James Morris: duty, honour, empire

The Wind of Morning Hugh Boustead (Chatto and Windus £2.80) 'I watched the rabbits playing on the green turf', wrote the Maharajah of Jaipur after a visit to Curzon's home at Kedleston in 1902, 'and I thought I could sit watching these little creatures in the sun, and could rest there for ever, playing a flute, and I wondered how English sahibs could ever go to India.' Or as one of my favourite imperial poems inquires: 'How could you go? Whilst Spring with cuckoos calls, With all the music in which wood-birds woo, With hymning larks, and hedgerow madrigals Girlish with sunshine, sweet with cushat's coo, Bade you to dream; how did you dare to do?'

It is a speculation which has often puzzled me too, on lovely spring days in Shropshire, or hilarious London nights. What could induce so many Englishmen, in the heyday of their especial civilisation, to exchange these enchanted islands for all the miseries of scrub, sand and sheeps' eyes? Curiouser still, why did the British public at large, at a time when-their homeland seethed with its own tumultuous excitements, become so obsessed with the prospects of overseas expansion? For during the brief hegemony of the New Imperialism, in the 1890s, Empire really was the prime national preoccupation, pervasive as football pools, insidious as pop.

The academics have stock answers, as always : that the ordinary people were not really interested; that the New Imperialism was all illusion; that prosperity. was Skin- deep; that the Empire was only middle-class opportunism, or capitalist exploitation. My own contributory theory is this : that the activists of Empire, in that spectacular splurge of high imperialism, were generally men basically out of tune, or out of sym- pathy, with the constants of English life. They were loners, protesters or flamboyants, to whom the English way of compromise offered few satisfactions. Long contempla- tion of the rabbits has convinced me that the more remote those characters were from my own Kinglakeian ideal of Englishness— amateur, tolerant, weedy, easy—the more zealous they were in shouldering the White Man's Burden.

Some, like Cromer and Milner, were actually of foreign extraction. Others, like Rhodes or Goldie, were British enough on paper, but distinctly un-patrial in practice. Kipling, the laureate of Empire, was the perpetual outsider; Northcliffe, its Goebbels, was a daemonic egoist; Chamberlain, its impresario, was a Birmingham screw manu- facturer in a Cabinet of patricians. Like 'tireless consultants reviving some moribund conglomerate, these strange, brilliant and often ruthless misfits seized upon the idea of Empire, rigged it out transcendentally, and dazzled the whole phlegmatic- nation with its allure. Empire was trendy in the )890s; some smart operators made it so.

The three books under review con- veniently, if obliquely, illustrate my point. They are all about Britons active in the imperial scenes in the first half of the present century, and in all three I must declare a personal interest. Hugh Boustead, whom I first met at Mukalla in southern Arabia, has been a family friend ever since. Sir Laurence Grafftey-Smith, whom I first met at the table of a later convicted spy in Egypt, tells me in his book that I was mis- taken in once attributing to King Hussein of the Hejaz a monopoly of aphrodisiac dried lizards in the Holy Places. And towards John Lord's subject, the late Col- onel Richard Meinertzhagen, I have long cherished, in reaction to his own published volumes of memoirs, a particular and probably grossly unfair antipathy.

But then we all have a personal interest in these books—and especially those of us born in the later 1920s or early 1930s. These three men represent the last of the imperial generation : Meinertzhagen died in 1967, Grafftey-Smith is seventy-eight, Boustead seventy-five. They and their kind made the world we grew up in. To our own sons their lives will have hardly more than an antiquarian or perhaps aesthetic interest: to us they are like family documents. In men like Boustead and Meinertzhagen the flame of British imperial assurance burnt brilliantly; in our sons it burns not at all; but we are the twilight caste, born between wars which shattered our power, with that blaze of Empire always over our shoulders, never before our eyes.

Consider Meinertzhagen first. His father's family were immigrants from Germany, highly successful bankers in the City; his mother was a Potter, which made him an improbable nephew of Beatrice Webb and a relative by marriage of Malcolm Mug- geridge. He was a man to whom the traditional English virtues of moderation, modesty, give-and-take, were anathema. He lived his life at fever pitch, perpetually campaigning or arguing or plotting, keeping an immense daily diary, scarred by a tragic relationship with his mother and always, it seems, at odds with life.

Meinertzhagen was an intellectual, of a devious and ruthless kind. He was a soldier who did not bother, as English soldiers generally do, to disguise his cleverness. He was an intelligence agent of Machiavellian skill. He was one of the great ornithologists of his day. He was an empire-builder of ferocious zest, and a Zionist utterly imper- vious to the claims of the Arabs, whom he despised and therefore dismissed. There was nothing of the amateur about him, and his biographer, an Englishman now living in America, understandably finds it difficult to apply his own cheerfully discursive style to so absolute a character. Meinertzhagen, who much took the fancy of Cecil Rhodes, was a born imperialist of the 1890s school: his spiritual home was Africa, the main arena of the new Imperialism—where, as Lord Kimberley once remarked, nobody stayed a gentleman for long.

Sir Hugh Boustead is several stages nearer home. He is all British, but urgently so.

Nobody could call him ruthless, or even violent, yet throughout his extraordinary career he has behaved with a precipitate gusto uncharacteristic of his kind. He is a man of great physical force—a wrestler, an Everest climber, a fine horseman—good at commanding men, good with guns. The great formative influence of his life was the first world war, and he has been fighting battles of one sort or another ever since.

He.fought the Bolsheviks in Russia and the Italians in Ethiopia. He commanded the Camel Corps in the Sudan. He has held quasi-imperial jobs in several corners of Arabia, and now divides his time between a villa in Tangier and the stud of the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf.

Yet for all this boisterous energy, his greatest gift has been for friendship, with men of all ranks and races : and though these friendships may sometimes seem to the outsider to have something patronising about them, in the proper late imperial manner, still they spring from a kind heart and a sympathetic imagination. Boustead is a rotten writer, and his book is only a pallid reflection of his marvellous life and vivid presence: but The Wind of Morning is an authentic product of Empire's declining years, when the conviction was still there, but the ferocity had mercifully faded.

So to Sir Laurence : no less a child of his times, a scion of the, old Levant Con-

sular Service, a High Commission func- tionary in post-Cromerian Egypt, but so Eothenically English, so self-deprecatory and urbane—so Levantine, almost—that one cannot conceive him pushing black men about with Meinertzhagen, or even presiding over the destinies of the Hadramaut with Boustead. Grafftey-Smith, who ended his career as British High Commissioner in Pakistan, was cast in a subtler role than imperialist : he was the intimate of Prime Ministers, not their master. He was well known indeed at the Gezirah Sporting Club, but always preferred the Mohammed Ali, where the Turco-Egyptian pashas indulged themselves in tortuous indiscretions, and the gossip was feline and Frenchified.

Boustead's book, like Meinertzhagen's memory, displays the faults of its strength. Grafftey-Smith's work is marred only by an excess of his elegance. He is like a less self- conscious and more compassionate Storrs, dropping rather too many Rabelaisian allu- sions, and showing an uncharacteristic discourtesy in the use of foreign phrases. Bright Levant is not a powerful book, but it stands squarely in an English literary tradition : a superbly effervescent enter- tainment in the best salon style.

They prove my point, I think. Meinertz- hagen spent his last years in England, but, as Mr Lord says, 'never came to terms with the modern world'. Boustead tried England for a while, but soon went East again. Grafftey-Smith lives happily ever after in Suffolk.

But if their differences support my thesis, there is a more salutary lesson to be learnt from their similarities. Gentle or lethal, bluff or sophisticate, they were all three men of standards. They stuck scrupulously, throughout their long and eventful lives, to their own public values. They never demeaned themselves. They declared their principles, and honoured them. Empires came and went, and sometimes all three must have looked back upon their life's work with a trace of disillusionment : but their integrity survived triumphant, making all three victors in the end.

I hope, when the time comes, whipper- snapper critics in the SPECTATOR can say the same about us.

lames Morris, a widely-travelled author and journalist, is currently at work on a trilogy about the British Empire