The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (35 page)

Imperial propaganda of the gripping kind produced by Henty and his fellow wordsmiths was deliberately spread to all classes. Henty’s publishers encouraged state and Sunday-school teachers to present his books as prizes, and thousands were duly presented. Working-class children could share in the adventures of their social superiors, learn about the deeds which shaped the empire, and absorb some of the imperial ideas. The new imperial ideology was already penetrating the elementary-school classrooms through the curriculum. Nearly all the geography learned by trainee teachers at Cavendish College, Cambridge in 1896 consisted of lists of colonies, details of how they were obtained, their products and accounts of their native inhabitants, all of which were passed on for their pupils to memorise. In the same year the recommended outlines of a lesson on South Africa drew attention to the primitive Calvinism of the Boers and their reluctance to wash frequently. As for the blacks, they ‘have become reconciled to the inevitable supremacy of the whites’ and had been taught to be ‘useful servants’.
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Even the nursery was not closed to imperialism.
An ABC for Baby Patriots
published in 1899 included:

C is for Colonies

Rightly we boast,

That of all the great nations

Great Britain has the most.

While the infant mouthed this, its elder brothers and sisters battled with the brightly-painted lead soldiers which became so popular after 1890. There were plenty of imperial units: red-coated British infantrymen, sailors in straw hats, Sudanese in fezes, Bengal cavalry in turbans, and colonial horsemen in khaki and broad hats with turned-up brims. The fighting men came complete with the paraphernalia of modern war: cannon, machine-guns, heliographs and field ambulances.

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There were plenty of real soldiers in exotic uniforms marching through London to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. Troops from every part of the empire took part in the festivities, which also included a review of the fleet at Spithead. The Jubilee was more than a display of imperial muscle; the Queen was at the heart of the empire and it was loyalty to her which helped give it a sense of cohesion. There was no other obvious bond to hold together white settlers from Canada or Australia who were now managing their own affairs; Indians governed from Delhi; Nigerians ruled by the privately-owned Royal Niger Company; and the subjects of protectorates and colonies ruled from Whitehall through local officials with the cooperation of their own chiefs. The Queen whose head appeared on their stamps and coins symbolised the unity of the empire. Her genuine, maternal care for her subjects (she had deliberately chosen Indian attendants for her household) was widely publicised.

There was plenty of entertaining imperial pageantry, though not on the same scale, before and after the 1897 Jubilee. Bands played and crowds cheered as the Grenadier Guards, dressed in the new khaki, marched through London in February 1885 on the first leg of their journey to the Sudan. As their train steamed out of Waterloo Station plate-layers waved their shovels, and there were hurrahs from workers in factories along the track. Guardsmen who stayed behind were hired out to take part in ‘Lord’ George Sanger’s show
Khartoum,
which was performed at the Grand National Amphitheatre in London during March and included tableaux entitled ‘The British Square at Abu Klea’ and ‘Gordon’s Last Appeal to England’. Some of the audience may have been moved to buy an oleograph print of Gordon priced at sixpence (2.5p) and available at all stationers, or a superior version, together with a ballad ‘A Song of Gallant Gordon’, for three shillings (15p). Perhaps this was the portrait of Gordon which hung in Sherlock Holmes’s Baker Street rooms.

Prints and pageants of battles had been popular for over a hundred years and would remain so. At the Crystal Palace in July 1898 a ‘striking and well-executed’ re-enactment of the recent fighting on the North-West Frontier was produced by soldiers from the Royal West Surrey Regiment, some dressed up as Pathans. This type of show was already being superseded; that year an enterprising journalist had taken a film camera to the Sudan, but his footage was destroyed or lost. Preparations were made to film the return to London in October of troops from the Sudan.
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Such material, like sequences from the Boer War, was shown at fairgrounds and in the new cinemas.

Newsreels from the front, including shots of the battle of Spion Kop in January 1900, were the inevitable outcome of the intense public interest in imperial campaigns. The new cheap press offered extensive coverage by war correspondents whose style was vivid and punchy. Moreover, the spread of the telegraph network meant that details from even the most far-flung battlefields could reach Britain within twenty-four hours, the time it took for news of the Ndebele rebellion in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) to appear in the London newspapers in June 1896.

Thrilling front-line reports in mass circulation newspapers, like the popular boys’ magazines and stories, coloured the public’s view of the empire. Photographs and sketches in the
Daily Graphic
during the 1896–8 Sudan War showed various battle scenes, British and Egyptian medical orderlies treating wounded Dervishes and, by way of a contrast to this humanity, skeletons of tribesmen massacred at the orders of the Khalifah Abdullah. Further confirmation that Britain was fighting for civilisation came with an illustration in June 1896 of Muslim chiefs in northern Nigeria, swearing on the
Quran
to renounce slavery.

Imperial themes and images were hijacked by advertising artists and copywriters. The results were often remarkably durable: a bearded sailor and an ironclad of the 1890s still appear on the Players Navy Cut cigarette packet, and another Victorian warship is the trademark of England’s Glory matches. It was the Boer War which gave advertisers their chance, and the public was soon swamped with cheery soldiers and sailors endorsing beef extracts, patent cure-alls and Colman’s mustard. Manly, firm-jawed and moustachioed fighting men in khaki bestowed
machismo
on various brands of tobacco and cigarettes. Bovril led the field in patriotic puffs, offering a print of the relief of Ladysmith to buyers of a product which, if the testimonials from men at the front were to be believed, more or less kept alive the entire army in South Africa. One ingenious copywriter alleged that the letters BOVRIL traced out the lines of Lord Roberts’s march through the Orange Free State.

The Boer War saw an unprecedented boom in the manufacture of every kind of patriotic souvenir. There were buttons with portraits of the leading commanders, whose features also stared from all kinds of commemorative pottery and cigarette cards. There were songs for music-hall patriots ranging from the sentimental ‘The Boers have got my Daddy’ to the swaggering ‘Soldiers of the Queen’. What was an explosion of mass patriotism came to a hysterical climax in May 1900 when news came through that the town of Mafeking had been relieved. Everywhere the announcement prompted spontaneous and often abandoned celebrations, a nationwide street party which produced, hangovers apart, the word ‘mafficking’.

Those who ‘mafficked’ were celebrating something more than the rescue of a comparatively insignificant garrison. The high jinks that May night were a mass release of tensions and a momentary dispersal of fears that had been deepened by the war. During the winter of 1899–1900 the army had suffered a series of unexpected and humiliating reverses, and the British people discovered that they were no longer invincible. Furthermore they were friendless, for all the great powers were hostile, particularly France and Germany. There had been a recovery on the battlefield in the spring of 1900, which raised national morale to the point where uninhibited festivities were in order, but their clamour did not drive away self-doubt.

To a large extent those who proclaimed the triumphs of empire were whistling in the dark. A nation which had been so full of self-confidence forty to fifty years earlier, when it had appeared the supreme force for mankind’s improvement, was now tormented by apprehension. It was true that between 1890 and 1900 the empire had grown at an unprecedented rate; in Africa Britain had secured control over the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, Nyasaland, Nigeria, Rhodesia, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, making it the largest imperial power on the continent. And yet the newspapers and journals which chronicled these acquisitions were also filled with baleful analyses of what was wrong with the country.

The psychological roots of this critical introspection stretched back well into the century. Invasion scares were a regular occurrence and were usually accompanied by hair-raising tales of how Britain, for all its outward strength, could be overrun by a daring enemy. For instance, in 1871, a best-seller, Sir George Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking,
described a Prussian invasion and a whirlwind campaign that ended with the occupation of London. Soon after the end of the Boer War, Erskine Childers’s thriller
The Riddle of the Sands
cleverly showed how a German fleet could steal across the North Sea undetected and support landings on the British coast. These were fantasies, usually written to shock the country into demanding extra cash for the army and navy’s budget. But there were also plenty of sober appraisals of underlying weaknesses in Britain’s economy and unfavourable comparisons of its performance with those of its rivals. There was, for instance, much heart-searching during the 1890s about the shortcomings in Britain’s educational system which seemed to be producing a workforce inferior in aptitude to those of Germany and the United States.

As ever, the strength of the navy became the ultimate yardstick for Britain’s relative power in the world. From 1878 France, Russia and Italy had adopted ambitious programmes of naval rearmament that soon had alarm bells ringing in Britain. The result was the 1889 Naval Defence Act, that confirmed the traditional two-power standard by which the Royal Navy’s total of battleships equalled that of its two closest rivals. A naval race was now on, with Britain vying against France and Russia in building battleships. The margin was always tight; in 1898 Britain possessed 52 battleships with 12 under construction, France and Russia 39, but with a further 18 on the stocks. Within six years, naval intelligence estimated, Britain’s two rivals would have overtaken her. These disturbing figures took no account of Germany, which had 17 battleships and 5 being built.
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As the pace of the naval race gathered momentum, British strategists realised that their country no longer had enough ships to be strong everywhere. The shortfall was most apparent and dangerous in the Mediterranean. In 1892 a Russian squadron had sailed through the Bosphorus and joined the French Mediterranean fleet at its Toulon base, a gesture designed to advertise the new alliance between the two powers and unnerve Britain. It did; the Admiralty was forced to admit that, given a war against France and Russia, the British fleet could not seize the Bosphorus, and so the Russian fleet was free to join their ally’s whenever an emergency occurred. A year later Chamberlain declared to the Commons that the Royal Navy had ceased to control the Mediterranean.

The shifting balance of power in the Mediterranean endangered the Suez Canal and therefore threatened India. Here the appearance of Russian troops on the Afghan border in 1885 had re-awakened fears of an invasion. This was now more feasible than ever since railway construction in Central Asia directly linked the region with the Russian heartlands to the north. Most menacing of all, from an Indian standpoint, was the Orenburg to Tashkent line which was started in 1901. Within three years it was within 240 miles of its terminus, bringing the Russian rail network to within striking distance of the Afghan frontier. As Russia acquired the means to transport and supply a mass army for an attack on India, strategic planners in Delhi and London wrestled with the problems of defending the subcontinent. They came to no definite conclusions save that if local Anglo-Indian forces were to hold the Afghan passes, they would need substantial reinforcements from Britain, which would have to be carried by sea by way of the Suez Canal or the Cape. Additional forces would also be needed to keep order in India where, it was predicted, a Russian invasion would trigger mass disturbances.

There remained the uncomfortable fact that, in the event of an assault on India, Russia could mobilise 300,000 men within three months and launch them against an Anglo-Indian army of 95,000 holding a line between Kabul and Kandahar. Prestige demanded an aggressive stance in Afghanistan, but there was no way of knowing how the volatile Afghans would react to the intrusion. The outbreak of the Boer War further exposed India’s vulnerability, since by the end of operations in South Africa Britain had had to commit 295,000 regular, reservist and volunteer troops to that theatre. The presence of thousands of Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians helped, but they could not disguise the fact that the imperial battleline was stretched to breaking point. There was a bad, but not unexpected attack of jitters when, in February 1900, the War Office received intelligence of Russian concentrations near the Afghan border.
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The attack did not materialise, but the lesson was clear; had the Russians moved against India there would not have been enough troops to counter them.

Britain entered the twentieth century as the world’s greatest imperial power at least in terms of territory and population. The fact was widely trumpeted by politicians and journalists, along with platitudes about dispensing civilisation to those who lacked it. There was also a steady stream of reassuring propaganda which emphasised national greatness and the innate strengths of the Anglo-Saxon character. What effect all this had is difficult to measure precisely. Certainly, many exposed to the writings of Henty and his fellows emerged convinced that brawn mattered more than brains, and large numbers of them acted in a manner of which their boyhood heroes would have approved when they volunteered for war in 1914 and 1915.