The condominium

One of the most bizarre consequences of the Entente Cordiale of 1904, that set of friendly agreements between France and Britain mostly relating to the two nations’ colonial possessions all over the world, and especially those that abutted, was the establishment in 1906 of the “condominium” by which France and Britain jointly administered the New Hebrides. That island group in the South Pacific achieved independence in 1980 and has since been known as the Republic of Vanuatu. The first European encounter with the islands took place in 1605 when a Spanish expedition named them Espiritu Santo. Louis-Antoine de Bougainville “re-discovered” the locality in 1768, and Captain James Cook followed in 1774. Cook named the islands New Hebrides. The French and British showed little interest in the islands before the 1860s, and both laid claim to the New Hebrides in the 1880s, but with distinct lack of enthusiasm. The condominium effectively resolved this competition, and divided the New Hebrides into two separate but nevertheless intermingled communities—English- and French-speaking. For most of the remainder of the twentieth century this curious arrangement insured that there were two currencies circulating side-by-side in the same tills, two sets of immigration procedures for bemused visitors to choose between, two justice systems, two education systems, effectively two colonial governments, each exactly mirroring the other, but naturally reflecting the different methods of colonial administration practiced in London and Paris. The British and French each appointed a co-equal “resident” from the Foreign Office in Whitehall and from the Quai d’Orsay, and their staff on the ground in Port Vila emphasized dualism to the point of farce. Every European official in one residency had an opposite number in the other with whom he was required to consult but with whom he rarely agreed. The condominium thus shared jurisdiction over the postal service, for example, but postage stamps were either British or French, and paid for with pounds sterling or francs issued by the Banque de l’Indochine. Indigenous people could choose whether to be tried under the British common law or the French civil law. Nationals of one country could set up corporations under the laws of the other. In addition to these two legal systems, a third court existed to handle cases involving traditional Melanesian customs and usage. Further, Britain and France agreed that the judge presiding over this native court should be appointed by the King of Spain in order that he could also decide with impartiality certain cases in which the French and British judges’ opinions or even whole branches of law were in conflict. The origin of this otherwise inexplicable arrangement was picturesquely historical. As well, there were two prison systems to complement the two different “national” courts. The police force was technically unified but consisted of two co-chiefs and equal numbers of officers wearing different uniforms. Each half strictly alternated their duties and assignments. The Union Jack and the Tricouleur were raised each morning in perfect synchronization, and flew side-by-side. When one or the other had to fly at half-mast, the other gallantly followed suit. Language was not the only barrier to the operation of this crazy system—because all documents had to be translated once to be understood by one side, and the response translated back again for the other. Bislama creole created further complications, although for those who could speak it Bislama did form an informal bridge between the British and the French administrations. The condominium was further strained by the radically different purpose each country had for being in the New Hebrides in the first place. Britain’s colonization of these and many other islands in the South Pacific was driven not by the Colonial Office in Whitehall, which consistently resisted their gradual annexation, but rather by pressure placed on the imperial government through the 1870s and 1880s by Australian and New Zealand colonists with voracious commercial ambitions, and a corresponding need to prevent them from doing too much harm. The French, by contrast, took a much more active interest in the region, largely to protect their much larger commercial interests in New Caledonia, and in turn their even more profitable strategic presence in French Indo-China. We are still living with the consequences of that. During the post-war period the rationale for the Anglo-French condominium was somewhat extended by the dirty business of testing atomic devices in remote atolls, reefs, and islands—the anxious and increasingly paranoid quest for the H-bomb. However, that it worked for more than seventy years, or even at all, seems to me utterly remarkable.

The Political Agent

Old Dubai

I have been reading Parting Shots, an anthology of extraordinarily entertaining extracts from British diplomats’ valedictory despatches from posts all over the world. Edited by Matthew Parris and Andrew Bryson, these lively documents were mostly never intended to be read outside the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in Whitehall. Indeed, their contents would probably have caused a great deal of embarrassment to H.M. government had they achieved wider distribution at the time of their composition. Tempus fugit, however, and the comparatively recent Freedom of Information Act has provided the editors with the best tool with which to harvest their selection from hitherto classified Foreign Office files. My favorite—though the choice has been exceedingly difficult—is the wistful dispatch furnished on September 27, 1964, to Her Britannic Majesty’s Acting Political Resident (Bahrain) by the Political Agent at Dubai, in other words not very long before the creation of the independent United Arab Emirates, not quite fifty years ago:

Sir,

The title of Her Majesty’s Political Agent, I have the honour to submit, is an exceedingly romantic one. Even the dourest would not deny that it carries a less prosaic, less workaday ring than Commercial Officer or Second Secretary (Information). It has to begin with (despite a lamentable increase of one-third in our numbers over the past three years) a growing scarcity value. To the best of my knowledge only four of us survive; and there is at times an enjoyable feeling of political agents contra mundum. The name, too, is rich in associations. It belongs with those other old and evocative titles: Collector, Resident, District Commissioner. It suggests remoteness in time and place. One feels that a Political Agent is (or should be) at the end of the line, one of those originals on whom the sun used never to set, the final, executive blood vessel in the network of arteries that stretched out, long, efficient and complex, from the distant heart of empire; the true ultima ratio regum. The ghosts of dead colleagues rise up: in the club at Mandalay, saddling their horses in Peshawar, haranguing the tribes in the Kalahari. And the nostalgia grows with the awareness that one is very nearly the last of that very long line, those thousand men who month by month sent back their despatches to the district headquarters, to the provincial capitals, and finally to the red boxes of Whitehall…

I take the view, it will now be evident, that, having been given a title, one might as well enjoy it. But the times are changing. There has been criticism, as Your Excellency knows, of the imperialist flavour of the name, and talk of adopting something more consonant with our egalitarian world. The nature of the post is also changing. Already the functions of my colleagues in our sophisticated neighbours, Bahrain and Qatar, are inclining more to the ambassadorial and less to the pro-consular. Dubai has begun to take the same well-trodden road and perhaps before long will be catching up [!]. The gunboats still call, but they are less peremptory than before. The Political Agent still commands, but more often now he suggests or advises.

Yet on the Trucial Coast, more perhaps than anywhere else, the old regime persists. The atmosphere is on the one hand imperial India. The guard at the compound gate hoist the flag at sunrise, and all day long it looks down upon the dhows an ferryboats in Dubai Creek. Below the windtowers the bazaars are crowded with Sindis and Baluchis, Bengalis and Pathans, dhobi-wallahs, babus, and chokidars. The Agent sits in court below the Royal Coat of Arms and sees the old procession of clerks and petition writers. His servants wear turbans and puggarees and long shirwani coats. He inspects gaols and pursues smugglers, runs hospitals and builds roads. He takes the salute from the Trucial Oman Scouts, on a sandy barrack square, amid ornamental cannon, pennants on lances, bugles and pipes and drums. He makes State tours with reception tents and dining tents and sleeping tents, trestle tables, carpets and military escorts. He is very much a bara sahib.

But he is also a sheikh. All year round he sits and receives his callers: Rulers with business of State; tribesmen with pastoral complaints; conspirators with offers of partnership; wealthy merchants seeking agencies; gold smugglers seeking passports; schoolboys seeking scholarships to England. To each he offers, through his coffee-maker girt about with the great silver dagger, the tiny, handleless cups of black spiced coffee. Twice or thrice a year he sits in full majlis while the visitors pour in with congratulations, sweetmeats, Christmas cakes and fat goats. His letters are addressed to “His Honour, the Most Glorious, the Magnificence of Her Majesty’s Trusted One in the Trucial States, the Revered.” He decides fishing disputes, negotiates blood-money, examines boundaries, manumits slaves. He presides over the Shaikhs’ Council. He exempts, pardons, appeases, exacts, condemns, ordains. Over a large but undefined field he in effect rules. It is all a far cry from the third room and the Foreign Office canteen.

It is important, I may break off to remark, that the sheikhly nature of the Political Agent should be thoroughly appreciated in the department. It may well be difficult for his fellow clerks, who have often seen him—and will no doubt see him again—making the office tea in a drab Whitehall corridor, to picture him as an oriental potentate among they grey-haired dervishes. The effort, arduous and even comical though it may be, must nevertheless be made. Without it, not only will the Agent seem intolerably pompous when he goes home on leave; his colleagues for their part will fail to understand the curious necessities which his post involves. What can he be doing with two maunds of cardamom and a bag of charcoal? For what purpose has he had his censer repaired? Why does the coffee-maker need (of all things) a dagger? Such questions, Sir, are pardonable. But they must be asked from a deferential and an understanding heart.

The Political Agent has, forbye, more orthodox functions. He must persuade Rulers and influence public opinion. He must justify (stern task) the workings of the United Nations and intercept the policies of the Arab League. He must help to negotiate oil concessions. He must expound the need for a law on workmen’s compensation and even, in settling sea frontiers, explain to an illiterate sheikh the principle of constant equidistance involved in the trigonometry of the median line. He must be severe and masterful when he feels insignificant and ill-assured. He must at times be as diplomatic as any conventional diplomatist.

But above all he must travel: in a long and ceremonious caravan or in a solitary Land Rover; in his own dhow or in an R.A.F. aeroplane; at speed across the gravel desert, slowly and painfully through a mountain wadi, or stuck altogether in the mud of the salt flats. This is his St. Crispin’s Day that will live into his old age. Long after the minutes and the submissions and the subcommittees have faded, he will remember waking on the great plateau to the scuffle and the mutter of the bedu at their dawn prayers; coming out of the tent to see them huddled in their skimpy cloaks round the fire waiting for the blackened coffee-pot to heat up; the hawks behind them on their perches, now huddling in against the cold, now fluffing their feathers to dry off the night-dew. Or being called out from a party with a message of shooting in the hills; the scurry round for a driver and a bed-roll and then out of the Agency gate and away across the salt flats into the dunes; sleep in the sand beside the track, then up at first light and through the mountains to where two groups of bandoliered tribesmen wait for him nervously. Nor will he forget the incense and the rose-water proffered by his host at the end of a stiff and dusty journey, or the chanted, stylized greetings, strophe and antistrophe, of the desert bedu, or the Agency dhow at anchor in the bay of Dibba with the Red Ensign fluttering improbably over those unheard-of fishermen.

All this will pass one day and we shall be centralised and standardised. The powers and the privileges, the discomforts and the eccentricities—all will vanish, and with them the fun. Meanwhile, Political Agent Dubai is a splendid job in a splendid place. When the name is changed and the first consul or Ambassador arrives, it will indeed be the end of a very auld sang.

I am sending copies of this dispatch to all Gulf posts, to Her Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and en titre personnel to Mr. Balfour-Paul at Her Majesty’s Embassy in Beirut.

I have, &c.

A. J. M. Craig

Her Majesty’s Political Agent

I find it quite impossible not to like His Honour Mr. Craig, to rejoice in his enjoyment of his soon-to-be-defunct office, and also to react with sympathy and a little sadness to his appeal to civil servants in Whitehall seriously to seek within themselves “a deferential and an understanding heart”—was ever such a thing farther distant from any and all corridors of power than it is today? The Trucial States (along the Trucial Coast of Oman) were a British protectorate from 1820 until 1971, when they became the independent United Arab Emirates. Ultima ratio regum means the last argument of kings. According to Hobson-Jobson a dhobi-wallah is a washerman; a babu a native clerk who could write English; a chokidar a watchman; a puggaree a type of turban, and a bara sahib a “white, i.e. British colonial master.” The majlis, meanwhile, was a formal audience with legislative functions mostly by instant edict, or decisions and/or proclamations issued verbally. St. Crispin’s Day (October 25, the anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and of the Charge of the Light Brigade) is, of course, a reference to Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” Though drafted more than fifty years after the death of King Edward VII and almost twenty years after the end of World War II, there are in this beautifully drafted despatch strong, nostalgic chords of imperium—it is very much Sir Edward Elgar gamely competing against the Beetles. His Honour Mr. Craig reminds us also that the ethos of empire, once implanted, lingered powerfully and long after the exhaustion of Britain’s part in two World Wars in rapid succession; the terrible upheaval of the partition of India; the humiliation of Suez, and Harold Macmillan’s speech about the “wind of change” blowing through Africa. It is scarcely believable, meanwhile, that in less than fifty years Mr. Craig’s Dubai could have been transformed from a smallish Arab fishing village into the oil-driven orgy of real estate we see today. What, I wonder, does the future hold in store for her?

The India List and India Office List

Naturally my copy of The Colonial Office List for 1911 is fairly useless without having close to hand that same year’s edition of The India List and India Office List. Many of the advertisements are identical, but with telling variations. It is not exactly clear to me why the Indian Civil Service was singled out by Swan Fountain Pens; Messrs. Silver & Co., of Cornhill, who knew “exactly what is needed for every part of the globe,” or William Coles & Co., Inventors and Makers of the Spiral String Truss (est. 1819). However, there were evidently good reasons for targeting the markets in Calcutta, Madras, New Delhi, and Bombay for jodhpurs, polo mallets, pith helmets, specialist banking, insurance, and shipping services for India, as well as Callaghan’s Binoculars, Stalking, Yachting, and Astronomical Telescopes and Aneroid Barometers—according to the Oxford English Dictionary, an aneroid barometer measures air pressure, not by the height of a column of mercury or some other fluid which it sustains, but by its action on the elastic lid of a vacuum box or flask—and, of course, Dinneford’s Magnesia, “approved by the medical profession for over 60 years as the best remedy for acidity of the stomach, heartburn, headache, gout, and indigestion, and the safest aperient [laxative] for delicate constitutions, ladies, children, and infants.” I suppose it is hardly surprising that The Law List (which meticulously includes attorneys-general, puisne judges, among many other law officers, etc. etc., serving in the colonies), The Army List and The Navy List, meanwhile, shunned advertising, although The Foreign Office List and Diplomatic and Consular Yearbook did not. In the latter case, certain hints toward the carefully differentiated needs of a British legation, as distinct from a colonial outpost, are discernable, namely J. Schweppe & Co., manufacturers of mineral waters; Carson’s paint, which “stands a tropical sun without blistering”; Thurston’s billiard tables; Allen’s portmanteaus, and Clark’s noiseless, self-coiling, revolving steel, iron and wood shutters (satisfactorily “fire and thief proof”). However, a full-page advertisement for Osler’s crystal glass chandeliers, wall lights and lustres for gas and candles, kerosene and moderator lamps for India and home use (my italics) certainly re-introduces a note of ambiguity.

Further Colonial Office List

The 1911 Colonial Office List contains an immense volume of information relating to all aspects of the administration of every corner of the British Empire, but its arrangement is essentially logical, and indeed bears witness to the almost superhuman capacities of its three patient, not to say dogged, longhand editors, who doubled as clerks with many other responsibilities in the colonial office in Whitehall: W. H. Mercer, C.M.G., A. E. Collins, and R. E. Stubbs. To these hard-working men all scholars of British imperial affairs owe an immense debt of gratitude that will only grow in scale with the future passage of years. They were careful to state in their preface that all particulars were only as accurate as the data returned to Whitehall by colonial governments and crown agents scattered across the globe. They also thoughtfully supplied a complete chronological list of the editors of 49 previous annual editions, the better to account for any inaccuracies that might some day be traceable to any one of them. Without exception all were relatively junior clerks in the colonial office, and as far as I can tell none of them ever visited a colony, and many only rarely traveled outside London. Part I is a minutely detailed historical survey of the office of secretary of state for the colonies extending back to the seventeenth century, together with a tour d’horizon of all offices, institutions, and voluntary associations connected with colonial affairs. These included but were not restricted to the Imperial Institute of the United Kingdom, the Colonies, and India; various Colonial Government Emigration Agencies, with corresponding offices in many distant colonies; the Emigrants’ Information Office in London; the Malay States Development Office; the Imperial Department for Agriculture for the West Indies; the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, interestingly; the London School of Tropical Medicine; the Incorporated Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (where most serious cases were first observed among landing passengers); the Colonial Nursing Association; the Sleeping Sickness Bureau; the Advisory Medical and Sanitary Committee for Tropical Africa; the Entomological Research Committee; the Colonial Veterinary Committee; the Colonial Survey Committee; the Royal Colonial Institute; the British West African Association; the Ceylon Association in London; the Straits Settlements Association; the West Africa Committee; the West Indian Club; and, most importantly, the Imperial Conference, with a summary of its most recent deliberations relating to matters of British foreign and colonial policy at the highest level. Part II consists of a brilliantly concise but exhaustive description of each colony, by region, together with a summary digest of the relevant statistics: the subtotal and total values of imports to and exports from Britain, the population of each colony, its public revenues, public expenditures, and public debt. The bulk of the volume then proceeds to provide a historical and statistical account of each and every inhabited colony in alphabetical order, with a comprehensive statement of all of its institutions of civil government, learning, and commerce, liberally accompanied with fold-out maps (of varying degrees of accuracy). A typical example of a single entry is the one for the Gold Coast (modern Ghana). This begins with an account of the diverse tribal distribution and location of the indigenous population; a history of the British colonial administration; a description of the colony’s written constitution; its legal system; its climate; the history of the abolition of slavery in the locality; an account of mail and steamship lines, railways, postal communication, telegraph and telephone services; a description of the local education system (which was, in this instance, in the hands of five missionary societies connected with different religious denominations); information about currency and banking, which at the Gold Coast was monstrously complex because although British sterling was the local currency, Spanish, American, and French gold coins circulated alongside British coin, and relative values were therefore dodgy; a granular breakdown of the population; a description of local trade and industries (mainly cocoa, raw cotton, gold, lumber, palm kernels, and rubber); and, in conclusion, a complete directory of local British personnel from the Governor at the top, all the way down through the executive branch, the native affairs, mines, treasury, customs and excise, postal and telegraphic, medical, sanitary, police, and judicial departments; the public works, survey, printing, prisons, ecclesiastical, education, audit, agricultural, forestry, and railway departments, together with a list at the end of the local consular representatives of Germany, Belgium, Spain, Norway (!), Liberia, and the Netherlands. Taking one of these departments as an example, that of the colonial secretary’s office, in other words the office of the Governor’s chief minister at the Gold Coast, we find that Brevet-Major H. Bryan, C.M.G., was serving as  colonial secretary, with a salary of £1,200 per annum and a duty allowance of £240; W. C. F. Robertson was his chief assistant (£650 and £130); A. A. C. Finlay and J. W. Church were assistants (£400 to £500 and £80); A. R. G. Wilberforce and H. P. Popham were junior assistants (£300 to £400 and £15); C. O. Hellis was European chief clerk (£350 to £400); S. H. Brew was “native chief clerk” (£200 to £250); P. Azu, C. Holm, and T. E. Hyde were second grade clerks (£100 to £150); A. S. Odonkor, C. C. Lokko, C. C. Lamptey, and J. M. Bartlett were third grade clerks (£80 to £100); W. S. Mettle, R. C. Annan, P. G. Vlerk, and H. H. Malm were fourth grade clerks (£60 to £80); S. A. Laryea, C. R. Adjaye, and A. A. Dua were fifth grade clerks (£40 to £60); and D. W. Abrahams, D. N. Fry, J. S. Akuerter, and E. C. Nmai were sixth grade clerks (£25 to £40 and, for some reason at this lowest eschelon, a duty allowance of £5). An appendix to this long middle section of The Colonial Office List covers all those possessions or protectorates that were not administered directly by staff reporting to the secretary of state. These included North Borneo, Sarawak, Zanzibar, Aden, Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, and “miscellaneous islands.” The miscellaneous islands, mostly acquired by accident or for specific purposes such as laying telegraph cables or erecting a lighthouse, included the Ashmore Group in the Indian Ocean; Bird Island and Cato Island in the Norfolk Island Group, roughly near Australasia; Sombrero in the West Indies; Raine Island, Bell Cay and Bramble Cay, all near British New Guinea (Papua); Sydney Island in the Phoenix Group of atolls in the Central Pacific; the Caroline and Flint Islands, also in the Pacific; Malden Island (which was leased to the guano mining company of Messrs. Grice, Sumner & Co., and, far more recently, after the end of World War II, used for British H-bomb tests); Starbuck Island, Vostoc, Gough, Nightingale, and the so-called Inaccessible Islands, all in the South Atlantic; “and there are many others.” Part III consists of “miscellaneous lists,” viz. (1) a list of honours lately conferred for services in and for the colonies; (2) a comprehensive list of all papers on colonial affairs that were presented to both houses of Parliament since 1877; and (3) a detailed memorandum setting out the procedures associated with making all colonial appointments from governors to commissioners of public works and all other minor officials in the field. Part IV is a biographical register of all members of the colonial service, either currently en poste or else retired, and is exceedingly useful because it mentions not only the sequence of posts occupied by each, but their educational background, and many ancillary facts about appointments, service on various charitable and other committees, etc. Thus, to return for a moment to the case of the Gold Coast, when we look up Brevet-Major Herbert Bryan, C.M.G., the colonial secretary, we find that he was born in 1865, took his commission as second lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment in June 1892, and was promoted lieutenant in 1894, then captain in the Manchester Regiment in 1899, and finally brevet major in 1900. He served in West Africa in 1897 and 1898, specifically in the hinterland of Lagos and also in operations on the Niger, including the expedition to Bassema, when he was mentioned in dispatches (medal with two clasps). He served in Northern Nigeria in 1900, and was slightly wounded (again mentioned in dispatches, another clasp). He served in operations in Ashanti; joined the staff of the Deputy Assistant Adjutant General, and was two more times mentioned in dispatches (another medal). He was chief staff officer on the Gambia expedition in 1901 (more dispatches, yet another medal); served as staff officer in the West African Frontier Forces from October 1901; was attached to the colonial office in London in 1902 and 1903; served briefly as acting governor in 1904, before assuming the permanent post of colonial secretary later that year. In other words, as second highest ranking British official in the Gold Coast, Bryan had accumulated considerable experience of the Gold Coast that went far beyond that of the governor whom he served, J. Jamieson Thorburn, C.M.G., who began his career in Ceylon, and served in various capacities there (acting assistant postmaster-general, acting secretary of the irrigation control board, etc.) and in Southern Nigeria (senior provincial commissioner “in anticipation of proposed amalgamation of the administrations of Lagos and Southern Nigeria,” before finally assuming the government of the Gold Coast in 1910. Part V of The Colonial Office List is perhaps the most extraordinarily useful, because it sets out “Colonial Regulations,” which governed every aspect of administration in the field, including constitutions, councils and assemblies, guidelines for governors and lieutenant-governors; appointments, salaries, discipline, leave of absence; ceremonies, precedence, medals and decorations, salutes, flags (above), uniforms, and so on; the correct mode and frequency of official correspondence back and forth to the colonial office in Whitehall; and, finally, rules about colonial finances, accounts, bookkeeping, audits, returns, supplies and stores. The tone is starchy, but clear: “Presents from kings, chiefs, or other members of the native population in or neighboring to the Colony, which cannot be refused without giving offence, will be handed over to the Government.” Certainly.

The Colonial Office List again

The cost of publishing The Colonial Office List was partly offset by advertising, and many of the ads were geared towards the exigencies of colonial life. In 1911 they included half- or full-page ads for Hickie, Borman, Grant & Co. Ltd., general shipping and forwarding agents (“passages booked and baggage shipped by all lines”); Henry Sotheran & Co., agents for all book-buyers in India, the colonies, and abroad; Ede, Son & Ravenscroft, colonial and civil uniforms (“the firm has been the recognised authority on court dress and robes for 200 years”); The Hardy Patent Pick Co. Ltd., hammer and rock drills; The Westminster Palace Hotel in London (for a little home leave: “Unrivalled position, overlooking Trafalgar Square, facing new entrance to the Mall, close to Houses of Parliament, Government Offices, theatres, and other places of interest and entertainment in the West End”); B. Drew & Co., hosiers, shirtmakers and general outfitters for W.A.F.F. khaki field service kit (“for officers serving with the West African Frontier Force and West African Regiment”); Army, Navy, and General Assurance Association Ltd., for accident and disease insurance (“double the usual compensations in the event of death, loss of eyes or limbs, or temporary disablement, total or partial, when arising from accident to a railway train”); The Legal and General Life Assurance Society; The Hunslett Engine Co., Ltd., manufacturers of locomotive, tender and tank engines to suit any gauge of railway; Cammell, Laird & Co. Ltd., axles, springs, buffers, files, and rasps; Wm. Potts & Sons, Ltd., cathedral, church, and turret clock manufacturers (“watchmakers to the Admiralty, first on list for 1905 and 1906”); Lambert, goldsmiths, silversmiths and jewelers to His Majesty the King; Whitfield’s Safes (“makers to H.M. the King, the Admiralty, the Agent-General for Natal, the Home Office, and the War Office”); Newton & Cook, painting, household, toilet, table, and general brush manufacturers; John K. King & Sons, the premier house for high-class seeds; Teofani’s cigarettes (“They possess an aroma peculiarly their own”); Alldays & Onions Pneumatic Engineering Co., Ltd., for cars, “perfect examples of British workmanship” (i.e. “standard cars suitable for colonial use”); The Civil Service Musical Instrument Association, Ltd. (“Pianos specially constructed for extreme and trying climates”); Osram lamps from General Electric; The Colonial Bank; The London City & Midland Bank; Bank of Australasia; Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China; Waterlow and Sons Ltd., engravers and manufacturers of bank notes, postage stamps, share warrants, and bonds (“The artistic nature of this engraving and the use of special geometric designs in white line has, combined with anti-photographic colours in the printing, successfully resisted all attempts at fraudulent imitation”); Jones, Chalk & Dawson, diplomatic uniforms of all countries; Nevill’s Charing Cross Turkish Baths (Hmmm: “Gentlemen’s entrance...pronounced to be the finest electric baths in Europe”); Szerelmey Stone Liquid, the remedy for damp, decay, scaling, chipping and discoloration; Aquascutum Ltd, overcoat specialists. One gradually forms a picture here of a pretty Government House somewhere exotic surrounded by beds of azaleas and hollyhocks grown from King’s seeds, with a clock in the turret from the house of Potts. Dressed by Ede & Ravenscroft and smoking Teofani’s cigarettes, the governor dictates instructions to Hickie, Borman & Grant relative to the imminent transfer to his next post, even while the civil engineers in town grapple with a big order for Hunslett locomotives, and the mines department is in touch with Hardy’s of Sheffield to see about getting in more hammer drills. Splendid.

The Colonial Office List

One of my favourite books is the 1911 edition of The Colonial Office List, that annual compendium of useful information pertaining to the administration of the British Empire. At this date, the Empire spread across five continents, namely (1. Europe): Gibraltar; Malta; and Cyprus; (2. Asia): the Indian Empire (which, though administered separately through the India Office, consisted of territories approximately corresponding with modern India, Pakistan, the Northwest Frontier with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Burma); Ceylon (Sri Lanka), which was never part of the Indian Empire; Hong Kong and Weihaiwei (in other words Weihai in the Shandong Province of modern China); the Straits Settlements (Singapore); the Federated Malay States, North Borneo, and Sarawak (most of modern Malaysia and Brunei); (3. Africa): Ascension Island; the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, Transvaal, Swaziland, and the Orange River Colony (most of modern South Africa); Basutoland (Lesotho); the Bechuanaland protectorate (Botswana); Mauritius; the Seychelles; St. Helena; Sierra Leone; Gambia and the Rio Pongas; the Gold Coast (Ghana); Southern Nigeria; Northern Nigeria; Nyasaland (comprising parts of modern Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi); British East Africa (essentially Kenya); Somaliland (Somalia); the Uganda protectorate; Tanganyika and Zanzibar (Tanzania); (4. Americas): Bermuda; Canada; Newfoundland and Labrador, which were not yet part of Canada; British Guiana; British Honduras; the Bahamas; Barbados; Jamaica; Turks and Caicos; Trinidad and Tobago; Grenada; St. Lucia; St. Vincent; Antigua; Dominica; Montserrat; St. Kitts and Nevis; the Virgin Islands; the Falkland Islands and South Georgia; (5. Australasia): Australia (comprising New South Wales, Tasmania, Western Australia, South Australia, Victoria, and Queensland); New Zealand; Fiji; Papua; the New Hebrides (Vanuatu); the Pitcairn and Solomon Islands; Norfolk Island; Lord Howe Island; Tuvalu; the Union Islands; the British Antarctic Territory, and various other small Pacific territories—with a total population (not including indigenous peoples) of slightly more than 55.6 million Anglo-Celtic settlers. The minister of the crown responsible for running this vast accumulation, upon which the sun never set, was the secretary of state for the colonies, a comparatively junior cabinet minister, who was assisted in this awesome task by four private secretaries (three of them assistants) who reported directly, and a department of state consisting of two permanent under-secretaries; four permanent assistant under-secretaries; a chief clerk; a “legal assistant,” seven “principal clerks,” nine “first class clerks,” and sixteen “second class clerks,” a librarian, two accountants, a chief registrar, his deputy, and two assistants; two copyists; two printers; two office keepers; seventeen messengers (six of them pensioners), and a porter. This tallies at forty-one staff, and eighteen domestics—who kept fires lit, ran errands, and made the tea. The office structure was geographical, and divided into (1) the dominions division (in which only eight staff looked after Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand); (2) the crown colonies division, a much larger group of more junior clerks; (3) the so-called general department, a kind of odd-bins; (4) the accounts department; and (5) the legal department. In each case, the oversight of multiple territories and colonial possessions in each region was allotted to small teams of responsible clerks who, it was hoped, developed specialist knowledge of the relevant files for each place. The colonial office was assisted in its economic remit by a separate colonial audit department that was in turn supplied with reports furnished by single auditors posted in the more prosperous colonies. In most cases these solitary watchers over each colonial ledger were regarded with suspicion by men in the field, who resented the inference that they required supervision, checks and balances. The whole system appears to have been based on the presumption that under normal circumstances the Empire would take care of itself, and any emergencies could be handled locally by the small army of colonial governors and crown agents administering each colony with the support of imperial forces either already present in the region, or else dispatchable at relatively short notice by order of the Admiralty. Even so, the legal department of the colonial office (consisting of only two hard-working clerks) was expected to peruse all legislation enacted by colonial parliaments, as well as to monitor the proper constitutional conduct of governors and executive councils in crown colonies that did not yet possess legislatures. The system was further complicated from time to time by the direct involvement in colonial affairs of up to four other cabinet ministers: the foreign secretary, when colonial affairs collided with British foreign relations, as in the 1898 Fashoda crisis, or else when British diplomatic representatives exercised what amounted to the political control of countries that were not technically colonies, e.g. Lord Cromer, who though merely British consul-general effectively ran Egypt as a sort of appendage to the Suez Canal; the secretary of state for India; the secretary of state for war (when the British army regularly interacted with colonial defense arrangements), and the First Sea Lord (the Royal Navy). As well, the dominions adopted the habit of posting agents-general to London, whose task was to represent the colonial interest in Whitehall when, in the view of the settlers, that interest was not always set in a satisfactory order of priority by or within the colonial office itself. In other words, there existed at least six completely separate and not always harmonious avenues of communication back and forth between the imperial capital and the colonial outpost. That the Empire managed to function at all with such a tiny staff, such immense problems of communication, and so many day-to-day conundrums, issues, and concerns all regularly flowing inwards by confidential dispatch from governors to the desk of the secretary of state himself is something of a major miracle. Yet The Colonial Office List goes a little way towards telling you how they did it.

London 2

This week, whilst kicking my heels in London, I chanced upon a gem of a book in a remote corner of Hatchard’s of Piccadilly. It is an anthology drawn from Corona, the journal of Her Majesty’s Colonial Service, 1948–1962. The selection was made for I. B. Tauris in 2001 by Anthony Kirk-Greene, formerly of the Nigerian Administrative Service, and it shines brilliant beams of light over the multitude of tasks carried out by members of the last and probably most able generation of British colonial administrators, and every sort of problem they weighed on long tours of duty. It also captures the complex moods brought on by the withdrawal from India and partition, ranging from bombast to pathos. British officials singlehandedly juggled any number of responsibilities that in most jurisdictions are now handled by whole departments of state, and handled each with impressive efficiency, and despatch. In most cases there was very little supporting infrastructure, quite often none at all, and rapidly dwindling support in Whitehall, on the contrary: Harold Macmillan’s Wind of Change rhetoric made it clear that the days of colonial administration were drawing to a close, yet morale remained determinedly high. How did these men and women spend their time? Here’s how: Trying to defuse lethal sectarian violence between villagers in the Gwoza District of Nigeria; completing tours of inspection of the “ulu” in Sarawak, in other words “impenetrable jungle coupled with discomfort and/or romance among the head hunters,” or the far more pleasant “ulendo” of the northern province of Nyasaland; enforcing regulations according to which the licence of an Indian proprietor of a coffee shop in Malaya could be renewed upon his passing a scrupulous medical examination; improving methods of disposing of slaughter-waste and dung in rural Kenya; calculating and levying royalties on the export of guano from the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, paying the salary of the wireless operator, and returning to H.M. Treasury his income tax; preventing French planters from selling cheap, actually lethal home-made liquor to thirsty sugar cane workers in the New Hebrides; gathering intelligence concerning the Mau Mau; persuading the Sultan of Perak to prevent the stoning to death of a young couple who confessed to adultery in Terengganu; finding an affordable boarding school in England for the son and daughters of a young district commissioner temporarily detained on official business in Micronesia; investigating the connection, if any, between the discovery of the remains of a giraffe (game properly belonging to the local chief, and therefore protected) and the cultivation of illegal narcotics in Barotseland; authorizing during “Good Manners Week” a dicey experimental landing by a Polish test pilot of a Dakota and then a bigger, heavier DC–3 on the newly completed but temporary landing strip on St. Vincent; sourcing adequate supplies of toothpaste and mosquito netting in Uganda; monitoring food hygiene in Hong Kong, specifically making discreet inquiries as to the real origin of snake, bear’s paws, and other delicacies putatively shipped from northern China; mastering the tribal politics of the two chiefdoms and eleven sub-chiefdoms of the Ha people of Kibondo, a region lying roughly half way between Lake Tanganyika and the Belgian Trust Territory of Rwanda; eradicating malaria in Cyprus; insuring the delivery of UNICEF milk to children throughout the Windward Islands; single-handedly providing medical attention to the entire population of the Falklands; doing battle with the tick, the worm, and the tsetse fly in Sukumaland; draining swamps in Selangor, the better to create and irrigate viable rice paddies; finding ways to prevent soil erosion in Fiji, without setting Fijian labourers against Indian farmers; collecting statistics relating to the better regulation of forestry in Hausaland; adjusting and refining the school curriculum in Antigua and Montserrat; defending from inter-clan hostilities the new trade unions of West Africa; maintaining port facilities in North Borneo, adapting them for the use of tankers should oil ever be discovered (it was, to the infinite delight of the Sultan of Brunei), and trying to keep the harbour master off his grog; insuring that officials of the Public Works Department and non-English-speaking Chinese draughtsmen were on the same page in respect of tall buildings that were creeping onto increasingly vertiginous sites in Hong Kong, with poor drainage and scarifying exposure to typhoons; keeping the peace in Jerusalem; meting out justice to surprisingly violent Norwegian sealers on South Georgia; studying cyclonic conditions and other meteorological phenomena on Mauritius with an eye to their global application; acting as returning officer in federal elections in the Malay states, and at the same time serving as registrar of births, deaths, and marriages, collector of land revenue, and chairman of the liquor licencing commission; running (for an official of the “Home Office”) a Mrs. Boye, wife of the manager of the Vanikoro Kauri Timber Company, who for many years in the Solomon Islands very effectively spied for H.M. government, mostly on the United States Navy; helping to prevent most forms of medical malpractice as an especially watchful operating theatre sister in Gibraltar, Nicosia, Nairobi, and then Mombasa— she saw everything, and was intimidated by no surgeon, however eminent; encouraging bridge parties and Scottish dancing as morale-building distractions during the hurricane season in British Honduras, with mixed success; providing to the Foreign Office a crisp assessment of the personal character and political ability and/or limitations of His late Majesty King Malietoa Tanumafili II of Western Samoa; auditing the public accounts of St. Helena, Ascension, and Tristan da Cunha—perhaps the most spectacularly boring occupation ever devised by man, even worse than proofreading the telephone directory (as Nick Trumble once pointed out to me, someone must have had to do it); and, perhaps above all, moving—constantly moving; moving so often that “up sticks” was for hundreds of British colonial officials and their families the domestic occupation of a lifetime, and retiring to somewhere in West Sussex or Shropshire or Devon or Midlothian during the mid- to late 1960s the most painful, bewildering, and dislocating transition of all. Beyond all this, there are telling flecks of detail contained in the crisp and straightforward advertising copy. Life insurance policies tailored for colonial servants by Acworth, Gaywood & Co., of Essex Street, Strand, balanced the extremely high premiums against the real likelihood of ill health, the perils of local riot and warfare, or misadventure at sea or in the air. The National Bank of India at 26, Bishopsgate, offered superior banking facilities in Kenya, Zanzibar, and Aden. Listings of sporting, theatrical, musical, cricket, and tennis highlights of the London season provided a convenient framework for planning your home leave. Lawn & Alder of 32, Sackville Street, W.1., offered personal shopping services: “no matter what the need may be, a tropical suit, a domestic utensil, a silver trophy, or a newspaper subscription, the L. & A. service is always at your bidding.” “Wanted: Administrative Officer’s sword. T. N. Rosser, Glenfield Crescent, Galashiels.” A marvelous, engrossing read, especially in the circumstances. (See London 1.)

The Joy of Crockford's Clerical Directory

Among diversions there is none more harmless than scanning from time to time that vast repository of Imperial and Church of England arcana, the 1908 edition of Crockford’s Clerical Directory. At this date, the British Empire—and indeed the entire globe, not necessarily the red bits only—were dotted with Anglican prelates who, according to the accepted convention, adopted for the time being the name of their see instead of their surname, thus yielding a froth of signatures from a vanished age, for instance: + Kenneth Argyll and the Isles, + Alfred Uganda, + Reginald Calcutta, + Edward Guiana, + Edward Falkland Islands, + Ernest Riverina, + Geoffrey Shantung, + Montagu New Guinea, + Wilmot Zululand, + Jervois Saskatchewan, + Hugh Osaka, + William Barbados, + William Gibraltar, + William Lebombo, + Edmund Mashonaland, + John Niagara, + John Zanzibar and East Africa, + Arthur Rangoon, + Churchill New Zealand, + Foss Chota Nagpur, + Isaac Yukon, + Herbert Mid China, + Herbert Western Equatorial Africa, + Henry South Japan, + Enos Jamaica, + Llewellyn Newfoundland, + George Jerusalem, + Arthur Corea [sic, although for reasons that are elusive Lambeth Palace clung to the old spelling long after the Foreign Office mandarins abandoned it], + Samuel Rupert’s Land, + George Singapore, Labuan, and Sarawak, and + Clarendon Nova Scotia, all of whom were certainly genuine, as was the unequalled + Horace Fuh-Kien. For those who stubbornly refuse to believe this last, here is His Lordship’s full entry:

FUH-KIEN, Right Rev. Horace MacCartie Eyre PRICE, Lord Bishop in, Foochow, Fuh-Kien, China.—Trin. Coll. Cam. B.A. (3rd cl. Cl. Trip.) 1885, M.A. 1889. d[eacon] 1886 Lon. for Col. p[riest] 1888 Sier. L. Cons. Ld Bp in Fuh-Kien in Westm. Abbey, 2nd Feb. 1906, by Abp of Cant; Bps of Lon; B. and W.; Ely; Glouc; Booh; St. Alb; Wakef; Moos; and Vic.; Bps Suffr. of Kensington and Dorking, and Bps Ingham and Montgomery. (Jurisdiction: The Province of Fuh-Kien, S. China. Area 38,500 sq. miles; Est. Pop. 22 millions; Ch. Pop. 13,694.) C.M.S. Miss, and Vice-Prin. Fourah Bay Coll. Sier. Leo. 1886–89 ; C. of Wingfield, Stiff. 1889–90; Prin. Of C.M.S. Boys’ Sch. Osaka, 1890–97; Acting Sec. C.M.S. Osaka, 1897–98; Prin. of C.M.S. Div. Sch. Osaka, 1900–03; Sec. C.M.S. Osaka, 1899–1904; C.M.S. Miss. Osaka, 1890–1906; Exam. Chap, to Bp of Osaka 1899–1906. Sec. C.M.S. Central Japan, 1904–06; Archd. of Osaka 1901–06.

Despite that dismal third at Trinity, the conspicuous absence of any publication, the school-mastering rut, and the slightly flamboyant point about the vast size and population of His Lordship’s flock, contrasting so sharply with the number of pews currently occupied in and around the cathedral and metropolitical church at Foochow, one senses here an overarching air of disappointment.

By 1908 + Field Flowers Melbourne, a childless widower—Mrs. Goe died in 1901—had for seven years been living in comfortable retirement at Wimbledon, while the Church of England was obliged to wait for several decades until a suitable berth was was created for + Roderic Gambia and the Rio Pongas.