11

The Governance of India

‘AS YOU AND I know,’ Curzon wrote to Lord George Hamilton, ‘though perhaps it is desirable that the world should not, India is really governed by confidential correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy.’1 To Hamilton’s successor at the India Office, Curzon defined the relationship between the two positions. The Secretary of State, he declared, was the constitutional ally of the Viceroy, and the two of them were the joint heads of the Indian administration.2 This may often have seemed to be the case, but in theory and sometimes in practice it was not. The Secretary of State for India was in fact the Viceroy’s constitutional superior, responsible for the actions of the Indian Government to the Cabinet and to Parliament.

Both titles dated from the Government of India Act of 1858 when the British Government completed its slow absorption of the East India Company’s role and took formal responsibility for the administration of India. The Secretary of State and the India Office were created to oversee the work of the Government of India, to approve legislation and changes of taxation, and to formulate policy, in conjunction with the Cabinet and Parliament, towards the Subcontinent. Since 1773 the chief executive in India had been the Governor-General, and he remained so until independence in 1947. In 1858, however, he was given the additional title of Viceroy to symbolize the fact that he was now the representative of the sovereign. Lord Canning, the first Viceroy, preferred it to the older, less resonant designation, and his successors were usually referred to as Viceroys, although ‘Governor-General’ remained their only statutory title. As the direct representative of the Queen, who assumed the title Empress of India in 1876, the Viceroy gained additional prestige and thereby confirmed popular perceptions of his relationship with the Secretary of State. When a Viceroy like Curzon coincided with a minister like Hamilton, a wise and gentle Freemason wrongly regarded as a nonentity by people who barely knew him, the Secretary of State might seem to be merely the Viceroy’s agent in Britain who once a year told an exiguous audience in the House of Commons that all was well in India.3 But when the Secretary of State was an autocrat like Morley and the Viceroy was the mild Lord Minto, the true constitutional position tended to reassert itself.

If the long weekly letters between Curzon and Hamilton arranged much of the governance of India, the shorter fortnightly correspondence which the Viceroy exchanged with Sir Arthur Godley, the Permanent Under-Secretary at the India Office, decided many details of administration. A pupil of Jowett, whom he revered, and a former secretary to Gladstone, whom he also revered, Godley had been appointed to his post at the age of 35. Although the India Office had to deal with every matter on the Subcontinent from irrigation to frontier policy, he had never been to India and had no particular knowledge of its problems. By the time of his retirement twenty-six years later, he had become immensely knowledgeable but he still had never visited, or expressed much desire to visit, the vast region to which he had dedicated his career. Shrewd, self-effacing and unflappable, he was valued by Curzon for his competence and good sense. Godley admired the talents, though not the character, of his fellow Balliol graduate, and once declared in an unctuous and disingenuous sentence that he never forgot he was ‘a small man writing to a great man’.4

While the Secretary of State could overrule the Viceroy, he himself could be overruled by the Council of India, a body consisting mainly of retired officials who met regularly under Hamilton’s chairmanship at the India Office. The councillors had often enjoyed distinguished careers in India, but by the time they reached Whitehall they were usually old and out of touch with the Subcontinent; Sir Alfred Lyall, who longed to resign his place and return to India as Governor of Bombay, complained that his work on the Council had the savour of chewed hay.5 Yet the Act of 1858 invested this body with the power of veto on financial matters and legislation. Godley admitted the absurdity of giving the councillors final and absolute control over the policy of the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, but observed that they seldom used their authority on important matters. Curzon found even their interference in minor things a constant irritant and tried to convince Godley that the Act should be amended by Parliament. It was ridiculous to be obstructed by a group of carping old men, with little work and no responsibility, who wanted to preserve India as they remembered it. Godley agreed that ‘the tendency of the ex-official to turn and rend his successor [was] a defect inherent in the nature of our Council’, but shied away from the prospect of legislation.6

Improved communications in the course of the nineteenth century further reduced the Viceroy’s independence. News of the Battle of Waterloo, fought in June, had not reached Calcutta until just before Christmas. A Governor-General of that period could thus act on his own accord in the knowledge that he would not learn of his employers’ views for another year, and that in any case, even if they disapproved of his behaviour, they could hardly reverse his action. Electric telegraph and the Suez Canal, however, had greatly diminished the Viceroy’s scope. It was only after nearly five years at his post that Curzon, while walking in the Himalayas, spent a few days beyond the range of the home Government’s wires. Yet within India the Viceroy’s powers remained unweakened. His Government was a personal one, observed Curzon, in which he could formulate his policy and draft his despatches on foreign affairs without consulting or even informing anyone else.7 In India the telegraph had even enhanced the impression of omnipotence, for it was now widely believed that the Viceroy, in touch with his entire dominion, was the fount of all decisions.

The supreme authority in India lay with the ‘Governor-General in Council’, that is to say the Viceroy and his ‘cabinet’ of councillors. The Council consisted of four ordinary ‘members’ in charge of the Financial, Legal, Public Works and Military departments, a fifth who ran both the Home and the Revenue and Agriculture departments, and, if nominated by the Secretary of State, one ‘extraordinary member’, the Commander-in-Chief. The Foreign Department had no member and came directly under the control of the Viceroy himself, who had almost exclusive responsibility not only for foreign affairs but also for relations between the Government and the Indian native states. The Council, which usually met once a week, was thus much like the Cabinet in England except that the Viceroy could not choose its members – a feature Curzon found anomalous and unsatisfactory – and it had no responsibility to a parliament. The Legislative Council, which operated in Calcutta for the first three months of the year, had been enlarged during Curzon’s time as Under-Secretary and had become marginally more representative. Now it consisted of the Viceroy’s Council, various officials nominated by the provincial governments and by Curzon himself, a member of the Calcutta Chamber of Commerce, and a handful of Indians elected by the provincial legislatures of Bengal, Madras, Bombay and the North-Western Provinces. Although the councillors had more power than their predecessors, it was difficult for them to obstruct the Viceroy’s legislative programme.

The Government of India may have been, as its defenders claimed, benevolent and beneficent, but no one could deny that it was an autocracy. Curzon was surprised that such a form of rule was permitted by the British Constitution and believed it could only have happened in Asia whose inhabitants were by nature followers. In the course of his viceroyalty people came to discern Asiatic features in his own rule. Friends jokingly called him Akbar, but Indian nationalists later compared him to Aurangzeb, the most intolerant of the Moguls, and one thought he had so far forgotten English methods as to embrace Asiatic ways of government.8

The Viceroy’s duty, in Curzon’s view, was to be head not only of the Government but of every department as well. Scrutinizing the workings of the secretariats, he soon recognized that, although the administration was conscientious and permeated by a strong sense of discipline, it had become clogged by bureaucratic procedures and was incapable of initiating policy. Lord Elgin, he discovered, had written admirable minutes about details but had scarcely framed a policy or made an innovation. Day after day he came across matters that had been either shelved or lost from sight in a maze of departmental argument.9 Examination of files revealed an astonishing system in which proposals were sent around the departments and returned to their starting point after a year or so garnished with an array of minutes from innumerable clerks and assistant secretaries. ‘All these gentlemen state their worthless views at equal length,’ he complained to Godley, ‘and the result is a sort of literary Bedlam.’10 A matter that could have been settled by the relevant officials in a couple of discussions went unresolved while its file proceeded in a leisurely way around Calcutta or Simla. Curzon, himself a profuse writer of minutes, was determined to reform the system. ‘I do not want’, he informed the Secretary of the Foreign Department, ‘the personal impression or the opinion of everyone in the Department on everything that comes up.’11 The officials of this department exasperated him too by their inability to write properly, a defect which obliged him to draft all despatches or letters of importance himself. This offence was characteristic of the rest of the administration, above all the army secretariat; by Curzon’s exacting standards, there was only one Secretary of a department who could write decent English. Indeed, the Viceroy spent so much time correcting the ‘positively villainous’ despatches of his officials that he often thought it would be quicker to write them from scratch himself.12 In some cases he did.

The running of the departments was not assisted either by the members’ habit of doing much of their work in their homes or by their fondness for government by correspondence. The location of the Foreign Department, which Curzon ran, was also a hindrance. As it was a quarter of a mile from his office in Government House, he had no way of making references, getting papers or issuing instructions except through messengers running between the two places. It was, he told Hamilton, like conducting the affairs of the India Office without emerging from the Carlton Club.13 Another anomaly, he soon noticed, was the division of labour in his Council. The Law Member had only two or three hours’ work a day outside the short legislative session, while the Home Member, if conscientious, found himself as overburdened as the Viceroy. The Home Department dealt with educational, medical, sanitary, ecclesiastical and judicial affairs, as well as with local government and the police, while its Member was also in charge of the Department responsible for forests, land revenue and the agricultural development of the country. For much of Curzon’s time the Home Member was Sir Denzil Ibbetson, one of the most distinguished civil servants of his generation; but as he was also the frailest, much of his work had to be done by a colleague to prevent him breaking down.14

‘Curzon will hustle you secretaries,’ an army officer had warned the senior official of the Foreign Department. ‘Oh no!’ was the reply, ‘he will be paper-logged in three months.’15 The Secretary’s complacency vanished as the Viceroy swept through the departments, shaking up officials and putting an end to what he described as the era of ‘tranquil procrastination’. ‘Efficiency of administration’, proclaimed Curzon, was ‘a synonym for the contentment of the governed’, and officials soon realized what he intended to do. His whole viceroyalty, remarked the editor of The Times of India, was ‘one long protest against the laggards and the languid’.16 So many areas of administration needed fresh ideas that he brought out experts from Britain to examine and report, and in some cases direct, his various projects. The laggards and the languid were in the end largely defeated, and so too were the wafflers. Curzon’s note on the system of minuting was distributed to the provincial governments and resulted in a significant decrease in the number of official papers. The only person exempted from its edicts was himself.

Surveying his task that first spring at Simla, the Viceroy felt it would take him ten years to achieve half of what needed to be done. Nothing, he told Pearl Craigie, had been accomplished hitherto under six months. ‘When I suggest six weeks, the attitude is one of pained surprise, if six days one of pathetic protest, if six hours of stupefied resignation.’17 After he had been in India for six months, he claimed he had not had a day off work or one in which he had laboured for less than eight hours. He believed that the foundations of a successful administration must be laid in the first year when the Viceroy was still fresh, because otherwise a man’s energies would become dulled by the prodigious routine, the resistance to reform, and the overwhelming weight of tradition and precedent.18 His capacity for work astonished everyone. Officials from the Foreign Department who sent him a stack of files each evening and observed how meticulously they had been dealt with by nine o’clock the next morning, thought it a ‘standing miracle’ that he had found time between dinner and breakfast to dispose of them.19

The members of Curzon’s Council were on the whole a mediocre group, far less able than Lord Dufferin’s colleagues eleven years earlier. Of the twenty-two members Curzon had to deal with during his viceroyalty, only Ibbetson, Clinton Dawkins and later J.P. Hewett were first-rate officials. Dawkins, a Balliol contemporary, was Finance Member and much appreciated by the Viceroy for his intelligence and intolerance of humbug, but he left after only a year to work for Pierpoint Morgan’s interests in London. At about the same time Ibbetson, whose health had not recovered from his labours as Chief Commissioner in the famine-ridden Central Provinces, was sent to England to recuperate and did not return as Home Member until 1902. The Viceroy was dismayed at losing his two best men so quickly. Ibbetson was replaced by Sir Charles Rivaz, whom Curzon regarded as loyal and sensible but ‘totally deficient in initiative’ and incapable of relieving him of any work.20 The successor to Dawkins was Sir Edward Law, who had no experience of India and believed he could settle its problems with solutions that had been successfully applied in Finland and Greece; he was so wrong-headed about so many things that several of his colleagues regarded him as ‘slightly cracked’.21 After Law had designed a tiger for the reverse side of the new rupee, Hamilton questioned the wisdom of choosing the creature which most frightened the ‘natives’. Law then opted for a lion, until Curzon observed that, as there were only a handful of these beasts still living in India, it could hardly be regarded as a suitably symbolic animal.22

Among his other colleagues, the Viceroy considered only the Legal Member, Sir Thomas Raleigh, to be of any real use. Whereas Dufferin had had Roberts as Commander-in-Chief and Sir George Chesney in the Military Department, Curzon found their places occupied by General Sir William Lockhart, who was a poor administrator, and General Sir Edwin Collen, whom he regarded as ‘an obsolete amiable old footler, the concentrated quintessence of a quarter of a century of departmental life’.fn123 Entertaining such views of his Council, it was hardly surprising that Curzon refused to delegate to its members and insisted on doing much of their work himself. Accused by friends, colleagues and relations of working too hard, Curzon derived some consolation from the lessons taught by a biography of Wellington he was then reading. ‘That great man’, he told Hamilton, ‘laid down the axiom that if you wanted a thing done in a particular way the only plan was to do it yourself; and the whole secret of his mastery of the art of war was his supreme attention to detail.’25

Curzon had no qualms about instructing his older colleagues even on matters not directly concerned with their work. At Levées and State Balls, he declared, members of Council must wear the white breeches and stockings as ministers did in England and not ‘take refuge in the less dangerous but irregular trouser’.26 He also tended to be a martinet about their living arrangements. Unmarried members could save a good deal of money if they lived in a club in Simla and Calcutta instead of renting a house. But it was Curzon’s view that they received large salaries in order to enable them to live in a certain style and to fulfil their social duties by entertaining. Current offenders were thus chivvied until they changed their arrangements, while new members were told bluntly that they were expected to live and entertain in a house and do the bulk of their work in their office.27 Curbs were also placed on their habit of disappearing on tour just when their chief needed them. They were frequently rushing off, he complained, allegedly to inspect a new barracks or some other building in a distant province, but in reality to have a good holiday. Law was the worst transgressor in this respect because he always disappeared without leaving an address and was next heard of examining a sewage farm in Poona and opening a file on the subject.28

Curzon’s idea of the Indian administration, a hostile Governor wrote during the rule of his successor, was that of ‘a stupendous organ with a multiplicity of stops and key-boards on which he could play at will, and from which he could produce any quality and quantity of sound that he desired’. His colleagues could work the bellows or pull out the stops which he indicated, but they were allowed to do nothing else.29 The caricature is not greatly exaggerated. Curzon admitted he was a tyrant in his Council, but claimed that his tyranny was accepted and his ‘truculent denunciations of departmental imbecility’ were overlooked because of the increased efficiency of administration.30 He also claimed, in most cases accurately, that he was on friendly terms with his colleagues and that their combats did not affect personal relations.31 Cowed though they may have been by his manner and his personality, the members usually accepted his arguments and agreed with his policies. The unanimity was such that during Curzon’s long viceroyalty only three dissenting minutes were sent back to the Secretary of State. The statistic could not have been achieved by bullying alone.

In 1900 British India was divided into eight provincial governments headed by the Governors of Madras and Bombay, the Lieutenant-Governors of Bengal, Burma, the North-Western Provinces and the Punjab, and the Chief Commissioners of the Central Provinces and Assam.fn2 Reviewing these officials for the benefit of Queen Victoria, Curzon admitted that, with the exception of Sir Antony MacDonnell, they were not a particularly able group. In the junior ranks of the civil service, he assured her, there were good men coming up, but the standard at the top was temporarily low.32 Bureaucratic routine had robbed senior officials of energy and initiative. Sir Frederic Fryer, he told Hamilton, was ‘an easy-going, lethargic, played-out sort of man’ at the head of an incompetent government in Burma. None of the others were much better except MacDonnell, a dour and antipathetic Irishman who governed the North-Western Provinces and Oudh. Curzon found his character ‘unaccompanied by a tinge of sympathy or a drop of generosity’ but forgave these defects because of his ability. ‘It is such a God-send in this pigmy-ridden country’, he reported, ‘to find a man who at least has mental stature.’33

The provincial rulers who caused Curzon most trouble during his first year were the Governors of Madras and Bombay, who administered two of the three ‘presidencies’ (the other was Bengal) of the old East India Company. Like the viceroyalty itself, these were political appointments made in London, and for reasons of tradition were regarded as more prestigious than the lieutenant-governorships. Among the privileges which only the two Governors enjoyed was the right to correspond in person with the Secretary of State. A consequence of the role the two presidencies had played in the building of the empire, the privilege tended to give Governors feelings of self-importance as well as a desire to assert their independence.

Curzon believed that the system of political appointments was justified only if talented politicians could be persuaded to accept the posts. If they were to be used merely as billets for well-connected nonentities, then the system should be abolished and the jobs given to members of the Indian Civil Service (ICS). Two of his friends had become Governors without any apparent qualification for their office. Lord Wenlock, a member of the Souls and a nephew of the Duke of Westminster, had recently returned from Madras, while Lord Sandhurst, a brother-in-law of Earl Spencer, had defeated the superior claims of Sir Alfred Lyall to become Governor of Bombay. The case of Sandhurst was particularly scandalous. Having been regarded by his brother officers in the Coldstream Guards as ‘incurably dense’, he was considered by his officials in Bombay to be almost illiterate.34 Curzon declared that a man who could not write a letter without errors of syntax and spelling was not fit to run a province administering twenty-five million people.35 Sandhurst’s main defect, however, was his reluctance to communicate at all. Soon after his arrival in Calcutta, Curzon asked the Governor for a statement on the detention of two Indian brothers suspected of conspiracy. Sandhurst replied evasively, assuring the Viceroy he would keep him informed of his views on the matter, until Curzon exploded at the end of May. He had been in India for five months, he pointed out, and he remained in complete ignorance as to why the brothers were still under surveillance, of what they were now suspected, and of how Sandhurst thought they might behave if they were fully released.36 After meeting him at the end of the year during a tour of areas affected by famine, Curzon found the Governor ‘a curious mixture of almost childish simplicity, charming manners, anxiety to do the right thing, and complete administrative incompetence.’ About many of the questions affecting his Government he was entirely ignorant.37

Even more uncommunicative than Sandhurst was Sir Arthur Havelock, the Governor of Madras, who had succeeded Wenlock. Informed by the Viceroy that he would occasionally like to hear news from the southernmost presidency, Havelock paid not the slightest attention. Madras had long enjoyed a tradition of leisurely self-sufficiency, but it was not one with which Curzon could be expected to sympathize. After five months without a word, the Viceroy complained to Hamilton that he knew more of what was happening in France and Egypt than he did about events in southern India. At that moment Havelock broke silence to inform him that someone had tarred the Queen’s statue in Madras.38 The Governor’s abilities, unlike Sandhurst’s, were defended by Hamilton, but Curzon was irritated by his pretensions both to grandeur and to autonomy. He found Havelock insufferably pompous and told Hamilton he had excited much ridicule by insisting that ‘God save the Queen’ was played wherever he appeared in the presidency.39 The Governor’s efforts to extend his autonomy and the Viceroy’s determination to curb it ended in a row in which Havelock sent his chief an intemperate remonstrance. Curzon regarded the letter as highly impertinent and refused to correspond further with his subordinate. Lawrence was then deputed to despatch a crushing note about the Viceroy’s feelings to Havelock’s secretary, a missive which persuaded the Governor to send an apology accompanied by a further grumble that the Government of India was interfering too much in his sphere.40

Although Hamilton had encouraged Curzon to correct Sandhurst’s waywardness, he was alarmed by the Viceroy’s intention of bringing the presidencies of Bombay and Madras under closer control. In August 1900 he received simultaneous letters from Havelock and Lord Northcote, the successor to Sandhurst, each displaying ‘the same aggrieved state of feeling’, and both complaining of the transfer of powers to the central government and of the reduction of their authority to below the level enjoyed by Lieutenant-Governors. Hamilton felt it appropriate not only to pass on these protests to Curzon but also to warn him about the dangers of humiliating people. If he wanted loyalty and service, the Secretary of State stressed with uncharacteristic firmness, the Viceroy should not make them look small in the eyes of their subordinates.41

Reducing the Governors to the level of Lieutenant-Governors was indeed what Curzon had in mind. The expansion of British India and the improvements in communication had made them an anachronism, he thought, removing any justification for their retention of greater powers than the heads of the Government in Bengal and the Punjab. It did not matter if the last two were raised to the status of Governors or if Madras and Bombay were lowered to Lieutenant-Governors. The important thing was to have these ‘small deities in petty temples’ on the same footing in relation to the Viceroy, to end the Governors’ right of appeal to the Secretary of State, and to open their posts to members of the ICS.42 Hamilton, like Godley, was always eager to avoid action which required a parliamentary bill, and refused to sanction the change. The idiosyncrasies of local life in India, he thought, should be allowed full play, while nothing should be done to increase the Viceroy’s workload or the concentration of power.43 Curzon always maintained that he was pursuing not a policy of centralization but a programme to raise the standard of administration all round. As local governments, he argued with some justice, never initiated reforms of their own accord, they needed the directing hand of the Viceroy. The Bengal Government, for instance, had done nothing about smoke pollution in Calcutta for fear of annoying the factory owners, and legislation to control it would not have been passed without Curzon’s insistence.44 But his arguments were of no avail. The governorships were neither reformed nor opened to the ICS, and the practice of making political appointments continued. When yet another unsuitable candidate was chosen for Bombay in 1903, Curzon longed for the day when a British Government would put the interests of administrative efficiency before those of social rank and prestige and ‘sweep away these picturesque excrescences on the surface of the most specialised service in the world’.45 The fact that this particular ‘excrescence’ had been the best man at his wedding is an indication of his unsentimental commitment to good government.

India, Curzon once remarked, may have been governed from Simla and Calcutta, but it was administered from the plains by a few hundred men from the Indian Civil Service. Dedicated and incorruptible, the ICS was the most admirable component of the British presence in India. Fresh from two years at university, the young official spent his early career in the district subdivisions, riding for half the year from village to village, his day starting in the saddle at dawn and progressing through visits, inspections and disputes settled from his office-tent under the trees, before ending in the evening stroll, the camp fire and the mosquito net. Unless he became a judge, he would be promoted in due course to the post of Collector or Deputy Commissioner and he would then control one of India’s 250 districts, an area of perhaps 4,000 square miles where he was responsible for the welfare of some half a million people scattered among about a thousand villages. Several hundred people worked under him, but probably only an assistant magistrate, the civil engineer, the doctor and the police chief were British. Few others of his fellow countrymen would be seen except on leave unless he was transferred in the course of his career to the secretariat of one of the local governments. If he survived plague and the climate, he might reach the top of the service and end up as a Chief Commissioner or Lieutenant-Governor. It was by any standards an exacting and sometimes dangerous existence that can only have been rewarding for a man who believed that the British held India for the benefit of her inhabitants.

Curzon considered the ICS to be ‘the proudest and most honourable’ service in the world, yet his standards of efficiency were so high that he was bound to find fault with its performance. His complaints about the mediocrity of the senior officials were acknowledged to be fair by the India Office, but Godley insisted that the calibre of the younger men had improved in recent years. Hamilton believed the ICS had become too bureaucratic, its officials spending too much time in their offices and not enough in the open air talking to ‘natives’.46 He subscribed to the view, impressed upon him many years before by a retired civil servant, Sir George Clark, that the spread of the telegraph and improvements in communications had had a detrimental effect on the performance of officials. In his day, said Clark, the young civilian was sent straight from his ship at Bombay to a district where there was not another European within forty miles and where he had to maintain order by getting to know the local Indian leaders and working with them. Nowadays, by contrast, he had little opportunity to use his brains, for he was given a code in one hand and a telegraph wire in the other and told to carry out the instructions of the local government.47 Curzon maintained that better steam and postal communications had also reduced the Englishman’s attachment to India, bringing the attractions of home life and home associations closer and encouraging him to regard himself as an unfortunate exile. It seemed to the Viceroy a most dangerous trend, for only if his countrymen retained the same sense of duty and affection for Indians as their predecessors would Britain’s position remain secure.48

By 1901, Walter Lawrence noted in his diary, Curzon had acquired a reputation for trampling on the feelings of his officials.49 As a great deal of evidence has been published to reinforce this view, and as an almost equivalent amount of testimony exists which disputes it, the point is a difficult one to judge. Far from suffering fools gladly, Francis Younghusband recalled, Curzon ‘left them in no doubt that they were fools’. But the Viceroy’s behaviour, he maintained, stemmed from a hatred of incompetence rather than from any desire to overbear an individual.50 Curzon examined a subordinate’s work and told him frankly what he thought of it. But if his criticisms were often justified, they were sometimes a disproportionate reaction to a minor misdemeanour. He was equally blunt to an official who had mismanaged an important project as he was to one who had used split infinitives in a note. Yet his exasperation was seldom personal. A natural debater, he used his parliamentary skills to counter arguments he disagreed with and to show them up as shallow and illogical. But whereas politicians accepted such treatment as part of their profession, officials in India merely fumed with resentment. Their complaints eventually reached Hamilton, who felt obliged to inform the Viceroy of the bitterness he had caused with his rebukes. As fools constituted the majority of mankind, he remarked, they should be tolerated a little more.51 Curzon admitted that his manner could be wounding but thought frankness was needed if he was to overcome the inertia and hostility threatening to obstruct his reforms. He therefore used Lawrence ‘to pour in the daily oil’ to the ‘infinitude of persons to be pacified and smoothed’.52

Much of the resentment that was aired in London came from officials who had not achieved the promotion they felt was their due. Curzon may not have been good at choosing domestic servants but he was perceptive about selecting people in India. He took a lot of trouble to find out about the candidates for a particular post, to weigh up their abilities, and then to appoint the best one irrespective of age or connections. A man who could oppose the appointment of Lord Lamington, one of his oldest friends, as Governor of Bombay, was unlikely to be lax about other choices. No one was ever given a job simply because he was the next in line. When choosing a Commissioner for the new North-West Frontier Province, Curzon appointed an officer over the heads of older Punjab officials who expected the post. In Burma he found the senior members of the local ICS inadequate to replace Fryer and chose the Secretary of the Foreign Department. In both cases it was recognized that he had done the right thing53 – although not very tactfully – and in both cases the disappointed officials thoroughly ventilated their disappointments. Mrs Smeaton, whose husband had hoped to become Lieutenant-Governor of Burma, brought her vendetta back to London and made the absurd allegation in the Daily News that Curzon had forced the Maharaja of Benares to give him some expensive furniture.54

Some enemies were made by the Viceroy’s refusal to recommend unmerited honours, and the hostility of the supplicants was increased by his indifference to their flattery. Others were victims of viceregal irritability and impatience. Lawrence observed that officials in a province visited by Curzon were in such an advanced state of nervousness that their minds were not normal and they often said the reverse of what they meant.55 But while the Viceroy had little sympathy with shyness, a characteristic he had never personally experienced, he valued pluck and plain speaking even when they bordered on impertinence. Evan Maconochie, an ICS official, recalled a visit to the Kolar gold field where Curzon much enjoyed the company of an old Cornish miner who opened their acquaintance by smacking him on the knee in the carriage and addressing him as ‘Sonny’. He then told the Viceroy that he knew he would ‘ask a lot of damfool questions’ and handed him a typewritten paper containing the answers.56

The popular image of an aloof and inconsiderate despot was disputed by many who knew him well. Maconochie remembered his ‘simple and never-failing humanity’ and claimed that no Viceroy had been so accessible or so eager to communicate with men of all classes.57 Visiting Simla after wrestling with famine and plague in Rajputana, Younghusband found no viceregal pomp but a ‘warm-hearted English host doing a kindness to friends who had had a hard time’.58 After working at his side for over three years, Lawrence noted in his diary that his chief had never spoken a rude word to him, and after a further year he recalled that hardly a day had passed without some striking act of generosity or of practical sympathy for those in trouble.59

Such conflicting evidence about Curzon’s treatment of officials can only be reconciled by Lord George Hamilton’s explanation to Godley: ‘the strong, self-reliant men’ recognized in him a ‘master mind’, but the mediocrities feared and disliked him.60 Those capable of achieving things, said Younghusband, were devoted to him because they knew he was a strong chief who would see them through and stand up for them if things went wrong. ‘All the frontier people’, an army officer told Gertrude Bell in 1903, ‘are fire and flame for him.’61 Like Wellington, he did not praise easily, but he encouraged and went to great lengths to ensure that those who served well would be rewarded. Percy Cox was one of several young administrators who recognized that the Viceroy’s faith in their abilities at a critical moment had been the making of their careers.62 The autocrat’s temptation to surround himself with the second-rate was wholly absent from Curzon’s nature. He invariably picked the best men for the job, for the provincial governments, for the frontier, for the secretariats, and he regretted that the constitution did not allow him to choose his own Council. Maconochie spoke for many of them when he called Curzon ‘the greatest viceroy of our times – possibly of all time – fearless, creative, ardent, human’.63 A more impartial though not substantially different testimonial came from a man who owed Curzon nothing. During a four-month stay in India in 1904–5 the future Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, sent the following judgement home to his father.

I have been collecting opinions about Curzon during my travels, and I am gradually coming to the conclusion that he is a great Viceroy. The majority of people perhaps dislike him intensely, almost always giving as their reason some childish gossip about his bad manners; but the best I have met have been without exception his devoted admirers. They say he is a man full of courage and strenuousness, no respecter of persons, and not to be bowed by red tape, but ready to take advice if there is common sense in it, and always bent on going to the root of every matter that comes before him.64