Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (45 page)

By the 1920s their works were inescapable. Hundreds of miles of canals had been cut or restored, many new barrages had been built, and vast new areas had been opened to irrigation. There were some unhappy consequences to these works—the spread of bilharzia, the exhaustion of the soil, the concentration on a single crop, cotton. Still they were among the chief achievements of the imperial decline, and the irrigation engineers became great men in Egypt, were greeted by crowds of grateful
fellahin
when they made their inspection tours, and blessed by imams in mosques.

The greatest of all their works was the Aswan Dam, which was to be after successive enlargements the bulkiest of all the British Empire’s artifacts. Imperial publicists called it the Eighth Wonder of the World, and with its immense line of dressed masonry, its massive buttresses and frothing line of sluices, set stupendously in the dun desert around the first cataract of the Nile, it did have a truly classical grandeur.
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The Aswan Dam stood at the head of the entire
Egyptian irrigation system, for behind the dam a great reservoir extended upstream to Wadi Halfa, and out of this reserve the engineers could release water in dry periods to provide perennial irrigation all over Egypt. Downstream eight smaller barrages distributed the water among the irrigation canals, and the engineer in control at Aswan had it in his hands to destroy the life of Egypt (or alternatively, Egyptian nationalists suggested, to divert the entire flow of the Nile direct to England).
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Upstream the Sudan was less dependent upon the river, and it had been agreed that from the middle of January to the middle of July each year all the natural flow of the river was to be allowed to go to Egypt. The Anglo-Sudanese hydrologists, though, saw profitable possibilities of irrigation in a tract of land called the Gezirah Plain, which lay between the Blue and the White Niles above Khartoum. The country was unprepossessing, and was inhabited by people of awkward migratory habits—sometimes there, sometimes not, farmers in the rainy season, Omdurman drapers or railway tracklayers when it was dry. The British resolved nevertheless that this should be the site of an experiment on the Anglo-Indian scale, the deliberate creation of a cotton-growing community dependent entirely upon artificial irrigation.

It took them six years to settle the land rights, renting the whole area from its owners, then re-allotting it in thirty-acre tenancies. It took them three years to build the Sennar Dam, by which 3 million acres of land was eventually to be made arable. But by the end of the 1920s the Gezira Scheme was one of the showpieces of the Empire, and the men of the Sudan Civil Service assiduously took visitors to see it. It was just as they wished Empire to look. It was a mixture of public and private enterprise: the Government Irrigation Department controlled the water, but two private British companies supervised the scheme itself, and the tenant farmers not only took 40 per cent of the profits of their cotton, but also grew food and fodder crops for themselves. It was replete with social organizations and improving systems—child welfare classes, domestic science schools, courses in civics and economics, village councils, educational films and a highly responsible newspaper. As one of its creators characteristically observed, it was ‘a great romance of creative achievement’: an object lesson too, for anybody, given rulers of equal merit, could do the same—‘vision and foresight’, as he generously added, ‘are not qualities peculiar to the Government of the Sudan.’

So, less than a century since Speke had discovered its source, less than half a century since Sir Garnet Wolseley hoisted the Union Jack over Cairo, the British had mastered the White Nile. Even as the Empire began its retreat, they had schemes for much larger works—dams at the Great Lakes, a canal to bypass the Sudd, huge new developments at Aswan, a series of new barrages in the Sudan—but they already controlled the river more absolutely than any of their predecessors. From the remote control points, high in Uganda, by which their hydrologists estimated the flow of the water, to the last Delta barrages, almost within sight of the Mediterranean, they had laid their skills upon the whole length of the Nile. Never again, though they did not know it, would they have such matter for experiment, or such truly imperial tasks to perform.

These were traditional concerns of Empire. When it came to the
internal combustion engine, and all that went with it, the approach was less sure. Everywhere people associated the British with trains, bridges and dams, but most of the first cars in the Empire were foreign, French, German and American manufacturers having gained an early lead over the British. American cars dominated the Australian and Canadian markets from the start, and even in India the first car of all was French—the Maharajah of Patiala’s De Dion Bouton, whose licence plate number was O. The British built cars for the small easy roads of their own islands, and until the end of the Empire never did master the tougher imperial markets. Rover’s Indian and Colonial Model of 1907 hardly swamped the far-flung highways, and when in the 1920s Morris Motors introduced a new model actually called the Empire, they sold
four
.

The motor car never blossomed in the imagery of Empire. One remembers Lawrence’s Rolls-Royces hurrying north from Aqaba, or Dyer’s sinister armoured cars outside the Jallianwallah Bagh; one glimpses a Governor emerging from his
porte
cochère
in his dowagerly Humber, or a visiting Prince whisked from the quayside in his especially imported Daimler. Symbolically, though, aesthetically, the imperial modes of transport remained pre-automobile: the white shuttered train, the gubernatorial barouche, the elephant, the bullock-cart, the double-decker trams surging through Sydney, the street-cars steamed up from their coal-stoves in the snowy streets of Toronto. The one memorable motor-route of the British Empire was established by New Zealanders, the brothers Nairn, in the new territories of the Middle East: and even its buses were built in America.

The Nairns, who had gone to the Middle East with Allenby’s Mounted Corps, astutely realized that the new British dependency of Iraq, so long immured in the obscurity of the Ottoman Empire, would now need swifter access to the west, and in 1922 they established a desert bus service linking Baghdad with Damascus, the capital of Syria, and so with the Mediterranean—a journey of some 500 miles along unsurfaced tracks. As Waghorn had been to the Overland Route to India, as Cunard was to the Atlantic steamship crossings, as P & O were to the Suez voyage, so the Nairn Brothers and their buses became to the new empire in the Middle East. They
carried the mails, and until the advent of air services, all the most important travellers in and out of Baghdad. Everyone knew them. ‘Taking the Nairn’ became a familiar part of speech, and one of the sights of the day was the spectacle of a big Nairn six-wheeler sweeping across the gravel desert, marked by the great plumes of its dust, on its overnight journey between the capitals. The Nairns had several competitors over the years, but they out-drove and outlived them all, remaining familiar institutions of the Middle East when the Empire itself had gone.

The only stop on the journey was at Rutba Wells, almost halfway, in the very depths of the Iraq Desert. This was a fortified oasis and customs post, surrounded by barbed wire and a high wall built of sand-filled petrol cans. There were a few mud huts outside the gates, a police barracks and a rest house inside. It was an awful place. Not a trace of green could be seen, except for a few patches of grass about the wells; all around the desert extended drab and brown, and behind the fort the dried-up bed of a river, which came to life only after rains, meandered away into nowhere. The tracks of camels and goat herds came out of the desert to converge upon Rutba, and the wide beaten path of the Baghdad to Damascus road passed outside its gates, to disappear over the horizons east and west.

Nothing much happened there. A group of Bedouin might lollop in, to settle with their beasts and black tents in the shade of the petrol cans. Oil company lorries might stop for beer or petrol. Sometimes a convoy of RAF trucks arrived, on its way to Azraq, Amman, or Habbaniyah, and occasionally even private cars appeared, chauffeur-driven generally, and generally in convoy, to discharge their dehydrated diplomats or car-sick Levantines briefly and unhappily into the rest house. Most of the time, though, Rutba simply sweltered and dozed behind its barbed wire, buzzed about by flies, ranged about by pi-dogs, with only the blare of the police post radio to break the silence.

But once a day, regular as clockwork, far in the distance there appeared the cloud of dust that heralded the arrival of the Nairn bus, and the oasis shook itself into life. The café tables were flicked more or less clean, the cook was woken up, the petrol men loitered
over to the pumps, the lemonade was put on ice, and even the police and customs men tipped their hats back from their eyes, stretched themselves and delicately picked their noses. Soon one could hear the agonized growl of the bus as it changed gear for the approach, and its dust came billowing ahead of it over the walls, and suddenly there it was rumbling and juddering at the gates—high, hot and thick with dust, with its two Arab drivers already clambering from their cab, and through the sealed windows of the passenger compartment tired lined faces looking out.

Every kind of person tumbled from the Nairn bus, when it arrived at Rutba Wells: Bedouin sheikhs in spacious hauteur, Baghdad Jews with thick beards and wide black hats, swaggering Kurds from the north, Persian wives in the prison-tent of the
burkah,
Iraqi Army officers stony in khaki drill, American oil technicians, Egyptian politicians with significant brief cases, Italian priests, Greek grocers—and aloof among them all, red from the sun, rather sweaty, in crumpled linen jackets or
RAF
serge, separated from all these companions by race, function, taste, history and prejudice, from each other by class, rank, preference and diffidence, there travelled the British, whose presence in that desert had sponsored the equipage in the first place, but who already seemed the least assertive of its passengers.

As to the air, the British never did establish the supremacy aloft which was so long theirs at sea. As one might expect, they were adventurous pioneers of flying. Englishmen were the first to fly an aircraft across the Atlantic, the first to fly to Australia, the first to fly over the Himalayas, the first to fly air mail, and they established speed records in all directions. After the war they realized the uses of air power in imperial government, too—the security of the Middle East was in the hands of the RAF, and as early as 1931 two battalions of troops were airlifted from Egypt to a trouble-spot in northern Iraq.

But there was something laborious, or even reluctant, in the application of all this initiative to the everyday business of air
transport—a subconscious desire, perhaps, not to hasten the air age, in which all competitors were starting from scratch. Imperial Airways, the airline which did in the end launch an All-Red Empire Air Service, was born in 1924, and even then it seemed faintly anachronistic. If the splendour of steam could have been transferred to the air age, Imperial Airways would have done it: as it was, its plodding biplanes and flying-boats, nearly always slower, nearly always better upholstered than their rivals, sailed the skies with a distinctly maritime dignity, their captains talking of ports and moorings, coming aboard and going ashore, just as though they were in fact navigating the steamships of the imperial prime.

The airline was heavily subsidized, and as a carrier of the Royal Mails enjoyed semi-official privileges, punctiliously maintained by the management. If an Imperial Airways aircraft made a forced landing in imperial territory, its captain was authorized to stop any passing train and oblige it to take on the mail-bags. When the airline began scheduled services to Iraq, the Iraqis were induced to dig a furrow right the way across the Iraqi Desert, to guide its navigators more conveniently into Baghdad. Though it operated in Europe too, this was essentially an imperial airline, and by the end of the 1930s it flew to most parts of the Empire. There were routes to Egypt, India, Iraq, South Africa, Singapore and Australia—‘buckling the Empire together’, as Churchill put it, and greatly changing the life-styles of the imperial administrators.
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It was not a very efficient airline. Its pomposity was a joke among competitors, and even the British themselves often found it too formal and officious—so many of them preferred the
KLM
service to Singapore that the Dutch complained they couldn’t get seats on their own aircraft. The imperial air routes, which looked so impressive on the maps and murals, turned out to be, if you actually tried to fly them, less than handy. Flights were unpunctual, staging-posts were uncomfortable. A traveller to South Africa in the early 1930s had to change six times, flying in five different types of aircraft: a traveller to India had to travel by train from Basle to Genoa, before
flying on to Rome, Naples, Corfu, Athens, Tobruk, Alexandria, Cairo, Gwadar and, after seven nights and four changes of aircraft, plus a Swiss wagon-lit, at last to Karachi.

All this was a far cry from the lost dreams of the R101, and Imperial Airways did not really get into its stride until the All-Up Empire Air Mail Scheme of 1934. Under this plan letters with an ordinary 1½d English stamp, the normal surface rate, were delivered by air mail to any Imperial Airways destination.
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It was another attempt to unite the Empire by technology, and it gave the airline an inspiriting sense of purpose. To handle the new traffic Imperial Airways ordered, direct from the drawing-board, twenty-eight new flying-boats, called of course the Empire Class, and destined to set once and for all, in memory as in imagination, the tone of the imperial air services. They were not very fast aeroplanes, they were not altogether reliable—only one in three of the Karachi flights arrived more or less on time—and they had their share of trouble. One collided with an Italian submarine, one dived into Lake Habbaniyah, one sank in the Hooghly River, one was blown up by an exploding fuel barge at Southampton and one was permanently stuck in the mud in a lake at Tonk. Nevertheless they became a familiar and beloved part of life for thousands of Britons.