Pax Britannica (5 page)

Backwards and forwards along the imperial shipping lanes went a large proportion of Mr Stanley Gibbons’s stamp catalogue (then in its thirty-second year), for the Empire’s mail services were advanced and elaborate, and many of the British possessions were already issuing their own stamps. Most of them merely carried the Queen’s head, but New South Wales had been issuing pictorial stamps for nearly fifty years, Newfoundland celebrated the Jubilee with engravings of icebergs, seals, caribous and ptarmigans, while the 16 cent North Borneo issue had a picture of the island’s only railway train.
1

When the Colonial Premiers met in London that summer most of them agreed to a penny imperial post for 1898. Until then the rate would remain at 2½d
per half-ounce, for imperial as for foreign letters, and the mails were carried under contract by the great shipping lines, entitling them to prefix their ships’ names with the initials R.M.S. The Royal Mail Company handled the West Indian mails, the Castle line and the Union Steamship Company shared the South African. The P. and O. was paid
£
330,000 a year for conveying the Indian mails. Cunard carried a large proportion of the Canadian mail via New York: the Orient Line and P. and O. carried the Australian mail in alternate weeks. All was under the control of the Postmaster-General in London, the Australian and South African colonies contributing to the cost, and by the nineties well over 22 million letters and postcards went from Britain to her possessions in a single year.

To elderly Victorians the speed of the mail service was astounding. Only thirty-eight days to Sydney! Only seventeen days to India! Post a letter in London on Sunday, and it would reach Ottawa on Monday week! Even so, they were constantly experimenting
with new combinations of sea and overland mails. Rhodes hoped his Cape-to-Cairo railway would provide the fastest mail route between England and South Africa, and some people thought the German scheme for a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway would be a blessing to the British by shortening the time to India. They planned to drop the Australian mails at Fremantle, when an east-west Australian railway was built, and there was already a postal route to the Far East via the Canadian Pacific Railway. The direct Canadian mails were dropped at a hamlet called Rimouski, near the mouth of the St Lawrence, and whisked into the interior by train. The Indian mails went by packet-boat every Friday afternoon to Calais, where a train of two engines, three coaches and three mail-vans awaited them, with two British Post Office men on board: by Sunday night they had crossed the Alps and reached Brindisi, and one of the fast P. and O. Mediterranean packets, the 1,700 ton
Isis
and
Osiris,
then sped them to Port Said to catch the Bombay steamer—which had left London a week before the letters.

Since 1885 there had been an imperial parcel post—first of all to India, which had thus come within reach of the thousands of plum puddings, sprigs of holly, mistletoe berries and haggises sent out there annually ever since. Even this domesticity, though, had not taken the romance out of the imperial mails, which strongly appealed to the British sense of far-flung order. The English mail rattled into Johannesburg, with view halloos and whinnies, in two great wagons drawn by teams of ten horses apiece. It reached the Australian mining camps, as the poet Henry Lawson recalled, in Cobb coaches, as in the American west: 

In Rhodesia it was carried by runners, wearing khaki shorts and
fezzes, with an average bag of 40 lb and an average daily range of thirty miles. And what could be more resoundingly Kiplingesque than the Indian runner service, by which the letters of the Imperial post reached the last outposts of the Himalaya?

The British had invented submarine cables, and by the 1890s had encompassed their Empire with them. Of the inhabited British territories, only Fiji, British Honduras, Tobago, the Falkland Islands, Turks Islands and New Guinea were not on a cable at all. The several imperial cable networks, upon which the Empire depended for its intelligence and its central control, were nearly all operated by private companies, though many of them received official subsidies, and most were possessed by the ambition to be All-British Routes, running exclusively across British landscapes or under British-dominated seas. Half the cables had been laid within the past twenty-five years, some of them by Brunel’s gargantuan steamship the
Great
Eastern,
originally designed for the Eastern service, but reduced at last to this humdrum chore: since 1870 the Colonial Office telegraph bill had risen from
£
800 a year to about
£
8,000.

To the New Imperialists the cables had a symbolic quality, and visionaries saw them developed into an absolutely British, earth-
embracing system. ‘Such a perfected system‚’ wrote one commentator, ‘traversing the deepest seas, touching only British soil, protected at every point of landing by British vigilance and courage, would be as reliable for the direction of our navies, and for combined military action in time of war, as it would be useful in time of peace for the development of commerce and the interchange of thought and information on national affairs.’ These majestic dreams excited Kipling hardly less than the Overland Mail, and he wrote a poem about them, too, called
The
Deep-Sea
Cables
—

In 1897 the network had its weaknesses. The transatlantic routes were secure enough, running direct to Newfoundland and Canada, and the seven American cables across the Atlantic called first at Canada, too, and could be commandeered, it was thought, in time of war. But the South American cable ran via Portuguese Madeira, and the two South African lines, down the west and east coasts, both crossed Portuguese territory. The line to Australia had to cross the Dutch island of Java; it ran by a special wire, worked by British operators, but still the Admiralty distrusted it, and pressed for an alternative line touching only at British relay stations. The line from Singapore to Hong Kong, via Labuan, was laid in 1894 specifically to avoid French Saigon, and on the China coast the British were perpetually scheming to evade the near-monopoly of Chinese cables held by a Danish company—the British cable from Hong Kong to Shanghai was worked from a hulk in the middle of the Min River, to avoid the several embarrassments of relay stations on shore.

But it was the route to India that chiefly preoccupied the imperial strategists. There were three lines from London to Calcutta, but none of them was altogether secure, and commercially the German and Russian Governments could prevent any reduction in the very
expensive tariff. This was because the first and most profitable of the routes began as a North Sea cable from Lowestoft to Germany. It then ran across Germany and Russia to Teheran (two minutes flat, as we know, from Buckingham Palace) and so to India. The German section of this cable was owned by the German Government, and the Russian by the Russian Government—neither of whom used it much, but both of whom, by the terms of their concessions, could keep its prices awkwardly high.

The second Indian route was also unsatisfactory. It ran across Europe to Constantinople, across Turkey to the Persian Gulf, and by submarine cable to Karachi (Kurrachee, as they spelt it then). It was never very effective, because of the murky inconsistencies of Turkish administration, and in 1870 the British had opened a submarine cable via Gibraltar, Malta, Alexandria, Suez and Aden—all safely Red—to Bombay. Even this, though, had to call at Spanish relay stations, and in fact most of its traffic went by land to Marseilles, picking up the big cable line in Malta. If all these three routes were cut, there was no southern link from India: the only alternative was the vulnerable line to Australia, through Java.

No wonder the safety and privacy of these lines gave the British so much anxiety. Keeping them open and efficient was one of the great technical tasks of Empire. The hazards were varied and sometimes violent: silt, uncharted currents, hostility from tribespeople or fishermen, winds—during the monsoon no Indian Ocean cable could be mended at all. Even the webs of the more portly tropical spiders could interrupt an imperial dispatch. The tariffs were understandably high. It cost 4s a word to send a cable at the standard rate to India, 4s 9d to Australia, 6s 9d
to Sierra Leone: yet sometimes the demand was so feeble that the average traffic in and out of the West Indian island of St Vincent, for instance, was worth just 15s a day.

All over the world Englishmen were at work laying or maintaining these cables, or operating booster stations along the line. In every British colony the local cable manager was an important member of society, and in remoter parts his cable station became a focus of nostalgia, so evocative were the clickings of its Morse keys from across the oceans. Among the most suggestive of all must have
been the nine little repeater stations erected down the line that crossed Australia from the Northern Territory to Adelaide. Long before a road or a railway crossed the Outback, the Overland Telegraph was erected—2,000 miles of line, with 36,000 telegraph poles. Seven or eight men lived in each station, with 20 or 30 horses, a few cows and a flock of sheep. All around was wilderness, and the stations were protected by brick walls with loopholes, in case of aboriginal attack. At Barrow Creek, in 1874, two cable men were speared to death by Warramunga tribesmen,
1
and the aborigines were constantly stealing insulators to use as axe-heads, and wire for multi-pronged spears. Building the line had taken two years. As the gap between the two ends narrowed, messages were carried from one to the other by horsemen: the original charge was nine guineas for twenty words.

The central station of the Overland Telegraph was at Alice Springs, the first nucleus of that famous little town. It was a clump of shacks and a stone bungalow above the springs, themselves named for Alice Todd, wife of the chief engineer. This was one of the loneliest places in the Empire. It was a thousand miles north to Darwin, a thousand miles south to Adelaide—the nearest towns. For company the little group of cablemen had only themselves, their animals, the odd incoherent bushman, and the occasional grazier or overlander dropping in for a beer in a country where the hospitality of the pioneers was still a rule of life. At night especially the Alice cable station must have seemed a properly epic outpost. Then the wind rustled off the desert through the eucalyptus thicket, armies of frogs croaked in the fringes of the pool, the air was heavy with dust and gum-smell, and the horses stood silent beneath the pepper trees. Oil lamps shone through the windows of the huts, and sometimes a sudden chatter of the Morse machine miraculously linked the Alice, for a moment or two, with Calcutta, Malta and the imperial capital on the other side of the world.
2

All this vast expertise, of ships and mails and cable stations, had made the British prime masters of international movement. Nobody else operated on such a scale, and whether one wished to ship a boiler to Canton, send a Christmas telegram to Montevideo, or merely go on a holiday voyage in the Mediterranean, the chances were that Britons would be making the arrangements. Nobody symbolized this command more famously than Thomas Cook, the booking clerk of the Empire. The original Cook had died in 1892, but his son had succeeded him in the firm, and ‘leaving it to Cook’s’ had gone into the language. Cook’s had virtually invented modern tourism, and their brown mahogany offices, with their whirring fans and brass tellers’ cages, were landmarks of every imperial city. They held the concession for operating steamers on the River Nile: all the way up to Abu Simbel the banks of the river were populated by Cook’s dependants—keeping Cook’s donkeys, growing Cook’s vegetables, rowing Cook’s boats or raising Cook’s fowls, porters, waiters, washerwomen, stately fly-whisked dragomen wearing Cook’s familiarly emblazoned jerseys. Cook’s made the travel arrangements for the Queen-Empress herself, and that summer they were helping to move Kitchener’s forces into the Sudan. Since 1880 they had actually been organizing pilgrimages to Mecca; their Eastern Princes’ Department once arranged a visit to Europe for an Indian prince with two hundred servants, twenty chefs, thirty-three tigers, ten elephants, a thousand packing-cases and a howitzer.