A Brief History of Life in Victorian Britain

by Michael Paterson

  Adventure

  It must be remembered that, from the 1870s (by which time memory of the Crimea and the Mutiny had faded) until the rude shock of the Boer conflict, war came to be seen by many Britons as something of a lark. With no ‘civilized’ enemy to fight, for Russia – the obvious candidate for several reasons – was unwilling to pick a quarrel, the Queen’s soldiers devoted their energies to colonial conflicts. For the public at home these were distant, small-scale affairs which they expected their soldiers to win without difficulty. Casualties were light, because the enemy were always at a disadvantage. The British troops, after all, had not only discipline and valour on their side but modern weaponry – which by 1889 included the Maxim machine gun.

  Colonial wars provided excitement, cheaply won victories, enhanced prestige and a sense that Britain’s mission in the world was being fulfilled. The exploits of generals and young officers were thrillingly told in fiction (With Kitchener in the Sudan, With Buller in Natal) and newspaper reports made celebrities of many commanders. Sir Garnet Wolseley, who defeated the armies of the Asanti king in West Africa and whose troops made yet another epic march in abominable conditions, was a textbook example. A dapper little man of distinguished appearance, he became highly popular, and was commemorated in contemporary slang with the expression ‘All Sir Garnet!’, meaning that all was well.

  The public could see that the Army was changing. Not only did weaponry improve, but appearances altered. The Guards might still wear bearskins and scarlet tunics at Buckingham Palace, but finery of this sort was vanishing from the battlefield. The last occasion on which troops wore scarlet in action was the Egyptian campaign of 1882. The previous year, fighting the Boers in South Africa, colours had been carried in battle for the last time. Uniforms – at least those worn on battlefields – were khaki, a pale-brown shade that had been created in India at the time of the Mutiny, allegedly by dyeing the cloth in tea. It was extremely practical for overseas service, though the public at home did not become fully aware of it until large numbers of troops marched through their streets on the way to the Boer War. Two of Galsworthy’s female characters illustrate what may have been a common civilian reaction, when discussing such a spectacle:

  My dear, but they’ve been so progressive. Think of their having given up their scarlet. They were always so proud of it. And now they all look like convicts. They must feel it very much. Fancy what the Iron Duke would have said!10

  Officers and Gentlemen

  Whatever the social qualifications necessary to be an officer, there was no requirement for great intelligence. The British, and especially the upper classes, had a traditional antipathy toward those who thought too much, and their ideal of an officer was that he be – in a famous phrase of Henry James – ‘opaque in intellect but indomitable in muscle’. Officers were expected, during the vast amounts of time at their disposal (they were granted five months’ leave a year) to indulge passionately in sports. If they were stationed in India it was unheard of that they should not play polo, for the game was something of a secular religion. Otherwise, foxhunting was more or less compulsory in smart regiments, the more so as it was believed to sharpen officers’ skills – improving their ‘seat’ through practice, accustoming them to risk and teaching them to ‘read’ a landscape through observation. Team games were seen as useful preparation for war.

  In no other army was this sporting ethos found. Officers in the Russian or Austrian service, for instance, might cultivate an aristocratic languor even greater than that in British regiments, but they regarded it as beneath their dignity to exert themselves or get dirty. Though they might ride for pleasure, their off-duty hours were spent in drinking, gambling, pursuing affairs, fighting duels and surviving the crushing boredom of small garrison towns. While British officers might be fitter, their brains were not exercised. Within their regiments, much of the training and drilling of the men was done by senior non-commissioned officers. In the Prussian Army – which after defeating France in 1871 became the dominant power in Europe and a potential future adversary – it was the officers themselves who carried out these tasks. As a result they knew their men very well, and had a firm grasp of administration and leadership, while at the same time they were required to study to pass promotion exams. The Prussian officer was often expected to be a professional. His British counterpart preferred to behave like an amateur.

  Though the stereotype of the Victorian officer – and the pages of satirical magazines were filled with caricatures of them, stroking their moustaches and speaking in a languid drawl (‘fwightfully!’) – suggested that the officers’ mess was a rarified, patrician world beyond the reach of others, yet it was not impossible to rise to the highest ranks of the Army without an aristocratic background. While Wellington, Roberts and Buller were all Old Etonians, Sir Colin Campbell – later Lord Clyde – was the son of a Scottish carpenter, Sir Garnet Wolseley was the son of a small-town Irish tradesman and General Hector Macdonald (‘Fighting Mac’) made an even more spectacular ascent. Beginning life as an Inverness draper’s assistant with a passion for military history, he enlisted in 1870 as a private in the Gordons and ended his career as a major general, a Knight of the Bath and an ADC to both Victoria and Edward VII. All three were extremely popular with press and public, in an era that treated victorious generals with the same adoration as film stars now command. A glance through an antique shop will often reveal souvenirs – teapots, plates, badges – commemorating Victorian military heroes, especially those, like Roberts and Baden-Powell, from the Boer War, upon whom the nation’s hopes rested.

  These men had won promotion through their abilities in the field, and every ambitious soldier, whatever his background, looked for opportunities to follow the same path. Even with a small Army and a constant succession of colonial campaigns, however, it was difficult to see action. Postings in Britain, or in Canada, New Zealand or Bermuda, for instance, might be pleasant enough but meant years of uneventful garrison duty. The same was true of India, where unless a regiment was sent to the North-West Frontier, there would be little for officers to do but play polo. Those without the patience to wait for battle experience often sought to be seconded to other units in order to go with them on campaign. The most glaring example of this type was the young Winston Churchill, whose tireless lobbying and social connections enabled him to take part in actions in both India and the Sudan by joining other regiments. When he entered the Army, in 1895, soldiers were very conscious that there had been no war against a white army since the Crimea. There was a professional curiosity to know how they would perform in a well-matched, major conflict. Churchill also dreaded seeing out his military career without gaining any medals, for his commanding officer had spent a lifetime in the Army without once seeing action. The prospect of war was therefore something to be sought out and valued – a rare opportunity to test one’s skills, gain experience and hope for distinction. In his memoir My Early Life, he wrote of this attitude:

  In the closing decade of the Victorian era the Empire had enjoyed so long a spell of almost unbroken peace, that medals and all they represented in experience and adventure were becoming extremely scarce in the British Army. The veterans of the Crimea and the Indian Mutiny were gone from the active list. The Afghan and Egyptian warriors of the early eighties had reached the senior ranks. Scarcely a shot had been fired since then, and when I joined the 4th Hussars in January 1895 scarcely a captain, hardly ever a subaltern, could be found throughout Her Majesty’s forces who had seen even the smallest kind of war. Rarity in a desirable commodity is usually the cause of enhanced value; and there has never been a time when war service was held in so much esteem by the military authorities or more ardently sought by officers of every rank. How we young officers envied the senior Major for his adventures at Abu Klea! How we admired the Colonel with his long row of decorations! How we longed to have a similar store of memories to unpack and display!

  The little titbits of fighting which the Indian fronti
er and the Soudan were soon to offer, distributed by luck or favour, were fiercely scrambled for throughout the British Army. But the South African War was to attain dimensions which fully satisfied the needs of our small army. And after that the deluge was still to come!11

  The excitement both of young officers looking for action and of a public reading about their exploits at the breakfast table suggests a confident assumption that events would always turn out in Britain’s favour. In reality there was a good deal less complacency than this image suggests. For one thing, the British did not always win. In 1879 the expedition of Lord Chelmsford against King Cetawayo suffered 1,329 fatalities when Zulus overran their camp at Isandlwana, and only the valour of defenders at Rourke’s Drift on the same day – for which seven Victoria Crosses were awarded – saved Britain from humiliation. Two years later, the Queen’s soldiers faced South African Boers after the latter refused to accept British rule over the Transvaal. British columns suffered terrible losses from the superb marksmanship of their opponents, and after securing the summit of the strategic Majuba Hill on 26 February 1881, they embarrassingly lost it the following day, being driven down the slopes in confusion and suffering heavy casualties.

  Another factor was that even glory did not make the army popular enough to entice young men to join. It was said in the countryside that ‘Jack Frost was the Army’s best recruiter’, for only failed harvests or harsh winters could bring men into the ranks in numbers. Unlike her Continental neighbours, Britain did not have a standing army, and recruiting was an uphill struggle, even during the depression of the 1870s. In order to make the military profession more attractive, and to eliminate the worst abuses, reforms had been carried through at the beginning of the decade. The purchase of commissions had been abolished, and enlistment, which had been for a period of twenty-one years, had been reduced to twelve, of which only six were spent on active service. The branding of deserters – an especially barbaric practice – was discontinued in 1871, and flogging was abolished a decade later. This notwithstanding, the pay of private soldiers could not compete with the wages of civilian tradesmen or skilled labourers, and the Army remained too small to fulfil its worldwide commitments.

  Comrades

  One solution was increasing reliance on units of local troops under the command of British officers. Throughout the Empire a number of these – often with highly specialist roles – came into existence during the latter half of the century, and caused a good deal of interest when they sent contingents to London for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee: the Gold Coast Hausas, the Singapore Engineers, the Hong Kong Regiment, the Sierra Leone Frontier Force, the British Guiana Constabulary, the Mauritius Royal Artillery, the Malta Submarine Mine Engineers. Numbers of these soldiers could be sent around the Empire to fill gaps where British troops were withdrawn, or simply to support a particular campaign. British punitive expeditions in West Africa relied heavily on black soldiers of the West India Regiment, who proved very able, one of them winning the VC. When in 1882 Wolseley, the hero of West Africa, landed a force at Tel-el-Kebir in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal from anti-European unrest, Indian Army native troops took part. When Egypt itself became a British protectorate shortly afterwards, local units of British-trained men were raised. These in turn helped to defeat the armies of the Khalifa at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898.

  Showdown

  Egypt was officially part of the Ottoman Empire, but in practice the Sultan’s government did not have the power, or the will, to run it effectively. The Sudan, a vast area of desert to the south of it along the Nile, was an Egyptian fiefdom – a colony of a colony, as it were – and here a rebellion against Egyptian rule was fomented in the early 1880s by a self-appointed local leader who called himself the Mahdi, or messiah. His followers, ‘dervishes’, were Muslim fanatics of a sort once again familiar. They were heavily armed, though with obsolete weaponry, and without mercy to those, whether locals, Egyptians or Europeans, who fell into their power. They were a major, and growing, threat to the whole region.

  General Charles Gordon, a distinguished soldier, was sent by Gladstone’s government to evacuate civilians from the Sudan. He arrived in the principal city, Khartoum, but after organizing one evacuation he decided to remain and defy the rebels. He had Khartoum turned into a fortress, and by March 1884 it was under siege. Gordon was hugely popular at home, and the public expected a relief expedition to go at once to his aid. Gladstone, who hated such measures and whose trust Gordon had betrayed by abandoning his original mission, procrastinated for several months as British outrage rose to fever pitch. When at length Wolseley led a British force to the Sudan, time had run out. It was necessary to fight the dervishes on the way, and in one action, at Abu Klea, the rebels overran a British defensive square. British gunboats arrived offshore on 28 January 1885 to find that two days earlier the Mahdi’s forces had broken through the defences and wiped out those within. Gordon’s body was never found. The Mahdi died a few years later but a new leader – the Khalifa – took his place, and the dervish threat remained.

  Far from feeling complacent about exotic wars and imperial adventures during the last decades of Victoria’s reign, the public was highly anxious. Majuba and Khartoum were international disgraces that cried out to be rectified. The Boers – who had proved the most charming of enemies (they treated the British wounded, and the defeated commanders, with outstanding kindness) – were regarded as backward farmers, while the dervishes were the most rapacious and savage opponents Britain had faced since the Indian Mutiny. Both enemies must be dealt with for the sake of national honour, but long years passed, and it was only after a change of government that opportunities for revenge could be found.

  Firstly, the dervishes. General Kitchener, the ‘Sirdar’ or commander-in-chief of the Egyptian Khedive’s forces and another military celebrity, led an expedition to occupy the Sudan in 1896. He slowly and carefully built and equipped an Anglo-Egyptian force that set out off southwards at a leisurely pace. Gunboats sailed up the Nile, while engineers constructed a railway over the desert to move supplies. It was not until September 1898 that his force arrived within sight of Khartoum and, opposite it, the city of Omdurman. The dervish army was not in the city but out in the desert, and the Sirdar had time to organize a formidable defensive position with its back to the Nile. The battle was fought on his terms.

  It began the following morning, 2 September. The dervishes – like some other peoples whom the British encountered in colonial wars – believed that they could not be killed by bullets. Their whole army therefore made a frontal attack on the Anglo-Egyptian defences, with a result afterwards described by a war correspondent as ‘not a battle but an execution’. The defenders had artillery as well as the gunboats that were firing from offshore. They had well-disciplined, volley-firing infantry and were equipped with Maxim guns. The dervishes were shot down in droves, the number killed being somewhere between ten and eleven thousand (Kitchener’s casualties were 80 dead, 472 wounded). Khartoum was captured and the Mahdi’s tomb blown up – by Gordon’s nephew. Rebellion simmered for a few years afterwards, but Mahdism was a dead letter.

  Although Gordon was now avenged, the public was not as euphoric as might be expected. Some elements of opinion felt that the enemy should not have been shot down wholesale, as if it were unfair to use modern technology against medieval weapons. There was also some outrage at the desecration by Kitchener of the Mahdi’s tomb. The Sirdar was rumoured to have carried off the head as a trophy – an act which won him a personal rebuke from Queen Victoria. Versions of the story state that he meant to have it made into a drinking vessel, that he returned it for burial or that he donated it to the Royal College of Surgeons. Whatever the truth, this was not in keeping with the sense of moral superiority with which the British had endowed themselves.

  South Africa

  The Boer conflict resurfaced in 1899, following the discovery of gold in the Transvaal. This brought thousands of British prospectors to the area,
where their presence and behaviour put them at odds with the devout and simple Boers. The latter believed – with perfect justification – that there were British plans, though perhaps only unofficial, to annex their republic. If enough of the incomers qualified to vote and opted for union with the neighbouring British territories, the Transvaal was finished as an independent state. To prevent this, the Boers stiffened the qualification for citizenship, enabling the British to see themselves as a persecuted minority whom it was the duty of the mother country to help. Others shared this view, including the vastly influential Cecil Rhodes, and when the Boers asked for negotiations the British sought to ensure that they failed. War broke out in October, but did not result in the quick victory that the public had expected.

  The Boers were well equipped, for their country’s gold reserves enabled them to buy sophisticated weaponry that was often superior to that of their enemy. They fought in small, mobile units called commandos, but also had artillery, which they used to effect. They possessed an excellent knowledge of the country, an ability to move fast and live off the land, and the same skill in marksmanship that they had displayed at Majuba.