Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online

Kipling said British India offered ‘freedom and cockroaches’, while P. and O. acted ‘as though twere a favour to allow you to embark’:
    How runs the old indictment? ‘Dear and slow’,
    So much and twice so much. We gird, but go.
         For all the soul of our sad East is there,
    Beneath the house-flag of the P. and O.
    It took about seventeen days to India— £ 50up—and one of the great daily functions of the Victorian world was the passage of the British liners through the Suez Canal: black-hulled ships with high-sounding names, Coromandel or Kaisar-i-Hind, Ophir, Bezwada or Pentakota, their high superstructures spick and span above the sand, look-outs alert on their flying bridges, muslin and scarlet gaily at their rails and Red Ensigns fluttering one after the other down the waterway.So much a part of Empire was their passage that the common abbreviation for the best combination of cabins on the India run (Port Outward, Starboard Home) had already gone into the language: Posh.
    The British were obsessed with distance. It was Macaulay who had written, in 1848: ‘Of all inventions, the alphabet and the printing press excepted, those which abridge distance have done most for the civilization of our species’—and he was thinking in particular, perhaps, of the steamships of the P. and O., which had only four years previously opened their Indian service. 1 To the later Victorians steam had ‘annihilated distance’. In Macaulay’s day the passage to India took four months, and merchants went out to settle there for life, sometimes never going home at all. Now they generally returned to England after five years, to marry; after ten years their children went home to school, their wives returning every other year to see them; and after twenty years, when they were important enough in the business, they were quite likely to retire to the English shires themselves, leaving the firm in the hands of junior partners, and occasionally pottering out to Calcutta on supervisory visits. For hundreds of British families the Eastern journey was part of life, like the beginning of term, or the annual session with the dentist. They generally met friends on board ship, and at Suez two imperial streams joined, the Anglo-Indians and the Anglo-Egyptians inspecting each other coolly, each finding the others insufferably provincial and, with their affectations of dress and language, their tiffins or their suffragis, their tarbooshes and ill-advised saris, often a little comic too.
    The ships that maintained these imperial services were very small. The largest P. and O. boat was the Egypt, launched in Jubilee year: less than 8,000 tons, an ugly square-prowed ship withtwo slightly leaning funnels, giving it a vacuous look. The biggest ship on the New Zealand run, the Roxaia, was less than 6,000 tons, and the Allan Line passenger liners to Canada were mostly 3,000 or 4,000 tons. Passengers were often wryly amused by the ponderous gentility of these little ships. G. W. Steevens, when he sailed to India in the 1890s, thought the green-tiled smoking-room of his P. and O. like ‘a bedroom suite in the Tottenham Court Road’. The Austrian traveller Baron von Hübner, who made a long voyage in the British India liner Dorunda in 1885, recorded in near-despair the awfulness of a shipboard Sunday—no whist, no bezique, even smoking was unpopular. ‘Young M. caught with a novel in his hand: a lady looks at him fixedly, utters the word “Sunday”, takes away the novel and slips into his hand a hymnbook instead.’
    Still, the shipping lines were intensely proud of their ships, and advertised them extravagantly. The Orient line Guide records what life was like on one of the latest Australia steamers. The new Ormuz was 6,000 tons, a steamer with a trace of sail about her, in her four tall masts and complicated rigging. Her engines were so smooth, the book said, that it was sometimes difficult to believe the ship was moving at all, and her