6: ‘Travel with a Purpose’, 1887

6 ‘Travel with a Purpose’, 1887–1890

UNTIL 1887 GEORGE CURZON had travelled only in Europe and in some regions of Africa and Asia along the Mediterranean seaboard. In that year, however, he embarked on a series of much longer journeys which ended only with his marriage in 1895. The nature and purpose of his expeditions changed with their destination. The ‘youthful rover’ turned into a more earnest observer, the tourist became, in his own words, a traveller with a purpose. Of course he retained a zest for seeing everything, a perennial curiosity which made him study and write about subjects as diverse as waterfalls, Japanese wrestling and the kow-tow. He remained captivated by the charms of the Orient: ‘Do we ever escape from the fascination of a turban, or the mystery of the shrouded apparitions that pass for women in the dusty alleys?’1 But the journeys to the countries of the East were not made primarily to experience that fascination. He visited them in order to study and report on those areas where the future of the British Empire would be decided. He had what he called a ‘scheme of Asiatic travel’ that would make him the most knowledgeable politician of the age on India and the wide regions which bordered the Subcontinent. The first journey, a hurried circumnavigation of the globe, was something of a reconnaissance. The subsequent expeditions, which took him to Asia in each of the next seven years except 1891, concentrated on specific areas and resulted in a crop of long and authoritative volumes.

Curzon felt mildly guilty about setting off on his first world tour while Parliament was still sitting, but there was little for a backbench supporter of the Government to do in the House of Commons. He had not made another speech since the Irish debate and his last utterance in the Chamber had been in June when he enquired about the ‘distressing condition’ of unemployed chain-makers in Staffordshire. Accompanied by two friends, he thus embarked on 4 August with an immense amount of baggage, including an air cushion donated by Alfred Lyttelton which established itself as an essential item in his luggage for future travels. His companions were Stuart Donaldson, an Eton housemaster, and his old friend J.E.C. Welldon, who had gone with him to Greece and was now Headmaster of Harrow. Their journey was planned and executed with meticulous precision. ‘Every item of our tour as mapped out beforehand’, Curzon reported from San Francisco, ‘has been successfully accomplished.’2

They crossed the Atlantic in a slow, uncomfortable, evil-smelling boat, their welfare in the hands of an even more evil-smelling steward. The food was greasy, the service slovenly, and on the 12th Curzon experienced a ‘spasm of regret’ that he was not spending the day shooting grouse in Scotland. The Canadian cities were also slovenly and disappointing, making it hard for him to appreciate that he was on British soil amid British subjects. But the natural sights were impressive, and his diary of the journey, which runs to 600 pages, contains immensely long descriptions of landscapes. After seeing eastern Canada they crossed the border and travelled via Chicago and Salt Lake City to San Francisco. From there the schoolmasters returned to their schools, Welldon leaving behind a touching poem about the strength of their friendship. Curzon expressed similar feelings. ‘It is a privilege to travel with such a man,’ he told Brodrick; ‘a more unselfish and tonic-like fellow traveller I cannot conceive.’3

The Pacific voyage was even more of a trial than the Atlantic crossing. It began in vile weather, which made Curzon, who considered himself an ‘excellent and seasoned sailor’, very sea-sick. Then it became monotonous, with nothing to see – not even an albatross – and no one to talk to, for there was ‘no one on board with a parallel taste or interest’. He conceived a strong dislike for a group of American missionaries who contributed ‘about as much excitement to the voyage as would a company of tortoises’. Nor did he sympathize with their purpose. They were not ‘self-sacrificing martyrs going out to danger and perhaps death in a distant country’ but ‘commonplace middle class folk’ engaged in a worthless enterprise. Missionary activity, he thought, was usually harmful both to the natives themselves and to the interests of the imperial powers. In China, moreover, there was little chance of success: ‘You might as well try to convert a Chinaman as a cocoanut.’4

Reading was the principal occupation of both voyages. He had read a good deal of history, particularly for his Oxford prizes, but he was not a great reader of fiction and at the age of 40 confessed that The Count of Monte Cristo was the only very long novel he had read from beginning to end.5 On board ship, however, he devoured a fair amount of literature, alternating between a serious book and a more frivolous one because he found the contrast relieved his brain and brought him ‘back fresh to the interrupted repast’. Shortly after sailing from Liverpool, he had begun with Horace, finding him a ‘delicious reprobate’ and regretting that he had been made to treat him at Eton as a ‘solemn business’ when in truth he was ‘the veriest relaxation’. The first novels he read were less satisfactory, especially Pendennis: ‘Thackeray’s dialogues with the “gentle reader” and soliloquies with himself about the foibles and frailties of mankind’ were ‘decidedly tedious’. A selection of novelists from Cervantes to George Eliot were sampled during the Pacific crossing, as well as several works on China and India. Thackeray was then given a second chance, which resulted in some bitter-sweet reflections for his reader. After perusing Esmond, Curzon wrote to tell Sibell Grosvenorfn1 how closely the character of Lady Castlewood resembled her, ‘more closely indeed than any other I remember to have come across in fiction’. The success of his reading programme may have mellowed his disdain for the missionaries and other passengers. At any rate he agreed to participate in an entertainment at the end of the voyage, reciting a poem by Longfellow and giving his imitation of Tennyson’s ‘deep chested’ rendering of ‘Tears, idle tears’.6

Despite Japanese officials, who appeared to take pleasure in keeping him waiting, Curzon was ‘positively charmed’ by Tokyo. It was ‘a paradise of gardens’, and a journey through the streets was like a ‘magic lantern with an unending series of slides’. Furthermore, he reported to Sibell, it contained ‘such alluring Delilahs that even St Francis might have consented to become a Samson’.7 Sumo wrestling occupied much of his interest in Japan, and after his return to England he turned his lengthy notes on the subject into an article for the New Review. On leaving the country, he told Brodrick he was ‘already flushed with the fever of desire to come again’, for Japan was a place he could not see too often. If he found China less attractive, his visit there nevertheless left him with ‘a far more favourable opinion of the Chinese’ than he had held beforehand. He visited Shanghai, Canton and the Portuguese enclave of Macao, a place of ‘dingy dilapidation … illustrating so eloquently the decline and fall of a once conquering race’. From Hong Kong he boarded an unpleasant Austrian steamer bound for Colombo in which he spent thirteen days with a single companion, an ‘American cad of the first water’, whom he felt inclined to push overboard whenever he saw him.8

Curzon’s first sight of Britain’s Asian empire prompted strong feelings of patriotism. ‘No Englishman’, he noted, ‘can land in Hong Kong without feeling a thrill of pride for his nationality. Here is the furthermost Eastern link in that chain of fortresses which from Spain to China girdles half the globe.’ Visits to other links were equally gratifying. In Singapore he was ‘very much struck by the stamp of men who represent the British Government’. Rome had depended on the calibre of its consuls and proconsuls, and so did Britain. Her officials abroad were ‘as able and enlightened a body of men as ever carried or sustained a conquering flag in foreign lands’, a view which was somewhat modified during his later command of a good many of them. By contrast with the French who, with their ‘tortuous’ diplomacy and ‘irksome’ rule, were not popular in the East, Britain’s subject peoples displayed a ‘satisfied and grateful acquiescence in our domination’. The Chinese, for example, poured into places where they could live and trade under the British flag, confirming his view not that his countrymen were a superior race but that they had a special genius for government. Their civilizing mission, he convinced himself, was a noble one.9

After an enjoyable ten days in Ceylon, travelling at night by bullock cart to remote ruins, he crossed to the mainland and took another boat from Madras to Calcutta. The viceregal city impressed him as ‘a fine town, a worthy capital of an Empire that is not far short of the entire size of Europe’. Staying at the Bengal Club overlooking the Maidan, he visited Government House and had lunch with the Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, of whom he formed a rather higher opinion than historians have done since. An enthusiast for colossal scenery, he then went to Darjeeling because he had been told that its view of Kanchenjunga was the finest in the world. It was certainly the most majestic he had seen until then. But elation at Darjeeling was followed by disgust at Benares, especially with the monkey temple and its evidence of animal sacrifice, and he hurried westwards to Agra, Delhi and the North West Frontier. At Amritsar he succumbed to the traditional British prejudice in favour of the Sikhs, whom he found ‘a splendid looking set’ of warriors, just as earlier he had conformed to the view that the Bengalis were ‘not an inspiring or manly race’. He thought the red sandstone forts of Delhi and Agra ‘the two grandest specimens of the architecture of fortification’ he had ever beheld, and considered Bombay the most beautiful city in India.10

The most poignant and rewarding moment of the entire tour was his visit to ‘the pearl of fabrics, the gem of man’s handiwork’, the Taj Mahal. Of all the buildings he had ever seen, this alone was ‘without flaw or blemish, exquisite, irresistible’, impossible to criticize, incapable of improvement, ‘the most perfect structure in the world’. The mausoleum had a powerful aesthetic and emotional impact on him, and he went three times to gaze at it. The Alhambra in Granada, which he thought the most beautiful Saracenic building in Europe, could not in his view compare with the Taj, and he scoffed at those who tried to disparage it ‘by talking of wedding cake smartness’.11 As he put it to Brodrick,

The Taj is incomparable, designed like a palace and finished like a jewel – a snow-white emanation starting from a bed of cypresses and backed by a turquoise sky, pure, perfect and unutterably lovely. One feels the same sensation as in gazing at a beautiful woman, one who has that mixture of loveliness and sadness which is essential to the highest beauty.12

He always retained this sensual and melancholic love for the building, revisiting it several times as Viceroy and devoting many hours to its restoration. In the miserable aftermath of his resignation, he was able to find some tranquillity and consolation in returning to see it for the last time. ‘I have learned’, he said eighteen years after his first visit, ‘to love this place more than any other spot in India. Here it is always peaceful and always beautiful.’13

After half a year’s absence, Curzon returned to England in February 1888 at the beginning of the parliamentary session. The following months were dominated by a local government bill providing for the establishment of elected county councils. Curzon disagreed with certain clauses in the bill but played little part in its long passage through Parliament. He was frustrated by the lack of opportunities for a government backbencher and described himself as a member of ‘the great silent brigade in the House of Commons that [sits] mute amid a universal babble’.14 Hoping to establish a name for himself as an expert on Asia, he spent two evenings in the House trying to make a speech in a debate on India. But the Speaker never called him. His principal contribution to the session was a speech in March in favour of reforming the House of Lords. To Labouchere’s motion proposing to abolish hereditary membership of the Upper House, Curzon moved an amendment calling for reform and modification of the hereditary principle. It was not true, he declared, that the House of Lords was completely unrepresentative, for it included bishops, law lords, former judges and colonial governors, as well as nearly two hundred men who had once sat in the House of Commons. Nevertheless, he conceded that various interests were barely represented in the Chamber and that the House would benefit from a broadening of its membership.

The speech received acclaim from the press. The Scotsman described him as ‘by far the most dashing of the young Ministerialists’ with ‘remarkable aptitude in debate’, while the Observer declared that no more promising speech had been made by a young member since the early days of Randolph Churchill.15 After a promise from Lord Salisbury that he would consider a scheme for House of Lords reform, Curzon developed the theme in two articles for the National Review. In the first he contrasted the Upper House’s debates, performed on a ‘lofty plane of courtesy, dignity and decorum’, with the unseemly brawls, the ‘rancour and vulgarity’ of certain speeches, and the ‘weeks of aimless and arid palaver’ which the House of Commons might devote to a single clause. In his somewhat eccentric view the House of Commons was ‘the playground of jesters and the paradise of bores’, while the House of Lords extinguished ‘the jester by a chilling silence and exterminates the bore by a buzz of sound’. Nevertheless, the composition of the Lords was weighted in favour of property and wealth to the detriment of learning and administrative experience, and the hereditary system should be mitigated so that ‘the men of culture, the men of public service, and the men from the colonies’ could be brought in. As the eldest son of a peer, Curzon’s continued membership of the House of Commons depended on the health of his father, and in the second article he argued that peers should be allowed to choose as well as be chosen. Membership of the House of Lords should be limited to those who had distinguished themselves in some form of public life, yet it should not be made obligatory. If a qualified peer preferred to sit in the Commons, he should be entitled to do so.16

The session was punctuated by brief excursions out of London. He spent Easter at Wilton, Lord Pembroke’s great house at Salisbury, where he impressed Matthew Arnold, who told him he would ‘succeed’.17 At Whitsun he visited Brittany and the Channel Islands. And at the end of the session he rushed north for the beginning of the grouse season in Perthshire. But he had decided to deny himself a lengthy Scottish season of sport and society. Refusing invitations to several country houses, including the Tennants’ home in Peebleshire and Arthur Balfour’s mansion at Whittingehame, he arrived at the beginning of September in Southport to give four speeches in two days to enthusiastic audiences. The visit was a diplomatic one, for he was about to desert his constituents and his friends for a second purposeful visit to the East.

The new expedition was more serious and intensive than its predecessor. It also had to be considerably shorter because the opening of Parliament had inconveniently been brought forward to the beginning of November. Curzon’s objective was to penetrate the khanates of central Asia, to observe the strength of the Russians, and to assess the threat that their galloping expansion posed to the British position in India. He thus became a participant in the ‘Great Game’, that bizarre and sometimes heroic contest that seemed destined to end in an epic struggle between the world’s two largest empires.

He left England on 6 September 1888, accompanied by Rodd and another friend as far as Berlin, and then made his way to St Petersburg in order to acquire introductions for his journey to central Asia. Despite problems with bureaucrats over a permit to visit Transcaspia, he formed a favourable view of the Russians. They were civil and amiable, and he believed their hostility to be directed at Germany rather than Britain. Moreover, their sympathy with France was largely artificial, a necessary corollary to hatred of the Germans. No country in Europe, he decided, had a more healthy contempt for France’s ‘epicene civilisation’ and her ‘music hall statesmanship’.18

Travelling via Moscow and Georgia, he arrived at Baku in the Caucasus and took a boat across the Caspian Sea. At Uzun Ada on its eastern shore, he boarded a train and sped eastwards to Bokhara along the recently opened Transcaspian Railway. But from Samarkand, then the railway’s terminus, he travelled in a horse-drawn tarantass, ‘a sorrowful and springless vehicle’, to Tashkent, where the Russian Governor of Turkestan had invited him to stay. Throughout the journey he indulged his appetite for detail and his taste for grandiloquent description. The population statistics, the rolling stock, the vegetation of oases, the numbers of camels in Transcaspia, all were meticulously noted. Eastern sunsets, ‘incomparable in their tranquil glory’, were contrasted with ‘the troubled grandeur of our Western skies’; the desert beyond Merv had ‘the appearance of a sea of troubled waves, billow succeeding billow in melancholy succession, with the sand driving like spray from their summits, and great smooth-swept troughs lying between, on which the winds leave the imprint of their fingers in wavy indentations just like an ebb-tide on the sea-shore’.19

Bokhara made a colourful impression on a traveller perennially fascinated by the Orient. Its men, turbaned and bearded, dressed in long robes which reflected ‘the instinctive good taste of the East’, were fine-looking and industrious, ‘a far less extortionate and rascally lot than their fellows in the marts of Cairo and Stamboul’. As for the town, a Russian protectorate still ruled by its Emir, Curzon considered it ‘the most interesting and intact city of the East’. Samarkand may have had ‘the noblest public square in the world’, but it had declined after twenty years of Russian rule, its bazaars straightened out and its streets ‘generally squalid and uninteresting’. Bokhara, however, could still be called ‘the Noble’, and he rejoiced that he had seen it in ‘the twilight epoch of its glory’. In a few years’ time, he calculated, there would be electric light along the highways and window-panes in the houses, tea would have been supplanted by Russian beer, and opium supplemented by vodka. Yet he was far from condemning all aspects of Russian influence in central Asia. The conquest had been brutal, the subsequent administration had lacked any moral or enlightened impulse, but order had been imposed on a barbarous region, and the resolute though tolerant government was not unpopular. The Russians were an energetic people destined to greatness, and the British, he thought, should regard their presence in Asia with equanimity and wish them God-speed in their undertaking.20

Curzon later acquired a reputation as an alarmist, a confrontationist, an exponent of the ‘forward’ school of British strategists eager to extend the frontier into Afghanistan and challenge the Russians. This is a distortion. In a typically Curzonian dedication, at once orotund and facetious, he offered the book of the journey ‘to the great army of Russophobes who mislead others, and Russophiles whom others mislead’: it would be found, he predicted, ‘equally disrespectful to the ignoble terrors of the one and the perverse complacency of the others’. In the course of his travels he had been able to interview many Russians, including generals and senior officers. He knew that the Transcaspian Railway made them ‘prodigiously strong’ and greatly increased the threat to Persia and Afghanistan. But he did not think they had a clear, single-minded policy which impelled them remorselessly towards India. Despite the many successful invasions from the north which had shaped India’s history, he believed that a Russian conquest of the Subcontinent was impossible and would not be attempted. Nevertheless, Britain had to be prepared for the possibility of a diversionary attack launched to dissuade her from interfering with Russia’s schemes for Constantinople. British policy should thus be guided by neither jingoist hysteria nor smug complacency but by a determined resolve to ‘render any hostile intentions futile, to see that our own position is secure, and our frontier impregnable, and so to guard what is without doubt the noblest trophy of British genius, and the most splendid appanage of the Imperial Crown’.21 The key to that position, as everyone knew, was Afghanistan.

Nowhere in the world had Victorian foreign policy been less successful than in Afghanistan. Since 1838 it had led to diplomatic disaster and military humiliation on a scale unparalleled elsewhere. As Curzon put it, there had been no ‘Afghan Amir whom we have not alternately fought against and caressed, now repudiating and now recognising his sovereignty, now appealing to his subjects as their saviours, now slaughtering them as our foes’.22 After forty years of blundering, however, the British had produced a master move in the ‘Great Game’ when in 1880 they offered the empty throne to Abdur Rahman, the legitimate heir who had been living in exile under Russian protection in Samarkand. In February of that year he had returned to his country with Russian rifles, raised the northern tribes in revolt and moved southwards to claim his rights. The rapid offer of the throne, coupled with a promise to withdraw troops from Kabul, and followed by defeat of a rival claimant, gained Britain what she had needed all along, a buffer state run by a strong, subsidized and friendly ruler.23 There were advocates of the ‘forward’ policy who, despite the lessons of the past half century, wanted to keep garrisons in Afghanistan; some even wanted to invade central Asia and turn Russia out of her recent conquests. Curzon disparaged such ‘infatuated nonsense’. Britain was pledged to defend the Emir against a Russian invasion, but he thought it folly to commit British troops to a defence of the rather nebulous frontier between Afghanistan and the Russians. If Russia seized Herat, he argued in an article in the National Review, Britain should retort with an extended movement along the frontier and occupy Kandahar. She should neither embark upon a ‘wild goose chase into the Khanates of Asia’ nor ‘sit twiddling her thumbs upon her Indian threshold’.24

It had been the most unleisurely of journeys. By 25 October, seven weeks after leaving London, he was on the Black sea, ‘working like a Trojan’ during the return journey on a series of sixteen articles he had agreed to write for a syndicate of provincial newspapers. Over the following months they were expanded into a 400-page book. As with Curzon’s subsequent works, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 only appeared after lengthy disputes with the publisher over royalties and matters such as the cost of the illustrations. But when it did reach the bookshops in the autumn of 1889, the reviewers regarded it as a solid and valuable contribution. In The Times it was hailed as ‘a volume of great and varied interest’ and its author congratulated for demonstrating ‘how a weighty and instructive volume may be written without detracting in the least degree from its interest’. Applause also came from anti-Conservative papers: the Star speculated that if the author had spent as much time studying the social problems of Britain as he had devoted to those of the East, he would undoubtedly have become a member of ‘the party of progress’.25

Curzon’s parliamentary duties remained far from onerous. The Temperance Movement tried to recruit him to the cause of total abstinence, one of its supporters in the Commons assuring him that ‘the little personal self-denial that is needed to give up stimulants is far more than made up for in the power of good so gained’.26 Others put pressure on him to vote for a bill that would close public houses on Sundays. Although illness prevented him from voting on the bill, he would have abstained, he told its supporters, because he believed that local people should decide the matter in their own areas. He also felt that closing the pubs on the day of rest would lead to ‘home drinking, the foulest form of alcoholic excess’, and added, in more liberal vein, that he was ‘anxious where possible to restrict the arbitrary interference of the State’ with what he held to be the ‘legitimate liberties of English citizens’.27

Labouchere’s almost annual attempt to abolish hereditary peers prompted Curzon to make another speech on the House of Lords in May 1889. He was more forceful in his criticism of that assembly than in the previous year, confessing that he could not look at the future of an unreformed House without apprehension. Denying that there were many ‘black sheep’ among the peerage, he admitted that the number of ‘piebald sheep’ – ‘the idler, the spendthrift, and the habitual absentee’ – was too large, and argued that their places should be taken by worthier folk. By means of life peerages, he suggested, the House of Lords could be made to represent the middle classes, the labouring classes, the dissenting denominations and every branch of industry and business.28

In the same month he clashed with Gladstone over Ireland and shortly afterwards included a mildly disrespectful remark about Mrs Gladstone and her white umbrella in a speech at Hatfield. After Herbert Gladstone had admonished him for the allusion to his mother, Curzon apologized for the discourtesy, explaining that ‘in addressing summer afternoon crowds one is apt to fall into thoughtless and ill-advised expressions’.29 The tone of his speeches had also begun to irritate journalists, who made disparaging references to his belief in ‘his superiority over the rest of mankind’. ‘Another young man of his age’, declared the Political World, ‘would feel some compunction at speaking of Mr Gladstone in the sneering contemptuous way which Mr Curzon affects: in any other youth it would have seemed somewhat bad taste to scoff and jeer at a man almost three times his age.’30 A further, still uncorrected fault, as Jowett reminded him in the autumn, was his long-windedness.31

In addition to politics and authorship, Curzon had embarked on a third career as a part-time businessman. Members of Parliament were then, as now, invited to become directors of companies dealing with subjects with which they were not closely acquainted. Curzon’s offers, for instance, included a seat on the board of a company building London’s Bakerloo line and a directorship of the Clerical, Medical and General Life Assurance Society. In these cases it is not clear what contribution was expected from the MP for Southport, who made a condition in accepting such jobs that the work would not interfere with his foreign travels. Yet following his appointment to the board of Hadfield’s munitions factory in Sheffield, he certainly worked for his emolument. After rapidly becoming an expert on munitions, he wrote a series of letters to Brodrick, now Financial Secretary at the War Office, extolling the merits of its armour-piercing shells. When the military preferred to deal with the Woolwich Arsenal, he implored his friend to support private firms and warned that his company would have to make many workers redundant unless it received fresh orders. But the only one of these directorships for which Curzon was in any way qualified proved a failure. In the spring of 1890, after his journey to Persia, he became a director and shareholder of the Persian Bank Mining Rights Corporation which spent three years trying to develop oil in the Shah’s dominions. The company’s failure was so complete, however, that for many years afterwards Curzon scoffed at the idea that large quantities of oil could be found in Persia.32

The spring and summer of 1889 gave Curzon his usual opportunities for short jaunts to Europe. He spent Easter with Rennell Rodd in Berlin and later stayed in Paris with the Prince de Wagram, a grandson of Napoleon’s Chief of Staff, Marshal Berthier. In August he sailed up the Rhine and went on to Bayreuth, where, although he had little ear for music, he sat through three of Wagner’s operas. But the main objective of his year was another, longer visit to the East, this time to Persia, where Britain and Russia competed for influence over an ancient and decadent country of vital strategic importance. ‘I am grieved but not surprised at your preference of Persia to Scotland,’ wrote Arthur Balfour, whose ideal holiday consisted of renting rooms in North Berwick and playing one round of golf in the morning and another in the afternoon. ‘Travelling is worse than drinking,’ he added. ‘Take my blessing with you, and come back full of beans, and without another book in embryo. Authorship is killing work.’33 Curzon did feel a tinge of guilt about abandoning his constituents for the third year running. He had hoped to spend the winter in England, he told his association chairman, and devote himself to Southport, but felt compelled to take the opportunity to visit Persia and continue his study of the central Asian question.34

There was no thought of heeding Balfour’s advice. Curzon, who did not find authorship as ‘killing’ as his friend, planned to write an immense work on every aspect of Persia: two volumes in small print totalling 1,300 pages were the result. As before, the book would be preceded by articles written on the spot. But they would no longer appear in papers such as the Manchester Courier or the Sheffield Independent: this time the editor of The Times was prepared to pay £12 10s. for each of the dozen articles. Because the journey was to be longer and more arduous, there also had to be more comprehensive preparations. In central Asia he had spent most of the time in trains, but as Persia had no railway and only two carriageable roads, he would be obliged to travel everywhere on the back of a horse or a mule. Following this experience, he therefore advised later travellers to take, among many other things, two Gladstone bags, an English military saddle, a snaffle and a two-reined bridle, a Norfolk jacket, towels and a folding indiarubber bath (‘Persians do not wash in our sense of the term’), a revolver, a Cardigan waistcoat, and tins of Crosse & Blackwell’s ‘quite excellent’ soup. The most important items, however, were a suit of dress clothes and a large flask which he kept in one of his holsters. Commiserating with the teetotaller who had to ride through Persia, he warned that a traveller would be tempting providence if he did not have some restorative at hand.

The most irritating incident of the journey took place in Istanbul on his way out in September 1889. Taking no notice of his parliamentary rank or his courier’s red passport from the Foreign Office, Turkish customs officials searched every piece of his baggage, made him pay duty on the watches he had bought as presents for Persian khans, and quickly caused him to lose his temper. Further annoyance awaited him at Tiflis, where he was relieved of his purse, and at Uzun Ada, where the train was delayed because its passengers refused to form queues and tried to bargain over the cost of the tickets. It was with some relief that he left the nineteenth century behind at Ashkhabad and began his experience of ‘the peculiar and doleful idiosyncrasies of Persian travel’. His first goal was the holy city of Meshed, where, since he was forbidden to visit the holy sites, he found nothing to interest him except the system of temporary marriages which pilgrims could arrange for their stay there. ‘There is probably not a more immoral city in Asia,’ he declared. From Meshed he rode to Tehran, a journey of 560 miles without scenic attractions. Almost the only sight worth seeing was the tomb of Omar Khayyám at Nishapur, but even that stood without inscription in a wasteland of weeds.35

Curzon was a good traveller, resourceful and resilient. His youthful good humour helped him survive discomfort, cold, squalor and officials, and enabled him to write cheerful accounts of his travails to his friends. Riding seventy-five miles a day, he told them, was tiring and uncomfortable, but his heart was in the thing and he was happy. On his long solitary rides through the northern desert he recited ‘The Blessed Damozel’ and thought without too much misery of Sibell Grosvenor.36 The horses on the road to Tehran were ‘at a low level of equine mediocrity’, emaciated and broken-down, but better mounts transported him further south. The best moment of the day, if travelling by caravan rather than post-horse, was the arrival at the place he had chosen to camp when he could stretch out on a carpet and relax while the samovar was put into action; at such a time a cup of tea seemed the finest drink in the world. He usually cooked his own meals but enjoyed Persian hospitality when it was offered. The food was better, he thought, than in any other oriental country and, although the wine was extremely nasty, sherbet proved a refreshing beverage. Other Persian products were appreciated, especially old ceramics and carpets with their ‘imperishable colours, mellowed but uneffaced by time’, and he succumbed to the ‘exquisite solace’ of the Persian water-pipe. Although in England he smoked only one cigarette a day, after dinner, he much enjoyed the tobacco of Shiraz, ‘a few perfumed inhalations’ sufficing ‘to fill the remotest cells of the brain with an Olympian detachment’. And despite his obsession with facts, the calculations of the Nestorian population of Azerbaijan or the leasehold value of the slaughter-houses of Tehran, he was still under the spell of the East. Among the strangest and most powerful memories of the journey were the nocturnal encounters with camel caravans, the sound of the bells, the animals looming out of the darkness, and the procession stalking by before being swallowed up in the night.37

The central part of Curzon’s journey was his stay in Tehran, where he arrived parched and exhausted, grateful for the glass of champagne proffered by the British Minister. He stayed for two weeks and had audiences with the Shah and numerous officials. The Persian monarch and his entourage emerge from the subsequent book in a slightly better light than its author had intended, because on the eve of its publication Curzon joined the Government. British relations with Persia were difficult in any case and would not have been improved by a minister’s description of the Shah’s wife as a woman who looked like a melon and wandered about her home in a ballet dress with naked legs. Lord Salisbury therefore requested the censorship of offensive passages. When Curzon replied that what he had written was true and that by oriental standards it was no insult to call a woman melon-shaped, the Prime Minister explained that it would not be ‘safe to handle the Shah with the truth and freedom which is permissible and salutary in the case of Mr Gladstone’. Personal references to the lady, known as ‘the Glory of the Empire’, were thus reduced or removed. So were Curzon’s opinions of the Shah as a man ‘entirely destitute of military knowledge and ability’ who enjoyed a military parade ‘much as a child enjoys a Punch and Judy show’.38 Less damning proclivities, such as a passion for cats and a sense of humour based on puns and practical jokes, were allowed into print.39

Curzon recognized that there was a good side to the Shah. He was diligent, patriotic, ‘fairly just’ and, in spite of occasional instances of cruelty, ‘a man of humane disposition’. The Government was secure and respected, commerce had expanded, and the telegraph had been extended to the principal towns. Public works, however, were almost entirely neglected, and administration was still regulated by bribery. Corruption seemed to exist in every corner of the country, allowing all jobs in government and the armed forces to be bought or inherited. Any policy of reform, Curzon believed, would be thwarted by the prevailing national apathy. ‘Persia knows well enough that she is weak,’ he wrote, ‘but at the bottom of her heart she would prefer to be left alone in her weakness.’40 And in a wise but uncharacteristic reflection at the end of his book, he recognized that this attitude might have merits.

Above all we must remember that the ways of Orientals are not our ways, nor their thoughts our thoughts. Often when we think them backward and stupid, they think us meddlesome and absurd. The loom of time moves slowly with them, and they care not for high pressure and the roaring of the wheels. Our system may be good for us; but it is neither equally, nor altogether good for them. Satan found it better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven; and the normal Asiatic would sooner be misgoverned by Asiatics than well governed by Europeans.41

The 800-mile ride from Tehran to the Gulf gave Curzon the chance to immerse himself in historical and archaeological controversies. He stayed in Isfahan, which possessed ‘one of the most imposing piazzas in the world’, and enjoyed the spectacle of its bazaars, that ‘ever-changing kaleidoscope of the unchanged Orient’. On his journey south he halted to deal with a disputed point about the site of the tomb of Cyrus the Great, upon which he delivered a twenty-page judgement in his subsequent book. Equally detailed treatment was awarded the sculptured tablets of Shapur, but the most astonishing section of the entire work was the eighty-page chapter he devoted to the history and ruins of Persepolis, a subject on which in his opinion almost every previous author had written with unbelievable inaccuracy. No wonder his despairing publisher implored him to curtail some of the ‘retrospective details’; and no wonder he refused Curzon’s request to publish a third volume consisting entirely of appendices.42

The principal objective of the long ride south was the shore of the Persian Gulf, where he wanted to examine the strength of the British position and assess the likelihood of a Russian advance to a warm-water port. From Bushire he visited the head of the Gulf, saw the pearl fishers of Bahrain, and on a visit to Muscat predicted that the Union Jack would one day fly from its towers. Reflecting on the British protectorate over the Gulf, he felt pleased that the pacification of the area and the growth in commerce had been the result of Britain’s determination to stamp out piracy. His country had invested so much in the region, he concluded, that its position must not be jeopardized by the challenge of another power. Although he later became aware of the threat from Germany, the most likely danger at that moment came from Russia, whose influence in northern Persia matched Britain’s in the south. But whereas the British had little interest in their rival’s area of influence, the Russians would clearly benefit from the use of naval facilities in the Persian Gulf. Curzon, obsessed by the need for buffer states between the Tsarist empire and India, thought that any Russian move southward must be countered, partly through closer relations with Persia but ultimately by the threat of military action. Looking back at the history of Anglo-Persian relations, he saw that British policy had been vitiated by what he termed ‘the criminal reign of masterly inactivity’,43 and that unless a tougher approach was quickly adopted, Russian influence would soon predominate. The failings of Britain’s Persian policy remained to frustrate and infuriate him for many years to come.