by Jan Morris
The motor car never blossomed in the imagery of Empire. One remembers Lawrence’s Rolls-Royces hurrying north from Aqaba, or Dyer’s sinister armoured cars outside the Jallianwallah Bagh; one glimpses a Governor emerging from his porte cochère in his dowagerly Humber, or a visiting Prince whisked from the quayside in his especially imported Daimler. Symbolically, though, aesthetically, the imperial modes of transport remained pre-automobile: the white shuttered train, the gubernatorial barouche, the elephant, the bullock-cart, the double-decker trams surging through Sydney, the street-cars steamed up from their coal-stoves in the snowy streets of Toronto. The one memorable motor-route of the British Empire was established by New Zealanders, the brothers Nairn, in the new territories of the Middle East: and even its buses were built in America.
The Nairns, who had gone to the Middle East with Allenby’s Mounted Corps, astutely realized that the new British dependency of Iraq, so long immured in the obscurity of the Ottoman Empire, would now need swifter access to the west, and in 1922 they established a desert bus service linking Baghdad with Damascus, the capital of Syria, and so with the Mediterranean—a journey of some 500 miles along unsurfaced tracks. As Waghorn had been to the Overland Route to India, as Cunard was to the Atlantic steamship crossings, as P & O were to the Suez voyage, so the Nairn Brothers and their buses became to the new empire in the Middle East. They carried the mails, and until the advent of air services, all the most important travellers in and out of Baghdad. Everyone knew them. ‘Taking the Nairn’ became a familiar part of speech, and one of the sights of the day was the spectacle of a big Nairn six-wheeler sweeping across the gravel desert, marked by the great plumes of its dust, on its overnight journey between the capitals. The Nairns had several competitors over the years, but they out-drove and outlived them all, remaining familiar institutions of the Middle East when the Empire itself had gone.
The only stop on the journey was at Rutba Wells, almost halfway, in the very depths of the Iraq Desert. This was a fortified oasis and customs post, surrounded by barbed wire and a high wall built of sand-filled petrol cans. There were a few mud huts outside the gates, a police barracks and a rest house inside. It was an awful place. Not a trace of green could be seen, except for a few patches of grass about the wells; all around the desert extended drab and brown, and behind the fort the dried-up bed of a river, which came to life only after rains, meandered away into nowhere. The tracks of camels and goat herds came out of the desert to converge upon Rutba, and the wide beaten path of the Baghdad to Damascus road passed outside its gates, to disappear over the horizons east and west.
Nothing much happened there. A group of Bedouin might lollop in, to settle with their beasts and black tents in the shade of the petrol cans. Oil company lorries might stop for beer or petrol. Sometimes a convoy of RAF trucks arrived, on its way to Azraq, Amman, or Habbaniyah, and occasionally even private cars appeared, chauffeur-driven generally, and generally in convoy, to discharge their dehydrated diplomats or car-sick Levantines briefly and unhappily into the rest house. Most of the time, though, Rutba simply sweltered and dozed behind its barbed wire, buzzed about by flies, ranged about by pi-dogs, with only the blare of the police post radio to break the silence.
But once a day, regular as clockwork, far in the distance there appeared the cloud of dust that heralded the arrival of the Nairn bus, and the oasis shook itself into life. The café tables were flicked more or less clean, the cook was woken up, the petrol men loitered over to the pumps, the lemonade was put on ice, and even the police and customs men tipped their hats back from their eyes, stretched themselves and delicately picked their noses. Soon one could hear the agonized growl of the bus as it changed gear for the approach, and its dust came billowing ahead of it over the walls, and suddenly there it was rumbling and juddering at the gates—high, hot and thick with dust, with its two Arab drivers already clambering from their cab, and through the sealed windows of the passenger compartment tired lined faces looking out.
Every kind of person tumbled from the Nairn bus, when it arrived at Rutba Wells: Bedouin sheikhs in spacious hauteur, Baghdad Jews with thick beards and wide black hats, swaggering Kurds from the north, Persian wives in the prison-tent of the burkah, Iraqi Army officers stony in khaki drill, American oil technicians, Egyptian politicians with significant brief cases, Italian priests, Greek grocers—and aloof among them all, red from the sun, rather sweaty, in crumpled linen jackets or RAF serge, separated from all these companions by race, function, taste, history and prejudice, from each other by class, rank, preference and diffidence, there travelled the British, whose presence in that desert had sponsored the equipage in the first place, but who already seemed the least assertive of its passengers.
7
As to the air, the British never did establish the supremacy aloft which was so long theirs at sea. As one might expect, they were adventurous pioneers of flying. Englishmen were the first to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic, the first to fly to Australia, the first to fly over the Himalayas, the first to fly air mail, and they established speed records in all directions. After the war they realized the uses of air power in imperial government, too—the security of the Middle East was in the hands of the RAF, and as early as 1931 two battalions of troops were airlifted from Egypt to a trouble-spot in northern Iraq.
But there was something laborious, or even reluctant, in the application of all this initiative to the everyday business of air transport—a subconscious desire, perhaps, not to hasten the air age, in which all competitors were starting from scratch. Imperial Airways, the airline which did in the end launch an All-Red Empire Air Service, was born in 1924, and even then it seemed faintly anachronistic. If the splendour of steam could have been transferred to the air age, Imperial Airways would have done it: as it was, its plodding biplanes and flying-boats, nearly always slower, nearly always better upholstered than their rivals, sailed the skies with a distinctly maritime dignity, their captains talking of ports and moorings, coming aboard and going ashore, just as though they were in fact navigating the steamships of the imperial prime.
The airline was heavily subsidized, and as a carrier of the Royal Mails enjoyed semi-official privileges, punctiliously maintained by the management. If an Imperial Airways aircraft made a forced landing in imperial territory, its captain was authorized to stop any passing train and oblige it to take on the mail-bags. When the airline began scheduled services to Iraq, the Iraqis were induced to dig a furrow right the way across the Iraqi Desert, to guide its navigators more conveniently into Baghdad. Though it operated in Europe too, this was essentially an imperial airline, and by the end of the 1930s it flew to most parts of the Empire. There were routes to Egypt, India, Iraq, South Africa, Singapore and Australia—‘buckling the Empire together’, as Churchill put it, and greatly changing the life-styles of the imperial administrators.1
It was not a very efficient airline. Its pomposity was a joke among competitors, and even the British themselves often found it too formal and officious—so many of them preferred the KLM service to Singapore that the Dutch complained they couldn’t get seats on their own aircraft. The imperial air routes, which looked so impressive on the maps and murals, turned out to be, if you actually tried to fly them, less than handy. Flights were unpunctual, staging-posts were uncomfortable. A traveller to South Africa in the early 1930s had to change six times, flying in five different types of aircraft: a traveller to India had to travel by train from Basle to Genoa, before flying on to Rome, Naples, Corfu, Athens, Tobruk, Alexandria, Cairo, Gwadar and, after seven nights and four changes of aircraft, plus a Swiss wagon-lit, at last to Karachi.
All this was a far cry from the lost dreams of the R101, and Imperial Airways did not really get into its stride until the All-Up Empire Air Mail Scheme of 1934. Under this plan letters with an ordinary 1½d English stamp, the normal surface rate, were delivered by air mail to any Imperial Airways destination.1 It was another attempt to unite the Empire by technology, and it g
ave the airline an inspiriting sense of purpose. To handle the new traffic Imperial Airways ordered, direct from the drawing-board, twenty-eight new flying-boats, called of course the Empire Class, and destined to set once and for all, in memory as in imagination, the tone of the imperial air services. They were not very fast aeroplanes, they were not altogether reliable—only one in three of the Karachi flights arrived more or less on time—and they had their share of trouble. One collided with an Italian submarine, one dived into Lake Habbaniyah, one sank in the Hooghly River, one was blown up by an exploding fuel barge at Southampton and one was permanently stuck in the mud in a lake at Tonk. Nevertheless they became a familiar and beloved part of life for thousands of Britons.
Like the R101, the Empire flying-boats tried hard to be ships. They had sleeping bunks, inhabited in the advertisements by elegant husbands in spotted silk dressing-gowns, bobbed wives in crêpe-de-chine. They had a smoking cabin, and a promenade deck, and the lavatories had tiled floors, and the seats had legs of chromium plate, and the chef in his galley wore a chef’s hat, and the captain and his first officer, high in their cockpit above the Mooring Compartment, were splendid in blue, gold rings and medal ribbons. When the Empire flying-boats alighted with a lordly swish on the Nile at Cairo or the Hooghly at Calcutta, flags proudly burst from the cockpit roof—the Blue Ensign of the Royal Mail, the crested emblem of Imperial Airways. It was all very imperial, very self-conscious, and perhaps rather touching.
The home base of these imposing aircraft was Hythe, in Hampshire, and the British public were now indoctrinated with the idea of British supremacy in the air. Bradshaws, suppliers of railway timetables to His Majesty the King, brought out their first Air Guide, with useful tips for imperial air travellers (it was advisable to take a dinner suit, but otherwise no special clothing was required, the cabins of the airliners being closed and heated). The ‘Speedbird’ image, the blue-winged flash of Imperial Airways, became one of the best-known of advertising symbols, and the airline diligently fed its passenger lists to the newspaper columnists (though their selection was sometimes less than exciting—in September 1935, for instance, they could only suggest the owner of the Karachi Daily Gazette and the Rumanian Secretary of State for Air). In the brilliant posters of Imperial Airways the Empire boats flew gracefully over the Pyramids or settled on limpid blue seas beneath palm fronds, attended by lithe natives in canoes.
It all sounded very novel and up to date: in fact the air services were thoroughly traditional, not simply in their manners, but in their systems too. For Imperial Airways as for P and O, the hub of imperial communications was the eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt the air routes diverged, one going north-eastward into the new Anglo-Arab empire, one down the Cape-to-Cairo corridor to South Africa, one following the steamship routes across the Red Sea to India. Based upon Alexandria was the Royal Navy’s duty destroyer, detailed from the Mediterranean Fleet to patrol the imperial air routes. Based upon Crete was the company’s motor-yacht Imperia, with full servicing equipment for the Empire boats. Even Corfu, the Ionian island once thought indispensable to the security of Britain’s eastern routes, came into its imperial own at last, so that the local cricketers, looking up from the game bequeathed to them by the Empire a century before, might often see the old flag breaking from Canopus or Cambria, Caledonia or Capricornus, as the boat for Alexandria settled on the emerald lagoon of Gouvia.
Flying the routes of Empire gave many Britons the same proprietorial sensations they had so long enjoyed from their liners, watching through sea-slapped portholes the passing of the imperial fortresses. ‘I was an Imperial passenger, a proud title,’ wrote Sir Edward Buck, CBE, of a flight through Africa, and indeed he felt easily at home. Among his fellow-passengers were Lord and Lady Chesham ‘who have interests in Swaziland’, and Mr F. Kanthack, CMG, formerly of the Indian Irrigation Department. At Entebbe he had time to make a brief visit to Government House, to congratulate the Governor on his new appointment to Nigeria, and to hear some of His Excellency’s recollections of Sangor, in the United Province of India, ‘where he served as Assistant Remount Officer in 1917’. They spent a night at Juba, where the paragons of the Sudan Service had created a model village in the bush, with its clean hostel, its well-planned native housing, its mission church and its spick-and-span District Commissioner rising courteously from his desk to greet his evening visitors. They had a couple of hours in Khartoum, where Major Barker showed them round the Zoological Gardens—Lady Chesham was much amused by the injunctions at the gate, which forbade her either to bring her donkey into the gardens, or to spit at the animals there.
Next day they spotted the Aswan Dam, the Empire’s pride, as Sir Edward, Mr Kanthack and the Cheshams enjoyed a game of bridge, and when they landed for the night at Luxor Lady Chesham insisted upon a visit to Tutankhamun’s tomb, whose replica she remembered so vividly from the Wembley Exhibition. So at last on the fourth day they descended thrillingly over the Pyramids to Cairo, where the Union Jack still billowed serenely over Kasr-el-Nil, and passengers on the port side of the aircraft caught a glimpse of the High Commission gardens beside the river. A line of uniformed Imperial Airways officials awaited them when they alighted upon the brown airfield at Heliopolis, snapping into a salute, as they stepped out into the warm sunshine, for all the world as though those passengers were being piped ashore from an imperial warship.
The 1935 African schedule allowed a week from Cape to Cairo, but never for a moment did the aircraft have to fly over foreign-controlled territory, or find itself out of sight (for it never rose higher than 10,000 feet) of more or less imperial soil. What was more, if passengers wanted it Imperial Airways would land at many another imperial outpost along the route: at Sheraik or Kosti, for instance, at Victoria West or Moshi or even at Mokia (though even in 1935‚ hardly anybody wanted to get off at Mokia).
8
It did not come naturally. Younger nations grew up with internal combustion: the British Empire was too old to find it easy, and for all the publicity of Imperial Airways, the British public were much more excited by the launching in 1934 of the greatest of all their Atlantic liners, the Queen Mary.1
One innovation which did fire the British imagination was something more mysterious, something almost spiritual it seemed: Wireless. It was, of course, a transforming agency for the Empire, and at one time the British hoped to make it as much their own as undersea cables had been in the previous century. Before the Great War Fisher had wanted to make it a world-wide Governmentmonopoly, shared only with the Americans—‘It’s VITAL for war! The HOURLY developments of Wireless are prodigious! You can’t cut the air! You can cut a telegraph wire!’ He pressed the idea upon the Imperial Conference of 1911, and the assembled Prime Ministers did plan a series of wireless relay stations, throughout the Empire, which would effectively have dominated the world’s communications systems.
The war prevented it, but wireless came to mean much to the British Empire, and its mystique powerfully attracted the British. Kipling even wrote a short story about it, more than he ever did for the Empire Flying Boats. When Freya Stark went to an English Mission service at Hamadan in Persia in 1930, the preacher likened the Lord himself to a Radio Receiving Station, tuned into the world’s prayers,1 while at home the Archbishop of Canterbury, exalted by the possibilities, wanted to know if he had to leave his windows open to receive signals. The British Broadcasting Company, founded in 1922, began regular Empire broadcasts ten years later, intended to ‘keep unshaken the faith the British nation has in its Empire’, and the King himself said that wireless could ‘work the miracle of communication between me and my people in far-off places’.
For most imperial citizens of the 1930s indeed, the wireless evoked above all the image of the King-Emperor himself, presenting his annual Christmas broadcast to his peoples across the world. This was the one occasion in the year when Empire and modernity truly coincided, but even so it was technique not in the cause of power or development, but for old t
ime’s sake. How Queen Victoria would have loved it! The chimes of Westminster relayed so magically around her Empire, the faint suggestive crackle on the loudspeakers, as though Buckingham Palace were even then being plugged into the system, the plummy accents of the ‘announcer’ (wearing, as everybody knew, evening dress for the occasion), the theatrical moment of absolute silence, and then, heard at that very instant in home and office, ship and barrack, kraal, hill-station, rubber estate and trading post across the British Empire, the thick bearded voice of His Majesty, speaking very carefully, as if to make allowances for the younger members of the family. ‘Another year has passed….’
1 Still easily to be evoked, for the Cardington airship sheds survive, and seen especially from the low hills to the south, look like two gigantic barrow-graves.
1 Nothing was left of the R101 but a pile of steel, presently used to make kitchenware in Sheffield, and the RAF ensign, which now hangs in the church at Cardington. The bodies of those killed were taken to Cardington too, and lie in a common grave within sight of the airship sheds. On the road from Beauvais to Paris an impressive monument records the sad roster, from Brigadier-General the Right Honourable Lord Thomson of Cardington, PC, CBE, DSO, to J. W. Megginson, Galley Boy, and James Buck, Valet. On the actual site of the crash, though, a mile or two away over fields and woods, there is a less grandiose memorial. It is a stumpy concrete pillar, half-hidden in the woods, and you can reach it only by scrambling through scratchy undergrowth and pushing aside the hazel branches. All it says is: LE DIRIGEABLE R 101, 5 OCTOBRE 1930.