by Jan Morris
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If precedents were anything to go by, the self-governing white colonies would be the first to break away from the Empire—probably not by armed rebellion, like the Americans, but perhaps by the exertion of independent tempers. A symbolically disconcerting proclamation was once made by the Australians at a place called Thursday Island, in the remote tropical north of Queensland. This was the very top of Australia, separated only by the narrow Torres Strait from New Guinea, the East India archipelago and Asia proper, and it was one of the hardest places in the world for a big ship to get to: when the British India boats sailed there through the islands their captains often stayed on the bridge for four days and nights, worrying their vessels through the shallows. On Thursday Island, off the tip of Cape York, there was a little town and a naval station—1,500 souls in all, with some fifty whites and a shifting community of Malays, Polynesians, Chinese, a few Japanese pearl divers and a few aborigines. The flag of the Queensland Government flew above the Resident Magistrate’s house, and there was a little wooden prison, a post office, a storehouse for the Royal Navy’s Australian squadron, a couple of pubs, two or three shops and a courthouse. Immediately behind this clutch of buildings was the bush, and the Sound all about was littered with low sandy islands, baked in heat.
It was a dismal place, away beyond the never-never, but if the Australians ever stamped out of the Empire, Thursday Island might be remembered as their Concord, for it was here that they first showed the world their independence. For years the Queenslanders had been urging the Imperial Government to occupy the island of New Guinea across the water, to forestall the Germans or the French. The British, who had more than enough islands on their books, repeatedly declined: so on March 30, 1883, the day after the English mail-boat had left for London, leaving northern Queensland conveniently incommunicado, the Resident Magistrate at Thursday Island posted a proclamation in his official notice-board. It announced the annexation of all New Guinea, not by the Imperial Government at all, but by the Government of Queensland. A day or two later the Magistrate sailed across the Torres Strait, and ceremonially planted the Union Jack upon the soil of Papua. The British first annulled the annexation in a huff, then agreed to declare a protectorate over the south-eastern part of the island: and when, in 1884, the Germans took the north-eastern coast for themselves, the Queenslanders were understandably piqued.
White colonial defiance did not often go so far, but the Thursday Island proclamation was a warning, and less dramatic disagreements smouldered on. Colonials intermittently complained that they were not permanently represented on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, their own supreme court of appeal, and it irritated them when the British, who controlled their foreign relations, high-handedly ignored their views. In Canada the historian Goldwin Smith1 campaigned against everything imperialist, to the fury of loyal Anglo-Canadians. In Australia the Bulletin stridently derided the ‘colonial cringe’ and what it liked to call ‘The Hempire’. The British, for their part, often found the self-governing colonies an embarrassment. Their racial prejudices were awkward in a multiracial Empire: Australian laws keeping out Chinese immigrants, blessed with the Queen’s assent, were distinctly at variance with the Imperial Government’s Chinese treaties, securing British subjects in China every kind of privilege. The way colonials treated their African and aboriginal subjects was often distressing to the British. Both the Australians and the Canadians were in bad odour with the Japanese, a people to whom the British were increasingly drawn. The belligerence of the Australians and New Zealanders in the Pacific chafed against Salisbury’s sophisticated diplomacy, and Canada’s frontier fears repeatedly caused friction between London and Washington. Britain and France were habitually at loggerheads over Newfoundlanders’ fishing rights: when a fishing dispute between the Newfoundlanders and the Americans was adjudicated in favour of Washington, the Newfoundland Legislature refused to pay the damages, and the British Government voted with embarrassment to pay them itself—late one night towards the end of a Session, when nobody would much notice. All in all, if ever the British family of nations broke up, it was debatable whether the daughters would flounce out first, or the mother.2
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Would the barbarians one day take over? Not, it seemed to the experts again, by force of arms. There were very few British possessions where armed revolution seemed seriously possible, and there was virtually no communication between one subject people and another. The British agencies of security and intelligence were thorough and experienced, and since the Indian Mutiny they had taken no chances: the secret agents of Kim, with their cloak-and-dagger habits and elaborate networks of information, were active all over British Asia. Von Hübner made the point that wherever the British lived there was sure to be a faithful servant, a trusty or Man Friday, to warn them of conspiracy: Lascar disaffection on British merchant ships was nearly always given away in advance.
In the black African colonies the last spirit of the Zulus and the Ashantis had been broken, and lesser tribes like the Matabele could not fight for long: even Adowa had not much shaken the military prestige of European armies and their Maxim guns. Kitchener was dealing with the Mahdi—or as Sir Walter Besant1 put it in an article that summer, ‘inspiring with a wholesome dread of the British name the death-despising hordes of the Sudan’. The Egyptians were docile. The French Canadians were dormant. The great Sikh fighting confederacy, the last of Britain’s enemies within India, now provided some of the most trusted and admired soldiers of the Indian Army. The Burmese had been pacified, the Maoris were being anglicized, the Australian aborigines were far less trouble than the rabbits.
The two imperial communities which might conceivably rise in arms against the Crown were both white: the Boers of South Africa, the Irish of the Other Island. The formidable Boers, in their endless efforts to get away from the British, the Aborigines Protection Society and the smoke from the next man’s chimney, had seldom failed to humiliate the imperial forces whenever they had clashed: their principles had such punch, their culture was so fanatic, their physiques were so stringy and spare, like the biltong that hung from their saddles, that they made their imperial opponents seem flabby by comparison. As for Ireland, there across St George’s Channel was the only real revolutionary situation of the British Empire. Nobody knew how many arms had reached the Irish nationalists, nor how prepared the Fenians were to try another rising: but it was a country, as everyone knew, that was only held by coercion, and twenty-three infantry battalions, with two regiments of cavalry and an army of police, stood on guard in case.
But it was the sea that counted. The sea insulated one possession from another, and gave the British, in effect, internal lines of communication. The British Army might not be very terrible to enemies in Europe, but it was expert in swift movement over vast distances, from one side of the Empire to another. If rebels within the Empire were to succeed, it would only be by scattered guerrilla tactics, tantalizing the heavy imperial forces and making them look foolish, without much hope of driving them out altogether. Since the Kaiser’s friendly telegram to Kruger at the time of the Jameson Raid the Boers had convinced themselves that if ever it came to a showdown against Britain the Germans would send troops or at least arms to South Africa. The Irish, too, imagined armies arriving, singing Gaelic marching songs, in Fenian troopships from New York. These were pipe-dreams. The British controlled the seaways, knew all about colonial wars, and would always win them in the end.
No, if they were to lose their Empire by force, it would only be in conflict with some immense equal, engaging their armies in a kind of war they did not understand, and defeating them at the centre. They had no real friends or allies, their strength was half bluff, and the best Navy in the world could not save them against a determined team of European enemies. Then Miss Gonne might find her opportunity, and out of the wreckage some of the colonial peoples might snatch back their sovereignties, restoring their kingdoms, principalities, chieftaincies and sultana
tes to their former fissiparous consequence.
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On Jubilee evening the Governor of Bombay gave a banquet in his palace at Poona, where the summer heat hung heavy over lake and grotto, and great ladies of the cantonment conversed stickily with Sassoons. Late that night two British officials, Mr Rand and Lieutenant Ayerst, were saluted into their carriage by the crimson-jacketed footmen at the door, and were driven away into the dark: they had hardly left the gate of the Government House compound when a volley of shots rang out from the shrubbery beside the road, and both men were killed.
A terrible plague was raging in the province of Bombay, and Rand and Ayerst were the plague officers trying to staunch it in Poona. Their methods had necessarily been forceful. They had called in troops to help, segregated people from infected areas into camps, pulled down contaminated properties. They had become dreaded figures among a populace that did not understand their purposes, and any dispossessed householder, half-crazed by anxiety, might have murdered them: but to the British in India their deaths meant far more. Fearful troubles beset India that summer, and the plagues and the famines were accompanied, for the first time since the Mutiny, by stirrings of nationalist feeling. For several days before the Jubilee leaflets had been circulating in Poona and Bombay, reviling the Queen and calling on Indians to boycott the festivities. Three hundred million Indians, they said, were living in slavery, diseased and half-starved. ‘Not even a demon would venture to celebrate his conquests in a time of famine plague and earthquake.’ The British newspapers did not give much prominence to the deaths of Ayerst and Rand, but the Anglo-Indians interpreted the tragedy as evidence of seditious conspiracy, and when a few weeks later the murderer was caught and hanged they felt that justice had only superficially been done.
In India an absolute despotism was supported by absolute freedom of speech, and a people with virtually no hope of governing itself was deliberately educated in the highest principles of English liberalism. At a time when only a handful of Indians had penetrated the senior Civil Service, and the idea of an Indian Governor, let alone a Viceroy, was perfectly unthinkable, thousands of educated Indians were conversant with the views of Burke and Bagehot, and followed debates at Westminster with informed and often partisan interest. This was terribly frustrating. Militant religious revivals fanned the resultant discontent, and a multitude of half-Westernized graduates, denied the jobs they thought they merited, formed a perfect audience for demagoguery. There were, to use the noun classically applied to nationalists all over the Empire, agitators at large. ‘In every province of India with which I am acquainted’, Sir Charles Crosthwaite wrote, ‘there is scattered about a considerable element of this kind—the vultures waiting for the death of their prey.’
It was, though, more than mere lust for carrion. One response to the challenge of imperialism was inevitably the rise of patriotism in the subject peoples. Even in India, historically a welter of separate entities held together by alien force, a new sense of nation was emerging. Its leaders foresaw that the way to independence was not by any hope of another Mutiny, but by constant argument, agitation, Parliamentary pressure and appeals to the British conscience. ‘It may be,’ said the nationalist Gopal Krishna Gokhale, ‘that the history of the world does not furnish an instance where a subject race has risen by agitation. If so, we shall supply that example for the first time. The history of the world has not come to an end. There are more chapters to be added.’
The British were most harassed by Indian nationalism in Bengal, a province of traditionally argumentative intellectuals, quick of thought, fluent of speech and supplied with all the latest liberal arguments by the University of Calcutta. The political prophet of Bengal in the 80s and 90s was an Englishman, Allan Octavian Hume, the son of a radical politician and a former member of the Indian Civil Service. Hume had been in most ways a model servant of the Raj. He had many of the qualities the service most admired in itself. He had distinguished himself in the Mutiny, first as an administrator, then as a courageous soldier. His chief fault was a popular one, disrespect for higher authority and an outspoken readiness to express opinions. He was a celebrated ornithologist in a service of sportsmen—Hume and Marshall was the standard manual of Indian game birds. Hume retired in 1882 and went to live in Simla, where he cherished his theory that before long the new Indian nationalism would become a revolutionary movement, so that its energies ought to be channelled into constructive ends from the start. In 1883 he sent a circular letter to the graduates of Calcutta University, asking for fifty volunteers to ‘scorn personal ease and make a resolute struggle to secure greater freedom for themselves and their country, a more impartial administration, a larger share in the management of their own affairs’. The Indian Government approved of these innocuous aims, and when Hume formed the Indian National Congress he and his associates were at first exceedingly polite to the Raj, even inviting the Governor of Bombay to preside over their opening session.1
Times changed. Congress became a rallying-point of far fiercer spirit. Its propaganda grew more virulent with the years, its intentions more fundamental. ‘It is impossible,’ remarked Crosthwaite, ‘to take such a Congress seriously … their doings serve mainly to show the political immaturity of the present generation of educated Indians.’ He was wrong. Congress was another of those small clouds. Behind it generations of incoherent resentment were waiting to burst into the open. In Bombay the Hindu zealot Bal Gangadar Tilak, whom many Britons believed to be at the bottom of the Ayerst affair, was glorifying the splendours of an older India, where violence had been justifiable in a good end, and life had been governed by a Hindu morality far more powerful than the demolitions of Plague Commissioners. In both Bombay and Calcutta the Indian-owned Press was scurrilously critical of the Raj. Most educated Indian ‘agitators’ only wanted self-government within the Empire, like most patriotic Irishmen: but the longer they were denied it, the more moderate bodies like Congress were forced into extremism, and spell-binders like Tilak came into their own. British rule in India was about as efficient, about as fair, as any Government of the day could offer—‘not only the purest in intention,’ J. S. Mill had thought, ‘but one of the most beneficent in act ever known among mankind’. But it was not, by the nature of things, popular. Its very impartiality meant that it had few particular friends. To many Muslims it had a pro-Hindu bias, and vice versa, and its big, aloof, thick-skinned representatives, respected though they were, were not always easy to love. ‘It would be an error to suppose’, as Sir John Strachey wrote in the 1880s, ‘that the British Government is administered in a manner that altogether commends itself to the majority of the Indian population. This we cannot help.’
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In Egypt almost nobody wanted the British to stay; when the pashas of the Cabinet cautiously suggested marking the Diamond Jubilee by a public holiday, the Khedive himself quashed the idea. In Burma the people somehow managed to stay apart from the Raj—‘an indisposition to serve us’, was how one official described the attitude, and the British had not succeeded in raising a Burmese soldiery. In Malta, which had joined the Empire of its own volition, and had always been run by its own officials, there were nationalist grievances of diverse kinds—about self-rule, about the economy, about the national language, about religion. In Jamaica, ruined by the collapse of its sugar market, there was a movement demanding accession to the United States. In the Cape the most clannish of the Boers, rankling at so many decades of British interference in their tribal ways, fantastically hoped that one day the whole of South Africa would be united under their own republican rule. In Canada the French Canadians hugged their humiliation to themselves, in Ceylon successive Buddhist revivals were tinged with sedition. Educated Africans of Sierra Leone and the Gold Coast resented the anglicization of the senior Civil Service, once run almost entirely by Africans, In the Parliamentary stand by Westminster Bridge a large gap in the seats showed how many of the Irish M.P.s refused to welcome the Queen’s Jubilee procession: th
e British profoundly agreed with Bismarck’s alleged suggestion that the Irish and the Dutch should change places—the Dutch would soon make Ireland thrive, and the Irish would let the dikes rot and drown themselves. As Edmund Garrett1 once wrote, surveying the Irish and the Boer problems in parallel, ‘Providence in its infinite indulgence has spared us the task of reconciling any race which combines both the Dutch and the Irish gifts of recalcitrance.’
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Everything was under control, though, and for the moment the British were less embarrassed by subversion in their Empire than by the complications that arose elsewhere in the world from their possession of an Empire at all. The idea of imperialism was by no means discredited abroad—it was reaching a climax everywhere—but the very size of the British Empire, and its application to so many races in so many parts of the world, was bound to make it enemies. Some of its foreign critics were merely jealous. Some thought the Empire evil. The Irish in particular had their champions everywhere, and especially in America, where hundreds of thousands of Irish emigrants and their descendants were to embitter Anglo-American relations for a generation to come. When Americans attacked the concept of Empire they were thinking partly of that German Empire from which so many of them had escaped in 1848, but chiefly of the British in Ireland. Wherever two or three Kennedys or McCormicks gathered together the name of England was sure to be execrated, and Irish-American comment on the Jubilee was bitter. The English were honouring not the Queen, but themselves, said the New York Sun, the chief organ of the Irish-Americans: they only kept the sovereign as a ‘theatrical accessory of traditional fetish’—the implication being that such a kingdom was necessarily hostile not merely to Irish rebels but to the Great Republic. In Australia, too, the Irish were a dangerous bore to the British (in 1868 a Fenian in Sydney had tried to murder Prince Alfred, the Queen’s second son, shooting him in the ribs when he was about to present a cheque to a charitable cause). As the Queen said, ‘So different from the Scotch, who are so loyal’, and as the Mashona Herald said in a headline reporting the Irish M.P.s’ boycott of the Jubilee procession, ‘Just Like Them’. To some imperialists the whole future of Britain as a Power depended upon her Irish policies—the real Home Rule issue, the Edinburgh Review once wrote, was whether Imperial Britain was to continue a dominant nation in the world.