• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1179 0

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