Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (49 page)

If Delamere was behind his time, Lugard was ahead of his. He was the archetype of the paternal imperialist, and paternalism was to prove the ante-penultimate phase of the British imperial process—the fifth age of Empire, perhaps.
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Lugard had spent most of his life
in Africa: he had fought, explored, adventured and administered there, and he loved the continent and its peoples. Never for a moment, though, did he regard the African as his equal, any more than Delamere did. The typical African, he once said, was a ‘happy, thriftless, excitable person, naturally courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of veracity … his thoughts are concentrated on the events and feelings of the moment, and he suffers little from apprehension of the future or grief for the past’.

It was as a kind of prefect that the Briton should live among these people, teaching them the rules (even some of the dodges), encouraging them to honour the school code, and preparing them for the day when they might win First XV colours themselves, and walk across the quad with their hands in their pockets. Furse’s young men, Lugard thought, were perfect for the job—English gentlemen whose only apparent passion was for fair play. There was nothing possessive to these attitudes, he always emphasized. The Briton in tropical Africa was not there to stay, only to guide and cherish: not to settle, only to spend a few terms there, or perhaps a long vacation.

Lugard’s influence was immense, for like Delamere he spoke with utter assurance. The system of indirect rule he evolved for Nigeria was in fact nothing new—it had been the British system among the Indian States for generations—but he made it
sound
new, he intensified it, and it was associated always with his name. Under it the Nigerian chiefs ruled their own people as they always had, but subject to the supervision of the Sixth Form, in the person of the Empire, Frederick Lugard and his District Commissioners. By these means they would acquire the best of western methods and values, while preserving their own cultures and prestige. It was a humane and practical system, but it was hardly less anomalous than Delamere’s opposing philosophy. As the enlightened Lugard sought to conserve African civilization, all the more vigorous of the Africans did their best to escape it. If Delamere was a reactionary in one kind, Lugard was seen as archaic in another. The Kenya Africans would be serfs: the Nigerians, exhibits in a folk museum.

Even Lugard did not recognize that whatever the white man did in Africa would be wrong. As in India, so in Africa, sooner or later 
his very presence there would be seen as an intrusion. No flicker of doubt, though, seems to have crossed the pro-consul’s mind as he dispensed his wisdom to the world. Lugard was another small man, and a nice one. Everyone liked him, even his critics. There is a photograph of him escorting a party of African chiefs on a visit to the London Zoo, and while he himself looks properly headmasterly, with his umbrella and his watch-chain, his voluminously robed companions, gleaming black and very serious, look as though they trust him absolutely, and would not in the least resent it if, muttering something about it hurting him more than them, he gave them six of the best with his rolled umbrella.

In the field he looked rather more peppery, and during his proconsulship visitors sometimes found him daunting in his fame, especially when there stood at his side, slightly taller and no less formidable, the celebrated Lady Lugard, née Shaw, formerly Colonial Correspondent of
The
Times
and an exceedingly clever woman. Lugard was one of the half-dozen men of the twentieth-century Empire who could claim, if not to have created a country, at least to have transformed it, but he was dominant chiefly in a philosophical sense. He had enjoyed a warlike youth, but in his maturity his presence was not pugnacious, only persuasive, almost reproachful. He seemed to be expecting the best of the British Empire, and to be slightly hurt when he got less.

Nor did he die, like so many of his peers, disillusioned. On the contrary, he remained convinced of his theories to the last, universally honoured, sustained in his old age by book royalties and lecture tours, loaded with honorary degrees and commemorative medals, chairman of the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures, he a peer, his wife a Dame, successful in all he did—and like so many Empire-builders, whether
post
or
propter
hoc
, childless.
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In Cyprus there was Ronald Storrs, who as Oriental Secretary in
Cairo during the Great War, had been one of the progenitors of the Anglo-Arab empire. So acute was he then in his use of Arab nuance that old King Hussein thought he must be a Muslim himself, and certainly of all the imperial activists of his time Storrs was the most polished, some would say the most exquisite. There he sits on his tasselled sofa, smoking a Turkish cigarette and reading a poetic broadsheet, and no one would guess that he was a favourite of Lord Kitchener, a protégé of Lord Cromer. Long-limbed, rather effete in appearance, with a delicately clipped moustache and a volatile, mannered conversation, he looked less like a pillar of Empire than a more than usually worldly dramatic critic, perhaps, or a fashionable museum curator. He was a classicist, an aesthete, something of a snob, with a preference, if not for the great, at least for the gifted. ‘I see I shall have to struggle’, he wrote in his diary after a journey up the Tigris with some more ordinary imperialists, ‘against developing into a Prig: but the whole paraphernalia of whiskies and sodas, the plugging and lighting up of great briar pipes, the bubbling and sucking, the pointless gusty sigh of relief (from what?), the halting oracular uttering of common-places!’

In no other period of imperial history would Storrs have become an activist of Empire, but it happened that when, in 1903, he came down from Cambridge the Egyptian Civil Service was recruiting British volunteers: and this small corps of urbane enthusiasts offered him his life-long ambiance. Physically he was an Englishman absolute, without a drop, he liked to say, of any other blood: but he was a Levantine by nature and by taste, and it was in the eastern Mediterranean that he found himself.

He had no sense of Empire. He did not want to rule people, and was never subject to the
frissons
of the imperial mission. This is how he recorded his first visit to Bombay, the Gateway of India: ‘Walked up and down the city with Said, who assumes that all big shops must be branches of similar establishments in Cairo. Alas, bought some books. Went into Cathedral and attempted to test organ, apparently good, but found bellows switch under lock and key. Very ugly church with interesting
basse
epoque
monuments of Colonels who braved “inexorable Sultans” and died young for their pains. Lunched with Jukes, and his pretty Jane Austen wife in the
splendour and opulence of the Yacht Club, to which we have nothing in Egypt
simile
aut
secundum
….’

He was an instinctive cosmopolitan, and a sybarite. He wallowed in life, in the true Levantine style, delighting in the company of artists and musicians, writers and actresses, eating well, keeping self-conscious and over-literary diaries full of foreign phrases, collecting
objets
d’arts
,
moving charmingly through a succession of poses and enthusiasms, the ideal dinner-guest, the perfect flat-companion. He was an aesthete, but a shrewd and capable aesthete, and he reached the climax of his career as Governor of Jerusalem, the first Christian satrap of the Holy City since the Crusades.

His first administration, as Military Governor, was mixed and colourful. His assistants included, so he claimed, a bank cashier from Rangoon, an actor-manager, a Glasgow distiller, an Alexandria cotton-broker, a taxi-driver from Egypt, a Niger boatswain, two schoolmasters and a clown. With this eclectic staff he ushered Christian rule into the Holy City, later spending six years as Civil Governor too, and with it he rode the tricky whirlwinds of Empire in Palestine—the perpetual squabbles of sect and faith, the duties of Mandate, above all the implicit threat of Zionism.

Storrs’ approach to these problems was essentially a-political. He viewed Jerusalem less as an imperial responsibility, less even as a Holy Place, than as a work of art, as his comrade-in-spirit Ian Hamilton viewed a battle, and he governed it with his adept and fastidious imagination. He cultivated all the communities. He made friends with the religious leaders, the archaeologists, the scholars. He founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, an early exercise in civic conservation, and himself designed the lovely tiled plates, made by Armenians, which designated the streets of the Old City in English, Arabic and Hebrew. Storrs married while he was Governor of Jerusalem, and he loved the place always, feeling like Allenby that it represented the apex of his life. ‘There are many positions of authority and renown within and without the British Empire,’ he wrote in his memoirs, ‘but in a sense that I cannot explain there is no promotion after Jerusalem.’

Alas for Ronald Storrs, promotion came his way, and never again did he find a post so suited to his temperament. In 1926 he was 
appointed to govern Cyprus, and there he was faced with more brutal realities. In Jerusalem he had succeeded by art and sublety, by his own flair for the oblique and the elliptical. In Cyprus he must deal with Greeks and Turks whose methods of debate were murderous or arsonical. Cyprus had been effectively British since 1878, when Disraeli acquired it from the Turks as an outwork for Egypt, but it had never been a success. Its first British ruler had been Sir Garnet Wolseley, its first surveyor had been the young Herbert Kitchener, but by the 1920s it had decayed into an improvident and often incorrigible backwater. It was torn by a perpetual antipathy, between the Greeks who were the noisy majority of the islanders, and the Turks who were its stoic minority. In the days of the Victorian Empire, when an Englishman’s mere presence was often enough to restore order, these fractious neighbours had been generally subdued: by Storrs’ day, when the mystique of Empire had been sadly weakened, the island was habitually on the edge of chaos.

It was not that the British were unpopular. In the fifty years of their rule they had restored the island from desolation to a degree of fruitfulness, with irrigation works, new forests, roads, and all the usual material benefits of imperialism. They had even revived the wine industry, one of the oldest in the world but almost extinguished under the Muslim regime of the Turks. The trouble was that the Greek majority did not wish to be British citizens at all, however beneficial the Empire, but wished to be united with the Greek mainland, while the Turks viewed such an event with violent misgivings.

Poor Storrs, this was not his metier. With a somewhat desperate charm he did his best, presiding sympathetically over the Legislative Council, encouraging tourism and archaeology, patron to the Survey of Rural Life in Cyprus, joint editor of
The
Handbook
of
Cyprus
(Jubilee issue, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of British rule). He persuaded Queen Mary to give fifty books to the Nicosia Public Library. He attended the Chess Club once a week, and even went to the Boxing Tournament. He nagged the Colonial Office to give more money for agricultural research. He tried genuinely but ineffectively to reconcile Greeks and Turks through the medium of 
scholarship, music and the arts, as he had momentarily brought together Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, Orthodox and Catholic in Jerusalem.

Always, though, simmering beneath the surface of Cyprus, he felt the pressure of its old resentments, and heard the Greek call, more insistent every year, for
enosis
,
union with the motherland. He was not happy in the island. He despised many of his British subordinates, he detested the provincial narrowness of the imperial way, and he came to loathe the treacherous practitioners of Enosis. In 1928 he had a breakdown, and it took him eight months to recover: when he returned to Cyprus, it was to discover that charm was not enough, in geo-politics, and that even the best-intentioned imperial dilettante must have his enemies.

One night in 1931 he was dressing for dinner after spending a very characteristic evening, preparing Christmas presents for his staff—‘I remember writing Gunnis’s name in Enlart’s
Art
gothique
en
Chypre,
which Enlart himself had given me’—when a crowd of several thousand people stormed the gates of Government House, shouting
‘
Enosis!
Enosis!’
They broke all the front windows, and threw burning sticks and material into the house. The Riot Act was read, in English and in Greek, and a volley was fired by the police, but by the time the crowd had dispersed into the night, the house was in flames. It was made of wood, and in ten minutes Storrs had lost everything: all his books and all his letters, his Steinway and his mother’s violin, his Homer won as a prize at Charterhouse, his Byzantine ikons and his Sienese primitive—his wooden hawk from ancient Egypt, his Greek torsos and his Armenian trays of beaten copper. He was not a strong man, physically or even perhaps morally, and though he did his best to draw happy conclusions from these dismal events, still he left the island saddened and disillusioned—‘as for the things that went in Cyprus, perhaps they were taken because I cared for them too much….’

He achieved no more. He was a man of Empire only by force of circumstance, and he was not really sympathetic to the imperial ethos, or born to rule in distant places. His last appointment was the most truly imperial of all, Governor of Northern Rhodesia, but he was out of his element. Now in his fifties, he hated every moment 
of it—‘almost overwhelmingly disagreeable’, he found life in the village-capital of Lusaka,
sans
libraries,
sans
antiquities, with a heritage altogether alien to him and an imperial protocol so rigid that in a population of 1½ million the only black man whose hand he was permitted to shake was the Paramount Chief of Barotseland. Furse’s empire was not for Storrs. He hated the philistinism of it, he hated the arid white society, perhaps he even hated Africa. After only two years he retired to England, and there he lived happily enough, if disappointedly perhaps, ever after, lecturing, being charming to people, gracing innumerable societies, and writing his ornamental autobiography
Orientations,
the least imperial, most enjoyable and best selling of all imperial memoirs.
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