Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (38 page)

In the field some of the imperialists, too, especially the younger men, now had their niggling doubts. ‘It is the virtue of the Englishman’, wrote Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson in 1913, ‘that he never doubts. That is what the system does for him.’ But it was no longer true. The men who ran the Empire, many of them ex-servicemen themselves, could hardly help sharing the new national attitudes. To some of them it was now apparent that the British Empire was not eternal after all, that parts of it indeed might not outlast themselves. They understandably resented this prospect, not merely because it might cost them their jobs, but because they believed still in the British mission, and thought they knew more about the true state of things in Burma or Somaliland than did President Wilson in Washington or the radical intellectuals of NW3. The villains of the Victorian Empire-builders were the villains of their successors too: meddling MPs, Americans, leftist agitators, lady do-gooders, self-righteous newspapers and their ignorant reporters. Their fathers, though, had argued from positions of power and certainty: by the 1920s the young imperialists were playing, as they might say, upon a losing wicket.

One senses consequently a new modesty in their approach, a new frankness with their literate subjects. Public education had never been a forte of the British Empire, which had frequently left the task to missionaries and private enterprise, but even so an educated subject class had emerged in several parts of the Empire. In India the western-style universities, established in the previous century, had by now produced thousands of men with western manners and ideas, and Indians vastly out-numbered Britons in all but the highest
ranks of the administration. In Africa there was a sizeable class of educated blacks, mostly mission-trained, and many young men were now going for further education in England. In the new provinces of the Middle East there existed already an urbane and sophisticated intelligentsia, rooted in the Islamic culture, and as the years went by many more young men there, too, absorbed western ways and values, until the Anglicized subject of Empire, with his upper-class English accent, his freedom with English literary quotations, his acquaintance with the Wars of the Roses, became almost a generic figure, whatever his own language, origin or religion, from Sierra Leone to Calcutta.

All this meant a modification of the ritual aloofness of the imperialists, maintained as a matter of policy, as of taste, at least since the Indian Mutiny. It was impossible now for the British to live altogether separately from their subjects, as they had with such success for nearly a century: and though the new proximity often led to irritation, and sometimes to more rather than less misunderstanding, still it meant that the British in the field were less arrogant and disdainful than they used to be. We need not doubt that for most of them, in 1930 as in 1860, the white race was inherently superior to the black, the brown, the yellow or the half-caste. A note of condescension, at best, coloured every instinct of the Briton in his Empire. Now, though, he was more likely to be self-conscious about his attitudes. It no longer came quite so spontaneously, that clap of the hands for the bearer, that stick on the bottom for the Gandhian demonstrator. Even the forms of Empire came to be questioned sometimes. Was it really to impress the Orientals, younger men sometimes wondered, that the Empire maintained its pomp and pageantry, or was it to sustain the self-esteem of imperialists?

Racial bigotry, one of Empire’s ugliest aspects, was past its worst, and the imperialists in the field were matured, softened perhaps, weakened almost certainly, by the changing order of things. ‘All over India’, wrote George Orwell, ‘there are Englishmen who secretly loathe the system of which they are part’: and he told the story of a journey he made by train with a man of the Indian Educational Service, in whom he gradually discovered a common
antipathy to the imperial values. ‘We parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple’—and with reason, for these half-hidden self-questionings were to prove as effectively treasonable, in the long run, as any armed rising against the Crown, or conspiracy of Bolsheviks.

India was lost, anyway, and the imperialists were more concerned now with the Crown Colonies, once the poor relations of Empire, now its chief hope. None of them enjoyed any real responsibility, and most of them seemed likely to remain within the Empire for ever and ever. The dependent colonies were expected to pay their own way—the total British expenditure on them in 1930 was only
£
3 million, and the tropical possessions were mostly in an appalling state of dereliction: but they seemed to represent the imperial structure of the future. ‘The Empire is Still in Building’, said the Empire Marketing Board in one of its neo-Biblical slogans, and the allegorical figures likely to appear now in the imperial propaganda were smiling Negroes of Jamaica or West Africa, garlanded Fijians, resolute Malays or diligent junk-men of Hong Kong.

Since it seemed likely to last longer, the colonial administrative service now offered more coveted careers than India. There was in fact no Colonial Service as such. Some colonies chose their men by competitive examination, but most recruits were selected by patronage. Officially the patron was the Colonial Secretary: unofficially, throughout the 1920s, it was one of his private secretaries, Major Ralph Furse, and it was Furse more than any other man who set the tone of the imperial services in the post-war years.

He was a conservative of a complicated sort. The son of a crippled agnostic—‘he taught me to ride a horse, to tell the truth, to love my country and to honour soldiers’—Furse was a member of Pop, the ruling society of Eton, and he remained a very responsible schoolboy all his life. He liked to call his seniors ‘Sir’, and had a sensible weakness for the great and famous: ‘I bowed as we shook hands,’ he recorded of his first meeting with Milner, ‘then, on an instinctive impulse, I drew myself up to my full height and looked
him straight in the eye. He gave a perceptible start….’ Though he had an unexpected passion for ballet, he stood for manly values, straight, prefectorial values: during his service on the western front he took a cold bath every morning, often in the open air, and there was a seven-year engagement before he married the daughter of Sir Henry Newbolt. Furse was not a brilliant man, but he had many of the traditional qualities of the Englishman: courage, patience, fitness, sympathy, good humour.
1

For thirty-eight years this man chose the rulers of the colonial Empire. He liked to call his method ‘one of the arcana imperii’, for it was altogether unwritten, instinctive and customary. He worked like a mole, he said, burrowing, tunnelling, establishing private contacts with headmasters and university tutors, so that likely men were sometimes unwittingly shunted, by one means or another, along the corridors of the establishment to his office in Westminster. A new genre of imperial service had come into being during the past half-century, since the acquisition of Britain’s vast African empire. Those ragbag black territories, it was thought, strewn across a continent without culture, without history—those bold and earthy possessions did not require intellectuals, but all-round men of practical skills. The men they needed, said Frederick Lugard, Governor of Nigeria, were plain English gentlemen, ‘with an almost passionate conception of fair play, of protection of the weak, and of playing the game’.

These were Furse’s men, not especially clever, not particularly ambitious, but healthy, and brave, and cheerful. In the 1920s and 1930s, as the Indian Empire faltered, they gave to the colonial empire a new cohesion. They were not zealots. They had principles but not beliefs, says a character in one of the novels of Elspeth Huxley, herself an Anglo-Kenyan, and if they were seldom gifted men, and perhaps unlikely to rise to great office at home in England, still they were seldom prigs or bigots either. The African empire did not require ideologies in the field. A recruit for the Nigerian service in 1930 spent a year at Cambridge learning the rudiments of law, tropical medicine and Nigerian languages, but learnt no local
history at all, not even imperial history, and indeed went out to the colony without ever having heard of its founder, the Rhodes of West Africa, George Goldie.

Furse had got a third at Oxford, and it was the game man with the third-class degree that he favoured for the Empire. He recruited thousands, for after the war there was a great expansion in the service. Most of them were ex-servicemen, most of them public school boys—‘the public school spirit’, it was said, ‘is greatly valued in the colonial service, and it is a matter of conscious policy to ensure that the supplies of it shall be constantly replenished.’ For the most part the new recruits had no lofty sense of mission. They generally assumed the colonial empire would last indefinitely, and took the job because it offered them honourable responsibilities, excused them the drab British grindstone, sounded fun and promised a pension. They were very decent men. They were Sanders of the River. They were Great White Carstairs. ‘Never since the heroic days of Greece has the world had such a sweet, just, boyish master’, wrote the American philosopher George Santayana, in one of the most widely quoted of imperial compliments, and he was thinking of Furse’s men.

They were often very close to their subjects, closer by far than the administrators of India, for the colonial officials were less hamstrung by tradition or convention, and were also, not infrequently, very fond of their charges. Relations with chiefs and potentates were often easy and friendly, and the concept of Indirect Rule—allowing the native peoples to run their own affairs, by their own cultures—meant that racial prejudice was never extreme. Settlers might talk of damned niggers, or mock the customs of the indigenes: Furse’s men would think it, by and large, hardly cricket. Here is part of a minute circulated by a Governor of the Gold Coast among his staff:

It was a resurgence of the trusteeship ideal, but it was weakness too. Furse’s colonial service was perfect for the imperial decline—not too aggressive, not too dogmatic, not even too sure of itself. These post-war imperialists were, without doubt, the
nicest
rulers the Empire ever sent abroad, but they were not the strongest. They saw the other side too generously, and if ever it came to My Empire Right or Wrong, one did not need to be a medicine-man to prophesy their resignation. ‘In such dangerous things as war,’ Clausewitz had said—and Empire was essentially a risky business—‘the worst errors are caused by a spirit of benevolence.’

The imperialists were undismayed. ‘The British Empire stands firm’, announced Stanley Baldwin, Kipling’s cousin and Prime Minister for most of the 1920s, ‘as a great force for good. It stands in the sweep of every wind, by the wash of every sea….’ The Never-Stop Railway trundled round and round; every few years the Dominion Premiers met in London; the Council of the Federation of Chambers of Commerce of the British Empire recommended a uniform monetary system for the whole Empire; George V combined imperial duty with kingly pleasure by going several times to
Rose
Marie,
Rudolf Friml’s smash musical about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and by planting an Empire Plantation of
trees in Windsor Great Park, each tree representing one of his colonies. When the Viceroy of India entered his dining-room at New Delhi for an official dinner, preceded by two elegant aides-de-camp, the band played the National Anthem, and all the Indian servants, poised behind their chairs in their gold and scarlet liveries, buried their heads in their hands. The fantasy of Empire survived, and to many of its cultists remained truer than the reality.

Consider Lady B’s face, as she drops her curtsey to His Excellency after dinner, and sweeps away into the ballroom beyond. She is only the wife of a provincial Governor, one of eight in India, but how sure she is of her status still, how determined to maintain the imperial proprieties. Her husband has risen laboriously through the ranks of the ICS; her father, I dare say, was an Indian Army general; she herself grew up in the long-established private world of Anglo-India, moving from cantonment to hill station, from Meerut to Bangalore, home for school or holidays perhaps, back again for the rites of courtship and marriage in Lahore Cathedral to poor dear Edward.