by Jan Morris
For Britain was the most envied and disliked of the great states. Her competitors were all too eager to abase her. To some percipient observers there was to the gathering of foreign notables in London that summer the faint first suggestion of jackals assembling. The Jubilee celebrations were specifically designed to keep them at bay, or send them ‘slouching homeward to their snow’. Britain was not finished yet, ran the message, and imperialism, properly exploited, could keep her indefinitely supreme. The British nations scattered around the globe, supported by all the manpower and minerals of the tropical Empire, would one day constitute a super-Power to dwarf all opposition. Before the end of the twentieth century, the economist David A. Wells forecast, the population of Australia alone would number about 190 million, if the present rate of increase were maintained. In the meantime vigorous expansion would be the rule. If there were territories waiting to be annexed, Britain must annex them, or other nations would. Glory was more than a luxury, or even a satisfaction. It was a national need.
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And there was one more stimulus to splendour: patriotism, kind and guileless—not arrogant, vicious or greedy, not Jingoism, but simply love of country, like love of family, or love of home, in an age when soldiers unquestioningly fought for their country right or wrong, because they did not think it could be wrong, and there breathed few men who ne’er had said this was their own, their native land. The British were among the most patriotic people of all. They were immensely proud of their country, trusted it, and believed it to be a force for good in the world. The stronger England was, the safer and sounder the world would be. If there were peoples who opposed her dominion, they were probably led by wicked men, or knew no better.
1 Himself a working imperialist—editor of the Johannesburg Star, soldier in the Boer War, Nile traveller and biographer of Disraeli. He died in 1912.
2 Carnarvon (1831–90) was twice Colonial Secretary, and once Lord Lieutenant of Ireland: he introduced the British North America Act which established the Dominion of Canada, was an early proponent of South African federation, and edited Dean Mansel’s Gnostic Heresies of the First and Second Centuries.
1 The song was made famous, at a time of tense Russophobia, by ‘The Great Macdermott’—G. H. Macdermott (1845–1901), a former Royal Navy rating who was for twenty years a lion of the London music-halls. Hunt himself, a painter as well as a popular composer and lyric-writer, died in 1904, of softening of the brain, in Essex County Asylum.
1 Like his father James, the historian of India, the philosopher-politician John Stuart Mill was an employee in London of the East India Company, and it was he who, in 1856, drew up the Company’s petition to Parliament protesting against its own dissolution. The petition failed, and Mill accordingly retired in 1858 with an annual pension of £1,500.
1 The incomparable David Livingstone (1813–73) had in fact broken with his original African sponsors, the London Missionary Society, because they thought he spent too much time exploring. By the 1890s most of the country he explored had been annexed by the British Empire. Chitambo, where he died, was now in Rhodesia, and he was buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey.
1 At 38 Curzon had already travelled widely, written three important books about Eastern affairs, married the daughter of an American millionaire and served as Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the India and Foreign Offices. In the following year he became the most dazzling of India’s Viceroys, only to resign in 1905 after bitter differences with the India Office at home. He returned to public life in the First World War, became Foreign Secretary in 1919, and died in 1925 after a career full of irony and vicissitude.
1 He became, as Russell Pasha, perhaps the most successful of Anglo-Egyptians, and sixty years later his structure of internal security was still the basis of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s régime. Russell’s last task in Egypt was to prepare, from his hospital bed, a report on the burning of Cairo in 1952, and he died in London two years later.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Caste
It is with nations as with men—
One must be first, we are the mightiest‚
The heirs of Rome.
John Davidson
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IN Murray’s Handbook to India, the Baedeker of the Raj, the separateness of the British cantonments was vividly demonstrated. The maps in that indispensable guide were beautifully produced, and delineated in three or four colours the detachment of the British from their subjects. There in the centre of ‘Agra And Environs’ is the red splodge of the Indian city, shapeless, solid, raggety at the edges, relieved only by suggestions of stinking back streets. Hygienically to the south of it, separated by a patch of green and linked to it by Hastings Road as by a causeway, is the neat enclave of the cantonment, with its churches, its Government Gardens, its High Bungalow, its banks, its Government Slaughter House and its Metcalfe Testimonial—the usual buildings, as the guide says, of a British station, with a club the traveller really ought to join, ‘if he knows a member to introduce him’. Just the look of it on the map suggests the absolute self-sufficiency of the cantonment. It was a world apart. The memsahib and her children need never visit the old city from one furlough to the next, and in the green expanse of the Government Gardens, or on the hopefully sprinkled lawns of the club, a stray native of the country must have felt horribly out of place.
There were down-to-earth reasons why a British garrison, or a British community, should not live in the heart of a tropical town. Plagues and tropical diseases were little understood, women and children were less self-reliant then, the most broad-minded of colonels would hardly wish his soldiers to associate too easily with the bazaar whores. But the detachment of the cantonments had a deeper meaning, for whatever the motives that sent the British out of their islands, a deep instinct kept them perpetually apart from their subjects of other races. The great ideal of Roman citizenship was only half-heartedly approached by the British. In theory every subject of the Queen, whatever his colour or skull formation, enjoyed equality of opportunity, and fifty years before Lord Palmerston, springing to the defence of Don Pacifico, a Greek merchant of Portuguese Jewish origin but British nationality, had almost plunged Europe into war. There was nothing to stop an African or an Indian going to Britain and becoming a bishop, a peer of the realm or Prime Minister.1 In practice, however, it was a racialist Empire—what was Empire, Lord Rosebery had once rhetorically asked, but the predominance of race?2 Awkwardly lying between the lines of the Jubilee manifestos, with all their warmth of family feeling, were ineradicable instincts of racial superiority, inherited perhaps from the slave-masters of the earliest English colonies, and fortified in Victoria’s day by pseudo-scientific theory and fuzzy-wuzzy wars. ‘An anthropological museum’, is how the Daily Mail‚ during an unguarded gap in the lyricism, described the colonial procession of the Jubilee, and this is how its star reporter Steevens, a scholar of Balliol, once responded to the Lascar seamen on board a British liner: ‘They are a specimen of the raw material. Their very ugliness and stupidity furnish just the point. It is because there are people like this in the world that there is an Imperial Britain. This sort of creature has to be ruled, so we rule him, for his good and our own.’
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The joke that ‘niggers began at Calais’ was not entirely a joke. Cloudy conceptions of Race and Heritage coloured the outlook of the British the moment they crossed the Straits of Dover, and, coupled with the confidence bred by the period of splendid isolation, made the average Briton feel a different being even from his contemporaries across the Channel There were few foreign-born citizens in Britain then: the nation was homogeneous, and though people of intellectual tastes no doubt felt as close to Europe as they do now, the British were generally contemptuous of foreign things. Their prejudices had been compounded by the rise and fall of the Aesthetic Movement, that outrageously talented renaissance of art and literature, led by Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, which had drawn its inspiration so freely from France, and had collaps
ed with such ignominy when Wilde was imprisoned for homosexual behaviour in 1895. ‘In my opinion’, wrote Admiral Sir John Fisher to his wife, looking across the celestial lake from his hotel in Geneva that same year, ‘it’s a very second-class place. It doesn’t compare with Portsmouth for shops, nor is there any view equal to the sunset at Portsmouth, looking up at the old hulks up the harbour. I will never come abroad again.’ In its Jubilee issue Punch offered a Conversation Book—‘Some Idiosyncratic Questions and Probable Answers’—for foreign visitors to the celebrations, and offered the following sketch of a foreigner visiting a cabman’s shelter.
‘Good afternoon. I hope I do not disturb you, Sir, but I have been waiting here two (three, or four) hours. Could you tell me if there is a likelihood of your being discharged today? I trust you will not charge by the hour for the time I have been standing here?’ ‘Look ’ere, Jim, ’ere’s a blooming furriner expecs me to put ’im dahn on my waitin’ list for nothing! Go ’ome and eat coke!’
Go ’ome and eat coke! The lesser breeds were not all coloured, and the racialism of the British was tinged with many shades of superiority—social, material, moral. ‘Cheek!’ scribbled Chamberlain in the margin, when a dispatch from the Niger told him of a French territorial claim in Africa, and Thomas Cook, the travel agent, once expressed a severe opinion of the Can-Can—not as a tourist spectacle, which Heaven forbid, but as a French national phenomenon. It was, he said, performed with ‘an unnatural and forced abandon’.
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But to be coloured was something else. Admiral Fisher himself, however orthodox his opinions on Abroad, was sometimes looked on with suspicion because of his mandarin face, with its high Mongolian cheekbones and Gobi eyes—rumour suggested he had a Sinhalese mother.
The British had not always been quite so colour-conscious. In the early days of the East India Company social intercourse between white men and brown had been easy and respectful, and imperialists of the nineties must have viewed with mixed feelings a splendid picture that still hung prominently in Fort St George at Madras: attributed to Chinnery, it showed the plump adventurer Stringer Lawrence,1 who went to India in 1748, amicably walking with the Nawab of the Carnatic like a pair of poets on a picnic—the Englishman florid and thick-set, the Indian marvellously shining with jewels, and the two of them promenading side by side across the canvas in a kind of springy minuet. It was not the association of the two men that must have struck a jarring note—there were many friendships still between Britons and Indian princes. It was the picture’s suggestion that here was a meeting between absolute equals, each representing a great and attractive civilization, consorting to music in the sunshine.
In those days, when Englishmen went out to the tropics alone, concubinage was one of life’s solaces. Most Englishmen in India took mistresses, and thus got close to the life and feelings of Indian people in a way that their successors seldom could. An entire race of Eurasians had been brought into existence by these practices, forming a social and vocational stratum of their own. Elsewhere in the Empire, too, earlier generations of imperialists had happily miscegenated. There was Scottish blood in the métis‚ the half-caste Indians of Manitoba who had rebelled against the British in 1870, and cross-bred aboriginals were found wherever the white men camped in Australia. In Burma there were commonly legal marriages between British and Burmese, while the white Rajah of Sarawak, Charles Brooke,1 had publicly suggested that the best population for the development of tropical countries would be a cross-breed of European and Asiatic: for his subordinates he preferred compliant local mistresses to burdensome European wives, and he believed physical intercourse to be much the best way of preserving the Empire.2
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By the nineties the attitude had hardened. For one thing, there were far more Englishwomen in the tropical Empire. The steamship had seen to that, and the Empire-builder now found himself confined far more closely within the cocoon of cantonment and family life. Baron von Hübner, remarking upon the higher moral tone of Anglo-Indian life in the later years of the century, wrote: ‘It is the Englishwoman, courageous, devoted, well-educated, well-trained—the Christian, the guardian angel of the domestic hearth—who by her magic wand has brought this wholesome transformation.’ John Ferguson, a well-known British journalist in Ceylon, agreed with him, and wished it had happened sooner. ‘I am convinced that the presence of his sister would have saved many a young fellow, in the pioneering days of the tropics, from drink and ruin’—‘ruin’ habitually meaning, in these austere imperial contexts, intercourse with natives. In the multiracial Empire the white woman now occupied rather the same semi-divine status she had enjoyed in the slave states of the American South—the centre and circumference, as a Georgia toastmaster once put it, diameter and periphery, tangent and secant of all affections. Newly emancipated herself, she took to India or Africa or the South Seas her own frilled and comfortable culture, patting the cushions as the muezzin called in the twilight, and receiving once a week. Fresh and fragile, pink and white, innocent by convention and inviolable by repute, among the dark skins of the subject peoples she must have seemed exquisitely distinct. To those subjects she remained, for the most part, benevolent but aloof; as one memsahib of the nineties wrote, ‘It is best to treat them all as children who know no better, but … they are proud of their lies and the innate goodness of the Empire is not understood by them’. The Englishwoman wove a white web around her menfolk; and though there were still unrepentant reprobates to steal down to the bazaars, or lie in another sweet bosom on the scented shore, still she did drive a wedge between ruler and ruled, breaking the physical contact, and hurrying the Briton home along Hastings Road for his bridge. Englishmen evidently preferred their women white, anyway: in Calcutta, Mandalay, Hong Kong and Rangoon, as along Pioneer Street in Salisbury, European prostitutes thrived (though they were very seldom British).
The Indian Mutiny, too, had tainted British attitudes towards coloured people. It had occurred in 1857, and was one of the few imperial events which had gone into the English folk-myth, on a par with the marriages of Henry VIII, say, or the murder of the princes in the Tower. It was a favourite horror story. The British saw it in terms of cowering white ladies in fetid cellars; goggle-eyed Indians, half blood-mad, half lustful, creeping unawares upon sweet English children in lace pantaloons; the massacre of innocent hostages, ambushes, orgies, treachery. Since the Mutiny British Government in India had lost much of its old humanity, that comradely ease of Stringer Lawrence with the Nawab. The British had never felt quite the same again about the coloured peoples, and all over the Empire a multitude of memorials stoked the bitterness—like the terrible monument in St James’s Church, Delhi, which recorded the deaths of a deputy collector of the city, his wife, his mother, his brother, his mother-in-law, three brothers-in-law, five sisters-in-law, eight nephews, three nieces and three grandchildren, all killed in the Mutiny.
The British had put down the rising with an uncharacteristic savagery. ‘The first ten of the prisoners were lashed to the guns‚’ wrote an eyewitness of the punishment parade of the 55th Native Infantry, ‘the artillery officer waved his sword, you heard the roar of the guns, and above the smoke you saw legs, arms and heads flying in all directions. Since that time we have had an execution parade once or twice a week, and such is the force of habit we now think little of them.’ The British colonel of the 55th shot himself, so aghast was he at the disloyalty of his own soldiers; and something sour went into the Empire. In England those who believed the East could be westernized, that a man was a man for a’ that, were disillusioned. In India the Government recoiled into a new correctness, and the merchants and planters developed a new arrogance. G. O. Trevelyan, travelling there soon after the Mutiny, met no European, outside the Government, ‘who would not consider the sentiment that we hold India for the benefit of the inhabitants of India a loathsome un-English piece of cant’. Dilke, at about the same time, reported that a common notice in Indian hotels read: ‘Gentlemen are r
equested not to strike the servants,’1 and forty years later British soldiers fresh to India were warned by the old hands not to hit natives in the face, where the bruises would show.
Another cause of racialism was fundamentalist religion, with its shibboleths about hewers of wood and drawers of water—those allegedly divine proscriptions, those appeals to the pedigrees of Ham and Shem, which were so often propagated by missionaries, and which had such effect in the days when the Bible was taken literally by people of all classes. Darwinian ideas, too, while they seemed to show that every word of Genesis need not be taken as simple fact, at the same time convinced many people that the blacker a skin looked, the nearer it was to sin and savagery: ape or angel, is how Disraeli interpreted the alternatives of human origin, and it seemed only common sense that a Negro was more a gorilla than a Gabriel. Besides, in the past couple of decades so many horrors had come out of Africa: the human sacrifices of Benin, the death of Gordon, the Matabele atrocities, the slaughter or mutilation of an Italian army at Adowa, in Ethiopia, only a year before. Black men, it seemed, were only debatably human—and most of the Negroes seen in England had either been slaves or freaks. In the eighteenth century there are said to have been 14,000 African slaves in the British Isles, many of them later shipped to the settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone: and elderly Londoners still remembered the two Bushmen from South Africa who were publicly displayed in 1853, often in partnership with Professor Sinclair (The Wizard of All Wizards)—they were said to have no language of their own, to subsist upon insects and plants in underground burrows, and to have eyes which were both microscopic and telescopic.
