Pax Britannica (20 page)

Since the days of Sir James Stephen, Colonial Under-Secretary from 1836 to 1847, the bias of the Office had generally been towards a liberal generosity. Stephen (‘Mr Mother Country’, ‘Mr Over-Secretary’) had been a leading figure of the anti-slavery movement—one of the only two Sabbaths he ever deliberately broke was spent in drawing up the Abolition Bill of 1833—and since its inception the Colonial Office had, in an often timid but generally consistent way, regarded itself as a trustee for the underdogs of Empire. It was often blamed for sickly weakness by the more hell-for-leather class of
colonist, and there were settlers from Jamaica to Bulawayo to whom its very name spelt a betrayal of white interests, of
imperial
interests, in the name of fuddy-duddy philanthropy. If ever an African tribal leader felt impelled to appeal over the heads of the local British authorities to the distant metropolitan power, it was the Colonial Office to which, buying himself a frock-coat and a top-hat, and packing the insignia of his decorations, he trustfully made his way. The Colonial Office was also, in a way, the London embassy of the colonies. Under its wing were the Crown Agents for the Colonies, who represented the dependent possessions, and the Agents-General of the self-governing colonies. The Colonial Office was the Empire’s link with Westminster, and all the official cables from Ottawa, Perth, Colombo, Durban or Wellington were handled by its clerks, or its new corps of ‘lady type-writers’.

The India Office was altogether grander and more stately. It, too, was really an agency: India was ruled from Calcutta, and its practical executive was the Viceroy. But the India Office, his link with the Imperial Government, was an
alter
ego
of the Raj. All the departments of Indian Government had their microcosms there in Whitehall, and the Office had its own stores depot, audit office and accountant-general. The Colonial Office was less than half a century old: the roots of the India Office lay deep in the romantic past of the East India Company, with its London headquarters at India House in Leadenhall Street. The Office was financed out of Indian revenues, and its officials were advised by a body called the Council of India, consisting of retired generals and administrators with Indian experience. Its authority was concentrated: Lord Bryce once wrote that the whole course of legal reform in India in the nineteenth century, a profound and historic codification, had been arranged by two or three officials in Whitehall and two or three more in Calcutta.

Everything about the India Office reflected Britain’s ancient association with the East. From the walls gazed down the faces of eighteenth-century administrators, heroes of the Mutiny, generals and pro-consuls: at the street door stood the ex-Army commissionaires, Indian campaign ribbons on their chests, ready to greet visitors in the rough-and-ready Hindustani familiar to generations
of British soldiers. In the library a succession of eminent Sanskrit and Arabic scholars had guarded the great collections of Indian literature—priceless Tibetan and Burmese manuscripts, a Sanskrit series that was probably the finest in the world, a modern deposit library that had a statutory right to every book published in India, in any language. The India Office was not a clubbable society. It was old, sombre, powerful and legalistic. It moved at a grand despotic pace. With its splendid library, its immense accumulated experience, its constant flow of dispatches, its innumerable visitors from the East, it perhaps knew more about India than any office of government, anywhere, had ever known about another country.

These were the two metropolitan departments of State which, from their gloomy but grandiose headquarters beyond the park, sent out their young men to rule the Empire.

It was an imperial maxim that the administrators of Empire should be chosen by the authorities in London, not by their seniors in the field. The intention was to avoid jobbery: one of the results was that both the India Office and the Colonial Office recruited their men overwhelmingly from the same stratum of society—the upper middle classes, stamped to a pattern by the public schools and the ancient universities. There was, though, no single method of entry to the imperial services. The two departments selected their people in very different ways.

The Indian system was developed from the methods of the old East India Company. It was designed to raise a dedicated caste of professional administrators, intellectual, well paid, far above petty parochial controversies, and apparently as permanent and invulnerable as the sun itself. The purpose had a classical purity, and the selection was by a fairly stiff academic examination. Suppose a young man with a recommendation from his headmaster, and a good word from his tutor at Oxford, decided one day to have a shot at the Indian Civil—in those days one of the plum prizes of undergraduate ambition. Up he would go to London, if he were not under 21 nor over 23, and he would sit down to an examination in which
he was offered twenty-one different papers, any one of which he could try if he liked, but none of which was compulsory. They ranged from Sanskrit to Logic and Mental Philosophy, and were of different value: advanced mathematics could earn a maximum of 900 marks, but Roman History was worth only 400. Seven papers were offered under the heading Natural Science, and there were papers in Arabic, French, German and Political Science. The set books for English Literature had been announced the year before: in 1897 they were two Shakespeare plays, two Ben Jonson plays,
Paradise
Lost
, the poems of Marvell, Dryden’s
Absalom
and
Achitophel,
Bacon’s essays and Browne’s
Religio
Medici.
In addition a candidate who took this paper was expected to have a ‘general acquaintance’ with twenty-five standard British authors, Chaucer to Macaulay.

All this invited ‘cramming’, and many private tutors specialized in bringing a young man up to the mark for the Indian Civil. If, against heavy odds, he succeeded, he then spent a year’s probation at an English or Scottish university, and a second examination followed. This time he must take compulsory papers in Indian penal code and procedures, the principal language of one of the Indian areas, and the Indian Evidence and Contract Acts: he must take a paper in either the code of civil procedure or Hindu and Mohammedan Law, plus a choice of papers in Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Chinese and the history of British India. He was also tested in horsemanship, including ‘the ability to perform journeys on horseback’: if he failed this, he could go to India anyway, but he would get no rise in salary until he passed his equestrian tests out there, generally under the effectively ferocious eye of a cavalry riding-master.

The Colonial Office was much less thorough, and looked for men of a different character. Civil Servants for Malaya, Hong Kong and Ceylon took the same examinations as those for India, but jobs in Africa and the lesser tropical colonies went by a kind of patronage. The private interview was the chosen method, and a quiet word in the right quarter often helped. Men were picked for a particular appointment, and they were likely to stay in the same colony all their lives, unless they reached the highest ranks (governors were moved every five years). There was no training programme—men
were expected to learn their trade on the spot: many subtleties of native life and custom escaped this slapdash novitiate, and British colonial officers were frequently ignorant about complexities like customary law and land tenure. As a whole the Crown Colonies were ruled by willing all-rounders of very varied quality—what ambitious man, in the days before malaria control, would wish to devote a career to Sierra Leone? They were recruited more for character than brain-power: it was said that a candidate with a first-class degree would actually be regarded as suspect. The Colonial Office had woven a mesh of contacts with university tutors and headmasters, and found its men quietly and privately on what the British would later call ‘the old boy net’. ‘Our methods were mole-like’, wrote one Colonial Office official in retrospect. ‘We learnt to eschew publicity and to rely on personal contacts in the most fruitful quarters: quiet, persistent and indirect.’

Steeped in the traditions of the team spirit, slightly glazed perhaps by the intoxications of the High Anglican revival, aglow still with the privileged pleasures, strawberries and Alpine reading parties of the English universities at their happiest, the young imperialist generally boarded his ship at Tilbury or Liverpool welcoming the worst that flies or savages could do to him. If the Indian Civil Service cadet knew he was joining a service of venerable order and regularity, the recruit off to Africa could hardly know what to expect, having no idea what his duties would be, still less how to perform them.

It was rare to find two entries in one year from the same school, but the Empire was administered very largely by graduates of the ancient universities. Against their permissive background, where a man could do as much or as little work as he pleased, the imperial administrators were expected to stand out in diligent distinction. Once in the field, they must be very hard-working indeed. The Conduct Rules for Indian Government Servants specified that Government was entitled to twenty-four hours a day of its employees’ time, and often it was very nearly claimed. In those days
the classic picture of the junior Empire-builder’s life was accurate enough. Often he really did sit in a leaky mud hut, several days from anywhere, all on his own with a few hundred thousand subjects. He really was policeman, judge, doctor, vet, handyman and oracle, all in one. Petitioners might come to his bungalow day and night, pleading for his help in solving a family dispute, dealing with a crop blight, or killing a man-eating tiger. From dawn to midnight he was seldom at leisure. He probably spent the morning as a magistrate, presiding over his own court; he spent the afternoon surveying his estate, inspecting crops, interviewing overseers; he spent the evening studying the local languages, receiving petitions, writing reports and letters. With luck he had a few other Englishmen at hand: a couple of traders on the river, perhaps, an engineer building a bridge, a missionary or an area doctor. If not, he considered himself alone, often without a telegraph, only a runner or his own horse to keep him in touch, and natives for company.

All over the Empire these administrators, like members of some scattered club, shared the same values, were likely to laugh at the same jokes, very probably shared acquaintances at home. An Australian governor, an Indian provincial commissioner, an officer of the North-West Mounted Police, busy Mr Cropper in St Lucia, beefy Philistine or grave classicist—place them all at a dinner table, and they would not feel altogether strangers to each other. To the outsider this sense of social or professional collusion could be intensely irritating. To the administrators themselves the easy fraternity of class, background and experience seemed an essential factor in the imperial system, giving strength to the web of Government, and providing consolation for lonely lives. Beneath the disciplines of convention and efficiency, an unexpectedly easy relationship linked senior and junior men. Although promotion was nearly always by seniority, outside the normal run men often reached positions of great responsibility in the Empire at surprisingly early ages. Egypt in 1897 was effectively ruled by three Englishmen, the Agent-General, the Sirdar of the Egyptian Army and the Financial Adviser: the first had assumed office at 41, the second at 40 and the third at 37.

Top jobs in the Empire sometimes went to grandees outside the two services. The Viceroyalty of India was a political appointment, governors of colonies were frequently noblemen or generals. For the rest the Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Service ran the dependent Empire, holding both political and administrative power in the colonies. In effect this was a State ruled by its own bureaucracy. Below the permanent secretaries in London came the governors on the spot; below them the chief secretaries; below them again the provincial commissioners and district officers. No tropical colony enjoyed any real degree of self-government, despite a few propitiatory sops. White settlements apart, the Empire was a vast despotism—or rather a group of despotisms, for liaison between region and region, or even perimeter and centre, was tenuous. We must imagine the different imperial branches like sections of a cloistered university: each faculty supremely knowledgeable in its own remote speciality, but seldom familiar with, or even interested in, the exercises of the philosophers, botanists or mathematicians across the quadrangle. Among colonial servants loyalty to colony, to region, to tribe was intense, and often exclusive: just as there were classicists, in those days, to whom the higher mathematics was upstart vulgarity, and probably slipshod at that.

A heavy thoroughness linked them all. The bureaucracy of Empire was overelaborate. ‘Round and round like the diurnal revolutions of the earth went the file, stately, solemn, sure and slow’: so Curzon wrote of an Indian proposal, and stateliness, solemnity, sureness and slowness were attributes of British imperial government almost everywhere. ‘Documents no longer needed may be destroyed,’ ran an apocryphal imperial directive, ‘provided copies are made in duplicate’: and in the Colonial Office List for 1897 there really was an advertisement for red tape. The annual General Index to the Administration of Aden gives us a glimpse of the ruling style. ‘Lady type-writers’ had not yet reached the tropical outstations, and the Index was written in a huge and splendid copper-plate hand that suggested Dickensian clerks on high stools, beneath the slowly
creaking punkahs of the forenoon. Here are some characteristic entries, not always scrupulously spelt: