Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  Oh‚ God will save her, fear you not:

  Be you the men you’ve been,

  Get you the sons your fathers got,

  And God will save the Queen.

  A. E. Housman

  16

  A WISTFUL satisfaction of Empire, it seems in retrospect, was the fulfilment of challenge and response. Much of the driving force of imperialism, as of Victorian progress in general, was the energy sparked by man’s struggle with his own environment, and to many of the imperialists the struggle was an end in itself. The notion of a perpetual striving was essential to the morality of the day. Darwin’s strictly biological ‘struggle for existence’ had been given metaphysical overtones by artists and philosophers from Carlyle to W. E. Henley, and now all the best didactic poets dwelt upon Man’s conflict with the inconceivable hostility of Time, or Nature, or Life—‘Say not the struggle naught availeth!’ ‘I am the captain of my fate’, ‘You’ll be a man, my son’—

  For men must work, and women must weep,

  And the sooner it’s over, the sooner to sleep;

  And good-bye to the bar and its moaning.

  A puritanical pleasure in hardship was often allied with a boyish delight in rip-roar, the two formidably combining to produce a breed of stoic adventurers, for whom the imperial mission was a larger embodiment of a personal challenge. These instincts were, of course, strongly reinforced by the training of the public schools, with their emphasis on spartan endurance, and we may assume that it was officers rather than men who enjoyed the possibility of sudden death in inaccessible ravines of the Karoo, that district commissioners relished the summer heat more often than expatriate engine-drivers, and that most of those who went gold-digging for the fun of it could afford to do without the gold anyway.

  2

  But one of the most enviable advantages of being born an Englishman in the later years of the nineteenth century was the range of adventure that was offered you. No need then for National Parks or synthetic wildernesses. Half the empty places of the world were a Briton’s for the seeking, and everywhere young Britons were roughing it, fighting it out, taking a chance or living wild, under the respectable aegis of imperialism. This was good for the spirit of the nation. The existence of the Empire opened a man’s horizons, offering him, if only through the vicarious medium of explorers’ narratives or the Boy’s Own Paper, a release from the daily humdrum; and for men in the field the imperial amalgam of duty, risk and fresh air could provide complete fulfilment. ‘I … have had a hard life but a happy one,’ wrote Robert Sandeman, an Indian administrator of celebrated dash, ‘in the feeling that I have helped men to lead a quiet and peaceful life in this glorious world of ours.’

  Quiet and peaceful are not the first adjectives that spring to mind in recalling the imperial adventure, for much of it was straightforward blood-and-thunder, and Sandeman’s own career had been full of knife-edge daring—‘Robert Sandeman!’ his Scottish dominie had said, ‘ye did little work at school, but I wish ye well. And I wadna be the Saracen of Baghdad or the Tartar of Samarkand that comes under the blow of your sabre.’ There was a folk-lore of violence in the British Empire. At Fort St George in Madras they proudly displayed, as a proper memento of the imperial service, a wooden cage in which an officer called Arbuthnot had been imprisoned by the Chinese during some forgotten adventure. He was a huge hairy man with a red beard, and he kept gold coins in his pocket to present to anyone he came across uglier than himself. This was the sort of hell-for-leather eccentric whose example was most cherished, and the memoirs of the imperialists often recall with dry affection really rich specimens of rascaldom or escapade, whether for or against the Empire. In Egypt, for example, young Thomas Russell soon developed a sort of malevolent understanding with the Bedouin cattle thieves of the desert, who often floated their quarry across the Nile by fixing inflatable goatskins to their bellies. In India the last of the Thugs, the hereditary fraternity of stranglers, were sometimes nostalgically visited (a Pass was Required) at the settlement established for their reform at Jubbulpore—the story of their suppression was one of the great thrillers of Empire, and a trip to Jubbulpore was like taking the children to the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud’s.

  In Ceylon they revered the memory of Major Thomas Rogers of Her Majesty’s Ceylon Rifle Regiment, who was supposed to have shot 600 elephants, and who found retribution in the end when he was killed by a stroke of lightning—his tombstone at Nuwara Eliya, too, was three times struck by lightning before it finally disappeared. (‘Lo these are parts of His ways‚’ said the memorial tablet in Kandy, ‘But the thunder of His power who can understand?’) Innumerable imperial anecdotes deliberately mix up the comic and the very dangerous, a piquancy always relished by the British. We hear often of the Indian stationmaster’s telegram down the line: ‘TIGER ON PLATFORM STOP STAFF FRIGHTENED STOP PRAY ARRANGE’, or its more sophisticated variant from upper Egypt, in which a man on a lonely Nile station was said to have cabled to Cairo: ‘POST SURROUNDED BY LIONS AND TIGERS’. Back went the reply from Cairo: ‘THERE ARE NO TIGERS IN AFRICA’, and back again went the Empire-builder’s simple ripost: ‘DELETE TIGERS’. Above Jamalpur a favourite tombstone wryly commemorated a Welsh imperialist, Gwilym Roberts, ‘who died from the effects of an encounter with a tiger near this place, AD 1864’.

  3

  For a century living dangerously, or alone, had been a way of life for a minority of the British people, to a degree that no other European nation could match, and this experience was by no means ended. There were still pirates to be intercepted in Chinese waters, slave-traders to capture in the Persian Gulf, Nandi tribesmen with poison arrows in East Africa—there was no antidote to the lethal paste they smeared on their arrow-heads, even injections of strychnine proving ineffective. Man-eating tigers had still to be tracked down, and when they built the Uganda Railway they not only had to cope with murderous lions but sometimes scooped the scorpions and ants in bucket-loads from their camp sites. In hundreds of African trading-posts, high up steamy malarial rivers, or all alone in the immense hinterland of Swaziland, with a hitching-post outside, a few sheep grazing, and a local chief tippling whisky surreptitiously behind the counter—in any such isolated store the traveller might find a perfectly familiar, down-to-earth Yorkshire shopkeeper running his business with an easy-going acumen, not ambitious for fortune nor particularly nostalgic for home, just treating life as it came. High in the hills at Mardan, on the north-west frontier of India, the men of the Queen’s Own Corps of Guides kept perpetual sentry-go on the most turbulent of border areas, their outposts hidden away in the arid hills, their patrols exchanging desultory rifle-fire with the intractable local tribes—a handful of Englishmen with their Sikh, Dogra and Pathan soldiers, perched on the edge of the Empire in permanent emergency.

  There were Englishmen commanding sealers that sailed for the ice out of St John’s, training elephants in the Burmese teak forests, dragging logs with ox-teams out of the Canadian backwoods, skirmishing with ungrateful primitives anywhere from the plains of Manitoba to the Irrawaddy basin. The world was a stranger place in those days, and the British often embarked upon these adventures marvellously wide-eyed and innocent. When a young adventurer called Matthew Morton, aged 20, decided to go out to Rhodesia in 1894, he asked at the Castle Steamship Company’s office in Glasgow how to get to Bulawayo. They told him he could probably take a cab there from Johannesburg, and off he trustfully went: but in the event the journey north from the Rand entailed five weeks in an ox-wagon and nineteen days walking with a pack-donkey. And this is how Charles Rudd, Rhodes’s agent in his original dealings with Lobengula, saw the great black king when he first reached his kraal in Bechuanaland: ‘He had his dinner brought to him while we were there, he went back into the wagon and they put a blanket over him and he lay down with his head and arms over the front box of the wagon, and a mass of meat, like the pieces they give to the lions at the Zoo, only as if it had been thrown into a big fire, was put before
him, and some kind of bread, he told the slave boy who brought the meat to him to turn it over, and then he began to tear off pieces with a kind of stick altogether very much like a wild beast.’

  The naïveté of the approach certainly added to the excitement—clearly Mr Rudd was venturing into new worlds—but the dangers were none the less real. The Empire was ornamented everywhere with memorials of sudden death. One of the most striking selections was displayed in the nave of St George’s Church at Madras, a virile sort of structure itself, in a wide ravaged churchyard like a recently fought-over battlefield. Here lay someone ‘cut off by the hand of an unknown assassin at Bellary’, and one who ‘fell by the hands of a band of fanatics’, and one killed in action ‘on the fortified heights of Arracon’, and one who died ‘from the effect of a coup de soleil, while gallantly leading his regiment at the storming of the fortress Chinkeang Foo’. At the battle of Ferozeshah died ‘the last of three brothers who fell for their country on the battlefields of Asia’. Several men were ‘lost at sea while on a voyage to Rangoon with the headquarters of their regiment on board the transport Lady Nugent’‚ one died of jungle fever ‘contracted during a few hours passed on the Yailegherry Hills’, and one simply suffered, saddest of all, ‘a premature and sudden dissolution in a distant clime’.

  All this, at the end of the Victorian century, was part of the British experience, and they were proud of it. Joseph Chamberlain approached his duties at the Colonial Office in a mood of pugnacious bravado—the Jubilee celebrations themselves, mounted with such pomp and panache in the face of a bitterly jealous Europe, were a snook cocked at the world. Imperialists abroad often behaved with similar gusto. When the coffee crop failed in Ceylon many of the British planters moved elsewhere, but many more gamely transferred the remains of their capital, their skills and their hopes to a crop that was altogether new to them—tea. When they found gold on the Rand Mr Thomas Sheffield, proprietor of the Eastern Star newspaper in Grahamstown, a thousand miles away, decided the profits would be greater up there. One day in 1889 he published issue number 2,042 of his paper, with the announcement that ‘with this issue the Eastern Star will cease to shine in the firmament in which its first rays were shed, and to move in the orbit which has been its daily round for the last 16 years. But it will rise again in another quarter of this South Africa of ours away to the north, where

  ‘There is gold to lay by, and gold to spend,

  Gold to give and gold to lend.’

  Next day he packed the entire equipment of the newspaper on the train to Kimberley, and thence conveyed it by laborious stages of ox-cart across the veldt to the infant Johannesburg. Seven weeks after his departure from Grahamstown, in his new premises on the Reef, Mr Sheffield published issue number 2,043.1

  4

  Into the mystique of every British settlement some particular old adventure had by now been absorbed, and had become familiar to every schoolchild. They mostly seem to have been heroic defeats, and this perhaps reflected the classical education of so many imperialists, conveying the British in spirit to Thermopylae, or to the bridgehead with Horatio—or perhaps in the Eternal Struggle brave failure was somehow more salutary than success. In Australia the origins of the colonies were, owing to a shortage of anything more inspiring, most famously commemorated in a dreadful picture of the discovery by two explorers, Burke and Wills, that a food cache they expected to find in the middle of the Outback was in fact empty, condemning them to another eight months of heroic nightmare. In Canada the picture on the schoolroom wall showed the death of Wolfe at Quebec, fragile and selfless upon the Plains of Abraham, with the army of his gallant enemy silent in the background. In Rhodesia the classic scene was Allan Wilson’s last stand against the Matabele—There Was No Survivor. In Natal the eighty men of Rorke’s Drift held out for ever against their 4,000 Zulu attackers, immortalized in scarlet and gunsmoke by the brush of Lady Butler. And in England the Spirit of Empire was perhaps most popularly symbolized by the vision of General Gordon, that Galahad or Gabriel of the later Victorians, standing guileless, unarmed, fresh-faced, almost radiant, at the head of the stairs in his palace at Khartoum, while the ferocious Mahdists in the hall below, brandishing their assegais, prepared to murder him. (There was, as a matter of fact, another version of the scene, which had Gordon on the landing blazing away with a revolver at the advancing savages: but it was the image of martyred British innocence that most people preferred.)

  5

  But there was to this great communal exploit, this epic dispersal of a people and its power, a poignant meaning, too. Not everybody died heroically, leading their men at Chinkeang Foo. The challenge of Empire must have seemed bitter enough to many a poor wife, condemned to unhealthy exile for most of her life, her children far away at school in England, her complexion slowly crumbling in sun and humidity, her one pitiful ambition a cottage with a bit of garden somewhere quiet in the West Country. At a time when Europeans could seldom bring themselves to mix socially with coloured people she must often have been terribly lonely: only five women were present when the White Rajah of Sarawak entertained the entire European community to dinner in 1887. Many a district officer, too, no doubt regretted his vocation as he opened his precious letters from home in the desolation of veldt or jungle. My mother’s writing! (as one of them wrote)

  ——my hide is tough,

  And the road of life has been somewhat rough.

  The fount of my tears, one would think, was dry,

  But it always brings a tear to my eye.

  Emigration, spirited and hopeful though it sounded, was often only the last resort of the unutterably dejected, for whom home seemed to offer no chances. ‘If crosses and tombs could be erected on the water,’ it was said of the transatlantic migrations of the Irish, ‘the whole route of the emigrant vessels … would long since have assumed the appearance of a crowded cemetery.’ Emigrants often ended up in doss-house or institution—there were generally at least a dozen destitute Britons in the Bombay workhouse—and all too often arrived in the colonies utterly ignorant of what to expect. A writer in the Oxford Survey of the British Empire, recording the case of a farm labourer who returned to England after a single Canadian winter because he found it too cold, commented severely: ‘Perhaps he had lacked, not through his own fault, that schooling in imperial geography which should be an integral part of imperial education.’

  The tropical climate was a terrible hazard, in the days when the mystery of malaria had not yet been solved, and the very science of tropical medicine had only just been born. The inescapable miseries of dysentery had a different wry nickname in each possession—Gippy Tummy, Poonaitis, Karachi trotters. Nervous disorders in India were called by the soldiers ‘the Doo-lally tap’, after a notorious transit camp at Deolalie, near Bombay, in which generations of Britons awaiting a ship home had found their nerves cracking under the strain of heat and boredom. West Africa had been killing or wrecking Britons for 300 years, and it is said that by 1897 there were 1½ million British graves in India. In 1880 the mortality rate among British troops there had been 24.85 per thousand, and an astonishing number of the most distinguished imperial soldiers died in their early thirties. ‘We’ve got cholera in the camp’, runs one of Kipling’s Anglo-Indian laments:

  Oh‚ strike your camp an’ go, the bugle’s callin’‚

  The Rains are fallin’—

  The dead are bushed an’ stoned to keep ’em safe below.

  The Band’s a-doin’ all she knows to cheer us;

  The Chaplain’s gone and prayed to Gawd to ’ear us—

  To ’ear us—

  O Lord‚ for it’s a-killin’ of us so!

  It was popularly supposed that cholera travelled about in a small invisible cloud of germs, two or three feet above the ground, and soldiers sometimes preferred to sleep on the floor, in the belief that the cloud would harmlessly over-fly them.

  ‘Two monsoons are the life of a man’, ran an old Anglo-Indian saying, and even Bryce, who w
as no alarmist, wrote: ‘The English race becomes so enfeebled in the second generation by living without respite in the Indian sun that it would probably die out, at least in the plains, in the third or fourth generation.’ The most familiar imperial epitaph was ‘Died At Sea On the Way Home’, and many a regimental roll contained more deaths from sickness than from enemy action. The big Indian trains carried coffins as a matter of course, in case any passenger succumbed en route from heat stroke or cholera; Murray’s Handbook is full of cautious advice about hygiene and infection—‘the traveller must bring food with him’, is the book’s dark advice on a visit to Bijapur, ‘as well as insect powder’. ‘Life at sea-level in Jamaica’, we are told, ‘is a deadly trial to the unacclimatized European’.

  Time and again whole families were destroyed by cholera and typhoid. Three little English children—Alice Daniell, 4; Lindsey Daniell, nearly 3; Georgina Daniell, nearly 2—lay beneath parallel slabs, each a different size, outside the English church at Pusselawa in the highlands of Ceylon. It was a haunting spot. The church was a little grey and whitewashed building, with a corrugated-iron roof, wire-netting windows, and dark-leafed tropical trees beside the gate to simulate the churchyard yews of home. There was a Hindu shrine in the next field, and on the other side of the church was the graveyard of the Christian Tamils, their epitaphs scrawled in indecipherable red paint that had sometimes dripped off the wooden crosses to the makeshift plinths below. Crows squawked in the trees above, cocks crowed from the hovels on the hillside, the gardener’s brush swished lazily in the sunshine, sometimes a shrill chatter of women’s voices rose suddenly from the village below, to end in laughter or angry squabble. The churchyard smelt of dust and scented foliage, the church of hassocks and candle-grease.