Pax Britannica

by Jan Morris

  2 Hogarth (1862–1927) was an archaeologist who became Director of the British-organized Arab Bureau in Cairo during the First World War, and helped to sponsor the exploits of T. E. Lawrence. He played an influential part in moulding British imperial policy towards the Arabs, before returning to his peacetime job as Director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford.

  1 It was completed in 1900, and has been successively heightened since, and provided with hydroelectric turbines. It stands downstream from the High Dam begun by a later ‘Le Grand Ours’, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

  2 Cromer remained in Egypt until 1907, and did little else in life beyond writing his magisterial memoirs, Modern Egypt, and fitfully presiding over the commission that inquired into the debâcle of the Dardanelles. He died in 1917.

  1 Salisbury stuck out the years of the Boer War as Prime Minister, resigning in 1902 after a total Premiership of thirteen years and ten months. A year later he died, and was buried in the churchyard at Hatfield, where Cecils had lived since 1608—as they still do.

  1 When the Government resigned after the Boer War, Chamberlain threw himself into the cause of imperial unity. He died in July 1914, happy to see that young Neville, a leading member of Birmingham City Council, was already on the way to political distinction.

  1 To wit, presidency of the B.S.A.C., premiership of the Cape, a baronetcy and membership of the Privy Council. He died in 1917, in England, but after the First World War his remains were transferred to Rhodesia to be buried beside those of Cecil Rhodes in the Matopo Hills. Kipling honoured him with If—.

  2 It survived until 1908, when it was abandoned because of the tsetse fly, and of this original Rhodesia there is now not a trace, on the ground or on the map.

  1 Rhodes never overcame the stigma of the Jameson Raid, but in 1899 Oxford, stifling its scruples, awarded him an honorary degree. This he amply repaid by signing a new will, a few days later, which left the University enough funds to establish 160 scholarships for colonial, American and German students. Rhodes died in 1902, and was buried at a site of his own choosing in the Matopo Hills in Rhodesia, which he called The World’s View. There, in a place of silent beauty, he lies with his friend Jameson and the dead of Allan Wilson’s Shangani patrol—all the heroes of Rhodesia, awaiting one fears not the Last Trump but the next régime.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Proconsuls

  The sense of greatness keeps a nation great;

  And mighty they who mighty can appear.

  It may be that if hands of greed could steal

  From England’s grasp the envied orient prize,

  This tide of gold would flood her still as now.

  But were she the same England, made to feel

  A brightness gone from out those starry eyes,

  A splendour from that constellated brow?

  William Watson

  14

  NORTHWARD from the Punjabi village of Kalka a winding and precipitous tonga road ran into the foothills of the Himalaya, the air becoming sweeter, the heat less oppressive as it climbed. There were pines and deodars about, and monkeys. High on a ridge to the east the traveller could see the military sanatorium of Daghshai, two or three barrack blocks and a very English church, poised on a narrow ridge overlooking the plains, and breathing the mountain air from the north. There was the bazaar town of Solon to pass on the way, where the local beer was brewed, and where swarthy hill-men, turbans fluttering, strode with sticks through scented market alleys: and then the road ascended steadily, in loops and double-tracks into the hills. It was a busy road throughout the summer, as the tongas of the British, blowing their horns, clip-clopped smartly through the labouring strings of mules, carts and livestock: and for one period of every year it became the most important road in India. Then, at the beginning of the hot season, the Viceroy himself took it, to escape from the miseries of Calcutta: and with his guards and his secretariat, his private staff and his public attendants, his Army headquarters, his Foreign Office, the envoys of foreign Powers, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, the representatives of the Indian Princes—with an infinity of files, an army of wagons, games and chaises, the memsahibs with their carriage trunks and excited children, hangers-on of every kind, adventurers of every aspiration—bands and flags, foreign correspondents and Tailors By Appointment, military observers, Thomas Cook’s men, bank clerks and estate agents and visiting parliamentarians—with all this caravanserai before and after him, up the Queen’s Viceroy went to Simla, the summer capital of the Indian Empire.

  2

  Simla in 1897 was one of the most extraordinary places in the world. It was small, and set delectably in a bowl of the hills, in tiers on the south side of a ridge like an English watering-place, except for the grand mass of the Himalaya behind. From a distance it looked archetypically Anglo-Indian. Scattered among the wooded hills were the chalet-bungalows of the senior officials, and properly on an eminence stood the Gothic tower of Christ Church, with a bell made out of a mortar captured in the second Sikh War. There were pleasant gardens about, and a comfortable esplanade meandered along the ridge, with tea-shops here and there, and Wine, Spirit and Provision Merchants of Quality, and Hamilton’s the jewellers from Calcutta (Established in the Reign of George III), and Phelps and Co., Civil, Military and Political Tailors, in their establishment at Albion House. A little lower a smudge of smoke and shanties marked the location of the Indian bazaar, and the town spilled away down the hillside in diminishing solidity, petering out in huts and shacks, until only the road itself was left threading a way through the trees to the distant plains below. At first sight Simla looked exactly what one would expect of a British hill station—quiet, sedate, and logically laid out.

  This was not its style at all. Simla was a very brilliant, savage, ugly little town. The air was electric, thin enough to make you pant upstairs at first, sharp enough off the snows to keep you unnaturally alert and vivacious, almost feverish. No carriages were allowed in the centre of the town, except those of the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief and the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, so when you arrived there a porter hoisted your baggage on his back and led you stumbling up steep steps and winding lanes to your hotel: and when you strolled out through the lights of the evening for a first look around Simla, somehow the place did not feel quite solid. It was like a stage set, quivering, full of character actors, walking fest and talking hard. There were the British themselves, of course, glowing with the thrill of the move to the mountains, marvelling in their escape from the sultry oppression of the plains and the sea-coast, looking forward to the balls and parties of the season, and pulling their wraps wryly around their shoulders as the evening chill set in. There were the hill Indians of the north, whom the British loved, warlike and confident people, with beards and gay colours on them, no nonsense about political rights and a steady hand with a rifle. And here and there in the streets, giving Simla a tantalizing hint of unknown places beyond the mountains, there strode groups of swarthy Tibetans—wide-set eyes and perpetual laughing chatter, bottle-green gowns open to the waist, pigtails, entrancing babies on their mothers’ backs and a smell of untanned leather. There was an Italianate fizz to the piazzas of Simla after dark, as the evening crowds swung here and there, the lights shone out from shops and theatre, and down the steps off the Mall the bazaar people moved in silhouette against their flickering fires, in a haze of spice and woodsmoke.

  3

  In the morning Simla seemed different again, for in the brilliance of the mountain sun one could see with an awful clarity the monuments of its power. The style the British evolved for their offices in Simla was brutally functional. It depended upon girders. Each huge block, surrounded by open verandas, was held together with iron stanchions, like a bridge. This suggested to different observers, at one time or another, piles of disused tramcars, monstrous toastracks, or the remains of junkyards salvaged by economical military engineers and put together wherever pieces could be found to fit. Stark, square and enormous,
these preposterous buildings stood about the ridge with an air of plated aloofness, like armadillos, facing this way and that, with roofs of corrugated iron and complicated external staircases. Physically they cast a blight upon the town: and there was something dismal to the thought of the scribbling hundreds inside them, the cogs of an Empire revolving in so many iron boxes on a hillside.1

  The Mall ran among them, gently undulating, sometimes opening out into a square in the Venetian manner; and sheltering demurely out of the limelight, up garden paths lined with dahlias or lupins, were the houses of the great, with names like Snowdon, Knockdrin, Hawthorne and The Gables. The Commander-in-Chief lived in one, the Foreign Secretary in another, the Manager of the Mercantile Bank in a third, and above and beyond them all, with a private chapel and sundry staff houses, was the Viceroy’s new palace, finished in 1888 and decorated throughout by Messrs Maple and Co., of Tottenham Court Road.

  It was a surprisingly long way from one end of Simla to another—from Barnes Court, say, where the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab lived, to the Viceregal estate behind its monumental guardhouse at the western extremity of the ridge. A few old jhampans could still be hired—curtained sedan-chairs like four-poster beds, carried by four coolies apiece: but the normal means of public transport was the four-man rickshaw, a wickerwork vehicle on high spindly wheels, which was propelled at dizzy speed through the streets, its crew alternately heaving, braking, swivelling and pushing with the desperation of tobogganers, and reaching a climax in their kinetic energies in propelling the thing fast enough down one hill to get it up the steep slope of the next.

  4

  Seven thousand feet up, eighty miles from a railway line, 750 miles from a port, Simla was the oddest and most inaccessible of the world’s great capitals. The mails were conveyed to railhead at Kalka by two-pony tongas, at breakneck speed, but the road was so rough that they sometimes had their springs packed with bamboo wrappings to lessen the jolts, and when the rivers near Kalka were flooded elephants sometimes had to be commandeered, to convey the imperial dispatches across the waters to the Viceroy.

  From Simla were directed the affairs of 308 million people—two and a half times the population, by Gibbon’s estimate, of the Roman Empire at its climax—protected by the greatest army in Asia, and forming a pendant to Britain itself in the immense balance of Empire. The world recognized that India was a great Power in itself. It was an Empire of its own, active as well as passive. Most of the bigger nations had their representatives at Simla, and the little hill station on the ridge cast its summer shadow wide. Its writ ran to the Red Sea one way, the frontiers of Siam the other. Aden, Perim, Socotra, Burma, Somaliland were all governed from India. Indian currency was the legal tender of Zanzibar and British East Africa, Indian mints coined the dollars of Singapore and Hong Kong. The proliferation of India, as we have seen, was represented by hundreds of thousands of her citizens scattered across the oceans, and the Indian Army, too, had seen service in many parts of the world. When Indian troops were sent to Malta in 1878 it aroused a furore in England, and Disraeli was accused of selling the Empire to the barbarians. Since then the use of Indian troops in other parts of the Empire had become a commonplace. In the past half-century Indian soldiers, under British officers, had served in China, Persia, Ethiopia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Egypt and East Africa, and in 1897 they were advancing up the Nile with Kitchener. It was the possession of India that made the Empire a military Power—‘an English barrack in the Oriental seas’, Salisbury had once called it. Its Regular Army was not large—some 160,000 men—but it was all voluntary, and it was recruited chiefly from the martial peoples of the north, Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, whose fighting qualities were celebrated everywhere.

  It was from Simla, in the summer-time, that the British supervised the eastern half of their Empire. Upon the power and wealth of India depended the security of the eastern trade, of Australia and New Zealand, of the great commercial enterprises of the Far East. The strength of India, so many strategists thought, alone prevented Russia from spilling through the Himalayan passes into south-east Asia, and the preoccupations of the generals in Simla were important to the whole world. ‘Everything is so English and unpicturesque here’, the artist Val Prinsep1 wrote during a visit to Simla, ‘that except the people one meets are those who rule and make history—a fact one can hardly realize—one would fancy oneself at Margate.’

  It was hard to realize, but it was true. There was substance to the fantasy of Simla. The British did their best to live up to the grandeur of their position, and though the town was commonly known to disrespectful juniors as The Abode of the Little Tin Gods, still a good deal of solid splendour surrounded the arrangements up there. The Viceroy himself was to be glimpsed on Sunday mornings resplendently driving to church in his carriage, a weekly second coming. His palace on the hill was so luxurious that many people thought Indian income tax, introduced in 1886, had been devised to pay for it. Its household staff comprised 300 domestics and 100 cooks, and in one recent season the Vicereine had presided over twelve big dinners (up to fifty guests), twenty-nine small ones, a State ball, a fancy dress ball, a children’s ball, two garden parties, two evening parties and six dances of 250 people each. The guards at the gatehouse, inspired by all this display, used to salute with such a reverberation of small arms that more than once the horses of eminent visitors had been known to turn tail at the clash, and bolt headlong back along the Mall.

  In this capital as in any other, the social graces and felinities intensely thrived, and the suburban instinct of Victorian life, fostered so paradoxically by the Queen-Empress, found its strangest expression in Simla. The houses of the Field-Marshals and Foreign Secretaries were not, as foreigners might expect, replicas of great country houses at home, such as might be said to illustrate the patrician flowering of England. Still less did they model themselves upon the palaces of earlier Indian conquerors. They were essentially villas, often done in half-timber and plaster, with decorous gardens and gravel drives, ferns in hanging wire baskets, and gates with their names upon them. With their mullioned windows and the ramblers entwined about their porches, they looked all lavender leisure: except for the swaggering Sikh guards who paced, with scimitars and tremendous beards, up and down outside the threshold.

  Brittle, vivid, snobby, like all centres of power Simla seethed with ambition and intrigue. Society was overwhelmingly official—only Army officers and Civil Servants, for example, could be full members of the principal Simla club—and there was a hot-house feeling to the place. Peliti’s restaurant, beside the bridge at the eastern end of the Mall, was the traditional hotbed of gossip, where an excellent view might be obtained of the current scandal, and the latest handsome arrival from the Frontier, or winsome bride fresh out from Hertfordshire, might be viewed and analysed to advantage. This was the hunting-ground of Kipling’s allegorical Anglo-Indian chatelaines, those grandes dames of Empire, with the adoring young subalterns and civilians at their feet, and their private channels of communication, via Tony or dear Major Lansdowne, direct to the Secretariat itself. Kipling, heightened his effects, but there really was a good deal of philandering, gambling and heavy drinking in Simla: if visitors from England thought it like Margate, to innocents from upcountry, where the nearest thing to vice was often a round of gin-rummy over a hurricane lamp, it sometimes seemed a very Paris.

  The English in Simla knew each other, for the most part, all too well. They had grown up together in the imperial service, and they had few illusions about each other or each other’s wives. It was the outsiders who were taken aback by the place: the Vicereines, who had often never been to India before, and generally loathed Simla, or the young girls fresh from England, to whom this high and startling place, rich with scarlet uniforms and brown young English faces, must have seemed one of the most exciting towns imaginable. Everything was overdrawn at Simla. Eight balls and dances at the Viceroy’s Lodge alone! Even the monkeys were so bold that they habitually came thr
ough people’s windows to steal fruit, and could often be heard thrumming with their feet on the iron roofs above: and constantly through the gossip and the music of the string orchestras ran the murmur of great power, a basso profondo to Simla’s frivolities.1

  5

  The British Government in India was a despotism of great efficiency, in which the Indians had virtually no say. The lower echelons of the administration were filled mostly by Indians, those babus whose humble respect, elaborate Welsh-sounding English and pitiful efforts to Westernize themselves so amused and irritated their rulers. In the middle ranks there were many Indians in minor executive positions, office superintendents, assistant secretaries, extra assistant commissioners. But the Indian Civil Service proper, the senior branch of the Government, was almost locked. Indians were free to compete in the I.C.S. entry examination, but the odds were heavily weighted against them. Their education was not geared to the examination, the papers were in English, they had to go to London to sit—the journey itself was against the tenets of Hindu orthodoxy, and some of the earliest Indian candidates dared not tell even their own parents that they were going. By 1897 only a few very clever Hindus and Parsees had managed to get in, and were acting as assistant magistrates and collectors: for the rest the I.C.S., the real Government of India, was absolutely British.

  At the top of it stood the Viceroy, who combined the offices of a President and a Prime Minister, was responsible only to London, and was generally a nobleman with no previous Indian experience, appointed on political grounds for a five-year term. He enjoyed some of the privileges of an independent ruler. India decreed its own tariffs, for example—British officers arriving to serve in India had to pay customs duty on their saddlery—and in the years 1896 and 1897 there was no legislation at Westminster dealing with Indian affairs. The Viceroy’s Council was in effect a Cabinet, and almost all its Ministers were Civil Servants, each the head of a Government department. It is true that the Commander-in-Chief attended as an extra member, and that sometimes the Viceroy, by summoning a dozen extra members, turned the Council into a legislative assembly, when the public was admitted to its sessions, and sat on a row of dining-room chairs. But the Viceroy could override its decisions anyway, and the power of the bureaucracy remained unchallenged.