Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (46 page)

Like the R101, the Empire flying-boats tried hard to be ships. They had sleeping bunks, inhabited in the advertisements by elegant husbands in spotted silk dressing-gowns, bobbed wives in crêpe-de-chine. They had a smoking cabin, and a promenade deck, and the lavatories had tiled floors, and the seats had legs of chromium plate, and the chef in his galley wore a chef’s hat, and the captain and his first officer, high in their cockpit above the Mooring Compartment, were splendid in blue, gold rings and medal ribbons. When the Empire flying-boats alighted with a lordly swish on the Nile at Cairo or the Hooghly at Calcutta, flags proudly burst from the cockpit roof—the Blue Ensign of the Royal Mail, the crested emblem
of Imperial Airways. It was all very imperial, very self-conscious, and perhaps rather touching.

The home base of these imposing aircraft was Hythe, in Hampshire, and the British public were now indoctrinated with the idea of British supremacy in the air. Bradshaws, suppliers of railway timetables to His Majesty the King, brought out their first Air Guide, with useful tips for imperial air travellers (it was advisable to take a dinner suit, but otherwise no special clothing was required, the cabins of the airliners being closed and heated). The ‘Speedbird’ image, the blue-winged flash of Imperial Airways, became one of the best-known of advertising symbols, and the airline diligently fed its passenger lists to the newspaper columnists (though their selection was sometimes less than exciting—in September 1935, for instance, they could only suggest the owner of the
Karachi
Daily
Gazette
and the Rumanian Secretary of State for Air). In the brilliant posters of Imperial Airways the Empire boats flew gracefully over the Pyramids or settled on limpid blue seas beneath palm fronds, attended by lithe natives in canoes.

It all sounded very novel and up to date: in fact the air services were thoroughly traditional, not simply in their manners, but in their systems too. For Imperial Airways as for P and O, the hub of imperial communications was the eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt the air routes diverged, one going north-eastward into the new Anglo-Arab empire, one down the Cape-to-Cairo corridor to South Africa, one following the steamship routes across the Red Sea to India. Based upon Alexandria was the Royal Navy’s duty destroyer, detailed from the Mediterranean Fleet to patrol the imperial air routes. Based upon Crete was the company’s motor-yacht
Imperia,
with full servicing equipment for the Empire boats. Even Corfu, the Ionian island once thought indispensable to the security of Britain’s eastern routes, came into its imperial own at last, so that the local cricketers, looking up from the game bequeathed to them by the Empire a century before, might often see the old flag breaking from
Canopus
or
Cambria,
Caledonia
or
Capricornus
,
as the boat for Alexandria settled on the emerald lagoon of Gouvia.

Flying the routes of Empire gave many Britons the same proprietorial sensations they had so long enjoyed from their liners,
watching through sea-slapped portholes the passing of the imperial fortresses. ‘I was an Imperial passenger, a proud title,’ wrote Sir Edward Buck, CBE, of a flight through Africa, and indeed he felt easily at home. Among his fellow-passengers were Lord and Lady Chesham ‘who have interests in Swaziland’, and Mr F. Kanthack, CMG, formerly of the Indian Irrigation Department. At Entebbe he had time to make a brief visit to Government House, to congratulate the Governor on his new appointment to Nigeria, and to hear some of His Excellency’s recollections of Sangor, in the United Province of India, ‘where he served as Assistant Remount Officer in 1917’. They spent a night at Juba, where the paragons of the Sudan Service had created a model village in the bush, with its clean hostel, its well-planned native housing, its mission church and its spick-and-span District Commissioner rising courteously from his desk to greet his evening visitors. They had a couple of hours in Khartoum, where Major Barker showed them round the Zoological Gardens—Lady Chesham was much amused by the injunctions at the gate, which forbade her either to bring her donkey into the gardens, or to spit at the animals there.

Next day they spotted the Aswan Dam, the Empire’s pride, as Sir Edward, Mr Kanthack and the Cheshams enjoyed a game of bridge, and when they landed for the night at Luxor Lady Chesham insisted upon a visit to Tutankhamun’s tomb, whose replica she remembered so vividly from the Wembley Exhibition. So at last on the fourth day they descended thrillingly over the Pyramids to Cairo, where the Union Jack still billowed serenely over Kasr-el-Nil, and passengers on the port side of the aircraft caught a glimpse of the High Commission gardens beside the river. A line of uniformed Imperial Airways officials awaited them when they alighted upon the brown airfield at Heliopolis, snapping into a salute, as they stepped out into the warm sunshine, for all the world as though those passengers were being piped ashore from an imperial warship.

The 1935 African schedule allowed a week from Cape to Cairo, but never for a moment did the aircraft have to fly over foreign-controlled territory, or find itself out of sight (for it never rose higher than 10,000 feet) of more or less imperial soil. What was
more, if passengers wanted it Imperial Airways would land at many another imperial outpost along the route: at Sheraik or Kosti, for instance, at Victoria West or Moshi or even at Mokia (though even in 1935‚ hardly anybody wanted to get off at Mokia).

It did not come naturally. Younger nations grew up with internal combustion: the British Empire was too old to find it easy, and for all the publicity of Imperial Airways, the British public were much more excited by the launching in 1934 of the greatest of all their Atlantic liners, the
Queen
Mary.
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One innovation which did fire the British imagination was something more mysterious, something almost spiritual it seemed: Wireless. It was, of course, a transforming agency for the Empire, and at one time the British hoped to make it as much their own as undersea cables had been in the previous century. Before the Great War Fisher had wanted to make it a world-wide Governmentmonopoly, shared only with the Americans—‘It’s
VITAL
for war! The
HOURLY
developments of Wireless are
prodigious!
You
can’t
cut
the
air!
You
can
cut a telegraph wire!’ He pressed the idea upon the Imperial Conference of 1911, and the assembled Prime Ministers did plan a series of wireless relay stations, throughout the Empire, which would effectively have dominated the world’s communications systems.

The war prevented it, but wireless came to mean much to the British Empire, and its mystique powerfully attracted the British. Kipling even wrote a short story about it, more than he ever did for the Empire Flying Boats. When Freya Stark went to an English Mission service at Hamadan in Persia in 1930, the preacher likened the Lord himself to a Radio Receiving Station, tuned into the world’s
prayers,
1
while at home the Archbishop of Canterbury, exalted by the possibilities, wanted to know if he had to leave his windows open to receive signals. The British Broadcasting Company, founded in 1922, began regular Empire broadcasts ten years later, intended to ‘keep unshaken the faith the British nation has in its Empire’, and the King himself said that wireless could ‘work the miracle of communication between me and my people in far-off places’.

For most imperial citizens of the 1930s indeed, the wireless evoked above all the image of the King-Emperor himself, presenting his annual Christmas broadcast to his peoples across the world. This was the one occasion in the year when Empire and modernity truly coincided, but even so it was technique not in the cause of power or development, but for old time’s sake. How Queen Victoria would have loved it! The chimes of Westminster relayed so magically around her Empire, the faint suggestive crackle on the loudspeakers, as though Buckingham Palace were even then being plugged into the system, the plummy accents of the ‘announcer’ (wearing, as everybody knew, evening dress for the occasion), the theatrical moment of absolute silence, and then, heard at that very instant in home and office, ship and barrack, kraal, hill-station, rubber estate and trading post across the British Empire, the thick bearded voice of His Majesty, speaking very carefully, as if to make allowances for the younger members of the family. ‘Another year has passed….’

S
INCE the Great War art had generally been hostile to grandeur, and so there was lost the last chance of a definitive imperial art form. Too late! Now there never would be such a thing as a British Imperial style, in art, in literature or even in architecture. The epic was past its climax, and nobody had commemorated it epically.

It was not that creative artists were necessarily hostile to the imperial idea—at least until the Great War few spoke out against it, and even the maverick Irishman Bernard Shaw believed that, in the absence of a world government, the British Empire was best qualified to rule the backward communities of the world. But they were seldom fired by it, either. No English Camöens arose, to celebrate the grand adventure—Tennyson went back to Arthurian legend, when he wanted a theme of chivalry and heroism, and Hardy preferred the wars against Napoleon. Even colonial artists failed to exploit the splendid story of their origins. Oliver Goldsmith II, born in Canada, hardly emulated his great-uncle’s success with
The
Rising
Village,
his colonial successor to Auburn, while the muses did not immediately respond to the Australian William Charles Wentworth’s attempt to win the Chancellor’s Medal at Cambridge—

It showed how transient was the British taste for glory, how shallow perhaps the imperial instinct itself, that the most lasting
artifacts of the British Empire were mostly green, gentle and quirky things, gardens and pleasant tropic cities, novels without heroes, limericks, wry ballads, echoes and suggestions.

Between the wars, almost for the first time, artistic intellectuals looked at the Empire speculatively in its decline, and dealt with it ironically. Aldous Huxley looked at India, and was reminded of the old man of Thermopylae, who never did anything properly. George Orwell looked at Burma, where he had been a policeman, and thought it all second-rate. ‘I wouldn’t care to have your job’, an American missionary once remarked to him, observing the scarred buttocks of a Burmese suspect in the police station, and the remark cut Orwell not as insulting, but as contemptuous—‘so
that
was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a tee-total cock-virgin from the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me.’

Out of these attitudes came one undoubted masterpiece, E. M. Forster’s
A
Passage
to
India
. Of all the novels written about the Empire, except possibly
Kim,
this was the most influential: two generations found their view of imperialism affected by it, if not actually formed, and anyone who read it found that the scenes of imperial life never seemed quite the same again. Forster wrote as a
half-insider
. He had been private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior, in which capacity he was once preposterously photographed, wearing a long-skirted spotted gown and a sort of oriental tam-o’-shanter, in very English lace-up shoes against a painted background of flowers and mullioned windows. But he was anything but Anglo-Indian, only a life-long college man translated briefly into the Indian environment, and in a thoughtful, melancholy way, half-enchanted by it.

A
Passage
to
India
is not really about imperialism, but about human nature playing itself out against an imperial background, between people of different origins thrown together by the imperial chance. In particular it is about the specifically British imperial technique that was summed up by the image of The Club—the
deliberate enclavity, the hanging-together. This was an ugly system, based as it was upon racial awareness and arrogance, but it was undeniably effective in sustaining the brazen bluff that lay at the heart of the Empire. Forster recognized this—‘we’re not pleasant in India‚’ as one of his characters says, ‘we’ve something more important to do’—and in exposing the idea of the Club in its sadness and falseness, he did not frontally attack it.

Nor did he attack imperialism in the abstract.
A
Passage
to
India
is not an ideological tract—nationalists often did not know what to make of it, and all too often its Indian characters really do seem incapable of running their own affairs. Forster was in India shortly after the Amritsar Massacre, and the book is full of allusions to that event, but still he was not repelled by the principle of Empire, the spectacle of one nation governing another, but by the personal implications of imperialism, the sham alienations it fostered, the hypocrisies, the apparently unbridgeable gulfs. Perhaps Forster did not worry himself much about the political meaning of it. He was looking deeper, and in his tentative, inconclusive way treated the imperial phenomenon as a Greek dramatist might handle a fourth Fate, as an ever-present imponderable decreeing and ensnaring the lives of human beings.

Yet he sees it too, paradoxically, as something transient and inessential. Render unto Caesar, he seems wryly to be saying as his book reaches its famous ending. ‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ asks the Indian of the Englishman. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ But no, India herself answers, not yet—‘and the sky said, “No, not there.”’ It would come in time, sooner than Forster could have dreamt as he finished his book in 1924, but better not to hurry it.

There was an imperial folklore of sorts, a corpus of popular art that had coalesced over the generations around the theme of Empire. Much of it was Kiplingesque, for the one period when imperialism impinged upon the popular consciousness was pre-eminently Kipling’s period; his verses, tales and characters entered the public vocabulary, and were often transmuted into proverbs, like
comedians’ catch-phrases. ‘You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din’, ‘But that’s another story’, ‘East is East and West is West’, ‘You’ll be a Man, my Son’—all these and many more, the very stuff of the imperialist philosophy, went into the language, and were bandied about in pubs and prize-giving speech-days as if they were immemorial saws. Every drawing-room baritone sang Oley Speaks’ stirring setting of ‘The Road to Mandalay’, every church-goer knew the solemn verses of
Recessional,
which gave to the Empire the most hackneyed, and later the most mocked, of all its epithets—‘far-flung’:

Around the real thing, too, there assembled a mass of neo-Kipling ballads like ‘The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God’, songs like ‘Pale Hands I Loved, Beside the Shalimar,’ and a whole body of literature, given a home by magazines like
Blackwood’s
or
The
Strand,
which came to possess a stylized unity, as folk-tales do.
Blackwood’s
published, in the 1930s, twelve volumes of such imperial mythology, under the generic title
Tales
from
the
Outposts,
and they included
Speech
Day
in
Crocodile
Country,
Ode
to
One
of
the
Old
Indian
Troopships,
My
First
Execution,
The
Left
Hand
of
Abdullah
the
Beggar
and
A
Solo
Flight
from
England
to
the
Gold
Coast
in
Cirrus-Moth
G.
EBZZ.
Here are the opening lines of
Khyber
Calling!
a novel by ‘Rajput’ (Lieutenant-Colonel A. J. E. Dawson):

Imperial humorists contributed prolifically to the form. There was never a shortage of them. Skilful or heavy-handed, subtle or naive, the satirist was the familiar of every imperial station, first to last, scribbling for the local magazines like the innumerable pseudonymous comic writers of Anglo-India, breaking into the bestseller lists like C. S. Jarvis of the Sinai or Arthur Grimble of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands. Of them all the funniest, and the most revealing, was
Lord Edward Cecil, whose book
The
Leisure
of
an
Egyptian
Official
is the one classic of the kind. Cecil was no artist perhaps, no historian either, but his outrageous set-pieces of imperial farce, his gallery of characters dominant or subject, translated many of the imperial attitudes, prejudices too, into universal terms.

Unexpectedly, too, Hollywood powerfully propagated the imperial myths. The yarns of Empire were so tremendous, the settings so colourful, that inevitably the film industry, seeking an occasional alternative to cowboys and Indians, seized upon sahibs and savages. Many an old stalwart of Warner Brothers or MGM was to be seen in the 1930s leading his sepoys into the jaws of the Khyber, or limping blood-stained out of the African bush. HereVictor McLaglen guides The Lost Patrol through the burning sands of Mespot, here Gary Cooper and Franchot Tone, dashingly disobeying King’s Regulations, rescue the colonel’s son from his Pathan torturers and so save the honour of the Bengal Lancers. Walter Huston played a wistful Rhodes against Oscar Homolka’s Kruger, Ronald Colman turned the rapacious Clive into a matinee idol, Spencer Tracy, lifting his hat politely, greeted Cedric Hardwicke at Ujiji with that incomparable one-liner, ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’
1

British film-makers treated the Empire more as a morality play.
Sanders
of
the
River,
for example, made by the passionately Anglophile Hungarian Alexander Korda in 1935, was a lavish rationale of the White Man’s Burden: Sanders, played by Leslie Banks, was beloved and respected by his simple African charges, and as his canoe was paddled along inky tangled creeks by faithful oarsmen, led by Paul Robeson, the cry of ‘Sandy the Strong, Sandy the Wise’ rang repeatedly through the imperial forests.
The
Four
Feathers,
taken from a novel by A. E. W. Mason, himself a wartime secret agent, was a thrilling justification of imperial attitudes, so thrilling that the official film censors actually thanked Korda for making it, and critics of the anti-imperialist Left felt obliged to point out that it had been
financed by the Prudential Assurance Company, capitalist lackeys of racialism.

Away in the overseas Empire the folk-art was more spontaneous, and seemed to spring more directly from the collective imagination. Sometimes indeed its origins were forgotten. Nobody could remember the first appearance of the monocled English policeman portrayed by the wandering Indian players of the United Provinces, or the top-hatted character called The Lord who, in the folk-plays of Corfu, represented the last echo of British authority in the Ionians. The Br’er Rabbit stories were pure imperial folk-art, for they were a mingling of Ashanti lore with Algonquin Indian spirit-stories, the two being brought together by the transportation of slaves to Canada.
1
More often the lore was invented by professionals, sometimes to fulfil a need in a country without traditions, but had been blurred by time and usage until it came to seem organic.

Every white colony had its tall stories, its familiar rhymes, its ballads and its legendary characters. Sometimes real people had been metamorphosed into myth—Rhodes, for instance, became nearly more than human in the Rhodesian memory, and the Anzac soldiers of Gallipoli achieved a similar kind of apotheosis. The Canadian Mounties entered the folklore almost as a matter of principle, Ned Kelly the Australian bandit entered it
faute
de
mieux,
there being a paucity of alternative domestic heroes. In India there really were peasants who worshipped images of long-dead British administrators. In Sarawak the first White Rajah had become a dimly imagined embodiment of perfection.

And properly enough the most vividly remembered totem of any, till the very end of the Empire, remained Queen Victoria herself. Her grand image survived all her successors, and though as the years went by her statue was removed from all too many parks and plinths, her memory remained, if inexact, lastingly potent. Most folklores have their supreme being, god, hero or arbitrator, the hovering presence behind their stories and enactments—Ansansi the Spider, Heitse of the Hottentots, Zeus, Haroun al-Rashid.
Unmistakably the presiding genius of the imperial lore was the Great White Queen, whose presence was all-pervading, inherent to the lays of primitive bards, not altogether amused by Lord Edward’s more provocative anecdotes, and present always, out of camera, in the Hollywood spectaculars of Empire.