In India, Last Stand immortality was attained in Burma or on the North-West Frontier, among the Afghans and the warring tribes of the Waziris, the Mahsuds, and the Afridis. It was in Kabul, on September 3, 1879—the year Winston began reading Chatterbox—that Arabs invaded the British legation and put Sir Louis Cavagnari and his staff to the sword. Disraeli had assured the Commons that the position was impregnable, and Gladstone never let him forget it. Yet turning the brittle pages of old newspapers one has the distinct impression that the sentimental Victorians enjoyed their sobs. They erected statues of Sir Louis and went about rejuvenated. The following year they put up another after a gallant young officer named Thomas Rice Henn and eleven men forfeited their lives while covering the retreat of an entire British brigade. Wolseley wrote of Henn: “I envy the manner of his death…. If I had ten sons, I should indeed be proud if all ten fell as he fell.”10 Horatius had held the Sublician Bridge over the Tiber to the last, or so Macaulay had said, and now, over two thousand years later, soldiers of the Queen were inspired by a similar code of valor:
The sand of the desert is sodden red—
Red with the wreck of a square that broke—
The Gatling’s jammed and the Colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke,
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks:
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This famous stanza strikes an odd note. The typical British soldier, if he had any education at all, had attended a “Ragged School” for the poor, where there were no games and certainly no concept of fair play. Those were the legacy of the public schools—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury—in whose forms the future rulers of the Empire were trained. The Victorian age was the Indian summer of homage, before wars, depressions, and nuclear horrors had destroyed faith in all establishments. The social contract was everywhere honored. England was guided by the self-assured men of the upper classes. They thought themselves better than the middle and lower classes, just as those classes assumed that they were better than the fellahin and the dukawallahs. In both cases the presumption was rarely challenged.
The selection of the Queen’s proconsuls in the colonies was oligarchic, a product of what later generations would call “the old-boy network” or—to use an allusion they would have understood—a philosophic vision not unlike that of Er the Pamphylian in Plato’s Republic, who, watching the souls choosing their destiny, saw the noblest pick power. There were two ways to enter the autocracy of colonial Britain. If you were recommended by your tutor at Oxford, say, or at Cambridge or Edinburgh, and were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, you could make an appointment at the India Office, situated along one side of the Foreign Office quadrangle at the corner of Whitehall and Downing Street. There you were given the Indian Civil Service examination on subjects ranging from Sanskrit to English literature, and if you passed you were tested on another spectrum of topics, including Asian languages and horsemanship, a year later. Candidates who were accepted were off to Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras on the P & O, probably for good. The “Indian Civil,” or “ICS,” was a much stiffer hurdle than that at the Colonial Office, on another side of the quadrangle. Applicants there needn’t be brilliant; indeed, those with a first-class degree were suspect. The emphasis was on “character” and the “all-rounder,” on being “steel-true and blade-straight.” You were interviewed by the colonial secretary’s assistant private secretary, who never saw a British colony in his life. The atmosphere in his homey office was convivial, clublike, manly. One talked of mutual acquaintances, friends, headmasters, tutors, and engaged in similar rituals of self-reference. In this crucial stage it was important to have the backing of someone whom the interviewer considered a keen judge of men—someone like Benjamin Jowett, the cherubic master of Balliol College, Oxford. Jowett’s maxims tell us much about his protégés. He said: “Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” And: “We are all dishonest together, and therefore we are all honest.” And, on Darwin’s Descent of Man: “I don’t believe a word of it.” He was partial to peers and noble families on the ground that “social eminence is an instrument wherewith, even at the present day, the masses may be moved.” If Jowett or his sort approved, a stripling just out of the university might find himself ruling a territory twice the size of Great Britain, acting as magistrate, veterinarian, physician, resolver of family quarrels, and local expert on crop blight. The similarity of officials’ backgrounds gave the realm a certain cohesiveness. Morris observed: “All over the Empire these administrators, like members of some scattered club, shared the same values, were likely to laugh at the same jokes, very probably shared acquaintances at home…. Place them all at a dinner table, and they would not feel altogether strangers to each other.”11
It was collusion, of course, and it could lead to highly unsuitable appointments, particularly when a great family wanted to rid itself of a black sheep. But most of the youths grew into shrewd men; the level of performance was very high. And many of them could scarcely be envied. Often they started out living in leaky mud huts, rarely seeing anything of their countrymen except for an occasional trader or missionary with whom, under other circumstances, they would have had nothing in common. They often had only the vaguest idea of the boundaries defining their territories, or the size of the populations for which they were responsible. In Uganda, six months was added to home leave because an Englishman had to walk eight hundred miles to reach civilization. While on leave he had to choose an English wife in a hurry, because it might be years before he saw another white woman. With grit, that quality much prized among the Victorians, he stuck it out, sometimes leaving a benign stamp on his tract of the wild. In Nyasaland, England’s deepest penetration into Africa, you can still find natives who, because their overlord was Scottish, recite Christian prayers with a Scot’s burr: “The Lor-r-r-d is my shepherd…”12 It is difficult to condemn men who followed their star when the temptation to slacken was immense, who daily wore their quaint little uniform of white shorts and white stockings into which the traditional pipe was stuffed, but dressed for dinner whenever possible, to keep a sense of order, and carried collapsible little flagpoles wherever they went, so that the fluttering Union Jack would always remind their wards of their distant Queen.
Uganda and Nyasaland were hardship posts. Elsewhere life was more agreeable. In Kenya, British residents stocked streams with trout, and all the great imperial cities had racecourses and polo fields. John Stuart Mill called the whole Empire “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.”13 That was misleading—by their sheer numbers, non-U voices were more audible than the accents of the U—but it was the highborn British who set the tone, which, by the time young Winston Churchill reached India, had become disturbingly insular. In the beginning white men had adopted local ways, learning that in Kerala, for example, it was polite to cover one’s mouth when talking to an Indian of high caste. In 1859 Samuel Shepheard, who built Shepheard’s Hotel, was photographed on an Egyptian divan, wearing a fez, with a glittering brass hookah at one elbow and a parrot at the other. Then, with the invasion of English wives, the memsahibs, all this began to change. Potted plants arrived, and whatnots, and acres of that printed fabric so popular among the natives that its admirers gave it the Hindi name of chintz. The metamorphosis reached its culmination in the hill station of Simla, the cool summer capital of the Raj, in the foothills of the Himalayas, with its Scottish-baronial palace for the viceroy and his vicereine; tea shops; bandstands where Gilbert and Sullivan airs were played; and the Anglican tower of Christ Church, whose bell had been fashioned from a mortar seized in the Second Sikh War.
Churchill, writing from Bangalore, told his brother Jack: “Labour here is cheap and plentiful—existence costs but little and luxury can be easily obtaine
d. The climate is generous and temperate. The sun—even in the middle of the day—is not unbearable and if you wear a ‘Solar topee’ or a cork hat—you can walk out at any time.” And then he reported: “I have just been to luncheon at the Western India Club—a fine large building where every convenience can be obtained.”14 The Raj was beginning to sink its hooks into him. He had been disarmed “up at the Club,” a phrase familiar all over the Empire. There, surrounded by paneled walls, deep leather chairs, and cut-glass decanters, a fresh subaltern like Winston could step up to the bar and find himself, if not among friends, at least among friends of friends. It was an important moment in Churchill’s life. Only by understanding the spell of the Empire, and particularly the Raj, can one begin to grasp the Churchillian essence.
It is a way of life which has vanished, and now, in the heyday of liberal piety, it is considered disreputable, even shameful. Yet there was an attractive side to the Raj, and its vitality is preserved in our language, in such words as bazaar, bungalow, pajamas, punch, dinghy, khaki, veranda, sandals, gingham, shampoo, jodhpurs, and chit. For young patricians who had passed the Indian Civil, or, like Churchill, had passed out of Sandhurst, the adventure began in London, with a shopping expedition in Oxford Street. There you bought your topee, in white or tan, at Henry Heath’s Well Known Shoppe for Hattes. Also available were clever contrivances for coping with the tropics—Churchill had been wrong about the heat, and soon acknowledged it (“Imagine… a sun 110 in the shade!”).15 Among these were antitermite matting, mosquito netting, thorn-proof linen, canvas baths, and patent ice machines. Quinine was essential, but the thrifty postponed ordering tropical clothing until they docked in India, where they would also hire a tropical servant, the first of as many as twenty-five servants. Help was cheap, as Churchill had observed; a lower-middle-class mem who had slaved over a washtub at home would supervise a whole staff, and even British privates had bearers who polished their brass and boots and blancoed their webbing. Once ready for the next leg of his journey, the tyro would travel by train, chugging along at twenty miles per hour, his blinds securely locked at night, telegraphing ahead for a light breakfast (which he would learn to call chota hazri) and for lunch (tiffin). Detraining, he might cover as much as a hundred miles on horseback before reaching his appointed bungalow or, if he were a serving officer, his cantonment. By then he might be ready for his first trip to the thunder box, but if he still felt fit he would be introduced to the more welcome ritual of the “sundowner.” This was the daily drink, and it was served in style by a bearer in a gown and turban. His tray would support a variety of paraphernalia: a carafe, linen napkin, gasogene, and ice bucket. Seasoned sahibs might add a nip of their quinine, as insurance against fever. Indeed, that is how the sundowner custom had begun, when men believed that alcohol was preventive medicine in the tropics.
It was an exotic, colorful life, and at a time when masculinity was valued, its greatest appeal was to men. The mems established their own conventions, their weekly At Homes and dances, their solemn talks with the C of E vicar, and, during the lawn tennis craze of the 1870s, a little exercise. But it was their husbands and the bachelors who thrived in India. They could retreat to their club, where women were of course forbidden, and they had polo, tiger hunting, golf, and all the glory, fireworks, and bunting that were manifestations of virile patriotism. If they were lucky and industrious, one day their names would appear on an Honours List. They were absolutely incorrupt, and the best of them were devoted to the natives in their charge. They adored their Queen, they knew that God was an Anglican, they believed in courage, in honor, in heroes. They could no more have identified with an antihero than with the Antichrist. In retrospect they all appear to have been gallant figures in one of history’s greatest Last Stands. Of course, they didn’t think of it that way. It never occurred to them that they, and all they represented, would one day be disowned, as the result of a national défaillance, within the lifetime of young Lieutenant Churchill, the polo star in Bangalore.
If you were passed back through a time warp and set down in Victorian London, your first impressions would depend upon where in the city you were, and under what circumstances. Henry James saw it at its most inhospitable, while riding in a “greasy four-wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to commit myself” from the Euston train station to Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square. Night had fallen. It was a cold, damp March Sunday. Recalling the scene in 1888, James wrote: “The weather had turned wet…. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness.” He felt “a sudden horror of the whole place… like a tiger-pounce of homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.”16
The city itself was also overwhelmed, engulfed by changes with which it had not learned to cope, and which were scarcely understood. Some were inherent in the trebling of the population, some consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Particles of grime from factory smokestacks, blending with the cold fogs that crept down from the North Sea channel, produced impenetrable pea-soupers which could reduce visibility to a few feet—“London particulars,” Dickens called them in Bleak House. They could be dangerous; it was in one of them that Soames Forsyte’s wife’s lover was run down by horses and killed. Much of London stank. The city’s sewage system was at best inadequate and in the poorer of neighborhoods nonexistent. Buildings elsewhere had often been constructed over cesspools which, however, had grown so vast that they formed ponds, surrounding homes with moats of effluvia. Thoroughfares were littered with animal excrement. Gaslight was not yet the clear piped white light which arrived with the invention of the incandescent mantle in the 1890s. It was smokier, smellier, and yellower; some smudged lanterns dating from the reigns of George IV and William IV may still be found in Regent’s Park. And the narrow, twisted streets were neither sealed nor asphalted. Victorians are often mocked for locking their windows, even in summer, but they had a lot to keep out: odors; dust; gusts of wind that could turn the open flames of candles or kerosene lamps into disastrous conflagrations.
In affluent neighborhoods windows were barred during most of the Queen’s reign, for no policemen pounded beats until late in the century. James recoiled from the gin shops, but he didn’t see the worst of it. The worst was in the blackened, brooding slums of Bluegate Fields, Cheapside, Wapping Docks, Bleeding Heart Yard, Mile-End Road, Maiden Lane, Paddington; St. Giles’s, along Saffron Hill; Westminster (“the Devil’s Acre”); Granby Street, beneath what is now Waterloo Station, with its bolt-holes for criminals; and Whitechapel, where the heaviest concentration of London’s eighty thousand prostitutes lived and Jack the Ripper stalked his prey. At night the East End was eerie. Here the bricks which built the rising city were hardened in kilns like those in Bleak House and in Trollope’s Last Chronicle of Barset, where fugitives found warmth at night. Workingmen were no longer paid in pubs, but that was where many headed when they had their money. There cheap gin, the curse of their class, fueled murderous fights and, by blurring judgment, converted men into easy recruits for criminal schemes—burglaries, typically, or pocket picking in Piccadilly. London’s vast slums terrified respectable Londoners. Even the huskiest gentlemen refused to enter them without a heavy police escort.
The center of London was a hive of hyperactivity. If, like Henry James, you were an American who had spent his first night beneath Nelson’s column and rose in the morning for a stroll along the Embankment, you might first become aware of a familiar quickness in the air. “Mon Dieu, ces anglais, comme ils travaillent!” wrote a French tourist.17 London then had the push and bustle foreign visitors began to note in New York in the 1920s. You could hear it; Londoners called it “the Hum.” This was the busiest metropolis in the world; men were all in a hurry, doing the world’s work. And in this part of the city they were men. If you wanted to see women you would have to stroll t
oward the shopping district and its center, Piccadilly Circus, then named Regent Circus, with its beguiling statue, now called Eros but then, more primly, Charity. Wealthy ladies would be accompanied by servants carrying their parcels and followed, at a respectful distance, by their carriages (hence “the carriage trade”), which, if they were upper class, bore heraldic crests on the doors and were driven by coachmen wearing livery. Middle-class women hired their “Parcels Men” by the hour and usually shopped in pairs. An extraordinary number of them were pregnant, though propriety forbade them from venturing out in public after their third month. Whatever their condition, they would be tightly corseted in armor of whalebone and steel, a cruel fashion which was responsible for internal injuries even among women not carrying children. The point was to show the world that your husband had a comfortable income, that you didn’t have to work. So styles were wildly impractical: great loops of ribbon, hoopskirts, lacy caps, silken parasols, dangling ringlets, blunt bustles, frills, petticoats, and layers of silk and satin heavily trimmed with bugles and beads.
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