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By Root 1224 0

Empire be without Englishwomen?’ commented an impressed German. Their arrival in numbers in India obliged the British to define who they were: if they were going to live in a self-sustaining community, they had to be confident about what was and what was not ‘British’. This was not, of course, something that was invented overseas. Like the English plants in their bungalow gardens, it had been taken with them from home. Sometimes, like some of the plants, it went a little odd in the unusual climate. But it was still identifiably the same genus, and was nurtured for being at risk and slightly unlikely. Transplanted from nineteenth-century Britain – a country increasingly sure of its purpose and in the grip of a religious revival – it rooted itself in the red soils of the empire and clung on.

It was not a role for shrinking violets. But then, a woman’s position in colonial India was not particularly easy. The heat, the humidity, monsoon rains and the swirling clouds of dust could destroy an English rose in the space of a year or two. The clothes she was expected to wear made matters worse. To the restrictions imposed by the role ascribed by the men of empire were added the daily chores of trying to keep clothes clean, stopping meat putrefying and seeing that there was enough water for a rudimentary bath at the end of the day, all of it in relentless heat, homesickness, often absent husbands, interminable railway journeys, the fear of tropical sickness striking a child (later often replaced by that numb, never cauterized wound, when they were sent off to boarding school at the age of seven), the temptations posed by single men and the menace of flirtatious other wives. And all to be endured in the foul smell that a capricious wind might waft around at any time from the thunderbox at the back of the bungalow.

India, the jewel in the imperial crown, was one thing. But in many other corners of the empire the entire edifice rested on the shoulders of one young man in a pair of shorts. As the idea of themselves as rulers of the world took ever firmer hold, the British were obliged to grapple with how these imperial subalterns were to live in the absence of European women. The French, for example, had come to a policy in which young men serving in west Africa were advised that they could both serve their own interests and help to Gallicize the continent by contracting ‘temporary marriages’ for the duration of their tour of duty. The British considered this typically French, and officers of the Sudanese Political Service, who prided themselves on being an elite, rather gloried in celibacy. But elsewhere a number of men out in the bush made their own arrangements. Across much of the rest of Africa and in the Far East, informal relationships between lonely young men and local women became commonplace. In Sarawak and Malaya the practice was either recognized or encouraged: the ‘sleeping dictionary’ being an established way of learning the local language. But when power was distributed so unequally, it was dangerous: how could a magistrate dispense justice fairly when he might be sharing his bed with a relative of one of the aggrieved parties? In typically British fashion, these things were not noticed, as long as no one drew attention to them.

But in 1908 the case of Hubert Silberrad, an assistant district commissioner in the Nyeri district of Kenya, blew the arrangement open. Silberrad had bought two Kenyan girls (for forty goats apiece) from a colleague who had been promoted. They were troublingly young – one of them, aged twelve, was extremely reluctant to be passed on, the other agreed to the arrangement in exchange for a monthly wage. When, three years later, Silberrad attempted to acquire a third mistress (of similar age) and one of his own policemen objected, Silberrad locked him up for the night, on grounds of insubordination. Two white neighbours, a Mr and Mrs Scoresby Routledge, came to express their outrage and then Mr Routledge rode four days through the rain to complain to the Governor in Nairobi. The Governor ordered