Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [99]
They used to tell a story in the Sudan Political Service about Colonel Robert Savile (‘Savile Pasha’), who spent seventeen years governing great swathes of the country in the early twentieth century. He was returning for home leave on a P&O liner when he met a stranger in one of the bars on board. The man told him he was travelling from India, whereupon the colonel asked him whether he had by any chance ever come across his brother, who was serving out there. ‘What is he called?’ asked the stranger, and then, when he heard the answer, exclaimed, ‘By Jove, Savile, I am your brother!’ It sounds like something out of Monty Python. In fact the story was told – and loved – by members of the SPS, who were lampooning themselves long before the post-imperial generation thought of doing so. But few occupations have suffered a greater fall in esteem than that of the colonial officer. A year before independence he is out in the middle of nowhere building a school, driving through a road or opening a dispensary. The next he is not merely redundant, but comical, a pompous clown in over-sized shorts whose only interests in life are the propagation of groundnuts, the state of the cricket team and the next bridge night at the club. It matters not that many former British possessions have retained much the same system of administration (even twenty-first-century India still has ‘collectors’, and below them other, instantly recognizable colonial-style officials). But, with the end of empire, those who had made the system function became like the lamplighters of gaslit London when the streets were electrified. Colonial officials belonged on a page of history which the British imagined they had turned, and need never revisit.
There is a scene in The Jewel in the Crown, Paul Scott’s novel set in the dying days of the Raj, when Duleep Kumar decides that to better himself he should travel to England to train as a lawyer. He has noticed that – even though his family are wealthy landowners – ‘the callowest white-skinnned boy doing his first year in the covenanted civil service could snub them by keeping them waiting on the verandah of the sacred little bungalow from whose punkah-cooled rooms was wafted an air of effortless superiority’. His father makes light of the supposed snub – what’s a few minutes hanging around? Better to stay in India and become an even richer man. The young British official is a fool to refuse gifts from Indians (because he has been taught that they are bribes), when ‘in forty years, he will be poor, living on his pension in his own cold climate’. Ah, the son replies, but during those forty years he will have wielded power. His father is incredulous. ‘What is this power?’ he asks. ‘He will have settled a few land disputes, seen to the maintenance of public works, extended a road, built a drain, collected revenues on behalf of Government, fined a few thousand men, whipped a score and sent a couple of hundred to jail. But you will be a comparatively rich man. Your power will be material, visible to your eyes when you look at the land you own.’
The father’s depiction of the life of the former colonial official is acute. At the end of their careers most did seem to retire to a life of genteel tedium in Cheltenham or somewhere, in which the highlight of the day was the Times crossword or the letters page of the Daily Telegraph. But, unless you believe