The Last Englishmen Read online

  Uncle Alfred might have hoped his eldest nephew would answer India’s need for men of science. But as soon as Michael read of a forthcoming expedition to the Great Barrier Reef in the March 1928 issue of Nature, he wanted in. To live for a year on a tiny sunlit coral island, in waters first explored by Captain Cook, on reef islands once studied by Darwin … how could a salaried job not seem sordid by comparison? Without telling anyone, Michael wrote a letter to the Royal Geographical Society, volunteering his services for the job of chief bottle washer.

  There was no funding for a bottle washer, Arthur L. Hinks, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, replied. The RGS was underwriting the posts of geographer and surveyor, and the former position had already been filled. On the eve of his interview, Michael’s nerve failed. How could he possibly calculate latitude or longitude without a book to look it up in? If he tried “I am absolutely the man you are looking for” on Hinks he would be cut to pieces and forever snubbed by the class lists. He saw himself stammering, being forced to admit that Hinks had better choose someone else.

  Michael Spender was an unduly conceited young man, the head of engineering at Oxford wrote by way of a recommendation, but he was terribly keen. Others at the RGS took issue with Michael’s “Oxford manner,” but Hinks overruled them, seeing something of himself in the young man’s unapologetic arrogance.

  On hearing the news that Michael was off to Australia, Alfred Spender decided his nephew was as flighty as his brother Harold had been.

  Whatever Granny thought, she let Michael go.

  Midnapore Collegiate School, Handicraft Exhibition,

  Kharagpur, Bengal, April 7, 1931, 6:40 p.m.

  The four rugby-playing Carritt brothers were known around Oxford as the Golden Boys. Soon after the eldest of them arrived in India, he began to wonder: did queers rule India just as they had university? The first two high British officials he met did little to hide their proclivities. He tried to imagine Wystan Auden, who’d been smitten with his younger brother Gabriel, ruling a district the size of Sussex County. During his frequent stays at their family house at Boars Hill, Oxford, Wystan had made himself at home. Then again perhaps Wystan wouldn’t have made the grade. He’d spent his final term writing poems about the Golden Boys and left Oxford with a third.

  Michael John Carritt’s father had long told him that even a second-class honors degree would mean a short wait for the best jobs going. Having spent more time in pubs than in the library, Carritt had left university with a respectable second only to discover that the jobs he’d counted on were no longer there. That left the colonial services. He chose the Indian Civil Service because it carried the most prestige. And as it was generally accepted that ICS officers assigned to the frontier were of the best caliber, Carritt had put the North-West Frontier Province as his top choice for a posting. He foresaw sharing pegs under staring trophy heads with the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Punjab at the regimental mess bar and squaring off against Rajput princes in chukkers of polo. This was the Raj Winston Churchill had written of in letters to his mother and retired ICS officers revisited in their memoirs. But to Carritt’s bitter disappointment he was posted instead to the backwaters of Bengal.

  Bengal’s dismal climate and its perpetually disgruntled populace accounted for its unpopularity. Bookish nationalists, sneaky terrorists, and vegetarian Gandhians were considered unworthy adversaries for the Indian Army, so those malcontents were left to the local police and district officers to handle. In Bengal, too, a junior officer would be lucky to scare up sufficient company for billiards, let alone polo or pig sticking. This would allow Carritt plenty of time to reflect that because he had not got a first in Greats he would always be at the bottom of the ICS deck. As the new assistant district officer of Midnapore District, he was to appear for duty in the fall of 1930. On his arrival he learned that a flamboyant Oxford acquaintance, now a district magistrate, had pulled strings to get him assigned to Midnapore.

  Raw recruits weren’t generally given postings in troubled districts, he was told by another extravagantly outfitted and queenly toff living in what had once been the summer residence of Warren Hastings, the first, de facto, viceroy of India. During Gandhi’s Salt March that past April, satyagrahis had descended on the Bay of Bengal. Gandhi’s volunteers had offered only passive resistance to the lathi charges and dogs set upon them by the superintendent of police. A local leader watched without emotion as the district officer burned his house and food stocks to the ground. When the jails were full, volunteers were hauled off in trucks and dumped by the wayside. Before the rains put an end to it, three satyagrahis were shot and killed. Gandhi wrote the organizers a letter of congratulation from prison. When Carritt arrived in India six months later, Gandhi was still there.

  If Carritt distinguished himself in Midnapore, the toff had said, there was the possibility of a transfer to Calcutta. Special officer appointments were proliferating in the new but highly competitive Political and Home Department, reflecting measures taken to combat the increase in terrorism throughout Bengal. The same month the Salt March was completed, a raid on the Chittagong armory resulted in the deaths of seven Europeans. After that dak bungalows were put under police guard and verandas were draped with wire mesh so bombs could not be thrown onto them. Watchers, informers, and spies began popping up everywhere. Letters were intercepted and translated. Reports were sent up the chain of command of the Special Branch of Police, ending up on the desk of the British governor of Bengal and sometimes the viceroy’s.

  The district officer to whom Carritt eventually reported was neither a toff nor a queer but a battle-hardened Scot. It was he who led the attack on the satyagraha volunteers. James Peddie had received a Military Cross during the last war, when he had been shot in the face. His thickset, muscle-bound body was furred and covered with freckles. One week out of every month Carritt and Peddie heard cases in Kharagpur. The rest of the time they shared a tent or dak bungalow, traveling all over the district inspecting schools, police stations, and village dispensaries. They scanned marriage registries for underage brides. They heard petitions for funding a village improvement or complaints about rapacious zamindars. They filed reports on road conditions and how much progress had been made clearing hyacinth from waterways. If wells they’d approved had yet to be dug or if someone’s servant had signed off on an extortionate price, inquiries were threatened.

  Yet Carritt did admit that about half their time on tour was spent in near-fanatical pursuit of game. Lying before dawn in a dugout canoe, listening to birds call out to each other and watching the low-lying mist over the marshes be burned off by the sun, felt like a dream. But eight months into his posting, having just returned from duck hunting in a remote corner of the district, Carritt was awakened.

  He and Peddie had been met at dusk by a delegation eager to escort them to an opening-day ceremony of a handicraft exhibition. They wandered through four or five shabby classrooms before the lights went. At the sound of gunfire there was a stampede to the veranda, where Carritt discovered Peddie was missing. Using a hurricane lamp he retraced his steps and found the DO leaning against a classroom wall. Peddie’s last words before collapsing were “They have got me.”

  Peddie had been shot three times, twice in his left arm and once in the back. The hospital had no morphine, no operating theater, and no doctor. He died the next morning. In the subsequent investigation Carritt gave a description of the two assailants. Both were members of the Bengal Volunteers, a terrorist group that vowed the office of Midnapore DO would henceforth remain empty. The next district officer barely lasted a year. The man who followed him was also shot and killed. In this way Parliament learned that all was not well in Midnapore, in Bengal, in India. Peddie’s assassins were arrested and executed but not before the police organized raids on local villages and mass arrests of young men.

  Within days of Peddie’s death, a new viceroy arrived. The Marquess of Willingdon soon found India ridiculously easy to govern. All it req
uired, he told a reporter for the Calcutta Statesman, was kindness. When another campaign of civil disobedience was launched in 1932, kindness would involve outlawing the Congress Party, and arresting and imprisoning every member of its working committee as well as tens of thousands of their followers. During Willingdon’s five-year tenure, both Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru would spend more than a year in prison. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the All India Muslim League, returned to his London law practice in disgust. Finally, Willingdon placed Bengal under martial law. Once the Indian Army was called in, Carritt noted, the only function of district officers in Midnapore was to provide terrorists with sitting targets.

  Dr. Auden’s credo, “Live as if on a mountain,” had left off Marcus Aurelius’s next words, a wisdom ideally tailored for district officers, rebel insurgents, and bugger poets.

  “Let them see, let them know that a real man lives according to his nature. If they cannot endure this, let them kill him. For that is better than to live thus.”

  Classroom, Zurich Polytechnic University,

  Switzerland, January–August 1931

  Michael Spender had spent a year surveying and drawing up a lovingly detailed map of two tiny and remote islands off the Great Barrier Reef whose terrain consisted largely of mangrove swamp and broken bits of coral. On his return he accepted a job at His Master’s Voice Gramophone Company where he invented a way to record music that would yield better sound than their scratchy disc reproductions. When told his invention would be too expensive to engineer, he would have resigned on principle but they let him go to Paris for a month. Then he resigned. To Arthur Hinks, the secretary of the Royal Geographical Society, Michael explained that fetching and carrying for a firm quickly progressing toward Queer Street felt futile.

  But what could be more futile than mapping a place with no inhabitants and no extractable resources? Unlike the GSI project of mapping the underlying geological structure of the subcontinent in pursuit of minerals and coal, Michael’s mapping of the Barrier Reef islands, like the ongoing effort to survey and map the fifteen-hundred-mile-long chain of the Himalaya, was largely an academic exercise, though with the Himalaya there was at least the possible question of border security. It is hard to escape the feeling that the English were apt to mistake the map for the place itself. And the magical belief that maps consolidated sovereignty, accuracy equaled impartiality, and heavenly perspective mimed the eye of an imperial sovereign deity added to their irresistible allure.

  In 1800 a sweet-tempered and reticent Englishman had conceived the modest ambition of surveying all of India. To map India a team of surveyors, beginning at an observatory in the western port of Madras, crawled toward the southernmost tip of India, before returning for a northward sweep, roughly following the arc of the seventy-eight-degree meridian. There were latitudinal forays to connect Madras and Calcutta on the east coast with Mangalore and Bombay on the west. Plagued by jungle fevers, floods, and wild animals, they steadfastly triangulated mile upon mile, year after year, using algorithms that took into account the curvature of the earth and the effect of heat on the links of the hundred-foot chain that established the seven-and-a-half-mile baselines. The longest measurement of the earth’s surface ever attempted, the result was called the Great Indian Arc of the Meridian.

  The use of triangles to estimate the distance between one point and another dates to antiquity. In order to survey a fixed area, lines of sight must first be established between three visible reference points. These three points demarcate the three points of a triangle, with the sight lines representing the three sides. The distance between two of the three points must be known. This is called the baseline. By measuring the angles made by the baseline with the angles of the sight line to a distant third point (a peak or a hill topped with a signal post), the distance and position of the latter can be established by trigonometry. Once its distance was determined, that side could be used as a baseline to fix the distance of another visible fixed point. Stations were thus added one by one, creating a web of triangles across the subcontinent. At critical junctures astronomical observations would be made to cross-check for accuracy.

  For the Great Indian Arc, a theodolite weighing half a ton was used to measure the horizontal and vertical angles from each end of the seven-and-a-half-mile baseline to the fixed point. It required a dozen men to carry it. Where there was no fixed point on which to fix the telescopic sights of the theodolite, the survey team built one. Another man would see to the project’s completion, fifty years after it was begun. His name was George Everest. The highest fixed point in the world would be named after him.

  A no less monumental achievement concluded half a century later. Upon winning the right to collect revenues, the East India Company had begun mapping every inch of inhabited, cultivated, and forested land in Bengal, registering the name of each landowner or tenant in logbooks. When, in response to the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Crown bought out the company (adding its stiff price to the long column of India’s debt) the project continued. These cloth maps and logbooks were known as land records. Land records were tied in neat bundles, wrapped in red cloth, and stacked on floor-to-ceiling shelves running the length of the record room of the district collectorate. By the early twentieth century, there was a map for every village in India.

  Every ICS officer spent one cold season learning the subtleties of land settlement recording. After his Midnapore posting Carritt had a stint. As soon as all the villages and fields in one district were surveyed, and the names, rents, and tenures recorded, a five-member team would move on to the next. As Bengal was made up of some twenty districts and each one took from two to four years to survey, Carritt had calculated it would take nearly fifty years to complete one round. Then the entire operation would begin again. Aerial photography to assist in drawing maps was, however, just coming into use. A light biplane flying back and forth along three-mile strips would generate a roll of images. These flights occurred in the morning or evening so that the shadows from the low mud walls surrounding each paddy could be seen and measured.

  It was through land records and Survey of India maps that the Crown replaced ancient understandings governing the land with its own legalisms. The rights of hereditary ownership, from the lowliest cultivator to the most powerful landowners, could be taken away with the stroke of a patwari pen. The revised land record would then be wrapped again in red cloth and placed in the appropriate spot on the collectorate’s shelves. And there it would sit collecting dust until the land once again changed hands. Yet even the smallest village has dimensions that elude measure. The offices of the collector were often overrun with litigants, gossips, and court officers agitating for recognition of the ever-shifting tides of human affairs of which any ICS officer could only ever be dimly aware.

  Tax collection in Bengal was often left in the hands of local landowners, the powerful zamindars and nawabs. On top of the revenues mandated by their British overseers, they and their minions often helped themselves to commissions, thereby sending their landless tenants spiraling into debt. The Marquis of Salisbury once said, “As India is to be bled, the lancet should be directed to those parts where the blood is congested [rather than] those which are already feeble for the want of it.”

  Once the wealthiest province in all India, Bengal was bled and bled.

  Michael Spender wanted to lose himself in some Sisyphean project like the Great Indian Arc. The maps of the southern African veldt were woefully inaccurate, he told Arthur Hinks. What about that? Hinks knew from the Everest Committee how difficult it was now to finance Sisyphean projects. Instead, he wrote to a Zurich professor asking that he teach Spender stereographic surveying. Hinks had a mountain in mind to map.

  The Wild stereoautograph was made of black cast iron, with a foot wheel and two handwheels. Between the hand wheels was an eyepiece with a high-powered double scope before which were placed two photographic plates. The whole apparatus was attached to a drafting table where a pencil clamped to a
carriage plotted elevation lines on drafting paper, steered by the handwheels. Just beyond this contraption, Michael watched Herr Professor give a lecture about some nuance of spherical geometry while chalking an elaborate equation on a blackboard with his left fist clenched under the tail of his black frock coat.

  “Good you have come here to work,” Herr Professor said, spinning around.

  Switzerland’s leading expert on photogrammetry then held forth for a solid hour on the principles laid out in his opus Die Photogrammetrie und ihre Anwendung bei der schweizerischen Grundbuchvermessung und bei der allgemeinen Landesvermessung. The man’s Swiss German dialect was nearly incomprehensible, so Michael decided to read the manuscript in German, rather than use Hinks’s rough translation, so as to learn the vocabulary. He was chagrined to discover that Continental mathematicians favored meandering analytical demonstrations rather than the sort of terse proofs he was accustomed to. Within a month Michael was boasting of having mastered the false position method and having produced an elegant proof of the rotation equation. Hinks doubtless knew what he was talking about.

  It is tempting to think that drawing a topographical map is like painting a portrait. A portraitist also translates the three-dimensional features of a face to the plane of a canvas. Yet however learned in the tricks of perspective, a painter in the end will trust her eye and, depending on her skill, the face she paints will be recognizable as her sitter. A map, however, requires more than a visual comparison to check its accuracy. Its inner structure, the infrastructure of triangles brought back from the field, is concealed. Only after this framework is built can visual details be fitted onto it.