Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  1 The bridge has acquired different meanings now, for by the 1960s it had become the border between white-dominated Rhodesia and the black republic of Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, and so one of the racial frontiers of the world. When the Prime Minister of South Africa met the President of Zambia in 1975, they held their talks in a railway carriage halfway across.

  2 The 11s 10d representing, it was coyly suggested at the time, the contractors’ profit.

  1 The harbour bridge was transformed in the 1960s by the construction beside it of the most beautiful building in the old overseas Empire, Sydney Opera House (by the Danish architect Joern Utzon), whose wing-like white sprawl at the water’s edge provides a perfect foil for the now elderly formalism above.

  1 Though it was originally reduced in size, at a sacrifice of 1,500 million cubic feet of water storage, to avoid flooding the Ptolemaic temples at Philae. ‘The State must struggle and the people starve’, commented Winston Churchill, aged twenty-four, ‘in order that professors may exult and tourists find some place on which to scratch their names.’

  1 The designer of the Aswan Dam was Sir Benjamin Baker (1840–1907), consulting engineer for the Forth Bridge and the first London tubes, and inventor of the vessel upon which, in 1877, Cleopatra’s Needle was floated from Egypt to the Thames Embankment. He is buried splendidly in the village churchyard at Idbury near Burford, in Oxfordshire, beneath a masonry structure, like an open pyramid, evidently intended to recall both his Egyptian associations and his cantilever genius. His dam, incidentally, contained 1½ million cubic metres of masonry, compared with the Great Pyramid’s 2½ million, but its successor downstream, the High Dam built by the Russians half a century later, is claimed to be the biggest thing ever made. Long after the end of the Empire British hydrologists retained their links with Egypt, and Mr H. E. Hurst, author of the monumental Nile Basin, was still a consultant to the Egyptian Government in the 1960s (in Who’s Who for 1977, when he was in his ninety-seventh year, his address was recorded as Sandford-on-Thames, Oxford, his club as the Gezira Sporting Club).

  1 ‘Am I responsible or are you’, a senior official asked his pilot, dubiously beginning a flight to Baghdad, ‘for seeing that this machine is not overloaded?’ ‘That will have to be decided at the inquest.’

  1 Before the Great War the imperial postage rate had been 1d—

  The stately homes of England

  Shake hands across the sea,

  And colonists, when writing home,

  Pay but a penny fee.

  1 Now surviving all the flying-boats, alas, as a degraded tourist spectacle at Long Beach, California. Legend says she was to have been called the Queen Victoria, but when Cunard officials told King George V they wished to name their liner after the greatest of all English queens, ‘Oh’, said His Majesty, ‘my wife will be pleased’—so Queen Mary it had to be.

  1 ‘Terrible sermon,’ Miss Stark commented.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Art Forms

  SINCE the Great War art had generally been hostile to grandeur, and so there was lost the last chance of a definitive imperial art form. Too late! Now there never would be such a thing as a British Imperial style, in art, in literature or even in architecture. The epic was past its climax, and nobody had commemorated it epically.

  It was not that creative artists were necessarily hostile to the imperial idea—at least until the Great War few spoke out against it, and even the maverick Irishman Bernard Shaw believed that, in the absence of a world government, the British Empire was best qualified to rule the backward communities of the world. But they were seldom fired by it, either. No English Camöens arose, to celebrate the grand adventure—Tennyson went back to Arthurian legend, when he wanted a theme of chivalry and heroism, and Hardy preferred the wars against Napoleon. Even colonial artists failed to exploit the splendid story of their origins. Oliver Goldsmith II, born in Canada, hardly emulated his great-uncle’s success with The Rising Village, his colonial successor to Auburn, while the muses did not immediately respond to the Australian William Charles Wentworth’s attempt to win the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge—

  … grant that yet an Austral Milton’s song

  Pactolus-like flow deep and rich along,

  An Austral Shakespeare rise, whose living page,

  To Nature true, may charm in every age;

  And that an Austral Pindar daring soar

  Where not the Theban eagle reached before.

  It showed how transient was the British taste for glory, how shallow perhaps the imperial instinct itself, that the most lasting artifacts of the British Empire were mostly green, gentle and quirky things, gardens and pleasant tropic cities, novels without heroes, limericks, wry ballads, echoes and suggestions.

  2

  Between the wars, almost for the first time, artistic intellectuals looked at the Empire speculatively in its decline, and dealt with it ironically. Aldous Huxley looked at India, and was reminded of the old man of Thermopylae, who never did anything properly. George Orwell looked at Burma, where he had been a policeman, and thought it all second-rate. ‘I wouldn’t care to have your job’, an American missionary once remarked to him, observing the scarred buttocks of a Burmese suspect in the police station, and the remark cut Orwell not as insulting, but as contemptuous—‘so that was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a tee-total cock-virgin from the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me.’

  Out of these attitudes came one undoubted masterpiece, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. Of all the novels written about the Empire, except possibly Kim, this was the most influential: two generations found their view of imperialism affected by it, if not actually formed, and anyone who read it found that the scenes of imperial life never seemed quite the same again. Forster wrote as a half-insider. He had been private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior, in which capacity he was once preposterously photographed, wearing a long-skirted spotted gown and a sort of oriental tam-o’-shanter, in very English lace-up shoes against a painted background of flowers and mullioned windows. But he was anything but Anglo-Indian, only a life-long college man translated briefly into the Indian environment, and in a thoughtful, melancholy way, half-enchanted by it.

  A Passage to India is not really about imperialism, but about human nature playing itself out against an imperial background, between people of different origins thrown together by the imperial chance. In particular it is about the specifically British imperial technique that was summed up by the image of The Club—the deliberate enclavity, the hanging-together. This was an ugly system, based as it was upon racial awareness and arrogance, but it was undeniably effective in sustaining the brazen bluff that lay at the heart of the Empire. Forster recognized this—‘we’re not pleasant in India‚’ as one of his characters says, ‘we’ve something more important to do’—and in exposing the idea of the Club in its sadness and falseness, he did not frontally attack it.

  Nor did he attack imperialism in the abstract. A Passage to India is not an ideological tract—nationalists often did not know what to make of it, and all too often its Indian characters really do seem incapable of running their own affairs. Forster was in India shortly after the Amritsar Massacre, and the book is full of allusions to that event, but still he was not repelled by the principle of Empire, the spectacle of one nation governing another, but by the personal implications of imperialism, the sham alienations it fostered, the hypocrisies, the apparently unbridgeable gulfs. Perhaps Forster did not worry himself much about the political meaning of it. He was looking deeper, and in his tentative, inconclusive way treated the imperial phenomenon as a Greek dramatist might handle a fourth Fate, as an ever-present imponderable decreeing and ensnaring the lives of human beings.

  Yet he sees it too, paradoxically, as something transient and inessential. Render unto Caesar, he seems wryly to be saying as his book reaches its famous ending. ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ asks the India
n of the Englishman. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But no, India herself answers, not yet—‘and the sky said, “No, not there.”’ It would come in time, sooner than Forster could have dreamt as he finished his book in 1924, but better not to hurry it.

  3

  There was an imperial folklore of sorts, a corpus of popular art that had coalesced over the generations around the theme of Empire. Much of it was Kiplingesque, for the one period when imperialism impinged upon the popular consciousness was pre-eminently Kipling’s period; his verses, tales and characters entered the public vocabulary, and were often transmuted into proverbs, like comedians’ catch-phrases. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’, ‘But that’s another story’, ‘East is East and West is West’, ‘You’ll be a Man, my Son’—all these and many more, the very stuff of the imperialist philosophy, went into the language, and were bandied about in pubs and prize-giving speech-days as if they were immemorial saws. Every drawing-room baritone sang Oley Speaks’ stirring setting of ‘The Road to Mandalay’, every church-goer knew the solemn verses of Recessional, which gave to the Empire the most hackneyed, and later the most mocked, of all its epithets—‘far-flung’:

  God of our fathers, known of old,

  Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

  Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

  Dominion over palm and pine….

  Around the real thing, too, there assembled a mass of neo-Kipling ballads like ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’, songs like ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar,’ and a whole body of literature, given a home by magazines like Blackwood’s or The Strand, which came to possess a stylized unity, as folk-tales do. Blackwood’s published, in the 1930s, twelve volumes of such imperial mythology, under the generic title Tales from the Outposts, and they included Speech Day in Crocodile Country, Ode to One of the Old Indian Troopships, My First Execution, The Left Hand of Abdullah the Beggar and A Solo Flight from England to the Gold Coast in Cirrus-Moth G. EBZZ. Here are the opening lines of Khyber Calling! a novel by ‘Rajput’ (Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. E. Dawson):

  I was donning my Blue Patrol jacket for dinner in mess when Firoze Din, my orderly, suddenly said: ‘Huzoor, a Gurkha mule-driver was killed by Pathans this afternoon.’ I made no answer, but grunted….

  Imperial humorists contributed prolifically to the form. There was never a shortage of them. Skilful or heavy-handed, subtle or naive, the satirist was the familiar of every imperial station, first to last, scribbling for the local magazines like the innumerable pseudonymous comic writers of Anglo-India, breaking into the bestseller lists like C. S. Jarvis of the Sinai or Arthur Grimble of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Of them all the funniest, and the most revealing, was Lord Edward Cecil, whose book The Leisure of an Egyptian Official is the one classic of the kind. Cecil was no artist perhaps, no historian either, but his outrageous set-pieces of imperial farce, his gallery of characters dominant or subject, translated many of the imperial attitudes, prejudices too, into universal terms.

  Unexpectedly, too, Hollywood powerfully propagated the imperial myths. The yarns of Empire were so tremendous, the settings so colourful, that inevitably the film industry, seeking an occasional alternative to cowboys and Indians, seized upon sahibs and savages. Many an old stalwart of Warner Brothers or MGM was to be seen in the 1930s leading his sepoys into the jaws of the Khyber, or limping blood-stained out of the African bush. HereVictor McLaglen guides The Lost Patrol through the burning sands of Mespot, here Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone, dashingly disobeying King’s Regulations, rescue the colonel’s son from his Pathan torturers and so save the honour of the Bengal Lancers. Walter Huston played a wistful Rhodes against Oscar Homolka’s Kruger, Ronald Colman turned the rapacious Clive into a matinee idol, Spencer Tracy, lifting his hat politely, greeted Cedric Hardwicke at Ujiji with that incomparable one-liner, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’1

  British film-makers treated the Empire more as a morality play. Sanders of the River, for example, made by the passionately Anglophile Hungarian Alexander Korda in 1935, was a lavish rationale of the White Man’s Burden: Sanders, played by Leslie Banks, was beloved and respected by his simple African charges, and as his canoe was paddled along inky tangled creeks by faithful oarsmen, led by Paul Robeson, the cry of ‘Sandy the Strong, Sandy the Wise’ rang repeatedly through the imperial forests. The Four Feathers, taken from a novel by A. E. W. Mason, himself a wartime secret agent, was a thrilling justification of imperial attitudes, so thrilling that the official film censors actually thanked Korda for making it, and critics of the anti-imperialist Left felt obliged to point out that it had been financed by the Prudential Assurance Company, capitalist lackeys of racialism.

  Away in the overseas Empire the folk-art was more spontaneous, and seemed to spring more directly from the collective imagination. Sometimes indeed its origins were forgotten. Nobody could remember the first appearance of the monocled English policeman portrayed by the wandering Indian players of the United Provinces, or the top-hatted character called The Lord who, in the folk-plays of Corfu, represented the last echo of British authority in the Ionians. The Br’er Rabbit stories were pure imperial folk-art, for they were a mingling of Ashanti lore with Algonquin Indian spirit-stories, the two being brought together by the transportation of slaves to Canada.1 More often the lore was invented by professionals, sometimes to fulfil a need in a country without traditions, but had been blurred by time and usage until it came to seem organic.

  Every white colony had its tall stories, its familiar rhymes, its ballads and its legendary characters. Sometimes real people had been metamorphosed into myth—Rhodes, for instance, became nearly more than human in the Rhodesian memory, and the Anzac soldiers of Gallipoli achieved a similar kind of apotheosis. The Canadian Mounties entered the folklore almost as a matter of principle, Ned Kelly the Australian bandit entered it faute de mieux, there being a paucity of alternative domestic heroes. In India there really were peasants who worshipped images of long-dead British administrators. In Sarawak the first White Rajah had become a dimly imagined embodiment of perfection.

  And properly enough the most vividly remembered totem of any, till the very end of the Empire, remained Queen Victoria herself. Her grand image survived all her successors, and though as the years went by her statue was removed from all too many parks and plinths, her memory remained, if inexact, lastingly potent. Most folklores have their supreme being, god, hero or arbitrator, the hovering presence behind their stories and enactments—Ansansi the Spider, Heitse of the Hottentots, Zeus, Haroun al-Rashid. Unmistakably the presiding genius of the imperial lore was the Great White Queen, whose presence was all-pervading, inherent to the lays of primitive bards, not altogether amused by Lord Edward’s more provocative anecdotes, and present always, out of camera, in the Hollywood spectaculars of Empire.

  4

  Some of the imperial settlements, especially those that deliberately reflected functions of the imperial mission, had come in their maturity to possess the quality of art. Bombay in India was one, Penang in Malaya another.

  Bombay had been acquired by the British in the days of Charles II, long before the birth of the Indian Empire, but it was the imperialism of the High Victorian age, inspired by a masterful and self-righteous set of convictions, which made it a great city. In its nineteenth-century plan, as in distant English prototypes, the British municipal virtues were exemplified in stone, and all its monuments stood testimony to their appointed values. Enterprise, for instance, the first and most fundamental of the imperial qualities, was magnificently embodied in Bombay’s Victoria Terminal, the headquarters of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, which provided a symbolic centre-piece for the entire city. It was one of the supreme memorials of the railway age anywhere, part Oriental, part Gothic, all unmistakably imperial, carved about with crests, emblems and gargoyles, with stained glass windows like a cathedral’s and brass-bound teak doors like a palace’s, and gigantic lions guarding its ce
ntral staircase. The Punjab Mail and the Delhi Express snorted all the more purposefully for the splendour of its girdered roof, and it was only suitable that from its central tower there should gaze down upon the commuters the busts not merely of Queen Victoria and her Viceroy Lord Dufferin, but the Company Chairman and his Managing Director too.1

  Order was embodied in the monumental Secretariat, overlooking the long Maidan beside the sea, from whose lordly galleries, shaded by gigantic rattan screens, the imperial administrators could survey their passing subjects in the blazing sun below, or keep an eye on the cricket on the green. Down the road was Law, in the fabric of the hardly less overpowering High Court, and all around were the structures of Enlightenment: the University, supplied with a ceremonial tower by a public-spirited Parsee; the Prince of Wales Museum, with a dome copied in a scholarly way from the Bijaipur Mosque in Mysore, and a genial statue of the Prince himself, the future Edward VII, meditating in the gardens in front; the School of Arts and Crafts, an institution in the progressive spirit of William Morris and the pre-Raphaelites (and truly a memorial to its age, for here in the Director’s House, still standing cool but dusty among its lawns of buffalo grass, trellis-shadows on its floors, hammocks beneath its banyans, was born the laureate of Empire, Kipling himself).

  Healthy Pleasure was not forgotten in this architectural catalogue—mens sana in corpore sano was always an imperial motto. The promenade along Back Bay was developed Brighton-style, to give the citizenry of all races the benefit of fresh sea air out of the west, while parks and gardens proliferated. The Bombay Gymkhana Club was built not in the Gothic mode but in a rustic mock-Tudor, an affirmation perhaps of underlying pastoral values, and marvellously preposterous on the foreshore was the Taj Mahal Hotel, one of the great hostelries of Empire, so open-minded in its hedonism that even the great black jazz musicians of America were to be heard there.