Pax Britannica (48 page)

The social structure of the Navy, though not so archaic as the Army’s, was still based upon privilege. The executive branch of the service was very smart, and in 1897 its officers included two princes, two dukes, a viscount, a count, an earl, four lords by courtesy, eight baronets and thirty-five honourables. There were twelve titled captains (though they also included Captain John Locke Marx), and they lived very much like gentlemen. To get good stewards they often chipped in out of their own pocket, sometimes doubling a man’s official pay, if they thought he could add suavity to the hospitality. A senior officer’s servants became in effect his personal retainers: a captain’s coxswain would move with him from ship to ship, familiar with all his foibles, until in the end, very often, he retired ashore with him, to serve him as a salty kind of butler in his old age. An admiral, whose standard pay was
£
5 a day, was entitled to a personal establishment of a secretary, a flag lieutenant, a coxswain and ten domestic servants, and wherever he went on the Navy’s service he found awaiting him an exceedingly comfortable Admiralty House: tropically terraced on the bay at Trincomalee, demurely Georgian at English Harbour in Antigua, ecclesiastically Victorian, like a rectory, at Esquimalt in British Columbia, or tucked away up a solitary creek at Simon’s Bay in South Africa, where the Admiral Commanding used to anchor his flagship directly outside Admiralty House, and there were always live turtles tied to the end of his jetty, waiting to be turned into soup.

The executive branch looked haughtily down at the engineering branch—‘mechanics’, ‘greasers’, ‘whose mammas’, as the radical Fisher once said, ‘were not asked to take tea with other mammas’. In the 1890s the engines of a ship were generally as distasteful to the executive officer as the tank was later to become to the disinherited cavalry, and there was still a nostalgic yearning for the great days of sail. (‘Great satisfaction was manifested at Portsmouth’, we read, when the brig
Sealark
,
which had been delayed by gales, beat up from the eastward for the Jubilee review under a full head of sail.) Hardly a single officer of gentle birth was prepared to
learn the messy mechanical trade, and the engineering branch was full of names like Samuel Rock, Elijah Tricker and Daniel Griffin, contrasting hornily with the Frederick W. Talbot Ponsonbys or the Honourable Henry A. Scudamore Stanhopes up on the bridge. As for the ratings, their pay could be as low as 7d a day, their quarters at sea were revoltingly cramped, and they had to eat their miserable victuals with their fingers, knives and forks being considered prejudicial to naval discipline and manliness. The Navy had no shore barracks—between commissions the seamen lived in old line-of-battle hulks. They were given no physical training,
1
and half of them could not swim.

The Royal Navy was an intensely conservative body, wrinkled with quaint anomalies. The Board of Admiralty was a gilded relic of earlier centuries, meeting in its beautiful eighteenth-century chambers in Whitehall, and acting as patron to several church livings, including that of Alston with Garrigill and Humshaugh. The Navy list included eight ancient functionaries called Vice-Admirals of the Coast of Great Britain, and four Vice-Admirals of Ireland. All in all, there was a marvellously humorous fascination to this force. For its officers life was often one long working holiday, full of high spirits and good company: and the ratings, too, for all their harsh conditions, were generally loyal to the service for life, and unshakeably proud of it—group photographs of ships’ companies emanate a delightful sense of cocky cheerfulness, very different from the moustachioed melancholy that seemed to hang around the crews of French or Russian ironclads.

It was very much an imperial Navy. It was excellent at showing the flag, charming important guests, overawing recalcitrant natives, rescuing shipwrecked mariners, relieving the victims of natural disasters, looking splendid and behaving stylishly. Maltese boatmen were carried on flagships of the Mediterranean Fleet, together with their high-prowed gondola-like
dgbaisas
: and nothing was more colourfully imperial than the sight of one of these bright-painted craft, lowered from the deck of a British man-o’-war, gliding ashore
with its swarthy Latin oarsman at the stern and a party of laughing English officers in its cushioned seats. Sometimes there were Navy scares in Britain, and alarmists made the flesh creep with talk of immense building programmes abroad, new kinds of Russian turret-ship, or much improved torpedoes in France. They always subsided after a month or two. The British had absolute confidence in their Navy. It was supreme. It had always won. It glittered, and was much loved.

British naval strategy, such as it was, had been distorted by the allure of Empire. The days of gunboat diplomacy were over, and the Fleet was dispersed to meet enemies that were never likely to arise, or to cope with situations that were not really relevant. What the country really needed was not far-flung magnificence, but modern strategic planning, concentrated force, and Admirals whose vision went farther than the good of the service, and glimpsed the world beyond the Sultan’s reception or the Ambassador’s ball for the Fleet. In the past, before imperialism glazed the British vision, the dangers of dispersal had often been more clearly seen. Sydney Smith once observed that the British maintained garrisons ‘on every rock in the ocean where a cormorant could perch’, and Sir William Molesworth told the Commons in the 1840s that ‘activated by an insane desire of worthless Empire, into every corner of our colonial empire we thrust an officer with a few soldiers; in every hole and corner we erect a fortification, build a barracks, or cram a storehouse full of perishable stores’.
1

The New Imperialists saw things differently. For them the Empire was itself the chief concern of British policy, and the BlueWater Policy, the thesis that Britain was best defended by the
widely dispersed force of the Navy, was paramount. Seapower alone, Monypenny thought, had made Britain the supreme regulating power of the earth: it was the ubiquity of the British presence, in all five continents, that was the strength of the island kingdom. Other theorists believed that the cruces of British power were no longer in the United Kingdom at all. Some saw the Mediterranean as the centre of imperial gravity, others Canada, with its coasts on two oceans, its limitless resources and its new transcontinental railway line—the defence of Canada, wrote L. S. Amery,
1
was the very touchstone of imperialism, to which every other consideration must give way.

So the initiate of Empire, as he sailed proprietorially along the sea routes, looked out with complacent pride at the scattered seabastions of the Flag. They were like policemen on duty, ensuring all was well. As spectacles they could certainly be superb. Gibraltar from the deck of a passing ship was splendid and terrible enough to move even that lifelong opponent of imperialism, W. S. Blunt—‘
God!
to
hear
the
sweet
shrill
treble
of
her
fifes
upon
the
breeze!
’ With the semaphores on its ramparts, the battleships at its feet, the distant sound of bugles from its barracks beneath the Rock, Gibraltar was like a declaration of intent to the passing voyager: what we have, it seemed to say, we hold. Malta was terrific, too, with the warships steaming in and out of Grand Harbour beneath the fortifications of the Knights—‘I would rather see the British on the heights of Montmartre,’ Napoleon had said, ‘than in possession of Malta.’ Hong Kong, bustling on the rim of China, was like a great British dynamo pulsing away in the East, and at Trincomalee—‘Trinco’ to the Navy—the Royal Navy had built its base on one of the grandest of all harbours, big enough to shelter the entire Eastern Fleet: the dockyard lay in the lee of a palm-covered ridge, and a gigantic banyan tree, all knotted and gnarled, gave shade to the Admiral’s garden.

Most hauntingly of all, the traveller might find his way to Ban try Bay, on the west coast of Ireland, at a time when the Channel
Fleet was lying there on exercise. Not a glimpse or a hint of its presence would he discover, as he travelled through the bare Caha Mountains: but as he crossed the last ridge above Bantry, there in the long desolate fjord below him, hidden away among the hills, suddenly he would see the fleet, brilliantly alive. There the great ships lie, black, white and yellow, bow to stern in their anchorage, some with sails furled above their high funnels, some with barbette guns like forts upon their decks. Steam pinnaces chug officiously across the bay, with gigantic ensigns preposterously out of scale at their sterns, and bearded sailors swanky with their boat-hooks. There are jolly-boats rowing smartly down from Bere Haven, and flags flying everywhere, and a tremendous sense of disciplined agitation, painting, polishing, saluting, men swarming up steel ladders, officers alert on white scrubbed bridges and over all a drift of black smoke from fifty yellow smoke-stacks.

Perhaps there is the thump of a band at practice, from the Admiral’s flagship down the bay, echoing over the water behind the hammering and the shouting of orders, the beat of machinery and the laughter. Or perhaps, as the traveller stands there marvelling, there is a sharp panting and scuffling out of sight, and over the ridge appears a landing-party of half a dozen sweating bluejackets, slung around with webbing equipment, wearing khaki gaiters and carrying rifles: stocky thicknecked fellows who talk to each other breathlessly and obscenely in West Country accents, and are led at a stumbling half-trot by a midshipman so pink, so white, so maddeningly sure of himself, so dapper in his white stiff collar and cording, that he might have stepped straight from a serial in the
Boy’s
Own
Paper
,
‘There she lies, men,’ he pipes as they pause for a moment on the grassy ridge, and look back to the ships below.

‘There she bloody lies,’ murmur the seamen
sotto
voce
in reply; ‘there she lies, you lucky buggers.’

‘
P
ASSP0RTS
’ ( said Baedeker, 1887): ‘These documents are not
necessary in England, though sometimes useful in procuring delivery of registered
poste
restante
letters. A
visa
is quite needless.’

With such an indulgent ease did England admit her visitors in those days, and the foreigner from more shuttered and suspicious States must have felt he was entering an imperially spacious kingdom. Once inside, however, he would find surprisingly little physical evidence that this was an imperial kingdom at all. The only two imperial events mentioned in Herr Baedeker’s
Outline
of
English
History
are ‘Foundation of the East India Company’ and ‘Canada Taken from the French’. His bibliography includes no book about the Empire, and even his separate volume on London lists the great imperial offices only
en
passant,
and does not bother to mention, for instance, that the laws passed by the House of Commons might govern the affairs of a couple of hundred million people who had never set foot on English soil.

The imperial venture had not much marked the British. They were still far more an island than an imperial race. If the visitor found his way to one of Frith’s immense genre pictures—
Derby
Day,
The
Railway
Station,
or
Ramsgate
Sands
—which were consciously intended to be epitomes of the time, he would find that nothing imperial showed at all (unless you count ostrich feathers—up to nine guineas a fan in 1897): not a bronzed face, not a blackamoor page, not even a Maharajah instructing his jockey.
1
In its most penetrating degree
British imperialism had been active for hardly more than a decade: in a kingdom moulded by a thousand years of historical continuity, it was only paint on the façade.

Let us ourselves, guide in hand, wander around London, this heart of the world, and see how much imperial gilding shines on its ancient structure. Then as now it was the city of all cities, giving to its visitors a Shakespearean sense of the universal—as if all the foibles, glories, riches and miseries of the human condition were concentrated there. Greater in area and population than any other capital, it lay there vast and blackened along the Thames, the smoke of ships and factories swirling perpetually among its towers. More often than not its skies were obscured with grey cloud, and the river flowed through it sluggishly, thick with filth. Far around the capital the Victorian suburbs extended, from slum to respectable terrace to detached villa, mile after mile into the blighted countryside: in the centre, lapped by the most rollicking night life in Europe, the offices of State rose grave and grey, Gothically pinnacled, and attended by that arcane shrine of the English, Westminster Abbey.

We are in the heart of the British Empire. The obvious place to start our inspection is Thomas Cook’s in Ludgate Circus: but it is disappointing to find that its doorman, who has until recently worn a kind of white topee, intended to evoke the liveliest East-of-Suez images, has already reverted to a plain blue cap, after ‘prolonged and embarrassed protests’ from the staff. The great monuments of London are hardly less reticent about their imperial connections. In the Tower they show us a few old guns from Aden. In St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey a handful of imperial heroes, Gordon, Henry Lawrence, Livingstone, Havelock, are altogether swamped by the mass of kings and queens, legislators, scientists, philanthropists, artists, or soldiers and sailors made celebrated by long centuries of war in Europe. Perhaps as we wander down Whitehall we may see one or two authentic men of Empire, sunburnt young men looking a little awkward in their stiff white collars, or shuffling with portentous wheeze up the steps of the India Office: but the imperial offices
are embedded indistinguishably in the warren of Whitehall, and nobody seems to know which is which. No Dyaks or Zaptiehs mount guard outside St James’s Palace; no pagoda roofs or African caryatids stand in imperial symbol; among all the bright frescoes of the Houses of Parliament we shall find only one with an imperial motif—and that concerned with seventeenth-century India.

A few deliberately imperial institutions may be pointed out to us. The Imperial Institute in South Kensington is a showcase of Empire, partly an exhibition of raw materials and manufactures, partly a club for people interested in imperial affairs, partly a commercial bureau—
rich
in
symbol
and
ornament,
Tennyson had written of it,
which
may
speak
to
the
centuries
: but it is too big, or too solemn, for the available enthusiasm, and if we venture through its elaborate halls, towered and vaulted like an Indian railway station, we shall find it depressingly echoing and deserted. At the Victoria and Albert Museum we shall see the collection of Indian art first assembled by the East India Company, but its rooms, too, are unlikely to be overcrowded, and if any members of the public are showing a marked interest in anything, they are sure to be looking at Tipu Sultan’s famous Tiger-Man-Organ, an ingenious toy which represents an Indian tiger eating an Englishman, the tiger growling and the sahib feebly gurgling from an interior mechanism. If we are male, and well introduced, we may look in at the Oriental Club, originally for ‘noblemen and gentlemen associated with the administration of our Eastern Empire’. We may be invited to the East India Club, where the talk is all of pigsticking and well-remembered subhadars, or even attend a session of the Omar Khayyam Club, dedicated to the pleasures of oriental literature, whose membership is limited to fifty-nine because the FitzGerald translation was published in 1859.
1

Observe, as we walk down Victoria Street, the new offices of the several Colonial Agents, New South Wales, Victoria, the Dominion of Canada, all advertising their opportunities in window-posters,
and pointing big cardboard fingers towards their Immigration Offices. Here are the Albany Rooms, much frequented by people from the Cape and Rhodesia (the Count de la Panouse, ‘
sang
bleu
and a great gentleman’, had met his wife Billy there—she was one of the housemaids). Here is the Royal Academy, that unchallengeable arbiter of colonial taste, among whose admired exhibits, in the summer show of 1897, is
A Wee
Rbodesian,
by Ralph Peacock, in which a very small, very white baby lies in the arms of a very black smiling houseboy, against a background of tropical blossom. The bookshops of the capital are well stocked with imperialist matter, recent reprints of Dilke, Seeley and Marcus Clarke, Henty and Kipling everywhere, Baden-Powell defying the Salisbury reviewers, Slatin Pasha’s popular
Fire
and
Sword
,
just off the presses and dedicated to the Queen-Empress. The British Museum shows surprisingly little in the way of imperial loot, but its library, we are assured, has a right to a copy of every book published anywhere in the Empire.

Here and there among the billboards, the brass plates, the advertisements plastered across the face of London, in the backs of guide-books thumbed through after luncheon, in prospectuses left lying around the club smoking-room, are hints of the existence of those immense possessions in the sunshine.
The
Homeward
Mail
is on sale at a few bookstalls—it comes out weekly to coincide with the arrival of the Indian mail—and so is
The
British
Australasian
(incorporating the
Anglo-New-Zealander
). Thresher and Glenny are advertising a new Jungra cloth shooting-suit (‘impervious to thorn and spear grass’—
vide
The
Field
).
Bessom and Co., with their depots in Poona and Calcutta, assure us that their Reeds for Military Bands are the
only
ones for use in tropical climates, and L. Blankenstein and Co. announce themselves, with a honky-tonk panache, as Colonial Pianoforte Manufacturers. Rose’s Lime Juice get their juices from the Finest Lime Plantations in the World, at Roseau, Dominica; Ship and Turtle Ltd, of Leadenhall Street, make their soups from West Indian Live Turtle Only. In premises at 22 Oxford Street are Messrs Ardeshir and Byramji, whose head office is in Hummum Street, Bombay, and down the road Henry Heath boasts that his Shikaree Tropical Hat is now patronized by nine royal families. Newman
Newman the paint people offer a special selection of slow-drying water-colours for hot climates. It is satisfactory for imperialists to know that ‘thousands who tried
SALADA
Ceylon tea as an experiment now use it altogether, and could not be induced to go back to the commonplace adulterated Teas of China and Japan’.

Up alleys off the Strand, among the bank signs of the City, around the corner from the India Office, are the Colonial Merchants, the Colonial Bankers, the Colonial Exchanges. Henry S. King, the East India Agents in Pall Mall, will book you servants in India. Grindlays in Parliament Square will advise you on Colonial Bonds. The Chartered Bank will issue you a draft on their branches in Rangoon or Hong Kong. The National Bank of India in Threadneedle Street will assume full responsibility for the collection of Indian pensions. William Watson’s at Waterloo Place will ship wine at wholesale prices to Mauritius. The Union Line is only too anxious to convey you to the Gold and Diamond Fields of South Africa, but a huge placard above 21 Cockspur Street brags that
THE RICHEST
GOLD AND SILVER MINES ARE TO BE FOUND IN BRITISH
COLUMBIA AND THE CANADIAN KOOTENAIS—APPLY
WITHIN
.

And if, like every other visitor, we finally strolled down the Mall, to end up with our noses poking through the railings of Buckingham Palace, as the guardsmen stamped through their sentry-go with little clouds of white clay billowing from their belts—then we might feel that we really were in an imperial presence at last. The trappings of the British Crown did suggest something bigger than an offshore island, and in the years since Victoria’s promotion to Queen-Empress the pageantry of her throne had been injected with imperial symbols. She herself, though she thought of England as a European country, had a taste that way. She loved signing herself V.R. & I.—Victoria Regina et Imperatrix—and much enjoyed entertaining exotic imperial visitors at Windsor or Buckingham Palace (‘One does not really notice it,’ she once observed, contemplating the fact that a visiting group of Red Indians, war-painted
and encrusted with beads, were in feet naked to the waist). On her favourite walking-stick, said to be made from a branch of Charles II’s oak, was fixed a little Indian idol, part of the loot of Seringapatam when that Mysore fortress was taken by Lord Cornwallis in 1792. She it was who popularized the pink and yellow glassware, ornamented with lily patterns of vaguely oriental outline, which became known as Queen’s Burmese: and she gave her title, too, to Her Majesty’s Blend, a mixture of Indian and Ceylon teas prepared for her by Ridgeway’s in the days when the imperial teas were challenging China tea for popularity. Kashmir shawls, all the rage in 1897, were chiefly famous because each year the Queen-Empress graciously accepted one from the Maharajah of Kashmir.

Victoria liked to greet her Indian guests in halting Hindustani, and her attachment to her Indian clerk, the Munshi, who succeeded the ghillie John Brown in her affections, edged towards the scandalous—she once asked her Viceroy in India to obtain a grant of land for him at Agra, and sometimes she even allowed him to answer letters for her. At the big dinner in Buckingham Palace on the eve of her Jubilee she wore a dress embroidered in gold that had been specially worked in India (‘dreadfully hot’). Her Ministers knew that the old lady’s sharp experienced eyes were focused on any imperial episode—Salisbury himself once had to apologize for calling Indians black men. A shimmer of imperial consequence hung around Victoria’s throne, and thus by osmosis around the purlieus of her palace: from the large white donkey which Lord Wolseley had sent her from Egypt (white donkeys were royal there) to the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a legendary wonder of the East since the fourteenth century, which was taken by the British from Ranjit Singh the Sikh, and was now the splendour of the Queen’s crown. Whoever possessed the Koh-i-Noor, ran the legend, possessed India: just the kind of legend Queen Victoria liked.