1913 Page 3
These were intoxicating ideas for some. They certainly had their backers amongst pan-Germans who imagined a titanic settling of scores between Germany and Britain or, more ethnically inflected, between Teuton and Slav. But they were not particularly new. Europe was accustomed to linguistic flourishes of German militarism, and conventional wisdom had generally learned to discount them. After all, Britain had its jingoes too, Russia its pan-Slavists and France, perhaps most shrill of all, its ultra-nationalists. More to the point, Crown Prince Wilhelm was not the Kaiser, he was the Kaiser’s rebellious son. And Bernhardi was a retired general, not an active one. The Emperor himself used the occasion of the royal wedding to return to his favoured roles as a man of the world and peacemaker, magnanimously releasing two British subjects, Captain Trench and Bertrand Stewart, both imprisoned in the fortress at Glatz (Kłodzko) for having conducted espionage of Germany’s naval defences while posing as tourists. Was not the presence of the British King and Russian Tsar at the home of the German Emperor sure evidence that no harm could befall the world so long as Europe’s dynasties remained so intertwined? Were not the cheering crowds on Berlin’s streets a testament to the underlying bonds of goodwill between the nations?
Choreography reinforced the sense of royal concord over and above any political disagreements. When King George arrived at Berlin’s Lehrter station he rode together with the Kaiser to the imperial Schloss, the British King wearing the uniform of the Prussian Dragoon Guards and a sash denoting him as a member of the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle while the German Emperor wore a British uniform, set off by the broad blue ribbon of the British Order of the Garter and topped with a brass helmet. As the carriages entered the grounds of the Schloss a 101-gun salute was fired. The next day the Tsar arrived with somewhat less fanfare but with rather more security, 200 burly Russian detectives manhandling the crowd. Tsar Nicholas, it was noted, travelled without his German wife and his reception from the public was somewhat colder. But the German court made up for it by covering the roof of the opera house with Russian and German flags.27 ‘Guests who Rule a Third of the World’ ran a headline of a British newspaper story of the events.28 It was only a very slight overstatement.
From Olympus then, level-headed, well-informed, internationally minded Europeans – not cynics, but not dupes either – could still view the world in 1913 with a certain equanimity, their civilisation unmatched, their superiority unchallenged, their peace disturbed only by a few rabble-rousers, martinets and revolutionaries at home, their future guaranteed by the march of progress. Things might come to some kind of scrap at some point, of course. But not today, nor perhaps tomorrow. When over, equilibrium would be re-established and calm restored. Olympus would remain inviolate, the dangers to it not negligible, but not unmanageable either.
As it was, the sun still rose each morning over Europe from behind the Urals and still set each evening into the wide Atlantic. The stars above remained fixed in the firmament. The universe continued on its steady, silent course.
LONDON
World City
The capital of a small group of islands off the north-western coast of the European landmass, London had become, by 1913, the most populous city the world had ever seen, the metropolis of the largest empire the world had ever seen, the fulcrum of global order, and the core of global finance. Ghent might be the world’s shop window for a few months that year but London was, in the words of one contemporary, a ‘permanent world’s fair’.1 Lord Curzon, the classically minded former Viceroy of India, described the city as ‘becoming what Rome was in the first three centuries after the coming of Christ, what Byzantium was rather later’.2 Within a Europe that was the centre of the universe, London could reasonably lay claim to be the centre of the world.
At more than seven million, the city’s population was half again that of New York or Paris, and nearly double that of Berlin. London was still, as the American novelist Henry James had described it some years before, ‘the biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world’.3 As a consequence of London’s overwhelming scale even the smaller national communities in its midst might have passed for whole cities elsewhere, including in their home countries. ‘In London’, noted one guide, there are ‘more Irish than in Dublin, more Scots than in Aberdeen, more Jews than in Palestine and more Catholics than in Rome’.4
But the city’s position in the world depended on more than the number of its inhabitants. For British subjects in far-off Australia, Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, London represented imperial Anglo-Saxon order – to some it represented ‘home’. In the corridors of Whitehall and the chambers of Westminster, with Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith presiding, political decisions were taken that affected the futures of millions in Asia and Africa and, closer to home, in Ireland. In the to and fro of Europe’s ambassadors to the British Foreign Office, overseen by the archetypically English Sir Edward Grey, could be discerned London’s central diplomatic role in maintaining the world’s peace, attempting to enforce a great power solution to troubles in the Balkans. Behind the newly ornamented façade of Buckingham Palace resided a King-Emperor whose impressed profile was as familiar to the palms of a merchant in Singapore as to a shop-owner on Oxford Street. In the city’s docks, the world’s largest, goods would arrive each day to match the fortunes and tastes of every Londoner – cinnamon from Ceylon, furs from Canada, rum from Jamaica, tea from India – and goods would be sent around the globe to pay for them. In the City of London, lapped by tides of rumour and by the silent currents of the world’s money, reports from far-off business interests in South Africa or Argentina could inflate or puncture the global market for a particular good, or for a particular security, making fortunes or destroying them in a matter of hours. The lesser cities of the world – from Moscow to Rio de Janeiro – relied on London to raise their finance, as did the countries of which they were part. ‘A bill on London’, stated The Economist with satisfaction, ‘is a form of international currency’.5
Through all this ran the River Thames, from the neat boathouses of Henley which opened on to it, through the centre of London which turned its back against the polluted river’s stench, to the estuary which led to the sea. Down this stream, reflected Joseph Conrad, chronicler of Britain’s empire, had floated ‘the dreams of men, the seeds of commonwealths, the germs of empire’.6 Up this river had returned imperial conquerors, the wealth of nations and the peoples of the world.
Foremost amongst these were King George’s imperial subjects. Most exotic, but hardly unfamiliar in the city’s East End, were lascar seamen from Yemen, Somaliland and the Indian sub-continent, constituting one in every seven seamen on British merchant ships. Settled now in London, lascars formed some of the city’s first Muslim communities.7 More familiar in the city’s central districts were the studious young men of empire – from Ghana, Nigeria and India – who arrived in London to study law, as had Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi some twenty-five years before. Some would perhaps settle to practise law in London; others would return home, while still others might take their skills to other corners of the empire where English legal practice and principle prevailed. Most familiar of all – so much so as to be barely noticeable – were Londoners’ British-origin kin from the self-governing colonies, perhaps only a generation or two distant from a farm in Kent or a village in the Scottish lowlands. Amongst these returnees from empire was the leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Andrew Bonar Law of the Conservative Party, who was born in New Brunswick, Canada. And then there were the Irish, split between the southern majority that had been seeking a parliament in Dublin and Home Rule for their island for the past fifty years, and the Protestants of Ulster, who saw Home Rule as a Catholic plot, and committed their lives to preventing it.
To the average Londoner of 1913, empire was a habit of mind. The sight of a visiting colonial premier or an Indian maharajah was a commonplace. Memories of King George’s coronation two years previously, and the
mass visitation of imperial personalities which this occasioned, were still fresh. The city’s bus routes advertised themselves by imperial analogy. ‘Just as the flag links the empire’s commerce’, ran one, ‘so does the General link up the world’s greatest city’.8 The Evening Standard ran an advertisement for holidays in Sudan: ‘Presents a perfect winter climate, invariably dry, sunny and bracing; offering express steamers and sleepcar trains-de-luxe’.9 The country, it was reported, offered excellent big game shooting.
Scattered across the city were the agencies of the different colonies and dominions of empire: Canada, West Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and South Africa on Victoria Street, Quebec on Kingsway, New South Wales on Cannon Street, Nova Scotia on Pall Mall, Queensland on the Strand, and Victoria on Melbourne Place. For Earl Grey, former Governor General of Canada, this was not enough. A single ‘Dominion House’ should be built, he argued, ‘a great landmark, it should dominate the entire district in which it is situated, and should imprint upon it its character so as to advertise the grandeur and significance of the great Dominions far and wide’.10 In July 1913 King George laid the foundation stone for what would become Australia House, which merged the various Australian agencies into a single building. The city’s Australian population met the event with a national shout of ‘coo-ee’, ‘a long-drawn, plaintive cry’, the Daily Express reported, ‘which swelled and died again and again, coming to Londoners’ ears with almost startling novelty’.11
Everyone found their place in London. Whatever imagined slights existed between Germany and Britain in the realm of high politics, a student from the Baltic city of Königsberg or the Silesian city of Breslau could feel at home in London, joining a German gym near St Pancras station or visiting the offices of the German cultural society near Oxford Street, taking any medical complaints to the German hospital in Dalston, while avoiding the German Officers’ Club which met every Wednesday morning at the Gambrinus restaurant on Regent Street or the Association of German Governesses in England, with its offices on Bryanston Square.12 Some 100,000 Germans lived in Britain.13 Though young German men embarking for Britain from a German port were required to show they were not fleeing military service, no passport was needed for them to enter Britain, whether by boat from Bremen or Hamburg (for Berliners and north Germans) or from Dutch Vlissingen or Belgian Ostend (more convenient for southern Germans). An Anglo-German exhibition opened at Crystal Palace in June 1913 (following an Anglo-French one in 1908). ‘Cousins should not be allowed to drift apart’, said one of its English promoters.14 The sentiment echoed that of Our German Cousins, a book published some years before by that supposedly rabidly anti-German rag, Lord Northcliffe’s Daily Mail.15
The summer months – May, June and July – were the best times to visit the city, Baedeker advised its German readers. This was the ‘season’, when Britain’s grander classes made London the centre of their social calendar – as opposed to the rest of the year, when the over-titled British aristocracy retreated into draughty country houses and to Scottish moors. And by 1913 London society was, more than ever, international. On the evening of 5 June – the day after suffragette Emily Davison had thrown herself under the King’s horse at the Epsom Derby in the cause of votes for women – Europe’s hybrid aristocracy gathered at the Royal Albert Hall for a charity event themed as a ball at the seventeenth-century French court of Versailles. Prince Felix Yusupov of Russia had been meant to play Louis XIV himself, but at the last minute passed off his role (and costume) to the German Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, preferring to attend as a French sailor. The Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova danced. ‘The bal masqué was in its hey-day in Paris of the Second Empire when the City of Light was the social centre of the world’, noted the Daily Mail, ‘is not London’s rise to social pre-eminence amongst her sister capitals shown by the ever increasing vogue of these splendid costume fêtes, each one more magnificent than the last?’16
Wealthy German visitors who did not wish to impose on friends and family might stay in one of the city’s grand hotels (with ‘all the modern comforts’, Baedeker advised) and be serenaded by small orchestras at set mealtimes. ‘Somewhat less demanding’ travellers – the hard up – could seek out lodgings in the temperance hotels of Bloomsbury, or at a guesthouse run by German immigrants. While French food predominated in restaurants, and most hotels would put on a mixed grill of some sort, vegetarians could choose between Food Reform on Furnival Street or the glorious Shearn’s Fruit Luncheon Saloon on Tottenham Court Road. Those seeking a taste of home could retire to the Löwenbräu and Zum Lahmen Pferd restaurants, or the Café Vienna.
For twenty-two-year-old Sergey Prokofiev, on his first trip outside the Russian Empire, critically hamstrung by the fact that his only English words were ‘jockey club’ and ‘water closet’, London nonetheless seemed to open a world of possibility.17 Walking along Regent Street and Piccadilly:
My eye kept being caught by the abundance of shipping-line offices, whose plate-glass windows were dignified by huge and artistically represented models of ocean-going liners, some of them with sections cut away so as to show the internal construction and layout. There were also brilliantly coloured images of India and America, with piles of the appropriate guidebooks and brochures. Such appetizing displays, beckoning from afar, are not to be found in St. Petersburg, or even Paris, and they make London seem somehow more closely connected to the world, so that a trip to India or South America, which seems to a Russian a virtually impossible fantasy, here appears a relatively normal, even simple, undertaking.
It was to prove more complicated to get to nearby Windsor, but repetition of ‘Vindzor’ eventually obtained him the required ticket. In London just for a few days, Prokofiev nonetheless managed to spot King George V and visiting French President Poincaré in Hyde Park, enjoy an evening at a London music hall (at which he laughed uproariously without understanding a single word), form an opinion that ‘one is more likely to encounter a beautiful face in London than in Paris’ and make an earnest resolution: ‘to learn English; it will be essential for my future travels’.
From an entirely different corner of the globe, Mr N. Ramunajaswami, a young lawyer glimpsing Britain for the first time after a four-week voyage from India, set down his excitement in his diary:
It was past three o’clock when I sighted the chalky shore of that great and free country which distinguished itself by winning laurels in the memorable and historic battles of liberty and good conscience. The sight of the English shore, longed after with devout expectation, sent a thrill of joy through me, and though the surrounding atmosphere was chill I was kept up by the warmth of my pleasure which the sight of Dover produced in me.18
In London itself, Ramunajaswami explored the city first from the upper deck of a London bus, travelling from his lodgings in Bayswater to Marble Arch and Oxford Street, and then to the City. Over the following several weeks, Ramunajaswami attended a lecture by Mrs Ellen Terry on Shakespeare’s women and went several times to the theatre. He visited Westminster Abbey, St Paul’s, the horse races at Epsom, both Cambridge (where there were said to be one hundred Indian students) and Oxford, Lord’s Cricket Ground, the House of Lords, the London Zoo (where he admired the polar bears), Madame Tussaud’s (where 1913 saw the introduction of wax models of the various warring Balkan monarchs), the British Museum, and the Tate, National and National Portrait galleries. At the Royal United Services Museum on Whitehall he saw a model of the battlefield of Waterloo, the order of execution of King Charles I, and a pendant of diamonds said to have been given to Admiral Lord Nelson by the Sultan of Turkey after Nelson’s victory over the French at the Battle of the Nile in 1798.
The political preoccupations of Britain and its empire were never far away. Ramunajaswami heard a suffragette haranguing passers-by at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park – an event which he referred to in Hindi as tamash, ‘a spectacle’ – and went to a larger meeting presided over by Mrs Pankhurst herself. He was present at the unveiling o
f a plaque at the headquarters of the Independent Labour Party in Bermondsey, whose members were now in Parliament. He went to a meeting of the British offshoot of the Indian National Congress, held under the auspices of one of its British founders, Sir William Wedderburn, and with future Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald in attendance. He visited the offices of the Universal Races Congress, devoted to the improvement of relations between the constituent nations of the British Empire. Everywhere, he came across representatives of a broader British Indian community, firmly entrenched in the capital city of empire.
Ramunajaswami was impressed at the city’s hugeness, of course, but also at its orderliness, and at the politeness of its policemen. He admired the British combination of conservatism and liberalism, the distaste for grand ideas yet the willingness to constantly adapt themselves to novelty – which he compared favourably with India. He marvelled at the British obsession with hats. One day he ventured into the working-class, poverty-stricken East End of London, remarking that ‘if the eastern portion alone were London, then London would not have been far better than even some of the inferior portions of Madras’. But overall he accepted London as a symbol of the Empire’s greatness and of that Empire’s rights of tutelage over India.