British India
Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd
The Viceroys of India Mark Bence-Jones (Constable £12.50)
With characteristic modesty, Lord
Mountbatten described the Viceroyalty of India as 'the greatest office in the world' to Mark Bence-Jones during the author's research for this engrossing biographical study of the men (and indeed women) who ruled the Raj. Thanks to the rich resources of Mr Bence-Jones's material, we can contrast this remark by the only Viceroy to retain a press attaché with Lady Reading's view of the young Mount- batten when he became engaged to Edwina at a Viceregal houseparty: 'We would have preferred her to get engaged to someone with a more promising career'. It was in Lord Reading's time that the concept of the Viceroyalty changed; having original- ly been an autocrat and then at best an ad- ministrator and at worst a 'Great Ornamen- tal', the Viceroy was now required to be a statesman.
Mark Bence-Jones, brought up in India, has already proved his ability to conjure up the magic of the place in his definitive biography of Clive and in The Palaces of the Raj. This latest tour de force is enliven- ed not only by his witty character sketches, sound historical grasp and acute social sense, but also his own recollections. For example, as a seven-year-old, the author was treated to the spectacle of 'Hopie' Linlithgow crawling out from under the canvas after a regimental tent had collapsed in Lahore. (As it gave way an ADC gave tongue to a four-letter word; to which the Viceroy responded by saying 'Quite right to tell the people to duck'.) Before I say anything else complimentary about Mr Bence-Jones I suppose that I had better declare some sort of interest as a fortunate friend (and sometime inadequate col- laborator) of this omniscient social historian. However, to be really boring, my mention in his acknowledgements was hardly earned by merely drawing his atten- tion to Muggeridge on those figures of fun, the Willingdons, and passing on a photograph album of my uncle's time as ADC to the penultimate Viceroy, Lord Wavell.
Before tackling his subjects in sequence, Mr Bence-Jones warms up with a resume of the Governor Generals who ruled India from 1774 until 'Clemency' Canning was first given the title of Viceroy in 1858, shortly after the Mutiny. The summing up of the ebullient Marquess Wellesley as 'at the same time both great and small, a man of noble conceptions and petty conceits' by Curzon could equally apply to George Nathaniel himself and, for that matter, to Dickie Mountbatten. Lord Auckland, from the same family that gave us Anthony Eden, is awarded the wooden spoon and rapped over the knuckles for his sin of always being bored. What strikes one is how hard most of them worked, in many cases to the death; in this context Lord Duf- ferin, who tended not to work after dinner, seems indolent to a degree. Mr Bence-Jones rates the great Viceroys as Canning, Mayo, Ripon, Minto and Irwin (the future Earl of Halifax, called 'the most Christian and most gentlemanly among them all' by one experienced Indian politician). Lord Mayo, formerly 'an outstandingly successful Master of the Kildare Hunt', seems to be the author's favourite: 'the ideal Viceroy' with abundant energy, who once travelled overnight in a bullock-cart. When he took over from 'Plain John Lawrence' in 1869, Mayo had to suffer a sermon from his predecessor on the importance of treating the Indians kindly, only to see Lawrence assaulting an Indian servant a few minutes later. Needless to say, Mayo, who practised what he preached, was the only ruler of British India to be assassinated.
The rise of an educated and politically conscious Indian middle class was furthered by the radical Ripon (the only Catholic Viceroy), who upheld the great tradition of racial equality. Lamentably, this policy was resented by the less attractive members of the British community who were forgetting the whole point of the operation: the British were, after all, in India to educate the Indians to rule themselves. In an admirably fair-minded way, Mr Bence-Jones traces the progress towards that goal, showing how the great majority of the imperialists were men of liberal, and often unconven- tional, views, who saw their first duty being to the Indians.
Politics aside, Mr Bence-Jones superbly evokes a world that now seems as remote as Ancient Rome but which only existed the day before yesterday. He handles an un- wieldly cast with great confidence, coming up with something fresh on the stars and bringing out the nonentities. Mr Bence- Jones is a master at jollying you up with some anecdote (such as an ADC being emasculated by a donkey) before slipping across a well-argued point whose complexi- ty dissolves in the clarity of his writing. Like his Ampleforth contemporary Mark Girouard, Mr Bence-Jones is not afraid to intersperse his Augustan prose with deliberate anachronisms (suitably fenced round by quotation marks and half apologies); thus Mayo had 'charisma' and 'a social conscience'; Northbrook's lieutenants included some 'whiz-kids'; Lansdowne was perhaps 'too great a swell for the job'; Curzon's outlook was of the 'meritocracy' rather than the aristocracy; and the author refers to the Willingdons 'not so much as Viceroy and Vicereine, as a way of life'. When one ADC tried to resign because of 'Her Excellency', Lord Will- ingdon told him: 'I've had to put up with her for forty years, you've only had to put up with her for two months; you can damn well stay.'
The publishers have included some splen- did illustrations, though they deserve a cau- tion for making a nonsense of page ii and for misspelling Delhi throughout the headlines of Chapter 12. I particularly liked the pictures of Charlotte Canning on an elephant; poor Lytton squirming from his piles on the Viceregal throne; Minto steady- ing his mount at the Simla Horse Show, like the great jockey he was; and the 'Terrible Twins', Lord Pethick-Lawrence and his
lookalike Gandhi; Attenborough's eponymous film should increase interest in The Viceroys of India (which has plenty to say about the fakir); I would dearly like to see it with Mark Bence-Jones.
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