Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [103]
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