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By Root 1290 0

these gunboats remains in Khartoum, where for many years it served as the clubhouse of the Blue Nile Sailing Club until an exceptional flood washed it up on to the shore, where it still sits, its 12-pound gun painted a bright cerulean blue. A man who had made the place his home was not receiving visitors when I called. Since the departure of the British the Blue Nile Sailing Club looks to have fallen on hard times and now seems to be mainly a campsite for Europeans making the road journey through Africa from the Cape to Cairo.

* The variety of titles reflected the subcontinent’s multiple influences: Hindu, Muslim, Mongol, Ottoman, Persian and more. The names could be very confusing, as a baffled Edward Lear acknowledged, when he asked:

Who, or why, or which, or what, Is the Akond of Swat?

Is he tall or short, or dark or fair?

Does he sit on a stool or a sofa or a chair,

or squat,

The Akond of Swat?

He needn’t have worried so much: within a few years, the British had redesignated the ruler of Swat as a wali. The significant thing was that, however grand the title, all the apparent rulers of the states within British India were mere princes. There was only one queen, and she was an empress, and thousands of miles away.

* Bearer of an imperial moustache as impressive in its way as that of Lord Kitchener, Lugard had quit Britain soon after reading Rider Haggard’s The Witch’s Head, whose hero sets off for Africa after being crossed in love. Lugard had had the same experience, with a flighty divorcee.

* Blunt had supported Urabi Pasha’s revolt and for a while persuaded Gladstone to leave Egypt to the Egyptians. When the revolt failed, his poem ‘The Wind and the Whirlwind’ predicted nemesis:

Thou hast thy foot upon the weak. The weakest

With his bruised head shall strike thee on the heel.

* The second verse had been inspired by a battle fought in the doomed attempt to rescue General Gordon. The engagement was described by Winston Churchill at the time as the most savage action ever fought by British troops in the Sudan, during which the square formation in which the soldiers fought did indeed break. By the time the First World War (in which the poet worked for the clandestine War Propaganda Bureau) was over, even Newbolt himself was slightly sick of the poem, calling it a ‘Frankenstein’s monster’ he’d created.

† The beliefs inculcated at school could, said one not entirely sympathetic observer, be reduced to Ten Commandments running from Number One – ‘There is only one God, and the Captain of the XV is his prophet’ – and ending in Number Ten – ‘I must show no emotion and not kiss my mother in public.’

* In a spectacular example of trickery or political misjudgement, in the 1935 film version of the book the black singer Paul Robeson was somehow induced to play the part of Bosambo, the quaint, big-headed, foolish African who makes the mistake of thinking he can outsmart the white official. When Robeson saw the final product, which was dedicated to ‘the handful of white men whose everyday work is an unsung saga of courage and efficiency’, he was understandably furious.

* George Orwell was another anti-imperialist who satisfied the India Office examiners, passing the test to become an empire policeman in Burma, after the usual spell at a crammer.

* ‘Sooner or later we are bound to catch them,’ Kitchener, commanding the overstretched British forces, wrote to two small boys who had sent him a letter, ‘but they give a lot of trouble. The Boers are not like the Sudanese who stood up to a fair fight. They are always running away on their little ponies.’

* Much of the criticism is unfair: Scouting was never, as some on the left claimed, anything like the youth movements of fascist Europe. Indeed, it was banned in communist Russia, fascist Italy and 1940s Japan, and in Nazi Germany they much preferred the Hitler Youth. Rule 4 of Scout Law – ‘A Scout is a friend to all, and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what country, class or creed the other may belong’