Imperial Vanities: The Adventures of the Baker Brothers and Gordon of Khartoum - Brian Thompson

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      The immediate consequence of his move to the coast was to open a window on to the part of Ceylon his brother had made such a point of ignoring – conventional Colombo society. As Val soon discovered, while the island might be a paradise for big-game hunters, its administration was a mare’s nest. As with every other outpost of Empire, social recognition hung upon favourable notice by the governor or his commander-in-chief. To be invited to this or that ball; there to be presented to a general on his way to a more distant posting, or to a savant of the Royal Society being carried to the ends of the earth – all this gave the appearance of upholding a civility whose wellspring was in London.

      The spirit of empire was not so sturdy that it did not need continuous reinforcement. When HMS Beagle came to Sydney in 1836, Charles Darwin found it ‘a most magnificent testimony of the power of the British nation. Here, in a less promising country, scores of years have done many times more than an equal number of centuries have effected in South America.’ Such generous sentiments were received with gratitude by his hosts, as was the conclusion he drew from them, a desire ‘to congratulate myself that I was born an Englishman’. He had not been so kind towards New Zealand, describing the English there as ‘the very refuse of society’, but in Australia, young though he was, he had done the right thing.

      The colonial enthusiasm that greeted the arrival of every ship flying the British flag and honoured its passenger list down to the least of its officers was demonstrated by people a long way from home, it was true; but that was not the only reason to feast strangers. The governor’s residence, which was always the distinguished visitor’s first port of call – in Colombo it was called, archaically, the King’s House – was the amplification chamber of a distant murmur. What were they saying in London? The home country’s desires and wishes were not always clear and congratulation was a rare commodity. As a consequence there was no such thing as stale news. Rumour and gossip were quite as closely attended as official dispatches.

      Such was early Victorian society that well-bred strangers in conversation with each other were seldom at more than two or three degrees of separation from common acquaintances, by marriage, by regiment or by country seat. For the governor and his entourage, this was a second and more anxious reason to flatter the latest new arrival. By indirection, they were trying to find out how they stood personally. Colonial appointments, far from being sinecures, were very much movable feasts. Since 1840 five governors had packed their bags and quit Colombo. Sam Baker pointed out in Eight Years in Ceylon how this constant shifting around of administrators, their secretaries and military advisers did nothing but harm to emerging colonies, denying continuity and cohesion to their governing class.

      Val was lucky – or circumspect – in his choice of Colombo friends, striking up acquaintance with a young man not entirely unlike himself. The chief justice of Ceylon was a man called Sir Anthony Oliphant, none too happily married to a powerful but neurasthenic woman who spent most of her summer months in a cottage by the lake at Newera. The couple were notorious evangelicals. Their only son Laurence was two years younger than Val and had been raised on the island as something of a wild child. In 1846 Sir Anthony and his family went home to England on a two-year leave, with the intention of leaving Laurence to study at university. Instead, the boy threw over his place at Cambridge to follow his father and mother back out to Ceylon.

      Ceylon as it was in Skinner’s day.

      When he and his mother pitched up at Newera, he found the Bakers in the full flood of setting up the model farm. Sam, in his breezy and open-handed way, took Laurence shooting. They camped together deep in the forest and the older man taught Oliphant, among other things, how to catch and dispatch a crocodile: you tied a live puppy to a wooden crucifix and, when the predator’s jaws were jammed wide open by the indigestible element of the bait, you hauled him in and took a sporting shot through the eye.

      Oliphant was completely sanguine about butchery of this kind; nor was he fazed by the other privations of a Baker jungle expedition. Courageous and resourceful, very quick-witted, he would later be one of the most enigmatic figures of the nineteenth century. His mother, whose address at Newera was ‘The Turtle Dovery’, was twenty years younger than her husband and liked nothing more than to be congratulated on her youthful appearance – and, on occasion, to be mistaken for her son’s sister. She clung to Laurence with almost a lover’s tenacity.

      The two young men – Oliphant and Val Baker – were at first glance very alike. They were good looking, athletic, perhaps a little too sketchily educated, but obedient to the usual conventions of society. Each had an interesting background. Strangers who had heard something of the Oliphant family and came looking for a mummy’s boy in Laurence were surprised to meet a blond but already balding giant, energetic and voluble. Those Colombo planters who felt themselves snubbed by the maverick Bakers up in Newera discovered in Val not an unhappy deserter, but a family member with the same trademark self-possession.

      An astute observer might have found more intriguing shadows in Laurence Oliphant. He was one of those men made to be a secret agent – spontaneous and effusive on the outside, but inwardly tortured. Born at the Cape in 1829, brought up haphazardly in Ceylon by a succession of private tutors, he nevertheless – to the surprise of his father’s distinguished dinner guests – spoke five languages. Dissembling his feelings in order to accommodate the war between his parents had made him a master of disguise. Never the milksop his mother seemed to want to cherish, and certainly not the evangelical saint of his father’s imagination, Oliphant was a complicated young man. On his way out to Ceylon in 1848 to join his family, he found himself in Naples in the middle of the Italian uprising.

      I shall never forget joining a roaring mob one evening, bent upon I knew not what errand, and getting forward by the pressure of the crowd and my own eagerness into the front rank just as we reached the Austrian Legation, and seeing ladders passed to the front and placed against the wall, and the arms torn down.

      He helped drag the hated emblem of foreign occupation to the Piazza del Populo and assisted in its burning. This is worthy of Byron or Shelley. At Messina his hotel was bombarded by the king of Naples’s fleet and when he came back up to Naples he was in the square in front of the palace when King Bomba ordered his troops to fire into the crowd. Laurence escaped injury by crouching behind an arch. He was nineteen years old.

      Val Baker’s life to date had been a great deal less exciting. He had manners, he was dutiful, yet he was to others merely an officer in an undistinguished rifle regiment, a young infantry subaltern who knew a great deal about horses. His military duties were almost ludicrously undemanding. The faintly effeminate nature of the indigenous population that made it so difficult to recruit also made the island easy to govern. There was, as it happened, an outburst of civil unrest just at the time Val came down to the coast. Everyone knew that, in the event of a serious threat, the place would be flooded with troops from India. In the ordinary course of things, soldiering in Ceylon was about as taxing as taking up watercolours, or butterfly-hunting; and it had been this way since the brief Kandyan wars of 1817–18.

      There was one Ceylon Rifle officer known by name at least to everyone on the island. Thomas Skinner joined as an ensign in 1819 when he was fifteen years old. To great amusement, he attended his first parade in civilian clothes, no uniform being found small enough to fit him. Skinner proved to have a genius for road-building and, by teaching himself the use of the theodolite, went on to produce the first accurate survey of the island’s interior. (Little monuments to him are scattered along the roads of Ceylon to the present day.) His career is an example of how the purchase system worked.

      After he had spent some years as a lieutenant, Skinner’s fellow officers clubbed together to provide the purchase price of a vacant captaincy, an exceptional mark of respect for his talents. Out of pride (both his father and father-in-law were colonels) Skinner declined the money and so lost eleven long years of seniority. His promotion eventually came about in a particularly grotesque way. There was in the Rifles a Captain Fretz. One afternoon Fretz levelled his musket at an elephant and had the block blow back in his face. A chunk of metal over three inches long and weighing nearly four ounces entered his nasal cavity and lodged against

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