Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (52 page)

All this made many enemies. ‘Miss Kingsley’, wrote
Concord
, a pacifist magazine, ‘is a very unwomanly woman…. Her language is tainted with the demoralization of frontier life…. Her politics are bad, her economics worse, and her morals, in regard to these 
public concerns, worst of all.’ At the same time her robust sympathy with West African traditions, even down to slavery, horrified the imperial evangelists, and her championing of indirect rule, long before Lugard’s conversion, did not please the Whitehall supremacists. Purist eyebrows were raised when, invited to lecture to the London School of Medicine for Women, she chose as her topic ‘African Therapeutics from a Witch Doctor’s Point of View’.

But she was only ahead of her time. Indirect Rule was to become an imperial orthodoxy, economic influence would one day be the respectable euphemism for imperialism, the world was presently to share her view of
négritude
, and her vastly entertaining travel books were to amuse and instruct West African administrators for the rest of the Empire. She did not live to see these consequences, for all her adventuring lasted less than a decade. When the Boer War broke out she went to South Africa to nurse sick Boer prisoners of war at Simonstown. From them she picked up enteric fever, and she was buried, as she had characteristically asked, at sea.

And most remarkable of all was Gertrude Bell. We have already seen her from a distance—in a fox fur and a flowered hat at the Cairo Conference of 1922—for out of her journeys she had become, not a critic of Empire, but one of its pillars. She was a more obviously brilliant woman than Mary Kingsley, but less surprising. The daughter of a celebrated Durham ironmaster, she was the first woman to win a first class degree in modern history at Oxford, and her earliest travels were proper peregrinations in the tradition of the Grand Tour, round the world once, climbing the Alps, staying with diplomatic representatives in embassies here and there. But she learnt Persian, and so acquiring a taste for the Islamic east, went to Jerusalem when she was thirty-one to learn Arabic. Soon she was deep within the Arab subject, linguistically, archaeologically, and presently politically. She travelled all over Syria, down the Euphrates to Karbala, northward through Mosul into Asia Minor, and finally, in the most ambitious of her projects, deep into the Arabian interior to the desert city of Hail.

The Great War gave purpose to these extraordinary experiences, for on the strength of them Gertrude Bell joined the Arab Bureau, then busily mobilizing British expertise about the Arabs. So she became one of the original British administrators of occupied Iraq, where as Oriental Secretary she played a key role in the enthronement of the Hashemites. For the last seven years of her life, in her fifties, she was the most powerful woman in the British Empire, and politically one of the most powerful in the world. She never married, remaining all her life faithful to the memory of her only love, a British officer killed in the war, but she never suffered the taint of the blue-stocking, for she was delightful in her emancipation. At Government meetings her opinion was generally decisive; at Arab gatherings sheikhs and even princes, anxiously peering across the assembly in the direction of Miss Bell, would await her nod or flickering eye before committing themselves to a course of conduct—

She was full of paradox. She loved clothes and hats and textiles, but she was tough as nails, riding every morning, swimming the Tigris frequently. She was a prime agent of the policy which made Iraq a puppet-State of Great Britain, but she was genuinely concerned for the independence of the Arabs. A tall, sharp-nosed, angular woman, red-haired and green-eyed, it was the fact that she
was
a woman that made a legend of her, for temperamentally she was not of the heroic mould, and the proudest of her achievements was the creation of the Baghdad Museum—‘like the British Museum, only a little smaller’. Yet briefly, perhaps luckily, a legend she became—‘The Arabs’, it said hopefully on the plaque they erected to her in the Museum, ‘will always hold her memory in reverence’—and every traveller to Baghdad wished to set eyes on her, meet her at a party, or best of all take tea with her in her house beside the river, cluttered with books, shards, maps, flowers and new evening dresses just arrived from England.

There is an old photograph of a garden party in Baghdad which 
illuminates this reputation. Its central figure is King Feisal, dressed in military uniform with medal ribbons, and there are a few sheikhs in the garden, and many British officers in topees, and two or three Englishwomen in long dresses, wearing elaborate hats and carrying parasols rather like Lady Pellatt in Toronto. A faded string of flags hangs above their heads, and the party appears to be happening in a decaying botanical garden, with banked lines of flower-pots, and a tangle of palms behind.

A row of kitchen chairs and an elderly sofa have been arranged for the principal guests, and on one of them, half-turned from the camera, sits Miss Gertrude Bell the Oriental Secretary, next to the king. She is having her cigarette lighted by an attentive Englishman in a trilby hat, and she is wearing a dark shady hat with flowers on it (by Anne Marie of Sloane Street), a long pale dress with some sort of ornamental belt, and white high-heeled shoes. What is it about her that compels the eye? Why do we look at her, rather than at comfortable Mrs G, on the other side of the king, or Mrs H who stands so daintily with her husband the general on the right flank of the picture? It is not that Miss Bell is about to smoke a cigarette, not that she carries no parasol, nor even that she seems to sit in that rather bony, defiant way characteristic of progressive women of the day. It is the fact that, as everyone in that picture knows, as she undoubtedly knows better than anyone, she represents Power. In her slim cottony figure imperial authority is improbably concentrated. The plump sheikh behind looks at her rather apprehensively; the king waits politely for a light himself; and nice Mrs G, one cannot help surmising, is thinking to herself really, that woman does give herself airs.
1

H
ARD times had come for the British people, in the years of slump and unemployment: terrible times were approaching, as the world walked like a blind man once again towards the precipice of war. Fifty years before the possession of Empire had offered an element of circus, to make up for the shortage of bread, and to a minority of Englishmen still it provided the stimulus of challenge and response, keeping their minds perhaps, like healthy team games at school, off more debilitating topics.

In the past the adventure of it had been something more, and had been a principal urge towards sovereignty—

Every adventurous taste was provided for then, in the boom days of Empire: the frissons of exploration, speculation, prospecting or war; the call of the pioneer’s trek and the settlers’ bivouac; the grand excitement of emigration itself, to a new life on the frontiers. Even the imperial proletarians, the private soldiers, often prided themselves on the challenging hardship of it all. They called the South African sun ‘McCormick’ but loved to boast about the heat of it;
they called the North-West Frontier ‘The Grim’, but shared their officers’ wry regard for its murderous Pathans; they absorbed affectionately into their folklore the horrific hazards of life on the Indian plains, where strong men were said to lose their potency through eating mango skins, and the noxious air of the Terai was composed of the breath of serpents.

The Empire had been a gigantic employment exchange for the adventurous. We see its solitary clients, for instance, penetrating disguised into Tibet or Turkestan, to be thrown into verminous dungeons by Khans of Bokhara, or strangled in Afghan marketplaces. We see them struggling over the Chinook Pass into the goldfields of the Yukon, or hastening on dromedaries towards the ambush of the Khalifa. We see Professor E. H. Palmer of Oxford murdered by Bedouin during an Arabian intelligence survey in 1882, or Bishop French of Lahore dying in Muscat after his forlorn attempt to proselytize the fanatic Omanis—‘I cannot say that I have met with many thoughtful and encouraging hearers or people who want Bibles and Testaments.’

For many people the instinct of adventure was killed in the Great War. It died with Rupert Brooke and his poetry, was buried with the bitter epitaphs of the war poets, and was one with the million ghosts who haunted the schools and universities of England.

Many a Briton swore, when he returned from the trenches, that he would never go abroad again, let alone risk his life in any cause.
Security was the national aim, preferable without exertion, and thought it proved an illusory hope, still the average Englishman disregarded the imperial challenge now, and preferred to make the best things at home.

Yet adventure was in some sense the deepest truth of Empire. The craving for excitement, the yearning to break out, was perhaps the profoundest of all the imperialist motives. It was not dead yet, and throughout these decades one may observe it still, held in trust so to speak, or latent, until history once again required it.

Some Englishmen still went to be pioneers. They were seldom pioneers in the rawest kind, for most of the Empire’s arable land had been exploited now, and everywhere the reach of Government had brought order and restraint to the frontiers. There were plenty of communities, though, which retained some of the old fizz, in the second or third generation of their citizens, where newcomers still felt themselves to be frontiersmen, and looked back with relief, sometimes condescension, to more ordinary places left behind.

In the spring of 1927, for example, a group of 300 British families, escaping the hunger-strikes and dole queues of England, emigrated with Government help to Alberta, and so found themselves in an authentic frontier-town of the British Empire, Calgary. It was a cow-town, as in the movies, and by the standards of the emigrants, inconceivably remote, being three days by train from Toronto. Just getting there was an adventure. In summer the journey could be dramatic enough, when the sun probed relentlessly through the chinks of the window-blinds, and made the waiters sweat in their high-buttoned jackets, but in the winter it was terrific. When the station-masters at the prairie halts put on their astrakhan hats and fur coats, when the snow lay feet deep through the forests, and the conifers creaked and drooped with the weight of it, when the fish lay embalmed in their frozen lakes, and a man could get frost-bitten crossing the village street—when the ice-grey skies of winter, like gun-metal, lay glowering and magnificent over the prairies, then 
the newcomer from Salford, Hull or Manchester felt he was venturing indeed.

‘Calgary coming up! Calgary ten minutes!’—and there it was now, the first dirt roads running into the outskirts of town, the first scattered houses clamped against the cold, a clutter of sheds and marshalling yards, a hiss of the brakes, a shudder, and there already at the door was the conductor with his little wooden steps, accepting gratuities. At once you were in the middle of town, for like most imperial frontier settlements Calgary was built around the railway station. It was very thin on the ground—just a huddle of dowdy buildings around the tracks, with the limitless prairie everywhere beyond—and even in 1927 it was still in Indian country. There were people alive who had signed Treaty No 7 with the local tribes, and the Blackfoot, Blood, Piegan and Sarcees, in their reservation down the Sarcee Trail, were still paid five dollars a head annually in Government stipend, ‘for as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers run’. There was no suburbia to Calgary. There it stood, take it or leave it, with the prairie all around, the Indians down the road, and the railroad running on to the Rockies and the Pacific.

It was still a very British frontier town, scarcely alarming to our apprehensive newcomers. Life was brash by Canadian standards, but only in a boyish and endearing way. There was a red light district beyond Centre Street, one heard, where the cowhands found their comforts, and there were a few discreetly unprosecuted gambling joints, one was led to believe, in the little Chinatown towards the river: but for the most part, like many twentieth-century imperial adventures, the adventure of Calgary was fundamentally
wholesome.
The crooked policeman was unknown there, the roads were safe for all, and there had not been an illegal still in those parts since the Mounties cleared up the border bad-men half a century before.

Why, even the Prince of Wales had bought a ranch nearby, and visitors with posher credentials than ours could be sure of a genteel welcome. The grand families of Calgary, the Hulls, the Lougheeds, the Burns lived in enfilade well south of the railway tracks, training their guns upon each other and upon visiting celebrities. They had 
built themselves elaborate villas on the prairie edge, with verandahs and dormer windows and scalloped eaves, and sometimes they flew Union Jacks largely on their lawns. Old Country cricket was regularly reported in the
Calgary
Herald
,
the Palliser Hotel had often been host to Dukes and Senior Officers, the Ranchmen’s Club was all cigars and mahogany, the schools faithfully honoured Empire Day.

Yet even Lady Lougheed was proud to boast herself a frontierswoman—did not the family firm of Lougheed and Taylor announce themselves on their office door as ‘Western Pioneers’? The great event of the Calgary year was the annual Stampede, when ranchers and stockmen, breeders and cowboys came to town from all over, but some of the swagger of that event lasted all year through. Calgary was full of characters, remarkable to immigrant eyes. Stylish rich ranchers, many of them American-born, strolled about in wide Stetsons and elegant boots, and gave a patrician glamour to the Ranchmen’s Club. Wild itinerant gypsies drifted in, to camp with their horses and trailers beside the railway tracks. Blanketed Indians, still be-feathered sometimes, hung about town at every intersection. Gloomy Hutterite Anabaptists, in cotton blankets and black Ukrainian hats, came shopping from their prairie communes.
1
Often cowhands clattered ostentatiously through town, and there were Russian horse-buyers sometimes, and prospectors of varying ambition, and the usual imperial assortment of remittance-men, drop-outs and loiterers.

It
was
an adventure. Calgary was not a substitute for older societies, but an alternative: it was loyal to the Empire, none loyaller, but it offered a true rebirth for people of the British stock. Our 300 families did not find it easy living. The great depression hit Alberta too, and between 1920 and 1930 not a single new office building was erected in Calgary. Life was demanding still in the Canadian west, and now and then, one may imagine, the new settlers pined for the hugger-mugger of a back-to-back terrace, or wished they could chalk a bitter up again on the slate of the Red Lion. They mostly prospered in the end, though. The Calgary instinct for success, if it
was dashed one day, was likely to be boosted the next. Every night, when our homesick Britons went to bed, they could see a flickering blaze in the northern sky. It lit up the whole prairie, like a violent aurora, and was to remain for many of them the most pervading memory of their whole adventure, so different was it from anything at home, so strange, so theatrical. It was the glow of the burning gases from the Turner Valley oilfields, the first of the Alberta oil strikes, and it hung there like a banner over Calgary, an earnest of gambler’s luck.
1

This was adventure of an organic kind, a last excitement of the migratory urge. Another old thrill of Empire, still fitfully available in the twentieth century, was the thrill of exploration. The Empire had been the greatest of explorers’ patrons. Under its auspices half the world had been penetrated, surveyed, mapped and tabulated, sometimes for strategic or economic reasons, sometimes in the interests of pure science. The islands of the south seas, the sources of the Nile, the Himalayan massif, the Canadian north, the Australian outback—all these wild or inaccessible places had been brought within the cognizance of western man by the agency of the British Empire.

There were still a few regions to be explored in the imperial interest, and a handful of men seized their chances still. Their motives, like their temperaments, greatly varied, for the imperial purpose was itself diffuse now, and men could read into it what they wished. F. M. Bailey of Tibet, for instance, bespoke all that was most fun about the great adventure. He was a soldier, the son of a soldier, and he first went to Tibet with Younghusband in 1904—seven years later, when the Dalai Lama escaped from the Chinese revolution into India, it was Bailey who hit upon the plan of disguising him as a
dak
wallah
, a postal runner, actually giving him
the mail-bags, and so smuggling him through the Chinese frontier posts.
1
Thereafter Bailey lived a life of magnificent hazard. He learnt Tibetan, his examiner being Sarat Chandra Das, the Bengali agent who was the original of Hurry Chunder Mokerjee in Kipling’s
Kim
, and after several more journeys within the forbidden country, feeding intelligence to the Indian Government, he evolved a grand ambition: to solve the mystery of the Tsangpo gorges.

Nobody then knew how the Tsangpo, the greatest river of Tibet, flowed through the north-eastern part of the country to become the Brahmaputra. Bailey prepared for years to find out. He perfected his colloquial Tibetan, he read every available book, and in 1913 he and an equally imperturbable colleague, Captain H. T. Morshead, secretly set off up the Dihang river, over the Tibetan frontier towards the ravines. Ostensibly they were defying their superiors’ prohibitions, actually they were spies.

They succeeded triumphantly. Not only did they solve the problems of the river itself, but they mapped large parts of the Tibetan frontier for the first time, they produced a detailed report of the border peoples, they cracked the esoteric riddle of the Eared Pheasant, and they discovered the blue Himalayan poppy,
Meconopsis
betonicifolia
baileyi
, which was to augment the incomes of seedsmen all over the world. Bailey went on to still more exciting adventures, as a secret agent in Central Asia during the Great War, and most melodramatically of all as a spy against the Bolsheviks in Russian Turkestan after the revolution. But it was the great Tibetan journey which was his triumph, and would be remembered as one of the last great strokes of imperial skulduggery.