Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  ‘There she bloody lies,’ murmur the seamen sotto voce in reply; ‘there she lies, you lucky buggers.’

  1 Parsons (1854–1931) was the son of the Earl of Rosse, whose telescope at Birr Castle in Ireland was the largest in the world. The Turbinia, with a speed of 34 knots, was his first ship, and the effect of this unscheduled publicity-display was immediate. The Navy ordered two turbine-driven destroyers, and by 1905 Cunard used turbines to power the 30,000-ton Carmania. Parsons became the owner of Grubb, Parsons, the optical firm, makers in 1967 of the 98-inch Isaac Newton telescope for the Royal Observatory. He took out 300 patents in all, and only failed, it is said, in trying to make artificial diamonds.

  1 All these remarkable officers had successful careers. ‘Pompo’ (1834–1915) became an Admiral, and a well-known opponent of Fisher’s reforms; Noel (1845–1918) an Admiral of the Fleet; Wilson (1842–1921) Admiral of the Fleet and First Sea Lord; Packenham (1861–1933) an Admiral and Bath King of Arms. Arbuthnot (1864–1916) became a Rear-Admiral, but died in command of a cruiser squadron at the Battle of Jutland.

  1 By 1900 the Italian Navy was the only other: it then had four muzzle-loaders on its ships, but the Royal Navy still had 300.

  1 Until 1900, when the Admiralty noticed that the men, deprived of the exercise of going aloft on sailing-ships, were getting flabby, and introduced the Physical Training Branch with a Swede as its first instructor.

  1 Smith (1771–1845), the celebrated Canon of St Paul’s, had two brothers in the East India Company, but once wrote so scathing an indictment of British rule in Ireland that it was, on Macaulay’s advice, suppressed. Molesworth (1810–55), an extreme and hot-blooded radical, was Colonial Secretary for a few months in 1855, but his chief claim to national gratitude was that as Commissioner of the Board of Works he first opened Kew Gardens to the public on Sundays.

  1 Who was the son of a member of the Indian Forestry Department, and became, in 1924, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and later Secretary of State for India. He died in 1955.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Imperial Effects

  In our Museum galleries

  Today I lingered o’er the prize

  Dead Greece vouchsafes to living eyes—

  Her Art forever in fresh wise

  From hour to hour rejoicing me.

  Sighing I turned at last to win

  Once more the London dirt and din;

  And as I made the swing-door spin

  And issued, they were hoisting in

  A winged beast from Nineveh.

  And as I turned, my sense half shut

  Still saw the crowds of curb and rut

  Go past as marshalled to the strut

  Of ranks in gypsum quaintly cut.

  It seemed in one same pageantry

  They followed forms which had been erst:

  To pass, till on my sight should burst

  That future of the best or worst

  When some may question which was first,

  Of London or of Nineveh.

  Dante Gabriel Rossctti

  23

  ‘PASSP0RTS’ ( said Baedeker, 1887): ‘These documents are not necessary in England, though sometimes useful in procuring delivery of registered poste restante letters. A visa is quite needless.’

  With such an indulgent ease did England admit her visitors in those days, and the foreigner from more shuttered and suspicious States must have felt he was entering an imperially spacious kingdom. Once inside, however, he would find surprisingly little physical evidence that this was an imperial kingdom at all. The only two imperial events mentioned in Herr Baedeker’s Outline of English History are ‘Foundation of the East India Company’ and ‘Canada Taken from the French’. His bibliography includes no book about the Empire, and even his separate volume on London lists the great imperial offices only en passant, and does not bother to mention, for instance, that the laws passed by the House of Commons might govern the affairs of a couple of hundred million people who had never set foot on English soil.

  The imperial venture had not much marked the British. They were still far more an island than an imperial race. If the visitor found his way to one of Frith’s immense genre pictures—Derby Day, The Railway Station, or Ramsgate Sands—which were consciously intended to be epitomes of the time, he would find that nothing imperial showed at all (unless you count ostrich feathers—up to nine guineas a fan in 1897): not a bronzed face, not a blackamoor page, not even a Maharajah instructing his jockey.1 In its most penetrating degree British imperialism had been active for hardly more than a decade: in a kingdom moulded by a thousand years of historical continuity, it was only paint on the façade.

  2

  Let us ourselves, guide in hand, wander around London, this heart of the world, and see how much imperial gilding shines on its ancient structure. Then as now it was the city of all cities, giving to its visitors a Shakespearean sense of the universal—as if all the foibles, glories, riches and miseries of the human condition were concentrated there. Greater in area and population than any other capital, it lay there vast and blackened along the Thames, the smoke of ships and factories swirling perpetually among its towers. More often than not its skies were obscured with grey cloud, and the river flowed through it sluggishly, thick with filth. Far around the capital the Victorian suburbs extended, from slum to respectable terrace to detached villa, mile after mile into the blighted countryside: in the centre, lapped by the most rollicking night life in Europe, the offices of State rose grave and grey, Gothically pinnacled, and attended by that arcane shrine of the English, Westminster Abbey.

  We are in the heart of the British Empire. The obvious place to start our inspection is Thomas Cook’s in Ludgate Circus: but it is disappointing to find that its doorman, who has until recently worn a kind of white topee, intended to evoke the liveliest East-of-Suez images, has already reverted to a plain blue cap, after ‘prolonged and embarrassed protests’ from the staff. The great monuments of London are hardly less reticent about their imperial connections. In the Tower they show us a few old guns from Aden. In St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey a handful of imperial heroes, Gordon, Henry Lawrence, Livingstone, Havelock, are altogether swamped by the mass of kings and queens, legislators, scientists, philanthropists, artists, or soldiers and sailors made celebrated by long centuries of war in Europe. Perhaps as we wander down Whitehall we may see one or two authentic men of Empire, sunburnt young men looking a little awkward in their stiff white collars, or shuffling with portentous wheeze up the steps of the India Office: but the imperial offices are embedded indistinguishably in the warren of Whitehall, and nobody seems to know which is which. No Dyaks or Zaptiehs mount guard outside St James’s Palace; no pagoda roofs or African caryatids stand in imperial symbol; among all the bright frescoes of the Houses of Parliament we shall find only one with an imperial motif—and that concerned with seventeenth-century India.

  A few deliberately imperial institutions may be pointed out to us. The Imperial Institute in South Kensington is a showcase of Empire, partly an exhibition of raw materials and manufactures, partly a club for people interested in imperial affairs, partly a commercial bureau—rich in symbol and ornament, Tennyson had written of it, which may speak to the centuries: but it is too big, or too solemn, for the available enthusiasm, and if we venture through its elaborate halls, towered and vaulted like an Indian railway station, we shall find it depressingly echoing and deserted. At the Victoria and Albert Museum we shall see the collection of Indian art first assembled by the East India Company, but its rooms, too, are unlikely to be overcrowded, and if any members of the public are showing a marked interest in anything, they are sure to be looking at Tipu Sultan’s famous Tiger-Man-Organ, an ingenious toy which represents an Indian tiger eating an Englishman, the tiger growling and the sahib feebly gurgling from an interior mechanism. If we are male, and well introduced, we may look in at the Oriental Club, originally for ‘noblemen and gentlemen associated with the admini
stration of our Eastern Empire’. We may be invited to the East India Club, where the talk is all of pigsticking and well-remembered subhadars, or even attend a session of the Omar Khayyam Club, dedicated to the pleasures of oriental literature, whose membership is limited to fifty-nine because the FitzGerald translation was published in 1859.1

  Observe, as we walk down Victoria Street, the new offices of the several Colonial Agents, New South Wales, Victoria, the Dominion of Canada, all advertising their opportunities in window-posters, and pointing big cardboard fingers towards their Immigration Offices. Here are the Albany Rooms, much frequented by people from the Cape and Rhodesia (the Count de la Panouse, ‘sang bleu and a great gentleman’, had met his wife Billy there—she was one of the housemaids). Here is the Royal Academy, that unchallengeable arbiter of colonial taste, among whose admired exhibits, in the summer show of 1897, is A Wee Rbodesian, by Ralph Peacock, in which a very small, very white baby lies in the arms of a very black smiling houseboy, against a background of tropical blossom. The bookshops of the capital are well stocked with imperialist matter, recent reprints of Dilke, Seeley and Marcus Clarke, Henty and Kipling everywhere, Baden-Powell defying the Salisbury reviewers, Slatin Pasha’s popular Fire and Sword, just off the presses and dedicated to the Queen-Empress. The British Museum shows surprisingly little in the way of imperial loot, but its library, we are assured, has a right to a copy of every book published anywhere in the Empire.

  Here and there among the billboards, the brass plates, the advertisements plastered across the face of London, in the backs of guide-books thumbed through after luncheon, in prospectuses left lying around the club smoking-room, are hints of the existence of those immense possessions in the sunshine. The Homeward Mail is on sale at a few bookstalls—it comes out weekly to coincide with the arrival of the Indian mail—and so is The British Australasian (incorporating the Anglo-New-Zealander). Thresher and Glenny are advertising a new Jungra cloth shooting-suit (‘impervious to thorn and spear grass’—vide The Field). Bessom and Co., with their depots in Poona and Calcutta, assure us that their Reeds for Military Bands are the only ones for use in tropical climates, and L. Blankenstein and Co. announce themselves, with a honky-tonk panache, as Colonial Pianoforte Manufacturers. Rose’s Lime Juice get their juices from the Finest Lime Plantations in the World, at Roseau, Dominica; Ship and Turtle Ltd, of Leadenhall Street, make their soups from West Indian Live Turtle Only. In premises at 22 Oxford Street are Messrs Ardeshir and Byramji, whose head office is in Hummum Street, Bombay, and down the road Henry Heath boasts that his Shikaree Tropical Hat is now patronized by nine royal families. Newman Newman the paint people offer a special selection of slow-drying water-colours for hot climates. It is satisfactory for imperialists to know that ‘thousands who tried SALADA Ceylon tea as an experiment now use it altogether, and could not be induced to go back to the commonplace adulterated Teas of China and Japan’.

  Up alleys off the Strand, among the bank signs of the City, around the corner from the India Office, are the Colonial Merchants, the Colonial Bankers, the Colonial Exchanges. Henry S. King, the East India Agents in Pall Mall, will book you servants in India. Grindlays in Parliament Square will advise you on Colonial Bonds. The Chartered Bank will issue you a draft on their branches in Rangoon or Hong Kong. The National Bank of India in Threadneedle Street will assume full responsibility for the collection of Indian pensions. William Watson’s at Waterloo Place will ship wine at wholesale prices to Mauritius. The Union Line is only too anxious to convey you to the Gold and Diamond Fields of South Africa, but a huge placard above 21 Cockspur Street brags that THE RICHEST GOLD AND SILVER MINES ARE TO BE FOUND IN BRITISH COLUMBIA AND THE CANADIAN KOOTENAIS—APPLY WITHIN.

  3

  And if, like every other visitor, we finally strolled down the Mall, to end up with our noses poking through the railings of Buckingham Palace, as the guardsmen stamped through their sentry-go with little clouds of white clay billowing from their belts—then we might feel that we really were in an imperial presence at last. The trappings of the British Crown did suggest something bigger than an offshore island, and in the years since Victoria’s promotion to Queen-Empress the pageantry of her throne had been injected with imperial symbols. She herself, though she thought of England as a European country, had a taste that way. She loved signing herself V.R. & I.—Victoria Regina et Imperatrix—and much enjoyed entertaining exotic imperial visitors at Windsor or Buckingham Palace (‘One does not really notice it,’ she once observed, contemplating the fact that a visiting group of Red Indians, war-painted and encrusted with beads, were in feet naked to the waist). On her favourite walking-stick, said to be made from a branch of Charles II’s oak, was fixed a little Indian idol, part of the loot of Seringapatam when that Mysore fortress was taken by Lord Cornwallis in 1792. She it was who popularized the pink and yellow glassware, ornamented with lily patterns of vaguely oriental outline, which became known as Queen’s Burmese: and she gave her title, too, to Her Majesty’s Blend, a mixture of Indian and Ceylon teas prepared for her by Ridgeway’s in the days when the imperial teas were challenging China tea for popularity. Kashmir shawls, all the rage in 1897, were chiefly famous because each year the Queen-Empress graciously accepted one from the Maharajah of Kashmir.

  Victoria liked to greet her Indian guests in halting Hindustani, and her attachment to her Indian clerk, the Munshi, who succeeded the ghillie John Brown in her affections, edged towards the scandalous—she once asked her Viceroy in India to obtain a grant of land for him at Agra, and sometimes she even allowed him to answer letters for her. At the big dinner in Buckingham Palace on the eve of her Jubilee she wore a dress embroidered in gold that had been specially worked in India (‘dreadfully hot’). Her Ministers knew that the old lady’s sharp experienced eyes were focused on any imperial episode—Salisbury himself once had to apologize for calling Indians black men. A shimmer of imperial consequence hung around Victoria’s throne, and thus by osmosis around the purlieus of her palace: from the large white donkey which Lord Wolseley had sent her from Egypt (white donkeys were royal there) to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a legendary wonder of the East since the fourteenth century, which was taken by the British from Ranjit Singh the Sikh, and was now the splendour of the Queen’s crown. Whoever possessed the Koh-i-Noor, ran the legend, possessed India: just the kind of legend Queen Victoria liked.

  4

  The New Imperialism was too new, and too sudden, to have changed the look of London. The public had only recently acquired its passionate interest in Empire, and Waterloo and Trafalgar still meant far more than any number of far frontier skirmishes. The Imperial Jubilee was mostly froth, whipped up for the occasion by Press and politicians.

  Yet in quieter colours, not to be observed by the casual visitor, the imperial experience did form a strand in the national tapestry. Among the middle classes especially thousands of families cherished imperial souvenirs, or aspired to imperial décors: Benares brass and trinkets from the Gold Coast, lengths of Indian silk waiting to be made up, a line of ebony elephants on the mantelpiece, a group of suntanned officers posed in careful asymmetry outside a sun-bleached bungalow, coloured shells from the orient cemented to a summer-house.1 In many a sewing desk were kept young Harry’s letters, sent home faithfully month by month, telling dear Mama and the girls all about last week’s soirée at Government House, and the trouble he was having choosing curtain materials for the bungalow, and what a ripping time he had upcountry, and affectionate regards to dear Papa from their Ever-Loving Son.

  Here we may eavesdrop, through the study door, upon Uncle James explaining to his brother the rector just how much money young Bob will need, if he really wishes to enter the Indian Army—he can live on his pay in a Mountain Battery, perhaps, but he must realize that the Cavalry would be quite beyond his means. Here dear little Miss Cartwright, who has always seemed so unlikely a spinster, confides in us at last, while we await the gentlemen after dinner, that were it not for a certain person she
had been, well particularly fond of—in the Mutiny—he was buried, she believed, somewhere near Meerut—but there, all that was long ago, and we must tell her all our news….

  This house seems to be African all over, prints of kraals and jungle caravans, masks and shields and monkey-skins; this seems to smell faintly of spices or perhaps incenses, and a tinkle of temple bells comes from its garden, near the bird-table, and those gourds on the butler’s tray have a Polynesian, or Malayan, look to them— Burma Forestry, do you think, or could he have been British Guiana? And sometimes, in the list of recent wills in The Times, there appears a name dimly and not always enthusiastically remembered from the past—‘Great God, that’s Hawkins the rubber man, a perfect pest, treated his natives like dirt and never stopped complaining about port dues—eighty thousand he left, bless my soul—a perfect blackguard.’

  5

  Half without knowing it, the British had picked up thousands of words from their subject peoples, and enriched their own language with them. A few were South African Dutch (laager, veldt, trek) and at least one was Red Indian—toboggan: but most of them came to England out of the East. Perhaps the most delightful imperial book of all was Hobson-Jobson, a dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and phrases compiled by Sir Henry Yule in the 1880s.1 There were at least sixteen other Anglo-Indian glossaries, but this instantly became the most famous, and there was no Englishman with Indian connections who would not know what you meant, if you said half a minute, I’ll look it up in Hobson-Jobson.