by A. N. Wilson
Although Curzon, to choose a colourful example, did not appear, as he and his wife rode into the Delhi Durbar on elephants in the full grandeur of his dress uniform, to be a man who believed that the meek would inherit the Earth, he was nominally a Christian, capable if confronted by the actual precepts of the Gospel of feeling shame. He believed that there was a providence in the British being given India to control. Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience in India, and the growth of the nationalist movement, belong to decades after Curzon’s resignation as viceroy, and return to England in 1905. (His wife Mary, her health seriously undermined by the Indian climate, died in 1906.)
Curzon’s resignation, angry and bitter, had come about after a dispute which ultimately arose from the Younghusband expedition. Lord Kitchener, hero or butcher, depending upon your viewpoint, of the Sudan and South Africa, condemned the system of dual control, whereby the Indian army possessed, in effect, two heads: the military member in the viceroy’s council and the commander-in-chief. Kitchener had been made commander-in-chief in India on Curzon’s recommendation, but the two fell out, and the viceroy remained in India only long enough to receive a royal visit, that of the Prince and Princess of Wales, on 9 November 1905.
Curzon’s achievements as an autocratic viceroy had been immense. Not only had he, from a position of deep knowledge, restored and preserved many works of art and architecture – notably the Taj Mahal – he had also given India the basic infrastructure and political institutions which would enable it to become a modern nation. Not only, in his last year in India, did investments in railways increase by 56 per cent, savings banks deposits by 43 per cent, and exports by 48 per cent. Not only had he, in the tradition of British administrators, defended India’s borders, provided her with access to the London money market, and modernized methods of irrigation and transport. He had developed India as a free-trade area the size of Europe, and continued the refinement of a civil service, the rule of law and the notion of individual freedom. All these things were acknowledged by Jawaharlal Nehru when he looked back on the British Raj of which Curzon was so proud and efficient an exemplar.
Yet Curzon was intensely reluctant to see any of the implications of his modernization. Though it was obvious that making India a modern free-trading nation would eventually lead it to require its own elected parliament, Curzon could retort:
Remember … that to these people, representative government and electoral institutions are nothing whatever … The good government that appeals to them is the government which protects them from the rapacious money-lender and landlord and all the other sharks in human disguise … I have a misgiving that this class will not fare much better under these changes than they do now … I am under the strong opinion that as government in India becomes more and more Parliamentary – as will be the inevitable result – so will it become less paternal and less beneficent to the poorer classes of the population.29
Certainly, the emergence of India as an independent and in economic terms liberal democracy only forty-two years after Curzon left the viceroyalty was not achieved without hundreds of thousands of deaths, the price paid by most peoples of the world in the twentieth century for political change and development. Gandhi, whose career and achievements will form an important part of our story, sounded an early warning note by asking rather simply whether the Christian gentlemen who had taken it upon themselves to administer his native land actually believed in the words of their Lord and Saviour when He had walked the Earth, or whether they preferred to be guided by Jeremy Bentham.
It was a difficult question to answer. One of the most touching of the items in the Younghusband Collection in the Library of the India Office in London is the tiny copy of Hymns Ancient and Modern, which bears two inscriptions on its flyleaf. First, ‘F. E. Younghusband from his loving sister Emmie. “Endure hardness as a good soldier of Christ.”‘ There is then added in Francis Younghusband’s own hand: ‘This was carried with me through Manchuria, the Gobi Desert and over the Himalayas and was returned to my dear old sister Emmie as a remembrance of me. F. E. Younghusband, June 14 1888.’ The two hymns which Younghusband has underscored heavily with pencil are Newman’s ‘Lead Kindly Light’ (number 266) and one which is less well known, number 264.
My God, my Father, while I stray
Far from my home on life’s rough way,
O teach me from my heart to say,
‘Thy Will be done’.
The dominant historical idea of the nineteenth century, popularized by Hegel, was determinism. Things must be as they are, history was moving in an ineluctable, inescapable progression. The Spirit of the Age cannot be gainsaid; nations and cultures have their day; once passed, the ascendancy is given to another. Hegel was a complicated thinker and he can be seen as the godfather of two quite contradictory movements, despotism, especially Prussian despotism, and freedom and liberalism. In his Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts) he saw the established order of the Prussian state as the beginning of political stability and wisdom; but for rather similar reasons to Curzon’s later defence of British domination. Democracy would be wasted on primitive or underdeveloped peoples. At the same time, Hegel, a profoundly influential philosopher in Britain among the political classes, saw history as ‘none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom’. This strand of essentially liberal thinking would persuade you in a different direction. Rather than thinking that order was the essential ingredient in political salvation, you might think that freedom is most important; and in collective terms, this means you would support nationalistic aspirations against the big collective ideal of an empire.
This is the big question, politically and diplomatically, at the start of the twentieth century. The old Ottoman Empire, the ‘sick man of Europe’, is crumbling away, and the lands over which it presides – Mesopotamia, Palestine, Syria, as well as the Islamic Balkan peoples – all aspire to self-determination. Liberals of all nations tend to be selective in the extent to which they support nationalist endeavour. The British in Ireland are a case in point. Gladstone, the Liberal leader, took several decades of evolution from being the rising hope of the stern unbending Tories to being the Grand Old Man of British Liberalism, before he could support Irish Home Rule. In his youth he had supported ‘rebel’ Italians against the Bourbon or Austrian hegemony. It took a long time to see parallels between the desire of continentals for freedom and the Irish aspirations on his own doorstep. His championing of Irish Home Rule split the Liberal party and as we start the story, with the reign of King Edward VII, the matter is still unresolved.
On the whole, English liberals (of both the Unionist and Liberal parties) supported nationalism as an idea when it suited them, and not when it did not. British nationalism was obviously as commendable a virtue as Prussian nationalism was an international menace. The aspirations of the Serbs to expel the Austro-Hungarians, who had annexed Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878, or of the Bosnian Muslims to be independent of the Ottoman Porte, were good things, whereas the desire of the Irish or the Indians to manage their own affairs was a nuisance, or plain crazy.
We are at the beginning of the twentieth century, a period of history in which human beings massacred one another in numbers without historical parallel. The sheer number of deaths is actually impossible to comprehend or to absorb with the imagination, however often we might recite the actual numbers of those killed. Added to the prodigious numbers killed in war is that grisly and peculiarly twentieth-century phenomenon, the mass slaughter of civilians: the Turkish killing of one million Christian Armenians in 1915, the incalculable numbers who died, first in the Russian Civil War, but also in the famines in the Ukraine, which Stalin used as a method of deliberate elimination; the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Nazi period.
In an important essay, Robert Skidelsky30 linked the growth of mass slaughter with the growth of those distinctive twentieth-century ideals, nationalism and democracy. ‘Hitler and Stalin were not democrats, b
ut they killed for the sake of the people – to secure them a Thousand Year Reich or the communist millennium. Genocide in Bosnia in the early 1990s started with the onset of democracy.’ Skidelsky argues that without some limit to the idea of democracy it easily slides into despotism. And if you ‘believe in “rule by the people” you have first to select the people’. In an Imperium, different racial and religious groups have to coexist in order to survive. Not so for the democratic nationalist, who actually asserts his ‘freedom’ by claiming the right to be a fully independent Hindu or Muslim, Indian or Pakistani. The inevitable concomitant is that the ‘alien’ in the nationalist’s midst will, by the democratic will of the majority, be expunged.
Skidelsky concludes his essay:
We have not yet overcome the idea that the world should be divided into national units, exercising their sovereign right of self-government. Yet they are not the only, or necessarily the highest, principles of political life. Empires at their best stood for multiracialism and religious tolerance. They also allowed a great deal of devolution in practice. They foundered in the 20th century because no way could be found of making their rule acceptable to their subject peoples.
Indian nationalists would legitimately resent Curzon’s lordly comment that ‘to these people representative government and electoral institutions are nothing whatever’. His was one of the loftiest and most patronizing of all the grand imperialist attitudes, but it could have been echoed, for example, in the life’s work and world view of Lord Cromer in Egypt, of the British in South Africa and Burma and Malaya. Cromer’s latest biographer tells of some young modern Egyptian students who made the pilgrimage all the way to North Norfolk to find Lord Cromer’s grave in order that they might spit upon it.31
We began this chapter with an account of Younghusband’s ill-starred invasion of Tibet, the killing of hundreds of Tibetans, and the thick-skinned insensitivity of the British imperialists’ attitude to the affair. But it would be unfair to leave the incident without setting it within a context of what came later. The massacre of 628 people in a mountain pass is a terrible thing, especially when the man who ultimately sanctioned the incident, the viceroy of India, can write: ‘there is no ground to blame anybody except the Lhasa general’. But fairness compels us to add that the moments when the British behaved with brutality in India, during the 1857–9 troubles, and in 1919 in Amritsar, are bloody interludes in a general story of containment and good order. The numbers slain are tiny compared with the numbers of those slaughtered by Indians and Pakistanis when they achieved their yearned-for independence. Likewise, it was in the aftermath of the overthrow of the Sultans that the Young Turks massacred the Armenians; the oppression of the Russian people by the Tsars would seem mild by comparison with the mass murders perpetrated by Lenin and Stalin. No Hohenzollern or Habsburg autocrat brought about killings on the scale of the populist Hitler.
Hegelian or predestinarían historians would see the end of the British Empire as doomed, foreordained to self-destruct. Certainly such incidents as the Younghusband fiasco did not strengthen the imperialist position. At the time of the disaster, there were many flag-waving jingoists who supposed that the Empire would go on for ever; and it is easy to see why. The Empire was still growing, reaching its maximum extent in 1921. But for many readers of H. G. Wells’s The New Machiavelli (published 1911) there must have been more than a hint of prophecy in its summary:
The English rule in India is surely one of the most extraordinary accidents that has ever happened in history. We are there like a man who has fallen off a ladder on to the neck of an elephant, and does not know what to do or how to get down. Until something happens he remains … No one dare bring the average English voter face to face with the reality of India, or let the Indian native have a glimpse of the English voter. In my time I have talked to English statesmen, Indian officials and ex-officials, viceroys, soldiers, everyone who might be supposed to know what India signifies, and I have prayed them to tell me what they thought we were up to there … And beyond a phrase or so about ‘even-handed justice’ – and look at our sedition trials! – they told me nothing. Time after time I heard of that apocryphal native ruler in the north-west, who, when asked what would happen if we left India, replied that in a week his men would be in the saddle, and in six months not a rupee or a virgin would be left in Lower Bengal. That is always given as our conclusive justification. But is it our business to preserve the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal in a sort of magic inconclusiveness? Better plunder than paralysis, better fire and sword than futility … The sum total of our policy is to arrest any discussion, any conferences that would enable the Indians to work out a tolerable scheme of the future for themselves … In some manner we shall have to come out of India.32
It is a chilling passage in what is supposed to be a novel, published thirty-six years before Wells’s fellow socialists abruptly withdrew from India, on a ‘better fire and sword than futility’ ticket, leading to well over a million deaths during partition. The sort of dull district administrator so admired by Kipling saw rather more value than Wells did in preserving the rupees and virgins of Lower Bengal. But for British imperialists, as for Bengali virgins, dangerous days lay ahead.
3
The Land
It was the age of bicycling and the great outdoors. The Victorian enthusiasts for pedalling into the countryside had been obliged to wobble precariously on pennyfarthings, or on the well-named bone-shaker. It was in the manufacturing towns of the West Midlands – Coventry, Wolverhampton, Redditch, Bromsgrove – that the modern safety bicycle was pioneered, with its chain drive to the rear wheel, its diamond frame, pneumatic tyres and effective brakes. The Danish engineer Mikael Pedersen worked for many years in the Gloucestershire village of Dursley and developed the Dursley-Pedersen, by Victorian standards a dazzlingly lightweight machine with a hammock-like wooden seat, a bicycle which could achieve unheard-of speeds.
Cycling at this speed and distance naturally led its enthusiasts to discard superfluous costume. Cycling Magazine, in its issue of 10 May 1911, shows a photograph of ‘the late Lady Harberton, attired in the cycling costume that led to her being refused admission to the coffee-room of an inn’. She looks a splendid figure, and would certainly be considered over-dressed if she appeared either at a cycling rally or an inn today in her high feathered hat, her waisted riding coat with a very full cravat at her neck, her bloomers which are calf-length and her dark hose and shoes. These bloomers, or baggy pantaloons, were an American import.
From the European Continent had come many ideas which inspired the Rational Dress Society in the 1880s when figures such as Mrs Oscar Wilde and Marie Stopes campaigned for women to be released from their heavy bone corsets, and tight stays which displaced the internal organs and led to curvature of the spine. Chief among the ‘scientific’ principles of rational dressers was that of the beneficence of wool. Dr Gustav Jaeger of Stuttgart was a professor of physiology who insisted:
It is most important to bear in mind that it is not enough to wear wool next to the skin and any other material over it. If at any point underclothing or lining, or padding or stiffening of vegetable fibre, or of silk, intervene between the body and the outer atmosphere, an obstacle is set up to the free passage of the exhalation from the skin, with the result that the noxious portion of the exhalation settles in the vegetable fibre, which consequently becomes mal-odorous; and everything mal-odorous is prejudicial to the health.1
An early convert to Dr Jaeger’s ideas had been George Bernard Shaw, who had his first all-in-one woollen suit made with money inherited from a despised father. Other forms of ‘rational’ dress included the sandal. The dress reformist W. A. Macdonald had been turned away from the British Museum Reading Room for wearing sandals.2
Rational or rebellious dress, however, was by no means universal. The composer Edward Elgar, for example, went cycling in bowler hat, tweed suiting with display handkerchief in his top pocket, and highly polished boots. Arnold B
ax, meeting Elgar once in the Malvern Hills, ‘expected him to sling a gun from his back and drop a brace of pheasants to the ground’.3 One of his most cherished possessions was his Royal Sunbeam, a fixed-wheel, 27-inch framed bicycle with a front plunger brake and a Bowden (calliper) rim brake for the rear wheel. It was manufactured by the Wolverhampton firm of John Marston Ltd and cost £21.10s. On such a machine as this you could ride across a country. Elgar christened the bike Mr Phoebus, partly as a pun on the name Sunbeam (Phoebus is the sun-god), partly after a character in Disraeli’s Lot hair, a favourite novel. Elgar wrote to his friend: ‘I hate coming to town – shall miss the hay making I fear. Had 50 miles ride yesterday amongst the Avon country.’4
Like many a self-conscious embodiment of national Geist, Elgar was an outsider. In spite of the grand, even forbidding, appearance – in later life he was often mistaken for Arthur, Duke of Connaught5 – he was the son of a Roman Catholic church organist and vendor of musical instruments. To be musical at all in Victorian England – seriously musical as opposed to being able to play ‘The Lost Chord’ on the pianoforte – marked you out. It was almost as if the practical, Benthamite, down-to-earth values of the Utilitarian economists and capitalist factory-owners had silenced English music itself. After the centuries of Dowland, Tallis, Byrd, Purcell, Handel, came an eerie silence as if the very birds had stopped singing. German propaganda in 1914 dubbed Britain Das Land ohne Musik. In the mid-nineteenth century it would have been almost a fair comment. Then, largely inspired by visits to Germany, the English musicians revived – the Royal School of Church Music and symphony orchestras flourished again.
