Victorian Builders
Thomps Telford. By L. T. C. Rolt. (Longmans, 25s.) IN this, the first book of a series dealing with British India, Michael Edwardes discusses the nineteenth-century empire and its two most signifi- cant heroes, John and Henry Lawrence. Broadly, British rule had three phases. That of the early Company when the rulers, on the whole, accepted India for what it was, intermarrying with Indians, and with casual views about all but the profit- motive. Then the expansionist period after 1813, the obsession with phantom Russian armies, and, with the arrival of the Victorian ethos and the British Lady, the joining of the moral motive to that of plunder and adventure. Following the Mutiny, with its enduring mythical legacies, the traders, heroes and such formidable buffoons as Lord Wellesley who considered Indians 'vulgar, ignorant, rude, familiar and stupid,' came the vast Imperial bureaucracy, with public works as a substitute for personal relations. Mr. Edwardes's period is still that of relative simplicity and per- sonal rule. One sees John Lawrence energetically at work, with the Koh-i-Noor diamond,,spoil of unconditional surrender, stuffed forgotten in his pocket. In him was 'Justice on Horseback,' the immediate decision, the rough untheoretical cam- paigns against suttee, infanticide, erosion, cholera, roadlessness, dacoits and private war. The Law- rences' rule in the Punjab was probably the peak Period of creative rule, the conquerors not yet Wholly alienated from their subjects, and their own misgivings sufficiently in check. For, though individual responsibility was not shirked, Mr. Edwardes gives an engrossing account of doubts and terrors that increasingly lurked beneath earnest Victorian ruthlessness, expressed in the bottle, an obsession with social precedence, the fatal urge to evangelise, often in a positive hatred of India. An 'either-or' attitude, leading to, but not ending with, the Cawnpore Well and the hanging-parties at Benares. This rather scrappy book defends British rule as necessary to the re- vitalisation of Indian society, though admitting the cruelties, indifferences and shallowness of so many British bigwigs. Indians might reproach Mr. Edwardes for enlarging more on the Necessity than the Hell. He says little about the underlying economic policy that sacrificed Indian home in- dustries for Lancashire prosperity, the undermin- ing of village life, the role of the money-lender, the effects of centralisation on agriculture and Morale, the statistics of disease, illiteracy and imprisonment. Perhaps his next volume will redress the balance. His story is notable, reinforc- ing the vital old platitude that ruthlessness can Only be justified if it creates the conditions for its OWn abdication.
Mr. Rolt's hero, Thomas Telford, the Pontifex Maximus of Civil Engineering, also built an empire, seemingly without inner doubts and with- out the retribution that overwhelmed Thomas BOuch, designer of the first Tay Bridge. Builder of 1,200 bridges in Scotland alone, 1,000 miles of toad, canals across Scotland and Sweden, the _Menai Bridge, the London-Holyhead road— Telford's achievement was colossal. His origins Were the humblest, and it is not surprising that an earlier biographer was Samuel Smiles. His original use of iron, creating bridges that made older efforts look clumsy, seems in part an effort to .eproduce the spirit of the written poetry that !.spired him throughout his life. Mr. Holt's biography is of solid technical excellence—aptly
enOugh.
PETER VANSTITART
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