by Jan Morris
On the Beach
IT was nearly over now. Future historians may well say the British Empire ended at Suez, for there it was finally made plain that the imperial potency was lost. In the 1960s it became clear to the staunchest of the British imperialists that their Empire was gone, and in a frame of mind more bewildered than resentful their leaders half-heartedly set out to find a new role in the world—as mediators between east and west, as Athenians to America’s Rome, as the ageing chatelaine of the increasingly skittish Commonwealth, or, as a last resort, as offshore islanders of a new Europe. Nostalgia set in, and while novelists and playwrights still made fun of the imperial blimps and postures, many other Englishmen looked back with a wistful if puzzled affection at the spectacle of their grandeur, fast dissolving into memory.
After Suez they never resisted again. They recognized the tide of history, and bowed to it—or more pertinently, perhaps, they remembered that politics was only the art of the possible. In January 1960 Harold Macmillan, the Conservative Prime Minister, set out on a tour of Africa. He was a man of the imperial age. The grandson of a Scottish crofter, the son-in-law of a Duke, the son of an American mother, he was a product of Eton, Balliol and the First World War, and for him the true Britain was still the Britain that had basked so expansively, so genially, in the flowered days of the Edwardian era. It was less than twenty years since he had represented the British Empire, in the last display of its power, as Minister of State in Cairo during the Second World War, or since, standing on the dais at Tunis while the Highlanders appeared over the crest of the road, he had believed the Empire to have the world at its feet.
He was a politician first, though; he had lived through the trauma of Suez to pick up the pieces of Eden’s policy afterwards: and in Cape Town in January 1960 it was he, the twenty-first Prime Minister of Great Britain since the accession of Queen Victoria, who formally recognized, as he might have recognized a new State or a new alliance, the end of the imperial idea. Ever since the end of the Roman Empire, he said, one of the most constant facts of political life in Europe had been the emergence of independent nations. ‘In the twentieth century, and especially since the end of the war, the processes which gave birth to the nation-States of Europe have been repeated all over the world. We have seen the awakening of a national consciousness in peoples who had lived for centuries in dependence upon some other Power.’
This was, Macmillan implied, something inevitable, something true. It was not the work of agitators or false prophets. It was, he said, in the last of all the truisms, euphemisms, hyperboles and obiter dicta that had enriched the vocabulary of imperialism, only the wind of change.
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Let us end the story gently, on a loyal note, for not everybody saw the Empire as wicked—people all over the world admired it still, for all its weaknesses and excesses, as a force for good, a kindly force despite it all, and a shield against those ‘scientific blackguards, conspirators, churls and fanatics’ whom Santayana foresaw as its supplanters. Even in the 1960s many a possession and dependency preferred to stay within the old fold, remote, dreamy, contented or simply ill-informed, governed still by English gentlemen, and visited sometimes by the spick-and-span frigates of the shrunken Royal Navy. By then Hong Kong, once among the least promising of British possessions, was as heavily populated as all the rest of the Empire put together, and the Colonial Office no longer existed: but Sir Ralph Grey was still Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas, £2,800 was the going salary for the Governor of the Falkland Islands, Mr Gribble was still the Government Printer of Fiji, and if you happened to be going to the Turks and Caicos Islands Geoffrey Guy the administrator there, though it is true his salary was only £2,150, would be sure to look after you.
These scattered settlements did not look much on the map, set beside the sweep of the imperial crimson not so long before, but still it was pleasant for the wandering Briton to stumble upon such half-forgotten relics and anachronisms, flotsam on the beach of history, still retaining some air of the imperial reassurance, some promise of relative good manners, some suggestion of punctuality or prospect of fish and chips. Let us then, having inspected so many fortresses of Empire, visited so many great cities, witnessed such scenes of splendour or of tragedy, end our own journey by dropping in upon some of the places which, while the world shifted all around them, seemed to be governed still by Victoria’s presence.
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Muscat was one such place, far away at the south-eastern tip of Arabia. It had never actually been an imperial possession, only an ill-defined protectorate, but by the 1960s nowhere was more redolent of the lost empire of the Raj. For a century and more the Sultans of Muscat and Oman had been feudatories of the Indian Empire. A treaty in 1891 had given British subjects (‘and their servants’) extra-territorial rights in Muscat, and gave Muscatis in return the right to enter with their vessels ‘all ports, creeks and rivers in the British Empire’, and to live, trade, travel, possess houses and shops in any imperial territory, except self-governing colonies.1 By 1903 the Sultan was swearing ‘eternal devotion and fidelity’ to Lord Curzon, beneath the awnings of HMS Hardinge in the harbour, and his son was appearing as a loyal feudatory at the Delhi Coronation Durbar for King Edward VII, taking with him a presentation model of a camel and a palm tree, fashioned in Muscati silver. Ever since then the Sultanate of Muscat and Oman had been a British ward—or puppet, if that was the way you saw it. It was subsidized by Britain, its foreign relations were controlled by Britain, and the British had deliberately kept it insulated there against foreign examples or predations, autocratically governed now by the Sultan Said bin Taimur, and supervised as always by the British Consul-General.
Here British India survived, and the ghost of Curzon still seemed to lean from the rail of the British India steamships, on their weekly visit to the capital. The ships indeed remained Muscat’s only public contact with the outside world. There was no civil airfield, and even the desert hinterland behind, linking Muscat proper with its southern dependency of Dhufar, had only recently been crossed from coast to coast by its first European.1 No nationalist party had yet arisen to disturb the equanimity of these arrangements—the only subversives were of a thoroughly traditional kind, fractious sheikhs and tribesmen of the interior who were, so to speak, essential to the genre. Sailing into the little capital of this almost unknown country really was like sailing back into the eastern Empire.
Two great fortresses, built by the Portuguese, stood sentinel over Muscat harbour, but they had no guns in them, and on the rocks above the anchorage the Royal Navy had, over many generations, left the graffiti of its supremacy in the Gulf. Scores of ships’ names were inscribed there, some faded, some fairly fresh, some of forgotten sloops and gunboats, Teazer or Surprise, one or two of old familiars like Hardinge herself. It was in this harbour, during the Napoleonic wars, that the British frigate Concord had captured the French Vigilante; Nelson came here as a midshipman on the Seahorse; here, during the Second World War, a Japanese submarine sank a British freighter, adroitly aiming its torpedo through a gap in the harbour rocks.
Once inside the anchorage, there was the long water-front of the capital’s twin towns, Muscat and Mattrah, gleaming white buildings in front, a jumble of suks, lanes and high-walled houses stretching away to the grey hills behind. Two flags flew bravely over this suggestive scene. Over the palace of the Sultan, gleaming and massive at the water’s edge, there flew the red flag of Muscat: but over the pleasant white residence of the British Consul-General, larger, grander and rather better laundered, there flew the Union Jack. It had an air of indolent arrogance, and the posture of the house itself, which stood at the end of the water-front, slightly separate from the town, was ineluctably prefectorial. ‘Unquestionably’, wrote the explorer Theodore Bent when he visited Muscat in 1895, ‘our own Political Agent may be said to be the ruler in Muscat’; Curzon observed that Percy Cox, the incumbent in 1903, virtually ran the place; and though the Agency had now been tac
tfully metamorphosed into a Consulate-Generalship, still the old house remained the source of ultimate decision in Muscat.
It was a lovely house—more than a house, for it had a compound in the truest Anglo-Indian manner, grouped around a gravel courtyard with a huge flagpole in it—upon which to that very day runaway slaves still sometimes threw themselves, to clasp it with their brawny arms and claim emancipation. There was a wide verandah flagged with stone, on which Englishmen in white ducks could still be observed being provided with long cool drinks by silent Indian servants, and there were old prints of Empire in all its corridors, portraits of former Agents, weapons from imperial skirmishes, carpets from the marts of India, relics of Lord Curzon’s visitation or souvenirs of naval occasions.1
Elsewhere in town, too, Englishmen were still living the imperial style. The Sultan had an English Wazir, who had formerly been in charge of the prisons of the Sudan, and was now one of the great men of Muscat. He lived in a magnificent old Arab house in the heart of the capital, and he appeared on ceremonial occasions in a long black Arab robe, wearing a beret and carrying a ciné-camera. The commander of the Sultan’s forces was an Englishman, and around the bay lived the English mercenary officers of his army. Many of them had gravitated into the Sultan’s service from the Indian Army, and had brought with them all the attitudes of Anglo-India, here in its last incarnation. Their messes smelt of metal polish, pipe tobacco, whisky and dogs. English magazines and soldierly books lay all about, there were fat cats and baskets of flowers, and one major in the Sultan’s employ, a former Royal Marine, had taught the mess servants to obey British boatswain’s calls, whistled between the teeth—‘Do you hear there? Do you hear there? Cooks to the galley! Hands to muster on the quarterdeck!’
It was all a quaint echo of lost times, and Muscat sheltered these late imperialists kindly. The Sultan preferred to live in the past too, for more than sentimental reasons, and he saw to it that his little capital changed as minimally as possible. This was hardly beneficial to the ordinary Muscatis, who were by now the most backward and deprived of all the Arabs, but it was certainly agreeable for the wandering Briton. How comforting, to withdraw through the harbour mouth into this little Shangri-La of sahib, sultan and respectful servant! How pleasant to find that here, if nowhere else, the Union Jack still commanded the deference of the natives! At night, as if to exclude the fantasy from the real world outside, a big gun was fired from the harbour fort, and the gates of the old city were slammed. Arab levies took their muskets to guard the exits, each gate being the responsibility of a particular tribe, and Muscat went to its beds in the old way—guarded at the gates, beneath the protection of the British Empire, to the lap of the peaceful sea. Perpetual curfew was the rule, and nobody might venture in those streets without a lantern, so that only an occasional flitting of robes, a twinkle of moving lights, the stir of the warriors at the walls, disturbed the shuttered silence of the town.1
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Mauritius was another relic. Here the British authority was more direct, for the island had been a Crown Colony since 1810, but it was no less easy-going. Mauritius had never much mattered to the Empire anyway. Ceded by the French after the Napoleonic wars, its only imperial purpose had been as a convenient and not too disagreeable place of exile—Boers, Jews and the Shah of Persia had all been sent there at one time or another. Very few Britons knew where Mauritius was, and it was famous in England only as the home of the Dodo, dodus ineptus, who had waddled his last long before the British arrived, and of the Mauritian 2d Blue, issued in 1847 to cover the expenses of a fancy-dress ball at Government House. Because there was a sizeable and cultivated French community there, few Britons were ever needed to run the island, and fewer still chose Mauritius for the making of their fortunes: only the top echelon of Government had ever been British, and even its members were regarded by the local French gentry with a certain condescension.
But it had been a happy enough association, and by the 1960s there was a fragrant, almost festive feel to the British presence on Mauritius. It might not be a very important appointment for a Governor or a Colonial Secretary, but it was very agreeable. The island was beautiful—Darwin described it as ‘elegantly constructed’, and it did possess a quality of graceful disorder that seemed almost contrived, like a landscape garden. Most of it was fine open country, such as the British always loved, with wide reaches of down and moorland, where deer roamed for the hunting, and small lakes lay darkly in the sunshine like Scottish tarns. Most of it was high, too, so that gusts of fresh winds often blew exuberantly off the sea, and the British could build their villas far above the sunburnt coast. Most of the Empire’s tropic islands were essentially ordinary, and the imperialist who had served in one often felt he had governed them all, but Mauritius was an endearingly odd place. Its fauna was odd—unique lizards and otherwise extinct birds—and until the seventeenth century no humans had lived on it at all. Also it had been periodically ravaged by hurricanes, so that all in all there was nothing very old on the island, no aboriginal artifacts or last descendants of forest dynasties, and a sense of inescapable transience gave to exile on the island an air of holiday.
Most of the population was Indian, and the British presence was unobtrusive. There was an old fort on a hill, looking rather Khyberesque, and an Anglican cathedral with a white spire, and a few mild emblems of Empire like red pillar boxes and statues of Queen Victoria or Sir John Pope-Hennessy. There was a Royal Navy communications base, and a pleasant Gymkhana Club popular among the Mauritian bourgeoisie. But Port Louis, the capital, still looked much more French than British, with its balconied Provençal houses behind walled gardens in bleached quiet lanes, and its high-collared savants dissecting rare reptiles in the Natural History Museum, or strolling towards that evening’s meeting of Le Cercle Littéraire. The exquisite little Théâtre Royal was in fact built by the British, but if you sneaked into the wings during a Saturday rehearsal, so resonantly did the French theatrical voices echo through the empty stalls, so determined was the talk of Sartre, Camus or Molière, that you might well think yourself back-stage in some Théâtre Municipal of Seine or Languedoc.
Even the Governor’s mansion, Le Réduit, was more French than British. It was perhaps the nicest of all the Empire’s Government Houses, but it had nothing in common with Dacca or Lagos, or even with Jamaica. It was built by the French as a refuge to which women and children could flee when pirates or Englishmen raided the Mauritian coast, and it still looked like a gentlemanly French country house. Governors’ wives loved it—it was so unpompous, so natural, so home-like—and visiting bigwigs from England, too, found it a pleasant change from the usual gubernatorial barracks. The British had set their stamp upon it, of course, but it was a tentative, gentle stamp, an imprint of croquet, charades and early morning tea. They had planted heaps of trees, and replanted them after successive hurricanes: they had laid tennis-courts, and built gardens, and enlarged the mirrored ballroom, and littered the terraces with comfortable seats.
Here the Governor and his lady pottered through their generally uneventful terms of office. They were left much to themselves, for generally speaking there was not a great deal to do—Governors of Mauritius had not usually been in the front rank of public servants, being men who deserved pleasurable late postings in an undemanding colony. The British had never been assimilated into Mauritian life, but there were always delightful French guests to enliven their dinner-parties, and nobody was going to be rude to them, or throw bottles at their cars, or accuse them of capitalist exploitation. The worst hazard, hurricanes apart, was nothing more perilous than a lecture on the superiority of French civilization from the president of the Historical Society.
It was not, one must admit, a very energetic colonial regime. Progress had been sluggish in matters like education, health, housing or political advance. On the other hand the usual excellent roads had been built, telegraphs and cables happened, new techniques of growing tea and sugar were introduced. Most visitors to
the island, in fact, remembered as vividly as anything the Mauritian Railway, a most beguiling little prodigy of Empire, which rambled all around the island puffing endearingly and frequently whistling, stopping at stations with names like Sans Souci or Circonstance, delicately pausing at the Governor’s private waiting-room outside Le Réduit, and faithfully taking to their offices each morning, behind the slatted windows of its khaki four-wheeled coaches, the sun-helmeted merchants and lawyers of Port Louis.1
If the regime was regarded patronizingly by educated Frenchmen of Mauritius, it was never actually unpopular. In both world wars Mauritians of all races had freely gone to war for the British Empire, and turned up unexpectedly on fighting fronts all over the world. The Empire had come, one day perhaps it would go, in the meantime it was there. Nobody fussed about it much. Above Port Louis there was a mountain, Pieter Both, upon whose spire-like summit there resided a large boulder, precariously balanced. It was an Old Mauritian Belief, so the guide-books and folklorists claimed, that so long as that boulder stayed in place, the British would rule the island. As the apes were to Gibraltar, that rock was to Mauritius. In most dependencies of the British Empire, by the 1960s, some patriot would have climbed up there and pushed it off, daubed all over with vituperative slogans. In Mauritius nobody cared, the boulder remained placidly upon its mountain-top, the savants talked regretfully about lost French supremacies in the Indian Ocean, and the croquet continued after tea on the lawn at Le Réduit.2
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Far, far away was British Honduras, on the steamy shore of Central America. Muscat remained imperial out of ignorance, Mauritius out of good nature, but British Honduras stayed within the Empire out of self-protection. For thirty years the neighbouring republic of Guatemala had laid claim to the place, even including the old colony on its own national maps, and contumaciously calling it the Province of Belice—and indeed the boundary was, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica had observed in 1898, ‘of a purely conventional character’, being an imaginary line drawn by surveyors through virtually untrodden jungle. The possession of British Honduras was scarcely vital to the welfare of Great Britain, but for good reasons nobody in the colony wanted to be annexed by the Guatemalans: so anomalously the flag still flew above the little capital of Belize, and the duty guards from the permanent British garrison, one of the very last in the Empire, stamped up and down outside Government House.
