The Lunatic Express by Charles Miller

Author:Charles Miller [Miller, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784972714
Publisher: Head of Zeus

There was a certain amount of official resistance, to be sure. Even in early 1895, the Rosebery Cabinet seemed bound to the principles embodied in Grey’s statement that railway construction must not be a Government enterprise, but the Administration could be seen to weaken under escalating Conservative-Unionist pressure. In the House of Lords, Salisbury began invoking the ever-reliable conspiracy to choke off the Nile. In February he spoke darkly of “four if not five Powers that are steadily advancing towards the upper waters of the Nile,” and warned that Government vacillation in pushing ahead with the railway could result in Uganda’s loss to a European rival—with, of course, dire consequences for the Suez Canal and India. Opposition impatience was soon rewarded. At about this time, Rosebery had appointed a committee to study the feasibility and cost of building the line. Among other things, the committee examined a proposal that a monorail system be adopted; it also advocated pinching pennies and reducing the original track width to a narrow three-foot gauge. There was some hope that the committee would recommend turning the whole project over to a private firm, but after unsatisfactory bids were received from five engineering concerns, the conclusion was reached that construction must, after all, be an official undertaking. Government found itself virtually pledged to building the railway.

But the vagaries of politics decreed against a Liberal-sponsored line. On June 21, 1895, Rosebery’s Government, its majority in Commons dwindling, was defeated on a relatively minor question of munitions supply, and Salisbury returned to power. The next decade would see the Liberals in all but total eclipse as Tory expansionism carried the Empire to its apogee.

The new Government lost no time in removing the last obstacle to the railway. In August, the report of the Rosebery committee was presented to Parliament, along with a request for £20,000 to cover initial expenses of construction. Curzon, Salisbury’s newly appointed Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, told Commons that a British Protectorate in Uganda could only be seen as “absurd... unless you had a railway to the coast,” and added: “Nothing is more certain than that if we do not construct a railway to the lake, the Germans will.”*5 (The Germans in fact had already started.) After only marginal opposition, the vote passed and Government continued to forge ahead. In September, a permanent Railway Committee was created; composed of Foreign Office officials, it would serve as a sort of board of directors, formulating policy and overseeing field operations. One of its first acts was to appoint George Whitehouse as Chief Engineer.

Shortly afterwards, the Committee recommended that the three-foot rail width be abandoned for meter gauge. This was partly because the predominantly meter-gauge Indian railways were expected to furnish the bulk of the rolling stock, but also, and far more significantly, because Salisbury was demanding a more rugged line that would meet the strategic requirements of his obsession with holding the upper Nile. There is an air of almost frantic unreality in the sense of crisis which Salisbury appears to have felt at this time.

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