Unless one counts Ireland, England’s first imperial conquest was Newfoundland, discovered by John Cabot in 1497. The East India Company was chartered in 1600, and thereafter explorers like Captain James Cook, roaming the South Pacific, were followed by missionaries and merchants who ruled and exploited the new lands. It is true that the newcomers introduced natives to law, sanitation, hospitals, and, eventually, to self-government, but Dickens’s Mrs. Jellyby, neglecting her family while “educating natives of Borrioboola-Gha, on the left bank of the Niger,” was deceiving herself about her country’s chief imperial motive. Palmerston, under no such illusion, said it was the government’s goal to “open and secure the roads for the merchant,” and Joseph Chamberlain said Whitehall must “find new markets and defend old ones.”3 Expansion of Britain’s maritime strength had led to settlements on America’s east coast and the hoisting of the Union Jack over the West Indies. The conquest of India had begun with a small trading station at Surat, on the west coast. Canada had been an acquisition of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a firm just as zealous in its pursuit of profits as the East India Company. Victorian Australia was built on the need for cargoes of gold and wool. And each new territory meant a further boost of England’s entrepôt trade, expansion of markets for the coal of Wales, the textiles of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and the steel of Sheffield and Birmingham. By Churchill’s youth the nation’s foreign trade had reached the astounding total of £669,000,000 a year.
As James Morris pointed out in his masterful Pax Britannica, the Empire’s growth had been “a jerky process,” a formless, piecemeal advance which leapfrogged across continents and was never static. Sometimes imperial possessions were lost—Manila and Java were once British, and so, of course, were the American colonies—but the realm always waxed more than it waned. The great prize, “the brightest jewel in the imperial crown,” as Englishmen said then, was the Indian Empire, comprising the modern nations of India, Burma, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh. It was the need to secure their ties to India which, they said, justified holding the southern tip of Africa, Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Port Said, and Aden. But the brightest jewel could also be approached from the other direction, so they had to have Sarawak, the Straits Settlements, and Malaya, too. The fact is that just as all roads had once led to Rome, so did all sea-lanes lead to India. When that argument seemed strained, as in Africa, the Queen’s statesmen explained that they had to move in before other great powers did. With this excuse, Victoria’s Lord Salisbury gobbled up the lion’s share of Africa without igniting a European war.
Imperial unity was a fiction proclaimed every time colonial officials visited London. Usually all they had in common were hats bought in St. James’s Street and gloves and spats from Dents’. Each possession had its own degree of freedom, its own language and customs, its own vision of God. The stable Dominions, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, governed themselves, and Australia even ran its own colonies, the Cook Islands in the Pacific. Most possessions of the Queen were protectorates, territories, or Crown Colonies. Running these was the responsibility of His Excellency, the local governor, who had all the trappings of royalty. On ceremonial occasions he wore a gaudy uniform with a cocked hat sprouting ostrich feathers; he was entitled to a seventeen-gun salute; men bowed to him; and women, including his own wife, curtsied as he led a party into his dining room, where he was served before anyone else. His reward for good and faithful service was inclusion on the Honours List at home. (The irreverent said that CMG stood for “Call Me God,” KCMG for “Kindly Call Me God,” and GCMG for “God Calls Me God.”) This, subscriptions to The Times, the stiff upper lip, the legends of Nelson and the Charge of the Light Brigade, faith in the pound sterling, “Abide with Me,” and a passion for cricket were among the frail linchpins linking imperial lands. Yet even on the administrative level there were exceptions to the colonial pattern. One Asian state was governed from a private office at 37 Threadneedle Street in London. Another, Sarawak, in Borneo, was an independent, third-generation despotism whose 600,000 people were ruled by an Englishman, the “White Raja.” The White Raja, Charles Brooke, had his own flag; national anthem; newspaper, the Sarawak Gazette; and army, the Sarawak Rangers. Since he accepted British “protection”—permitting Whitehall to handle his foreign affairs—Sarawak was considered part of the Empire. Similarly, Nepal had a native sovereign, but the Nepalese cavalry pledged allegiance to the British Resident and bore his personal crest. Native sultans and rajas were accepted as aristocrats and were usually addressed as “Your Exalted Highness.” For diplomatic reasons, however, the islands of Tonga were recognized as an independent kingdom. Tonga’s queen was greeted as “Your Majesty.” When Edward VII, who took the matter of royal blood very seriously, was told that he was about to meet the sovereign of Tonga, he asked suspiciously, “Is she a real queen or just another damned nigger?”4
By then the Empire was on an ebb tide, but even at its peak it was a lurching, reeling contraption, riddled with contradictions and inequities. Matthew Arnold knew how vulnerable it was:
… she
The weary Titan, with deaf
Ears, and labour-dimm’d eyes,
Regarding neither to right
Nor left, goes passively by.
Staggering on to her goal;
Bearing on shoulders immense,
Atlantean, the load,
Well-nigh not to be borne,
Of the too vast orb of her fate.
And yet the thing worked. In those days before the Wright brothers began the annihilation of distance, sea power was everything, and no other nation could match Britain’s. Altogether there were 330 imperial warships, manned by over 92,000 tars, policing the world’s waterways and keeping trade free. Spangling all oceans with their coaling stations and strategic forts, they were the strongest guarantee of the Empire’s integrity, and their men spoke of its far-flung domains with the affectionate familiarity of men supremely confident of their national strength: the sacred Swami Rock in Ceylon was “Sammy Rock”; Barbados was “Bimshire”; Kuala Lumpur was “K.L.”; Johannesburg was “Joburg”; Alexandria was simply “Alex.” When the mighty British Mediterranean Fleet sighted Malta, the whole population turned out for the spectacle. The ships were painted silver, with tars in white in rigid formation on the decks; the procession was led by destroyers, followed by cruisers and then the battleships. Royal Marine bands played “Hearts of Oak” and the ships anchored with their prows pointing seaward, baring their teeth to any challenger.
Britannia ruled the waves, and Britons knew how important that was; every family with the means clothed its children in sailor suits and sailor dresses, their caps bearing the name of the Queen’s latest battleship. And the warships were only part of it. The other part was the merchant marine. At the peak of its glory, England was launching a thousand merchant ships every year, most of them on the Clyde. More than half the world’s maritime vessels flew the red ensign of British merchantmen; at any given moment they were carrying 200,000 passengers. The Peninsula and Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s four-week voyage between the Mother Country and Calcutta, then India’s capital, had become a legend. The worst part of the passage was the crossing of the Red Sea. Those who could afford relative comfort bought—for fifty pounds each way, not counting deck-chair rental—port-side cabins going out to India and starboard cabins for the trip home; in time “Port Out, Starboard Home” became the acronym POSH. Unfortunately the service was anything but posh. Kipling wrote that P & O crewmen behaved “as though twere a favour to allow you to embark.”5
But if the crews seemed high-handed to their British passengers, all Britons had that reputation in other nations. Robert Laird Collier, an American touring England in the 1880s, wrote: “No people are so disliked out of their own country…. They assume superiority, and this manner is far from pleasant to other people…. They are overbearing, and haughty…. I have never seen among any people such rudeness and violation of good breeding…. As a nation
they are intensely selfish and arrogant.” In their “Splendid Isolation”—isolationism was British before it became American—Englishmen looked disdainfully across their Channel and said: “The wogs begin at Calais.” Thomas Cook lectured the French on the cancan as a sign of national decadence, performed with “an unnatural and forced abandon,” and when a dispatch from Africa reported a French colonial claim, Joe Chamberlain, the very model of an imperial statesman, scrawled in the margin: “Cheek!” England issued the first postage stamp, the “Penny Black,” in 1847, and in an act of conceit undiminished by the fact that it was unintentional, the stamp bore a cameo of the Queen and nothing else—identification of the country seemed superfluous. Yet sometimes British contempt could be magnificent. Dressed to the nines, buttons glittering and collar starched, Captain William Packenham went ashore to deal with a gang of cutthroats who were massacring Armenians. The leaders of the pogrom gathered around him, glowering and fingering the edges of their bloody knives. Packenham stroked his beard and told the interpreter: “Let us begin. Tell these ugly bastards that I am not going to tolerate any more of their bestial habits.”6
Britons were so sure of themselves. Like today’s Americans, who are also disliked abroad, their dominance was the consequence of a cluster of accidents, among them their tremendous deposits of coal and iron ore—one-third of all the miners on earth were British—and England’s role as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Thus, Britain had naturally become the world’s manufacturer, merchant, shipper, and banker—“the workshop of the world.” Not only were Britons certain that they would keep all they had; they expected more and more—“wider still and wider.” Already English economists were managing Siam’s foreign trade. There were two British colonies, British Honduras and British Guiana, in Latin America. More important, Hong Kong and Weihaiwei were on the Chinese coast; in London, men speculated over when Victoria’s other titles would be joined by “Empress of China.” They also dreamed of a Cape-to-Cairo railway, just as Germans looked toward a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. Englishmen had expelled officious Chinese from Tibet, and the Indian Ocean was already an English lake. Southeast Asia’s future was pretty much settled. The Bank of Persia was a British firm. In Italy, the cable car route up Mount Vesuvius was owned outright by Cook’s. Constantinople had its own judge and jail for Englishmen. The inspector general of Chinese Customs was Irish, and the military adviser to the sultan of Morocco was a Scot. Foreign governments were told where and when to build new lighthouses, and if they weren’t prompt, the British solved the problem in their own way; the P & O put one up in the Red Sea on Dardalus Reef—foreign soil—and hired Englishmen to man it.
London was not only the capital of the world; it was the largest metropolis history had ever known, bigger than most imperial possessions or even some European powers. As we shall see, in matters of sex the Victorians should be judged, not by what they said, but by what they did; during the century before Churchill’s birth the population of the island tripled—then a reproductive record—and London grew from two million souls to five million. (It was also the favorite of expatriates. Over thirty thousand Germans lived there, over fifteen thousand Americans, and more Irishmen than in Dublin.) The advent of trains and steamships had seen London rise as England’s greatest port and the largest exporter on earth. The clocks of the world were measured from Greenwich. The Near East and the Far East were so called because they were near and far from London. Lloyd’s was the world’s insurance agent, and had been for two hundred years. In the vaults beneath the City’s banks, gold bars rose in gleaming stacks; British securities were worth an astounding £11,333,000,000. The interest on foreign investments alone exceeded £100,000,000 a year. The gold sovereign was the strongest currency on earth; the City, the world’s center of finance, commerce, and banking. London was the center of much else. Here, at the time of Churchill’s birth, Joseph Lister was pioneering antiseptic surgery. Here Bessemer had perfected his process. Here Darwin, Tennyson, Browning, and Trollope were at the height of their careers. Dickens had been in his grave only four years; John Stuart Mill less than one. And if distant natives became restless, British ingenuity could be counted on to solve the problem:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun and they have not.
In London there were ten mail deliveries a day. “Communications,” Morris wrote, “were the first concern of [the] late Victorian rulers.”7 Letters reached Melbourne in four weeks, and British lines of communications, which had begun with cables to India and the United States in 1866 and were now spanning Australia, would soon gird the entire world. Distant outposts still depended upon native runners, trotting through jungles or over highlands with forty-five-pound leather pouches slung over their shoulders, but the days of isolation for months or sometimes years were past. Lebensraum was one of the Empire’s driving forces; millions of Englishmen lived under its mandates, and serving them was a major industry. If you were posted near one of the population centers, the free ports of Aden, Gibraltar, Singapore, or Hong Kong, for example, you lived in style. The ubiquitous Cook’s would provide you with poultry, vegetables, rowboats, donkeys, servants wearing Cook’s livery, and even the Oxford Marmalade of which Victorians were so fond. Cook’s made the arrangements for Gordon’s and Kitchener’s military expeditions on the Nile and also for troops fighting on India’s frontiers. Cook’s planned Moslem pilgrimages to Mecca and arranged Queen Victoria’s own travels. On one occasion Cook’s mapped out a European trip for an Indian maharaja whose baggage train included twenty chefs, ten elephants, thirty-three tigers, and a Krupp cannon.
Except for the time lag for news from home, which the cables would soon close, Englishmen in the Empire’s settled possessions were well informed about the world’s goings-on. In Cairo, say, you could read the Egyptian Gazette, or in Lahore the Civil and Military Gazette, subedited by young Kipling. The reading room of your club carried Punch, the Book of Horse, Blackwood’s, Wisden, and Country Life. The favorite London paper was the archimperialist Daily Mail, which, typically, said of lascars: “It is because there are people like this in the world that there is an Imperial Britain. This sort of creature has to be ruled, so we rule him, for his good and our own.” Doing so required preservation of the myth of white supremacy; of what we call racism. (Significantly, there was no such word then.) Conditions had improved since pre-Victorian days, when a native could be castrated for striking a white man or hanged for the theft of one shilling and sixpence. Certainly the average Indian or African toiling beneath the Union Jack was far better off than the average Chinese under his warlords, but British colonial hotels still found it necessary to display notices reading: “Gentlemen are requested not to strike the servants.” English soldiers arriving in imperial cantonments were coached in how to avoid inflicting blows on the face, where the bruises would show. And Africans were caned frequently, like unruly boys.8
Playing the role of an Übermensch wasn’t always pleasant. You paid the price of the myth. In Calcutta it meant wearing a frock coat and top hat in the punishing heat. Even the white linen suits and cork topees worn inland could be cruelly uncomfortable. Emotional discomfort could be worse. For loving parents the hardest moment came when a boy reached his seventh birthday, time for him to be sent home to school, never again to be seen as a child. Health was also a problem. Every newcomer could expect to be laid low by diarrhea—“Delhi Belly.” Old-timers suggested Cockle’s Pills, and they seemed to work for some. Others suffered from intestinal upsets, off and on, throughout their colonial years, attended by the native “wet sweepers” who serviced the privies known as “gulkskhanas” or, more vulgarly, as “thunder boxes.” It didn’t help that snakes were said to slither inside sometimes and lurk within the thunder box, coiled there, waiting to bite the next visitor.
The penultimate sin for an Englishman, in all imperial possessions, was to go broke. If it happened, the hat was passed for passage home, and the penniless offender was dump
ed on the dock like trash, which was how he was regarded. Only cowardice was worse than indigence. Showing a yellow streak was the greatest threat to rule by consent of the ruled, the surest way to shatter the image, and the man guilty of it was lucky to escape unflogged. Absolute fearlessness was assumed. Death in battle was the noblest of ends. In Africa, men’s eyes misted over and their voices grew husky in speaking of Major Allen Wilson’s Last Stand on the bank of the Shangani River during the wars against the Matabele tribesmen in 1896. When Wilson and his thirty-two men had run out of ammunition, the story ran, they shook hands, sang “God Save the Queen,” and stood shoulder to shoulder to meet their doom. There were many similar examples. The Last Stand—resistance to the last man—was in fact a kind of rite, a tableau vivant celebrated in Victorian yarns and ballads, and in Wilson’s case by a famous painting, Allan Stewart’s There Was No Survivor, depicting dauntless men veiled in gunsmoke, surrounded by their dead horses, with their leader stage front, bareheaded, a sublime expression on his face. Such accounts were particularly popular in Chatterbox, a magazine favored by genteel children; they were probably a secular expression of the evangelical Christianity which swept England in the 1870s and 1880s.
Chinese Gordon was the most heroic martyr. His hour of glory struck on January 28, 1885, when Winston was ten. According to one popular account, Gordon waited until the Arabs were storming his Khartoum palace. Then, knowing all was lost, it was said, he changed into his white uniform at daybreak and took up a position at the head of the stairs, “standing in a calm and dignified manner, his left hand resting on the hilt of his sword.” Racing upward, one sneering Arab shouted, “O cursed one, your time has come!” Gordon, according to this version, “made a gesture of scorn and turned away.” Moments later he was impaled upon a half-dozen spears. Queen Victoria wrote his sister: “How shall I write to you, or how shall I attempt to express what I feel? To think of your dear, noble, heroic Brother, who served his Country and his Queen so truly, so heroically, with a self-sacrifice so edifying to the World… is to me grief inexpressible!” What is peculiar about this is that Gordon’s garrison, like Wilson’s, had been wiped out. As there were no survivors, there had been no one to tell the world how either had actually ended.9