by Jan Morris
A broad beaten track across the Egyptian desert preserved the memory of the Overland Route. Lieutenant Thomas Waghorn,1 Royal Navy, had created this way to India, spending most of his life on it, until in the 1840s the P. and O. company took it over. Passengers and mail were disembarked at Alexandria, and sent up the Nile by steamer to Cairo: there they were transferred to horse-drawn vans, and off they went across the Overland Route to Suez and the India boats. There were seven relay stations on the desert track, with food, fresh horses and the inevitable champagne, and for thirty years the service was the chief mail route from Britain to India. The railway to Suez killed it, and the cutting of the Suez Canal: but in 1897 its wide track across the desert was still used by camel-trains and solitary travellers, one or two of its rest-houses were still perceptibly in business, and imperialists of a romantic turn could still imagine their forebears, in nets, goggles, topees and mufflers against the sand, bowling across the waste towards their empires in the east.1
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But this was the railway age—its tail-end in Britain, where the astonishing and often scandalous years of railway boom were over, but still its heyday in the overseas Empire. These were the years of the snort, the hiss and the green-gold livery, mahogany booking-offices like gigantic confessionals, railway stations of diocesan gravity. All the ritual of the railways was transferred by the British to the ends of their grateful Empire.
Britain’s experience in railway-building was still unrivalled. British engineers, with British financiers behind them, were responsible for foreign railway systems as far apart as China and the United States, and almost the first thing that crossed the British mind, when a new territory was surveyed or a stroke of expansion contemplated, was the best location for a railway line. The great railways of the Empire, Bryce thought, would remain ‘to witness to the skill and thoroughness with which a great nation did its work’. More than half the railway mileage of Asia was British, and five-sixths of the African mileage. The romance of the imperial railways was very dear to New Imperialists. When Rhodes first planned his railway across the chasm of the Victoria Falls, where the spray rises from the cataract like a cloud across the plain, he saw the meeting of the steel lines and the eternal waters as a meeting between equals, and decreed that the bridge must stand so close to the falls that the passengers would see the spray upon their windows.1
Some sensational things were done by the imperial railway engineers. While that irrigation water went through the Ghats in one place, in another the Great Indian Peninsular Railway was hoisting itself across them in a phenomenal complex of tunnels, bridges and sidings, the trains now labouring up what seemed to be an impossible jungle gradient, now suddenly backing into a reversing siding and starting off afresh in the opposite direction. On the Uganda Railway trains had to be loaded, truck by truck, on to a kind of elevator, and slid gently down a dizzy slope to the depths of the Great Rift. In Ceylon the mountains were so steep that at one time the engineers wondered despairingly if they ought to abandon the idea of locomotives altogether, and haul all their trains up the hills by huge stationary engines. There was almost nowhere in the Empire where they would not lay a railway. There was one in Malta, 8½ miles long, and there were two on the island of Mauritius, and an adorable little train, with easy chairs on canopied open wagons, puffed up a two-foot track around Darjeeling to deposit its passengers at the highest railway station in the world—Ghoom, at 8,000 feet. Lord Napier took a complete railway with him when he sailed from Bombay to Ethiopia in 1868, and Kitchener was laying one as he went southward into the Sudan.2 In 1897 they were completing one in Newfoundland, starting one into the Yukon, half-way through one in Burma, thinking about one from Suakin to Berber, plotting one from Singapore through Siam to India, grumbling about not having one to Salisbury in Rhodesia, negotiating one from Hong Kong to Canton, surveying one up the Kabul River into Afghanistan, hard at work on one from the Kenya coast to the Great Lakes of Africa.
The purpose of the last was partly to open up Uganda to trade and settlement, and partly to protect the southern flank of Egypt against foreign meddling. The coastal terminus of this line delightfully represented the spirit of the imperial railways. In those days Mombasa was an Arab seaport almost untouched by Western civilization—a town of tall balconied houses and narrow scented lanes, palm trees, hookahs, bearded magnificoes and women smothered head to foot in black. An ancient Portuguese fort commanded the town, and in its deep harbour the dhows lay exhausted in the heat, waiting to load up with spices and ivory for Arabia and the Persian Gulf. In the very centre of this medieval place, almost within sight of the dhow harbour, the British had built a solid, sensible, standard sort of railway station. It was the kind of station one might expect to find on a fairly busy branch line in the West Country, except that it was made of whitewashed mud. Its booking-offices were trim, its luggage counters capacious, its platform benches freshly painted, its sleeper-beds well weeded—all done to a neat and modest pattern, and ready, one might think, to take Mrs Proudie up to London for a conference, or receive the school special at the start of an unusually sunny summer term.
From this homely building there set out into the interior of Africa a railway so set about by savagery that for several months its construction was delayed by man-eating lions,1 and once a Punjabi labourer was found strung up on a pole full of Nandi arrows, like a warning crow on a fence. Endless misadventures attended the construction of the Uganda Railway, rinderpest, famine, plague, attacks by hostile tribesmen, attempted murder in the construction camps, drought, smallpox and collisions on the track: but it reached Lake Victoria in the end, and there it was met by the steamboat William Mackinnon, prefabricated in England and carried up the route of the line by several hundred labourers.2
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There was no grand plan for the railways of the Empire. In general they were built to British standards and methods, as against American or Continental, but there was no attempt to standardize them. Even the Irish railways ran on a different gauge from the railways in England, and the six Australian States, disregarding the advice of the Colonial Office, worked on three different gauges between them. Often, nevertheless, there was grandeur to their conception. Rhodes saw his Cape-to-Cairo railway in epic terms—a British highway up the spine of the continent, with through trains from one end to the other, and feeder lines branching east and west to the Indian and Atlantic Oceans: it was precluded by the agreement, in 1890, which gave Tanganyika to the Germans, and when the idea was later revived, and there was an attempt to lease land in the Congo to skirt Tanganyika, the Germans themselves prevented it.
All around the African coast railways like the Uganda line were for the first time taking Western trade and technology into the tribal areas of the interior. The South African railways, Bryce reported, had made Cape Town, Kimberley, Johannesburg and Pretoria a single social unit, where all the important people knew each other—Johannesburg and Cape Town, he said, were in closer social touch than Liverpool and Manchester, or New York and Philadelphia. The confederation of Canada, fulfilled in 1871, would not have happened if it had not been for the Canadian Pacific Railway—British Columbia refused to join unless a transcontinental line were built. To some Britons this line seemed the key to the unity not only of Canada but of their whole Empire, for it offered a new, secure and all-Red route to the orient; Columbus’s vision fulfilled at last, and in as thoroughly British a way as he would doubtless have preferred, if he had lived in the right century. The Canadian Pacific was already romantically dubbed the Queen’s Highway, and at its Pacific end the Royal Navy had built its base at Esquimalt. There was even talk of constructing a new port on the west coast of Ireland, through which the posts for Australia could pass for Halifax and the C.P.R. mail train (a route which would involve six transhipments, but would never leave the shelter of the flag). The C.P.R. was the only single-system railway crossing the American continent. Its trains made the journey at an average speed of 28 m.p.h., and the British tho
ught it highly significant that its very first trainload of material was a consignment of stores for the Pacific Squadron of the Royal Navy.
In India especially, in all things the apogee of Empire, the railways stood for historical change. They bound the country into a unity, and they prised open the internal economy of India, each district self-sufficient and oblivious to the next. The railways opened the eyes of many Indians to the size of their country, even to the existence of communities other than their own. Some were built for military purposes, some specifically to move grain about at times of famine, and they were mostly financed by private British capital, with Government subsidies or guarantees (the only one built entirely with Indian capital was that little treasure of a line up to Darjeeling).
Some of the railway companies were, by the standards of nineteenth-century Asia, marvels of modern organization. The East India Railway Company, for example, though its carriages were notoriously dirty, was the richest company in India and one of the most thorough. Its administrative offices were enormous palaces of paper-work, packed with multitudinous docketed files in red tapes and paper-clips, laboured among beneath the twirling fans by armies of bemused babus. At Jamalpur the Company had built its own headquarters town, with living quarters for its British employees. Its streets had names like King’s Road, Victoria Road, or Steam Street, and its houses were built to a standard design, but in varying sizes, nicely laid out in village style, and so arranged that no employee lived far from his work. There was a communal swimming pool, a library, a Masonic lodge, a night school for apprentices, an Institute with half a dozen tennis courts, and once a week the East India Railway Volunteers, a militia company, paraded at the drill hall in grey and red uniforms, led by a band—membership of the force was a condition of service with the Company. The E.I.R. was a paternal employer, run by Scotsmen and North Country men. Many a son followed his father into its service, and to Indians a job on its payroll was only inferior to a job in the Government.
For the British the railway stations of upcountry India were fulcrums of Anglo-Indian security, as those cable stations were oases in the Outback of Australia. Steam, piston grease, the stuffy smell of waiting-rooms, starched white dining-room napkins, smudgily printed time-tables, soldiers at junction platforms drinking tea out of saucers—all these were basic ingredients of Anglo-India, as organic to the Raj as hill-stations or protocol. The Indian railways stimulated the Englishman’s imagination, and gave him a Roman pride. In Indian cities the grandest and most ornate of the public buildings were usually the railway stations and offices, hulking mock-oriental caravanserais, Saracenic, Moghul, all domes, clocks, whirligigs, stained-glass windows, immense glass-and-girder roofs, beneath which the railway lines lay like allegories of order in chaos. There the great trains steamed and hissed: the British engine-driver grandly at the cab of the mail-train locomotive; the British conductor with his check-board at the first-class carriage door; the British Stationmaster at the end of the platform, dressed splendidly in dark blue, like an admiral at the quay; the British passengers stalking down the platform in a miasma of privilege, pursued by coveys of servants and porters with bags, children, bedding, and possibly a goat to be tethered in the guard’s van, and provide fresh milk for the journey.1 All around was the theatrical confusion of India, which Empire had tamed: a frenzy of Indians, in dhotis, in saris, in swathed torn rags, in noseclips, ankle-bangles, turbans, baggy white shorts, scarlet uniforms, yellow priestly robes, topees, bush-jackets, loin-cloths; hawkers shouting in hollow voices and peering through train windows with blazing eyes; office messengers hurrying importantly by to post their letters in the mail-coach box; entire families sitting, sleeping, clambering about, feeding babies or apparently dead on piles of baggage, tied up with string; and sometimes a desperate beggar, a man with no face or a legless boy, darting terrifyingly out of nowhere to seize upon a likely straggler.
The British gentry travelled first-class, usually with a servant’s compartment next door—on the South India Railway a little window linked them, for milord to give his orders through. The Indian gentry travelled second-class; British other ranks, commercial men and mechanics went intermediate; and pushed, levered, squeezed, squashed into the slatted wooden seats of the fourth-class compartments, travelled the Indian millions. A journey across India took anything up to a week, and the wise sahib took his own padded quilts and pillow, his own tiffin-basket (which should always be kept furnished, Murray’s Handbook advised, ‘with potted meats, biscuits, some good spirit, and soda water’), and a few good books (such as, Murray suggested, Sir W. Hunter’s Indian Empire, or Sir Alfred Lyall’s Rise and Expansion of the British Dominion in India). There were refreshment rooms at most junctions, but the experienced traveller telegraphed his requirements ahead, and as the train drew into Chanda or Gadag, out of the shadows would leap a man in white, carrying your luncheon on a tray, covered with a napkin—fiery curry, vivid chutney and onions, chupattis, to be washed down with a draught of Scotch from your tiffin-basket. So immediate was this service that it was as though the man had been awaiting you there all morning, holding his tray: but you had to eat fast, for before you left he would want the plates back, and as the train moved off again, with a creaking of its woodwork and a distant chuffing of its engine, you might see him bowing perfunctorily still, as he retreated to the Vegetarian Food Stall for the washing-up.
The Indian railways provided all sorts of social services, ancillary to their grander functions. Murray is full of their usefulness. The stationmaster at Jungshahi would arrange your camel for you. There was a comfortable Waiting Room (‘with Baths, etc.’) at Neral. Travellers to Verawal might find it convenient to get permission from the stationmaster to retain their first-class railway carriage at the station, and to sleep in it at night. For the Englishman in India the railways were a reassurance, a familiar constant in an often unpredictable world. With Newman’s Indian Bradshaw on one’s lap, a stalwart engine-driver of the Great Northern Railway up front, and the certainty of a tonga awaiting one at Kathgodam station, one could lean back in one’s seat (‘unusually deep’, Murray says) in rare security. Someone, somewhere, it seemed, had got the hang of the place. To travellers in the remote Himalaya, one marvellous moment of a descent into the plains was the sight of a distant plumed railway train, streaming across the flatlands with a whisper of starched linen and chilled champagne. To the new arrival at Bombay, awaiting apprehensively the plunge into the Indian hinterland, nothing could be more comforting than the Punjab Mail, glistening and eager in the gloom of Victoria station, as British as the Crown itself, and sure to be on time.
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In the last three decades of the century much of the Empire was mapped for the first time, generally by soldiers, sometimes by road-builders and railwaymen. No such slabs of empty territory had been so thoroughly surveyed before, and London was the world centre of cartography, just as geographers in most countries reckoned their longtitude from Greenwich. Strategy was the chief impulse of the work. The very first British official maps were of Ireland, and were drawn (in 1653) when the British wished to distribute the lands of rebellious Irishmen among their soldiers and settlers. Ever since the British had been mapping those countries they wished to subdue or occupy, and generally the more determined the local resistance the more thorough the maps. This made for a patchy system. Canada, which was mostly empty, was covered by a hodge-podge of boundary maps, railway maps, exploration maps, geological maps for speculators and sketch maps drawn up by adventurers in the Rockies. In Australia, where there had been virtually no local resistance, there were virtually no topographical maps. India, on the other hand, was very thoroughly mapped—all of it on the scale of ¼” to the mile, most of it on an inch to the mile. South Africa was oddly neglected,1 but Rhodesia had been well mapped from the start, if only to make sure the gold reefs would be properly located. Elsewhere in Africa most colonies and protectorates had accurately surveyed frontiers, with less accurate surveys around the ch
ief settlements and along the coastlines, while the interior of the continent remained, for the most part, a smudge on the map, delineated only from guesswork or the imprecise observations of explorers. Kitchener, himself a skilful surveyor, had taken a large mapping mission with him into the Sudan, busy even then surveying a million square miles of potential Empire: but Africa was still the dark continent, and part of the excitement of the New Imperialism was the lure of the uncharted—‘the other side of the moon’, was Salisbury’s simile for the Upper Nile Valley, and the systematic reduction of the Empire to grids and projections was, for the men of those days, a task akin to the mapping of space. Napoleon, surveying the Great Pyramid of Giza, is supposed to have cried to his veterans: ‘Soldiers, forty centuries look down upon you!’ The British, almost as soon as they arrived in Egypt, lugged a theodolite to the pyramid’s summit and made it a triangulation point.
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They were making a start with tropical medicine. The first school in the world exclusively concerned with the subject was being built that year in Liverpool, home port for the West Africa trade. In many parts of the world the British were the first heralds of the message that cleanliness and health went together, and they were just beginning to understand a few of the hitherto intractable tropical diseases. They knew that beri-beri was caused by rice from which the outer grain layers had been stripped. They knew that leprosy and cholera were bacterial, and that the filaria worm was the cause of elephantiasis. Sir Ronald Ross, in India, was pursuing the theory that malaria was caused by the anopheles mosquito, and Patrick Manson, medical adviser to the Colonial Office, had convinced all but the most rigid devotee of spine pad and siesta that the health hazards of the tropics were seldom due simply to heat.1