by Tim Newark
As far as Gladstone was concerned, the abuse of opium was no worse than that of gin. ‘Undoubtedly my honourable Friend may rely upon his own personal consistency, and I know very well that there is nothing which any man can say against opium that my honourable Friend is not ready to say against alcohol.’
Moving on to the matter of financial dependency on the opium trade, Gladstone argued that it would be hard to replace that 15 per cent of Indian revenue.
‘This is a very serious matter as regards the responsibility of this House. Nothing could be more ruinous, and few things could be more discreditable, than for you to pass a vote which, on the one hand, must remain an idle expression of opinion without practical result, [but] if it were acted upon, must simply have the effect of throwing the finances of India into confusion, and greatly compromising the condition, the welfare, and even, possibly, the peace and security of that country.’
And were the British people ready to meet that deficit by digging into their own pockets?
‘The other day,’ said Gladstone, ‘the Chancellor of the Exchequer was so happy as to possess a surplus of something like £6,000,000. If the honourable Member for Carlisle succeeds in carrying this Resolution, is he ready to propose a second, to the effect that the £6,000,000 shall be handed over to the Indian Treasury to supply the first year’s deficiency due to the abandonment of the opium Revenue?’
One of Lawson’s supporters motioned that he was happy to hand this money over. But Gladstone pointed out the arrogance of changing an entire economy because of their supposed superior morality.
‘Until you have proved that this drug is wholly intolerable,’ persisted Gladstone, ‘and ought to be absolutely proscribed, as productive of unmixed mischief, you have no moral right to deprive a considerable portion of the people of India, who are engaged in the cultivation of it, of what is probably their only means of subsistence.’
And if they did remove government involvement in the trade, what would be the result? ‘We cease to impose a transit duty on the opium of the North-West; we cease to exercise what is called the Government monopoly in respect of the opium of the North-East; and what is the effect but an enormous stimulus to the trade?’
Or was Lawson proposing to go further and impose a prohibition on opium cultivation?
‘If he is not prepared for prohibition, his case is hopeless,’ said Gladstone. ‘If he is, he is not much better. By prohibition, you deprive the Government of India of a very large Revenue; you disable it from meeting its engagements; you compel it to impose very heavy taxes upon a country already too much burdened; and you deprive a portion of the people of their means of employment in the raising of this commodity, on which they are very dependent.
‘With regard to the opium of the North-west, you will forbid the transit, and you will offer to the smuggler the moderate premium of 600 rupees a chest, or 8s per pound weight, under which an enormous contraband trade will grow. Does not my honourable Friend see that, supposing he could stop the growth of opium in the whole Indian peninsula, his measure would immensely stimulate the growth of it in China?’
With great clarity, Gladstone had predicted what would indeed happen when the Anglo-Indian opium business came to an end. It would unleash organised crime in the region and would allow other countries to step in and fulfil the insatiable desire for narcotics. But, at the time, Gladstone was sure that common sense, as he saw it, would prevail.
‘Proposing to himself an end dictated only by benevolence, he has not considered the means by which alone it is possible that end could be attained,’ concluded Gladstone. ‘Under these circumstances, I am quite sure the House will avoid – as they frequently have to avoid – the snare set by proposing an abstract Resolution of this nature.’
Lawson was disappointed but cannot have been surprised at Gladstone’s stance. The Prime Minister was chief executive of the British Empire and no Cumbrian teetotaller was going to derail that magnificent engine of dominion and enrichment.
Lawson got one final word in before his motion went to the vote. Scowling at his front-bench Liberals, he said: ‘The argument from the Treasury Bench has been nothing but money, money, money, regardless of morality and Christian duty.’
Lawson’s motion was defeated by 151 votes to 47.
Lawson and his supporters may have lost the battle in 1870, but, in the end, they won the war. The unfortunate Mr John Hartley was just one victim among many opium traders, as the zeal of these moral crusaders fired the support of more and more well-meaning Victorian Liberals. In 1874, a group of Quakers in London founded the Society for the Suppression of the Opium Trade. Sympathetic MPs continued to submit resolutions calling for an end to the trade and, in 1891, they finally won a majority in the House of Commons. The following year, Gladstone, Prime Minister once again, was compelled to reverse his support for the opium business by instigating a Royal Commission inquiry into the possibility of prohibiting the production and sale of opium in India.
In India, the local press, both English- and Indian-language newspapers, as well as a group of highly placed Indian government officials, strongly opposed the prohibition of opium. Commission investigators travelled throughout the subcontinent and spoke to 723 witnesses both for and against opium production. The result was a published report that comprised 2,500 pages in seven volumes. Overwhelmingly, the testimonies within the report and Indian public opinion rejected the idea of prohibition. Anti-opium campaigners were furious and accused the inquiry of bias, but its arguments were solid and well reasoned.
Since 1890, the Chinese government had given up trying to stop the wave of opium flooding into its country and had legalised the trade. Opium production within China had already been growing and this just encouraged it further. As a result, the demand for Indian opium dropped. To prohibit it now would be a meaningless sacrifice, concluded the Royal Commission. In addition, the Indian government demonstrated its responsibility by tightly controlling the sale of opium within its own borders, so it was not a problem to its own people, even though that might be counter to its own fiscal interests.
Smoking opium was not popular in India and opium dens were banned. Taking opium pills as a daily medicine was, however, enormously widespread in the subcontinent and Indian popular opinion rejected the concerns of anti-opium campaigners as unwanted western interference. What they objected to most strongly was the importation of alcohol. One Indian official testifying to the Royal Commission suggested ‘persuading the people of England to take to opium’:
Opium is amazingly cheap, duty included; it prolongs life after a certain age, and it can be asserted with all the force of truth and seriousness that its substitution in place of alcohol … will bring back happiness to thousands of families in Great Britain and Ireland where there is no happiness now.
Despite this robust defence of the Indian opium trade, its days were numbered. At the beginning of the twentieth century, educated English opinion was so strongly against it that when a motion of prohibition was again put before the Liberal Parliament of 1905, this time, without Gladstone at its head, it was passed without the need for a vote.
On 1 January 1908, the British and Chinese governments signed a treaty agreeing to substantially reduce the Indian export of opium to China over the next ten years until it ended completely. In the meantime, in 1906, China had reversed its previous imperial decision to legalise the drug and banned its sale, embarking on a ten-year crusade to eradicate the habit. Bans on the sale and use of opium soon after followed in other leading nations, including the USA.
Regardless of the move to prohibition, there was still an enormous demand for opium in and outside China. As Gladstone – the grand old Victorian prime minister – predicted, the demand was met by a dramatic increase in the illegal supply of opium. As its value rose on the illegal market, drugs smuggling became a worthwhile occupation for organised criminals, and the twentieth century of fabulously rich and powerful narcotics ganglords was born.
If the British Empire had now taken the moral high ground and turned its back on exporting opium, its unparalleled global trade network provided the perfect conduit for an explosion in drugs-related criminal activity. Gangsters needed weapons and gunrunning became a great challenge to the Pax Britannica.
2
THE IMPRESSIVE LT-COL ROOS-KEPPEL
LIEUTENANT-COLONEL SIR GEORGE OLAF ROOS-KEPPEL was a strongly built man of mixed Dutch–Swedish–English blood, with a thick Edwardian moustache. He brooked no nonsense and commanded a significant military force as Chief Commissioner and Agent to the Governor-General, North-West Provinces. Covering the terrain that now borders onto Afghanistan, it was – and still is – one of the toughest regions in the world to police. On the afternoon of 1 March 1911, it was about to get a whole lot tougher.
Hakim Khan, a notorious bandit, had arrived at the village of Tarnab, 25 miles north-east of Peshawar, in what is now called Pakistan, not far from the Afghan border. Hakim was accompanied by at least 30 heavily armed raiders and believed he could pass though this region with impunity. But something happened on that March afternoon between him and the local villagers. Perhaps he had demanded they supply him with young men for his bandit horde, forcing them into service, or perhaps he had taken a liberty with one of the women of the village. Whatever happened, it resulted in the villagers of Tarnab rising up against the bandits.
Armed with British government rifles, axes and spades, they forced Hakim and his bandits to take refuge in a mud-brick tomb compound about a mile outside the village. The bandits made loopholes for their guns in the walls of the tomb to keep the villagers at bay, killing one of them and wounding another. As the anger-fuelled bravery of the villagers began to sap away, they turned to the local imperial police force to help them out.
It was at this point that the 45-year-old Roos-Keppel rode to their rescue. He deployed a force of 200 men of the 82nd Punjabis and 50 troopers of the Guides Cavalry, plus two mountain guns carried by mules. By the time he arrived personally at the surrounded tomb outside Tarnab, it was early evening. Two of the bandits had been killed, but they were keeping up a brisk fire against the cordon of villagers and soldiers. As the light began to fade, it was Roos-Keppel’s main task to ensure that none of the bandits escaped into the nearby mountains. This was a golden opportunity to end the criminal reign of Hakim Khan.
‘During the night, the cordon was drawn closer and closer,’ recalled Roos-Keppel in his report of the action, ‘the men taking advantage of the natural cover, which was plentiful, and entrenching themselves in the open spaces. The ground was so favourable that at some points the cordon was within 30 yards of the tomb.’
But Hakim Khan and his bandits were not so easily intimidated. They had dominated the area for years and a few raggedy-arsed villagers and khaki-clad policemen were not going to easily end their rule. Throughout the night they sang songs, fired their guns and boasted of what they would do in the morning. Some of the villagers felt nervous, fearing the wrath of Hakim, but Roos-Keppel kept his nerve and wheeled forward his breech-loaded 10-pounder mountain guns.
At dawn the guns opened fire from 160 yards, it being, by the nature of the ground, impossible to get a good position at more distant range, owing to the trees surrounding the tomb and the danger to the cordon.
Roos-Keppel had little reason to doubt the effect of his 2.75-inch calibre guns. Their shells pounded the mud-bricks of the tomb, sending up great clouds of dust, and soon made a breach in the surrounding wall. At this point, some of the bandits tried to make a break for it on the west side, but five of them were shot down and killed. Using the distraction created by his comrades, Hakim Khan made a dash from the east side, but he was spotted and killed. The rest of the bandit gang was holed-up in a bastion in one corner of the tomb compound.
The remainder continued to offer a stubborn resistance and, in order to demolish the bastion in which they had taken refuge, Lieutenant MacGowan, RA, was forced to bring his guns to a second position within 80 yards of the objective and finally to a third position at 40 yards distance.
Mercilessly, 75 shells smashed down the walls of the bastion. Finally, as the gunfire from within died away, dismounted cavalry, infantry and police edged their way into the ruins of the tomb. Nine bandits were found still alive, but half of them were seriously wounded by shrapnel. ‘All were too dazed by the concussion of the shells in an enclosed space to offer any resistance,’ noted Roos-Keppel. Twenty others were dead. The survivors owed their luck to part of the roof falling in and shielding them from the exploding shells.
‘The destruction of Hakim Khan’s gang, which has harried this border for 12 years, will have an excellent effect,’ Roos-Keppel told the Secretary to the Government of India, ‘and the demonstrations of rejoicing on the part of the inhabitants of this Ilaqa [neighbourhood] are unanimous.’ In his report, Roos-Keppel praised the contribution of his officers in responding quickly to the requests of the brave villagers and working together to destroy the gang. The incident even made a small item in The Times, although it wrongly reported the final fight was fought in a cave not a tomb.
Roos-Keppel had demonstrated a commendable ruthlessness in snuffing out Hakim Khan, but this did not mean he was a brutal imperialist at war with the local culture – far from it. Throughout his report, he was at pains to recognise the contribution of the local population as unpaid law-enforcers. Ten years earlier, he had demonstrated his mastery of the local language by writing The Pashto Manual as a guidebook to colloquial Pashto.
Sir Olaf Caroe, an expert on the Pathans, called Roos-Keppel a ‘very fluent speaker of their language, he could turn a proverb, point a moral, quote a poet, make a domestic allusion in perfect timing and in communion with those who heard him – more than any Englishman, he has been claimed as a Pathan among Pathans’. Later, he became a founding member of the Islamia College that evolved into the University of Peshawar.
Descended from a branch of the Dutch Van Keppel family that came over with William of Orange, he was gazetted to the Royal Scots Fusiliers in 1886. He saw action during the Upper Burma War of 1886–7, but then began his long service on the North-West Frontier. Starting as a transport officer, he progressed to the Political Agency of the Khyber and commanded the Khyber Rifles. He never married and frowned at his colleagues for finding wives. ‘No need to keep a cow to get your milk,’ he said, preferring the company of many passing lovers.
The two distinct sides of Roos-Keppel’s character were further illuminated by Caroe, who had met him on a few occasions: ‘He loved to mingle sympathy with callousness, pride with an easy familiarity, generosity with [an] ill-humour towards those who displeased him that could be vindictive. He was a man of strong character who stood above all those who surrounded him, a good friend, but a very dangerous enemy.’
The near-biblical destruction he could bring down on his foes was demonstrated on another occasion when Roos-Keppel gave notice to the chieftains and greybeards of an outlaw border tribe that had killed one of his sepoys.
‘I gave you the choice between friendship and the sword,’ he told them. ‘That of these two you might choose one. Your tribe has chosen the sword. Let it be so …’ He levied a fine of 50 modern rifles and 300 flintlocks, and all the prisoners he had taken from them were dispatched south to India. But worse was to come.
Your villages which have been destroyed by me and any which by God’s Kindness may be so destroyed will remain thus in ruins, and for the future those villages will not be rebuilt nor will their lands be cultivated.
Despite this level of fury, Roos-Keppel did not bring an end to major crime on the North-West Frontier. Two years later, after destroying Hakim Khan, a gang of Pathan outlaws made headlines by stopping a mail train from Peshawar to Calcutta. They shot dead the European driver and guard, plus an Indian fireman. They then advanced through the train carriages, looting the passengers. Unfortunately for them, the outlaws happened to hijack a train containing a small group of British
officers and soldiers.
As soon as the bandits walked into the carriage filled with khaki-clad gentlemen, they heard the sound of cocked pistols and unsheathed swords, and the thieves made a hasty retreat, fleeing into the surrounding hills. The British officers commandeered an engine from a goods train and continued their journey undisturbed.
What made Roos-Keppel exceptional was that not only did he have a sound appreciation of crime on a local level, he also saw the bigger picture. Decades of continuous low-intensity conflict along the North-West Frontier between imperial lawmen and bandits had been punctuated by major military conflicts, but this was just one part of a complex system of organised crime that stretched across many countries. The arsenal of weapons employed by Pathan bandits often came from European suppliers, who sent them via Arab arms dealers in the Persian Gulf. From 1908, with the end of British control over the opium trade, this same route would be used in reverse to smuggle narcotics into the Mediterranean and Europe.
For most of the nineteenth century, the British enjoyed an enormous technological superiority in weaponry over their many imperial adversaries. At the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, an Anglo-Egyptian army stopped dead a horde of charging Islamic fundamentalists, twice its number, with an array of rapid-firing Lee-Metford magazine-fed rifles and Maxim machine guns. For only 60 casualties in their own ranks, the Anglo-Egyptian army slaughtered thousands of Sudanese. ‘It was a terrible sight,’ said a young Winston Churchill in the imperial army, ‘for as yet they had not hurt us at all, and it seemed a terrible advantage.’
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the ‘terrible advantage’ had been eroded by an influx of western arms sold to tribesmen in some of the most volatile parts of the British Empire. None more so than on the North-West Frontier, where combat-experienced Pathan tribesmen gave the British an increasingly hard time with their imported precision-rifled guns. The British retaliated by escalating the arms race with them by devising ever more deadly weaponry, such as armoured cars and bomb-dropping aircraft, on top of the newly improved mountain guns used by Roos-Keppel to such devastating effect against Hakim Khan.
