Pax Britannica by Jan Morris Read Free Book Online Page B

Australian traffic used the Cape route, and other ships went round the Horn: but on the homeward passage, loaded with perishable cargoes, all these ships used the Canal.) The British Government owned 48 per cent of the Canal Company’s shares, and the defence of the Canal was the responsibility of a British garrison in Egypt. Most of the traffic was British—Royal Mail steamships actually had priority of traffic, and the big India liners regularly paid up to £ 1,000 in dues. But there was £ 65 million of French capital in the Canal Company, compared with only £ 31million British, and there were twenty-two French directors against ten British. They constantly squabbled about transit fees, the British always wanting them lower, the French higher. Worse still, the Canal was too small for British imperial requirements: large battleships could only go through by dismounting their heavy guns into lighters, and coaling at the far end of the canal. Suez was like an exposed nerve in the anatomy of the Empire. Sometimes the British thought of cutting a rival British canalthrough the Sinai Peninsula, to link the Mediterranean with the Gulf of Akaba. But they never did.
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    Backwards and forwards along the imperial shipping lanes went a large proportion of Mr Stanley Gibbons’s stamp catalogue (then in its thirty-second year), for the Empire’s mail services were advanced and elaborate, and many of the British possessions were already issuing their own stamps. Most of them merely carried the Queen’s head, but New South Wales had been issuing pictorial stamps for nearly fifty years, Newfoundland celebrated the Jubilee with engravings of icebergs, seals, caribous and ptarmigans, while the 16 cent North Borneo issue had a picture of the island’s only railway train. 1
    When the Colonial Premiers met in London that summer most of them agreed to a penny imperial post for 1898. Until then the rate would remain at 2½dper half-ounce, for imperial as for foreign letters, and the mails were carried under contract by the great shipping lines, entitling them to prefix their ships’ names with the initials R.M.S. The Royal Mail Company handled the West Indian mails, the Castle line and the Union Steamship Company shared the South African. The P. and O. was paid £ 330,000 a year for conveying the Indian mails. Cunard carried a large proportion of the Canadian mail via New York: the Orient Line and P. and O. carried the Australian mail in alternate weeks. All was under the control of the Postmaster-General in London, the Australian and South African colonies contributing to the cost, and by the nineties well over 22 million letters and postcards went from Britain to her possessions in a single year.
    To elderly Victorians the speed of the mail service was astounding. Only thirty-eight days to Sydney! Only seventeen days to India! Post a letter in London on Sunday, and it would reach Ottawa on Monday week! Even so, they were constantly experimentingwith new combinations of sea and overland mails. Rhodes hoped his Cape-to-Cairo railway would provide the fastest mail route between England and South Africa, and some people thought the German scheme for a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway would be a blessing to the British by shortening the time to India. They planned to drop the Australian mails at Fremantle, when an east-west Australian railway was built, and there was already a postal route to the Far East via the Canadian Pacific Railway. The direct Canadian mails were dropped at a hamlet called Rimouski, near the mouth of the St Lawrence, and whisked into the interior by train. The Indian mails went by packet-boat every Friday afternoon to Calais, where a train of two engines, three coaches and three mail-vans awaited them, with two British Post Office men on board: by Sunday night they had crossed the Alps and reached Brindisi, and one of the fast P. and O. Mediterranean packets, the 1,700 ton Isis and Osiris, then sped them to Port Said to catch