by Jan Morris
There were women who flew aeroplanes around the Empire, like Amy Johnson. There were women who treated Empire as a holiday, like merry Sarah Wilson in her Mafeking dug-out, or as a protracted nature ramble, like the painter Marianne North, who spent fifteen years depicting the imperial flora, including five species she discovered for herself. The Irishwoman Daisy Bates deserted her husband but became the most influential friend of the Australian aborigines, while Lady Florence Dixie, daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry, was one of the earliest champions of the Zulus. Mary Slessor, raised in a Scottish slum, spent nearly forty years as a missionary on the Niger coast, and ended up as British Vice-Consul in Okoyong. Clara Butt, a 6-foot 2-inch contralto, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ with such incomparable diapason that she became, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the very voice of Empire.1
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Several great women travellers were sponsored by the fact of Empire—great not merely because of their journeys, but because of the use they made of them. They were seldom adventurers of the absolute kind, seeking excitement for its own sake. They went to achieve something, and the danger was incidental.
The brief travels of Mary Kingsley, for instance, influenced the course of history in West Africa. She was a marvellous traveller, but an even more enterprising political theorist. A doctor’s daughter, a niece of Charles Kingsley the novelist, she had no formal education at all, and until she was thirty stayed at home and helped to look after the family: but when her parents died in 1892, and she was free to pursue her own fulfilment, she sailed away alone to Africa, a late Victorian spinster, to collect zoological specimens and study ancient cultures. Her fame was established by two tremendous journeys, both completed within four years, across great slabs of forbidding country almost unknown to Europeans before—to Kabinda and Matadi on the Congo, up the Ogowe river through the perilous rapids of N’Ojele, across the cannibal Fan country, around the obscure Lake Ncovi, to the dim island of Corisco, and finally to the summit of Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Great Cameroon, 14,000 feet above the sweltering desert of the Wouri!
Even the names of her itineraries sounded scarcely lady-like, and indeed of all the imperial explorers of Africa Mary Kingsley was the most astonishing. She was the born free-lance. She had no rich institutional supporters, but paid her way by trading in palm oil and rubber as she wandered. She was not a beautiful woman, and preferred to wear, so she said herself, ‘elderly housekeeper’s attire’—Africans, puzzled by the effect, frequently called her ‘Sir’. Many people she instantly antagonized—‘I do not worship at the shrine myself’, said Lugard, and the mandarins of the Colonial Office came to detest her. Many more, and especially Africans, she instantly charmed, with her zest, her courage and her long, funny face.
She was an imperialist of a particular and then unfashionable kind. At a time when Empire was presenting itself to the world as a privilege and a mission, Mary Kingsley saw it as Trade. Especially in West Africa, she thought, trade should be its sine qua non, and she struck up an unexpected alliance with the great Liverpool merchant houses which, having been deprived of their West African slave trade half a century before, now dealt in the cocoa and copra of Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Mary Kingsley used to boast that some of her own ancestors had been slave traders, and she had nothing but contempt for the windbag pretensions of the New Imperialism. She despised missionaries, too, loathed Little Englanders, and called herself ‘a hardened, unreformed imperial expansionist’.
Hers was Rhodes’ view of Empire, ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’, pursued with a sense of practical style, and a dignified respect, without hypocrisy or condescension, for the native civilizations. She had strong views about race. The African, she allowed, was probably inferior to the white man, but what was much more important, he was different. His virtues and vices were arranged in a different way, and he was no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit was an incipient hare. The African approached life more spiritually, and if he was to be educated, he must not be forced into European modes of thought. He was not a mere cipher, to be manipulated as Empire willed. He was, Miss Kingsley provocatively thought, very likely the archetype of World Man.
Commerce was to be the bridge, by which the Empire reached the truth about these peoples. She viewed the project romantically. ‘You great merchant adventurers of England,’ she once reproached the sober and bourgeois business community of Liverpool, ‘you great adventurers must pull yourselves together, and become a fighting force, and a governing force!’ Traders were the true experts of Empire, knowing more, and having a more genuine stake in their territories than any colonial officials. Traders had no wish to change the natives, who were perfectly profitable as they were. Traders had no fancy notions, as Mary Kingsley put it, ‘about the native being a man and a brother’. The trading instinct was the key to progress—to dominion, stability and power.
All this made many enemies. ‘Miss Kingsley’, wrote Concord, a pacifist magazine, ‘is a very unwomanly woman…. Her language is tainted with the demoralization of frontier life…. Her politics are bad, her economics worse, and her morals, in regard to these public concerns, worst of all.’ At the same time her robust sympathy with West African traditions, even down to slavery, horrified the imperial evangelists, and her championing of indirect rule, long before Lugard’s conversion, did not please the Whitehall supremacists. Purist eyebrows were raised when, invited to lecture to the London School of Medicine for Women, she chose as her topic ‘African Therapeutics from a Witch Doctor’s Point of View’.
But she was only ahead of her time. Indirect Rule was to become an imperial orthodoxy, economic influence would one day be the respectable euphemism for imperialism, the world was presently to share her view of négritude, and her vastly entertaining travel books were to amuse and instruct West African administrators for the rest of the Empire. She did not live to see these consequences, for all her adventuring lasted less than a decade. When the Boer War broke out she went to South Africa to nurse sick Boer prisoners of war at Simonstown. From them she picked up enteric fever, and she was buried, as she had characteristically asked, at sea.
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And most remarkable of all was Gertrude Bell. We have already seen her from a distance—in a fox fur and a flowered hat at the Cairo Conference of 1922—for out of her journeys she had become, not a critic of Empire, but one of its pillars. She was a more obviously brilliant woman than Mary Kingsley, but less surprising. The daughter of a celebrated Durham ironmaster, she was the first woman to win a first class degree in modern history at Oxford, and her earliest travels were proper peregrinations in the tradition of the Grand Tour, round the world once, climbing the Alps, staying with diplomatic representatives in embassies here and there. But she learnt Persian, and so acquiring a taste for the Islamic east, went to Jerusalem when she was thirty-one to learn Arabic. Soon she was deep within the Arab subject, linguistically, archaeologically, and presently politically. She travelled all over Syria, down the Euphrates to Karbala, northward through Mosul into Asia Minor, and finally, in the most ambitious of her projects, deep into the Arabian interior to the desert city of Hail.
The Great War gave purpose to these extraordinary experiences, for on the strength of them Gertrude Bell joined the Arab Bureau, then busily mobilizing British expertise about the Arabs. So she became one of the original British administrators of occupied Iraq, where as Oriental Secretary she played a key role in the enthronement of the Hashemites. For the last seven years of her life, in her fifties, she was the most powerful woman in the British Empire, and politically one of the most powerful in the world. She never married, remaining all her life faithful to the memory of her only love, a British officer killed in the war, but she never suffered the taint of the blue-stocking, for she was delightful in her emancipation. At Government meetings her opinion was generally decisive; at Arab gatherings sheikhs and even princes, anxiously peering across the assembly in the direction of Miss Be
ll, would await her nod or flickering eye before committing themselves to a course of conduct—
From Trebizon to Tripolis
She rolls the Pashas flat,
And tells them what to think of this,
And what to think of that.
She was full of paradox. She loved clothes and hats and textiles, but she was tough as nails, riding every morning, swimming the Tigris frequently. She was a prime agent of the policy which made Iraq a puppet-State of Great Britain, but she was genuinely concerned for the independence of the Arabs. A tall, sharp-nosed, angular woman, red-haired and green-eyed, it was the fact that she was a woman that made a legend of her, for temperamentally she was not of the heroic mould, and the proudest of her achievements was the creation of the Baghdad Museum—‘like the British Museum, only a little smaller’. Yet briefly, perhaps luckily, a legend she became—‘The Arabs’, it said hopefully on the plaque they erected to her in the Museum, ‘will always hold her memory in reverence’—and every traveller to Baghdad wished to set eyes on her, meet her at a party, or best of all take tea with her in her house beside the river, cluttered with books, shards, maps, flowers and new evening dresses just arrived from England.
There is an old photograph of a garden party in Baghdad which illuminates this reputation. Its central figure is King Feisal, dressed in military uniform with medal ribbons, and there are a few sheikhs in the garden, and many British officers in topees, and two or three Englishwomen in long dresses, wearing elaborate hats and carrying parasols rather like Lady Pellatt in Toronto. A faded string of flags hangs above their heads, and the party appears to be happening in a decaying botanical garden, with banked lines of flower-pots, and a tangle of palms behind.
A row of kitchen chairs and an elderly sofa have been arranged for the principal guests, and on one of them, half-turned from the camera, sits Miss Gertrude Bell the Oriental Secretary, next to the king. She is having her cigarette lighted by an attentive Englishman in a trilby hat, and she is wearing a dark shady hat with flowers on it (by Anne Marie of Sloane Street), a long pale dress with some sort of ornamental belt, and white high-heeled shoes. What is it about her that compels the eye? Why do we look at her, rather than at comfortable Mrs G, on the other side of the king, or Mrs H who stands so daintily with her husband the general on the right flank of the picture? It is not that Miss Bell is about to smoke a cigarette, not that she carries no parasol, nor even that she seems to sit in that rather bony, defiant way characteristic of progressive women of the day. It is the fact that, as everyone in that picture knows, as she undoubtedly knows better than anyone, she represents Power. In her slim cottony figure imperial authority is improbably concentrated. The plump sheikh behind looks at her rather apprehensively; the king waits politely for a light himself; and nice Mrs G, one cannot help surmising, is thinking to herself really, that woman does give herself airs.1
1 Unless you count Y Wladfa‚ the Welsh settlement founded in Patagonia in 1865, where everyone over eighteen had a vote from the start. But that, as Kipling would say, is another story….
1 She had actually suggested ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ to Elgar, just as another of the great imperial anthems, Samuel Liddle’s setting of ‘Abide With Me’, was written for her. She was made, of course, a Dame of the British Empire before she died in 1936, but her singing was remarkable, says the Dictionary of National Biography carefully, ‘for its broad effect rather than for its artistic finesse’.
1 But the strain of it all defeated her; she died in Baghdad in 1926, aged fifty-eight, and was buried in the British cemetery near General Maude.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Adventurers
HARD times had come for the British people, in the years of slump and unemployment: terrible times were approaching, as the world walked like a blind man once again towards the precipice of war. Fifty years before the possession of Empire had offered an element of circus, to make up for the shortage of bread, and to a minority of Englishmen still it provided the stimulus of challenge and response, keeping their minds perhaps, like healthy team games at school, off more debilitating topics.
In the past the adventure of it had been something more, and had been a principal urge towards sovereignty—
He was the first to venture, he was the first man to find!
Trusting his life to his rifle, groping ahead in the blind!
Seeking new lands for his people!—This is the end of the day,
A little mound on the mountain, a little cross in the clay….1
Every adventurous taste was provided for then, in the boom days of Empire: the frissons of exploration, speculation, prospecting or war; the call of the pioneer’s trek and the settlers’ bivouac; the grand excitement of emigration itself, to a new life on the frontiers. Even the imperial proletarians, the private soldiers, often prided themselves on the challenging hardship of it all. They called the South African sun ‘McCormick’ but loved to boast about the heat of it; they called the North-West Frontier ‘The Grim’, but shared their officers’ wry regard for its murderous Pathans; they absorbed affectionately into their folklore the horrific hazards of life on the Indian plains, where strong men were said to lose their potency through eating mango skins, and the noxious air of the Terai was composed of the breath of serpents.
The Empire had been a gigantic employment exchange for the adventurous. We see its solitary clients, for instance, penetrating disguised into Tibet or Turkestan, to be thrown into verminous dungeons by Khans of Bokhara, or strangled in Afghan marketplaces. We see them struggling over the Chinook Pass into the goldfields of the Yukon, or hastening on dromedaries towards the ambush of the Khalifa. We see Professor E. H. Palmer of Oxford murdered by Bedouin during an Arabian intelligence survey in 1882, or Bishop French of Lahore dying in Muscat after his forlorn attempt to proselytize the fanatic Omanis—‘I cannot say that I have met with many thoughtful and encouraging hearers or people who want Bibles and Testaments.’
For many people the instinct of adventure was killed in the Great War. It died with Rupert Brooke and his poetry, was buried with the bitter epitaphs of the war poets, and was one with the million ghosts who haunted the schools and universities of England.
Who are the ones that we cannot see‚
Though we feel them as near as near?
In chapel we felt them bend the knee,
At the match one felt them cheer‚
In the deep still shade of the Colonnade,
In the ringing quad’s full light,
They are laughing here, they are chaffing there,
Yet never in sound or sight.1
Many a Briton swore, when he returned from the trenches, that he would never go abroad again, let alone risk his life in any cause. Security was the national aim, preferable without exertion, and thought it proved an illusory hope, still the average Englishman disregarded the imperial challenge now, and preferred to make the best things at home.
Yet adventure was in some sense the deepest truth of Empire. The craving for excitement, the yearning to break out, was perhaps the profoundest of all the imperialist motives. It was not dead yet, and throughout these decades one may observe it still, held in trust so to speak, or latent, until history once again required it.
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Some Englishmen still went to be pioneers. They were seldom pioneers in the rawest kind, for most of the Empire’s arable land had been exploited now, and everywhere the reach of Government had brought order and restraint to the frontiers. There were plenty of communities, though, which retained some of the old fizz, in the second or third generation of their citizens, where newcomers still felt themselves to be frontiersmen, and looked back with relief, sometimes condescension, to more ordinary places left behind.
In the spring of 1927, for example, a group of 300 British families, escaping the hunger-strikes and dole queues of England, emigrated with Government help to Alberta, and so found themselves in an authentic frontier-town of the British Empire, Calgary. It was a
cow-town, as in the movies, and by the standards of the emigrants, inconceivably remote, being three days by train from Toronto. Just getting there was an adventure. In summer the journey could be dramatic enough, when the sun probed relentlessly through the chinks of the window-blinds, and made the waiters sweat in their high-buttoned jackets, but in the winter it was terrific. When the station-masters at the prairie halts put on their astrakhan hats and fur coats, when the snow lay feet deep through the forests, and the conifers creaked and drooped with the weight of it, when the fish lay embalmed in their frozen lakes, and a man could get frost-bitten crossing the village street—when the ice-grey skies of winter, like gun-metal, lay glowering and magnificent over the prairies, then the newcomer from Salford, Hull or Manchester felt he was venturing indeed.
‘Calgary coming up! Calgary ten minutes!’—and there it was now, the first dirt roads running into the outskirts of town, the first scattered houses clamped against the cold, a clutter of sheds and marshalling yards, a hiss of the brakes, a shudder, and there already at the door was the conductor with his little wooden steps, accepting gratuities. At once you were in the middle of town, for like most imperial frontier settlements Calgary was built around the railway station. It was very thin on the ground—just a huddle of dowdy buildings around the tracks, with the limitless prairie everywhere beyond—and even in 1927 it was still in Indian country. There were people alive who had signed Treaty No 7 with the local tribes, and the Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan and Sarcees, in their reservation down the Sarcee Trail, were still paid five dollars a head annually in Government stipend, ‘for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers run’. There was no suburbia to Calgary. There it stood, take it or leave it, with the prairie all around, the Indians down the road, and the railroad running on to the Rockies and the Pacific.
