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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 in 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.

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