Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  On the morrow through the city we sauntered, arm in arm.

  I strove to do the cicerone—my style was grand and calm.

  I showed him all the lions—but I noted with despair

  His smile, his drawl, his eyeglass and his supercilious air.

  As we strolled along that crowded street, where Fashion holds proud sway,

  He deigned to glance at everything, but not one word did say;

  I really thought he was impressed by its well-deserved renown,

  Till he drawled ‘Not bad—not bad at all—for a provincial town.’

  7

  The maverick patrician escaped all this: Lord Henry Paulet with his Salisbury sawmills, ‘Lord Have-One-More’ on the Klondike trail, or Sir Drummond Dunbar, the eighth baronet, whose home at this time was an uninviting shack in Johannesburg. So did the roving company of the imperial bums, those loiterers, beachcombers and scavengers who roamed the Empire from end to end, occasionally pretending to be Americans when the law was at their heels, but generally recognizably British. We meet them everywhere. The sweep of their indigence was marvellously wide, and the same rogue Briton might turn up in Queensland and Borneo, Egypt and Rhodesia, wherever the presence of the Empire gave him some nominal protection and privilege. In the Transvaal, where the protection was most nominal and the privilege non-existent, most of the Uitlanders were British, and a wild lot they were—‘wanglers’, wrote one contemporary observer,1 ‘workers of snaps’, ‘fixers-up’, Artful Dodgers and Slick Sams. ‘They bribed, they lied, they swindled. They lived at the best hotels and drank champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning. When not involved in some sordid financial intrigue, they spent their time making open and indecent love to the maids behind the bars set up at almost every corner.’

  In the Yukon that summer hundreds of such adventurers were stumbling over the high passes towards the Bonanza creek, many of them fresh from England, many others from Australia or the older goldfields of British Columbia, and hundreds more were wandering through the Outback or the High Veldt, surviving as often as not by grub-staking—pledging a share of any claim they pegged in return for supplies in the meantime. In India many old soldiers of the East India Company army, still drawing a pension of 1/- a day, wandered from job to job, barracks to barracks, often with half-caste wives. Here and there across the Empire we come across the trail of somebody who has deliberately turned his back on his own kind, an imperial renegade, a mystic. The original of Browning’s Waring became Prime Minister of New Zealand,1 but there were others who really did choose ‘land-travel or sea-faring, boots and chest or staff and script’, and wandered off to be Avatars in Vishnu-land. In a small kraal between King William Town and East London, in South Africa, a blind English lady lived at this time with the Kaffirs, who treated her with kindly courtesy: occasionally they took her into town to beg from the white people, but in the evening she always returned to the kraal, and shared her profits with her hosts. And sometimes the English children of Simla crept up the hill of Jakko, high above the town, to the temple of Hanuman the monkey-god: and there beneath a tree, alone among the monkeys, they would see a young Englishman dressed in the yellow robes of a sadhu, with a head-dress made of a leopard skin. He was Charles de Russet, son of a well-known local contractor, who had abandoned his family and his faith to become a disciple of the Jakko fakir. For two years he sat there, all alone. Sometimes an attendant came from the temple, to give him food: and sometimes the children, peering through the brush, would hear the old priest calling his monkey- children by name to their victuals—Ajao! Ajao!—and away they would bound, Raja and Kotwal and Budhee and Daroga, helter-skelter through the undergrowth, leaving the Englishman silent and solitary beneath his tree.1

  1 It was of Chaplin (1840–1923) that Lord Willoughby de Broke once said: ‘No one was half such a country gentleman as Henry Chaplin looked.’ In 1864 he had been jilted by Lady Florence Paget, who eloped and married the Marquis of Hastings: when Chaplin’s horse Hermit won the Derby at 66 to 1 three years later, Hastings lost £140,000 on the race. They lived imperially then.

  1 Commander, that is, of the Most Exalted Order of the Star of India. In 1967 there were, by my count, seventy-seven living members of this chivalric order, but there will be no more, for conferments ended with the Raj in 1947.

  1 He was William Hunter (1840–1900), who rose to eminence as administrator and historian, and was knighted. I cannot resist another apposite quotation from his letters home: ‘It is useless talking of the poverty of a country’s literature unless you do your best to encourage men of letters by buying their works. I have impressed this on my chum, Gribble.’

  1 Rundle (1856–1934) later became Governor of Malta, but his father might not have liked the Dictionary of National Biography’s estimate of his military genius: ‘He never took a risk, and was rewarded by never meeting a reverse.’

  2 This glorious adventurer was the son of Hercules Skinner, a Scottish soldier in India, by his Rajput mistress. He was apprenticed to a printer in Calcutta, but ran away and joined the Mahratta Army, transferring to the British flag in 1803. Skinner’s Horse was originally a body of deserters from the Mahratta forces, placed under Skinner’s command, but the title was later transferred to the 1st Bengal Cavalry and Skinner ended his days in respectable glory, Commander of the Bath and landlord of a large estate granted him by the Indian Government. The family have lived in India ever since.

  3 Anthony Mundella (1825–97) had been President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s last Government: he was a director of the New Zealand Loan Company, and when that company went into liquidation in doubtful circumstances, was forced to resign from office. Hooley was a financier with wide industrial and trading interests: when he went bankrupt it turned out that he habitually bought the names of eminent noblemen, to give respectability to his boards. Scandalous indeed.

  1 She had reason to look forlorn. The Prestons had already spent half a lifetime building railways in India, and they were never to go home for long. Preston died in Kenya in 1952.

  1 Young died in England, while watching a cricket match, soon after the First World War, and Lake Young, in the Chinsali district, has reverted to its old name of Shiwa Ngandu—The Home of the Crocodiles.

  1 They fortified her for half a century in the Outback. When she died in Adelaide in 1951, aged 90, she knew more about the Australian aborigines than anybody else, and her papers now form part of the Australian National Archives.

  1 Vere Stent, a journalist who accompanied Rhodes on his peace-making mission in the Matopos, and who described in Environs of the Golden City and Pretoria the impact of the Uitlanders upon the Biblical pastorialism of the Afrikaners.

  1 He was Alfred Domett (1811–87), who eventually retired to London with a C.M.G.—

  Oh, never star was lost here but it rose afar!

  1 De Russet, ‘the leopard fakir’, was still in Simla in the 1920s; by then he had apparently forgotten the English language, and lived in a temple below the town.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Imperialists in Particular

  Oft as the shades of evening fell,

  In the schoolboy days of old—

  The form work done, or the game played well,—

  Clanging aloft the old school bell

  Uttered its summons bold‚

  And a bright lad answered the roll-call clear

  ‘Adsum,—I’m here!’

  Heaven send, that when many a heart’s dismayed,

  In dark days yet in store,—

  Should foemen gather; or, faith betrayed,

  The country call for a strong man’s aid

  As she never called before,—

  A voice like his may make answer clear,

  Banishing panic and calming fear,

  ‘Adsum—I’m here!’

  A. Frewen Aylward

  13

  OF these assorted British Empire-builders, perhaps twenty million were scattered across the world, as settl
ers, administrators, merchants, soldiers. Yet it was an anonymous Empire. The British public could scarcely name one of its Governors. Laurier was the only Colonial Premier whose name they vaguely knew. Over the past half-century of unprecedented imperial expansion only a dozen heroes had arisen to command the public’s loyalty, and many of those were dead. The activists of Empire were remarkable men, but few, and no more than a handful of those alive in 1897, were famous at the time, or would be widely remembered after their deaths.

  2

  The age of the great explorers was almost over, but there still lived in England one or two of the giants. Sir Henry Stanley, deliverer of Livingstone, impresario of darkest Africa, namer of lakes and discoverer of mountains, was an inconspicuous Liberal-Unionist backbencher, whose election platform had been ‘the maintenance, the spread, the dignity, the usefulness of the British Empire’. He was 56, a bullet-headed man with a truculent mouth and a walrus moustache, broadly built and very hard of eye. Nobody in England had led a more extraordinary life. Born John Rowlands in Denbighshire, North Wales, he spent nine years of childhood in the St Asaph workhouse, his father dead, his mother uninterested, under the care of a savage schoolmaster who later went mad. He ran away, worked on a farm, in a haberdasher’s shop and a butcher’s, and in 1859 sailed as a cabin-boy from Liverpool to New Orleans. In America he was adopted by a kind cotton-broker, and took his name, only to be left on his own again when the elder Stanley died. A life of staggering adventure followed: war, on both sides of the American Civil War, in the Indian campaigns of the West, in the United States Navy; journalism, with Napier in Abyssinia, in Spain during the 1869 rising, in search of Livingstone for the New York Herald; African exploration of the most sensational kind; wealth, great fame, and the long slow struggle for recognition and respect in England. By the late nineties his fighting days were over, and he had become an eminent citizen of mild benevolence, reassuming British nationality, and marrying very respectably in Westminster Abbey. Though the British Empire had not yet recognized his services with a knighthood, he was at least loaded with honorary degrees, and Queen Victoria had herself commissioned a portrait of him, to hang in Windsor Castle. We hear nothing of him in the Jubilee celebrations, though we may assume he joined his fellow M.P.s to watch the procession go by: but it is enthralling to think of him there at all, with his memories of workhouse and celebrity, the colossal journeys into the heart of Africa, the meeting with Livingstone that was to go into the folk-lore, the expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, beleaguered by the Mahdi in the Sudan, which cost 5,000 human lives. Stanley’s journey across Africa in the 1870s had led directly to the ‘scramble for Africa’ which was the mainspring of the New Imperialism. He was the greatest adventurer of the age, an imperial monument in himself.1

  Edward Eyre was still alive, an imperial specimen of a different sort, whose name had been given to a large bump on the southern Australian shoreline, Eyre Peninsula. Eyre was a Yorkshireman who emigrated, aged 17, with £400 to Australia. He farmed for a time, served as a magistrate and ‘protector of aborigines’, and discovered a livestock route from New South Wales to the new settlements in South Australia. Then, in 1841, he set off on one of the most desperate of all exploratory journeys, from Adelaide around the Great Australian Bight to King George’s Sound in the extreme south-west. One white man and three native boys started with him, but presently two of the boys murdered the white overseer and absconded with most of the supplies. Eyre was left with a single aborigine, forty pounds of flour, some tea and some sugar, with five hundred miles of waterless desert behind him, and six hundred ahead. For eight weeks the two men laboured across that terrible slab of country. Often they were reduced to gathering the morning dew in a sponge and sucking it between the two of them: once the aborigine found a dead penguin on the beach, and ate it at a sitting. At Thistle Cove they were picked up by a French whaler, and rested for ten days on board, but Eyre insisted on finishing the journey, went ashore again, and after five months on the march stumbled at last into the settlement at King George’s Sound—soaked to the skin, after so many waterless weeks, by rainstorms. It was a perfectly useless adventure, as it turned out. Nothing was discovered, and nothing proved: but Eyre had made his name as one of the most intrepid of the imperial explorers.

  By 1897 he was unfortunately best known in England for other reasons. Eyre became Lieutenant-Governor of New Zealand, Governor of St Vincent, and finally Governor of Jamaica, and there, in 1865, he put down a Negro riot with unusually ferocious zeal, killing or executing more than six hundred people, flogging six hundred more, and burning down a thousand homes. He became a figure of violent controversy at home. Ruskin, Tennyson and Carlyle were among his supporters: John Stuart Mill and T. H. Huxley were members of a committee that secured his prosecution for murder. The Eyre Defence Committee called him ‘a good, humane and valiant man’. The Jamaica Committee, supported by a strong body of what Carlyle called ‘nigger-philanthropists’, hounded him for ten years with accusations of brutality. The legal charges were dismissed, and Eyre’s expenses were officially refunded, but he was never offered another post. In 1897 he was living in seclusion in a Devonshire manor house, a strange, always dignified and self-contained man. Through it all he had hardly bothered to defend himself—as though the sandy silence of the Outback had muffled his soul.1

  3

  There were only three British soldiers whose personalities had caught the fancy of the public. By the nature of things none had held command in a major war, against equal enemies: but they had all distinguished themselves in campaigns against black, brown or yellow men, and their fame was raised to theatrical heights by the new martial pride of the British.

  The first was Garnet Wolseley, Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, who had been fighting small wars, on and off, for forty-five years. He was Anglo-Irish, and loved a good fight. ‘All other pleasures pale’, he once wrote, ‘before the intense, the maddening delight of leading men into the midst of an enemy, or to the assault of some well-defended place’. The first business of any ambitious young officer, he thought, was to try and get himself killed, and this intent he himself pursued in the Burma War of 1852, the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, the China War of 1860, the American Civil War, the Canadian rebellion of 1869, the Ashanti War of 1873 and the Zulu War of 1879—in his first twenty-five years of Army life he tried to get himself killed in a war every three years. In 1882 his supreme moment came. Arabi Pasha rose in rebellion against the Egyptian Government. The British intervened, and in a brilliant brief action Wolseley, attacking Arabi from the Suez Canal, defeated him handsomely at Tel-el-Kebir, occupied Cairo, and established the British presence in Egypt. He was given a Government grant of £30,000, created Baron Wolseley of Cairo and Wolseley, and became a popular hero. It was Wolseley who was celebrated as ‘The Modern Major-General’ in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance, and in the slang of the day ‘All Sir Garnet’ meant ‘all correct’. Even his failure to reach Khartoum in time to rescue Gordon in 1884 did not cost him his public popularity, though it made him many enemies in the Army.

  Wolseley was the late Victorian soldier par excellence. Technically he was a reformer and something of a prophet. Temperamentally he was arrogant, snobbish, insensitive. Intellectually he was not only exceedingly methodical, but also deeply religious, with a sense of dedication never quite fulfilled. He relied on favourites in the Army, erecting around himself a ‘Wolseley Ring’ of officers who had served with him in old campaigns, and who came to dominate, in the absence of a General Staff, the conduct of the late Victorian colonial wars. Some military critics thought Wolseley a fraud, some believed him to be the only great commander of the day, who would in action in a great war, have proved himself a Marlborough or a Wellington. By 1897, at 64, he was a disillusioned man. He thought his luck had turned with his failure before Khartoum, and he was very conscious of his waning powers. Even his reforming zeal, once so virile and direct, seemed to have lost its bite, and jogging
along in the Jubilee procession we see his long melancholy face rather like the White Knight’s, a little flabby at the jowls—its moustache, its eyebrows, the shape of its eyes, the hang of its mouth, all drooping sadly with advancing age, beneath the plumed cocked hat of a Field-Marshal. He was Commander-in-Chief of the British Army, but not, as he was once said to have imagined himself, Duke of Khartoum.1

  The second soldier of the Empire was Field-Marshal Lord Roberts of Kandahar, Commander-in-Chief in Ireland and the most popular man in the British Army. Where Wolseley was daunting, Roberts was endearing. Where Wolseley pressed for change and efficiency, Roberts stood for the old traditions. Wolseley’s professional appeal was to experts, or to his own tight circle of intimates: Roberts was above all beloved of his private soldiers, who called him Bobs. Wolseley was tall and overbearing. Roberts was small, simple, sweet-natured. If Gilbert caustically honoured Wolseley with The Modern Major-General, Kipling serenaded Roberts with Bobs:

  There’s a little red-faced man,

  Which is Bobs,

  Rides the tallest ’orse ’e can—

  Our Bobs.

  If it bucks or kicks or rears,