Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [105]
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