by Jan Morris
In the Crown Colony of Gambia schoolchildren used to sing a melancholy little ballad:
It was sad when the big ship went down,
It was sad when the big ship went down,
Husbands and wives,
Little children lost their lives,
It was sad when the big ship went down.
They were remembering the loss of the Titanic on her maiden voyage in 1912, and there were some people who, in a superstitious way, traced the British technical decline to that older tragedy. Others remembered Beatty’s cri de coeur at Jutland, as he watched his ill-designed battlecruisers inexplicably blowing up around him: ‘There’s something wrong with my bloody ships today.’ Economists argued that the nation had over-extended itself once and for all in the war, by becoming at once a naval, an industrial and a continental military power, and it was true that since 1918 British industry had consistently lost ground against its foreign competitors.
The British were paying for their old success. The overwhelming superiority of their Victorian technique had made them complacent, even timid about new ideas. They were slow, or at least reluctant, to grasp the meaning of the aeroplane or the motor car—in August 1914 the British Expeditionary Force, the striking force of the British Army, possessed 80 cars and 15 motorcycles. In this as in so many ways, their social structure retarded them, too. Even now, Britain was still geared to a rural hierarchy, in which country landowners were pre-eminent. Industry was hardly for English gentlemen. Not many of the country’s best brains graduated from Oxford and Cambridge into industry, and there were no equivalents in England of the great technical universities of Germany and Switzerland. British industry stuck, by and large, to what it knew best: and what it knew best was the technology of the preceding century, when Made in England had been the universal hallmark of quality, and hardly a French steam-cock or an American lathe had reached the limitless markets of the Empire.
It was not that invention had failed. British scientists remained remarkably resourceful, and there was no shortage of striking prototypes: in the 1930s Britain held the world speed records on land, on sea and in the air. But the nation seemed to lack the flair, the will or perhaps the incentive to translate ideas into solid achievement. Habit and long success made the British look at the twentieth century through nineteenth-century eyes, and the immense machine of Empire itself, with all its systems, all its schedules, even much of its equipment, remained essentially a Victorian device, coal-fuelled, steam-hauled.
3
By and large, the imperial specialities of Victoria’s day were the specialities of George V’s. The great age of railroad building was over, but still here and there in the Empire the railway engineers were at work, and the lines they laid, the trains they despatched, could still be spectacular. The most dashing of all trains were surely ‘The Silks’, the non-stop expresses by which the Canadian Pacific Railway hurtled the Chinese silk consignments from Hong Kong across Canada to the Atlantic ports and so to the London markets. The stateliest was unquestionably the white official train of the Viceroy of India, twelve carriages for one man, with its quarters for aides and secretaries and servants and bodyguards, its great crested locomotive, and the guard of honour which, during troublesome times in India, lined every mile of its way across the sub-continent, a soldier every few feet along the railway track, presenting arms one by one as the train went by. The most gentlemanly trains were certainly the splendidly serviced sleepers of the Sudan Railway, like travelling clubs of finesse, which ran down the tracks laid by Kitchener’s engineers during his advance to Omdurman, and deposited their passengers at last in the cavernous bedrooms of the Grand Hotel, Khartoum (where the laundry lists quoted prices for Jodhpurs and Nannies’ Uniforms). The most forbidding train was perhaps ‘The Ghan’, which ran across the inexpressible wastes of the Australian outback from Port Augusta to Alice Springs, held up for weeks at a time by frequent flooding, bumping and swaying horribly on its rocky roadbed, and named ironically in honour of the Afghan camel-men who first laboured along that uninviting route.
And the most romantic of railways, at least in conception, was certainly the Cape-to-Cairo line by which Cecil Rhodes had hoped to establish his British axis north and south through Africa. By the 1920s this had actually become possible. South Africa—Rhodesia—Tanganyika—Kenya—Uganda—Sudan—Egypt—Rhodes might have done it had he lived, under the Union Jack all the way. It never happened in fact, but it had its own great memorial anyway, for the centre-piece of the enterprise, the work which meant most to Rhodes himself, was the bridge by which the railway crossed the Zambezi River, on the northern frontier of Rhodesia. This was nothing like half-way from Cape to Cairo, but it had a symbolic quality about it that everyone felt. The river was one of Africa’s greatest: beyond it lay the legendary country of the Great Lakes and the Nile sources; and here, heralded across the bush by its perpetual rainbow, there fell into the great chasm the waterfall which Dr Livingstone himself had named for the Queen-Empress long before. At Victoria Falls many elements of Empire were magnificently expressed, and there it was that Rhodes had decreed his railway should cross the Zambezi. ‘I should like’, he observed, with his odd mixture of the banal and the poetic, ‘to have the spray of the water over the carriages.’
The bridge was built after Rhodes’s death, and it would have been much easier to cross the river a few miles upstream, where it was narrower: but his wishes were honoured, and the railway crossed the Zambezi within range of the spray. Nobody lived there then. The Africans would not go near the falls, and all around was dense bush, swamp and forest. In this place, where almost nobody could see it, one of the great imperial artifacts was erected. The gorge was 350 feet deep, and Ralph Freeman, the chief designer, bridged it in a Single steel span, at once a tour de force of engineering and a gesture of grand romance. It was a combination of arch and girder, and it carried two lines of track across the ravine. By the 1920s there was a rest house beside the falls, and a little community was established on the north bank, to look after the tourists.
Not everyone paid much attention to the bridge, so dazzled were they by the falls; but to stand on the river-bank when the Bulawayo train steamed across the gulf was an unforgettable experience of Empire. Against the tremendous thundering background of the waterfall, its rolling spray, its reverberating cannon-cracks, the seething mass of its water, the bridge stood there defiantly, almost frail, with its slender arch curving gracefully across the void. The noise of the water was so deafening always, and the scale of the scene so immense, that at first one often failed to notice the train when, with black smoke billowing, it came puffing heavily out of the forest: but when it cautiously felt its way across the girders of the bridge, when the spray really did splash on its windows and sizzle on its locomotive boiler, when the passengers inside rushed as one man to the windows to see the falls through the streaming glass, then what allegories were invoked! Here was Empire still! Here was Rhodes! Here was Kipling’s old power of Steam and Fire!1
4
The greatest bridge of the 1920s was the Sydney Harbour Bridge, another of Ralph Freeman’s designs. As an engineering work this was undeniably impressive. For more than a century people had talked about bridging the narrowest part of the great sea-inlet known as Sydney Harbour, to connect the original nucleus of the city with its growing suburbs on the northern shore, but the plan took time to crystallize. Not until 1924 did the well-known British firm of Dorman Long, after submitting seven alternative schemes, win a contract to build it, their tender quoting a craftsman’s price of £4,217,221 11s 10d.2 The bridge was a single-span steep arch structure. It was built to withstand gales of 250 knots, and carried six lanes of roadway, four railway lines and two footpaths across a main span of 1,650 feet. It was then the longest single-span bridge in the world, and the biggest arch ever made.
There has probably never been a more talked-about bridge, nor one that was to become more universally known. It was hailed, especially in Br
itain, as a triumph of the imperial technology. It took seven years to build, and year by year the newsreels and magazines carried pictures of its progress, the vast concrete pylons going up, the steep arch hanging ever further over the water, the ‘creeper’ cranes high on the unfinished steelwork, against the blue glittering background of the harbour. A deep-water wharf was especially made to handle steel shipments from England. More than150 men worked for five years quarrying the necessary granite. Sydney Harbour Bridge was ‘one of the Great Engineering Wonders of the world’, said Arthur Mee’s Book of the Flag, and when it was finished in 1932 it really did present a striking image of Australian strength, its silhouette becoming a national symbol familiar everywhere on earth. Younger Australians viewed it with a mordant affection, traditionalists saw it as a proud figure of the imperial connection—
There is a land where floating free,
From mountain top to girdling sea,
A proud flag waves exultingly;
And freedom’s sons the banner bear,
No shackled slave can breathe the air,
Fairest of Britain’s daughters fair—
Australia!
Yet in the somewhat lumpish structure of the bridge itself, with its great white towers monumental at each end, later generations might see signs of the imperial ageing. It was a very big bridge, but it lacked spirit. It did not soar. Even Arthur Mee’s Book of the Flag did not call it beautiful. It had none of the colossal affront of the bridges, often hideous but never weak, by which the British had bridged the rivers of India in the Victorian century. Its function was disguised, as far as possible, in a tentative traditionalism. Its street lights were mock-lanterns. Its presiding pylons were vaguely Egyptian in style, like something from the Wembley Exhibition, or war memorials, but they served no technical purpose, being there simply for effect. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was a true product of the imperial thirties, when the British Empire was larger than it had ever been before, but rather less tremendous.
Sydney made a great occasion of its opening—it was easily the most prominent structure in the city, and for thirty years would remain the only Australian building that the average visitor would remember. In March 1932, the Governor of New South Wales, representing the King, unveiled a commemorative tablet, and the State Premier prepared to cut the tape. A royal salute was fired. The harbour ferries sounded their sirens. Most of the Royal Australian Air Force flew in formation overhead. But before the Premier had a chance to declare the bridge open, a young man in elaborate military uniform, wearing many decorations, rode on horseback past the Governor’s stand, past the mounted guard of honour, past the astonished Premier himself, and drawing his sword from its scabbard, in one slash cut the ribbon and shouted in a loud voice: ‘On behalf of decent and loyal citizens of New South Wales, I now declare this bridge open.’ He was a member of a political protest group called the New Guard. They arrested him at once, replaced the ribbon and started all over again.1
5
Dams were another old British speciality, and the expertise of imperial hydrologists had been translated from British India, where 13 per cent of all the cultivated land had been irrigated by the British, to the imperial dependencies along the River Nile. The British relished the symbolism of these works. Records of the rise and flow of the river had been kept for 900 years: controlling the Nile was a charge handed across the centuries, from the river-lords of the Pharaohs to the Ministry of Public Works.
The Empire controlled the whole of the White Nile. Egypt’s river service was run by Englishmen; Uganda was a Crown Colony; the Sudan, though ostensibly an Anglo-Egyptian Condominium, was in effect a British possession, headed by a British Governor-General and run by a corps of British administrators generally thought to be, especially by themselves, the best in the Empire. This unprecedented unity meant that for the first time the flow of the Nile could be regulated logically in the interests of all the riverain people (and some further away too, like the Lancashire cotton magnates). Dams could be built in one country to benefit the people of another, and water could be fairly divided between them all.
The British had begun work on the Nile at the turn of the century, their purpose being to transform flood irrigation, which depended upon the amount of each year’s river flood, into storage irrigation, which would provide insurance against a poor year’s rainfall. They set about it spaciously. Enormous reports were printed. Splendid maps were made. The river was measured, recorded and analysed as never before, and a whole new vocabulary entered the imperial lexicon: Timely and Untimely Periods, Century Storage, Flush Irrigation. Just as Victorian Englishmen had devoted their whole lives to the study of the Ganges basin, or the irrigation of the Punjab flatlands, so now Britons in the Egyptian and Sudanese services spent all their days thinking about the Nile.
By the 1920s their works were inescapable. Hundreds of miles of canals had been cut or restored, many new barrages had been built, and vast new areas had been opened to irrigation. There were some unhappy consequences to these works—the spread of bilharzia, the exhaustion of the soil, the concentration on a single crop, cotton. Still they were among the chief achievements of the imperial decline, and the irrigation engineers became great men in Egypt, were greeted by crowds of grateful fellahin when they made their inspection tours, and blessed by imams in mosques.
The greatest of all their works was the Aswan Dam, which was to be after successive enlargements the bulkiest of all the British Empire’s artifacts. Imperial publicists called it the Eighth Wonder of the World, and with its immense line of dressed masonry, its massive buttresses and frothing line of sluices, set stupendously in the dun desert around the first cataract of the Nile, it did have a truly classical grandeur.1 The Aswan Dam stood at the head of the entire Egyptian irrigation system, for behind the dam a great reservoir extended upstream to Wadi Halfa, and out of this reserve the engineers could release water in dry periods to provide perennial irrigation all over Egypt. Downstream eight smaller barrages distributed the water among the irrigation canals, and the engineer in control at Aswan had it in his hands to destroy the life of Egypt (or alternatively, Egyptian nationalists suggested, to divert the entire flow of the Nile direct to England).1
Upstream the Sudan was less dependent upon the river, and it had been agreed that from the middle of January to the middle of July each year all the natural flow of the river was to be allowed to go to Egypt. The Anglo-Sudanese hydrologists, though, saw profitable possibilities of irrigation in a tract of land called the Gezirah Plain, which lay between the Blue and the White Niles above Khartoum. The country was unprepossessing, and was inhabited by people of awkward migratory habits—sometimes there, sometimes not, farmers in the rainy season, Omdurman drapers or railway tracklayers when it was dry. The British resolved nevertheless that this should be the site of an experiment on the Anglo-Indian scale, the deliberate creation of a cotton-growing community dependent entirely upon artificial irrigation.
It took them six years to settle the land rights, renting the whole area from its owners, then re-allotting it in thirty-acre tenancies. It took them three years to build the Sennar Dam, by which 3 million acres of land was eventually to be made arable. But by the end of the 1920s the Gezira Scheme was one of the showpieces of the Empire, and the men of the Sudan Civil Service assiduously took visitors to see it. It was just as they wished Empire to look. It was a mixture of public and private enterprise: the Government Irrigation Department controlled the water, but two private British companies supervised the scheme itself, and the tenant farmers not only took 40 per cent of the profits of their cotton, but also grew food and fodder crops for themselves. It was replete with social organizations and improving systems—child welfare classes, domestic science schools, courses in civics and economics, village councils, educational films and a highly responsible newspaper. As one of its creators characteristically observed, it was ‘a great romance of creative achievement’: an object lesson too, for anybody, given rulers of equa
l merit, could do the same—‘vision and foresight’, as he generously added, ‘are not qualities peculiar to the Government of the Sudan.’
So, less than a century since Speke had discovered its source, less than half a century since Sir Garnet Wolseley hoisted the Union Jack over Cairo, the British had mastered the White Nile. Even as the Empire began its retreat, they had schemes for much larger works—dams at the Great Lakes, a canal to bypass the Sudd, huge new developments at Aswan, a series of new barrages in the Sudan—but they already controlled the river more absolutely than any of their predecessors. From the remote control points, high in Uganda, by which their hydrologists estimated the flow of the water, to the last Delta barrages, almost within sight of the Mediterranean, they had laid their skills upon the whole length of the Nile. Never again, though they did not know it, would they have such matter for experiment, or such truly imperial tasks to perform.
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These were traditional concerns of Empire. When it came to the internal combustion engine, and all that went with it, the approach was less sure. Everywhere people associated the British with trains, bridges and dams, but most of the first cars in the Empire were foreign, French, German and American manufacturers having gained an early lead over the British. American cars dominated the Australian and Canadian markets from the start, and even in India the first car of all was French—the Maharajah of Patiala’s De Dion Bouton, whose licence plate number was O. The British built cars for the small easy roads of their own islands, and until the end of the Empire never did master the tougher imperial markets. Rover’s Indian and Colonial Model of 1907 hardly swamped the far-flung highways, and when in the 1920s Morris Motors introduced a new model actually called the Empire, they sold four.
