The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (11 page)

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 dumped 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

In India, Last Stand immortality was attained in Burma or on the North-West Frontier, among the Afghans and the warring tribes of the Waziris, the Mahsuds, and the Afridis. It was in Kabul, on September 3, 1879—the year Winston began reading
Chatterbox
—that Arabs invaded the British legation and put Sir Louis Cavagnari and his staff to the sword. Disraeli had assured the Commons that the position was impregnable, and Gladstone never let him forget it. Yet turning the brittle pages of old newspapers one has the distinct impression that the sentimental Victorians enjoyed their sobs. They erected statues of Sir Louis and went about rejuvenated. The following year they put up another after a gallant young officer named Thomas Rice Henn and eleven men forfeited their lives while covering the retreat of an entire British brigade. Wolseley wrote of Henn: “I envy the manner of his death…. If I had ten sons, I should indeed be proud if all ten fell as he fell.”
¹⁰
Horatius had held the Sublician Bridge over the Tiber to the last, or so Macaulay had said, and now, over two thousand years later, soldiers of the Queen were inspired by a similar code of valor:

This famous stanza strikes an odd note. The typical British soldier, if he had any education at all, had attended a “Ragged School” for the poor, where there were no games and certainly no concept of fair play. Those were the legacy of the public schools—Eton, Harrow, Winchester, Westminster, Charterhouse, Rugby, Shrewsbury—in whose forms the future rulers of the Empire were trained. The Victorian age was the Indian summer of homage, before wars, depressions, and nuclear horrors had destroyed faith in all establishments. The social contract was everywhere honored. England was guided by the self-assured men of the upper classes. They thought themselves better than the middle and lower classes, just as those classes assumed that they were better than the
fellahin
and the
dukawallahs
. In both cases the presumption was rarely challenged.

The selection of the Queen’s proconsuls in the colonies was oligarchic, a product of what later generations would call “the old-boy network” or—to use an allusion they would have understood—a philosophic vision not unlike that of Er the Pamphylian in Plato’s
Republic,
who, watching the souls choosing their destiny, saw the noblest pick power. There were two ways to enter the autocracy of colonial Britain. If you were recommended by your tutor at Oxford, say, or at Cambridge or Edinburgh, and were between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, you could make an appointment at the India Office, situated along one side of the Foreign Office quadrangle at the corner of Whitehall and Downing Street. There you were given the Indian Civil Service examination on subjects ranging from Sanskrit to English literature, and if you passed you were tested on another spectrum of topics, including Asian languages and horsemanship, a year later. Candidates who were accepted were off to Calcutta, Bombay, or Madras on the P & O, probably for good. The “Indian Civil,” or “ICS,” was a much stiffer hurdle than that at the Colonial Office, on another side of the quadrangle. Applicants there needn’t be brilliant; indeed, those with a first-class degree were suspect. The emphasis was on “character” and the “all-rounder,” on being “steel-true and blade-straight.” You were interviewed by the colonial secretary’s assistant private secretary, who never saw a British colony in his life. The atmosphere in his homey office was convivial, clublike, manly. One talked of mutual acquaintances, friends, headmasters, tutors, and engaged in similar rituals of self-reference. In this crucial stage it was important to have the backing of someone whom the interviewer considered a keen judge of men—someone like Benjamin Jowett, the cherubic master of Balliol College, Oxford. Jowett’s maxims tell us much about his protégés. He said: “Never retract. Never explain. Get it done and let them howl.” And: “We are all dishonest together, and therefore we are all honest.” And, on Darwin’s
Descent of Man:
“I don’t believe a word of it.” He was partial to peers and noble families on the ground that “social eminence is an instrument wherewith, even at the present day, the masses may be moved.” If Jowett or his sort approved, a stripling just out of the university might find himself ruling a territory twice the size of Great Britain, acting as magistrate, veterinarian, physician, resolver of family quarrels, and local expert on crop blight. The similarity of officials’ backgrounds gave the realm a certain cohesiveness. Morris observed: “All over the Empire these administrators, like members of some scattered club, shared the same values, were likely to laugh at the same jokes, very probably shared acquaintances at home…. Place them all at a dinner table, and they would not feel altogether strangers to each other.”
¹¹

It was collusion, of course, and it could lead to highly unsuitable appointments, particularly when a great family wanted to rid itself of a black sheep. But most of the youths grew into shrewd men; the level of performance was very high. And many of them could scarcely be envied. Often they started out living in leaky mud huts, rarely seeing anything of their countrymen except for an occasional trader or missionary with whom, under other circumstances, they would have had nothing in common. They often had only the vaguest idea of the boundaries defining their territories, or the size of the populations for which they were responsible. In Uganda, six months was added to home leave because an Englishman had to walk eight hundred miles to reach civilization. While on leave he had to choose an English wife in a hurry, because it might be years before he saw another white woman. With grit, that quality much prized among the Victorians, he stuck it out, sometimes leaving a benign stamp on his tract of the wild. In Nyasaland, England’s deepest penetration into Africa, you can still find natives who, because their overlord was Scottish, recite Christian prayers with a Scot’s burr: “The Lor-r-r-d is my shepherd…”
¹²
It is difficult to condemn men who followed their star when the temptation to slacken was immense, who daily wore their quaint little uniform of white shorts and white stockings into which the traditional pipe was stuffed, but dressed for dinner whenever possible, to keep a sense of order, and carried collapsible little flagpoles wherever they went, so that the fluttering Union Jack would always remind their wards of their distant Queen.

Uganda and Nyasaland were hardship posts. Elsewhere life was more agreeable. In Kenya, British residents stocked streams with trout, and all the great imperial cities had racecourses and polo fields. John Stuart Mill called the whole Empire “a vast system of outdoor relief for the British upper classes.”
¹³
That was misleading—by their sheer numbers, non-U voices were more audible than the accents of the U—but it was the highborn British who set the tone, which, by the time young Winston Churchill reached India, had become disturbingly insular. In the beginning white men had adopted local ways, learning that in Kerala, for example, it was polite to cover one’s mouth when talking to an Indian of high caste. In 1859 Samuel Shepheard, who built Shepheard’s Hotel, was photographed on an Egyptian divan, wearing a fez, with a glittering brass hookah at one elbow and a parrot at the other. Then, with the invasion of English wives, the memsahibs, all this began to change. Potted plants arrived, and whatnots, and acres of that printed fabric so popular among the natives that its admirers gave it the Hindi name of chintz. The metamorphosis reached its culmination in the hill station of Simla, the cool summer capital of the Raj, in the foothills of the Himalayas, with its Scottish-baronial palace for the viceroy and his vicereine; tea shops; bandstands where Gilbert and Sullivan airs were played; and the Anglican tower of Christ Church, whose bell had been fashioned from a mortar seized in the Second Sikh War.

Churchill, writing from Bangalore, told his brother Jack: “Labour here is cheap and plentiful—existence costs but little and luxury can be easily obtained. The climate is generous and temperate. The sun—even in the middle of the day—is not unbearable and if you wear a ‘Solar topee’ or a cork hat—you can walk out at any time.” And then he reported: “I have just been to luncheon at the Western India Club—a fine large building where every convenience can be obtained.”
¹⁴
The Raj was beginning to sink its hooks into him. He had been disarmed “up at the Club,” a phrase familiar all over the Empire. There, surrounded by paneled walls, deep leather chairs, and cut-glass decanters, a fresh subaltern like Winston could step up to the bar and find himself, if not among friends, at least among friends of friends. It was an important moment in Churchill’s life. Only by understanding the spell of the Empire, and particularly the Raj, can one begin to grasp the Churchillian essence.

It is a way of life which has vanished, and now, in the heyday of liberal piety, it is considered disreputable, even shameful. Yet there was an attractive side to the Raj, and its vitality is preserved in our language, in such words as
bazaar, bungalow, pajamas, punch, dinghy, khaki, veranda, sandals, gingham, shampoo, jodhpurs,
and
chit.
For young patricians who had passed the Indian Civil, or, like Churchill, had passed out of Sandhurst, the adventure began in London, with a shopping expedition in Oxford Street. There you bought your topee, in white or tan, at Henry Heath’s Well Known Shoppe for Hattes. Also available were clever contrivances for coping with the tropics—Churchill had been wrong about the heat, and soon acknowledged it (“Imagine… a sun 110 in the shade!”).
¹⁵
Among these were antitermite matting, mosquito netting, thorn-proof linen, canvas baths, and patent ice machines. Quinine was essential, but the thrifty postponed ordering tropical clothing until they docked in India, where they would also hire a tropical servant, the first of as many as twenty-five servants. Help was cheap, as Churchill had observed; a lower-middle-class mem who had slaved over a washtub at home would supervise a whole staff, and even British privates had bearers who polished their brass and boots and blancoed their webbing. Once ready for the next leg of his journey, the tyro would travel by train, chugging along at twenty miles per hour, his blinds securely locked at night, telegraphing ahead for a light breakfast (which he would learn to call
chota hazri
) and for lunch (tiffin). Detraining, he might cover as much as a hundred miles on horseback before reaching his appointed bungalow or, if he were a serving officer, his cantonment. By then he might be ready for his first trip to the thunder box, but if he still felt fit he would be introduced to the more welcome ritual of the “sundowner.” This was the daily drink, and it was served in style by a bearer in a gown and turban. His tray would support a variety of paraphernalia: a carafe, linen napkin, gasogene, and ice bucket. Seasoned sahibs might add a nip of their quinine, as insurance against fever. Indeed, that is how the sundowner custom had begun, when men believed that alcohol was preventive medicine in the tropics.