Empire

by Jeremy Paxman

  The father’s depiction of the life of the former colonial official is acute. At the end of their careers most did seem to retire to a life of genteel tedium in Cheltenham or somewhere, in which the highlight of the day was the Times crossword or the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. But, unless you believe that societies can function without roads and drains and law and order, the list of duties discharged by the imperial official is rather impressive. In one young man were encompassed all the duties performed in other societies by councillors, officials, magistrates, surveyors, engineers and tax collectors. To all intents and purposes, the local colonial official was the government. And, unlike many of the possible alternatives, it was a system pretty free of corruption. It is true that at the end of his career the DO could generally expect nothing more than to look out on the rain from a less than luxurious sitting room. But during his years of service overseas there was almost nothing to which he might not have been expected to apply his hand or brain. If you could stand the loneliness, it could be a rich life. In well-established colonies there might be a comfortable bungalow, a well-trained cook and an expat community with clubs, hill stations and social events at which you could meet friends and colleagues. But in northern Kenya it was not unknown for a district officer to travel for an entire day merely on the off-chance that there might be another DO visiting the little thatched building in the middle of thousands of square miles of desert that – in a characteristic joke – was called the Royal Wajir Yacht Club.

  Where was the empire to find young people robust enough to live this sort of life? When he looked back on a lengthy career, Frederick Lugard,* Britain’s pre-eminent proconsul in Africa, was in no doubt. The empire had been made and maintained by the products of the Victorian public schools. They ‘produced an English gentleman with an almost passionate conception of fair play, of protection of the weak, and of “playing the game”. They have taught him personal initiative and resource, and how to command and obey,’ he said. In the twenty-first century this is the sort of talk which draws nothing but snorts – where’s the ‘fair play’ in being colonized? But if you are to live under someone else’s rule, better, surely, that it is represented by an individual out for something more than his own prosperity. The Victorian public schools did not exist solely to manufacture colonial officials and army officers, but the values they inculcated were particularly attuned to the needs of empire – resilience, reliability, obedience when instructed and initiative when the individual was left to his own devices. Men who considered that their mission in life was to sit about thinking were no use at all, and might well turn out like that figure of moral turpitude, the scandalous poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who responded to Kipling’s guff about ‘the white man’s burden’ –

  Send forth the best ye breed –

  Go bind your sons to exile

  To serve your captives’ need

  – with the observation that ‘the white man’s burden, Lord, is the burden of his cash’.* Instead, the public schools were trying to turn out steady, reliable chaps whose minds would be free of the danger of seditious thoughts – or, indeed, too much thought of any kind. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, school after school was established across the country (and older foundations reinvented) to satisfy the demands of an expanding middle class. The ideal product of these institutions was ‘a decent chap’. To achieve this paragon, there was much emphasis on learning classical Greek and Latin and how to play a straight bat in cricket.

  Cricket mattered. At King’s School in Worcester the memorial to those who died in the First World War took the form of a new pavilion, inscribed with the words ‘In Memory of those who, having learnt in this place to play the game for their school, played it also for their country during the years 1914–1919’. The reference is to one of the most resonant of imperial poems, Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitaï Lampada’. Newbolt was the son of a vicar and won a scholarship to Clifton College, where he rose to become head boy. The lines are worth quoting again:

  There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –

  Ten to make and the match to win –

  A bumping pitch and a blinding light,

  An hour to play, and the last man in.

  And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,

  Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,

  But his captain’s hand on his shoulder smote –

  ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

  The sand of the desert is sodden red –

  Red with the wreck of a square that broke;

  The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,

  And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.

  The river of death has brimmed its banks,

  And England’s far, and Honour a name,

  But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks –

  ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’

  The poem has spent much of the century since its composition being lampooned.* Yet it would be hard to exaggerate the importance of sport in the creation of an imperial spirit. It was coincidence that the empire grew at the very time that, at home, the rules of so many sports – soccer, rugby, cricket, tennis, golf, for example – were either invented or codified and their first national championships created. But the cult of sport was made for the cult of empire. It was more than the creation of a healthy officer class. There was something in the conventions of a game – loyalty to the team, obedience to the rules, unquestioning respect for the authority of the referee – which spoke of the imperial design.† Cricket, in particular, was more than a game: its customs were believed to be civilizing in themselves. The empire may have been built by mavericks. But it was held by those who played by the rules.

  And there were numerous genuine testimonials to the moral benefits of sport, sometimes from unlikely sources. The Trinidadian writer and radical C. L. R. James, for example, felt the improving influence of the sport when he was sent to Queen’s Royal College before the First World War. It was the most prestigious school on the island, where cricket featured prominently. ‘Rapidly we learned to obey the umpire’s decision without question, however irrational it was,’ he recalled.

  We learned to play with the team, which meant subordinating your personal inclinations, and even interests, to the good of the whole. We kept a stiff upper lip in that we did not complain about ill fortune. We did not denounce failures, but ‘Well tried’ or ‘Hard luck’ came easily to our lips. We were generous to opponents and congratulated them on victories, even when we knew they did not deserve it. I knew what was done and what was not done.

  Which was precisely what cricket was intended to teach.

  It was not, of course, the only game taken around the world, for by the late nineteenth century the British had become sport-obsessed. When Lord Cromer arrived in Cairo to take up his post running Egypt, less than a year after the 1882 battle of Tel el Kebir, he discovered that ‘every department of the Administration was in a state of the utmost confusion. Nevertheless a race-course had already been laid out and a grandstand erected.’ By then, tracks had been created all over the world, from Africa to India, Hong Kong to New Zealand. Eustace Miles, the proprietor of a cranky health-food shop on the King’s Road, Chelsea, was one of the greatest apostles for the imperial benefits of sport. He observed that when the British took some new place ‘we do not merely rule people with the rule of iron, but we admit them to our own life; we do not treat them like slaves, but we say to them, for example, “Come and play Football”, or “Have a try at Cricket”. This is surely one way to their respect and also to their affection and loyalty. We bring them something which is not only useful, but also pleasant.’ And at the Gezira Sporting Club founded by the British in Cairo, they continue to take him at his word. You can still watch horse-racing and play golf, croquet, hockey, lawn tennis, table tennis, squash and cricket.

  The image of the men who graduated from the playing fields of England to run the empire has never re
ally recovered from Sanders of the River, the colonial officer created by that master of the potboiler, Edgar Wallace, who dispenses justice to ‘child-like’ west Africans while sitting cross-legged on a chair, an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth, a Browning pistol on his hip. ‘I am Sandi,’ he says, ‘I am a man quick to kill and no respecter of kings or chiefs. I have ploughed little kings into the ground and the crops of my people have flourished on the bones of princes.’* Edgar Wallace may have considered this sort of dialogue made for an amusing narrative, but as a picture of the colonial official it was complete tosh. The diaries and letters of district officers tell a much more mundane story. It was frequently a life of stoical endurance, rudimentary comforts, terrible food, tedious bureaucracy and numbing loneliness, in pursuit of small initiatives – a bridge here, a bit of irrigation there – which might better the lives of the community in which the DO found himself.

  And in addition to the frustrations of life in the bush, DOs had to cope with the clods in London. ‘Documents no longer needed may be destroyed,’ a Colonial Office directive is imagined to have ordered, ‘provided copies are made in duplicate.’ The Whitehall bureaucrats so often seemed simply not to have a clue about the realities of life overseas. ‘Why, some of them seem to think that you can govern a West Indian colony with a fiddle and a ham-bone,’ exploded the Governor of the Leeward Islands (and former Oxford rower), Sir Clement Courtenay Knollys. The early twentieth-century diaries of Sir Hesketh Bell bubble with ideas he had for cultivating citrus fruit while governing in the West Indies (he’d been told that American men considered grapefruit to be good for the liver and American women thought it a contraceptive) or how to create an insurance scheme to protect islanders from the financial effects of hurricanes. These men might occasionally wonder whether the places to which they had been sent were worth the effort. But they rarely questioned the moral basis of their work: they believed they were ‘doing good’. In a world before the United Nations and aid agencies, this was another side to colonialism.

  Recruiters for the Sudanese Political Service – which considered itself a cut above most colonial administrations – sought a very particular type of person. Within three years of Kitchener’s capture of Khartoum, small numbers of civilian officials began to arrive from Britain and between 1901 and 1930 there were never more than twelve men selected in a year. This was a tiny force in a vast expanse – at any one time a mere 125 men, running a territory four times the size of Texas, 150 times as big as Yorkshire. Since those chosen were likely to have to deal with anything from a broken town drain to the settling of vendettas by knife murder, the selectors were after candidates who could demonstrate leadership, stamina and a steady head. Most of those who made the grade were graduates of Oxford or Cambridge, but the selection board had a definite preference for reliability over cleverness: one applicant was rejected because the selectors did not care for the fact that he had ‘by accident’ left his copy of that morning’s Times newspaper lying about with the entire crossword completed. They preferred the sort of man likely to have played sport for his university: Sudan was said to be ‘The Land of Blacks Ruled by Blues’. Those who satisfied the selectors were sent off to learn Arabic, how to administer the law, a little anthropology, some basic first aid and the rudiments of surveying and drainage: in one young man were to be contained all the necessities of civilization.

  For the right sort of person, it wasn’t a bad job. The service offered three months’ home leave every year, on the grounds that nine months was quite long enough to expect anyone to endure the Sudanese climate, and for much of the year the young official might be alone out in the bush. There was the prospect of retirement at fifty, which meant the chance of a second career. But they were not expected to think about getting married any time soon. A very large proportion of those selected came from country families, presumably because their background meant they were accustomed to the open air and the squirearchy’s traditional responsibilities towards the village community. A remarkably high proportion of those who qualified – one-third – were the sons of clergymen.

  Much of the rest of the empire was officered by the Colonial Office. By comparison with the grand edifice housing the Foreign Office, with its frescos of Britannia imposing her will upon the world, the Colonial Service was a shabby establishment with temperamental lifts, odd-shaped rooms and smoky chimneys, the below-stairs quarters of the imperial drawing room, where armies of servants laboured to make pretension real. Colonial administration was not for everyone. A man desperate to make a fortune might be willing to brave an infernal climate, ghastly diseases, alien cultures and other sweaty discomforts in the service of the East India Company. But serving the Crown for a salary was a less attractive prospect. ‘Beware and take care of the Bight of Benin,’ ran a cautionary verse about the White Man’s Grave of West Africa, ‘For one who comes out, there are forty go in …’ In the early days, colonies had to make do with what they could get. ‘Bankrupts, divorcees, cashiered army officers – all were grist to the mill,’ writes a colonial historian. They did not even need to be gentlemen. ‘Mr Rowland called today,’ ran one Colonial Office memo. ‘He seemed an energetic keen little chap, though he is not beautiful to look at (rather like a cheese-maggot) and drops his H’s. [But] he has made several trips to the Gold Coast and is not afraid of the climate.’ They weren’t all like that, however. Oddly, one of those who passed the selection process in 1904 was the future pillar of the Bloomsbury Group and enemy of imperialism Leonard Woolf, who left England for Ceylon accompanied by a miniature edition of Shakespeare, a four-volume set of Milton, ninety volumes of Voltaire and his fox-terrier, Charles. He then spent a thoroughly miserable seven years in one of the most enchanting places on earth.*

  It could not continue indefinitely in quite such a haphazard style. After the First World War, with the empire bigger than it had ever been, the recruitment business was centralized and formalized. For decades, the task of choosing the core of the Colonial Service then became entrusted to an extraordinary man, Major (later Sir) Ralph Dolignon Furse, a thin, patrician character straight out of Central Casting. He had been wounded, and won a DSO and bar, in the First World War. He had collected a third-class degree in Greats at Oxford. He had played rugby and cricket for Balliol College. He had married the daughter of Henry ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game’ Newbolt. Now it was his responsibility to find men who would keep a straight bat in whichever corner of the empire they found themselves. Towards the end of his career in 1948 Furse still sometimes wore the brown tweed suit in which he had turned up for work in 1910. He had the stiffest of stiff upper lips: once, while staying in Canada, he had been offered a strange liqueur to drink. Furse drained the glass and went to bed, where he suffered a terrible night. Several weeks later his hostess discovered that the bottle had contained shampoo. She wrote to him to apologize, adding, ‘We had often heard of the standard of English manners. Now we know.’

  In seeking suitable candidates, Sir Ralph did nothing so obvious as to advertise for applicants. Instead, to ensure that no ‘rubbish’ (his word) came through the door, he operated a network of ‘recruiting spies’. These were mainly Oxbridge dons who knew the sort of chap that Furse was looking for – after that, it was a mere matter of references and interview. Furse and his assistants sat together in a room next to that of the Secretary of State, large enough for them to interview several candidates simultaneously. His questions were unpredictable. (‘Don’t turn round – or look at your watch – there’s a big clock on the wall behind you. How long has this interview lasted?’ ‘Do you think you could tell a smoking-room story to an African elder?’ ‘How would you get to Lord’s from here, assuming you can’t afford a taxi and the match is nearly over? Anyhow, what match is on there today?’) By the time of his retirement Furse was pretty well stone deaf and unable to hear their answers anyway, a disability which he felt in no way disqualified him from judgement. Sometimes, while apparently talking to one candidate, he was i
n fact evaluating another out of the corner of his eye. ‘A man’s face may not reveal that he is intensely nervous,’ he wrote in his memoir Aucuparius (Aucuparius was a character in classical mythology whom he had once been told – wrongly – was a bird-catcher). ‘But a twitching foot, or hands clenched under the table, will tell you this.’ Furse’s system was based upon hunch. Most important of all was the handshake – the slightest suggestion of limpness and you might as well kiss goodbye to your ambition.

  This selection system continued throughout the period between the wars, with the successful candidate being able to look forward to a telegram containing a sentence such as ‘YOU HAVE BEEN ALLOCATED UGANDA’. There was usually a proviso about passing the medical examination and getting a ‘satisfactory’ degree, but this was not generally especially taxing: Furse carried a torch for ‘that admirable class of person whom the university examiners consider to be worthy only of third-class honours’. The selection process was intended to weed out the cad, the feeble, the too clever: what was wanted was steadiness, authority and biddability – you did not want a man somewhere out in the bush deciding to question why he was there. On the other hand, the good name of the empire might depend upon an ability to act independently. When one of the men Furse had chosen for the service reflected on his life, he concluded that ‘a service of amateur humanists was … admirably suited to the administration of unsophisticated peoples’. A modicum of learning was necessary, of course. But much more important than first-class degrees were the sort of skills you might learn on the public-school playing fields. ‘I was head of my house, I was deputy head of the school, captain of rugger, and company sergeant-major in the Officer Training Corps,’ recalled one former district officer, ‘so when eventually I found myself in the bush in Nigeria on my own I wasn’t worried about it in the slightest way.’ The selection process had worked. Though he would probably never have put it quite as baldly, Furse understood the crucial fact that running an empire was partly a big bluff. The sort of person he especially prized was a ‘boy’ he had sent to Nigeria. Within months of his arrival, the young man had been left in sole command of a district, when serious rioting broke out. Murders were committed, buildings were burned and the young District Officer had neither soldiers nor police to restore order. Suddenly, a rampaging mob appeared on his doorstep, led by a large woman. The official walked out alone to face the rioters, then suddenly threw his arms around the woman’s waist, kissed her on both cheeks and invited her in for a talk. The unrest was over.