Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

third-class arrangements were particularly complete, ‘the object being both to insure the comfort of the steerage passengers, and also to avoid any annoyance to the travellers in the first and second saloons’. Pictures of the ship pungently suggest oiled wood, creaks, fairly stiff conversations and incipient flirtations. There was an organ in the picture gallery, and in each first-class cabin there was ‘an arrangement by which the electric light can be turned on and off at pleasure by the occupant’. In the first-class dining saloon the passengers, in evening dress, sat in arm-chairs at heavily naped tables, waited upon by bearded stewards and surrounded by potted palms. In the second-class saloon they sat at long communal tables, rather like cocktail bars, with decanters slung on trays from the ceiling above their heads. The Ormuz was so powerful, we are told, that ‘all the horses in use in the British Army, if we could compel them to join in a gigantic tug of war with the Ormuz, would be pulled over’. Passengers were advised to bring a deck-chair with them—‘it should be plainly marked with the owner’s name, in a conspicuous place, not on theback’—and ladies would find ‘what are called tea gowns’ very convenient in the tropics. 1
    On the day of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee the old Allan Line steamer State of California was making her last voyage from Liverpool to Canada. At dinner that night, in mid-Atlantic, they honoured the Queen with a banquet. The menu included Balmoral pudding, Victoria cream and Windsor biscuits, ‘and through the generosity of the cabin passengers, a set of handsome prizes were competed for by the steerage in a series of athletic events that created great enjoyment and merriment’.
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    Elaborate systems of supply, defence and communication serviced these vessels along the imperial seaways, and the sole purpose of some British possessions was to keep the traffic moving: the South Atlantic coaling station of St Helena, for example, was ruined when the Suez Canal was opened. Vast supplies of coal were piled up at stations all along the route—fuel for their own ships figured largely in the British export statistics—and foreign shipping, too, depended largely upon British bunker supplies. 2 The British held key ports and maritime fortresses all over the world, and their instinct had always been to gain control of communications, before carrying sovereignty further. They occupied most of the Indian seaboard, before they extended their authority inland. They established great ports at Hong Kong, for the China trade, and Singapore, for the East Indies; Hong Kong’s traffic was greater than Liverpool’s, andfifty lines of ocean shipping regularly used Singapore. They had recently acquired Mombasa, which they saw as the key to the riches of Central Africa, and they still hoped to wrest from the Portuguese the harbour of Delagoa Bay in South-East Africa, the nearest outlet to the goldfields of the Rand.
    They were the arbiters of maritime affairs, and set the world’s standards in matters like seaworthiness and navigational aids. The Greenwich Standards Department verified not only British weights and measures but United States and Russian standards, too. A1 at Lloyd’s was already a world criterion, and it was often British pressure that impelled foreign governments to erect lighthouses and moor lightships. For years the British tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Turkish Government to establish proper navigational aids in the Red Sea: in the end they erected lighthouses themselves—P. and O. built and maintained the lighthouse at Daedalus Reef, a coral strand in the northern Red Sea—and even manned some of them with British lighthouse-keepers.
    So for the most part, by right or by effrontery, the British kept a firm hand upon the sea lanes. The one vulnerable thread in the system was the Suez Canal, through which the mass of the Eastern shipping passed. (More than half the