by Jan Morris
It was a paradox of Empire that the British, the most pragmatic of peoples, should have best expressed themselves architecturally in planned townscapes—in groups rather than individual buildings, skylines rather than façades. This was partly because sites were generally virgin, and partly because soldiers so often laid out settlements, and partly because in their overseas possessions the British allowed themselves to be more formal and methodical than they often were at home. There were no sentimental yearnings for the crooked way, the rolling way. Right angles were de rigueur in the imperial towns, streets were often numerically named: many cities, like Adelaide, were built to a grid. Streets were often immensely wide, to allow ox-trains to turn in them, and the setting of spire against dome, tree against clock tower, was often arranged with methodical finesse. Foreigners were frequently struck by what seemed to them an uncharacteristic logic of design: von Hübner, surveying the straight broad streets of Australia, concluded that the young Englishmen of the colonies ‘lean to the American’. Certainly the cities which the British had summoned into existence across the world were notable for a spaciousness, an airiness, that suggested boundless promise—as though the colonial planners foresaw from the very start their couple of shacks and a lean-to shop transformed into a metropolis.
Melbourne, for example, had been founded only sixty years before, when a Mr John Batman signed a land agreement with the aboriginal chiefs of the area—the three brothers Jagajaga, together with Cooloolock, Bungarie, Yanyan, Moowhip and Mommarmalar. No Colonel Light stepped in, to enlighten its origins with green belts and zoning, but it had already become a city of consequence, gilded with the profits of sheep-range and gold-rush. It was built to a grid, regardless of the shape of the ground. Each main street was flanked by a lesser access road, so that Lonsdale Street had its Little Lonsdale Street in parallel, Bourke Street its Little Bourke Street, Flinders Street its Flinders Lane. The business houses had their front doors on a big street, their back doors on a small, and suavely among them proceeded the supreme Australian thoroughfare, Collins Street, already claiming itself to be the finest street in the southern hemisphere (to every other Melbourne Street, Miss Clara Aspinall had written in the 1850s, ‘there is an American, go-ahead spirit, very objectionable to the well-regulated minds of our sex’). There were no squares or crescents: the centre of the city was rigidly geometrical, partly because it made land sales easier, and it was in the suburbs that the individualism of Australia found expression. These were very British. Carlton was frankly modelled on Bloomsbury, and when they established their first seaside suburb the Australians naturally called it Brighton. Street after street the villas extended, each in its garden, across the Yarra River and down to the sea; rich and showy houses, often delightfully touched up with decorative cast-iron, with ballrooms and nurseries, fern houses and coach houses, stucco decorations everywhere and stained glass on the landing. From these elegant and commodious retreats, as the panegyrists used to say, furnished in the costliest taste of four-poster and mahogany, such magnates as had escaped the bank crash of 1893 drove into town along broad tree-shaded boulevards, out of rus into urbs, to their flamboyant offices on Chancery Place, to lamb chops at the Melbourne Club, or simply to perform the social ritual known as ‘doing the Block’—strolling up and down the north side of Collins Street, fetching up at last at Gunsler’s Vienna Café, where everybody went.
English visitors might scoff at such a city (‘isn’t it a little far from Town?’), and Melbourne citizens of cosmopolitan pretensions habitually disparaged it, too. But these great cities of the white colonies—Melbourne, Sydney, Toronto, Durban—were already much finer places than the industrial cities of the English provinces. They were handsome towns: not subtly handsome, but boldly so. In the detail they often slavishly copied English patterns, but in the whole they had a freshness all their own, as though their builders had torn Birmingham or Manchester breezily apart, and begun all over again.
Give me old Melbourne and give me my girl,
And I will be simply all right,
Does anyone know of a better old place,
Than Bourke Street on Saturday night?
6
The British, who generally neglected their waterfronts at home, or blocked them all off with high-walled docks, used them rather better abroad. They created no Golden Horns, it is true, and wasted a few such marvellous sites as Wellington or Vancouver, but one did not easily forget the harbour-front at Hong Kong, the formal splendour of Empress Place in Singapore, or St John’s in Newfoundland, with its tumble of wooden houses secreted behind the Narrows. Sometimes the imperialists even set out to give gaiety to their waterfronts. Almost the first thing they created at Aden was a forlorn and blistered Esplanade, facing Front Bay. Sydney Harbour was flanked with little villas, perched Riviera-like high and low along its banks, and the seafront at Durban, where the Zulu rickshaw boys waited outside the hotels with bells on their ankles and feathers in their rickshaw wheels, was already one of the brightest of Victorian water-places. As for the esplanade at Colombo in Ceylon, that isle of imperial delights, it was almost Breton in its seaside elegance, and only seemed to be awaiting Proust’s young ladies, to flounce along the boardwalk with their bikes and parasols. At one end stood the swanky Galle Face hotel, with its gay sunblinds and majestic hall porters; at the other the British Army barracks were built in sunny enfilade, like expensive hotels themselves; facing the sea was the oval-shaped Colombo Club, white, shuttered and Members Only; between them all stretched a huge seaside lawn, beautifully maintained by the Municipality, with white rails like a race-course all around it, and Dufy ships sailing brightly by beyond the seawall.
And at Madras, beyond the Coromandel surf, the British erected the best of all their city skylines, a romantic extravaganza comparable to that Whitehall view from the little bridge in St James’s Park. In London the oriental elaboration seemed gloriously alien: in Madras, the oldest British city of the Raj, exotic flourishes seemed only proper. The skyline was like a cross between the Kremlin, a story-book Damascus and St Pancras railway station. Its buildings were, in fact, quite widely separated, and various in their styles, and seen close to resolved themselves into huge warrens of courthouses and Government offices, all arched and vaulted, with sunshine and rain pouring alternately down open staircases, and immense piles of documents glimpsed beneath portraits of old Governors and judges through barred unglazed windows. When seen from a distance, though, through the haze of the Carnatic noonday as your ship approached the anchorage, something ethereal happened to those structures: their walls were lost in the bustle of the city, and only their bulbous roofs and towers seemed to float above Madras, insubstantial against the blur, portly for Victoria and domed for the East.
7
‘The Maharajah gave the order and Yakub Sahib made the garden.’ In every city the sahibs softened their architecture with gardens, and of all expressions of the imperial taste, the gardens were the most satisfactory. The English predilection for the paradise garden, nature unobtrusively coaxed into order, was richly encouraged in the tropics, where the imperial gardeners found plants readier than anything at home to intertwine and luxuriate in the profusion they preferred. This was a ruling race with green fingers. The great gardens of the British Empire were mostly botanical gardens created for scientific purposes, but they were never mere open-air laboratories, while around their own houses, and in their public parks, the British lovingly grafted imperial cuttings to the root of English landscape art.
The best of the imperial gardens had an air of exuberance, as though their creators have been given carte blanche. The two famous botanical gardens of Ceylon, for instance, felt like English gardens magically released from the restraints of English taste and climate. Peradeniya, outside Kandy, was done to a Blenheim scale: the river Mahawali-ganga almost surrounded it, giving it a theatrical unity, and everything about it was lavish—royal palms, vast clumps of bamboo, greenhouses and wicker arbours veiled in creeper,
an eerie grotto of an orchid house, flower gardens dramatically laid out, colour by colour in big bright slabs. Its high-altitude subsidiary, Hakgalla, was its antithesis. It stood secluded in the mountains beyond Nuriya Eliya, a favourite object of Grand Hotel excursions, and it was like an English garden in a dream, blurred and suggestive. Peradeniya was best seen on the evening of a sunny day, when the shadow gave depth to its grand manner, and threw the silhouettes of its palms nobly across the green. Hakgalla excelled in a Scotch mist in early morning, when its maze of little paths, thickets and hollows opened unexpectedly one after another through the haze. It was only just short of a wild garden, its foliage exquisitely checked on the brink of anarchy, and it was dominated by ferns—damp and lacy ground ferns, tangled rock ferns, and the beautiful tree ferns peculiar to Ceylon, whose leaves formed a high caparison, and dripped their rain-drops all around the edge.
The British had never stopped creating botanical gardens—those on the island of Dominica, in the West Indies, though already a superlative collection of tropical plants, had been founded only in 1891. The gardens at Sydney, which meandered delectably along the shores of the harbour, predated the city itself, for on the same site had been planted the flowers and vegetables brought out with the First Fleet of convicts in 1788: but the senior imperial gardens of all lay on the banks of the Hooghly at Calcutta, removed from the city’s clutter on the other side of the river. Behind them passed the Grand Trunk Road, on the first stage of its march across India, and over their walls the masts and upperworks of ships could be seen, silently moving up and down the river. Into this retreat the British had brought tropical specimens from every part of the world—mahogany and Cuban palms, mangoes, plantains, giant South American creepers, tamarinds and casuarinas: and Bishop Heber wrote of the Calcutta botanical gardens that they would ‘perfectly answer to Milton’s idea of Paradise, if they were on a hill instead of a dead flat’.
The British had a genius for parks, and in the end perhaps it would be for these noble urban expanses, preserved with such a sense of scale and human values, that their Empire would longest be thanked. There was something very superior to the imperial parks. They seemed to announce a grand disregard of petty side-issues, like land values, or property rights, and at the same time a mastery of nature apparently so complete that their designers could afford to relax their discipline, and let things run a little wild within the stockade of the surrounding city. King’s Park at Perth, indeed, was simply a slab of native bush, fenced about above the harbour and preserved for ever as the aborigines had known it: while Phoenix Park in Dublin, though it contained a zoo, a race-course and several official residences, was so vast—1,750 acres—that it was virtually open country, its paths highways and its mansions country houses. The Maidan at Calcutta was just the opposite: in the centre of a tumultuous oriental metropolis (for by the 1890s the City of Palaces was scarcely recognizable) a huge ordered pleasure-garden, scrupulously British, with tennis courts, golflinks, bicycle tracks, cricket pitches, riding roads, innumerable statues of generals and administrators, and down at the river’s edge an ornamental pagoda, a substantial piece of loot from Burma.
The Maidan was originally no more than a clear field of fire for Fort William, but sometimes the creation of such a park showed astonishing self-denial. Nobody doubted that Vancouver, incorporated as a city in 1886, would one day be among the chief ports of the Americas. It was founded as the western terminus of the C.P.R., and was already booming. Yet in a particularly covetable part of the city area, beside the narrows which formed the harbour entrance, the city fathers established a park. It was to become, so many travellers thought, the most beautiful park in the whole world, half savage, half domestic, with water on three sides of it and the soft Pacific winds ruffling its trees—a damp west coast park, where the moisture steamed out of the tree-bark when the sun came out, and sometimes even the morning birds were to be seen preening their feathers in a haze of vapour. The great port grew all around it, but never encroached, and sentinel for ever at its gate stood the Queen’s Governor-General of the day, Lord Stanley, with the inscription upon his plinth: ‘To the use and enjoyment of people of all colours, creeds and customs for all time, I name thee Stanley Park.’1
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The garden instinct of the English did not always survive migration. The private houses of the simpler Australians and Canadians notably lacked greeneries—not just because of the climate, for public gardens thrived, but perhaps because life was too near the soil already, without bothering about herbaceous borders. The Briton fresh from Britain, though, as soon as he moved into a new bungalow, or set down the family baggage on a new small-holding, almost always got hold of some seeds or cuttings to make himself a garden. The gardens of Government Houses were often the only consolations for restless Governor’s ladies, and tea among the orchids on the buffalo-grass lawn was an imperial institution—the wildest dreams of Kew were the facts of Katmandu. Sir George Grey, the man the aborigines so loved, created a remarkable garden on the island of Kawau, in the Hauraki Gulf, north of Auckland. He built a house of concrete there, stocked it with a good library, and surrounded it with exotic foliage. He brought oaks from California, Norfolk Island pines, Chinese willows, pines from Tenerife, fibrous plants from Chile and Peru, silver trees from South Africa, camphor trees from Malaya—and all through the shrubberies, to be glimpsed by the studious statesman from his library windows, ostriches and white-ringed Chinese pheasants stalked, and kangaroos queerly lolloped.
Most expatriate Britons, counting the months to home leave, had garden aspirations of a different kind. Love of their own country was very strong among this people; nostalgia and homesickness were among their weaknesses. It was roses these transient imperialists pined for, stocks and honeysuckle, lavender hedges and spring daffodils. Up their little gardens sprang, hopeful around each bungalow, and there were rose-petals in bowls in the sitting-room, and nodding wallflowers beside the compound gate. With luck, when the Empire-builder moved elsewhere, or went home for good at last, his successor loved the garden in his turn, so that it proliferated down the generations, and was immortalized in scrapbooks. If not it very soon languished. The weeds of the country started up triumphantly, tangled trees overcame the flower-beds, and presently all that was left in souvenir was a bramble of English roses gone wild in the undergrowth, their scent forgotten and their colours faded.
1 Though Sir Osbert Sitwell once suggested that a British Empire style might ‘lie dormant’ in the Brighton Pavilion.
1 ‘Many men erected the stonework of this building: I. Begg directed the work.’
2 It was bombed by Pakistani aircraft during the fighting with India in 1965.
1 When they rebuilt it, without the spire, it looked like Canterbury.
2 It is rebuilt now, but still unfinished.
1 The Port of Spain houses are still in their full glory, with more cricketers than ever shouting ‘Owzat?’ or ‘Very pretty, sir’, in the best imperial fashion on the Savannah. The Zomba house is now a hostel for Government employees, and its grounds form a public garden.
1 The buildings remain, daunting as ever, but land reclamation has removed them some distance from the sea, and tempered their majestic effect.
1 The principal architect of this great group was Fuller (1822–98), who was born in Bath. The central block was recognizably related to the University Museum at Oxford, which Fuller knew, and which had been completed in 1855.
1 Poor light, though he is now gratefully remembered in Australia, came to a sad end. He resigned his job after a series of differences with his superiors, and died in 1839, aged 54, penniless and tubercular, in a cottage of mud and reed near his city site, nursed by his English mistress Maria.
1 The successors of Empire have been sensible of all these garden glories. On the great green at Peradeniya, during the Second World War, Lord Mountbatten set up the headquarters of his South-East Asia Command, but the garden remains glorious, and now forms an appendag
e to the University of Ceylon along the road. The Sydney garden makes a backdrop for the city’s bold new Opera House, the Dominica gardens were described by Mr Patrick Leigh-Fermour, in 1950, as ‘the most perfect botanical gardens I have ever seen’. Phoenix Park has passed unscathed through permutations of Empire and independence, and its zoo remains pre-eminent for the breeding of lions. The Maidan at Calcutta, though stripped of its plinthed Viceroys and trampled by the feet of a million angry demonstrators, remains at least an open space. When I speak of the travellers who consider Stanley Park the most beautiful of all, emphatically among them I number myself.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Tribal Lays and Images
England, none that is born thy son, and lives
by grace of thy glory, free,
Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with
hope to serve as he worship thee;
None may sing thee: the sea-wind’s wing beats
dawn our songs as it hails the sea.
Algernon Swinburne
18
SOLDIERS, sailors, politicians, engineers, merchants and men in the street responded to the call of Empire. Artists were more chary. The most talented young men of the nineties, the exquisites of Art Nouveau, the Yellow Book and the Café Royal, expressed values outrageously opposed to those of the imperialists. When Figaro once offered its readers a translation of Hunt’s Jingo rhyme—‘Nous ne voulons pas la guerre, mais, par Dieu! si nous combattons’—the translator was forced to admit that he had been unable to ‘arriver à la sauvage énergie de l’original’. The London intelligentsia was unable to arrive at it either, and though in the universities there were attempts to evolve an intellectual rationale of Empire, creative people were not generally stimulated by the savage energy of the time.
