threw her
calico
bonnet on to the
teak
table, put on her
gingham
apron and slipped into a pair of
sandals.
There was the tea-
caddy
to fill, the
chutney
to prepare for the
curry,
pepper
and
cheroots
to order from the
bazaar
—she would give the boy a
chit.
The children were out in the
dinghy,
and their
khaki
dungarees
were sure to be wet. She needed a
shampoo,
she still had to mend Tom’s
pyjamas,
and she
never had finished those
chintz
hangings for the
veranda.
Ah well! she didn’t really give a
dam,
and putting a
shawl
around her shoulders, she poured herself a
punch.
’
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A little slang had come bouncing back to Britain from the Antipodes—‘up a gum tree’, for instance—and perhaps the oddest adaptation of all was
cooee
! which was originally the signal-cry of Australian aborigines, imitative perhaps of the dingo, perhaps of the wonga pigeon, but was by the nineties the habitual call of the Kensington Garden nannies, when they wished to recall recalcitrant charges from the Round Pond—‘keep within
cooee,
dear’, they used to say, as they settled for a gossip on the bench. Charles Thatcher, the Australian poet, once wrote a poem about a digger who had made his fortune in Australia and brought his wife to London, leaving her at ‘Hodge and Lowman’s splendid shop’ while he strolled down the street:

In 1882 there appeared in the lists of English cat breeds an elegant and patrician new-comer called the Abyssinian. Its genesis was mysterious. Cynics were of the opinion that it was not Abyssinian
at all, but only a rarified British tabby, and some people preferred to call the breed the British Tick or the Bunny Cat. The truth seems to be, though, that this beautiful creature was first brought to Britain by soldiers returning from Lord Napier’s expedition to Ethiopia in 1867. The troops had passed near the ancient Ethiopian capital of Axum, where numbers of sacred cats were kept as acolytes to the cathedral of St Mary, and it is likely that some enterprising fancier whisked one into his kit-bag and shipped it, Amharically mewing, home.
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Exotic animals had traditionally figured in the trains of conquerors, and in the second half of the nineteenth century the zoos and private collections of Britain had been wonderfully enlivened by spoils of Empire. Within the confines of the Pax Britannica almost all zoological regions were represented. Every living kangaroo was born a British subject. So was every kiwi, every koala, every duck-billed platypus—and every Dodo, if any sad survivor still lurked in the forests of Mauritius. There were British tapirs and British okapis, and even the giant panda was almost within a British sphere of influence.
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The London Zoo was accordingly much the best in the world, and possessed a grander collection of weird living trophies than ever pranced in a triumph of the Romans. Lions, tigers, monkeys, snakes, elephants, rare bats and unimaginable birds were sent home to London by every expedition, spluttering and spitting in their crates, and whenever a royal personage visited some tropical possession he came home with a little menagerie of his own. When the Prince of Wales returned from a visit to India in 1876 the cruiser
Raleigh
accompanied the royal yacht with a cargo of two tigers (Moody and Sankey), a leopard (Jummoo), and large numbers of smaller animals and birds: as the royal squadron steamed up the Solent, to the cheers of crowds lining the shore, this collection of animals howled in response to the signal guns, and on each paddle-
box of the royal yacht itself there was to be seen standing an Indian elephant.

A shifting population of colonials moved through London. The white colonials were unobtrusive. The dialects of England were so varied then, and the impress of colonial origin was generally so recent, that an Australian, a Canadian or a South African could often merge into English life unremarked. Numbers of Australians and New Zealanders still came to England to be educated: many Englishmen who had spent half a lifetime in the colonies came home in the end to die. It was difficult still to know just where a colonial began and an Englishman ended. All carried the same passport, and while many British people thought of the self-governing colonies as extensions of the Mother Land, many colonials thought of themselves simply as Britons overseas.

People from the coloured empire were rarer and mostly grander. The coloured servant, once so common in England, was now almost unknown, and most of the coloured people to be seen about were rich or powerful, courted by Authority for political reasons or sent to be moulded in the manners of the ruling race. For years there had been a small Indian community in London, with an active and often dissident intelligentsia: from 1892 to 1895 there had even been an Indian member of Parliament—Dadabhai Naoroji, the Parsee member for Central Finsbury, formerly Prime Minister of Baroda. Ranjitsinjhi Vibhaji, claimant to the throne of Nawanagar, was one of the most popular and successful cricketers in England, playing for Sussex, and for thousands of Englishmen his quick and stylish batting offered a first comprehensible image of the dream that was India. The Hindu ban on sea travel still limited the numbers of young Indians coming to English schools and universities, but since 1890 fourteen undergraduates with Indian or African names had been admitted to Oxford—two were princes, one was a sheikh, and six were at Balliol, adding substance to the legend that all black men preferred that college. When Queen Victoria drove home through Windsor after her Jubilee junketings, waiting in attendance
at a ceremonial arch were four Etonians—the sons of the Maharajah of Kutch Bihar, the Prince of Gondal and the Minister of Hyderabad, all resplendent in Indian dress.
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If the physical imprint of Empire was slight, in 1897 its
gusto was inescapable. A vigorous kind of brain-washing was in full swing, conducted by the popular Press, the Government and several active pressure groups. Imperial monuments might be hard to find, but imperial sentiments were deafening. All the energies of the nation seemed at that moment to be directed towards imperial ends; almost no subject of public interest was discussed outside an imperial context; the Empire was an infatuation.