Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [178]
* Becoming a Companion was to achieve the lowest of the three decorations within the order, for the British graded these things precisely, with the highest ranks reserved for the Viceroy and for Indians who had been fortunate enough to have princely parents yet pliant enough to let the British install an agent telling them how to run their state. A Companionship would be sufficient reward for a stolid engineer. There is no indication Findlayson imagines any honours going to labourers and craftsmen.
† An Indian sailor.
* Patterson had the skins made into rugs, which he later sold to a museum in Chicago. Despite their being a little moth-eaten by then – and still punctured by bullet holes – the museum’s taxidermist managed to recreate the lions, which were put on display in 1928. They are now the motif for T-shirts, mugs, posters and caps in the museum gift shop. Earnest forensic scientists who recently examined the skull of the first lion concluded that it had suffered from ‘a severe abscess of the lower right canine that would have prevented it from killing large vigorous prey’. The railway workers were a sort of convenience food.
* Like Rhodes, Barnato did not make old bones. He died when he jumped overboard from the steamer carrying him back to England for Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1897, a few weeks short of his forty-fifth birthday.
* In 1888 Rhodes would merge Kimberley Central into a new company, De Beers Consolidated Mines Ltd, which he controlled and which is still the biggest diamond-mining company in the world.
* By contrast, Bell considered that his own territory, Uganda, was ‘emphatically a black man’s country and European settlement is out of the question’.
* Argument over this unfortunate treaty continues, while the site of the signing now offers itself as the perfect venue for weddings, as the place where ‘two peoples forged a relationship that has grown into nationhood’. For an additional fee, you can arrive by boat, as Hobson did, and plant ‘a seed of commitment’ in the gardens of the British Residency. In 2010 eleven couples chose to take up the offer.
* The Indian tea plantations, established to reduce the dependence on China, were an imperial creation, as were tea and coffee plantations in Kenya and rubber plantations in Malaya. One of the consequences of imperial trade was to make London the prime international trading centre.
* She is supposed to have taken some comfort from the words which came from behind her – ‘Steady, old lady! Whoa, old girl!’ until she realized it was the colonel of the 2nd Life Guards trying to control his overexcited mare.
* The building still provides the British ambassador to Egypt with a splendid residence, even if the price of Egyptian freedom was the construction of a highway between the elegant lawns and the Nile, and the State Department has erected one of the ugliest American embassies anywhere in the world next door. A portrait of Lord Cromer still hangs in the British ambassador’s study and a pair of stone lions taken by Lord Kitchener from a former Khedival palace still guard the door.
* The Mahdi’s great-grandson, a delightful, Oxford-educated former prime minister, rejects the description, preferring to see his ancestor as a sufi who denied the material world. Unfortunately, as we sat in his peaceful garden in Omdurman, I forgot to ask him quite how that worked with the Mahdi’s reputed seventy wives.
* It was destroyed when the British later retook Khartoum, a 1929 guidebook claiming that the body had been removed and ‘burned in the furnace of one of the steamers’ on the Nile, with the ashes tossed into the river, because ‘the building had become a symbol of rebellion and fanaticism, the goal of pilgrimages and the centre of fraudulent miracles’. The current dome appears to be coated in anodized aluminium and is not visible miles out into the desert for the simple reason that the desert has been built upon and the air is now heavy with pollution.
* One of