Farewell the Trumpets

by Jan Morris

  The colony’s government was, of course, altogether British. The Governor lived in lavish style on the slopes of the Peak, guarded by soldiers at his gate.1 The administrators and generals and admirals of the island lived hardly less consequentially. They ran it with a paternal authoritarianism, making few concessions to liberal thought, and almost none to Chinese susceptibilities. Everywhere the symptoms of Empire showed: the ships always steaming in from India, Australia or Britain itself, the Indian soldiers who often formed its garrison, the Sikh policemen and hotel doormen, the Australian jockeys who won all the races at Happy Valley, above all the British mesh of the place, the webs of money, style and sovereignty which bound the colony so unmistakably to the imperial capital far away. English equity was the basis of Hong Kong’s trade, with British cash to keep it flowing, and British power to back it.2

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  There was a caravanserai feeling to Hong Kong, a feeling of movement and opportunity and intelligence, as a ceaseless flow of traders, scholars, refugees and wanderers moved through it in and out of Asia. This gave a cogent impression of British omniscience. The colony’s newspapers were always full of Chinese news, commercial information from Shanghai, trade reports from up the Yangtze, rumours from Tibet or Mongolia, lists of travellers arriving from Canton or Vladivostock. The Peninsula Hotel, one of the supreme imperial hostelries, was associated with the Grand Hotel des Wagons Lits in Peking, and the red brick and mahogany railway station, down by the water-front at Kowloon, was linked by daily train with Canton and the Chinese capital. It was a caravanserai, though, conducted strictly to the imperial rules: undesirables were briskly deported, and the very first thing the new arrival saw, when he stepped out of the train from Shanghai, Peking or even Moscow, was a trimly uniformed British policeman, in pith helmet and khaki at the end of the platform.

  It was very beautiful. At first most visitors were intoxicated by the setting of the place, and did not grasp its full meaning. The colony lay there all a’bustle, with the ferry-boats passing and repassing across the crowded harbour, the steam-launches sweeping away from the quay outside the Peninsula, the ships steaming in and out, the flags, die trams and the rickshaws, the carriages crawling up the flowered Peak, the deep tireless hum of life from the Chinese tenements. Away down the coast lay lesser islands, green and silent in the sun, and in crystal bays the junks lay anchored, awkward but elegant, looking as though they never moved from their moorings at all, but lay there for ever as upon a china plate. Outside their barracks the sentries stamped and strutted: in a thousand workshops the Chinese diligently worked their crafts, the apothecaries and the silversmiths, the tailors and the magicians, the shipwrights and the bookbinders and the calligraphers, bringing to the island some profounder stability from China itself.

  But the beauty was misleading, for the real purposes of Hong Kong were brutal. The colony had been acquired to facilitate the selling of opium to the Chinese, and even in 1912 a quarter of its revenue came from the official monopoly in the opium trade. It was there to make money, by means fair or relatively foul—and by being there, by seeming to bristle with bayonets, riggings, wealth and self-assurance, to advertise the Law of Empire.1

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  Far away, and even more explicit, lay Malta. This had been one of the great British naval bases since its acquisition in 1814, and its sole purpose now was to serve and display the Royal Navy’s Mediterranean Fleet. Half-way between Gibraltar and the Suez Canal, it was at once a defensive station on the imperial route to India, and a watch-post off the southern flank of Europe, and no fortress on earth looked more satisfyingly commanding. The ramparts of the Grand Harbour, built by the Knights of St John during the two centuries of their regime, were colossal in themselves, but doubly so when they sheltered, mirrored in the still waters of the haven, the towered and turreted battleships of His Majesty’s Fleet.

  The Navy was dominated still by its capital ships. Some of them were always based at Malta, for everyone to see, and their tremendous shapes were inescapable in Valletta, the capital, glimpsed at the end of city streets, or basking in the sun, like sea-monsters, below the public gardens. In 1910 there were six on station, a sixth of the Royal Navy’s battlefleet. Four were vessels of the Duncan class, looking stolid, almost ecclesiastical, with their close-set funnels like pince-nez and their bridges like church chancels. Two others were the striking Triumph and Swiftsure, built originally for the Chilean fleet, and still curiously exotic—tall, slim ships, with slender funnels and ornamental prows, and large goose-neck cranes, between the masts, which made their silhouettes unmistakable to the sailors of any Navy.1 Flotillas of cruisers, destroyers, torpedo boats and submarines attended these great ships, and the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, flew his flag sometimes on his flagship, Cornwallis, and sometimes from the yardarm of his comfortable Admiralty House ashore.

  In British eyes Malta was an extension of this fleet. They saw the island specifically in terms of firepower, fuel and repair works. Here there were no hinterlands to be defended, spheres of influence to be disputed, squabbling chiefs to be pacified, or even taipans to pursue alternative priorities. Malta was a fortress, no more, no less, and nobody who went ashore on the island could escape the fact. Malta felt both powerful and permanent, for the British were of the opinion that the base was absolutely essential to the security of the Empire, and therefore destined to be British for ever and ever.

  As it happened, too, this was one place in the Empire where the British had a true respect for their environment, or at least for its history. Towards the contemporary Maltese they had adopted a benevolent, tolerant, but superior pose, erecting a kind of imaginary colour bar (Maltese being not much swarthier than Welshmen), excluding Maltese from the best clubs, and seldom inviting them to dinner-parties. Towards the previous rulers of the island, though, they could scarcely be patronizing. Not even a British sub-lieutenant could sneer at the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. In many ways they had behaved just as the British did themselves, and honoured similar values. Fighting capacity, a taste for splendour, the team spirit and the family tradition—all these characteristics of the Order exactly matched the British imperial ethos, and made the Knights in retrospect seem a very decent lot.

  So a towering sense of continuity dignified the British presence in Malta, and made it seem more formidable still. The magnificent architecture of the Knights, the white ramparts above the Grand Harbour, the great gates and the stepped city streets, had become by symbiosis part of the British imperial tradition. The house of the Commander of Galleys was now the house of the Dockyard Captain. The Fort of St Angelo flew the White Ensign as naval headquarters, and its slave dungeons were used as ammunition stores. Where the galleys had careened the cruisers refitted. The narrow alley called Strait Street, a byword among the Knights for sex and skulduggery, had long been adopted by the bravos of the Navy too, and was known throughout the Fleet as ‘The Gut’. And in the Palace of the Grand Masters themselves, where generations of soldier-priests had ruled the island, a British Governor now sat in similar authority, distributing the pomp of Empire in a very knightly manner.

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  It all looked down to the Fleet. All the sailors’ bars, the Happy Return, the Cricketers’ Arms—all the whorehouses and cafés and cheap souvenir shops—the Union Club, the Opera House, the bosomy Methodist Church, the Anglican Cathedral spired above the harbour—the dock-workers streaming home when the evening hooter sounded, the sentries with their bayonets fixed at the Main Guard in Palace Square—all the mass and life of Malta, stacked there so vividly above the sea, looked always towards the warships in its lee. A visit to Malta was less an experience than an indoctrination, and among the grandest historical spectacles of the day was the return of the Mediterranean Fleet, after exercises at sea, to its incomparable haven.

  For its commanders this was a supreme professional moment, and they handled it theatrically, hoping foreigners were watching. Some Admirals preferred the approach state
ly, the grey ships treading steadily and regally to their moorings; some liked to do it at maximum speed, with froth, hiss, split timing and brilliant displays of seamanship. Either way, the impact was tremendous. Crowds hastened to the quays to watch the fleet come in, flags ran up poles and yardarms, children hopped about in excitement, wives chatted happily beneath their most fetching parasols. The distant thump of a band, the muffled thudding of engines—and there they were! First the destroyers, smoke streaming, swept past the harbour mouth to their Sliema moorings. Then the big ships approached in line ahead, their decks lined with ratings, their lamps flashing, their Marine bands overlapping in rich discord as, one by one, they entered Grand Harbour to the strains of ‘Rule, Britannia’ or ‘Hearts of Oak’. Presently, in an atmosphere of festive splendour, they were at their moorings, and the Commander-in-Chief, piped overboard from his flagship in the sunshine, was scudding across the water in his steam-barge to pay his respects to the Governor.1

  All the ships were moored facing out to sea, for it was a maxim of Malta that the Mediterranean Fleet was ready for instant action at all times, against all comers.2

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  Such, many times multiplied, was the show of power. The majesty of it all, and especially the arcane and gorgeous ritualism of the Navy, certainly helped to overawe potential enemies of the Crown, even as the century entered its second decade, for it gave an impression of strength more than merely military or economic, but actually organic. The Empire provided a kind of talismanic screen, like the mystery of ikons and war-banners behind which mediaeval armies went into battle.

  But it was only half true. In many ways the Empire made the British weaker rather than stronger—it presented, John Morley the Liberal had said in 1906, ‘more vulnerable surface than any empire the world ever saw’. Now the British reluctantly attended to their less recondite defences. In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman was succeeded as Prime Minister by Herbert Asquith, a rather less liberal Liberal. In 1910 Edward VII was succeeded as King by George V, a more imperial Emperor. A succession of reformers worked to implement in the British Army the lessons of Spion Kop and Magersfontein: its structure was altered top to bottom, its tactics and weaponry were drastically revised, at last the hidebound traditions of the parade-ground and the open square were jettisoned in favour of field-craft and initiative. By 1914 it was no longer an imperial army in the old sense, trained specifically for the imperial purposes. Its core was now a highly professional expeditionary force ready for service anywhere, but particularly against European enemies.

  At the same time Admiral Fisher, now a volcanic and visionary First Sea Lord, prepared the Royal Navy for duties more demanding than patrolling the China coast, showing the flag in South America, or entertaining sheikhs to wardroom dinner parties. Ruthlessly he cut away the dead wood of the Fleet, most of it the rot of Empire: ships that were good only for showing the flag, drills that were performed only for exhibitionism, unnecessary stations, irrelevant exercises. Oil power was introduced, and the British Government acquired a controlling interest in the oilfields of southern Persia, specifically for the fuelling of the new warships. The focus of the Fleet was shifted, from the blue waters and the far horizons to greyer waters nearer home: the commander of the home fleet, Fisher used to say, was the only man who could lose a war in an afternoon. By the summer of 1914 almost all the great ships were home, ready to face a European enemy in northern waters—of all the Royal Navy’s battleships, only seven were on the imperial stations.

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  They were just in time. In 1897 the Kaiser, already in possession of Europe’s most powerful army, had ordered the construction of a German High Seas Fleet. He had seen it from the start as a deliberate challenge to Britain’s command of the seas, and so to the established order of things. One day, he told his admirals and constructors, it would be God’s Instrument of Justice—‘until then, silence and work’. By 1914 the work was done, the silence broken, and as Europe burst like an abscess into war, Queen Victoria’s Empire found itself challenged by equal force of arms for the first time since she had succeeded to the throne, almost eighty years before. The grand illusion was collapsing. The Powers no longer waited, straightening their ties or adjusting their ribbons, upon Admiral Napier, KCB.

  1 Its leading characters are wise and witty‚

  Their suits well-tailored, and they wear them well,

  Have many a polished parable to tell

  About the mores of a trading city.

  Only the servants enter unexpected,

  Their silent movements make dramatic news;

  Here in the East our bankers have erected

  A worthy temple to the Comic Muse.

  —W. H. Auden, ‘Hong Kong’, Collected Poems.

  1 And almost certain to be commemorated, when the time came, in a street name, a quarter or an institution. Today Pottinger Peak, Mount Davis, Bonham Strand, Bowring Town, Blake Pier, Peel Rise, Northcote Hospital, Grantham College, Sir Cecil’s Ride and Robinson, Nathan, Macdonnell, Kennedy, Hennessy, Bowen, Des Voeux, Lugard, May and Stubbs Roads are all dedicated to gubernational memories. In 1973 academics at the University of Hong Kong analysed the nouns, verbs and adjectives most frequently used in the South China Morning Post: ‘Governor’ came third.

  2 British condescension, too. When in 1910 the powerful new German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau arrived in Chinese waters, the officers of the British China Station promised that if it ever came to a battle, their own armoured cruisers would give the Germans a sporting chance, and use only nine of their ten 7.5-inch guns. Both German ships were to be sunk by the Royal Navy, using all its weapons, at the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914.

  1 Of all the imperial possessions Hong Kong was to retain its posture longest, for to this day it is not only still a Crown Colony, living still by wits and paternalism, but it is larger in population than all the rest of the surviving Empire put together. There is a garrison of Gurkhas, and the taipans on the Peak are richer than ever, being active in shipping, trading, banking, insurance, speculation and agency all over the Far East—‘I’m so sorry,’ I was told once when I inquired after the friend of a friend, ‘but Mrs W—is away in Japan, launching a ship.’

  1 Their offices were still marked in Spanish, and they were known to the Navy as Occupado and Vacante.

  1 Unless he was Sir John Fisher, commander of the Mediterranean Fleet from 1899 to 1902, who preferred to enter harbour first and walk up to the Barracca Gardens to watch the Fleet moor. Once the flagship of his second-in-command, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford, was so ineptly handled that Fisher sent him a malignant signal of public rebuke, observed throughout the Fleet: ‘Your flagship is to proceed to sea and come in again in a seamanlike manner.’

  2 In 1972 I went to Malta, by then an independent State within the British Commonwealth, to see what was left of the Mediterranean Fleet. All I could find was the wooden minesweeper Stubbington (360 tons).

  CHAPTER NINE

  The First War

  THE Pax Britannica came to an end in August 1914, and the British Empire entered its first general war. It was not really an imperial war, but many an old imperial preoccupation, the Eastern Question, the Overland Route, Cape-to-Cairo, Freedom of the Seas, the Supremacy of Race, now came home to roost. From distant seas and perfumed stations the cruisers came hurrying back, and men whose most formidable enemies had been the fugitive commandos of the veld armed themselves to face the greatest army in Europe. The recruiting offices of the Empire were besieged once more by volunteers, as they had been fifteen years before at the start of the Boer War: but now the patriots offered themselves in a different spirit, a spirit of willing sacrifice, almost of sacrament, knowing that this was a conflict separate in scale, in kind and in consequence. They went to South Africa to the jingles of Alfred Austin and the music-hall balladeers. They went to the world war with a very different Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges:

  For Peace thou art armed, thy Freedom to hold:

 
; Thy Courage as iron, thy Good-faith as gold.

  Thro’ Fire, Air and Water, thy trial must be:

  But they that love life best die gladly for thee.

  The Love of their mothers is strong to command;

  The fame of their fathers is might to their hand.

  Much suff’ring shall cleanse thee, but thou through the flood

  Shall win to salvation, to Beauty through blood.

  Thou careless awake! Thou peacemaker, fight!

  Stand, England, for honour, and God guard the right!1

  To Beauty through blood. The entire British Empire went to war with Germany and her allies that August, all 450 million subjects of the Crown being bound by a single declaration from the King-Emperor. The imperial mobilization was presided over by the most famous of all the imperial fighting men, Lord Kitchener, who was immediately appointed War Minister, and the Empire’s response surprised even the British themselves. ‘Our duty is quite clear‚’ announced the Prime Minister of Australia, ‘to gird up our loins and remember that we are Britons.’ Within ten days New Zealand had despatched an expeditionary force of 8,000 men. Within two months 31,000 Canadians had been recruited, drilled and sent to Europe. The South Africans, led by the conciliatory Smuts and Louis Botha, the victor of Spion Kop, not only sent soldiers to Europe, but also took on the task of evicting the Germans from their colonies in south-west Africa, while from every last island, promontory or protectorate came volunteers, offers of money or at least flowery messages of support.

  There were dissenters. In Ireland, as we shall presently see, old enemies of the Empire obeyed an old Irish dictum—‘England’s trouble is Ireland’s chance.’ In India and in black Africa a few premature nationalists chose this moment of crisis to rebel. In South Africa 10,000 ‘last-ditch’ veterans of the Boer War rose to arms rather than support the war, and had to be put down by their old comrades-in-arms. In Canada many French-Canadians opposed the war as a matter of sectarian principle. Generally, though, the Empire attained a unity in conflict which it had never achieved in peace, and the fact of war in Europe gave an unexpected boost to the imperial ideal. The war propaganda of the British was rich in Sons of Empire, Bonds Across the Sea, posters of stalwart Sikhs or devoted Sudanese, cartoons of Britannia attended by her statesmen, her young men of the frontiers, or her familiar imperial menagerie—lion, tiger, emu, springbok, kangaroo and beaver.1