Cities of Empire

by Tristram Hunt

  Bombay Gothic grew to maturity along the Esplanade. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s University Library and Rajabai Clock Tower, which now overlooks the cricket games and tea-tents along the Oval Maidan but once stood at the sea’s edge, is a more free-flowing account of Gothic Revivalism. Loosely modelled on the tower of Big Ben, Scott’s design deployed the coloration of the local Porebunder stone with a thirteenth-century French Romanesque styling. Twenty-four statues representing the castes of western India are combined with busts of Shakespeare and Homer. ‘They are the mild Hindu; the shrewd Kutchi; the traditionally fierce Rajput … a praying Parsee … a sleek, high-caste Brahman’, as one contemporary British guide described the Rajabai Clock Tower.79 Next to the university is the Government Secretariat Building, designed in more orthodox Venetian Gothic style by Colonel Henry St Clair of the Royal Engineers and completed in 1874. The front elevation is a textbook translation of the Doge’s Palace, but again the use of local stone gives this otherwise drab design an unexpected colour and lift. Completing the Maidan’s array of departmental buildings is the High Court, which deployed all the might of Gothic design to elevate the majesty of British justice. A series of subversive interior sculptures – a fox wearing lawyers’ bands; a monkey with an eye-patch holding a scale – attempt to puncture the pomposity, but ultimately can do little to leaven the turrets, towers and black stone of officialdom. This was exactly the ‘fine series of structures’ colonial mandarins like Sir Richard Temple so admired.80

  The Victoria Terminus itself, bespeaking ‘the incomparable power and beauty of steam, and the unaccountable blessings of empire too’, stood as flamboyant testimony not to the bureaucracy of East India Company clerks, but to the technological power of the Empire and its relentless modernity in the British imagination.81 Lodged between the Sassoon Docks and the business district, connecting the Municipal Buildings to the General Post Office, the station stood at the fulcrum of East and West, truly the central building of the British Empire; the transit point from Suez to the world through the axis of British India. Born a stone’s throw from the VT site, no wonder Rudyard Kipling called Bombay,

  Mother of cities to me,

  For I was born in her gate,

  Between the palms and the sea,

  Where the world-end steamers wait.

  It would be his own father’s students, the alumni of the JJ School of Art, who would embed that Bombay ethic so dramatically in the VT fabric.

  The station’s lead architect was F. W. Stevens, who was brought up amid the uniformity of Bath but nurtured his eclectic style at the Victoria and Albert in South Kensington, and was assisted by Sitaram Khanderao Vaidya as assistant engineer and M. M. Janardhan as supervisor. Appointed in 1877, Stevens’s first act was a ten-month study trip of European termini as he worked out how to combine the Gothic Revival with emergent Indo-Saracenic designs. The result was costly, but a stunning triumph. ‘The style of architecture is Italian Medieval Gothic, and the detail of the whole scheme is most elaborate,’ as James Furneaux of the Times of India described the terminus soon after its opening.

  The hall is as large as that so familiar at Euston but infinitely grander. Within its four walls there is a wealth of columns of choice Italian marble, and polished Indian blue stone; elaborate stone archways covered with carved foliage and grotesque heads of men and animals; a groined roof rich in blue and gold decorations, a tessellated floor, a dado of art tiles; stained glass windows, galleries of highly ornamented iron work; long counters made of differently coloured woods, exquisitely carved and polished and fitted with brass work and brass railings of artistic designs.82

  What this description doesn’t bring out is the joyful chaos: the riot of pediments, sculpture, tympanums and ironworks – mongooses, monkeys and peacocks alongside busts of Sir Bartle Frere and railway worthies. Just as on Dublin’s Custom House the Arms of Ireland are embraced by the Lion and the Unicorn of Great Britain, the VT west front displays its imperial purpose though a sculpture of a lion and tiger couchant, representing England and India. There were so many other startling feats to the station: the marble columns, the cantilevered staircase, the stained-glass windows, the courtyards, verandas, the sheer enormity of a 100-metre-high and 366-metre-long train shed – and, above all, the high dome of dovetailed ribs, built without centring, Bombay’s answer to Brunelleschi’s Florence Cathedral. Just as with London’s Euston Arch, or St Pancras Station, the designers of Victoria Terminus sought to encase one of the great engines of modernity – the steam train – in an architecture reminiscent of the classical or medieval past. But in Bombay, ‘a city of the present and the future, but not of the past’, the symbolism was contemporaneous and unrepentant in its embrace of modernity. On each of the main gables were placed sculptures representing Engineering, Commerce and Agriculture. On top of the central dome of the tallest tower in western India was a statue of Progress herself, carrying aloft a flaming torch and a winged wheel at her side.

  The goddess of Progress stood as the crowning monument to the colonial system in Bombay. Forged into a single metropolis from seven islands, this wealthy, well-run, well-connected metropolis was a symbol of the industry and improvement which came with British rule. The very same municipal, sanitary and civic progress that had transformed the domestic cities of Manchester, London, and Birmingham could now be seen abroad on the island of good life. In Victorian Bombay, Empire had a modernity and practical application which allowed its administrators to convince themselves they had the best interests of the colonized at heart. Many of the institutions which the British and Parsi elite established in Bombay – secular spaces such as such as libraries, colleges, art galleries, parks, railway carriages and hospitals – did indeed have the effect of modernizing Indian society by confronting caste and religious identities and, in the process, updating the city’s historic, cosmopolitan sensibility.

  For all the multiculturalism of Bombay, Empire in India still remained a question of ruler and ruled, European and Indian. It would take the transformation of a former convict settlement, on the final stop of Kipling’s world-end steamers, to develop an idea of Empire owing as much to Commonwealth as colonialism.

  8

  Melbourne

  ‘The very counterpart of England’

  British civilization reached Australia on 26 January 1788, when Captain Arthur Phillip and his cargo of convicts first anchored in what became Sydney harbour. Yet, 100 years on, it was the city of Melbourne, not Sydney, that was chosen to commemorate the anniversary. The 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition opened with a 7,000-strong procession of firemen, trade unionists, friendly society members, even druids marching behind a living Britannia, complete with her trident. Following her were the six governors of Britain’s Australian colonies (New South Wales, Queensland, South Australia, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia) riding in open carriage up to the festooned arches of the Royal Exhibition Building. Spread out before them, beneath the building’s vast dome, were 33 acres of display space bursting with global and colonial ephemera – a giant bust of Captain Cook; dioramas of Botany Bay; marble statues of Queen Victoria and the late Prince Albert; Irish linen; wire mattresses; a model Westminster parliament; and then a range of ‘wine and beer tasting outlets’. There were orchestras and hydraulic lifts, electric lighting and banners decorated with improving words of Victorian wisdom: ‘Experience is by Industry Achieved’; ‘The Wheels of Progress do not Stop’. To launch the formal proceedings, the city choir sang a centennial cantata, penned by a local Melbourne minister:

  Where the warrigal whimpered and bayed,

  Where the feet of the dark hunter strayed,

  See the wealth of the world is arrayed.

  Where the spotted snake crawled by the stream,

  See the spires of a great city gleam.1

  In its avenues and halls, its hundreds and thousands of square feet of products and artefacts, the International Exhibition revealed what colonial Australia – and more pa
rticularly Victoria – thought it stood for. Like pre-revolutionary Boston, Victoria styled itself a prosperous partner in an updated ‘Empire of goods’ that successfully connected Britain’s disparate possessions together under the banner of material improvement. Indeed, it seemed only natural that ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ – with its department stores, suburban mansions and glitzy hotels – rather than lumbering, slothful Sydney (with its unfortunate penal past) should be the locus of the centenary celebrations.

  Yet the International Exhibition was also keen to explain how the bonds of colonial fraternity went beyond mere commercial advantage. Australia had also bound herself to a deeper sense of shared, imperial identity: Victoria, and its capital Melbourne, conceived of themselves as part of a Greater Britain, whose blood loyalties flowed out from the British Isles all the way to the Bass Strait. The International Exhibition identified a notion of Empire very different to the kind of autocratic governance the British state had pursued in Africa or the caste politics it had deployed in India. It was premised, first of all, on a decision to treat the indigenous inhabitants of Australia – the Aborigines – as beyond redemption. Imperial commentators and administrators in Britain and Australia regarded the Aboriginal tribes as lost to civilization and, as such, they were widely excluded from elite debate as to how to govern the colonies. ‘The Aboriginal Australian blacks … were so extraordinarily backward a race as to make it difficult to help them to hold their own,’ explained Charles Dilke, a British Member of Parliament, in the 1860s. ‘They were rapidly dying out, and it is hard to see any other fate could be expected for them.’ In the chilling words of Anthony Trollope, ‘it was their [the Aborigines’] fate to be abolished’.2 So late nineteenth-century Australia saw no attempts by Haileybury cadres to Westernize the backward mores of the populace or refashion their habits. Instead, as in 1760s Boston, debate focused on the relationship between the British settler class and the mother country. And that came down to the ‘crimson thread of kinship’, in the words of the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, that connected Australia to Great Britain. In the urban centres of the ‘white colonies’ – South Africa, Canada and New Zealand as much as Australia – a conception of Empire emerged as a partnership between an Anglo-Saxon tribe separated by oceans but connected by race. It was to this belief in a shared purpose, of struggle and responsibility, in which all ‘European’ parts of the Empire were engaged, that the imperial city of Melbourne bore witness.

  But pass through Melbourne’s Carlton Gardens today, from the beautifully restored Royal Exhibition Building (where generations of Melbourne students have sat their school exams) round the corner to the ultra-modern, glass and steel Melbourne Museum and that colonial history is shed like the skin of the cantata’s spotted snake. The antagonism of the new museum’s angular architecture towards the Renaissance aesthetic of the Royal Exhibition Building is reaffirmed by the curatorial hostility. The museum’s main ‘Story of Melbourne’ gallery is a postmodern exercise in historical amnesia, as meandering displays of Ned Kelly and Phar Lap (the legendary Melbourne Cup racehorse) undermine any chronological understanding or insight into the city’s imperial history.

  The same is true elsewhere. Metropolitan, Pacific-rim, China-focused, itchingly republican Melbourne has no need or desire to dwell upon its colonial past. The remnants of imperial rule – martial statues, the King George V memorial in the Kings Domain parkland, road names and busts – are neither revered nor removed. There are no Mumbai-style decapitations of Wellesley or Cornwallis here, no dumping of old monuments in the distant corner of a park. Of course, there are fierce debates between conservationist groups and property developers over the colonial fabric, with Melbourne Heritage Action bravely resisting the destruction of some fine Victorian buildings in the downtown Hoddle Grid district. Yet these preservation battles are played out on purely architectural grounds just as in San Francisco or Glasgow, with none of the post-imperial angst of Dublin, Calcutta or Hong Kong. For the official ideology of modern Melbourne is consciously multicultural. Mundanely self-branded as ‘one of the world’s most liveable cities’, its official literature foregrounds not the British past but the postwar story of Chinese, Greek, Italian and Vietnamese migration. The only element of imperial history with which the city is concerned is the unresolved legacy of internal colonization and Aboriginal genocide.* ‘The City of Melbourne respectfully acknowledges that it is located on the traditional land of the Kulin Nation’, as the official website of the urban authority guiltily admits. ‘This special place is now known by its European name of Melbourne.’3

  But despite this prioritization of other pasts, the Empire heritage is nonetheless remarkably well preserved in modern-day Melbourne. The city’s colonial-era fabric remains among the world’s finest, rivalled only by that of Glasgow or Liverpool. On swaggering Collins Street and Swanston Street, beneath the Gothic spires of St Paul’s and St Patrick’s, in the alcoves of Melbourne Town Hall, the vestibule of the Melbourne Club and the tea room of the Windsor Hotel, the city’s unique mix of imperial bombast and gold-digger vulgarity is still tangible beneath the New Australia modernity. Melbourne came to maturity as the greatest urban embodiment of a mid-Victorian belief in imperial solidarity, Anglo-Saxon brotherhood and civic pride. Like Bombay, it prided itself on being a city of modernity and progress. But in Australia, the British Empire aspired to be an exercise in communal endeavour rather than an assertion of colonial superiority.

  AUSTRALIA FELIX

  It was on 20 June 1837 that Her Majesty commenced that long and eventful reign which makes so wonderful an era in the history of human kind. The first land sale of Melbourne had taken place twenty days before, and we may well suppose that it was just about the time when the girl Queen was roused from her slumbers at break of day to be informed of her uncle’s death that the pioneers of Melbourne, having bought their allotments, began to lay the foundations of those permanent buildings which constituted the real beginnings of what is now so handsome a city.4

  In fact, the foundations of Melbourne – contrary to this 1888 centenary account – had been laid during the reign of King George III in the early 1800s. Some fifteen years after Captain Phillip’s landing in Botany Bay in 1788, British ships were dropping anchor around the southern Australian coast in the protected harbour of Port Phillip Bay. Lieutenant John Murray, aboard the Lady Nelson, observed in January 1802 an ‘apparently fine harbour of large extent’; Captain Matthew Flinders of HMS Investigator found the land around Port Phillip had ‘a pleasing, and in many places a fertile appearance’; only Captain David Collins, of HMS Calcutta, was less enamoured. After landing a party of marines, free settlers and convicts in 1803, the absence of fresh water forced him to abandon the site for Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) across the Bass Strait. It would be another thirty years before British settlers, led by the bushranger John Batman, sought to reacquire the site – principally through a series of treaties, purchases and then forcible acquisitions from the indigenous Aboriginal people. In September 1836, in response to the quickening commercial interest in the Port Phillip Bay area, the Crown authorities issued an official settlement order, sparking a frenzied land grab. As the colony of Victoria would not be legally established until 1851, overseeing the initial auction was the governor-general of New South Wales, Sir Richard Bourke, and his assistant surveyor-general, Robert Hoddle, whose grid-iron development plan for the city further augmented the plot values. With sweeping colonial bravado, he laid out forty-eight rectangular blocks, with three main east–west streets, each some 99 feet across, four ‘little’ east–west streets and then the main north–south avenues. Hoddle purchased a couple of lots for himself, and in time did very nicely from them. When it came to the name for this emergent conurbation, Bourke wisely alighted upon the new sovereign’s first prime minister and avuncular favourite – William Lamb, Viscount Melbourne.5

  The new city expanded furiously, putting on some 10,000 residents by 1840 and reaching 126,000 by 1861. I
t was an extraordinary boom, yet in tune with the peculiarly urban nature of the British Empire in Australia. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the American sociologist A. F. Weber commented on the uniqueness of British colonialism in Australia: how ‘the most remarkable concentration, or rather centralization, of population occurs in that newest product of civilization, Australia, where nearly one-third of the entire population is settled in and about capital cities’. Other countries contained a larger proportion of urban population, ‘but in none of them is it so massed in a few centres’.6 As with America, there was initial resistance towards populating the rural interior and, instead, there took place an intensive clustering of populations along the coastal cities. Nowhere more so than in Melbourne, which housed two-fifths of the residents of Victoria and, in the words of one British guidebook, ‘has somehow amassed a population out of all proportion to the numbers of people settled in the rest of the colony’.7 ‘The metropolis of Victoria is inordinately overgrown,’ agreed the Victoria MP William Shiels. ‘I forget who it was that compared London to a wen on the face of England; but what would he [William Cobbett] have said to a metropolis of a new and still undeveloped country, which has gathered to itself more than one-third of the total population of the community?’8

  Balancing such fears of demographic sinks and urban sprawl was admiration for Melbourne’s ambition. Travelling for the first time to Australia and New Zealand in 1871 to visit his younger son Frederic, who was working on a sheep farm in New South Wales (and would become the inspiration for his 1874 novel Harry Heathcote of Gangoil: A Tale of Australian Bush Life), Anthony Trollope thought Melbourne ‘the undoubted capital not only of Victoria, but of all Australia’.9 The travel writer Isabella Bird described Melbourne as ‘the great capital of Australia Felix, the child of gold and wool’, shimmering betwixt the blue waters of Port Phillip Bay and the green woods lining the River Yarra.10 Clara Aspinall, author of Three Years in Melbourne, was impressed by the transformation of the bay from the land of the whimpering warrigal (or dingo) and straying dark hunter into such a civilized city. ‘I did not expect to find myself in such a handsome city,’ she wrote, ‘the streets wider than those of any provincial town I had ever seen in England.’ She was most shocked by the prosperity of the retail boulevard Collins Street – ‘lined on each side with handsome shops, banks, and private houses, three or four storeys high worthy of the neighbourhood of Hyde Park. Melbourne in reality is quite a different place to the Melbourne I imagined’.11