This sort of presence of mind could not really be taught. Indeed, since a single individual might be expected to discharge the duties of magistrate, administrator, public-works engineer, mediator, estate manager, occasional doctor and general father-figure (even if not a father himself), the formal instruction for the task was either limitless or extremely limited. With the empire so vast, it was often just irrelevant. A district officer sent to Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) recalled that he ‘spent three months in the old Imperial Institute learning about tropical products which did not grow in Northern Rhodesia; Mohammedan law, which did not run there; and the elements of government accounting, which were still too unreal to us to be absorbed’. At the end of the training, a novice official collected his kit from the approved outfitters and off he went on the steamer to Africa, clutching his phrase book, ready to brave scorching sun and biting insects, malaria and loneliness, and sometimes, in the middle of nowhere, meeting the man he was to replace – flaming drunk by nine in the morning because Furse’s system had made a mistake.
Doorkeepers do not make policy and Sir Ralph Furse had stood like an especially superior doorkeeper to the Colonial Service. (He had become so well known that when he eventually retired there were fears that the supply of candidates would dry up: his successor – Furse’s own brother-in-law, Henry Newbolt’s son – had to beg the department to reannounce his appointment because no one had any idea who he was.) Latterly, Furse had expressed occasional anxieties about aspects of the imperial mission – ‘What shall it profit the African if we save his soil and he loses his soul?’ he wondered. But at the close of his career he concluded – as he had to do – that the empire had been A Good Thing. He recited an idiosyncratic list of achievements: ‘The abolition of slavery; the suppression for the most part of cannibalism and tribal warfare; the long campaign against disease and want; the example of justice and fair play; the introduction of cricket and the rule of law; some slight shrinkage of the kingdom of fear ruled over by the dark gods – and so on down a long and not unimpressive record of beneficent service.’ It was not Furse’s function to question the moral judgement on which the whole thing rested.
At first sight, Robert Baden-Powell (his socially ambitious mother had invented the double-barrel) was the sort of steady, low-brow Englishman for whom the empire might have been created. As it was, B-P invented imperial service for millions who would never have made the grade as colonial officials, even in the Bight of Benin. What Ralph Furse did for the Colonial Service, B-P did for millions of others.
It is unlikely that Robert Baden-Powell would have passed the entrance test for the Colonial Service himself. At his public school he had not troubled the examiners much, but had turned out to be good at throwing himself around in goal on the football pitch. Failing to get into university, he joined the army, where, during service in Afghanistan, he witnessed the hanging of recalcitrant tribesmen with the casual indifference of an occasional visitor to a provincial theatre. He shot tigers, lions, hippos, buffalo, and produced a guide to Indian field-sports, Pig Sticking and Hog Hunting. And, just as he was sure of the superiority of his own countrymen, so he was certain of the woeful inadequacy of other races. ‘An occasional lick from a whip is, to an unintelligent savage, but a small matter,’ he wrote. When the Matabele people rebelled in 1896 against the ‘white pioneers of civilization’, Baden-Powell had been thrilled to be part of the military campaign against them – ‘a tussle with the niggers’ was like knocking back ‘a couple of glasses of champagne’. B-P belonged to that comparatively small group of empire-builders who not only believed these things, but were successful evangelists for them. He was an ardent self-publicist, whose broad ambitions for celebrity stood in contrast to the narrowness of his mind. His Adventures of a Spy is full of tips about keeping an eye out for ‘foreign-looking gentlemen’ in London who will probably turn out to be dastardly secret agents. It recounts his experiences tramping around enemy territory in the eastern Mediterranean, posing as a butterfly collector, his notebook full of sketches of forts, disguised within drawings of the wings and bodies of moths. Biographers have been unable to find any evidence to support many of his espionage claims, and to read his jaunty, self-confident, irrepressibly upbeat books is to spend an uncomfortably long time in the company of a juvenile ego-maniac. But, like Winston Churchill, B-P understood that the burgeoning mass media could accomplish three things at once – make his name, make his fortune and spread the gospel of empire.
It was the 217-day siege of Mafeking during the Second Boer War (1899–1902) which established B-P’s reputation. The wars between the two settler communities of South Africa were set off when the longer-established descendants of Dutch settlers determined to defend their autonomy against the expansionist ambitions of the British Empire. Since the British had no shortage of men in uniform – they would eventually have to send 500,000 soldiers to fight in South Africa – and the Boers had no formal army at all, their inability to assert British rule in the first conflict came as a terrible shock. The siege at Mafeking in the second war vividly demonstrated their difficulty. The British had become accustomed to getting their way in colonial battles, a success they generally attributed to superior training and moral values, but which was really much more to do with the fact they usually had more sophisticated weapons. This time, the Boers had gone on an arms-buying spree before the war began and equipped themselves with modern rifles and even some artillery. This was to be no one-sided ‘tussle with the niggers’, and the Boer ‘commandos’ had one other great asset: as a light, irregular force ready to live off the land, they could fight the most mobile and effective guerrilla campaign the British had ever faced. The war developed into a vicious and very squalid conflict, in which the conventions of ‘civilized warfare’ were repeatedly ignored.* The British would eventually win – how could they not, against a scrappy bunch of bandoliered farmers cantering around the veldt? – but only at the cost of tremendous damage to their reputation, when the world learned that the response to the Boer offensive had been to burn down their farms, poison their wells and intern women and children in ‘concentration camps’, where many died of sickness and hunger. The exposure of the appalling conditions in the camps was largely the work of Emily Hobhouse, another member of that small, heroically subversive band of women who insisted on sticking their noses into the work of imperial menfolk. One can date the beginnings of the terminal sickness which carried off the British Empire to the South African campaigns. The British won the Second Boer War too, but lost something much more important. Too many people knew that the texts of sermons on Britain’s civilizing mission were hanging on the barbed wire of the South African veldt.
In 1899, Colonel Baden-Powell had been sent to rustle up new recruits for the second British war effort, and had not been much impressed by the calibre of men he found. ‘They are bad riders and bad shots,’ he reported – quite the opposite of the Boer irregulars. Any plan to use his recruits to harry the Boers was not going to work. Instead, in October 1899, B-P assembled a mountain of stores and settled down inside the town of Mafeking. Large claims were later made, not least by Baden-Powell himself, for the importance of the siege which soon became inevitable. It is true that the town sat on a railway line and that, despite its small population (about 1,700 whites and 5,000 black people), it had the appurtenances of a little sophistication – library, prison, hospital and so on. But one could as easily say that the siege which then developed became an immensely famous action for a mainly fatuous target (Kitchener is said to have claimed later that there were people in the War Office under the impression that the town – about as far from the sea as you can get in South Africa – was the nearest sea-port to Pretoria). In later life, B-P seemed increasingly unsure how many Boers had been besieging the town. He could not have known with any precision at the time, but as the years went by his estimate rose, from 8,000 in his report after the engagement, to 10,000 in his autobiography thirty years later, until by the
time of a radio broadcast in 1937 he was claiming to have tied down 12,000 enemy. In fact, it seems that many of the Boer besiegers had left after a few weeks, but that, of course, did little to lessen the horror of the siege. B-P’s defenders claim that in keeping his force inside the town, he diverted more of the Boer forces than he could ever have done by trying to chase them across the veldt with his incompetent militia: once an attractive target like Mafeking presented itself, plenty of Boers were occupied in trying to beat the place down into surrender. Nonetheless, as one of B-P’s officers, Major de Montmorency, wrote in his diary, it was surely the oddest action ever taken by a cavalry officer to have ‘burrowed into the ground at the very first shot being fired … and commenced to eat his horses’.
The true importance of the siege of Mafeking to the British was less what it was than what it represented. B-P was an inspirational siege commander and a clever tactician, deceiving the watching Boers by having his men appear to lay minefields or move around as if they were negotiating (non-existent) barbed-wire fences. He turned the railway workshops over to production of guns. He made a point of appearing unflappable, even as shells whistled over his head into the town – ‘A second shell sang a little nearer and raised clouds of dust not two hundred yards away,’ said a witness. ‘The colonel closed the book which he had been reading, and, marking the place, rose quietly, whistling to himself, as is his habit, and as a third shell wrecked a couple of outstanding buildings, said “You had better come inside.” ’ When his jaunty dispatches, the most famous of which was boiled down by his signaller to ‘All well. Four hours’ bombardment. One dog killed,’ appeared in the London newspapers B-P became a hero in the Nelson mould. His initials, claimed the drum-bangers at home, stood for ‘British Pluck’.
Like many empire heroes, it sounds as if Baden-Powell might have been born for extreme adversity. The burden was not shared evenly, of course. Everyone went hungry, but the whites got much better rations than the black people, and in his subsequent accounts of the siege B-P hardly mentioned the Africans’ big contribution to Mafeking’s survival. But he was in his element and the embattled little community provided a stage – both metaphorical and literal – for his indefatigable cheeriness and vanity. B-P designed Mafeking banknotes and his head replaced that of the queen on postage stamps. The tedium of month after month under siege was eased by his encouragement of concerts, plays, cricket matches, gymkhanas and flower shows. At concerts he would appear on stage in fancy dress and sing in a silly voice. Were there occasions when his audiences wondered whether it might not be preferable to go over to the Boers than to sit through another of his hilarious monologues, practical jokes or imitations of birdsong?
Eventually, a relief column reached the town and Mafeking joined the list of ‘scrapes’ in which the British delight. When news of the relief of the town reached Britain, a new verb entered the English language. To ‘maffick’ meant to join the crowds of thousands who took to the streets in uproarious celebration, waving Union flags and carrying pictures of B-P in his broad-brimmed hat.
Mother, may I go and maffick,
Tear around and hinder traffic?
as Saki’s couplet put it. Military parades swaggered in front of Queen Victoria. Portly mayors of industrial cities made thunderous speeches about the superiority of British values. Hotels printed their menus on khaki paper, adorned with photos of B-P on the cover. Fireworks were lit (the finale of the display in Twickenham was a blazing likeness of B-P). In Dover a mob wrecked the offices of a member of the local chamber of commerce, because they had decided he was ‘pro-Boer’. Much drink was taken. In St Paul’s Cathedral Canon Henry Scott Holland preached that, like Lucknow, the name Mafeking would thrill Englishmen’s hearts for many a long year, proving their tenacity, pluck and refusal to know when they were beaten.
When Baden-Powell returned to England he did so as a hero, garlanded with praise even from the worst poet in Scottish literature, William Topaz McGonagall:
Oh! think of them living on brawn extracted from horse hides,
While the inhuman Boers their sufferings deride,
Knowing that the women’s hearts with grief were torn
As they looked on their children’s faces that looked sad and forlorn.
For 217 days the Boers tried to obtain Mafeking’s surrender,
But their strategy was futile owing to its noble defender,
Colonel Baden-Powell, that hero of renown,
Who, by his masterly generalship, saved the town.
It was with this background that B-P’s most famous book, Scouting for Boys, appeared in 1908, if not quite as a celebrity memoir, then certainly with a celebrity author. His customary tone – part martinet and part breezy chorus-leader – pervades the whole text of a book now estimated to have sold over 150 million copies. The opening lines of the book make plain B-P’s purpose. ‘I suppose every boy wants to help his country in some way or other.’ He gave examples of the way in which his corps of teenage boys in Mafeking had cheerfully cycled through shot and shell delivering messages. The popularity of the book tells you something about the tone of British society at the time. But the really clever thing about it was that instead of merely telling young people what they ought to do to help the empire, Baden-Powell made Scouting a personal, homely adventure. For sure, there were plenty of instructions about attitudes – ‘ “Country first, self second” should be your motto,’ for example. Yet what child could resist the advice that every boy ought to know how to shoot, to fish or ‘to be very clever at passing news secretly from one place to another, or signalling to each other’? There was plenty more: ‘It is very necessary for a Scout to be able to swim, for he never knows when he may have to cross a river, to swim for his life, or to plunge in to save someone from drowning.’ B-P even managed to make keeping your room tidy sound exciting: ‘because he may yet be suddenly called upon to go off on an alarm, or something unexpected: and if he does not know exactly where to lay his hand on his things he will be a long time in turning out, especially if called up in the middle of the night’.
The nightmare lurking at the back of Baden-Powell’s mind was of a nation which no longer had the resources to defend either itself or its empire. Scouting was intended to do for poorer boys what the public schools aimed to achieve for the sons of the middle and upper classes. The urban slums in which army recruits grew up were having a catastrophic effect on their health: it was said that over half of the young men examined during the Boer War had failed relatively undemanding medical tests. In the aftermath of war, the government formed an Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. B-P identified the problem at once. There were too many ‘loafers’ and ‘slackers’, hanging around on street corners with their hands in their pockets, smoking, drinking and watching sport instead of playing it. So Scouting for Boys had plenty of advice about well-being. ‘Scouts breathe through the nose, not through the mouth,’ runs one memorable admonition; ‘in this way they don’t get thirsty, they don’t get out of breath so quickly; they don’t suck into their insides all sorts of microbes or seeds of disease that are in the air; and they don’t snore at night, and so give themselves away to an enemy.’ In B-P’s original manuscript there had been more intimate advice, on the subject of sex, a matter which troubled him deeply: masturbation was a definite symptom of slackness, causing weakness, headaches, shyness, palpitations of the heart ‘and if he carries it on too far he very often goes out of his mind and becomes an idiot. A very large number of the lunatics in our asylums have made themselves mad by indulging in this vice although at one time they were sensible cheery boys like any one of you.’ A Scout, by contrast, was ‘clean in thought, word and deed’.
B-P had considered naming the youth organization which grew from these admonitions ‘Young Knights of the Empire’ (in one especially odd sentence, he even claimed the twelfth-century Crusader king Richard I – ‘the Lion Heart’ – as ‘one of the first of the Scouts of the Empire’). It is certainl
y true that much of the Establishment saw Scouting as a way of maintaining the moral health of the nation. Lord Rosebery (Prime Minister in 1894–5), for example, believed that a country ‘trained in the Boy Scout theory … would be the greatest moral force the world has ever known’. The London Evening Standard noted that ‘The Boy Scout at 19 will be something very different from the cigarette-smoking street-corner loafer, who diversifies his indolence by occasional bursts of hooliganism. He will be smart, clean, alert, well-mannered.’
Empire Page 23
