Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  In theory Egypt was not part of the Empire at all, though the British had run it for fifteen years. It still owed allegiance to the Sultan of Turkey, and its nominal ruler was the Sultan’s vassal, the Khedive Abbas II. There was an Egyptian Prime Minister, an Egyptian Cabinet, an Egyptian Parliament, an Egyptian Army, an Egyptian flag. British sales to Egypt appeared in the official statistics as exports to a foreign country, and when a British ship dropped anchor in the Suez roadstead, to pick up a French pilot, invite the British garrison commander on board for a drink, welcome Thomas Cook’s man or send a telegram to book a room at Shepheard’s in Cairo—as it paid these practical respects to reality, it honoured the fiction, too, by hoisting the Egyptian ensign on its topmast.

  In two respects the government of Egypt really was out of British control. The national finances were in the hands of an international board of experts, the Caisse de la Dette; half the national revenue was taken by this body to pay the interest on Egypt’s foreign debts, while the other half was used to finance the administration. Then Egyptian jurisdiction over foreign residents had been surrendered to a whole series of capitulatory courts, one for each consulate, whose machinations often made a mockery of justice, and were surrounded by labyrinths of hidden interests, claims and skullduggeries. For the rest, Egypt was virtually the personal responsibility of the British Agent and Consul-General, Lord Cromer, who had been in command almost since the occupation began, and whose stature was by now so towering that he was known simply as ‘The Lord’. Cromer paid proper court to the young Khedive, and he scrupulously allowed the façade of Egyptian sovereignty to stand—only one British official, the Financial Adviser, attended Cabinet meetings, and he did not vote. Laws were decreed by the Council of Ministers, and sealed by the Khedive. Administrative orders were signed by His Highness’s Ministers, and executed mostly by Egyptian officials. But nothing of real importance could be done without British sanction, and it was British imperial initiative that set most things moving in Egypt, from the reorganization of the tax system to new schedules for the Nile steamers. The Khedive was hardly more than a puppet. When 18,000 of his own soldiers were once sent down to the Sudan to fight the Mahdi, he only heard about it from the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, who was on a visit to Egypt, and had been told the news by a drunken British officer the night before. The wittiest of Anglo-Egyptians, Lord Edward Cecil, once described how the British presence made itself felt at an Egyptian Cabinet session: the merry in-sparring among the pashas, the exchange of innuendoes, the touches of farce, the suggestions of cultured nepotism, and at last the appeal to the opinion of the solitary Englishman present, who said he’d sleep on it and let them know.

  A formidable team of Britons ran Egypt under Cromer. Many of them had Indian experience, and they were recruited by Cromer himself. In all the Ministries, in every key post in the field, at the desk of the Sirdar of the Egyptian Army or discreetly settled in rooms above the Alexandria dock police station, one would find Englishmen. Upon them the Government of Egypt really depended—when one man retired, resigned or changed his job, confusion often momentarily followed: and so individualist was the system, so unregulated by the usual conventions of seniority or decorum, that competition among the British themselves was cut-throat. It was, as one of its most successful practitioners1 said, plain survival of the fittest.

  This cell of English officials, backed by six thousand men of the British Army of Occupation and a substantial British commercial community, so set their mark upon Egypt that to the world at large it became a British dominion. They did very little to prepare Egypt for the absolute self-government so piously foreseen in 1882; they failed, as the British did nearly everywhere, to give the country a proper system of education; they never succeeded in making themselves popular—Dilke said in 1893 that nobody of weight wanted the British to stay in Egypt except the British themselves. But by great engineering and irrigation works they gave new hope to Egypt’s peasants, and by force of character they turned Cairo into a new kind of capital, part Arab, part African, part Levantine, part imperial British. The French influence had been strong in Cairo ever since Napoleon’s day, and that part of the city which did not look orientally medieval looked seedily French : but upon it the British had imposed four-square institutions of their own. High on Saladin’s citadel, above the glorious minarets and courtyards of the old city, the Union Jack flew vastly above the fortifications, and the screw-guns of the British garrison commanded the whole of Cairo. Down by the Nile the brown slab of the Kasr-el-Nil barracks echoed with bugle calls, throaty commands and clattering rifle-butts, like a power-house of Empire, and through the streets each morning marched the guard squads, brilliant in khaki drill and white sun-helmets, their belts dazzling with pipe-clay, the bayonets on their Lee-Mitfords glittering in the sun.2 The British hotel was Shepheard’s, one of the most famous in the world. The British suburb was Zamalek, an island in the Nile, where the Empire had established its own familiar society, with its calls and its soirées, its gossip and its private feuds, its favourite Copts and its few flattered Muslims. The international winter season, now exceedingly fashionable, was dominated by the British, with Lord Cromer moving through the balls and picnics like a grave deus ex machina. Alexandria was virtually a British port—of the 940,000 tons of steamer traffic cleared there in 1896, 800,000 tons were British. The police force was organized to a British pattern, the trams were fresh-painted, the trains had British rolling-stock, the telephone service was the envy of visiting Europeans, and comfortably up and down the River Nile ran Cook’s famous steamers.

  Those steamers! In the summer of 1897 many of them were far upriver, taking Kitchener’s soldiers and supplies towards the capture of Khartoum, but in normal times, as they paddled serenely from one Pharaonic prodigy to the next, they were happy embodiments of Empire in themselves. Most of them were built in England, and they were repaired by Cook’s own Cairo boatyard, on the Nile at Boulak. They generally carried a European manager, and they were kept as spick and span as any Atlantic flyer—paddle-boxes blinding white, chintz curtains in the saloon windows, flowered toiletries in every cabin. At the breakfast table the passenger, whatever scorched reach of the Nile his steamer was chugging through, would find his morning paper and his personal mail laid neatly beside the marmalade, just as though he were home in his own club. There was a strong symbolism to one of these little ships, as she steamed between the changeless sands, so trim, so polished, so energetic, with her sailors in blue jerseys, and so many splendid moustaches upon her promenade deck (for not the least of Britain’s emblems in Egypt was the moustache of the Sirdar, Kitchener himself, the cynosure of soldiers everywhere, and shamelessly copied on the spot).

  7

  Paddling up the Nile with Oxford marmalade and the Egyptian Gazette: one might suppose that to be British in those days was very heaven, and that the Englishman wandering through his Empire would find his path eased everywhere, subservient lackeys always to hand, ordered efficiency always at his instruction. It was not so. The imperial system did not succeed in disciplining all the Empire into the predictable common sense of Surrey or Nova Scotia. Even better-ordered parts of the Pax Britannica often looked, to the disillusioned traveller, a fearful shambles, and contemporary guidebooks are full of warning, in the most thoroughly British of possessions, against the Neapolitan hazards of pester, larceny and impertinence. The British presence might enable you to walk unscathed through the deserts of Sind or the prairies of the Six Tribes, but it did not protect milord against the pickpockets of Calcutta. The flashy larrikins or city roughs of Melbourne were the bane of every genteel visitor—loud-mouthed, quick-fisted and apparently quite beyond the control of Authority. ‘Touts’, runs an entry in Murray’s Indian handbook: ‘travellers are warned against these individuals, who torment the stranger from morning till night trying to persuade him to patronize his employers. They should be treated, as far as possible, with indifference.’ Nor would it always do much good complaining t
o the imperial police—in India the native constables were frequently corrupt, and anyway visitors from England were not always very welcome to their Indian estates. There were parts of the British Empire indeed where ordinary Britons were forbidden to go at all, and often the Empire-builder in the field seemed to think that the Empire was not so much the property of the British people as of his particular branch of the colonial administration. Even native employees of the Raj caught this infection. The story was told of a formidable peer, a member of the Viceroy’s personal staff, who found himself pointedly ignored by the Indian booking-clerk at a railway station. He cleared his throat and tapped his fingers, but the babu took no notice. Finally the peer lost his temper. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘damn it, I don’t think you know who I am. I’m Lord So-and-So.’ ‘Oh my Lord God,’ the clerk cried without looking round, and fell backwards off his high stool to the floor—but the interesting part of the anecdote was not his final discomfiture, but his studied rudeness in the first place. Just to be British was clearly not enough.

  The imperial complexity was all too apparent. No soothing uniformity of procedure greeted the traveller at British ports. The Union Jack above the ramparts, fluttering from Gibraltar to Vancouver, was a false promise: nothing was the same from colony to colony, currencies and tariffs varied everywhere, the forms to be completed were never the same twice, and the uninitiated stranger seldom knew whether he was disembarking at a Crown Colony port (Valetta, for instance), a Protectorate port (Mombasa or Kuching), an Indian Empire port like Aden, a port of a self-governing Dominion or a port like Alexandria which defied any succinct classification, flying the green Egyptian flag but apparently run by British officials in tarbooshes. Other Empires—the Roman, or the French—stamped their dominions with the hall-marks of unity. Not the British. They did not much care about appearances. Their Empire was, so J. L. Garvin1 once wrote, ‘the most complex and plastic political organism the world had yet known’, and plastic it must indeed have seemed to the voyager stepping ashore into the squalor of Georgetown, British Guiana, all huddled wooden shanties beside the Demerara, or the leers and babel of Port Said, or the internationally notorious muddle of Madras—where the beach was littered all over with coal, timber, crates of liquor, sacks and railway sleepers, and it took so many weeks or months to clear a consignment that often before one ship’s cargo could be removed another would be dumped on top of it.

  Picture postcards of imperial scenes in the nineties generally seem to show the cities of the Empire leisurely, uncrowded, and bathed in benign sunshine. This is perhaps because they were taken on fine Sunday afternoons with police protection. In fact, as travel memoirs of the time reveal, a British imperial city could be as ghastly a hole as any other. Paved streets in the Indian cities were very rare, and some of the fortress colonies were universally detested. Aden seemed to live in a constant and highly uncomfortable state of semi-siege: the eight or nine fierce tribes of the hinterland were only kept quiet by bribery, and one traveller of the nineties, pausing there on a voyage to India, described the faces of the British soldiers as ‘shrivelled up—a pathetic sight to see’. Gibraltar, topographically the most splendid British possession of all, turned out to be, when you landed at the docks, only a fly-blown, dingy and smelly barracks town, haunted by urchins fraudulently claiming to be Cook’s guides, or Spanish hawkers wandering from door to door with straggly flocks of turkeys. The lady of legend was right when, told her ship would be calling at Gibraltar, she exclaimed that the one thing she wanted to see there was the Rock.

  8

  It was all bits and pieces. There was no System. The Mother Country was an audacious euphemism, applied to such immense and ancient organisms as India or Nigeria, and the whole terminology of Empire had become so confused that often the New Imperialists could not even use the word ‘nation’ without an explanatory footnote. ‘When we have accustomed ourselves’, Seeley had written, ‘to contemplate the whole Empire together and call it England we shall see that here … is a great homogeneous people, one in blood, language, religion and laws, but dispersed over a boundless space.’ Such saws of ancient prophets only confused the issue further: Seeley could not have foreseen the imperial assault on Africa in the eighties and nineties, and he thought in terms of a white Greater Britain with a single docile dependency, India.

  In fact the very essence of this Empire was its formless improvisation, its stagger. Four million people of British stock lived in the six self-governing colonies of Australia. British settlers had been there for rather more than two hundred years, and the organization of affairs was entirely theirs. They had started from scratch. The six colonies had six different sets of tariffs, mainly directed against each other. They had six separate postal and telegraph services, and six uncoordinated defence forces. The judicial processes of one colony could not be enforced in another. The railways were built to different gauges. If an inventor took out a patent in Queensland, it did not protect him in Victoria.

  All six, that Jubilee summer, sent their Premiers to London, where they basked in the effulgence of the New Imperialism, kissed the hand of the Queen-Empress, and made many well-received speeches about Imperial unity, historical fraternity, and the advantages of British method.

  1 Ascension, now a dependency of St Helena, is today less a ship than a radio programme, for the BBC maintains a large transmitter there.

  1 Eldon Gorst (1861–1911), born in New Zealand, who was in 1897 adviser to the Ministry of the Interior. He survived so well himself that in the end he succeeded Cromer.

  2 Kasr-el-Nil barracks, now demolished to make way for the Hilton Hotel, was still the centre of British military power in Egypt during the Second World War. In 1897 a traveller reported that the favourite marching song of the British troops, as they moved from the barracks to the Citadel, was ‘When I was bound apprentice, in famous Lincolnshire’. By the 1940s the flavour of the occupation had changed, and much the best-known Anglo-Egyptian song, performed with cheerful disrespect on every route march, began with the words: ‘King Farouk, King Farouk,’ Ang ’is bollocks on a ’ook.…’ Farouk was a first cousin once removed of the Khedive Abbas. When Gamal Abdel Nasser’s revolutionaries forced him to abdicate in 1952 he appealed for help to the British forces on the Suez Canal. But they let him go.

  1 Garvin (1868–1947) was the son of an Irish immigrant to England, and in his youth a brilliant exponent of Irish Home Rule. He was so thoroughly converted to the imperialist creed that by 1936, as editor of the Observer, he was ready to support Mussolini in the invasion of Ethiopia.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Imperialists in General

  Come of a right good stock to start with,

  Best of the world’s blood in each vein;

  Lord of ourselves and slaves to no one,

  For us or from us, you’ll find we’re MEN!

  Robert Reid

  12

  WHEN Kipling first went east from India, he noted that though the stinks of Lahore and Calcutta had something in common, the stink of Burma was different: he was struck by the numberless energies of the Chinese, and the startling vigour of Japan: but wherever he went in the eastern Empire he observed that the British appeared to be exactly the same. ‘It was just We Our Noble Selves’, he wrote sardonically of a party in the barracks above the botanical gardens at Singapore. ‘In the centre was the pretty Memsahib with light hair and fascinating manners, and the plump little Memsahib that talks to everybody and is in everybody’s confidence, and the spinster fresh from home, and the bean-fed, well-groomed subaltern with the light coat and the fox-terrier. On the benches sat the fat colonel, and the large judge, and the engineer’s wife, and the merchantman and his family after their kind—male and female met I them, and but for the little fact that they were entire strangers to me, I would have saluted them all as old friends.’ They were just the same people as he knew in India, except that they were pale from the Singapore climate, ‘and the veins on the backs of their hands are pr
inted in indigo.’

  2

  Nobody, of course, runs so true to type as that. The subaltern probably cherished a passion for the poetry of Baudelaire, the spinster spoke fluent Cantonese, the merchant and his kind were Seventh Day Adventists. To the stranger nevertheless the British in their Empire do seem to have been instantly familiar, whether they were the stiff, pomaded or parasoled representatives of the gentry or irrepressible soldiers of the line. Britishness was very strong in Victoria’s later years, and British people were unmistakably British.

  For the most part they were bigger and fitter than other Europeans. A prosperous century had made even the poorer classes so, and several hundred years of success had filled out the gentry: according to Florence Nightingale, London was the healthiest city in Europe. The tall stature and upright bearing of the English gentleman was proverbial, and is confirmed in every old photograph of regiment, First XV or Union committee. Five members of Lord Salisbury’s patrician Cabinet were more than six feet tall. Salisbury himself was six feet four inches, and Henry Chaplin, his President of the Local Government Board, weighed 250 lb.1 The average height of Army recruits in 1897 was five feet seven inches and their average chest measurement was 34 inches—substantially bigger than the conscripts of the Continental armies. It was a time of British athletic supremacy; only the Americans could compete. The public school idea of mens sana in corpore sano was percolating, in a desultory way, into the upbringing of the masses, and no other people in Europe was so keen on sport—sportsmen on the Continent merely copied what the English did.

  These physical advantages were sustained by a detachment of bearing. The most rabid of the New Imperialists were quite proud of the fact that the British were not liked: certainly it was no part of the national ambition to be loved. The British were aware that of all the peoples of the earth they were the most commonly resented, but a shell protected them, composed of pride, duty, shyness and a sense of membership. An Austrian traveller in Egypt at about this time describes the remote composure of a young Cook’s official, when a German threatens to sue the company for the loss of his trunk—wildly valued at £200. The Englishman instantly guarantees to pay £200 compensation if the trunk does not show up within an hour. Ten minutes later it arrives, the German is all abashed, and the Austrian ruefully compares affairs in his own Empire: ‘How many underlings and how many Councillors of the Imperial Court would have been needed to register and deal with such a complaint, and how big their file would have grown within six months, and how sure we are that, even six months later, that claim would not be settled!’ G. W. Steevens, travelling to Egypt in 1897, describes the all-British company on the mail train to Brindisi: ‘Fair-haired, blue-eyed, spare-shouldered and spare-jawed, with puckered brows and steadfast eyes that seemed to look outwards and inwards at the same time, they were unmistakably builders—British Empire builders.’ Can one not imagine them, this trainload of bronzed aliens, sharing their private jokes, exuding their particular smells of tweed, tobacco and lavender, as they presented their hand baggage to the customs officials at Modane? It is as though they were encapsuled there, snug in their own ways, honouring their own club rules and rolling securely across Europe to catch their P. and O. Foreigners and subject peoples alike recognized this separateness, and it was essential to the character of the Pax Britannica. This was not so much a haughty Empire as a private one.