The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire by Deborah Baker
The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire By Deborah Baker Chatto & Windus £25.00 Oldie price £22.25 inc p&p
On 26th February 1937, W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s play The Ascent of F6, in which two colonial powers are in competition to conquer the mountain of the title, opened in London.
The play was dedicated to Auden’s brother, John, a geologist and climber working in the Himalayas for the Geological Survey of India, and its protagonist, Michael Ransom, was named after, and owed some of his character to, Michael Spender, the older brother of the playwrights’ close friend Stephen Spender.
In 1935, Michael Spender had been the chief surveyor on a reconnaissance expedition undertaken by the Mount Everest Committee, founded with the intention of getting a British climber to be the first person to conquer the world’s tallest peak. Both he and John Auden would not only spend time together on Himalayan expeditions, but would also fall in love with the same woman, Nancy Sharp. She was married to her fellow painter William Coldstream, with whom W H Auden had worked at the GPO Film Unit.
Another of Sharp’s lovers was Auden’s friend and sometime collaborator Louis Macneice, who in 1947 would be sent to India by the BBC to cover the events surrounding the country’s independence. Meanwhile, Michael John Carritt, an older brother of the ‘snub-nosed winner’ with whom Auden had been in love at Oxford, was combining a career as a high-ranking officer in the Indian Civil Service with that of a spy for the Communist Party. From this tangled network of personal and professional relationships in England and India, Deborah Baker has created a fascinating account of the twilight years of the British Empire.
In A Blue Hand (2008), Baker portrayed the Beat poets in India, taking a seemingly familiar subject and looking at it from a new and enlightening angle. In The Last Englishmen, she performs a similar trick, focusing on the less celebrated relatives of well-known writers and using their experiences in India to portray the decline of British rule there.
Alongside those people already mentioned, Baker fields a huge cast of climbers, politicians of all parties (both British and Indian), administrators, spies and a loose group of Bengali intellectuals, whose regular meetings in Calcutta to discuss philosophy, politics, culture and nationhood were recorded in a lively secret diary, eventually published in 1990. In constructing her narrative, Baker has also made extremely good use of vast quantities of unpublished material, particularly diaries and correspondence still in private archives.
In The Ascent of F6, Ransom exemplifies Isherwood’s notion of ‘the Truly Weak Man’, the neurotic hero spurred to action by a need to prove himself. ‘With immense daring, with an infinitely greater expenditure of nervous energy, money, time, physical and mental resources, he prefers to attempt the huge northern circuit, the laborious, terrible north-west passage, avoiding life; and his end, if he does not turn back, is to be lost for ever in the blizzard and the ice.’ John Auden was certainly neurotic and needed to prove himself and, while Michael Spender was if anything far too sure of his abilities, both men valued Himalayan expeditions, partly because the dedication these required allowed them to avoid, or at any rate leave behind, life’s emotional complications.
Unlike Ransom, they did not disappear for ever into the blizzard and the ice, but Baker provides vivid descriptions of the dreadful conditions they endured. She also writes amusingly about the fraught relationships on such journeys, with some leaders regarding the two men’s labours much as ‘a not too patient uncle might regard his nephews playing trains on the table on which he was shortly expecting his lunch’. What they were doing would, however, prove extremely valuable: Auden’s fieldwork would fuel innumerable World Bank projects in India, while the skills Spender brought to mapping the Himalayas would be employed during the war in the vital work of aerial photo interpretation.
Although their endeavours in India were seen as part of the imperial project, neither man personally subscribed to the Raj. While surveying in Greenland, Spender ‘had been struck by the idea of administering a country entirely for the benefit of the people who lived there’, not something he thought would ever be said of the British Empire. Auden defied imperial attitudes to race by marrying an Indian, and he saw at first hand the results of Britain’s failure to protect those it governed when, in the aftermath of the Great Calcutta Killings of August 1946, he assisted in the burial of 500 corpses.
Baker’s portraits of Michael Spender, John Auden and Nancy Sharp are compelling and clear-eyed, and it is greatly to the credit of the families that they allowed her to use material that does not always reflect well upon this central trio. Baker also has a good nose for odd and unlikely characters, such as Lady Houston, a former chorus girl and suffragette devoted to nudism and Mussolini. She personally underwrote the development of an engine that would allow an aeroplane to fly over Everest. Another engaging figure is the Rev Michael Scott, a domestic chaplain to the Archbishop of Bombay who used his connections to gather information for the Indian Communist Party.
Baker tells her story as if it were fiction, generally paraphrasing rather than directly quoting letters, diaries and other documents. Purists may object to this, but every incident and description of minutiae, and every thought or feeling she details, is meticulously sourced. The result is a book with the narrative sweep of an epic novel.