* The fort and all surrounding land within the range of a shell (local villages are still occasionally referred to as ‘cannonball villages’) had been bought by the Company from the local Maratha king. It was renamed St David on the orders of the Governor, Elihu Yale – whose benefactions would later be memorialized in the name of the New England university. In fact, a more significant donor to that institution was Yale’s friend Jeremiah Dummer, but fortunately for students they did not choose to name the place after him.
* The Mughal Empire in India had been founded by Babur, born in what is now Uzbekistan and said to be descended from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan. He invaded India in the early sixteenth century and within little more than a decade had created an empire which stretched across the north of the subcontinent, from Afghanistan to Bengal. He was reputedly enormously strong (capable of jogging along with a fully grown man on each shoulder) and to have swum across all the rivers he encountered during his invasion. He also drank prodigiously, enjoyed drugs and had a hobby of stacking up the severed heads of those who had displeased him.
* By his own account, Holwell himself seems to have survived the ordeal remarkably well. Within an hour of being dragged out from under a pile of corpses he was able to hold a conversation with Siraj ud-Daula and then walked three miles. The next day, despite being covered in boils and wearing heavy fetters, he marched the same distance, under ‘an intense hot sun’. No trace of the Black Hole now remains, and the memorial obelisk commissioned by Lord Curzon has been moved to the graveyard of St John’s, the earliest surviving church in the city.
* Apart from some enigmatic observations about the use of the scrotum, no trace of this report has ever been found. During a visit to India in 1876, a woman asked Burton’s devoted wife whether their marriage had been blessed with children, and was told, ‘No, thank God; nothing to separate me from my Dick.’
* The holiday ended during the Boer War siege of Ladysmith, where Steevens died of typhoid, aged thirty-one.
* As time ticked down to the centenary of Scott’s death, attitudes changed. A 1979 double-biography of Scott and Amundsen by Roland Huntford portrayed the former as incompetent and deceitful. An inquiry in the late 1990s talked of Huntford’s ‘devastating evidence of bungling’ (quoted in Spufford, I May Be Some Time, p. 4). It was not that the facts had changed, merely that empire and empire-makers were seen differently.
* In 1882, the defeated king of the Zulus, Cetshwayo, was brought to London and taken on tours which included the Houses of Parliament, the bustling docks, the glittering shops of Bond Street and, oddest of all, an outing to the zoo, where he could look upon animals which, however exotic to cockneys, were native to his home continent. The king’s own position was not very different to that of the animals, with crowds gathering each day outside the house rented for him in Kensington and newspapers recording his every move. To avoid being mobbed, he had had to travel to the zoo inside a closed carriage. The king returned to Africa as comfortable in tailored frock coat as he had ever been in traditional near-nudity, and died on a Native Reserve, the human safari park of its day.
* And he was certainly not unique. At the age of fifty-one, Bishop John Hine of the Universities Mission to Central Africa – a stick-thin, feeble-looking figure with a huge beard and a preference for the company of cats to that of women – led a mission into Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), a country over twice the size of England. He walked nearly 3,000 miles in two years.
* On the subject of polygamy, an unfortunate consequence of the missionaries’ encouraging men to discard ‘surplus’ wives was the spread of syphilis, because abandoned wives were often driven to prostitution.
* Chilembwe is the only Christian minister I have heard of who not only sanctioned killing a man (a local white estate manager, William Jervis Livingstone, in 1915) but then preached his Sunday sermon with his victim’s head displayed on a pole beside him.
* They were marked out by their moustache habit, which became commonplace for European soldiers in the East India Company’s Bombay Regiment in 1854, largely because Indian soldiers laughed at clean-shaven men. Soon the fashion had taken hold everywhere. Canny businessmen offered pomades, wax, scissors and curling tongs to make facial topiary appear even more impressive. Piers Brendon, author of one of the most readable of empire histories, even believes that the state of the moustache carries a message about the state of the empire. When Kitchener set out to retake Sudan he wore what was to become the most famous facial hair in the world (as seen on the First World War ‘Your Country Needs You’ recruiting poster). By contrast, Anthony Eden, the Prime Minister responsible for the bungled attempt to capture the Suez Canal in 1956, had a weedy apology for a moustache (see p. 264). Other stigmata of empire were not on public display, although another distinguished empire historian, Ronald Hyam, suggests that the growth of the moustache was complemented by the snipping off of the foreskin. How much the increasing popularity of male circumcision was to do with discouraging masturbation later in life and how much to do with health considerations in the tropics is a question unlikely ever to be resolved.
* Sadly, the story of the supposed origin of the missionary position, as the only arrangement which British missionaries believed suitable for the beastly business, is probably untrue.
* The nawab was an Olympic-class voluptuary, whose English factotum described him as ‘a curious compound of extravagance, avarice, candour, cunning, levity, cruelty, childishness, affability, brutish sensuality, good humour, vanity and imbecility’. He took a lot of drugs, had elephant-drawn carriages inside which he could give comfortable dinner parties for a dozen guests at a time, and maintained a harem of 500 women. He was just the sort of pet ruler the British liked. Colonel Mordaunt commanded his bodyguard.
* Without the Anglo-Indian community, it is fair to say, the railways, telephone exchanges and customs service of British India could not have functioned. Since independence they have found life harder, although their excellent command of colloquial English has ensured jobs in places like call centres. They have all sorts of unexpected talents. At an Anglo-Indian tea party in Chennai, one of the prominent members of the local community turned to me proudly and pointed out how well everyone danced. ‘It’s part of our heritage,’ he said, ‘natural rhythm. We got it from the British.’
* Like the great orientalist Sir William Jones, Stuart is buried among dozens of less culturally sympathetic colonists in South Park Street Cemetery in Calcutta. Jones’s grave is marked by a stained stone obelisk thrusting its way up through the trees, the crossed cannon which often decorated the graves of soldiers replaced in his case by crossed spades, in recognition of his talents as an archaeologist. Major General Stuart lies in a (now rather badly restored) ‘Hindu’ tomb, in front of which a dog had just whelped when I visited. His greatest memorial, though, is his large assembly of Hindu art, which forms the core of the British Museum collection.
* ‘Make a slip-knot at each end of your cord. Tie his hands behind him by passing each loop over his little fingers. Place the burglar face downward, and bend his knees. Pass both feet under the string, and he will be unable to get away’ (Baden-Powell and Baden-Powell, The Handbook for Girl Guides, pp. 291–2).
* Becoming a Companion was to achieve the lowest of the three decorations within the order, for the British graded these things precisely, with the highest ranks reserved for the Viceroy and for Indians who had been fortunate enough to have princely parents yet pliant enough to let the British install an agent telling them how to run their state. A Companionship would be sufficient reward for a stolid engineer. There is no indication Findlayson imagines any honours going to labourers and craftsmen.
† An Indian sailor.
* Patterson had the skins made into rugs, which he later sold to a museum in Chicago. Despite their being a little moth-eaten by then – and still punctured by bullet holes – the museum’s taxidermist managed to recreate the lions, which were put on display in 1928. They a
re now the motif for T-shirts, mugs, posters and caps in the museum gift shop. Earnest forensic scientists who recently examined the skull of the first lion concluded that it had suffered from ‘a severe abscess of the lower right canine that would have prevented it from killing large vigorous prey’. The railway workers were a sort of convenience food.
* Like Rhodes, Barnato did not make old bones. He died when he jumped overboard from the steamer carrying him back to England for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, a few weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday.
* In 1888 Rhodes would merge Kimberley Central into a new company, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd, which he controlled and which is still the biggest diamond-mining company in the world.
* By contrast, Bell considered that his own territory, Uganda, was ‘emphatically a black man’s country and European settlement is out of the question’.
* Argument over this unfortunate treaty continues, while the site of the signing now offers itself as the perfect venue for weddings, as the place where ‘two peoples forged a relationship that has grown into nationhood’. For an additional fee, you can arrive by boat, as Hobson did, and plant ‘a seed of commitment’ in the gardens of the British Residency. In 2010 eleven couples chose to take up the offer.
* The Indian tea plantations, established to reduce the dependence on China, were an imperial creation, as were tea and coffee plantations in Kenya and rubber plantations in Malaya. One of the consequences of imperial trade was to make London the prime international trading centre.
* She is supposed to have taken some comfort from the words which came from behind her – ‘Steady, old lady! Whoa, old girl!’ until she realized it was the colonel of the 2nd Life Guards trying to control his overexcited mare.
* The building still provides the British ambassador to Egypt with a splendid residence, even if the price of Egyptian freedom was the construction of a highway between the elegant lawns and the Nile, and the State Department has erected one of the ugliest American embassies anywhere in the world next door. A portrait of Lord Cromer still hangs in the British ambassador’s study and a pair of stone lions taken by Lord Kitchener from a former Khedival palace still guard the door.
* The Mahdi’s great-grandson, a delightful, Oxford-educated former prime minister, rejects the description, preferring to see his ancestor as a sufi who denied the material world. Unfortunately, as we sat in his peaceful garden in Omdurman, I forgot to ask him quite how that worked with the Mahdi’s reputed seventy wives.
* It was destroyed when the British later retook Khartoum, a 1929 guidebook claiming that the body had been removed and ‘burned in the furnace of one of the steamers’ on the Nile, with the ashes tossed into the river, because ‘the building had become a symbol of rebellion and fanaticism, the goal of pilgrimages and the centre of fraudulent miracles’. The current dome appears to be coated in anodized aluminium and is not visible miles out into the desert for the simple reason that the desert has been built upon and the air is now heavy with pollution.
* One of these gunboats remains in Khartoum, where for many years it served as the clubhouse of the Blue Nile Sailing Club until an exceptional flood washed it up on to the shore, where it still sits, its 12-pound gun painted a bright cerulean blue. A man who had made the place his home was not receiving visitors when I called. Since the departure of the British the Blue Nile Sailing Club looks to have fallen on hard times and now seems to be mainly a campsite for Europeans making the road journey through Africa from the Cape to Cairo.
* The variety of titles reflected the subcontinent’s multiple influences: Hindu, Muslim, Mongol, Ottoman, Persian and more. The names could be very confusing, as a baffled Edward Lear acknowledged, when he asked:
Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?
Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?
Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or a chair,
or squat,
The Akond of Swat?
He needn’t have worried so much: within a few years, the British had redesignated the ruler of Swat as a wali. The significant thing was that, however grand the title, all the apparent rulers of the states within British India were mere princes. There was only one queen, and she was an empress, and thousands of miles away.
* Bearer of an imperial moustache as impressive in its way as that of Lord Kitchener, Lugard had quit Britain soon after reading Rider Haggard’s The Witch’s Head, whose hero sets off for Africa after being crossed in love. Lugard had had the same experience, with a flighty divorcee.
* Blunt had supported Urabi Pasha’s revolt and for a while persuaded Gladstone to leave Egypt to the Egyptians. When the revolt failed, his poem ‘The Wind and the Whirlwind’ predicted nemesis:
Thou hast thy foot upon the weak. The weakest
With his bruised head shall strike thee on the heel.
* The second verse had been inspired by a battle fought in the doomed attempt to rescue General Gordon. The engagement was described by Winston Churchill at the time as the most savage action ever fought by British troops in the Sudan, during which the square formation in which the soldiers fought did indeed break. By the time the First World War (in which the poet worked for the clandestine War Propaganda Bureau) was over, even Newbolt himself was slightly sick of the poem, calling it a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ he’d created.
† The beliefs inculcated at school could, said one not entirely sympathetic observer, be reduced to Ten Commandments running from Number One – ‘There is only one God, and the Captain of the XV is his prophet’ – and ending in Number Ten – ‘I must show no emotion and not kiss my mother in public.’
* In a spectacular example of trickery or political misjudgement, in the 1935 film version of the book the black singer Paul Robeson was somehow induced to play the part of Bosambo, the quaint, big-headed, foolish African who makes the mistake of thinking he can outsmart the white official. When Robeson saw the final product, which was dedicated to ‘the handful of white men whose everyday work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency’, he was understandably furious.
* George Orwell was another anti-imperialist who satisfied the India Office examiners, passing the test to become an empire policeman in Burma, after the usual spell at a crammer.
* ‘Sooner or later we are bound to catch them,’ Kitchener, commanding the overstretched British forces, wrote to two small boys who had sent him a letter, ‘but they give a lot of trouble. The Boers are not like the Sudanese who stood up to a fair fight. They are always running away on their little ponies.’
* Much of the criticism is unfair: Scouting was never, as some on the left claimed, anything like the youth movements of fascist Europe. Indeed, it was banned in communist Russia, fascist Italy and 1940s Japan, and in Nazi Germany they much preferred the Hitler Youth. Rule 4 of Scout Law – ‘A Scout is a friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed the other may belong’ – might be a motto for the multicultural age (quoted in Collis, Hurll and Hazlewood, B.P.’s Scouts: An Official History of the Boy Scouts Association, p. 36).
* There were two official languages and two police forces, but joint punitive expeditions when the natives got restless. The courts contained British and French judges, but to ensure fair play the presiding judge was appointed by the king of Spain.
* ‘England without an empire! Can you conceive it?’ he asked in his last speech. ‘England in that case would not be the England that we love … It would be a fifth-rate nation, existing on the sufferance of its more powerful neighbours. We will not have it.’
* Coincidentally, the first shot fired by British land forces in the war had been in west Africa, by a sergeant of the Gold Coast Regiment, who had been part of a patrol sent into the German protectorate of Togoland to try to silence a powerful German radio transmitter there. The Germans surrendered within three weeks.
* ‘Getting a Blighty’ came to mean getting a wound serious enough to have you return
ed home without endangering your life. Such wounds were desirable enough to be sometimes self-inflicted.
* That was the least of his titles: at one point in the war he commanded a squadron of Inniskilling Dragoon Guards which had occupied the little tin-roofed settlement at the Sheba gold mine. This made him, he said, king of Sheba, and his wife the queen of Sheba.
* In Port Said, Egyptians celebrate the spring holiday of Sham el-Nessim with a bonfire. Rather like Guy Fawkes Night in England, it involves the burning of a dummy, often dressed up as the villain of the day. The festival is called Harq Allenby – the burning of Allenby.
† When the inevitable honours came, he chose to be Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, a perhaps unexpected pairing, but no odder than Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspall, which married the capital of a million square miles of Africa to a Suffolk village with a population of fifty-two, or Horatio Nelson, who became Baron Nelson of the Nile and Burnham Thorpe (population 396).
Empire Page 39