by Jan Morris
When they were not racing the British were likely to be hunting, for wherever they went they scratched together a pack of hounds, reinforced it with the odd terrier, and set off in pursuit of fox, jackal, elk, pig, hare, red deer, hyena, or whatever else was available to be chased. (Everybody in the Empire seemed to possess a fox-terrier, a bullterrier or a spaniel: no group photograph is complete without a dog in somebody’s arms, and in India many imperial households had their own dog-boy, generally the son of a more senior employee.) There were scores of light-hearted hunts in India, and in Africa, so strong was the ethos of the British, even a few Boers took up the sport, and were to be seen authentically costumed in pinks, shouting Tally-ho in Afrikaans. The Montreal Hunt, founded by British officers in 1826, flourished in the heart of French Canada.1 The Calpe Hunt started with a pair of foxhounds actually on the Rock of Gibraltar, where foxes lived high in the brush among the apes: by the nineties it was one of the smartest imperial hunts, was regularly entertained by Spanish grandees on their estates across the frontier, and once went over to Tangier, ‘where a wolf gave an excellent run of over 40 minutes and a distance of nine miles’.
In India pigsticking, like polo, was pursued with passion, encouraged by immense silver trophies presented by Maharajahs. The Kadir Cup for pigsticking was one of the principal sporting trophies of India (it was won in 1897 by Mr Gillman, Royal Horse Artillery, on Huntsman). This tremendously exciting sport, in which a single man on horseback with a spear was pitted against boars, tigers, buffalo, or even rhinoceri, had been popular among the British since the early days of the East India Company: by the nineties the northwest provinces of India were its headquarters, and on the great day of the Kadir Cup sometimes a hundred spears competed, and the men and their horses settled in gay tented camps upon the Punjab plains, practising their runs with stampeding hoofs and dust-clouds in sunshine, like knights before jousting.
Whatever there was to chase or kill, the British pursued. In those days the reaches of the Empire teemed with multitudes of game, the deer and the zebra roamed Africa in their countless thousands, and conservation was not yet a preoccupation of nature-lovers. Hawkers called ‘hare-wallahs’ used to frequent the Indian cantonments, selling live hares and wild cats to be chased by the soldiers’ whippets, or jackals to be pitted against two or three dogs in a ball-alley. If there was nothing to fish, the imperialists stocked their rivers with trout and salmon from home, so that some of the highland hotels of New Zealand, for example, faithfully reproduced all the tangy pleasures of Scottish fishing inns, with knowledgeable ghillies in attendance, fishing books lovingly kept up, malt whisky before big log fires at the end of the day. No colonial handbook was complete without its chapter on the blood sports, though when Sir George Scott compiled his admirable Burmese guide he was obliged to observe that the Burmese did very little hunting themselves owing to the ‘mingled pity and dislike’ with which hunters were regarded by Buddhists.
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Drink came next—food did not interest them half so much. ‘Diseases Affecting the Whole Empire’, was a heading in Volume VI of the Oxford Survey of the British Empire, and the very first ailment to be discussed was Alcoholism. It is easy to see why. All classes of the British abroad, Governors to troopers, seem to have drunk terrifically—sometimes to alleviate a grim climate, sometimes because they were lonely, and often because it was part of the general effervescence of life. In the imperial cities the breweries went up almost as fast as the race-courses, and many brewers in England produced beers especially for colonial markets—‘Produced by Brewers’, as was claimed for Wrexham Lager Beer, ‘thoroughly conversant with the requirements of a Tropical Country’. Millers, the Colombo importers, offered a lager bottled for them in Germany, and a malt whisky especially bottled in the Highlands. The sundowner was an institution throughout the tropical Empire—that first delectable drink of the evening, brought to your veranda with glistening paraphernalia of ice-bucket, napkin, carafe, and soda-siphon, by a servant in a long white gown and a crimson cummerbund, a tarboosh or a turban: the custom began, it was said, because it was thought that the moment of sunset was particularly ill omened for malaria, and that a strong drink taken then, perhaps with a shot of quinine in it, was the best prophylactic.
It was the British from Britain who were the heaviest drinkers. None of the colonials could match them. The Australians already had a reputation as beer-drinkers, and they also produced excellent wines—Trollope thought the white wine of the Upper Yarra vineyards, at 6d a pint, the best vin ordinaire he had ever tasted: but their consumption of alcohol per head was hardly more than a third that of the British at home. The Indian breweries were producing rather more than 6 million gallons of beer annually: 3 million gallons of it was drunk by the British soldiery, who called it ‘neck-oil’, ‘purge’, or ‘pig’s ear’, and who often grouped themselves in ‘boozing schools’, dedicated to the common spending of all available funds on drink. The greatest single problem facing the Calcutta police in the 1890s was the spate of drunken British seamen at week-ends: in the Royal Navy more officers were court-martialled for drunkenness than for any other offence.
Among the moneyed classes, and the gamblers, champagne was the drink of the day. When West Ridgeway, later Governor of Ceylon, marched under Roberts from Kabul to Kandahar, he was haunted throughout by the thought of iced champagne. So terribly did it pursue him that when Roberts ordered him to ride as fast as he could to the nearest railway station, with an urgent dispatch for the Viceroy, the first thing that occurred to him was that at any Indian railway station iced champagne would be available. He telegraphed ahead to reserve a bottle, he rode breakneck for three days and nights—‘and oh! the disappointment: the ice was melted, the champagne was corked, and the next morning I had a head’.
So important was champagne to these men of Empire. One of the many complaints of the Assistant Commissary-General, when Wolseley’s army was having difficulties in the Sudan campaign of 1884, was that the champagne, officially taken for medicinal purposes, was ‘of very indifferent quality, and calculated to depress rather than to exhilarate the system’. Officers’ messes normally carried vast amounts of champagne around with them on campaigns—General Buller, on this same advance up the Nile, used to give seven-course dinners in his tent, washed down with any amount of it—and champagne was ordered as a matter of course for any imperial triumph or venture. ‘Champagne’ Anderson, a jolly old prospector of the Rhodesian nineties, got his name because after selling a claim for a satisfactory profit he ordered himself a hotel bath of champagne, at 25s a bottle. Lord Avonmore set off for the Klondike with seventy-five cases of champagne: unfortunately it froze, and was auctioned off in the main street of Edmonton—it went for 25 cents a case, successful bidders instantly breaking the necks of the good bottles, and drinking them there and then.
It is not surprising that the temperance workers were active in these hard-drinking years of the imperial heyday. The Army had its own Temperance Association, whose canteens in every overseas station sold only soft drinks, cakes and bread and butter; members were given a medal after each six months of teetotalism, and official positions on the association were much coveted, allegedly because good money could be made on the side, to spend on whiskey. One of the most eminent reformers was Thomas Cook, the travel king, who began life running a temperance hotel, and whose first conducted tours were temperance outings. Cook never demanded total abstinence of his clients, as did his rivals, Frames Tours, but he never hid his distaste for strong liquor, however happily the British officers, feet up on the rail, swigged their whisky on his Nile steamers. He was an active teetotaller all his life, and once recorded with satisfaction that there were 5,908 recorded abstainers in the Indian Army. The dangers of contaminating native peoples with alcohol were always alive in the evangelist mind—and with reason, for the Australian aborigines, the Canadian Indians, the Maoris and the Polynesians had all been half-rotted by liquor, when first introduced to it by the
British. Sometimes a native ruler saw the point, and proved in his conversion more abstemious than his converters. Khama, the great king of Bechuanaland, not only compelled his entire tribe to turn Christian, but in the 1880s decreed prohibition throughout his domains. In a country several times the size of England the only place where a drink could be sold to anyone, African or European, was the railway refreshment room—that ultimate haven of Empire. Khama called alcohol ‘the enemy of the world’, and wished it could all be spilt into the sea: but he was out of his time, for there has probably been no more effective agency for distributing this particular consolation throughout the world, than the thirsty Empire of the British.
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They liked their creature comforts, and were able to indulge them more luxuriously than they generally could at home, especially in the tropical possessions. With their coveys of servants and their social privileges, they could live in a class above themselves, elaborated in grandeur as they rose in rank, until at last in their retirement back they went to England, to live in obscurity with a housekeeper and a jobbing gardener, and be known to the neighbours, after ruling a couple of million people for half a lifetime, as having been ‘something in the colonies’. In the early days of Empire they had adopted the sybaritic ways of the natives, dressed themselves in silks and reclined languidly on divans with hookahs: as late as 1859 Samuel Shepheard, founder of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, was portrayed dressed altogether as an Egyptian, feet up on a wide and squashy sofa, with a shallow tarboosh on his head, a parrot at his elbow, and a splendid brass hubble-bubble conveniently at hand. By the nineties the British usually preferred their own varieties of relaxation, and wherever they went they took with them the chintz, the leather arm-chairs, the glass decanters and the potted plants that were the hall-marks of cultivated leisure at home.
The club was pre-eminently a product of this portable décor, barring only the chintz. Insulated against the world outside, barred almost certainly to natives and very likely to females, with its own hierarchy of president, committee and senior members, the club was a comforting enclave of Englishness, its familiar features unchanged whether it was deposited in equatorial heat or near-Arctic cold. It was social centre, library, hotel, town forum, recreation ground all in one. If ever the British community wished to forgather, it would do so ‘up at the Club’: and whenever the wandering Briton wished to find company of his own kind he had only to get himself introduced to a member, and soon he would be standing at the bar as if he owned it, asking his neighbour if he happened to know ‘Tommy’ Oldbourne, who’d been Forest Officer in those parts in the eighties. Some clubs were exceedingly luxurious. The Kimberley Club, in the heyday of Rhodes and his diamond cronies, was as lavish as you might expect: it was a graceful low white building, arcades below, veranda above, with wrought-iron railings, imposing lamp standards, a pair of tall flagpoles and a small projecting balcony, like those on the Doge’s Palace, from which overwhelmingly successful financiers might harangue or encourage the toiling speculators below. It reeked of success, lived by diamonds, and was frequented by all the flashiest millionaires of the day—Rhodes himself, lounging in his wicker chair on the terrace, the indefatigable Alfred Beit, who dined there every evening, returning to his office after dinner to continue making money till midnight, or Barney Barnato, the ex-boxer from London, who drowned himself by jumping from a ship in Cape Town harbour on Jubilee day.
The club at Madras was described, in Ivey’s Club Directory, as ‘one of the most magnificent clubs in the world, amidst the splendours of tropical vegetation and surrounded by luxuries which Nature and Art combine to offer those who can enjoy spacious apartments, cool colonnades, the grateful sea-breezes wafted across green fields laden with the perfume of roses and mendhim, while ice, fruit and flowers—to say nothing of admirably trained servants—contribute to the snatches of Sybarite enjoyment in which even a soldier may at times be allowed to indulge’. It was in the club at the hill station of Ootacamund in southern India—‘Snooty Ooty’—that a subaltern called Neville Chamberlain, in 1875, first thought of adding an extra coloured ball to the billiards table, and thus invented the game of snooker: it was named after the term given in the British Army to a first-year officer cadet, and the original rules were hung on a wall in the Ootacamund Club, at the start of their phenomenal journey around the world.
In Australia the clubs very early became strongholds of established wealth and dignity in a disrespectful continent. The grandest of them was the Melbourne Club, which had begun indeed as a rip-roaring affair, whose members went in for false fire-alarms, pushing policemen into mud-holes, stealing door knockers or fighting not very deadly duels—they had a special annexe to creep into, to sleep it off or lie low. It had matured into a very bastion of respectability, with handsome renaissance premises in Collins Street, liveried menials and large lace-curtained windows through which the eminent bankers, politicians, graziers and mining men of Victoria could look out upon the life of their metropolis, and deplore the passing of the old days. The Rideau Club in Ottawa had elegant premises directly opposite the Parliament Buildings of the Canadian Confederacy, with balconies allowing members a canopied grandstand view of every ceremonial. The Kildare Street Club in Dublin was the stronghold of the Anglo-Irish, a fortress of British ascendancy almost as formidable as Dublin Castle itself, and designed by the architect Benjamin Woodward in his most overpowering Venetian Gothic.
Let us visit, for a taste of imperial club life at its most agreeable, the Hill Club at Nuwara Eliya in Ceylon. This little town lay high among the tea estates of the interior, in country which had known the young Samuel Baker among its first British settlers, and the baby Jack Fisher among its residents. It was the principal hill station of Ceylon, and a perfect period piece of the Victorian Empire. Set on a grassy plateau among the hills, immediately below the highest mountain on the island, it was like a model hill station in an exhibition. The British had laid out a park, with a maze and a botanical garden. They had dammed a little lake. They had marked out gentle walks around the surrounding woods, and named them for great ladies of the colony—Lady Horton’s Walk, or Lady McCallum’s Drive. Fir trees flourished, and gave the place a Highland look. There was a big half-timbered Grand Hotel, and a gabled cottage for the Governor of Ceylon, with a pond and a croquet lawn of exquisitely mown buffalo grass. There were the inevitable golf and race-courses, and villas strung about the lake like fishing lodges round a loch; and an English church, of course, and a lending library; and poised most benignly above the plateau, the Hill Club.
It was a low, baronial sort of building with gardens all around it. Its windows were mullioned, and inside it the atmosphere of an English or more properly a Scottish country house was diligently re-created. If the private houses of the British Empire tended towards the suburban, the clubs smacked distinctly of landed gentry. Blackwood’s, The Field, the Illustrated London News lay on the smoking-room table, and The Times and the Morning Post, not more than a month old, were carefully smoothed in the breakfast room. Glass-enclosed upon the walls were the champion trout of the local hill streams, descendants of those first brought to Ceylon by the British fifty years before. There were rod racks about, landing-nets, somebody’s waders in the back passage, and when a rattle of wheels was heard outside out ran a couple of turbaned servants to help another sportsman from his tonga, collect his bags and his rod case, his walnut fly box and his boots, and usher him inside for his bath and his sundowner. Service at this club was paternal, or perhaps avuncular. The planting families used it as a second home, and the club servants were like family retainers to them all. The Hill Club had a useful little library, mostly books about Ceylon, but it was chiefly a place for outdoor men. The grave seniors of the Indian Civil Service might not feel at home here: this was the Pax Britannica at its most boyish and breezy, where the bedroom fires flickered in the mountain evenings like nursery memories, and a chap slept like a log.1
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Throughout t
he length and breadth of the Empire a well-spoken, reasonably well-connected young man, with a few introductions in the right places, and a sufficiently entertaining line in small talk, could travel by himself without feeling the need for an hotel. If he did not stay at clubs, somebody was sure to invite him to stay at a bungalow. Family travellers, though, must depend upon hotels or the official rest-houses which the British erected in most of their Eastern possessions. Then as now the good traveller did not greatly care. Henry Beveridge,2 a retired Indian Civil Servant on a sentimental revisit to India in the 1890s, happily put up at the Temperance Hotel in Mango Lane, Bombay, where the daily all-in charge was 3s 4d, and the monthly tariff £4. Others were less easily satisfied. G. W. Steevens thought there were only four hotels in India that could ‘indulgently be called second-class’, while all the rest were ‘unredeemably vile’. The only country inns in Rhodesia were thatched huts of clay attached to the trading stores, and Kipling paints a compassionate portrait of a British commercial traveller stuck forlornly in an hotel—‘dark and bungaloathsome’—in one of the sleazier corners of Empire. ‘Isn’t this a sweet place? There ain’t no ticca-gharries, and there ain’t nothing to eat, if you haven’t brought your victuals, and they charge you three-eight a for bottle of whisky. Oh! it’s a sweet place!’