Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (53 page)

Everything Bailey did was vivacious, daring, and in the profoundest way innocent. Sometimes he disguised himself as a Buddhist monk, with a compass hidden in his prayer wheel—‘the usual secret
service agent’s equipment’, as he casually observed. Sometimes, menaced by murderous tribespeople, threatened by avalanches, pursued by furious messengers from Calcutta, he would pause to observe the habits of a hitherto unknown shrew (
Soriculus
baileyi
, no doubt), or take a cutting of a new rhododendron (
Rhododendron
baileyi
,
for instance). Once, swept away by a sudden snowslide, he saved himself only by the skilful handling of his butterfly net. Nothing daunted him, or suppressed his dry humour.
1
When he got home from Central Asia he married the daughter of a peer and retired to Norfolk, writing accounts of his great adventures, and slowly growing, as he aged, more and more like a Tibetan sage himself. (As for his friend Morshead, the happy companion of his great Tibetan journey, he was, so Bailey blandly recorded in his memoirs, ‘taking a peaceful ride one morning in Burma when he was murdered’.)
2

At another extreme St John Philby of Arabia expressed a darker side of the imperial spirit, its complexes and neuroses. He was the son of a colonial philanderer (and became the father of a Communist spy), and he spent his life restlessly betwixt and between: between patriotism and rejection, between anarchy and authority, between duty and impulse, between pathetic uncertainty and overwhelming pride, between Islam and Christianity, between the spell of Arabia and the loyalties of Westminster and Cambridge, between one wife and several mistresses. In many ways Empire was his whipping-boy, for upon it he unloaded his burden of bitterness, and in reaction to it he found his fulfilment.

He began his life, a salt fish in fresh water, as a member of the ICS, but the Great War took him to Iraq as an official of the occupying Government there. He quarrelled at once with nearly everybody
because he disapproved of the imperial policy, believing that an independent Iraqi Republic should be established; and though he later went on to serve the Emir Abdullah in Transjordan, he was never reconciled to the British presence among the Arabs, or the alliance with the Hashemites. Instead he presently devoted himself to the cause of the Saudis, the Hashemites’ most potent rivals, and became the greatest of all foreign travellers in their kingdom.

Philby had first visited the Arabian peninsula as a British civil servant, on a mission to Ibn Saud, but so enthralled was he by the personality of the king, so bewitched by the empty grandeur of the country, that he eventually left the imperial service and went to live there as a private citizen. He earned his living as the Ford agent in Saudi Arabia, but devoted his genius to the exploration of the desert. He was one of the first men to cross the peninsula east to west, the first thoroughly to explore its inner fastnesses. He mapped it all meticulously, kept exhaustive notes, and sent home to London box upon box of specimens, botanical, zoological, archaeological, geological—a colossal memorial to his own professionalism.

Yet he was never a happy man. He was never fulfilled by adventure itself, as men like Bailey were, and adventure offered him no simple purpose, as it gave the Calgary pioneers. He was a very clever man, but querulous: it was his misfortune to have started life as the servant of an Empire no longer sure of itself, for his career was one long unresolved squabble, not least with himself. He worshipped King Saud, an absolute monarch, with an adolescent fervour, yet came to loathe the British Empire for its despotism. He adopted Islam out of crass opportunism, yet constantly accused the Empire of hypocrisy. He was a revolutionary at the foot of the throne, a palace radical.

The older he got, the more Philby disliked the British, and vice versa, and the more alien he became to everything their Empire represented. All too often he was proved right, and he looks back at us from his many photographs, dressed generally in the full Arab mode, with a look of told-you-so: a foxy, conceited look, with a touch of sneer to it. Philby disassociated himself from the Empire, preferring private adventures to public: but no less eagerly the Empire disassociated itself from him, and this was perhaps because
its officials recognized in him some awkward reflections of their own self-doubts, and some disagreeable truths about dominion.
1

For self-doubt, self-recognition had now become part of the imperial condition, and not least among the adventurers. The cause was hazier now, they had no sense of civilizing mission, and their explorations were often, in the age of Freud and Jung, inner journeyings. Among the most introspective of the late imperial explorers was Henry George Watkins, ‘Gino’, who was born in 1907 and died in his twenty-fifth year. Watkins’ most celebrated exploit, his journey to Greenland in 1930, did indeed have a public purpose, but he really did it for his own reasons, to test himself, perhaps to compensate himself for missing the Great War. He seemed to his contemporaries the beau-ideal of the professional explorer. He was handsome not in an English kind, but Nordically, fair, sharp-featured, symmetrical, and he prepared himself with an un-English thoroughness for a life of physical endurance. As an undergraduate he climbed in the Alps, learned to fly, and led an expedition to Spitzbergen. Then he spent a year in Canada, exploring and surveying among the fur-trappers of the north. He was very hard and lean, very demanding of his comrades, and we are told he used to
run
home through the streets of London after all-night parties.

He was a man made for war, condemned to live in a brief period of peace. In 1930, though, a perfect opportunity arose for him. The Empire Airship Scheme was about to be launched by the R101, and one of its destinations was to be Canada. It was suggested that the best route for the airships might be not across the 2,000-mile expanse of the North Atlantic, but rather by the Great Circle route to the north, by way of Iceland, Greenland and Baffin Island: it was shorter, and it was said that the weather, to which the great
dirigibles were dangerously susceptible, was more stable. The least-known part of the route was the interior of Greenland, and an expedition was mounted to survey it and to record its weather conditions. The Royal Geographical Society and the British Government gave the expedition its support: ‘Gino’ Watkins, twenty-three years old, flyer, explorer, surveyor, leader-figure, was its ideal commander.

It was his one great achievement in life. He never married, and he was to die on a second visit to Greenland, two years later, when his kayak overturned in an icy fjord. The Arctic Air Route Expedition made a hero of him, and perhaps in a tragic way gave his life a richer meaning than most. Within its limits it was a perfect adventure, for it had a practical purpose but was attended by a certain symbolic brilliance. It was a young adventure, an adventure of young friends, concerned with modern matters, and led by this dazzling young Cambridge prodigy.

Watkins believed in living off the country. Though motor-boats and aircraft were used too, he proposed to travel across the Greenland ice-cap eskimo-style. He learnt all about dogs and sledges, and became a skilful handler of kayaks. He became a skilful handler of Eskimos, too, enjoying a succession of mistresses in the expedition’s base camp on the coast, and indeed his whole approach to adventure was functional, realist and amoral. He regarded himself as a machine to be tested, and he treated his expedition as a series of technical experiments, dispassionately conducted, with danger itself accepted as a scientific quantity.

They established a meteorological station in the mountainous interior of Greenland, planning to relieve it every month from their base camp on the coast, with the object of recording a full year’s weather. The weather itself was so terrible, though, with hurricane winds and visibility down to a few yards, that one member of the expedition, Augustine Courtauld, volunteered to stay at the station all alone from December to May. Long before he was relieved his hut was buried deep beneath the snow, and he had run out of fuel for heating or cooking: when the relief team arrived in the summer they could at first find no sign of him at all, only a slight mound in the snow where the station ought to be.

He survived in perfect health, but Watkins welcomed him back to base without surprise or emotion. His ordeal alone on the ice-cap were no more than an interesting trial of stamina and psychology: it was also very economical in manpower. Besides, was not the very discomfort of it a sort of satisfaction? On a plaque, painted in gold letters above the door of his hut, Watkins’ philosophy of adventure was declared in a verse by John Masefield, as true a Poet Laureate for the declining Empire as Tennyson had been for its materialist prime:

The most emblematic adventure, in these years of contrived excitement, was the protracted effort to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world. The Himalayan frontier was the most evocative of them all, and generations of Britons knew its seduction: the long heavenly treks through the rhododendrons, the myriad cuckoos of the foothills, the amiable slant-eyed indigenes, the dizzy rope bridges over unfathomable gulfs, the wood-fire smells and the roast potatoes, the heady local liquors, the obliging local monks, the flap of the prayer-flag and the creak of the holy wheel—and always beyond the trees and foothills, the celestial rampart of the snow-peaks.

Tremendously at the centre of these imperial delights stood Mount Everest, recognizably the greatest of mountains, from whose summit there habitually flew, high above the Tibetan frontier, a plume of white driven snow, like a defiance. For thirty years the British were the only climbers to attempt this ultimate peak, and their monopoly was purely a gift of Empire. Everest was a British preserve because it stood on the limits of the Indian Empire, the border between Nepal and Tibet passing across its summit, and in later years it became almost an Empire-substitute in itself, providing 
successions of sahibs, with their attendant bearers, a late adventure in the old style.

Everything about the Everest saga was imperial. The mountain was named, in 1849, for Sir George Everest, former Surveyor-General of India.
1
The first man to think seriously about climbing it was an Indian Army officer named Charles Bruce, who had travelled all over the Himalaya on military business and viewed the mountain with the speculative eye of the Great Game.
2
The first man to sponsor an expedition was Curzon—the plan was squashed by Whitehall, on the grounds that it might upset the Russians. The first man to get near the mountain was another Army officer, John Noel, who entered Tibet in disguise in 1913 and penetrated within forty miles of it.
3
The first President of the Everest Committee was Younghusband of Tibet. No wonder it was generally assumed that there were strategic motives behind the British affair with Mount Everest: in those days there certainly were, for either route to the mountain, from the Tibetan or the Nepalese flank, would take an expedition into sensitive frontier country never yet seen by Europeans.

The first full-scale reconniassance, in 1921, was indeed accompanied by a military survey team, led by Morshead, but the climbing parties that followed really were pure sport. They were the imperial impulse atrophied, in fact, or sublimated, for they had no purpose but themselves. Even the scientific usefulness of the Everest adventure, though it was repeatedly stressed for propriety’s
sake, was really vestigial. ‘I think the immense act’, wrote H. W. Tilman more frankly of the 1938 expedition, quoting Chesterton, ‘has something to it human and excusable: and when I endeavour to analyse the reason of this feeling I find it to lie, not in the fact that the thing was big or bold or successful, but in the fact that the thing was perfectly useless to everybody, including the person who did it.’ The great adventurers of the Victorian Empire, who had performed
their
immense acts in the causes of progress and power, would have squirmed in their graves to read it.

On the face of things the Everesters (as they called themselves) seemed the very type of the Empire-builder: Englishmen of the upper middle classes, Furse men, who went to Everest in a spirit of uncomplicated bravado. All the Everest expeditions between 1921 and 1938 reached the mountain through Tibet, by permission of the now restored and compliant Dalai Lama, and so it happened that six times in the post-war years jolly groups of Englishmen crossed the Tibetan frontier by Younghusband’s route, up the Chumbi valley along his old telegraph wire, and made their way across the wide gravelly steppe that lay beyond the Himalaya. The Everesters became well known along this esoteric route. A whole generation of Tibetan villagers grew up knowing them, and the great monastery of Rongbuk, almost in the northern shadow of Everest, became in the climbing season almost a British club, where the sahibs unbent themselves in the congenial company of the monks, and wrote up their journals beneath the flapping prayer-flags.

There they sprawl now in the statutory group photograph, 1921, 1922, 1924, 1933, 1936, 1938, among the tumbled scree of Base Camp or the shambled shrines of Rongbuk, dressed in a cheerful variety of climbing clothes, some casual, some exhibitionist, with school scarves, and old Army jerkins, and Tibetan boots, some in flapped astrakhan hats, some in caps bought long ago in Tyrol or Chamonix—bearded and dirty from the long march, but essentially clean-limbed, clean-living young Englishmen of the post-war generation, speaking a common language, sharing accepted values.