Pax Britannica
Page 29
It was only along the great trade routes that the Empire sponsored its own luxury hotels, whose names had entered the vocabulary of travel. Of them all the most famous was Shepheard’s in Cairo. Its new building had been finished in 1890, and it stood in Italianate glory, looking across the Ezbekia Gardens to the Opera House, with Cook’s almost next door. Its original fortunes had been built on the Overland Route to India, before the cutting of the Suez Canal. Now it prospered largely because of the Cairo winter season, which brought hundreds of rich Europeans and Americans to Egypt each year. Shepheard’s wide terrace was the most celebrated of rendezvous, with its carpeted staircase to the street, its vast potted palms, the impassive gold-braided suffragi at its door and the medley of snake-charmers, souvenir-sellers, dragomen, donkey-men, and miscellaneous touts who haunted the pavement outside, sometimes shouting to the toffs above to suggest a trip to the Pyramids, the purchase of a camel saddle or some small expression of baksheesh.
Everybody knew Shepheard’s. The hotel’s Golden Book was full of fame and royalty, and that welcoming terrace became a mirage-like objective for travellers labouring down the Nile out of Africa. There is a drawing of Stanley arriving there in 1890, after three years in the interior looking for Emin Pasha: he is dressed still in his pith helmet and high boots, and as the manager, in a frock-coat, clasps the explorer’s right hand with both of his own, an Englishman on the terrace waves his hat and raises a cheer, a flounced lady lifts her lorgnette, and a porter in a tarboosh looks curiously through the front door of the hotel—‘the fashionables of Cairo,’ Stanley wrote, ‘in staring at me every time I came out to take the air, made me uncommonly shy’. Rudolf von Slatin, escaping from eleven years’ imprisonment by the Mahdi, made for Shepheard’s to write his book Fire and Sword in the Sudan: he became one of the hotel’s best-known regulars, and a staff with a taste for honorifics loved referring to him by his full sonorous title—General Baron Sir Rudolf von Slatin Pasha.1 It was at Shepheard’s, too, that Gordon had stayed, impatiently waiting for Cook’s to complete the travel arrangements, before he left Cairo in 1883 for Khartoum and his death. Shepheard’s was a legend already, and one of the classic travel experiences of the imperial age was to sit on its terrace on a winter morning, with a Turkish coffee and a sticky cake, watching a parade march by outside—the tarbooshed bandsmen puffing away at their bugles, the British commander ineffably superior on his horse, and in front Shepheard’s own water-man laying the dust with squirts from his leather water-bag, backing away before the advancing military, and chivvied by testy superiors on the pavement.
No other hotel was quite so famous, but several more were as familiar to the travellers of Empire as home itself. There was the Casino Palace at Port Said, with its huge glass-roofed terrace, looking across the mole to where the P. and O. lay coaling, or the Crescent at Aden, which opened directly upon the British Army’s horrible hot parade ground. At Bombay they were building the monumental Taj Mahal, which was to be the most imposing building in the city, outshining even the great structures of Government, and standing flamboyantly striped, turreted and balconied upon the Apollo Bund, the very first thing to greet the new arrival in India. At Colombo there was the G.O.H.—the Grand Oriental Hotel—a huge lumpish hostelry called by Murray’s Handbook ‘one of the best hotels, if not the best, in the East’. At Calcutta there was the awful Great Eastern, monumental and morose, at Singapore Raffles’, a delightfully sun-shaded, courtyarded, loose-limbed sort of hotel, famous for its long cool drinks and its food, notorious in those days for its squalid rooms. At Hong Kong the hotels on the waterfront, run on American lines, sent their own launches, house flags at the prow, to meet the liners steaming into harbour. All across Canada, wherever the Canadian Pacific Railway passed, enormous castle-like hotels sprang up, spaciously called the Château This or That, and sometimes so dominating their cities that the hotel in the centre of Quebec has been popularly supposed, ever since, to be the ancient fortress that was the city’s raison d’être.
All these were very grand hotels indeed.1 They lived by the Empire, had mostly risen with its fortunes, and were now in their plushy, palmed and Electric-Illuminated prime. Perhaps more suggestive of the best imperial pleasures, though, were the houseboats for which the British had a particular fondness. At Aswan, high up the Nile, one could hire a dahabia, one of the long-prowed sailing-boats which still provided passenger service down to the Delta for those who could not afford Cook’s steamer fares. This would be exquisitely converted by Cook’s, and equipped down to the last table napkin, and it could be towed more or less where you wished, preferably within reach of one of the better hotels, for tea-dances or tennis. Even more delicious were the houseboats of Kashmir, moored on the celestial lake of Srinagar beneath the Karakoram, and served by floating shops that drifted out from town each morning. These quaint craft were devised because a Maharajah of Kashmir, fearing an influx of retired British officials into his arcardian State, forbade Europeans to own land there. The Europeans took to the water instead, and in about 1875 the first of the Kashmir houseboats were launched. They looked like little Thames-side chalets mounted on hulls, with dormer windows and shingle roofs, the whole slightly orientalized by curving prows: and on their decks the exiled British, gazing across the water towards the white ramparts beyond, took their tea and crumpets, did their embroidery, devised new phrases for their journals in uninterrupted content.
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They had developed to a new pitch of finesse the art of living in tropical countries. The specialist outfitters of London offered all kinds of ingenious devices for defeating the equatorial climates—patent ice machines, spine-pads, thornproof linen, the Shikaree Tropical Hat, in white and brown canvas, from Henry Heath’s Well Known Shoppe for Hattes in Oxford Street. The tent of a British Army officer in the tropics was a sight to see, with its portable writing-desk, its canvas camp bath, the gleaming boots laid out on their trees beside the ‘Union Jack’ Patent Field Boot Container, the taut white ‘Up-Country’ Mosquito Net and the ‘Unique’ Anti-Termite Matting on the floor. Private houses, though stuffily packed with the bric-à-brac of the day, were shaded by verandas and cooled by hand-powered fans, worked by invisible servants in the room next door (in the best-ordered households the punkah magically started swaying the moment you showed signs of pausing in a room, to glance at a picture or pin your hair up). Every kind of al fresco activity was popular. The British loved picnics, and camping parties, and boating, and often at Government Houses, if there were too many guests for the bedrooms, great comfortable tents would be erected on the lawn for the overflow.
Even so, the Victorians in their tropical possessions must have been fearfully hot and sticky. Their clothes were so heavy, they were so loaded down with protective devices like puttees (against snakes) and neckpads (against heat-stroke), that a dressy occasion must have been horribly uncomfortable. For the most part to be smart was to be dressed just as you would be at home in England, even though the temperature might be 109 degrees in the shade. Women used to order complete outfits from London, with dress, hat, gloves, bag and shoes to match (or if they could not afford it, at least took great pains to conceal the fact that their dresses had been made by a tailor in the bazaar). When one took a turn on the Maidan at Calcutta one wore a thick frock-coat and a top-hat. Men really did dress for dinner in remote tropical outposts, if only to keep some sense of root and order. The British soldier in the tropics, though he changed into white uniform, still had his jacket brass-buttoned to the chin—and carefully dandified himself each evening, buttons polished and hair slicked, even if he had nowhere to go but the canteen in the cantonment. As if all this were not enough, a favourite recreation of the British was the fancy dress ball, to which guests often came weighed down with elaborate fineries—when Lord Roberts gave one at Simla in 1887, eighteen officers of the Royal Irish came in a body in long scarlet coats and powdered wigs.
There was an overpowering aura of closeness—one can scarcely speak
of sweatiness in such a context—to the whole grandeur of Empire, the epauleted, gold-braided jackets, the heavy silks and long skirts, the dark brown paint of the Government offices. The taste of the late Victorians was ill suited to the administration of a tropical Empire. There is a picture of the Wiltshire Regiment officers’ mess at Peshawar in 1886 which depressingly suggests this portentous clutter. The table is thick with regimental silver, trophies and elaborate oil lamps and sauceboats and pepper-pots and goblets, and the walls seem to sag beneath the weight of antlers. Flags are draped here and there, napkins are impeccably folded, and the sixteen chairs for the officers are packed so rightly together in the midst of it all that there looks scarcely room for the servant to manoeuvre a crested soup plate between them. The homes of the senior civilian officials were just as overloaded with consequence. Government House at Poona, where the Governor of Bombay spent his summers, was built in the château style, like a Canadian hotel, and had an eighty-foot tower, a grotto, a lake and innumerable gazebos, arbours and summer-houses. Inside it was burdened all over with dark wood panelling and chandeliers, festooned with pictures of kings and maharajahs, crammed with gigantic and lugubrious pieces of furniture. It must have been difficult indeed for the Governor, when wearing his sword for ceremonial receptions, to pass from one saloon to another: but he was used to it all—his other palace, in Bombay, had two dining-rooms, one for the dry weather, one for the monsoon.
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They enjoyed themselves with tourism. The British, for all their aloofness, were indefatigable sightseers. The Victoria Falls very soon became a tourist spectacle, and even India was full of the symptoms of the trade—the blackguardly guides, bowing obsequiously, the picture-postcard man at the Taj Mahal, or the chairs with long poles attached to them, in which the trippers from Bombay were carried by coolies up the long steep steps to the caves on Elephanta Island. A team of four guides was considered convenient for sightseers in Madras—‘No 1 to lead, No 2 to see that he does it, No 3 to see that No 2 does his duty, while No 4 supervises the lot’. They habitually called British tourists ‘My Lord’, in the Empire of those days: Kipling says gharry-men in India used to warn off rival carriages by claiming they were ‘rotten, My Lord, having been used by natives’.
The British enjoyed themselves with the theatre, too. Calcutta had four professional English-speaking theatres, Melbourne three, and there was even one in Rangoon—though most of them only played music-hall and harmless farce. Sometimes fairly distinguished companies from London undertook a tour of the more urbane imperial centres: Charles Carrington, one of the best avant-garde producers of the nineties, spent three years touring India, Australia, New Zealand and Egypt with Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. Well-known musical companies from London toured the garrison theatres of India, and Thespians in the mellow tradition of ham and fly-by-night often turned up on the frontier stations; like the well-known Professor who was a familiar figure of the Rhodesian veldt, plodding with his sad troupe from one stand to the next, Hamlet to pantomime. Amateur theatricals flourished almost everywhere, and seem to have formed an absolutely essential part of the imperial way. When Kipling wanted to invent a conversation to show the sameness of imperial conversation everywhere, this is what he wrote: ‘And then, you know, after she had said that he was obliged to give the part to the other, and that made them furious, and the races were so near that nothing could be done, and Mrs —— said that it was altogether impossible.’ The most familiar photograph of social life in the Empire of the nineties, to be found in faded sepia print in picture albums from British Columbia to the Cape, shows Colonel Hampstead, Mrs Rathbone, Miss Susan Walkley-Thomas and the Reverend Arthur Millstead, poised precariously in too much makeup holding teacups, at a climactic moment of last year’s production of Caste.1
And naturally they enjoyed themselves with sex. The late Victorians were, for all their later legend, as full-blooded as any other generation, and the annals of their imperialism are rich in sexual adventure. Frank Richards recalled, in his book Old Soldier Sahib, the irrepressible randiness of the British soldier abroad in those days. Commanding officers often established regimental brothels, to cope with it: in Burma the military authorities imported Japanese prostitutes, and most Indian garrison towns had brothels reserved for the white troops, inspected by military doctors for cleanliness and patrolled by military police, who did not hesitate to beat up any native seen approaching the girls. Itinerant whores—‘sand-rats’—habitually followed any British regiment on the march in India, and the pimp’s cry ‘jiggy-jig, sahib’ haunted the British soldier the moment he set foot outside his barracks.
As for the women of Empire, Kipling badly damaged their reputation for purity with his stories of the goings-on in the Indian hill stations. The historical novelist Maud Diver undertook to restore it in a book called The Englishwoman in India, but even she had to allow that the British grass widow in the hills had many temptations to resist. The two most insidious dangers, Miss Diver thought, were military men on leave and amateur theatricals, but many memsahibs fell too for the exotic allure of the East. Dennis Kincaid, an Indian civil servant, reported that they were often much moved by a well-known Pathan marching song called Wounded Heart, and sometimes asked to be told the words: but unfortunately the least obscene lines in the song, Kincaid said, were those of the final verse, which ran: ‘There is a boy across the river with a—like a peach, but alas 1cannot swim’.2
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One easily detects pathos in these pleasures. These were often people putting a brave face upon it. Some were pretending to be grander than they were. Some were tortured by that cruel and incurable disease, home-sickness. Some were compensating for pleasures that England denied them. Some were just making the best of things, drinking themselves silly, gambling themselves broke. The first-generation emigrant was generally disillusioned, and hung on only for the sake of his children. The expatriate merchant only wanted to make his pile before he hurried home to Guildford or Inverness. Perhaps the only really happy men of Empire were the men of lofty duty: those to whom it was not a spree at all, nor even a passable way of spending a few profitable years, but a vocation. Real happiness emanates from the pages of the missionary journals, with their bright-eyed conviction of Christian opportunity: and they seem to have been genuinely happy men who sat in their tents dispensing justice to the backward peoples, decreeing imprisonment here, waiving a levy there, in the absolute knowledge that the Raj was right.
1 It is now an open air lecture-hall of the University of Ceylon.
1 The Cup is still the great event of the Australian season, and the Windsor Hotel in Melbourne, one of the graziers’ favourites, seems to me on the whole the most comfortable I know.
1 It was only in the 1950s that French-Canadians were welcomed in any numbers to this very exclusive hunt: until then, I was once told in Montreal, the country was only hunted by ‘English Montrealers of a certain type’.
1 Nuwara Eliya (pronounced more or less Noorellya) has miraculously defied the years. The little town is almost unchanged, the Governor’s cottage is impeccably kept up for the Prime Minister of Ceylon, and in 1965 the Hill Club still had not admitted a single Ceylonese to membership.
2 Father of Lord Beveridge and so grandfather of the Welfare State. He joined the East India Company in 1836 and died in 1929, the year the British Labour Government declared Dominion status to be its goal for India.
1 von Slatin, born in Austria in 1857, governed a Sudanese province under Gordon, and was captured by the Mahdi in 1883. He escaped to Egypt in 1895, returned to Khartoum with Kitchener, and became Inspector-General of the Sudan when Anglo-Egyptian rule was restored there.
1 Most of them still thrive. Shepheard’s was destroyed in the Cairo riots of 1952, but has been rebuilt on an even better site, beside the Nile. The terrace of the Casino Palace at Port Said is sadly dingy now, but the hotel service is still geared to the passage of the India boats through the canal. The Crescent Hotel at Aden is stil
l the best in town, while the Taj Mahal in Bombay remains the most imposing building in the city, and is perhaps the grandest hotel in Asia. The G.O.H. in Colombo has been redecorated in advanced colours and indigenous motifs, removing its last traces of imperial splendour, but Raffles has kept its character, and the Canadian Pacific hotels still boast in the Royal York at Toronto ‘the largest hotel in the Commonwealth’—1,600 rooms, and an Imperial Lounge.
1 A play (by T. W. Robertson) which seems to have obsessed the Empire, dealing as it did with a humble girl’s marriage to an aristocratic guardsman, and his unexpected return from the colonial wars to dash the predictions of those who thought that never the twain would cleave.
2 Kincaid tells this story in his exceedingly entertaining British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (London, 1938). Old Soldier Sahib (London, 1936) was the first, and possibly the only, full account of a British private soldier’s life under the Raj.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Challenge and Responses