Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (51 page)

A
N allegorical factor in that withdrawal was the advance of women. Empire had generally been unkind to women (to British women, that is, for the women of the subject races had often benefited greatly, being relieved from the necessity of self-immolation or barbaric surgery, spared the hazards of slavery or tribal war, and occasionally persuaded to regard their husbands as less than god-like after all). Empire marched uneasily with the feminine principle. ‘We’re not pleasant in India‚’ says Heaslop the City Magistrate in
A
Passage
to
India,
‘and we don’t intend to be pleasant’, but his mother disapproves. ‘God has put us on the earth to be pleasant to each other … and He is omnipresent, even in India, to see how we are succeeding.’ Now, in the 1930s, the principle of being pleasant to people was gaining ground on the principle of being strong, and Mrs Heaslop’s view of Empire was imperceptibly leading to its dissolution.

In theory the British Empire was staunchly feminist—the first women in the world to get the vote were those of the Isle of Man, the next were those of New Zealand.
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In practice it was a purveyor of female heartbreak, relative or complete, temporary or life-long. The imperial memorials were full of women’s sadness: dead babies, fatal pregnancies, early widowhoods, disease, loneliness, terrible boredom, perpetual separations, the bicker and envy of small isolated communities, the gnaw of homesickness and regret. The Empire’s wars had deprived millions of mothers of their young sons. The adventure of Empire had destroyed countless families, and
condemned thousands more to unhealthy alien climes, where for a couple of centuries the memsahibs and others tried to recreate, with their flowered curtains and their drooping cottage gardens, some sad verisimilitude of home.

To add insult to melancholy, it had become popular to blame women for the Empire’s decline. The imperialist attitude to the sex had detectably changed over the years. In mid-Victorian times the memsahib and her kind were sacrosanct, figures of porcelain perfection, above and apart from ordinary human functions, to be cherished tenderly in life and Mourned Perpetually in death. By Kipling’s day the memsahib had become a more fallible figure, and his Mrs Hawksbee, bitchy, snobby and conniving, became the fictional archetype of the imperial female. The ladies’ drawing room at the United Service Club at Simla was nicknamed ‘the snake-pit’, and the doughty novelist Maud Diver, a bold supporter of General Dyer and an imperialist to the core, felt obliged to write a book specifically to restore the damaged reputation of her sisters.

With the 1920s an element of bantering contempt entered the Empire’s attitudes to its women. ‘The hen-house’ was now the epithet for ladies’ annexes in the imperial clubs, and women’s efforts to fulfil their own potential, physically and intellectually, were generally greeted with affectionate and patronizing amusement. Later still their effect on Empire was represented as baleful. Until the women came, it was suggested in clubs and bar-rooms around the world, the Empire had been invincible. The British male, as everyone knew, was frank, fearless and no respecter of persons—the natives knew where they stood with him, an Englishman’s word was his bond and all that. Besides, there was nothing like a bit of black to cement race relations, was there? Living dictionaries, as they used to say! It was the damned memsahibs who wrecked it all. ‘Mark my words old boy, if the women had never come we’d still be on top of the world. What will it be now? No no, old boy, it’s my round …
Bearer!
’

There was something to this beery myth. Many women, like many men, were devoted to the country of their adoption—often their countries of birth indeed, especially in Anglo-Indian families. Few women, though, were imperialists. The Empire offered them so
little. They were denied most of its chances and half its stimulations, and if it is true that they were often more race-conscious than their menfolk, equally they were much less ambitious to rule other peoples. The notorious absurdities of the memsahibs, satirized for so long by male writers, were generally only the frustrated expressions of unhappiness, fear, homesickness and waste—for surrounded as she generally was by servants, denied any real responsibility, the woman of Empire often felt herself to be no more than an ornamental, and progressively more
un
-ornamental, supernumerary. Nobody wanted her to be too clever, still less politically concerned. Any attempt to break from the herd would damage her husband’s career. All too often the climate, the society and the way of life sapped her desire to be beautiful. Male values were supreme almost everywhere in the British Empire, and even the family role, even motherhood itself, was forlornly disrupted by constant moves and partings.

How sad it was! The girls who flocked bright-eyed to India, Malta or Egypt, ‘the Fishing-Fleet’ as they were cruelly called, all too often returned sad-eyed and sallow, when thirty years later their husbands reluctantly retired at last, and they settled alien and out of touch at Guildford or Yelverton, all their imperial pretensions crumbled, all their memories rather a bore. No wonder, in their exiled prime, they were often supercilious and overbearing: there was purpose to their husbands’ imperialism, fun too very often, but there was not much satisfaction to their own.

Yet out of the generalizations, a thousand brilliant exceptions spring, for if the Empire did not offer much to the average woman, it was fertile in opportunity for the maverick, the solitary, the rebel and the visionary. The imperial adventure sharpened the outlines of exceptional men, and even more did it bring into focus the gifts of remarkable women, for the very fact of their independent presence on the frontiers marked them out as special.

Some were women who, for all the restrictions of their status, actively responded to the imperial idea: some were women who 
passionately opposed it. It was after all a matriarch’s Empire, and Victoria herself had always been able to see in it womanly terms, a gigantic family strewn around the globe for whom she was a universal Earth-Mother. It was true that she never ventured deeper into her domains than Ireland, but she was with all her dear peoples night and day in spirit, which was in many ways just as demanding as going there in person. The evangelical aspect of Empire held a true appeal for many women not only because, like Victoria, they wished to be good, but also because the mission stations of India and Africa offered them rare chances of active service in the field. Many an adventurous Englishwoman found her fulfilment looking after lepers in Bengal, teaching Dinka children in the southern Sudan, nursing sick Eskimos, vainly trying to persuade the Ashanti towards a Truer Light, or even, like the indefatigable Mrs Dorothy Brooke of Cairo, rescuing from their miseries the derelict quadrupeds of the fellahin.

Often in their pursuit of the good, they came up against the mighty. Smuts was not being altogether flattering when he called Emily Hobhouse ‘the eternal woman’: having been Kitchener’s scourge in the Boer War—‘that bloody woman’—she went on to nag Smuts to distraction towards racial enlightenment, and was one of the few people who presumed to offer moral guidance to Gandhi. Lady Anne Blunt, who raised her magnificent Arab horses almost in the shadow of the Pyramids, and was often to be seen careering across the desert in full Arab costume, was a staunch ally of her husband Wilfrid, the gadfly of Empire, and disconcerted all the Cairo hostesses by her wilful combination of radicalism and aristocracy. Who could be more aggravating to Authority than stumpy Annie Besant, henchwoman of the Mahatma, founder of the Theosophist cult, socialist, atheist, strike-leader, Indian nationalist, imprisoned for subversion but becoming in the end, in a triumph of will over circumstance, President of the Indian National Congress? Or who more infuriating than the handsome Countess Markievicz, née Gore-Booth, who was born a favoured child of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, admired by Edward VII, but who went on to command the Irish rebels in St Stephen’s Green during the six days of the Easter Rising?

These were rebels all, but there were many more who influenced events obliquely, within the system. There were women who flatly refused to go to the Hills, and by staying with their husbands in the sweltering plains of the Indian summer, helped to shatter the myth of female uselessness and fragility. There were women like Helen Younghusband, who furiously advanced her husband’s interests whatever the opposition—she was, it was said, ‘inordinately proud of him, and despises the whole race of officials’. While Lutyens was building the Viceroy’s house his wife Emily was organizing crêches for the women labourers on the site—the first in India. While Frederick Lugard was presiding over the destinies of Nigeria his formidable wife Flora, confidante if not fellow-conspirator of Rhodes and Jameson, was powerfully propagating his ideas to captive visitors in the Gubernatorial drawing-room.

There were women who flew aeroplanes around the Empire, like Amy Johnson. There were women who treated Empire as a holiday, like merry Sarah Wilson in her Mafeking dug-out, or as a protracted nature ramble, like the painter Marianne North, who spent fifteen years depicting the imperial flora, including five species she discovered for herself. The Irishwoman Daisy Bates deserted her husband but became the most influential friend of the Australian aborigines, while Lady Florence Dixie, daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry, was one of the earliest champions of the Zulus. Mary Slessor, raised in a Scottish slum, spent nearly forty years as a missionary on the Niger coast, and ended up as British Vice-Consul in Okoyong. Clara Butt, a 6-foot 2-inch contralto, sang ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ with such incomparable diapason that she became, in the first quarter of the twentieth century, the very voice of Empire.
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Several great women travellers were sponsored by the fact of Empire—great not merely because of their journeys, but because of the use they made of them. They were seldom adventurers of the absolute kind, seeking excitement for its own sake. They went to achieve something, and the danger was incidental.

The brief travels of Mary Kingsley, for instance, influenced the course of history in West Africa. She was a marvellous traveller, but an even more enterprising political theorist. A doctor’s daughter, a niece of Charles Kingsley the novelist, she had no formal education at all, and until she was thirty stayed at home and helped to look after the family: but when her parents died in 1892, and she was free to pursue her own fulfilment, she sailed away alone to Africa, a late Victorian spinster, to collect zoological specimens and study ancient cultures. Her fame was established by two tremendous journeys, both completed within four years, across great slabs of forbidding country almost unknown to Europeans before—to Kabinda and Matadi on the Congo, up the Ogowe river through the perilous rapids of N’Ojele, across the cannibal Fan country, around the obscure Lake Ncovi, to the dim island of Corisco, and finally to the summit of Mungo Mah Lobeh, the Great Cameroon, 14,000 feet above the sweltering desert of the Wouri!

Even the names of her itineraries sounded scarcely lady-like, and indeed of all the imperial explorers of Africa Mary Kingsley was the most astonishing. She was the born free-lance. She had no rich institutional supporters, but paid her way by trading in palm oil and rubber as she wandered. She was not a beautiful woman, and preferred to wear, so she said herself, ‘elderly housekeeper’s attire’—Africans, puzzled by the effect, frequently called her ‘Sir’. Many people she instantly antagonized—‘I do not worship at the shrine myself’, said Lugard, and the mandarins of the Colonial Office came to detest her. Many more, and especially Africans, she instantly charmed, with her zest, her courage and her long, funny face.

She was an imperialist of a particular and then unfashionable kind. At a time when Empire was presenting itself to the world as a privilege and a mission, Mary Kingsley saw it as Trade. Especially
in West Africa, she thought, trade should be its
sine
qua
non
,
and she struck up an unexpected alliance with the great Liverpool merchant houses which, having been deprived of their West African slave trade half a century before, now dealt in the cocoa and copra of Nigeria and the Gold Coast. Mary Kingsley used to boast that some of her own ancestors had been slave traders, and she had nothing but contempt for the windbag pretensions of the New Imperialism. She despised missionaries, too, loathed Little Englanders, and called herself ‘a hardened, unreformed imperial expansionist’.

Hers was Rhodes’ view of Empire, ‘philanthropy plus five per cent’, pursued with a sense of practical style, and a dignified respect, without hypocrisy or condescension, for the native civilizations. She had strong views about race. The African, she allowed, was probably inferior to the white man, but what was much more important, he was
different.
His virtues and vices were arranged in a different way, and he was no more an undeveloped white man than a rabbit was an incipient hare. The African approached life more spiritually, and if he was to be educated, he must not be forced into European modes of thought. He was not a mere cipher, to be manipulated as Empire willed. He was, Miss Kingsley provocatively thought, very likely the archetype of World Man.

Commerce was to be the bridge, by which the Empire reached the truth about these peoples. She viewed the project romantically. ‘You great merchant adventurers of England,’ she once reproached the sober and bourgeois business community of Liverpool, ‘you great adventurers must pull yourselves together, and become a fighting force, and a governing force!’ Traders were the true experts of Empire, knowing more, and having a more genuine stake in their territories than any colonial officials. Traders had no wish to change the natives, who were perfectly profitable as they were. Traders had no fancy notions, as Mary Kingsley put it, ‘about the native being a man and a brother’. The trading instinct was the key to progress—to dominion, stability and power.