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By Root 1144 0

that’s all I want.’ Add in a firm handshake and an ability to play cricket and you have the makings of a district officer. That such a key part of the British educational system was for generations geared not to mental achievement but to something else – ‘pluck’ is perhaps the best word for it – seems at odds with the fact that Britain has nearly twice as many Nobel Laureates as France, five times the total of Italy, Russia or Japan. But these men and women of intellectual pre-eminence are a memorial not to the famous Victorian public schools, created expressly with the empire in mind, but to the country’s grammar schools and to the huge intellectual contribution made by refugees and migrants. Let Yorke Harberton, the hero of G. A. Henty’s With Roberts to Pretoria, stand for all of the products of the imperial educational system:

a typical public-school boy – straight and clean-limbed, free from all awkwardness, bright in expression, and possessed of a large amount of self-possession, or, as he himself would have called it, ‘cheek’ … a little particular about the set of his Eton jacket and trousers and the appearance of his boots; as hard as nails and almost tireless; a good specimen of the class by which Britain has been built up, her colonies formed and her battle-fields won …

Not all Henty’s heroes came from such privileged backgrounds, for at most the public schools could educate only about 20,000 boys a year. But one of the lessons Henty and other imperial authors tried to teach was that the empire gave opportunities for anyone who had the guts to seize them with both hands. By the 1950s, total sales of Henty’s novels were reckoned at about 25 million and they had become an important means of passing on the values of imperial education to anyone who could read.

The fate of many of the products of these schools is captured in one of Rudyard Kipling’s most resonant poems about empire, ‘Arithmetic on the Frontier’ (‘A great and glorious thing it is / To learn, for seven years or so, / The Lord knows what of that and this …’). It describes what happens when a young public-school subaltern is sent to the North-West Frontier.

A scrimmage in a Border Station

A canter down some dark defile

Two thousand pounds of education

Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.

The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,

Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

The walls of churches across Britain are plastered with memorials to young men who died in inconsequential ambushes like this, or were carried off by fever in some obscure location the churchgoers at home could not place on a map of the world. The memorials to these imperialists created a sense that there really were corners of foreign fields that were forever England. The deaths of grander figures created a distinctive empire iconography, as familiar in its way as stained-glass representations of the Passion of Christ. Tableaux depicting the last moments of General Wolfe during the battle for Quebec, surrounded by his grieving officers and native Indian guide, of the mortally wounded Horatio Nelson lying in the bowels of HMS Victory, or of General Gordon serene on the steps of the palace in Khartoum, about to be speared to death, became familiar to countless numbers of citizens. The streets of our cities are peopled with statues and monuments to these generals, admirals and explorers who died to ensure that Britannia’s bounds were set wider still and wider.

But the most vibrant legacy of empire evident every day is not its now deeply unfashionable poetry, music or paintings but the sports which were either invented or codified to keep its young men fit and occupied and somehow to pass on to the colonized, through cricket, soccer, rugby, tennis or golf, some of the imperial values. These sports were also supposed to inculcate personal courage and collective loyalty in the builders of empire. The supreme imperial game was cricket – as an 1868 guide to outdoor sport put it, ‘We even think that square-leg to a hard hitter is no bad training for coolness at the cannon’s mouth.