The most significant convert to the imperial creed of Dilke and Seeley was Joseph Chamberlain. He was probably the most able politician of his time and certainly the most restless and difficult to label. In appearance he looked like an archetypal aristocrat with elegant features, a monocle and a fresh orchid in his buttonhole. Chamberlain was in fact a Birmingham businessman who progressed from a Radical Lord Mayor with fierce republican views to a Liberal minister under Gladstone, and, in 1895, Colonial Secretary in a Conservative government. During the course of his political perambulations he split two parties, the Liberals in 1886 and the Conservatives in 1904, a unique achievement which says much for his influence.
Of all the causes which Chamberlain embraced, that of the empire was the most deeply felt and longest lasting. Attachment to the ideal of imperial unity; as well as frustration with Gladstone’s indifference towards social reform, drove Chamberlain to desert the Liberals over Irish Home Rule in 1886. Thereafter, he led his splinter Unionists towards a coalition with the Conservatives, reserving for himself what had hitherto been a minor cabinet office, Colonial Secretary. His brand of imperialism was an amalgam of older notions of disseminating civilisation and modern concepts of race. In 1893, when Britain had accepted a protectorate over Uganda, he told the Commons that the country welcomed the new addition to the empire. The people, he continued, were well matched to the tasks of spreading civilisation since they were animated by the traditions of the past, and by what he called ‘that spirit … of adventure and enterprise distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon race [which] has made us peculiarly fit to carry out the working of colonisation.’4
It was essential that the Anglo-Saxon race should understand the qualities that it needed to foster if it was to fulfil its historic destiny. Most importantly, the young had to be given models of how the Anglo-Saxon should behave and which of his innate virtues he should cultivate and how. A generation of university teachers, schoolmasters, clergymen, poets, journalists and boys’ fiction writers concentrated their minds and energies on popularising the cult of the new imperialism. At its heart lay the concept of ‘Anglo-Saxon manhood’, an abstraction compounded in equal parts of patriotism, physical toughness, skill at team games, a sense of fair play (sometimes called ‘sportsmanship’), self-discipline, selflessness, bravery and daring.
The ground had been well prepared for the apostles of the Anglo-Saxon ideal. Since the 1840s the public schools had undergone a revolution, started by Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby, which transformed the habits of mind of the middle and upper classes. Arnold and his acolytes sought to instil Christian altruism into their pupils and direct their ambition and aggression towards the playing field. The public schoolboy, educated according to the Arnoldian code, also learned how to control himself and control others through the prefectorial system, a perfect preparation for ruling and chastising the empire’s ‘lesser breeds’. Intelligence mattered less than the acquisition of ‘character’, and intellectual activity was largely restricted to otiose and repetitive exercises in the languages of two former imperial powers, Greece and Rome. The end product was a Christian gentleman with a stunted imagination, who played by the rules and whose highest aim was to serve others. If he had to earn his living, he elected to become an army or navy officer, a senior civil servant, a clergyman, a barrister, or joined a branch of the Indian or Colonial administration.
By 1880 a generation had passed into manhood with an outlook which made them ideally suited to govern the empire and fight its wars. Incidentally, the late-Victorian public schoolboy shunned trade and industry, even if one had been the occupation of his father. Both activities were consequently starved of talent, which has been seen as one of the causes of the paralysis which was spreading through British manufacturing and commerce during this period.
The qualities cherished by public schools were those which marked out the banner-bearers of Anglo-Saxon civilisation. By the turn of the century the obsession with games had become a mania. It was the belief of J.E.C. Welldon, headmaster of Harrow (1881–95) and later Bishop of Calcutta, that, ‘If there is in the British race, as I think there is, a special aptitude for “taking up the white man’s burden” … it may be ascribed, above all other causes, to the spirit of organised games.’ These fostered team spirit from which sprang self-sacrifice. The highest examples of this were represented in a stained-glass window in the chapel of Sedbergh School which showed three Christian heroes of empire: Sir Henry Lawrence, a warrior proconsul in India, and two martyrs, General Gordon and Bishop Patteson, a South Seas missionary. The ideals of Arnoldian Christian manliness merged easily with those of the new imperialism.
Throughout the 1890s schoolboys were bombarded by popular magazines written specially for them and steeped in the ideas of the new imperialism. They interwove thrilling adventure yarns with patriotism and reminders of imperial duty. The older, evangelical Boys’ Own Paper was joined by Chums, Pluck and Union Jack, the last two both of 1894 and from the Harmsworth stable, whose titles reflected their contents. Chums was packed with tales of imperial derring-do and coloured illustrations, including ‘Storming the Heights of Dargai’, which showed an incident in the 1897 North-West Frontier campaign in which Highlanders rushed a Pathan position, spurred on by the playing of a wounded piper who was later awarded the Victoria Cross. The cover of the Young England annual for 1902 symbolised its own and its competitors’ values; alongside a cavalryman dressed to fight the Boers were rowing oars, cricket bats, stumps, tennis racquets and a fisherman’s basket.5
Those who read Young England would also have enjoyed the many full-length tales of derring-do which poured relentlessly from publishers during the 1890s. Of these, the best were the yarns of G.A. Henty, a dyed-in-the-wool imperialist who had served as a war correspondent during the 1873–4 Asante War. Henty turned out on average three boys’ stories a year, which appeared in time for the Christmas market and cost five or six shillings (25–30p) each. In his earlier works, Henty addressed his readers as ‘My dear lads’ and confessed that he found it painful to write of any campaign in which the British were defeated.6 Mercifully, there were plenty of victories for him to choose from and work into straightforward narratives in which a resourceful young man finds himself caught up in the events of history. Henty ranged from Pharaohic Egypt to his own times, but his commonest subjects were the wars of empire.
His purpose was to excite his readers. A reviewer of On the Irrawady (based on the 1824 Burma War) described his hero as a lad whose ‘pluck is even greater than his luck, and he is precisely the boy to hearten with emulation the boys who read this stirring story.’7 Just how his younger readers should behave was laid down by Henty in Through the Sikh War, in a passage where the hero is told what would be expected of him when he joined the East India Company’s army:
Think it over yourself, Percy. Can you thrash most fellows your own age? Can you run as far and as fast as most of them? Can you take a caning without whimpering over it? Do you feel, in fact, that you are able to go through fully as much as any of your companions? Are you good at planning a piece of mischief, and ready to take the lead in carrying it out?… It is pluck and endurance and the downright love of adventure and danger, that have made us the masters of the great part of India, and ere long makes us the rulers of the whole of it.
The values of the 1890s empire-builder have been transferred back to the 1840s.
Henty’s ideal beau sabreur of empire was portrayed in embryo in Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. This public school tale revolved around the pranks of Stalky and his cronies, a reckless, and at times ruthless band who cocked a snook at authority. They were just the fellows to run the empire, as one of them, Beetle, explained: ‘India’s full of Stalkies, Cheltenham and Haileybury and Marlborough chaps – that we don’t know anything about, and the surprises will begin when there is a really big row on.’ The point was taken up by a reviewer who claimed that Stalky and his cronies were ‘the very men the Empire wants’.8 Paradoxically, the figure on whom Stalky was
modelled, Major-General Lionel Dunsterville, led a force that made an audacious attempt to seize the Baku oilfields in 1918; just the sort of exploit on which Henty would have hung a story.
The huge public fascination with the early stages of the Boer War was a godsend to Henty and his imitators. Christmas 1900 saw a cascade of boys’ tales set in South Africa, including Henty’s With Buller in Natal. The politics of these books was crude; Henty represented Britain as the ‘greatest civilised power on earth’ fighting against one ‘without even the elements of civilisation, ignorant and brutal beyond any existing white community’.9 An example of Boer depravity was revealed in Fox Russell’s The Boer’s Blunder (1900) in which the villain abducts an English girl and promises her sister to an African chief. Readers of Captain ES. Brereton’s One of Our Fighting Scouts (1903) were urged, at the end of the story, to follow the hero’s example: ‘If it is your fortune to take a rifle and go forth to fight for your king and country – may you keep your face to the enemy, and ride as boldly as did George Ransome, one of the Fighting Scouts.’ Many had not needed such bidding. In the winter of 1899–1900 thousands came forward to volunteer for service in South Africa as imperial yeomanrymen like the ‘large limbed Anglo-Saxon heroes’ who sailed for the Cape with the future novelist and Irish patriot, Erskine Childers.10
Imperial propaganda of the gripping kind produced by Henty and his fellow wordsmiths was deliberately spread to all classes. Henty’s publishers encouraged state and Sunday-school teachers to present his books as prizes, and thousands were duly presented. Working-class children could share in the adventures of their social superiors, learn about the deeds which shaped the empire, and absorb some of the imperial ideas. The new imperial ideology was already penetrating the elementary-school classrooms through the curriculum. Nearly all the geography learned by trainee teachers at Cavendish College, Cambridge in 1896 consisted of lists of colonies, details of how they were obtained, their products and accounts of their native inhabitants, all of which were passed on for their pupils to memorise. In the same year the recommended outlines of a lesson on South Africa drew attention to the primitive Calvinism of the Boers and their reluctance to wash frequently. As for the blacks, they ‘have become reconciled to the inevitable supremacy of the whites’ and had been taught to be ‘useful servants’.11
Even the nursery was not closed to imperialism. An ABC for Baby Patriots published in 1899 included:
C is for Colonies
Rightly we boast,
That of all the great nations
Great Britain has the most.
While the infant mouthed this, its elder brothers and sisters battled with the brightly-painted lead soldiers which became so popular after 1890. There were plenty of imperial units: red-coated British infantrymen, sailors in straw hats, Sudanese in fezes, Bengal cavalry in turbans, and colonial horsemen in khaki and broad hats with turned-up brims. The fighting men came complete with the paraphernalia of modern war: cannon, machine-guns, heliographs and field ambulances.
* * *
There were plenty of real soldiers in exotic uniforms marching through London to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Troops from every part of the empire took part in the festivities, which also included a review of the fleet at Spithead. The Jubilee was more than a display of imperial muscle; the Queen was at the heart of the empire and it was loyalty to her which helped give it a sense of cohesion. There was no other obvious bond to hold together white settlers from Canada or Australia who were now managing their own affairs; Indians governed from Delhi; Nigerians ruled by the privately-owned Royal Niger Company; and the subjects of protectorates and colonies ruled from Whitehall through local officials with the cooperation of their own chiefs. The Queen whose head appeared on their stamps and coins symbolised the unity of the empire. Her genuine, maternal care for her subjects (she had deliberately chosen Indian attendants for her household) was widely publicised.
There was plenty of entertaining imperial pageantry, though not on the same scale, before and after the 1897 Jubilee. Bands played and crowds cheered as the Grenadier Guards, dressed in the new khaki, marched through London in February 1885 on the first leg of their journey to the Sudan. As their train steamed out of Waterloo Station plate-layers waved their shovels, and there were hurrahs from workers in factories along the track. Guardsmen who stayed behind were hired out to take part in ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s show Khartoum, which was performed at the Grand National Amphitheatre in London during March and included tableaux entitled ‘The British Square at Abu Klea’ and ‘Gordon’s Last Appeal to England’. Some of the audience may have been moved to buy an oleograph print of Gordon priced at sixpence (2.5p) and available at all stationers, or a superior version, together with a ballad ‘A Song of Gallant Gordon’, for three shillings (15p). Perhaps this was the portrait of Gordon which hung in Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street rooms.
Prints and pageants of battles had been popular for over a hundred years and would remain so. At the Crystal Palace in July 1898 a ‘striking and well-executed’ re-enactment of the recent fighting on the North-West Frontier was produced by soldiers from the Royal West Surrey Regiment, some dressed up as Pathans. This type of show was already being superseded; that year an enterprising journalist had taken a film camera to the Sudan, but his footage was destroyed or lost. Preparations were made to film the return to London in October of troops from the Sudan.12 Such material, like sequences from the Boer War, was shown at fairgrounds and in the new cinemas.
Newsreels from the front, including shots of the battle of Spion Kop in January 1900, were the inevitable outcome of the intense public interest in imperial campaigns. The new cheap press offered extensive coverage by war correspondents whose style was vivid and punchy. Moreover, the spread of the telegraph network meant that details from even the most far-flung battlefields could reach Britain within twenty-four hours, the time it took for news of the Ndebele rebellion in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to appear in the London newspapers in June 1896.
Thrilling front-line reports in mass circulation newspapers, like the popular boys’ magazines and stories, coloured the public’s view of the empire. Photographs and sketches in the Daily Graphic during the 1896–8 Sudan War showed various battle scenes, British and Egyptian medical orderlies treating wounded Dervishes and, by way of a contrast to this humanity, skeletons of tribesmen massacred at the orders of the Khalifah Abdullah. Further confirmation that Britain was fighting for civilisation came with an illustration in June 1896 of Muslim chiefs in northern Nigeria, swearing on the Quran to renounce slavery.
Imperial themes and images were hijacked by advertising artists and copywriters. The results were often remarkably durable: a bearded sailor and an ironclad of the 1890s still appear on the Players Navy Cut cigarette packet, and another Victorian warship is the trademark of England’s Glory matches. It was the Boer War which gave advertisers their chance, and the public was soon swamped with cheery soldiers and sailors endorsing beef extracts, patent cure-alls and Colman’s mustard. Manly, firm-jawed and moustachioed fighting men in khaki bestowed machismo on various brands of tobacco and cigarettes. Bovril led the field in patriotic puffs, offering a print of the relief of Ladysmith to buyers of a product which, if the testimonials from men at the front were to be believed, more or less kept alive the entire army in South Africa. One ingenious copywriter alleged that the letters BOVRIL traced out the lines of Lord Roberts’s march through the Orange Free State.
The Boer War saw an unprecedented boom in the manufacture of every kind of patriotic souvenir. There were buttons with portraits of the leading commanders, whose features also stared from all kinds of commemorative pottery and cigarette cards. There were songs for music-hall patriots ranging from the sentimental ‘The Boers have got my Daddy’ to the swaggering ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. What was an explosion of mass patriotism came to a hysterical climax in May 1900 when news came through that the town of Mafeking had been relieved. Everywhere the an
nouncement prompted spontaneous and often abandoned celebrations, a nationwide street party which produced, hangovers apart, the word ‘mafficking’.
Those who ‘mafficked’ were celebrating something more than the rescue of a comparatively insignificant garrison. The high jinks that May night were a mass release of tensions and a momentary dispersal of fears that had been deepened by the war. During the winter of 1899–1900 the army had suffered a series of unexpected and humiliating reverses, and the British people discovered that they were no longer invincible. Furthermore they were friendless, for all the great powers were hostile, particularly France and Germany. There had been a recovery on the battlefield in the spring of 1900, which raised national morale to the point where uninhibited festivities were in order, but their clamour did not drive away self-doubt.
To a large extent those who proclaimed the triumphs of empire were whistling in the dark. A nation which had been so full of self-confidence forty to fifty years earlier, when it had appeared the supreme force for mankind’s improvement, was now tormented by apprehension. It was true that between 1890 and 1900 the empire had grown at an unprecedented rate; in Africa Britain had secured control over the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland, Nigeria, Rhodesia, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, making it the largest imperial power on the continent. And yet the newspapers and journals which chronicled these acquisitions were also filled with baleful analyses of what was wrong with the country.
The psychological roots of this critical introspection stretched back well into the century. Invasion scares were a regular occurrence and were usually accompanied by hair-raising tales of how Britain, for all its outward strength, could be overrun by a daring enemy. For instance, in 1871, a best-seller, Sir George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking, described a Prussian invasion and a whirlwind campaign that ended with the occupation of London. Soon after the end of the Boer War, Erskine Childers’s thriller The Riddle of the Sands cleverly showed how a German fleet could steal across the North Sea undetected and support landings on the British coast. These were fantasies, usually written to shock the country into demanding extra cash for the army and navy’s budget. But there were also plenty of sober appraisals of underlying weaknesses in Britain’s economy and unfavourable comparisons of its performance with those of its rivals. There was, for instance, much heart-searching during the 1890s about the shortcomings in Britain’s educational system which seemed to be producing a workforce inferior in aptitude to those of Germany and the United States.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire Page 26