by Jan Morris
3
The aristocracy of Empire was the official class, together with the landed gentry of British planters: in Crown Colonies the two classes often intermarried (in Mauritius and Guiana, so Royal Commissions reported, a prime cause of bad laws and harsh administration). It was not a very aristocratic aristocracy. Viceroys and Governors were often noblemen, and their wives Society beauties—Lady Horton, wife of a Governor of Ceylon in the 1830s, was the subject of Byron’s She Walk In Beauty Like The Night. British regiments posted overseas contained their quota of young bloods. But the great mass of the imperial service, like the officer corps of the colonial forces, was pre-eminently upper middle class. The English aristocracy played no great part in the everyday running of the Empire, having greener dominions of its own at home, and Eton was low on the list of schools that educated the imperial administrators. ‘Here’s their ground’, Kipling wrote of India’s British rulers:
They fight
Until the Middle Classes take them back,
One of ten millions plus a C.S.I.1
They were the children of a unique culture, that of the English public schools, with its celibate discipline, its classical loyalties, its emphasis on self-reliance, team spirit, delegated responsibility, Christian duty and stoic control. One did not cry when one said good-bye to Mama at Paddington station. One did not, as a general rule, wish to appear too clever, or too enthusiastic. One loyally upheld the prefectorial system, while realizing that certain rules were made to be broken. The public schools, greatly expanded in the second half of the century, and ever more dedicated to their own code of conduct, lay somewhere near the heart of the imperial ethic. ‘It would be terrible to think of what would happen to us’, wrote Eustace H. Miles, amateur tennis champion of the world, ‘if our public school system were swept away, or if—and this comes to very much the same thing—from our public school system were swept away our Athletics and our Games.’ A man’s best proof of fitness to rule in India, Miles thought, was to have been a captain of games, and certainly the public school system was well suited to the imperial needs. It produced men of high spirits, courage and assurance, ready to rough it and unafraid of responsibility. If it was intellectually narrowing and chauvinist, well, this was an Empire that survived by the separateness of its rulers, their conviction that what they did was right, and that all else was second best. The public school man was generally able to see the other person’s point of view, provided it reflected his own values—civilized values, he would say. His inability to grasp the aspirations of Indians, Africans or Malays stemmed from his absolute certainty that their whole manner of thought or way of life was, through no real fault of their own, misguided. At his worst the public school man was a snobbish hearty: at his best he combined authority with Christian kindness and what he would have called grit: the rarest of his virtues was human sympathy, the rarest of his vices cowardice.
And the most irritating of his traits, at least in the imperial context, seems to have been smugness. From the memoirs of the imperial Civil Services there generally breathes an air of conscious rectitude—disguised often in jollity and boyish dash, but seldom altogether absent. The Empire-builders were very pleased with themselves. ‘No country has ever possessed a more admirable body of public servants than the Civil Service of India’, wrote Sir John Strachey, a distinguished Indian Civil Servant himself. ‘How is it’, another Anglo-Indian asked of himself and his colleagues, in a rhetorical question addressed without a blush to his fiancée, who must have loved him dearly—‘how is it that these pale-cheeked exiles give security to a race of another hue, other tongues, other religions which rulers of their own people have ever failed to give? Dearest, there are unseen moral causes which I need not point out.…’1 G. W. Forrest, another Indian Civil Servant, once observed how difficult it was for a stranger to disentangle the different social sets of Calcutta—their laws of procedure, their jealousies and their relations with each other. The Official set, however, was easily recognizable: their position was ‘by Royal enactment assured’, and their wives ‘viewed from an eminence’ the Mercantile circle below. The imperial protocol was strict and all-embracing—in India, sanitary commissioners and inspectors-general of jails shared seventy-sixth place in order of precedence—and von Hübner tells us that if ever ‘members of the lower classes’, other than grooms, showed up in Singapore, the Government found means of returning them to Britain, if necessary at its own expense. White prestige must be maintained, and caste was in the air of Empire.
People of grander imagination often disliked these official airs. Bryce thought the average Indian Civil Servant pretty boring—‘a good deal of uniformity … a want of striking, even marked individualities … rather wanting in imagination and sympathy … too conventionally English’. Kitchener infuriated the Official ladies of Egypt by his preference for the society of glamorous Levantines. Winston Churchill, who was in India in 1896 and 1897, did not at all take to Anglo-Indian society. ‘A lot of horrid Anglo-Indian women at the races. Nasty vulgar creatures all looking as though they thought themselves great beauties. I fear me they are a sorry lot…. Nice people in India are few and far between. They are like oases in the desert…. I have lived the life of a recluse out here. The vulgar Anglo-Indians have commented on my not “calling” as is the absurd custom of the country. I know perhaps three people who are agreeable and I have no ambitions to extend my acquaintance.’
4
Poor Anglo-Indians! Twenty-one and very new to the country, Churchill was applying to their provincial attitudes the standards of his own background, glittering with the wealth and genius of London and New York. Life in the official circles of Empire may not have looked exciting to him, but it pursued a staid and comfortable course, much in the tennis-party tradition of the lesser British gentry at home. The scale of things was often grotesquely swollen, though, so that a married couple in India might easily have a staff of twenty-five servants, imposed on them by a caste system even more rigid than their own: bearer, children’s nurse, cooks, table-servers, a tailor and a laundryman, a water-carrier, gardeners, grooms and grass-cutters. In camp, if a fairly senior official took his wife on tour, the establishment might grow to fifty or more dependants. Living in what was virtually a private village with this immense ménage, the imperialist forfeited any kind of privacy—the servants knew everything—and the manner of life remained supremely orthodox. The planting community of Ceylon, for example, formed as serenely exclusive a community as any county society at home. Planters nearly always married into one another’s families, when they returned from their education in England, and they lived a well-ordered country gentry’s life. People were normally At Home once each week, and there were frequent calls, and dances at the Queen’s in Kandy, and golfing week-ends at Nuwara Eliya, and the bungalows were lofty and cool and lapped in lawns, and there was an English vicar at the church up the road, and all seemed changeless, useful and very agreeable.
The family tradition was strong in the imperial service. The same names appear repeatedly in the honours lists and church memorials, and fathers’ footsteps were loyally followed. The two Napier brothers in the Indian Army were the sons of Lord Napier of Magdala, who had served in the Mutiny and virtually created the hill station of Darjeeling. General Henry Rundle, Kitchener’s chief of staff in the Sudan, was the son of Joseph Rundle, who had first planted the British flag on Aden soil in 1839.1 Generations of Stracheys had served in India, and there had always been a Skinner in the 1st Bengal Lancers, since Colonel James Skinner2 founded the regiment as Skinner’s Horse in 1803.
This imperial élite was, as conquerors go, well behaved. Its values were solid. Its rules were mostly sensible. Corruption was rare, and what Churchill thought vulgar was often no more than a dogged determination to stick to the habits and traditions that gave the Empire its stability. Fin-de-siècle London was rich in scandals of fraud and bankruptcy—the Mundella scandal, the Hooley scandal,3 the disreputable failure of the Liberato
r Building Society. Few such disgraces marred the recent record of the overseas Empire. The graft was almost always petty, and there are worse sins to a ruling class than thinking yourself more beautiful than you are.
5
‘They walk dolorously to and fro under the glare of jerking electric lamps, when they ought to be sitting in shirtsleeves around little tables treating their wives to iced lager beer.’ So wrote Kipling of Calcutta’s commercial community. By now the merchants of Empire, no less than the governors, were mostly men of habit and convention, conservative men who honoured the proprieties. It was not the thing to smoke in the streets of Calcutta, and in the evening, in that city of slums and emaciation, the richer British box-wallahs emerged in top-hats and frock-coats to promenade the Madan, driving steadily here and there in broughams, hansoms and victorias, exchanging bows and transient assessments. There was, however, much more variety to the unofficial of Empire. They come from a wider range of backgrounds, and from the photographs of the time they glare out at us—for there is often something accusatory to their expressions—with striking suggestions of force and originality.
Let us look at a few faces from the imperial gallery of the nineties, chosen at random from a railway camp, a Spy cartoon, an African police station and a settlement of the Australian Outback. Here, for a start, is Ronald Preston, the railhead engineer of the Uganda Railway, then under canvas with his gangs half-way to Lake Victoria from the sea. We see him sitting at the entrance to his tent with his wife Florence, wearing a linen suit and a shirt without a tie, and holding a gun across his knees. He has prominent teeth and large ears, and all around him are trophies of the hunt—zebra skins, antelope horns, tiger hides. He looks lean, loose-limbed, a little sad, as though he has been condemned to live for ever under canvas, building railways and shooting animals: and beside him his wife, in a long skirt, mutton-sleeves and a little black boater hat, gazes forlornly out of the picture into the surrounding wilderness, very faintly smiling1.
It is the White Rajah of Sarawak, Sir Charles Anthony Brooke, who returns our stare so urbanely from the Spy cartoon in Vanity Fair. What kingly ease of deportment! What perfection of buttoned frock-coat! How exquisitely symmetrical the heavy white moustaches and the curled grey hair above the high forehead! Brooke has prominent white eyebrows, bags beneath the eyes, a wrinkled turtleneck and a bulky cleft jaw, but above all it is the expression of the face that holds our attention—the expression of a man who makes his own rules, in a sphere of action altogether unique, dealing in subjects that we know nothing whatsoever about, and would be wise not to make foolish comments on.
Haughty in a very different kind is ‘Bobo’ Young, an employee of the British South Africa Company in north-eastern Rhodesia, who was previously a private in the Scots Guards, and a cook in the Bechuanaland Border Police, and who policed his tribes with a ferocious sang-froid—he once killed twenty-five natives in a single fight. He is pictured sitting with his arms folded, against a prisonlike background of a brick wall, wearing a high-collared military tunic, and squinting sidelong at the camera, so that his face looks one way and his eyes another: he has a waxed moustache like a drill sergeant’s, his eyes are fiercely gleaming, and his mouth is set in a sardonic, slightly contemptuous smile, such as might shrivel an African chieftain to insignificance, or in another incarnation wither an importunate customer in the cab queue at the Savoy.1
And finally a great lady of Empire, Mrs Daisy Bates. Mrs Bates first set eyes on Australia in the middle nineties, a young Irishwoman of literary leanings and polished manners. She had married an Australian cattle-rancher, but was to spend her life in the service of the aborigines, whose fate as a people she assumed to be sealed, and whose last generations she wished to comfort. She was a woman of truly Victorian resolution, and did nothing by half-measures, living for years alone among the tribes, learning their languages, accepting the squalors of their society, and never passing judgement. In our picture we see her setting off by camel-buggy for a particularly ghastly journey around the Great Australian Bight. Beside the two camels stands a tall and heavily bearded aborigine, smoking a pipe, with a linen hat pulled down over his ears. On the driving-seat, hung about with baggage, pots and pans, is an aboriginal woman all in black, shaggy matted hair protruding from her bonnet: and immaculate beside her sits Mrs Daisy Bates. Her face is stern, her neck is stiff, her hands lie lady-like upon her lap. She wears a high-collared blouse fastened with a ribbon, a severe black coat and skirt down to her ankles, and a white straw hat with a fly-veil over her face. She seldom, indeed, wore anything else: and if the strength of the White Rajah lay in his facial expression, the power of Daisy Bates was in her posture: high up there on her rickety buggy, with aboriginals for company and camels to tow her, she sits superbly, flamboyantly erect, as if to show that a good British upbringing, with sensible corsetry, could fortify a woman against hell itself.1
Powerful figures all four, full of sap or gristle, who brought to the developing Empire a vigour all too often tamed by red tape and the hope of promotion, in the secretariat buildings up the road.
6
Among the white settlers everywhere the Englishman had undergone some metamorphosis, making him taller, or broader, or cockier, or coarser, than before. In Canada he was already half an American, neither quite an Englishman nor quite a Yank, and a little conscious of deficiencies in both. In South Africa his accent was beginning to acquire the queerly distorted diphthongs of the Afrikaner. In New Zealand, we read, he was already of a darker complexion, a quicker speech, a livelier manner, a more sociable disposition and a more argumentative turn. In Australia, where he was most conscious of the freedom and freshness of the colonial life, the release from all the old bonds of convention, he was still pre-eminently a man of the open spaces, not yet buttoned by the city ways of the seaboards. Thephysical splendour of the young Australians was already a legend, and their dialect was rich and beguiling. ‘Where are you off to?’ asks a character in Tom Collin’s novel Such Is Life. ‘Jist as fur back as I can git,’ is the answer. ‘But you’ll stay in Echuca tonight?’ ‘Didn’t intent. But I’d like to have a pitch with you, sposen I wouldn’t be in your road.’
The migrants had taken with them, none the less, old seeds of social consciousness. There were snobs in the colonies too, and in some parts the settlers were evolving class distinctions peculiar to themselves. In New Zealand the English rural hierarchy had suffered a sea-change into orders of a different kind: the gentleman farmer had become the run-holder, the yeoman was the cocky, and yesterday’s yokels were the musterers, shearers and drovers of the South. The élite of Canada, especially in the Maritime provinces of the east, was provided by descendants of the Empire Loyalists, those unshakeable Tories who had trekked northwards into Canada rather than remain in the American Republic: they often lived beautifully, in white colonial mansions with negro servants and horses, but were by now more like patricians from New England than from Old. In Australia there was a class awareness of a very different kind. There the people known as ‘exclusives’ were those who had no convicts in their ancestry: among the others, the squalid origins of New South Wales were not often mentioned. ‘It is a sore that is not yet healed,’ one lady told von Hübner. ‘Take care how you touch it: never utter the word “convict”.’ Even in that free-and-easy nation, the normal social ambitions were stirring, too. By the nineties few of the emigrants to Australia were down-to-earth working men, and urban, bourgeois standards were beginning to count: girls arriving in Australia on immigrant ships often found themselves engaged for domestic service by telegram before they even docked.
For the colonists were British still, brought up in a tradition of social respect. Their ingrained deference towards the manners and customs of the English upper classes did not evaporate when they unpacked their bags in Queensland or Manitoba. They knew that the word ‘colonial’ often had pejorative undertones in England—suggestions of hick, bumpkin or even criminal—and some of them were alrea
dy self-conscious about the inadequacies of the colonial cities, so grand and bustling to local innocents, so provincial to visiting dudes from the Mother Country. The Australian Arthur Patchett Martin wrote a poem, My Cousin from Pall Mall, about this feeling, describing the arrival in Melbourne of a particularly superior new-comer: