Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (48 page)

The capital proper was conceived in three parts: the Secretariat, the circular Assembly Chamber, the Viceroy’s palace. Around it was laid out a garden city for the chiefs, bureaucrats and feudatories of the Indian Empire. The richer princely States had their ownpalaces, surrounded by a Princes’ Park closed to the public, and radiating from several hubs ran the domestic streets of the civil service and the military, each planted with a different kind of tree. The Commander-in-Chief, the second most powerful man in India,had his own palace, due south of the Viceroy’s, and half-way along the axis to the Jami Masjid a big shopping plaza was built, providing a sort of junction between India of the Raj and India of the people. Kingsway ran for two miles straight as a die from the Viceroy’spalace towards the great ruined citadel of the Purana Qila, and there were plans to complete the conception with a ceremonial boulevard along the river.

The Secretariat buildings, facing one another at the western end of Kingsway, were Baker’s work. They were grandiose but weak, and managed in a curious way, rare in monumental architecture, to look rather
smaller
than they really were. Their immense colonnaded façades, eaved and turreted, and riddled with huge echoing courts and staircases, felt oddly insubstantial from close quarters, and Baker’s characteristic progressions of vistas, arches seen through arches, columns ending arcades, belvederes and courts and galleries, worked less well in the changeable and dust-laden Indian light than they did in the clarity of Africa. The buildings looked what they were, institutional, and if their eaves and shady corners made them pleasantly cool in summer, generations of civil servants were to curse the name of Baker when the bitter Delhi winter reached through the unglazed staircase windows.

Beyond them on the hill, though—the Acropolis, Baker thought, to their Propylea—Lutyens built the greatest monument of the imperial architecture, the Viceroy’s palace. Its presence was weakened by a squabble between the architects. It should have beenapproached as through a ravine between the Secretariat buildings, but Baker declined to reduce the gradient of the roadway, so that an
unworthy bump in Kingsway obstructed the central view, and weakened the impact of the palace. Even so, it formed a tremendous climax to the capital. Lutyens conceived it as the destination of a colossal ceremonial way: away from the river boulevard to the east, up the uncompromising unwavering Kingsway, past the tall white figure of King George V in his cupola, under the Arch of India inscribed with the names of the imperial war dead, between the lofty slabs of the Secretariat, through the tall wrought-iron gates of the palace entrance, across the gravelled courtyard with its grave viceregal statues, up the immense ceremonial steps, through the arched loggia, and so, hardly deviating an inch from the start of the main east-west axis two miles away, directly into the throne room of the Viceroy of India, where the Crown’s Anointed, seated with his lady in the sumptuous regalia of his rank, would greet you with a fitting condescension, and accept your humble courtesies.

In designing this unexampled palace Lutyens made no concession to the imperial falter. Perhaps he had not noticed it. He built the house as for an absolute monarch, a later Moghul—India, he said, had made him ‘Very Tory—pre-Tory, feudal’. Certainly he seemed to accept implicitly the old Anglo-Indian maxim that to rule India successfully a ruler must live magnificently. Grander and grander had risen the structures of Indian sovereignty, ever gaudier trundled the elephants of Empire, until in New Delhi ‘Ned’ Lutyens, the urbane and puckish creator of English country houses, built upon Raisina Hill a palace fit for a Sun-King.

It was bigger than Versailles in fact, and perhaps more powerful, for it was more compactly structured. It was 600 feet square, more or less, and including its twelve enclosed courtyards, covered four and a half acres. Lutyens designed it all, down to the 130 chairs of the State dining-room—it was said to be the largest project ever undertaken by a single architect. It was not at all like his neo-Georgian fancies of Kent or Sussex, with their gentle brickwork and unassuming entrances, its style being set by a rather bizarre central feature, a vast shallow dome of faintly Byzantine bearings. In fact this was curiously derived from the celebrated Buddhist stupa at Sanchi in Bhopal; in adapting it Lutyens cut off its base, lifted the whole of it bodily, so to speak, as he might remove the dome of
St Paul’s, and deposited it, complete with its surrounding balustrade, on top of a squat square tower.

The rest of the house was just as boldly hybrid. If it was like a gentleman’s country house in some ways, it was like a despot’s castle in others. Its comfortable private quarters were balanced by immense offices of State, and its wings and courtyards were linked by interminable bazaar-like corridors, marble-arched and marble-floored, whose traffic of liveried servants, aides and hurrying bodyguards gave the building the feel of an arcaded oriental city of its own. The garden was part rose-bed English, part water and clipped trees in the Moghul style, and all through the courtyards and passages cobra-fountains spouted their water into the sunshine, and lines of elaborate lamps swung heavily in the breeze.

The Viceroy’s private quarters were like rooms in the stateliest but most comfortable of English country houses—the Lutyens vernacular enormously magnified. The baths were Romanly lavish, the lavatories had the very latest kind of flushing system, there was a handsome loggia suitable for conversation pictures and a classic country gentleman’s library of fiction, travel, history and biography. The Durbar Room was circular, lofty and awesome, with a floor of porphyry and columns of yellow jasper. The grand central staircase was open to the sky. The Council Chamber was decorated with a fresco, covering one entire wall, showing the imperial air route from London to New Delhi, complete with hurrying flying-boats and biplanes, and a puffing foreign locomotive, somewhere in the Alps, admitting that in the 1920s even Viceroys had to come part of the way by train.

Deep below stairs laboured the servants. Nearly 6,000 of them manned the great house, and they lived in a township of their own, just out of sight in the viceregal estate beyond the gardens. More than 400 of them were gardeners, and fifty of
them
were boys whose only job was to scare the birds away from the vegetables. In the basement of the palace, running the entire length of the building, a great household community was always at work. The pot-cleaners perpetually scoured their great copper pans, the chicken-pluckers squatted among their feathers, the linen-men stood guard over their cavernous linen-cupboards, the dish-wallahs laboured up to
their ankles in washing-up water. The kitchens, hung picturesquely all about with skillets, skewers and choppers, were equipped with the latest English electric ovens, and generally presided over by a French chef. The stables housed a regiment of cavalry. English mechanics tended the three Rolls-Royces in the garage, sewing-men sat at their machines in the Tailors’ Shop, numberless pheasant hung in the Game Room. There was a Tinman’s Room, and a tent store, and away at the north end between the carpet godown and the tiffin rooms, the ever-busy Viceroy’s Press clanked away at its menus, court circulars, seating plans and confidential agendas—His Excellency’s visit to the dentist that morning, or the arrival of Sir Hector and Lady Edgington-Shore (from Calcutta, to the Minto Suite).

From the start opinions varied about New Delhi. Visitors who saw it first at moments of great ceremony or delight, when the crimson-jacketed lancers were parading in the Great Square, when the howdah’d elephants majestically advanced along Kingsway, when the handsome young ADCs, elegant in navy drills and sky blue lapels, welcomed one so charmingly to the ballroom, and the Viceroy’s house was a pageantry of uniforms, saris, ball gowns and decorations, scented with orange blossom from the garden and roofed by the stars above the great open stairs—people who saw it first in its lordly moments were generally overwhelmed, and thought the capital a worthy crown to a tremendous enterprise. On a stifling dusty day when nothing much was happening it seemed less impressive, and then most observers thought it too big, or too pompous, or not Indian enough, or not British enough. One Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, even wondered if it was sufficiently
large.
Perhaps it was at its best, though, seen through eyes of gentle irony, as Forster might have seen it—early on a spring morning, say, when the dewy haze was beginning to clear, when the heat was starting to shimmer in the air and the old walled city was astir with the sun—when the early-morning riders were trotting along Kingsway, and the first buses rumbling shakily towards Connaught Place. Then if you stood far back from New Delhi, down by the river, say, with the cracked monuments of other empires lifeless all round, and looked back over the dun and
green expanse of the Kingsway gardens, glistening here and there with dew and lily-pond, then its proud distant bulk up there, towered, domed and flagged in the morning, looked a thousand years old itself, and perhaps, in that fallacious morning light, a little dishevelled already, like the dead tombs and fortresses all round.
1

But epic, never quite. Suppose the Victorians had built this, the one supreme temple to the British idea of empire! Then what marvels of assurance we might have seen on Raisina Hill, what glinting flamboyances of skyline, what a tight-packed elaboration of pride, stern and imperturbable above the Jumna! Too late! The flare of the imperial confidence had been too brief, too illusory perhaps, and the only epic of Empire lay in the memory of the thing itself, in the surprise and the effrontery of it, in its own images of labour, service, swank and avarice, and in its effect, for good and for ill, upon the lives and manners of mankind.

T
HE British Empire lacked charisma now. By the 1930s it was more benevolent than it had ever been, more idealist in an unassertive way, more sympathetic to its subjects, less arrogant, more humane: but it was becoming a somewhat dowdy presence in the world. Even for its practitioners it had often lost its tang—‘in comfortless camps,’ as Orwell wrote of them in 1935, ‘in sweltering offices, in gloomy dark bungalows smelling of dust and earthspoil, they earn, perhaps, the right to be a little disagreeable.’ There was a reason for this. Nobody had properly analysed the root causes of imperialism, but everybody recognized the prime characteristic of the phenomenon: aggression was necessary to its spirit, whether it be aggression for bad or good causes, and when an empire lost its aggressiveness then the excitement of imperialism itself, for better or for worse, was lost.

In this chapter we meet some men who, in this prosaic matinée of the imperial performance, acted still with a sense of style.

In Kenya was Lord Delamere. Kenya
was
Lord Delamere. The British had acquired that delightful country, with its high pastoral downlands, its flamingo lakes and its tropical seashore, in the 1880s, and by building a railway through it from the Indian Ocean to Uganda, had opened it up to European settlement. They had always loved the place. Its rolling downs were like a freer, grander Wiltshire. Its fauna was noble, its tribespeople were handsome, its soil was fertile, much of its farmland was more or less free for the taking. It was Crown land. Lord Kitchener, looking around for an 
agreeable investment in the days of his stardom, acquired a few thousand Kenyan acres, and by the 1920s many other Europeans had done the same. Most of them were British, including a sizeable minority of aristocrats, but many more were Afrikaners, who trekked up with their families from the south.
1
Of all the white settler colonies, Kenya was the most stylish, and the highland country north of Nairobi, much of it fenced off for European ownership, became the most desirable ranching and farm land of the overseas Empire. Kenyan life demanded hard work, rough living and real risks: but for a fit and adventurous man of the right disposition, and preferably the right connections, it was the imperial dream fulfilled.

Officially it was governed by the Colonial Office. A Governor sat in his handsome palace in its garden outside Nairobi, well-paid, well-servanted, with an elaborate official administration to interpret his wishes—more than a thousand men of the Colonial Service, in the most coveted posting of all. There was an elected legislative council, in the usual Crown Colony pattern, but all executive power was in the Governor’s hands. To him, and to his masters in Whitehall, Kenya was an African country. One day, one distant day, it would be returned to the black people, when they had been educated to run it themselves: in the meantime the Crown, represented in the field by His Excellency and his thousand diligent officials, would look after it for them.

This was not the view of the white settlers, and the leader of the settlers was the most vigorous, impatient and imaginative man in Kenya, Lord Delamere. He had first come to the country in 1898, leading an exploratory expedition out of Somaliland. Seeing for the first time the glorious landscapes that lay beneath Mount Kenya, rippling with grasses in the sunshine, and inhabited only by genially co-operative blacks, he had fallen in love with the place, and after an unsuccessful attempt to settle down on his family estates in Cheshire,
came back to Africa, aged thirty-three, and obtained a 99-year lease on 100,000 acres of Kenyan highland.

Delamere was as tough as nails. He arrived on his new lands on a stretcher, having been injured in a fall, and all his life his fortunes alarmingly fluctuated. He was always in money trouble. With his young wife he lived for many years in a mud hut, curtained with sacking, and he tried almost everything on his property. He tried sheep, cattle, ostriches, wattles, wheat, pigs, oranges, tobacco, coffee. He built a flour mill, and bought a chain of butchers’ shops. He never did get out of debt, but his ranch Soysambu became a famous showplace, his merino sheep won prizes everywhere, he evolved the first successful East African wheat, and he walked through his wide acres with all the pride of a man whose roots are in the soil, and whose land is his by right.

For he believed firmly in that right. He thought this was country ordained for the white man, and he wanted to see a large European farming community controlling Kenya for ever. In 1921 the settlers of southern Rhodesia, resisting Colonial Office attempts to liberalize the colony, had persuaded the British Government to give them a limited form of self-government, by which they confidently hoped to sustain white supremacy indefinitely. Delamere wanted to achieve the same in Kenya, and he dreamt of a chain of British white-dominated settlements running down Africa from Nairobi to Salisbury, linked in some federal arrangement as a huge East African dominion. He arranged conferences of delegates from Kenya, Tanganyika, Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland, which met three years running in different places, and discussed magnificent dreams of sovereignty. The first was held in a deserted mission house in southern Tanganyika, 450 miles from the nearest railway station, 800 miles from the nearest shopping centre. It was not for nothing that Delamere was called the Rhodes of Kenya.

He was a man of powerful convictions, or prejudices—‘part politician,’ a Labour MP thought him, ‘part poseur, part Puck’—and so resolutely did he practise what he preached that by the 1930s he was indisputably the great man of Kenya. He had been there longer than almost any other European. He had suffered and succeeded there. He knew exactly what he wanted for the country, and he cut 
through the liberalism of colonial officialdom as a knife through margarine. He believed at once in the natural superiority of the white man, and the qualities of the noble savage, and he thought the idea of eventual black sovereignty no more than a mischievous or sentimental day-dream.

Down the years he had watched the Governors come and go, like a constitutional monarch surviving all his Prime Ministers—‘the uncrowned King of Kenya’, thought Sir Edward Grigg, one of them, ‘to whom all the settlers looked up for leadership’. Officials prepared themselves nervously for his visits, hostesses vied for his company, and the Legislative Council, in which he represented the Rift Valley, the heart of the settler country, was dominated by his arguments. He not only influenced the policies of Kenya Colony, he also powerfully affected its manners. He was not a handsome man, with his small figure, his rather hawk-like face and his slightly cauliflower ears, but in his youth he had been distinctly racy. He dressed eccentrically then, in peculiar hats and disreputable clothes, and he grew his hair outrageously long, down to his shoulders. He had a taste for violence, his temper was foul, he indulged himself in bad language, strong drink and practical jokes, and he loved every sort of high jink and irreverence. His had been a subaltern’s, hunt ball kind of fun—shooting out street lamps, midnight rickshaw races, throwing oranges at the windows of the Nakuru Inn or shutting the manager of the Norfolk Hotel inside his own refrigerator, when he declined to serve more liquor.

In his maturity he was more sober, devoting himself to his farms and his politics, but by then he had become a legend, and the reputation of his youth attached itself to the colony, many of whose settlers liked to think of themselves as lesser Delameres, hard-riding, high-spirited, fast-living, well-bred individualist adventurers, there to stay.

They were a small community—in 1934 there were some 9,000 white people in Kenya, 1,500 of them farmers—and though some of them would hate to hear it said, essentially provincial. Nairobi, 
their capital, had started life as a shunting-station on the Uganda railway, and was now a curious mixture of the drab, the boisterous and the snobby. Its architecture was hardly distinguished, its roads were unpaved, its Africans lived in petrol-can shanties and its many Indians had created an untidy bazaar quarter of their own. But its rollicking New Stanley Hotel was always full of boisterous young men in Stetsons and plus-fours, and on the edge of town was the Muthaiga Club, encouched in lawns and creepers, which was the cosy bastion of the settlers, refusing membership to blacks and browns, and begrudging it to officials. There were three banks in town, and a synagogue, and a masonic temple, and a cantonment of the King’s African Rifles. The air was marvellous, for Nairobi stood 5,500 feet up, and the brilliance of the light and atmosphere gave life in the town a hectic and often bawdy feeling. Scandals of one sort and another were common, and from time to time the London popular papers printed exposés of Nairobi life, full of titles and wife-swappings.

It was generally agreed that this was destined to be a great capital. Government House itself had been consciously designed by Herbert Baker, Rhodes’s favourite architect, to become one day a viceregal residence, where the King’s surrogate could hold sway over a great new African dominion. Where the parties differed was over the character of Greater Kenya. The Colonial Office foresaw an African India, the indigenous blacks gradually acceding to power under Whitehall’s kindly tutelage, the European settlers relegated to the role of a planter class like any other. Lord Delamere and his friends held quite different views. They stuck to convictions long discredited at home, concerning the nature of civilization and the hierarchy of race, and they envisaged the East African Dominion as a species of Virginia, gracious and spirited, where a gentlemanly white ruling class would hold power in perpetuity. In this Lord Delamere was no more reactionary than most of his contemporaries. He had come to Africa at a time when black civilization seemed hardly more than a joke—‘blank, brutal, uninteresting, amorphous barbarism’, is how the first Commissioner for the East Africa protectorate saw the native cultures in 1900. Delamere had virtually created Kenya; he had written the style of the country upon what 
appeared to be an empty page, and it was beyond his imaginative powers to revise the conceptions of a lifetime.

He was bound to lose. In 1922, when the settlers were particularly incensed about Indians in Kenya being put on a common electoral roll with Europeans, there were plans for a rebellion on the Ulster pattern—communications to be seized, the Governor to be gently kidnapped, the imperial Government obliged by force to accept the Delamerian view. But it never happened, and by the end of the decade the settler community was already an anachronism. Most of Delamere’s cherished criteria were out of date even then. His opinions on race, on responsibility, on laissez-faire, were all robust survivals from the previous century, and more and more people were wondering if the white man had any right to settle in Africa at all.

Delamere’s last political act was a mission to London, in 1930, to protest against the Labour Government’s declaration that Kenya was primarily an African territory, where ‘the interests of the African native must be paramount.’ He must have known he would fail, fighting as he was so clearly against the tide, and he returned to Kenya depressed, sick and disillusioned, dying in the following year. They erected a statue of him in the middle of Nairobi, at the junction of Delamere Avenue and Government Road, and they buried him on his own land at Soysambu in the highlands, where the pink mass of flamingoes murmured and meditated at the lake’s edge, and across the open range the old adventurer’s merinos peacefully and profitably grazed.
1

In London was Frederick John Dealtry Lugard, first Baron Lugard of Abinger in the county of Surrey, who had been a mercenary of
Empire, and a pro-consul, and was now one of its few theorists. He had spent a lifetime in the imperial cause, starting in India, ending as a member of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, but he made his name, and evolved his philosophies of Empire, in a colony which he more or less created, Nigeria.

This was a very different kind of Africa. Nigeria was unarguably Black Man’s Country, sweltering tropical country, where few white men much wanted to work, still less to settle. With its 350,000 square miles it was much the largest African possession of the Crown, but hardly the most serene. There were at least 100 different Nigerian tribes, each with its own language, and they were by no means all fond of each other. Some, in the north, were Muslims, ruled by the elegant Fulani Emirs, whose bodyguards wore chain mail and blew fanfares on horn trumpets. Some were boisterous pagans of the seashore, who ate slugs and practised necromancy. There were great tribal federations like the Ibos and the Yorubas: there were infinitesimal clans, lost in the rain-forests, who lived by the hunt and the barter, and knew nobody else.

Long after the British had established themselves on the West African coast, they understandably stayed clear of the unnerving Niger hinterland, contenting themselves with a trading establishment at Lagos, the chief coastal town. The stimulus of trade took them tentatively into the interior, often against their better judgement—of the forty-eight Europeans of the first Niger trading expedition, thirty-nine never came home. By the end of the nineteenth century flag had followed trade, and partly for profit’s sake, partly to keep the French and Germans out, the British Government presently established protectorates over the whole country, and in 1914 converted it into the biggest of all their Crown Colonies. Its first Governor-General was Lugard.

Lugard was one of the few professional imperialists to evolve an ideology. In 1922 he published a widely read and almost fulsomely admired rationale of imperialism,
The
Dual
Mandate
in
British
Tropical
Africa,
for which Nigeria had provided the laboratory. The views it expressed came just at the right time, for they offered at once a sop to the liberal conscience and a prod to the wavering imperialists. Lugard offered sensible, generous reasons why the 
British Empire should continue to exist in Africa at a time when self-determination was all the rage. His ‘dual mandate’ implied that Empire was good for everyone: it was a mandate to swop skills for resources, to the equal benefit of the subject peoples, the ruling Power and the rest of the world. ‘The tropics are the heritage of mankind and neither on the one hand has a suzerain power or right to their exclusive exploitation, nor on the other have the races which inhabit them a right to deny their bounties to those that need them…. The merchant, the miner and the manufacturer do not enter the tropics on sufferance or employ their technical skill, their energy and their capital as “interlopers” or as “greedy capitalists”, but in the fulfilment of the mandate of civilization.’