Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (5 page)

Such were the master-imperialists, the dogmatists, prophets and executives of the creed. Few of them spoke the language of Newbolt, or even of Kipling himself. Few of them had been at English public schools.
1
Most of them looked cynically upon the gaudy patriotism of the day—some indeed chose to work in the Empire because they so detested life in late Victorian England. Yet they were heroes to the masses. Country doctors and surburban solicitors nodded their
heads in agreement, when they read Mr Chamberlain’s latest speech in the
Morning
Post
. Crowds flocked to quay or platform when the great Kitchener came home from the wars. The British saw in their leaders the best of themselves, the truest: they did not often know, and would not willingly believe, what excesses were sometimes committed in their name.

Take the young Mahdist commander Emir Mahmoud, captured by Kitchener at Berber in 1897. Would the proud father of
Following
the
Flags
like his children to know what happened to him? Chains were riveted around his ankles, an iron halter was put around his neck, his hands were bound behind him, and he was paraded in ignominy through the town. Kitchener rode in front, magnificently on a white charger: Mahmoud came behind, sometimes dragged, sometimes running. Whenever he fell, Sudanese soldiers drove him on with leather-thonged whips. The crowd hooted and pelted him as he passed: far in front, beyond the tossing cavalry, the Sirdar rode on impassive, looking neither left nor right.

Every Empire rests on force, and though the British were not habitually cruel, they were certainly ruthless on their frontiers. By any standards but their own they might be considered bullies—almost the worst category of villain, in the vocabulary of Victorianism. There were few rougher fighting men than the British soldier in revengeful mood, shouting Irish scurrilities perhaps, or sustained by the eerie wailing of the pipes, as he advanced with a gleam of that abattoir weapon, the bayonet. ‘Severity always,’ was an old imperial maxim, ‘justice when possible.’ ‘Butcher and bolt’, is how they described that familiar imperial exercise, the punitive expedition.

For by now an assumption of superiority was ingrained in most Britons abroad.
1
The English milord had long before travelled through Europe as though he owned the place. The British imperialist travelled through his subject lands with the same proprietorial air, and when ennobled often formalized the status by including some foreign fief or battle-ground in his title: Kitchener became Kitchener of Khartoum and Vaal in the Colony of Transvaal,
Roberts was Roberts of Kandahar, Wolseley was Wolseley of Tel-el-Kebir—for all the world as though they really were hereditary squires of those recondite properties.
1
The Englishman expected the best seat, throughout his quarter of the world. He expected to be treated, by a quarter of the world’s people, with a proper respect, even with the gratitude due from a tenant to a benevolent landlord. Men of the middle classes acquired patrician pretensions, for between the castes of Empire and the castes of home there was a recognizable correspondence, while the ancient social orders of the subject nations were all too often ignored or mocked.
2

Though these snobberies were more often a matter of habit than intent, they placed the African or Asian subject, struggling to speak English and to Anglicize himself, at a perpetual disadvantage, and on a level of high policy they could be translated into insufferable assumptions of authority. It was as though the British were gods themselves. Lord Salisbury, who hated racial bigotry, and called it the ‘damned nigger attitude’, nevertheless seriously considered transferring half the population of Malta to the island of Cyprus, to prevent Greek irredentism there.
3
Kitchener once suggested that all the more contumacious of the Boers, in South Africa, might conveniently be expelled to Madagascar, Fiji or the Dutch East Indies. There were no Indian natives in the Government of India, Lord Curzon once observed, because among all the 300 million people of the sub-continent, there was not a single man capable of the job. When the Khedive of Egypt, ostensibly an independent sovereign, once ventured to criticize the way the British were reorganizing his own army, his Minister of War was instantly obliged to resign, and it was even suggested that the Khedive might have to abdicate.

Sometimes the hauteur was self-defeating. In 1900, for instance, the British in West Africa determined to seize the Golden Stool of the Ashanti. This was far more than a stool really, being the most sacred possession of the Ashanti people, delivered to them magically out of Heaven at the beginning of the eighteenth century: it rested upon its own Chair of State, was hung about with talismanic emblems, and was in fact the very repository or ark of the Ashanti nationhood. Who destroyed it, destroyed the nation; who abused it, insulted the soul of the Ashanti people. The Golden Stool was kept in an inviolable shrine, never to be seen by strangers, and around its mysterious presence revolved the entire Ashanti meaning.

The British found that meaning generally unprepossessing, for the Ashanti were addicted to human sacrifice, dishearteningly unresponsive to Christian improvement, and reluctant to pay an indemnity they owed the Queen of England. In 1900 the Governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Frederick Hodgson, accordingly travelled with his wife and a stalwart bodyguard through the rain-forests to Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, and there called a palaver of the chiefs. He was hardly one of Newbolt’s cricketers, being variously described by his contemporaries as ‘rotten’, ‘an egregious ass’, and ‘no gentleman’, and he wasted no time on subtleties. Summoning the elders and potentates of the Ashanti around him, Lady Hodgson white-gloved at his side, he adjusted the Order of St Michael and St George around his neck, and demanded the instant surrender of the Golden Stool. ‘Where is the Golden Stool? Why am I not sitting on it at this moment? Why did you not take the opportunity of my coming to Kumasi to bring the Golden Stool, and
give
it
to
me
to
sit
upon?
’

The people rose to arms at once, the Governor was shut up in his own fort for six weeks, and though inevitable retribution followed, imperial columns fell upon Kumasi from all directions, and the Asantahene Prempeh I was banished for twenty-four years to the Seychelles Islands, still from that day to the end of the British Empire, no white man ever set hands upon the Golden Stool of the Ashanti.
1

Yet if there was something loathsome to this arrogance, there was often something impressive too, and even Britain’s enemies begrudgingly conceded it. The implacably hostile Boers, to whom the whole British arrangement of life was inexplicable, if not actually deranged, were nevertheless moved to admiration by the certainty of it all: the unshakeable patriotism, the acceptance of hierarchy, the paradoxical brotherhood, the beauty of pageantry and tradition, the inspired courage—‘I must say this for the British officer‚’ said one Afrikaner critic of Empire, ‘that I never once saw one who was a coward.’

This intangible power, beyond morality, beyond measurement, Joseph Chamberlain the Colonial Secretary now hoped to channel into efficiency. He was the odd man out in Salisbury’s Government, a modernist, a bourgeois, and he believed that the Empire needed an altogether new driving force, to pull it together and prepare it for a more difficult future. The white self-governing colonies, who now liked to be called Dominions, were gradually coalescing: Canada had been a single federation since 1867, the six Australian colonies were about to become a federal Commonwealth. Chamberlain wished to see these ‘overseas Britains’ supplemented by the black, brown and yellow colonies in one self-supporting, self-sufficient political unit—a new kind of super-Power, embracing supply and demand, raw materials and manufacturing ability, malleable labour and constructive capital. He saw the whole amorphous conglomeration as one enormous estate, and he wanted it run by the best principles of modern management, like his factories in Birmingham. Imperialism should not be an adjunct to national policy, as Salisbury saw it, but a national purpose in itself—‘the days are for great Empires,’ Chamberlain said, ‘not for little States.’

Times moved fast, in those days of discovery and realization: if
Victoria’s Empire had seemed the Very Latest Thing at the end of the 1880s, by the end of the 1890s it needed a new direction. Schematic solutions had always been a Victorian speciality—everything from ethics to biology had been tabulated, subdivided and classified—and now Chamberlain and his imperial reformers wanted to do the same for Empire. ‘There is no article of your food,’ he told the British, ‘there is no raw material of your trade, there is no necessity of your lives, no luxury of your existence which cannot be produced somewhere or other in the British Empire … nothing of the kind has ever been known before.’ Empire should be an economic system, a political solution, a modern career. It should have an altogether new kind of romance, principled but brisk, adequately defined by Lord Cromer, the pro-consul of Egypt, when he offered a philosophy of life to the boys of Leys School, Cambridge: ‘Love your country, tell the truth and don’t dawdle.’

How to achieve this dawdleless fulfilment was a constant preoccupation of Chamberlain and his supporters, in the years after the Diamond Jubilee. They thought of an imperial federation, or an imperial parliament, or a Grand Council of Empire, but the shape of the thing was so inchoate, its constituent parts were so varied, and the dead weight of its backward regions was so colossal, that the self-governing colonies could never be persuaded far along the way. They thought of an imperial customs union, embracing the whole Empire in an immense free trade area, but the British themselves were too dedicated to Free Trade, while the Dominions were altogether too protectionist. They tried repeatedly to give some pattern to imperial defence, sharing its responsibilities between Britain and the Dominions: but for the most part the colonists were very content to have their security looked after by the Mother Country, and the most the British achieved was a battleship or two contributed by the colonies to the Royal Navy, and some garrisons of colonial militia.

At home Chamberlain campaigned assiduously to place his idea of Empire at the centre of British politics. He tried to develop tropical colonies with Government money, as an inducement to private investment there. He founded research institutes and schools of tropical medicine, to encourage progress in the more uncomfortable
possessions. He gave hope to imperialist agencies of many kinds, from public institutions like the British Empire League to enthusiastic journals like
The
Imperial
and
Colonial
Magazine
, or private propagandists like the journalist Arnold White, who foresaw the worst if the Empire was not reformed—‘There is no time to lose! What is to arrest our Gadarene rush down the steeps of inefficiency to the sea of national destruction?’

But the people of the homeland, like the colonists, responded half-heartedly. They loved their Empire dearly, but since Chamberlain’s vision was strenuous, challenging, and might put prices up, it met with a mixed response. The British never did believe in taking pleasures too seriously.

It was too late, anyway. Though for the rest of the Empire’s history there were intermittent attempts to give it logic, in fact it had gone too far already, was too odd, too heterogeneous, for centralist reforms. Its separate units were more competitive than complementary, and the only real unifying bond was the authority of London. The white colonials, far from wanting closer ties with the Motherland, only wanted more independence for themselves: the subject peoples, when if ever they achieved equality, were bound to demand control of their own resources. The Empire was essentially irrational, not to be transformed into a smooth-running joint stock company, and its truest energies were highly individualist, not to say arcane.

Chamberlain was a utilitarian. He never did see that the poetry of Empire was not merely half its point, but actually its chief support. There was an absurdity to this structure which could not survive down-to-earth Birmingham analysis, but which was a strength in itself: as the bumble-bee aerodynamically could not fly, so 40 million northern islanders patently could not rule 370 million subject peoples in the face of the world’s jealousy. Yet as the bee flew, so the Empire stood. Bluff, pageantry, confidence, faith, habit, tradition, even sleight-of-hand—all these were to prove, in the end, more resilient than Chamberlain’s criteria of advantage, and the
least successful imperial experiments were those which relied upon common-sense.

These truths were realized most clearly in India, the most tremendous of all the imperial territories, where the spectacle of so few Britons administering so vast a country made even less sense than most of the imperial demonstrations. The British had been in India for 200 years, and they had long before adapted to the Indian taste for colour and display, partly to amaze the indigenes, partly to fortify themselves. In a country of princes, they deliberately used the mystique of monarchy as an instrument of dominion, carrying the idea to lengths which some of the more sophisticated Indians found ludicrous, but which seemed to work among the susceptible masses. Elephant parades, soirées, durbars, palaces—these were among the technical devices of British rule in India, a showy palanquin of authority beneath which those thousand civil servants proceeded workmanlike with their court hearings, their tax collections and their inspection tours.

Let us then, since this strain of splendid pretence was a true
leitmotiv
of the imperial climax, end this chapter of attitudes with a visit to one of the ceremonial durbars with which the British in India from time to time glorified their own achievement. We will choose the most glorious of them all, which Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1898 to 1905, personally staged outside the walls of Delhi, the ancient seat of the Moghul Emperors and the most vital centre of Indian history.