Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (14 page)
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Authors: Jan Morris
If reason led Milner to war, the synoptic mind, when once the conflict was over, led him to new conclusions. He was still a fervent exponent of imperial unity, he recognized that true unity came best by consent, and the experience of the war perhaps convinced him that the stubbornness of the Boers could not be overcome by brute force. Instead, he thought, ‘stringent patient policy’ might do the trick. He imported from England a team of a dozen young Oxford bachelor intellectuals, nicknamed (naturally) Milner’s Kindergarten, to help with the task of reconstruction: they included a future Governor-General of South Africa, an editor of
The
Times
and a British Ambassador to the United States. Their work was greatly admired, and the imperial propagandists hailed the Milner settlement as a model of foresight, enabling the two old enemies to live together in friendship at last.
But if Curzon the great romantic was always frank, Milner the logician could be devious. A policy hailed as liberal, in that it promised the defeated Boers equality with their victors, was really hardly more than a continuation of the war itself. Milner was out to create a South Africa in which, year by year, the British element
would finally overcome the Boer. ‘My formula for South Africa’, he once told Winston Churchill, ‘is very simply: 2/5ths Boers and 3/5ths Britishers—Peace, Progress and Fusion. 3/5ths Boers and 2/5ths Britishers—Stagnation and Eternal Discord.’ He was not fond of the country—‘I have always been unfortunate’, he wrote, ‘in disliking my life and surroundings here’—but he saw it as his mission to bind South Africa permanently within the imperial unity, in the interests, one feels, not so much of human happiness or prosperity, as of applied theory.
In most parts of the Empire the British imposed their ways by sheer force of example: the western culture was so obviously superior, in economic and technical terms, that the subject peoples flocked in self-interest to its schools, its counting-houses and its drapers. In South Africa it was different: only in French Canada, Gaelic Ireland and Celtic Wales did the indigenes so uncompromisingly defend their heritage against the onslaught of Englishness. Milner’s methods were thorough and subtle. He brilliantly restored the ravaged country to normal life, resettling the landless families, building new schools and farms, evolving constitutions for the new Boer colonies. He imported Chinese labourers, under indenture, to bring the Rand mines back to full production. He started irrigation schemes and experimental farms, he founded municipalities in the hangdog Boer townships, he established a customs federation for all four colonies.
In short, he really did lay the foundations of a union, in which eventually the Boers would enjoy constitutional equality with the British. But it was to be a union inalienably, irrevocably of the Empire, giving the British permanent hegemony in South Africa, giving the Boers ‘a far higher plane of civilization than they had ever previously attained’. When Milner built new schools for Boers, he intended that the instruction should be in English. When he founded experimental farms, he hoped that British farmers would come and settle there. When he treated the Boer leaders with magnanimity, it was because he hoped they would be converted to the imperial plan. In 1910 the four colonies of South Africa, Boer and British, were joined in the self-governing Union of South Africa, and many people at home thought Milner had succeeded. ‘The
grant of self-government’, declared a League of Empire publication that year, ‘has enabled two once hostile peoples to combine in a common ambition.’ ‘The Boers,’ said
The
British
Empire
in
Pictures
more ingenuously, ‘seem to be comfortable and contented under British Government.’
They were not contented at all. Though some of their leaders really did embrace the imperial ideal, the most obdurate of the Boers were as calculating as Milner himself, and had no intention of allowing the British to swamp or pervert the Volk—just the opposite, in fact. Piece by piece the policy collapsed. British settlers never did achieve Milner’s algebraic serenity, while Boer national feeling only became more cohesive over the years, finding expression in political movements, secret societies, religion and an implacable cultural chauvinism.
Milner had returned to England for good in 1905, and blamed it all on too much haste—it takes time, to de-culturize a people. But he was blamed himself for disregarding the blacks of South Africa, who were denied all franchise in the new Union, but whose welfare had been, to many Englishmen, the only good reason for fighting the Boer War in the first place. ‘For the first time’, cried the Socialist Keir Hardie, ‘we are asked to write over the portals of the British Empire, “Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here.”’ Milner’s rash importation of Chinese labour for the Rand, something that seemed dangerously close to slavery, horrified liberal opinion hardly less, and in the end brought down the Conservative Government that had sent him to South Africa. Even Churchill, an old friend of Milner’s, could only say in a celebrated Parliamentary circumlocution that the indenture system could not be ‘classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude’.
Racialism, absolutism, illiberalism—all these were now seen as Milnerisms, and the radical Press fell upon him. ‘Is it any wonder when an essentially German mind drives English policy that the result is not exactly what the English public look for?’ demanded
The
Speaker
. The
Manchester
Guardian
said that what used to seem exciting in Milner’s character was now merely disgusting, while H. W. Massingham, who had been a war correspondent in South Africa, described Milner as ‘essentially un-English’—‘he had hardly any English characteristics, but was a pure bureaucrat and a pure ideologue.’
Milner never quite recovered from the taint, and ten years later a newspaper diarist could still say of him that ‘rightly or wrongly, few men in the country are more distrusted’. The Liberal leader Campbell-Bannerman called him ‘a most dangerous element in the national life’. He went on to be War Minister and Colonial Secretary, but his name would always be associated first with South Africa, and so with failure: for there the tribal spirit outstayed the synoptic skill, and made South Africa in the end a sad antithesis of the Empire’s good and glory.
1
Yet it would be wrong to leave Milner on a note of logic betrayed, for despite appearances he was far more than a mere intellectual. He had true gifts of friendship, his clever young disciples worshipped him, and behind that imperturbable façade, which made the Boers think of him as the Englishman incarnate, he burnt with lofty aspiration. He was, he said himself, ‘from head to foot one glowing mass of conviction’. With a vision less poetic but more furious than Curzon’s, he believed in the imperial mission almost as a revelation: he was one with the possessed expansionists of earlier times.
When Milner returned from Egypt, in 1892, he wrote a book,
England
in
Egypt
, in which he set out with his usual clarity the purposes of the British presence there. It was a plea for the acceptance of great responsibilities, and became one of the seminal texts of the New Imperialism. Churchill said it was ‘more than a book’, it was ‘a trumpet-call which rallies the soldiers after the parapets are stormed, and summons them to complete the victory’. Milner’s imperialism, when it came to the point, ran deeper, more religiously,
than Curzon’s. It possessed a conspiratorial element, and in later years the members of his Kindergarten, reconstituting themselves in London as the ‘Round Table’, propagated the imperial faith like cultists, given to arcane images and confidential reports, and becoming the most persistent of all political pressure groups. Milner’s life was dominated, he said himself, by the dream of Empire: for years he spent every Empire Day, Queen Victoria’s birthday, talking about it to Rudyard Kipling. Though he claimed to see the Empire as a means of social reform—power equalled prosperity equalled a better life for all Britons—he really believed in it as an end in itself, to which any weapon might be directed: diligence, magnanimity, neo-slavery, cunning, logic, war.
Even treason: for years later, when the Protestant patriots of Ulster, in northern Ireland, proposed to defy the authority of the Crown in the interests of Empire, Lord Milner offered them all his help. It would not really be a rebellion at all, he reasoned, though the Royal Navy was preparing even then to put it down, it would be ‘an uprising of unshakeable principle and devoted patriotism—of loyalty to Empire and the Flag!’ Such was the lifelong fervour of this misleading man, who looked so grave, and thought so icily, but felt with such unexpected passion.
1
Two late grandees, each to end his life, in succession, as Chancellor of their old University, that last compensation of aged fame. There would never be imperialists like them again. No men of their calibre, in future generations, would see in Empire a proper arena for their talents, or satisfaction for their profoundest hopes. In the twentieth century the British Empire could no longer be the master
of its own fate, still less dictate the course of world history, so that it lost its power to fascinate men of great ambition. Here, in farewell, are characteristic quotations from each of our imperialists, each illuminating a strand of Empire and a kind of man. This is Milner on his conception of imperial patriotism: ‘I am a British (indeed primarily an English) Nationalist. If I am also an Imperialist, it is because the destiny of the English race, owing to its insular position and its long supremacy at sea, has been to strike fresh roots in distant parts of the world. My patriotism knows no geographical but only racial limits. I am an Imperialist and not a Little Englander because I am a British race patriot. It is not the soil of England … which is essential to arouse my patriotism, but the speech, the traditions, the spiritual heritage, the principles, the aspirations, of the British race….’
And here, more stylish, less anxious in the end, is George Curzon’s own epitaph, above his tomb behind the great iron screen at Kedleston:
In
diverse
offices
and
in
many
lands
as
explorer,
writer,
administrator
and
ruler
of
men,
he
sought
to
serve
his
country
and
add
honour
to
an
ancient
name
.
1
1
It is all there still, all just the same, occupied by Curzon’s nephew the 6th Baron Scarsdale, with the descendants of his deer still around the lake, another generation of gardeners in the graveyard, and Curzon himself culminating the family honours with his sumptuous marble tomb (where he lies in a coffin of Kedleston oak beside his first wife. His second, visiting the family vault one day after his death in 1925, found a note on a shelf in the Viceroy’s magisterial handwriting:
Reserved
for
the
Second
Lady
Curzon
).
2
The first couplet is thought to be by J. W. Mackail, later Professor of Poetry at Oxford and author of Mackail’s
Latin
Literature,
the second by Cecil Spring-Rice, later British Ambassador to the United States and author of ‘I Vow To Thee My Country’. ‘Never has more harm been done to one single individual’, Curzon wrote nearly forty years later, ‘than that accursed doggerel has done to me.’
1
‘Look upon me’, he once told a favoured subordinate, ‘not as a Viceroy but as a friend’: but as the young man said, it was beyond imagination.
2
Or declaring, in one of the Viceroy’s favourite examples, that
KARACHI
WANTS MORE CURZONS
.
1
And so he remained, as baron, as earl and finally as marquis, but the title died with him, for he had no sons.
1
The Arab horses that pulled it had never been between the shafts before, and when they had conducted Curzon to the Sheikh’s palace, they turned spitefully upon the vehicle and kicked it to pieces. Curzon and his host had to walk back to the embarkation point, ‘very gingerly’, he reported, ‘over heaps of ordure’.
1
By which I mean, as I do throughout this trilogy, British people serving in India, of which there were two kinds—those who had their homes in Britain and those who had actually settled in the sub-continent, and were gracelessly known as the Domiciled Community. One felt itself superior to the other, and vice versa.
In 1900 ‘Anglo-Indian’ came officially to signify people of mixed blood—Eurasians.
1
They had played the first game of polo in England, at Hounslow Heath in 1871—they called it Hockey on Horseback, and a contemporary account found it ‘more remarkable for the strength of the language used by the players than for anything else’.
2
Generally
illustrious: the 9th turned tail during the battle of Chillianwallah, in the Sikh War of 1849, but the regimental historian stoutly attributes the rout to ‘the gross mismanagement of their brigadier’, and certainly it was the only recorded instance, in all the 145 years of their independent history (1715–1960), of their running away from the enemy.
1
Though Elinor Glyn the romantic novelist, who had a brief affair with him at Carlsbad in 1903, and thought he must be the reincarnation of Socrates, recalled a playful evening when they got lost together in the woods, and she pretended there were bears coming out of the trees to eat them—‘I held his hand and made him run down into the open early moonlight.’ She had an affair with Curzon, too, a few years later, and described herself as ‘his grovelling slave, ever ready to kiss his hands, lick his beloved toes’:
1
He made sure of it anyway by adopting, when ennobled in 1901, the title Baron Milner of St James’s and Cape Town.
1
Milner married, when he was seventy, the widow of our old friend Lord Edward Cecil, living happily ever after until his death in 1925—two months after Curzon. Ronald Storrs the diplomat, who met him once in Venice, reported that he expressed a particular sympathy for Carpaccio’s dragon in the Scuola San Giorgio—who looks up reproachfully, almost wistfully, as St George thrusts his long spear implacably down his snout. Almost alone among the undergraduates of his day, Milner kept a cat in his rooms at Balliol.
1
Above the tomb there hang, side by side, a mediaeval war banner of the Curzons and the flag of the Indian Empire. Milner, who had no roots and left no heir, is buried less grandiloquently at Salehurst in Sussex, unnoticed even by the guide-books.