The Last Englishmen

by Deborah Baker

  Though it had been less than six months, Wystan was already tiring of the Film Unit. The GPO left him little time to write and the atmosphere was too public school, too upper middle, for his taste. And the present film was not at all the sort of film he was interested in making. He did enjoy working with Benjamin Britten. Benjamin had proved as effortless a composer as Wystan was a lyricist. Wystan was just then mulling over writing a play about mountain climbers with Christopher Isherwood. Benjamin would provide the score. Himalayan expeditions were once again all the rage.

  The dramatic premise of The Ascent of F6 would revolve around a race between climbing parties of rival colonial powers for a summit strategically placed on the contested border of a prize colony. The quest for F6 was an expansive metaphor. Not only did it capture the jockeying for power in proxy wars then under way in Spain and Africa, but it also neatly dramatized Britain’s struggle, in its ongoing quest for Everest’s summit, to project its imperial power over a restive India.

  That past fall Wystan had seen quite a bit of Michael Spender, not long returned from Everest. Michael had introduced him to Shipton and had sung John’s praises, Wystan reported to his brother. Yet when the list of those chosen for the upcoming attempt on Everest was published, once again John hadn’t made the cut. Only Bill Tilman’s exclusion had excited comment. After his and Shipton’s reconnaissance of Nanda Devi, they were thought inseparable. But Tilman had failed to acclimatize during the 1935 reconnaissance. Shipton had made the difficult call.

  For his play, Wystan decided to base the lead climber and dramatic hero of The Ascent of F6 on Michael Spender. Echoing the colonial rivalry would be a fraternal one between the mountaineer hero and his politician brother. The politician’s scheme to exploit the expedition for imperialist propaganda is at first thwarted by the mountaineer’s refusal to sully his beloved mountain with great power politics. Only when their mother arrives to compel him to take the commission does the mountaineer hero relent. Wystan could never resist an Oedipal theme.

  There would also be a lot about marriage in the play, Wystan told John. Wystan had once likened heterosexuality to watching a game of cricket, but in its domesticated form it hadn’t proved nearly as boring as he had once supposed. Six months of living with Bill and Nancy had made him a marriage expert. The climbers’ progress up the mountain would be relayed over the wireless into the living room of a similarly bickering couple. They never went anywhere exciting, the wife complained.

  Knowing John was still bitter about Margaret, Wystan reported that Michael Spender was also in dire marital straits. And while he was on the subject of Michaels, Wystan asked that John convey his best wishes to Michael Carritt. Mrs. Carritt had been happy to hear that her eldest son had finally found someone to talk to in Calcutta. But how had he abused the Carritts’ hospitality while at Oxford? He was a model house-guest; Mrs. Carritt adored him, as did Nancy.

  Carritt had regaled John with tales of Wystan at Boars Hill. Wystan had complained about the “tepid piss” of his mother’s tea, made midnight raids on the pantry, and pulled up the stair carpets to add to the blankets on his bed. Wystan had also kept his brother Gabriel awake till all hours going on about poets no one had ever heard of.

  The Morning Post, London,

  October 17, 1936

  “We are beginning to make ourselves look very ridiculous,” the headline in the Morning Post had read, quoting Captain George Finch, a member of the legendary 1922 Everest expedition. “We ought not to treat the climbing of Mount Everest as a domestic issue. It is an issue of National and Imperial importance.”

  Such an assertion was scarcely ever uttered aloud, much less published in the morning papers. While the 1936 Everest expedition was under way a hopefulness mixed with dread had stilled any criticism. Even after it became clear the climbers had once again failed, any disagreement over how the Mount Everest Committee had choreographed the enterprise was limited to grumbling and backbiting. Now, with the Morning Post headline, the frustration of those with a stake in Everest had exploded into the open. Captain Finch was leading the charge and Bill Wager was egging him on. Like Wager, in 1922 Finch had been defeated by the Great Couloir on Everest’s North Face. Since then he had run afoul of committee members over their resistance to his pioneering use of oxygen. In twice placing its bets on Hugh Ruttledge, Finch continued, the Everest Committee had wasted precious time. The conquest of Everest should not be left in the hands of those whose climbing days, if they ever had any, were long behind them. Nor should the committee be choosing an expedition’s members and leader.

  A clipping of the article and its offending headline quickly found its way to the External Affairs Department of the Government of India, the Foreign Office, the desk of the secretary of the RGS, and the members of the Everest Committee. Few needed to be reminded of the stalemate in the trenches. Soldiers trapped by enemy fire had been unable to advance, sometimes for months. The decision to limit the Everest roster to Englishmen, Rutledge insisted, had nothing to do with chauvinism. Everest’s summit would admit only those who approached the mountain as votaries, unsullied by the lust for fame, fortune, and national glory that had become so shamefully evident in continental climbing parties. Ruttledge didn’t name the offending nation but Nazi flags would soon be photographed flying over camps on Nanga Parbat. To Finch, a New Zealander, this was tantamount to embracing mediocrity. Men had been left out of leadership positions, he held, because certain individuals considered them to be unduly driven by personal ambition.

  “In a venture of this kind,” Finch continued, “personal ambition is a valuable quality.” Everest leadership should be in the hands of a proven climber, no older than thirty-five, with solid Himalayan experience. He alone should choose his team. It was absurd to appoint a leader without the power to compel climbers to risk their lives. “The instruction, ‘you must not take any risks’ is tantamount to saying that you must not get there.” Only a climber could ask others to face the same peril he did; only a climber could judge the risks fully. He should not be down on the East Rongbuk squinting through a telescope whose sights are obscured by a blizzard.

  While the wireless on Everest in 1933 made it possible for Ruttledge to receive weather reports from Calcutta, it also meant London expected progress reports every twenty-four hours. Just as India’s viceroys were now at the mercy of cables from the Secretary of State for India, obliging them to make up in pomp what had been lost in power, so Hugh Ruttledge had to answer to an overbearing Hinks and the second-guessing of the Everest Committee. In this way the distance between Kensington Gore and Base Camp was uncomfortably close, impossibly distant, and, like the relationship between Westminster and Delhi, prey to the armchair misconstructions of men hoping to relive their prime.

  The question was no longer about how best to climb Mount Everest but how much longer Britain’s global hegemony would last. Though an Australian, Finch fully identified with all that was at stake. He’d heard the Germans and the Americans now had their eye on Everest. “Unless we put up a better show,” he concluded, “it will be difficult to argue that we are justified in keeping Mount Everest for ourselves.”

  Eric Shipton, for one, was ready to hand the mountain over. Had it not been for Everest, he wouldn’t have wasted an entire climbing season stuck on the East Rongbuk Glacier freezing to death. He would have been with Bill Tilman when he, and a handful of American undergraduates, summited Nanda Devi, the highest peak in British India.

  CHAPTER 9

  I Spy

  Viceroy’s Residency, New Delhi,

  April 18, 1936

  According to the book Winston Churchill pressed on first-time visitors to India, the viceroy of India was a veiled prophet, the axis around which the British Empire turned. Screened from all knowledge of the people he ruled, the viceroy perceived, dimly, a “dark indistinguishable mass” far below his unfocused gaze. Indeed, if India was the plant, the viceroy was its flower.

  At six feet four the 2nd Marq
uess of Linlithgow was a very tall flower.

  Due to a bout of childhood polio that left him stiff-necked, if Linlithgow wanted to address a man at his side he had to pivot his entire body. In his official portrait the blue velvet mantle of the Star of India rests on a cape with ermine trimmings. Beneath the cape is an embroidered Kashmiri vest and below that knee breeches and white stockings, ending in pointy patent leather slippers. The delicate effect is somewhat ruined by his swollen ankles, but the formal pose is softened by the figure of his four-year-old granddaughter, Sarah Jane, looking up at him, bobbed head atilt, and arms crossed in a huff.

  Linlithgow had chaired the panel of worthies responsible for drawing up the 1935 Government of India Act that had so exercised Lady Houston. This act was initially intended to tamp down the political passions stirred up by Gandhi’s Salt March of 1930 but the Die Hards, led by Winston Churchill, had tied up negotiations for years. The Daily Mail had published Churchill’s fanatical rants suggesting that sectarian wars would break out should even the most nominal autonomy be granted. When that argument didn’t succeed, he asked why Britain should feebly surrender power just when other countries were carving out their own empires and turning their backs on democracy altogether?

  Though the 1935 act was pitched as a great step forward, to get the bill past the Die Hards, a back door of safeguards was installed to reclaim all that was brought in the front door of regional autonomy. As before, the fine print enabled the viceroy to dismiss ministers, dissolve legislatures, and suspend the constitution. Defense, foreign policy, finance, and police were again excluded from Indian oversight. The British business community in Calcutta exploded with relief. The government would not be turned over to baboos.

  Linlithgow arrived in India hoping that both Nehru and Gandhi would embrace the spirit in which the 1935 act was written. Though Gandhi had resigned from Congress in 1934 to focus on the plight of low-caste Hindus, the Government of India no longer fooled itself that he was in any way a spent force. Linlithgow appreciated the feeling that in the past there had been instances of bad faith, but this time things would be different. It all came down to trust. Secretly, Linlithgow had misgivings about his predecessor, the Marquess of Willingdon, though less for his iron-hand rule than for his misplaced priorities. Lady Willingdon had every room in all three viceregal residences painted lilac. The Calcutta residence had been done up with enough mirrors and chandeliers to suggest Versailles. Everywhere Linlithgow looked he saw a lack of initiative and a sorry neglect of duties.

  For his maiden speech in April 1936, the viceroy chose the easily grasped metaphor of family, promising to understand and cherish the differences between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and tribals, just as he did with his own children. He would never favor one over the other. His first task, however, was to oversee regional elections.

  The dyarchy of the 1919 Government of India Act would be abolished and replaced by representative assemblies of elected Indian members in each of the eleven provinces of India. The viceroy’s second task was to persuade all six hundred and sixty nizams, nawabs, rajahs, and maharajas of India’s princely states, protectorates, petty states, agencies, and unions of states to sign the Instruments of Accession, surrendering their sovereignty to answer to an All India federation of provinces and princely states. The territory under royal rule constituted one-third of the Indian subcontinent. It was made up of private fiefdoms of varying sizes, their princely rulers all staunch allies of the Raj. Linlithgow was eager to get to know these royals, not having had the opportunity in his earlier seat on the Royal Commission on Indian Agriculture, given that many of them preferred hunting, gambling, and carousing in European capitals over the quiet cultivation of the soil.

  Next came the question of a meeting with Congress leaders. His predecessor had believed that because Gandhi’s methods of argument were so slippery and oriental the wisest course was to avoid him altogether. Linlithgow was more concerned that a meeting might enhance Congress’s prestige or create unrealistic expectations. He needed to bear in mind, too, the peace of mind of the princes and Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Though still based in London Jinnah remained the leader of the nearly moribund Muslim League. Any sudden overture to Congress might be regarded as a betrayal of his loyal standing. Such were the concerns that kept the viceroy at his desk all hours composing lengthy missives to the Secretary of State for India and to the king.

  The king found his letters exceedingly tiresome.

  Archbishop Acland’s Residence,

  Malabar Hill, Bombay, March 1936

  Reverend Scott’s clandestine meetings with Indian Communists took place in public so that they might more easily be passed off as chance encounters. In Bombay their rendezvous point was Juhu Beach. To arrange a meeting he would leave a stray mark on a specified pillar. His contact would see it on his way to work and know a note would be waiting at the usual drop. Retrieving it, he would leave another note confirming the meet. In this way, Scott maintained contact with Communist Party leaders such as S. S. Mirajkar or Chief Secretary P. C. Joshi. Despite the best efforts of Special Branch to keep tabs on them, their whereabouts were presently unknown.

  That day Scott had used his usual evasion technique en route to the drop point. Tram hopping involved getting off at alternate stations then, at the last moment, jumping back on to see if anyone followed suit. He’d picked this up reading about how the Communists evaded the Nazis. That was before Hitler. There probably weren’t any Communists left in Germany now, he thought.

  But then, just as he approached the rolled-up missive tucked into a hollow railing, a large black crow swooped down, picked out the piece of paper, and flew off with it. He was stunned, incredulous. It occurred to him that his Indian comrades would not find this amusing. Worse, they might not believe him. He scarcely believed it himself. Once again, he decided he wasn’t really cut out for this work.

  Reverend Michael Scott came from a long line of vicars.

  He had first been recruited to the Communist cause while working as a lowly assistant priest in Hackney. In 1933 Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts were squaring off against the Communists, and Hunger Marchers were arriving in droves from the North and Northeast. The streets of London’s East End had become a battleground and he’d had to choose sides. On his departure for India he had offered his services to the Communists as long as what they asked of him didn’t clash with his Christian conscience. As he understood it, the mission of the Communist Party of Great Britian was to encourage Indian peasants and factory workers to join the global uprising against their capitalist and imperialist overseers.

  Posted as a domestic chaplain and assistant to the archbishop of Bombay, the reverend had been shocked by the wealth of the European community and its Indian supporters. For official functions this crowd would glide up the long drive to Government House in gleaming motorcars driven by liveried chauffeurs to emerge one by one in all their feathered finery. There were the savvy merchants and bejeweled princes and the small but powerful Parsee community. He was never comfortable in such a crowd. Except for tobacco—he smoked like a chimney—the reverend had an abstinent disposition. And everywhere he went he overheard the same withering remarks about the nationalists.

  Congress: a crop of worthless agitators who in no way represent the starving and ignorant masses. Gandhi: a bowler-hatted solicitor who had taken to native attire to deceive the unwitting peasant into thinking he was one of them.

  From the high windows of the archbishop’s palatial residence in the fashionable heights of Bombay’s Malabar Hill, Reverend Scott watched the mass political rallies taking place on Chowpatt Beach. Brightly colored banners fluttered among cheering crowds. Though the Communist mission was more ambitious than the strictly nationalist goals of the All India Congress Party, he was sympathetic to their cause. When a Congress deputation gave him proof that police had beaten their cadres with long canes and inflicted shocking forms of torture he had pleaded with His Eminence to compel the governor to prosecute
the men involved. The archbishop had no immediate response.

  On a trip outside the city, however, the archbishop gently suggested that it was time for Scott to face reality. Wasn’t it better for a few agitators to suffer than to have whole tracts of the country laid waste when the realization hit that the hopes these troublemakers were raising among innocent villagers were destined to be disappointed?

  The question did worry him. But he found it impossible to accept that there was nothing to be done. So Reverend Scott fell back on the Gospels. Yes, he argued with himself, the Communists were the first to grasp the perils of fascism, the first to fight it on the ground. Similarly, Marx offered a convincing critique of imperialism. Yet Scott found the idea of perpetual class warfare inimical to his Christian beliefs and a materialist view of ethics wanting. And it was no help at all, alas, when it came to explaining the vagaries of individual conduct, or even chance events. Like that crow.

  And so he censured himself over the pride he took in his own cunning. He prayed he would be forgiven for the lies and duplicities of his double life, telling himself that God would understand that helping the Communist Party of India was the very least he could do. Periodically, the strain would overwhelm him and he would ask his contacts to find someone else. In the spring of 1936, not long before he was transferred to Calcutta, they had. That person was ICS Special Officer Michael John Carritt.

  It was during his last rainy season as a subdivisional district officer in Tangail that Carritt had finally begun to grasp the true nature of the British Empire. Tangail was located in the plains of the Bengal Delta. Barely a town, it had no club and no machinery in place for any kind of socializing. Because a previous district officer had been shot on an inspection round, neither his DO nor the police chief visited during Carritt’s yearlong tenure. Yet he had asked for this post. Had he wanted to prove he was as much a man as the assassinated district officers of Midnapore? Did he hope to disarm the Raj’s most implacable foes with a demonstration of his due diligence?